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Mother, daughter raise thousands for cancer screenings
Published: Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 10:45 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 10:46 p.m.
A Houma dermatologist and her daughter are helping the local cancer center battle breast cancer one screening at a time.
Sarah Haydel’s grandmother was a 35-year survivor of breast cancer, so the fight against the disease is deeply personal to her.
“She was very serious about early detection,” Haydel said. “She knew what the risks were and how to watch out for them, and it saved her life.”
But Haydel knows not everyone has the knowledge or resources her grandmother had. So she and her 12-year-old daughter Brooke started an annual raffle to raise money to provide that to them.
Last year, their first raffle raised $10,000. This year, it raised $12,000.
Brooke Haydel said she has a target for the next one.
“I want us to raise $15,000,” she said. “We need to keep getting better at it.”
The money goes to the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center at Terrebonne General Medical Center. Specifically, the money pays for the hospital’s mobile screening unit to make trips into the community to serve residents who couldn’t otherwise afford preventative care.
The Haydels visited one of the sites the unit visited Saturday, the Save A Lot store on Grand Caillou Road.
The mobile unit consists of two RV-style trucks. One is like the waiting room for a doctor — patient advocates help fill out paperwork and determine medical histories. The second, a bright pink truck, contains the advanced equipment for full mammograms.
The mobile unit will next visit the Rouses Supermarket in Morgan City on Dec. 1.
Houma resident Vicki Williams was one of about 50 people who received screenings at the trucks Saturday. She said preventative care like this is important to her.
“My sister had breast cancer and didn’t find it early,” Williams said. “She had to have a full mastectomy and chemo.”
Williams said she couldn’t afford this kind of preventative care on her own.
“I lost my job, and I don’t have insurance,” Williams said. “I couldn’t pay for this if it wasn’t for them. I’m very grateful.”
Amy Ponson, the cancer center’s director of development, said the unit screened 650 people last year, detecting abnormalities in 70 patients. Five women screened were diagnosed with some form of breast cancer, which may have saved their lives.
The center is looking for donors like the Haydels to help it pay for more screenings and expand its efforts, Ponson said.
“Anyone who’s looking for a good cause, this is someplace you can do a lot of good,” she said.
If you or your business is interested in donating, call the cancer center at 223-3871.
Staff Writer Matthew Albright can be reached at 448-7635 or at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:1e7f6c35-fea0-4529-b26c-2f773f8803d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20121118/ARTICLES/121119683/-1/sports16?Title=Mother-daughter-raise-thousands-for-cancer-screenings | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964237 | 733 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Creating the Environment for Success with Mike Frantz
By George Dise
What is success? How do you achieve it? According to Mike Frantz, a company like Starbucks maintains success through brand awareness and loyalty. Mike believes that since a single negative experience stands out five times larger in the mind of a customer than a single positive experience, the number one most important thing to consider is consistency of service. Well-picked co-workers tend toward providing positive service, but can occasionally lapse or make a mistake; the key to customer satisfaction is consistently providing the same service on a bad day that you’d provide on a good day. While it may be difficult to maintain consistency throughout an entire brand, let alone a single franchise, it helps to formulate products and train employees to provide services that are always positive. This is especially important for law firms like Frantz Ward- think about all the times people complain about “the lawyers” on TV. “The lawyers say we have to do it this way,” “the lawyers say we can’t do this.” Like every business, law firms have to avoid being tarred as the company of no. That’s why Mike thinks of- and advertises his services as- “figur[ing] out ways to get things done, not throw up obstacles.” His firm exists to promote new ways of thinking to help clients get things done –to avoid obstacles.
Mike thinks the best way a lawyer should act in order to create an environment for success is as a “consigliere,” or trusted business advisor. As a consigliere, he focuses both on what a client expects, and what a client needs. In some cases, expectations may not meld well with needs, and clients need to be advised so they receive the maximum possible benefit from your company’s services. In these cases, you have to give clients what they need packaged in a way that it appears to be what they want. That requires a service provider to actively listen and figure out what keeps a client awake at night, then take an open-minded reconnaissance of the marketplace to figure out what other options are available. With a thorough understanding of possible options, service providers need to take efficient and effective steps to resolve the issue. Even if your client never figures out that their expectations and needs didn’t coincide, if you served them effectively, they’ll still ultimately realize that they did the right thing by hiring you, because your services provided a lasting benefit.
Mike considers a lack of clarity in the definition of success an obstacle. At Dise & Company, we occasionally see this ourselves when we present a slate of candidates that are overqualified for a position, which has caused us to reassess our search criteria. We now expect this to happen when we conduct searches, and we find we serve our clients best by quickly sending in a relatively broad slate of candidates and then narrowing our search criteria as we get feedback from our clients and develop our understanding of both the marketplace and the company’s expectations.
Hiring the right people is essential to developing an environment for success. Frantz Ward’s first consideration, when adding to their team, is to ensure a candidate has enough experience in a given field of law, since law practices tend to be highly specialized. Though it’s important for a candidate to have the intellectual capacity to practice law at the highest level, candidates must also function well outside both the office and the courtroom. When hiring the firm considers how the candidate will add to the culture rather than detract, and won’t do anything to damage Frantz Ward’s reputation as a great place to work. The bottom line: employees need to feel that they are being treated with respect so they can work well together as a team. The best way to give them that feeling is to hire the right people in the first place.
The final thing Mike gives us to consider is his advice to make sure your firm is on the short list of great service providers in your field. That way, any time a prospective client starts researching the services you provide, there will be a higher probability that your name will be given as a referral by past clients. There’s no way for a law firm to be the perfect choice for every client, and the most you can hope for is to be considered, period. If you fail to land an account after giving your best pitch, at least you made it into the boardroom, and you know that people are hearing good things about your business practices. What more can a trusted advisor ask for than the opportunity to leave a good impression on a potential client? | <urn:uuid:863d5794-09f9-4565-bc2b-0d04f24186a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.diseco.com/2011/09/creating-the-environment-for-success-with-mike-frantz/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961277 | 956 | 1.5 | 2 |
Forge of Empires - More Details Emerge
- By: Rich
- Posted 30th Jan 2012
More information about the rare good, trading system and city construction has emerged for InnoGames' latest browser based strategy game, Forge of Empires.
InnoGames are currently accepting pre-registrations on it's official website for the game: http://www.forgeofempires.com.
Rare resources like glass, copper or iron are important to players progress and vital to a peaceful way of playing. Several production buildings and varying supplies of 22 different goods add to the challenge. Players must undertake various tasks including research, trade, warfare and tactical battles, all of which are necessary to lead a Stone Age village through various epochs and transform it into an impressive and prosperous city.
Rare Goods Screens
Aspiring architects and city-planners have to juggle several factors; residential and production buildings provide coins and supplies, as well as housing space to accommodate an ever-growing population. Military buildings allow players to recruit troops to defend their city and conquer neighbor provinces. Goods Buildings produce rare resources like marble or honey, which can be used for trading and diplomacy, in order to keep citizens happy, however, players must also consider community and cultural buildings, such as schools, theaters and, later in the game, much grander structures like Castles and Cathedrals.
City Building Screens
Players gain access to several supplies of raw goods, such as wool or trees, by conquering provinces on the world map. Resources can be refined to rare goods, like lumber or cloth, but as every resource needs its own production building, the outcome is largely dependent on the supplies at hand and trade with other players is important. Obtained resources can be used to unlock new technologies on the research tree and to negotiate with NPCs. By fulfilling their demand of resources, peacefully-minded players can endeavor to assimilate provinces without bloodshed. | <urn:uuid:6f98ef50-8c33-416a-a242-fcd2ecb64d9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gamingupdate.com/news/3591/Forge-of-Empires-More-Details-Emerge | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965091 | 391 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Click on any phrase to play the video at that point.Close
I hope you'll understand my English. In the mornings it is terrible, and the afternoon is worst. (Laughter) During many years, I made some speeches starting with this saying: "City is not a problem, it's a solution." And more and more, I'm convinced that it's not only a solution for a country, but it's a solution for the problem of climate change.
But we have a very pessimistic approach about the cities. I'm working in cities for almost 40 years, and where every mayor is trying to tell me his city is so big, or the other mayors say, "We don't have financial resources," I would like to say from the experience I had: every city in the world can be improved in less than three years. There's no matter of scale. It's not a question of scale, it's not a question of financial resources. Every problem in a city has to have its own equation of co-responsibility and also a design.
So to start, I want to introduce some characters from a book I made for teenagers. The best example of quality of life is the turtle because the turtle is an example of living and working together. And when you realize that the casque of the turtle looks like an urban tessitura, and can we imagine, if we cut the casque of the turtle, how sad she's going to be? And that's what we're doing in our cities: living here, working here, having leisure here. And most of the people are leaving the city and living outside of the city.
So, the other character is Otto, the automobile. He is invited for a party -- he never wants to leave. The chairs are on the tables and still drinking, and he drinks a lot. (Laughter) And he coughs a lot. Very egotistical: he carries only one or two people and he asks always for more infrastructure. Freeways. He's a very demanding person. And on the other hand, Accordion, the friendly bus, he carries 300 people -- 275 in Sweden; 300 Brazilians. (Laughter)
Speaking about the design: every city has its own design. Curitiba, my city: three million in the metropolitan area, 1,800,000 people in the city itself. Curitiba, Rio: it's like two birds kissing themselves. Oaxaca, San Francisco -- it's very easy: Market Street, Van Ness and the waterfront. And every city has its own design. But to make it happen, sometimes you have to propose a scenario and to propose a design -- an idea that everyone, or the large majority, will help you to make it happen. And that's the structure of the city of Curitiba.
And it's an example of living and working together. And this is where we have more density; it's where we have more public transport. So, this system started in '74. We started with 25,000 passengers a day, now it's 2,200,000 passengers a day. And it took 25 years until another city ... which is Bogota, and they did a very good job. And now there's 83 cities all over the world that they are doing what they call the BRT of Curitiba. And one thing: it's important not for only your own city; every city, besides its normal problems, they have a very important role in being with the whole humanity. That means mostly two main issues -- mobility and sustainability -- are becoming very important for the cities.
And this is an articulated bus, double-articulated. And we are very close to my house. You can come when you are in Curitiba and have a coffee there. And that's the evolution of the system. What in the design that made the difference is the boarding tubes: the boarding tube gives to the bus the same performance as a subway. That's why, I'm trying to say, it's like metro-nizing the bus. This is the design of the bus, and you can pay before entering the bus you're boarding. And for handicapped, they can use this as a normal system.
What I'm trying to say is the major contribution on carbon emissions are from the cars -- more than 50 percent -- so when we depend only on cars, it's ... -- that's why when we're talking about sustainability, it's not enough, green buildings. It's not enough, a new materials. It's not enough, new sources of energy. It's the concept of the city, the design of the city, that's also important, too. And also, how to teach the children. I'll speak on this later on.
Our idea of mobility is trying to make the connections between all the systems. We started in '83, proposing for the city of Rio how to connect the subway with the bus. The subway was against, of course. And 23 years after, they called us to develop -- we're developing this idea. And you can understand how different it's going to be, the image of Rio with the system -- one-minute frequency. And it's not Shanghai, it's not being colored during the day, only at night it will look this way.
And before you say it's a Norman Foster design, we designed this in '83. And this is the model, how it's going to work. So, it's the same system; the vehicle is different. And that's the model. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not trying to prove which system of transport is better. I'm trying to say we have to combine all the systems, and with one condition: never -- if you have a subway, if you have surface systems, if you have any kind of system -- never compete in the same space.
And coming back to the car, I always used to say that the car is like your mother-in-law: you have to have good relationship with her, but she cannot command your life. So, when the only woman in your life is your mother-in-law, you have a problem. (Laughter) So, all the ideas about how to transform through design -- old quarries and open universities and botanic garden -- all of it's related to how we teach the children. And the children, we teach during six months how to separate their garbage. And after, the children teach their parents. And now we have 70 percent -- since 20 years, it's the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world. Seven zero. (Applause) So teach the children.
I would like to say, if we want to have a sustainable world we have to work with everything what's said, but don't forget the cities and the children. I'm working in a museum and also a multi-use city, because you cannot have empty places during 18 hours a day. You should have always a structure of living and working together. Try to understand the sectors in the city that could play different roles during the 24 hours.
Another issue is, a city's like our family portrait. We don't rip our family portrait, even if we don't like the nose of our uncle, because this portrait is you. And these are the references that we have in any city. This is the main pedestrian mall; we did it in 72 hours. Yes, you have to be fast. And these are the references from our ethnic contribution. This is the Italian portal, the Ukrainian park, the Polish park, the Japanese square, the German park. All of a sudden, the Soviet Union, they split. And since we have people from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, [unclear], we have to stop the program. (Laughter)
Don't forget: creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget. If you cut two zeros, it's much better. And this is the Wire Opera theater. We did it in two months. Parks -- old quarries that they were transformed into parks. Quarries once made the nature, and sometimes we took this and we transformed. And every part can be transformed; every frog can be transformed in a prince.
So, in a city, you have to work fast. Planning takes time. And I'm proposing urban acupuncture. That means me, with some focal ideas to help the normal process of planning. And this is an acupuncture note -- or I.M. Pei's. Some small ones can make the city better. The smallest park in New York, the most beautiful: 32 meters.
So, I want just to end saying that you can always propose new materials -- new sustainable materials -- but keep in mind that we have to work fast to the end, because we don't have the whole time to plan. And I think creativity, innovation is starting. And we cannot have all the answers. So when you start -- and we cannot be so prepotent on having all the answers -- it's important starting and having the contribution from people, and they could teach you if you're not in the right track.
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Jaime Lerner reinvented urban space in his native Curitiba, Brazil. Along the way, he changed the way city planners worldwide see what’s possible in the metropolitan landscape.
From building opera houses with wire to mapping the connection between the automobile and your mother-in-law, Jaime Lerner delights in discovering eccentric solutions to vexing urban problems. In the process he has transformed the face of cities worldwide. Full bio » | <urn:uuid:d5e6fea1-5c81-4bd7-9c9d-c656a37be2f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jaime_lerner_sings_of_the_city.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971844 | 2,027 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Prodigy: A Legend Novel by Marie Lu; Putnam, 384 pages ($17.99). Ages 12 and up
Marie Lu doesn’t skip a beat in her high-octane, supercharged follow-up to best-selling dystopian thriller “Legend,” with a cliffhanger ending that will leave fans eagerly awaiting the final book in the trilogy. The romance across class divide (between dual narrators, Day, who grew up poor, and June, a privileged member of the military elite) is set against a more interesting political backdrop than the dystopian world of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” – in a totalitarian Republic, at war with the Colonies in what was once the United States, where trials are held to winnow out the most-gifted young people, with the rest dispatched to a miserable fate. In the first book, set in post-apocalypse Los Angeles, with poor sectors devastated by plague, June’s brother was murdered, Day falsely accused of the crime and June sent to hunt him down. Now, the Republic faces a rebellion from the Patriots when the Republic’s ruling Elector dies. The Patriots recruit June and Day to assassinate the new Elector as a condition for freeing Day’s little brother. But certain events leave June wondering about the true allegiance of the Patriot leader. The narration by Day and June, in alternating chapters marked by different-color typefaces, is an effective way to tell the story. Lu is a graduate of the video game industry (and designed a game version of her story for Facebook) and the colorfully cinematic action of her books seems tailor-made for film treatment; CBS Films has acquired the rights to “Legend.”
– Jean Westmoore
Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman; Ballantine Books, 336 pages ($26)
A young widow’s grief and naiveté evolve into paranoia and a sense that she has no idea what is really going on in the quiet town where she lives in Jenny Milchman’s stunning debut.
Milchman tackles small-town angst where evil can simmer under the surface with a breathless energy and a feel for realistic characters.
Nora Hamilton has been launching her career as a house restorer in the lovely Adirondack town of Wedeskyull, where her husband Brendan is a policeman. But her life is shattered when she discovers the body of her husband, who has apparently committed suicide in their home. Now Nora not only has to deal with her inconsolable grief, but the peaceful town seems to have changed overnight. Her mother-in-law, with whom she was never close, becomes increasingly antagonistic. Nora can’t seem to go anywhere without being followed by one of Brendan’s fellow cops; their excuse is that they are worried about her mental health. Then little things, especially Brendan’s mementos, are disappearing from her house. As she looks into Brendan’s background, she finds out that she may not have known her husband as well as she thought she did. The frigid air that blows through the town is the perfect metaphor for Nora’s feelings of isolation. Milchman’s original approach serves her story well, including the unpredictable resolution.
– McClatchy Newspapers
Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King; Walker, 322 pages, ($28)
Leonardo da Vinci was a genius of delay, a master of the unfinished. “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he lamented in a notebook.
Ross King, an English novelist and historian, tells the story, in “Leonardo and the Last Supper,” of the improbable creation of one of art’s greatest masterpieces. With a fiction writer’s feel for character, King depicts a supremely ingenious, enigmatic, stubbornly independent, and underachieving Leonardo, and, with a nonfiction writer’s skill, he sets the sketch against a richly described background of a society in creative and often violent ferment.
“A commission to paint a wall was not the most obvious assignment for Leonardo,” King writes. He had never worked in fresco, the preferred technique of the day for painting murals. And he had never worked on a painting so large: 15 feet tall and nearly 29 feet wide.
Leonardo finished what he started, although he took about four years, going slowly enough to annoy the leader of the Dominican community at Santa Maria.
The Leonardo who emerges in King’s pages may have been a genius, but he was a refreshingly human one. King writes that Leonardo, brilliant as he was, was “a poor mathematician” and had difficulty with Latin: “That one of history’s greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be a consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.”
– McClatchy Newspapers | <urn:uuid:77c36a3b-7109-4d4d-ad39-0c7cc608325a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130210/LIFE/130219973/1058 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966364 | 1,034 | 1.5 | 2 |
source: Global Resarch May 11, 2011
Global Research Editor’s Note
We bring to the attention of our readers the following text of Osama bin Laden’s interview with Ummat, a Pakistani daily, published in Karachi on September 28, 2001. It was translated into English by the BBC World Monitoring Service and made public on September 29, 2001.
The authenticity of this interview, which is available in recognized electronic news archives, is confirmed.
Osama bin Laden categorically denies his involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
Bin Laden’s statements in this interview are markedly different from those made in the alleged Osama video tapes.
In this interview, Osama bin Laden exhibits an understanding of US foreign policy. He expresses his views regarding the loss of life on 9/11. He also makes statements as to who, in his opinion, might be the likely perpetrator of the September 11 attacks.
This is an important text which has not been brought to the attention of Western public opinion.
We have highlighted key sections of this interview. It is our hope that the text of this interview, published barely a week before the onset of the war on Afghanistan, will contribute to a better understanding of the history of Al Qaeda, the role of Osama bin Laden and the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
Michel Chossudovsky, May 9, 2011
Full text of September 2001 Pakistani paper’s “exclusive” interview with Usamah Bin-Ladin
Ummat (in Urdu), Karachi, 28 September 2001, pp. 1 and 7.
Kabul: Prominent Arab mojahed holy warrior Usamah Bin-Ladin has said that he or his al-Qa’idah group has nothing to do with the 11 September suicidal attacks in Washington and New York. He said the US government should find the attackers within the country. In an exclusive interview with daily “Ummat”, he said these attacks could be the act of those who are part of the American system and are rebelling against it and working for some other system. Or, Usamah said, this could be the act of those who want to make the current century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. Or, the American Jews, who are opposed to President Bush ever since the Florida elections, might be the masterminds of this act. There is also a great possibility of the involvement of US intelligence agencies, which need billions of dollars worth of funds every year. He said there is a government within the government in the United States.
The secret agencies, he said, should be asked as to who are behind the attacks. Usamah said support for attack on Afghanistan was a matter of need for some Muslim countries and compulsion for others. However, he said, he was thankful to the courageous people of Pakistan who erected a bulwark before the wrong forces. He added that the Islamic world was attaching great expectations with Pakistan and, in time of need, “we will protect this bulwark by sacrificing of lives”.
Following is the interview in full detail:
Ummat: You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington. What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?
Usamah [Osama bin Laden]: In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the earth as an abode for peace, for the whole mankind. Allah is the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad for our guidance. I am thankful to the Ummat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant and Momin true Muslim people of Pakistan who refused to believe in lie of the demon.
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people.
Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children, and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.
There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya, and Bosnia?
Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Muslims .
The US has no friends, nor does it want to keep any because the prerequisite of friendship is to come to the level of the friend or consider him at par with you. America does not want to see anyone equal to it. It expects slavery from others. Therefore, other countries are either its slaves or subordinates.
However, our case is different. We have pledged slavery to God Almighty alone and after this pledge there is no possibility to become the slave of someone else. If we do that, it will be disregardful to both our Sustainer and his fellow beings. Most of the world nations upholding their freedom are the religious ones, which are the enemies of United States, or the latter itself considers them as its enemies. Or the countries, which do not agree to become its slaves, such as China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria, and the former Russia as received .
Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.
According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the US government has stated. But the Bush administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the US itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.
Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This funding issue was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger.
They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usamah and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush administration approved a budget of 40bn dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance.
Read the rest of this entry » | <urn:uuid:99b60dab-72c0-4a6d-82f1-415adb29f398> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://norcaltruth.org/category/osama-bin-laden/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970393 | 1,631 | 1.796875 | 2 |
(Interview with Newt Gingrich, Fox News Channel. Secretary Rumsfeld interview portions originally conducted on May 10, 2002.)
Gingrich: Hello, I'm Newt Gingrich. Welcome to "Not If, But When: America and the Axis of Evil."
President George W. Bush's State of the Union was truly historic. But then it followed an historic attack on the World Trade Center, and on the Pentagon. Now, in his address, the president was to put a face on the enemy. It is, he said, not one nation but three whose governments, whose actions, most threaten America and our way of life.
President Bush (from video): North Korea has a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility towards America and to support terror. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world.
Gingrich: An axis of evil, but why those three countries? Why only those three? And now that names have been named, what's next? Do we watch and wait, or do we take the offensive and move directly, militarily, to replace those regimes? Do we go after Saddam Hussein once and for all?
In the next hour, I'll discuss those questions with some of America's top minds and most important decision makers. Michael Ledeen was a National Security Advisor, Defense Department consultant, and worked in the State Department under President Reagan. Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Laurie Mylroie is an author and leading authority on Saddam Hussein. Senator Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate and possible presidential candidate in 2004, and one of the most influential voices on either side of the aisle in Congress. And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the president's point man for the war on terror, his most visible and articulate Cabinet member since September 11th. Rumsfeld has arguably, among other things, done more for the press conference than anyone in Washington since John F. Kennedy.
I met with Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon recently, and I asked about the president's State of the Union Address, his choice of words and his choice of countries.
Are North Korea and Iran and Iraq really logically lumped together? What is it that they do that makes them logically joined together in terms of our definition of them?
Rumsfeld: Well, what we know about those countries and the other countries on the terrorist list, like Syria and Libya, Cuba, North Korea, is that those are countries that have cooperated with each other. North Korea, for example, has supplied ballistic missile technologies and various WMD capabilities to Iran, to other nations. They cooperate, they each have strengths and weaknesses in the development of these weapons, and they trade them among each other, so all of them increase their capabilities.
We also know that they are nations that have, and because they're on the terrorist list, by definition, they have sponsored terrorism, they've engaged in terrorist acts themselves. We know today, for example, that Iran is funding terrorist organizations that come down from Iran into Damascus, Syria, down into the Baaka Valley, and then down into Southern Lebanon where they engage in terrorist acts against the Israelis, as an example.
Do they belong together? They're different. There's no question that Iran is a different situation from Iraq, and Iraq is different from North Korea. The one thing that is common is the viciousness of those regimes, they way they are repressing their people. It's just different in each way. In Iran, they're being denied a lot of rights. The Iranian people are intelligent, they're industrious, they have a wonderful history. And the thought that they should be under the thumb of the extremists that govern that country is just a crime, it's a shame for those people. They aren't allowed to do the things that most people do that are free people. I'm not going to be naive and hold my breath, but I think that it is not beyond the possibility that the Iranian people could throw off that regime and decide that they do want women to have rights, and they do want the kind of education that will give them opportunities, and they don't want to be stifled in their daily lives as they are.
In North Korea, it's just different. Here is North Korea with the same people that live in South Korea. And the people in South Korea have developed this enormously vital and energetic economy, the people have all kinds of opportunities. And in North Korea they're in prison camps, they're starving. Their GDP per capita, I haven't looked it up, but it has to be something like a 20th of what it probably is in South Korea. And the people are tortured and treated just inhumanly. It is a terrible, terrible life for the North Korean people.
Gingrich: There seems to be, though, a sudden increase in the number of North Koreans trying to find refugee, trying to leave. Is that a new development or is it just that the news media are now picking it up?
Rumsfeld: I think probably it's the news media is picking it up. There are areas in North Korea that are in square miles the size of a major city in the United States that are prison camps, and there is more than one, where these people are sent away, kept in inhumane circumstances. Nearby, outside of those prison camps, are people that are starving, and needless to say, people vote with their feet, and they try to get away, and they get out.
Iraq is a world-class vicious dictatorship -- torture, denial of every opportunity to do anything that free people would be able to do. I look at that situation and think of the fact that here is one of the few dictators on the face of the earth who has used chemical weapons against his own people, people of his own country as well as on a neighbor.
Gingrich: Ambassador Richard Butler, an Australian, who was the head of the United Nations Inspection Team in Iraq said that Saddam was clearly doing everything he could to develop weapons of mass destruction despite the U.N. inspectors. That's been four years without inspection. Is it your estimation that Saddam has continued and has made substantial progress towards acquiring the kind of weapons that really could lead to lots of people dying in one incident?
Rumsfeld: When Desert Storm took place, and the people went in and found out the circumstance of the Iraqi nuclear program, they were much closer to developing a nuclear weapon than anyone on the outside, any intelligence community in the world, had even estimated, including the Israelis and the United States. Saddam Hussein's appetite for these weapons is enormous. We know he's been focusing on them. I would say about the president's speech about the axis of evil, it was a wonderful thing to do because what it did was, it focused world attention on the carnage in those countries, the damage that those dictatorships and repressive regimes are posing on their people, to say nothing of the risks they pose to their neighbors. This is a good thing to do to say to the world, 'look at what's happening in those countries.' It's a terrible thing for those people.
Gingrich: When we come back, we'll hear more from Secretary Rumsfeld, and from Senator Joseph Lieberman. And a panel of experts on the axis of evil.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman: The three countries that the president named, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, have done some very evil things, and are capable of more evil unless we find ways to stop them.
Gingrich: Nearly two years since his run for vice president, Senator Joseph Lieberman remains a powerful influence both in the Democratic Party and on Capitol Hill. In recent weeks Senator Lieberman has questioned the administration's handling of intelligence data prior to September 11th. Yet, he remains a staunch supporter of the war on terror. In that light, I sat down with the senator at his office recently, and asked for his view on the president's newly declared enemies list.
Do you see the president's concern about the axis of evil being over here, and the war on terror over here, or is it the same problem? How do you assess that kind of a language, and whether it leads us towards a helpful policy?
Lieberman: Well, the axis of evil was brilliant rhetorically. I would say it was not quite right diplomatically. But there was some truth to it. I mean, the three countries that the president named -- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- have done some very evil things, and are capable of more evil, unless we find ways to stop them. The reason I think it wasn't quite right diplomatically is because, one, obviously the three countries are not really an axis, they're not joined together in an alliance. But, two, each of them calls out for different responses. I think Iraq is the most immediately menacing country to the security of the United States and the world, because of the hatred that Saddam Hussein has for us, because we know that he has chemical and biological weapons. We have reason to believe that he's developing nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles, and when he gets a chance to use them against us at home, or overseas, the probability is that he will. So when the president said that time is not on our side, he was right. The sooner we're able to dislodge Saddam the better. North Korea, Kim Jung Il, I think are subject to diplomatic and economic persuasion. But, they're very dangerous. The North Koreans are making ballistic missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. They're selling a lot of this stuff to other countries, they're a danger. The Iranians are the most perplexing, in that they're somewhere in between North Korea and Iraq. Iran probably has the most anti-American government and the most pro-American public in the Middle East.
Gingrich: Like many Democrats and Republicans who concur with the president's axis list in general, Senator Lieberman wonders why not Syria?
Lieberman: It may not be a full-fledged member of the axis of evil, but it's been responsible for some evil itself, and we ought not to give Syria a pass here. You know, after September 11th, the nations of the world rallied around us, there began to be a plausible thought that perhaps this was the moment to bring Iran and Syria into the orbit of civilized nations. They've both been, again, a profound disappointment.
Gingrich: Syria, known to be testing chemical weapons and missiles, home to terrorist organizations, at least four headquartered in Damascus, the capital.
Rumsfeld: They're cooperating with Iran, they're funding terrorism, they're allowing it to transit their country, testing weapons of mass destruction, they are what they are, and it's a terrorist state that has been active in assisting terrorist organizations that cross national borders, going into Lebanon, and attacking Israel, among other things.
Gingrich: When we come back, our think tank team of experts will have its say on America and the axis of evil.
Michael Ledeen: The common denominator of our enemies in the Middle East is tyranny, the terror masters are all tyrants.
Reuel Marc Gerecht: I think it's imperative the United States allows everyone to see in the Middle East that we are going to track bin Laden down whether it takes months or it takes years, that we are not going to relent.
Gingrich: In out last segment, the Secretary of Defense, and an influential Democratic senator both agreed that in addition to President Bush's axis of evil of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, Syria could easily be included as a terrorist supporting state.
Ledeen: So we have to get back to the basic mission, which is bringing down the various tyrannies.
Gingrich: Michael Ledeen is a former White House national security advisor, he would add Syria and more to the evil axis list.
Ledeen: The common denominator of our enemies in the Middle East is tyranny. The terror masters are all tyrants. So Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq are all tyrannies. And I believe until these tyrannies are brought down we will continue to have terrorism.
Gingrich: So you would include Syria and Saudi Arabia with Iran and Iraq?
Ledeen: Yes, I think those four countries. You can't any longer -- maybe it was possible once upon a time to pick them off one at a time. Right now Iran, Iraq, and Syria are bundled. They've all been talking to one another, they've all been making contingency plans, each has made promises to the other two, if you're attacked we'll do this. So they're all ready to go. So wherever we start now, we're going to get all three at once.
Gingrich: But, why Saudi Arabia, America's chief Arab ally in the Gulf War, and sponsor of the most recent Middle East peace plan?
Ledeen: The Saudis finance all the terror. The Iranians design it, the Iraqis support it, and the Saudis finance it. And the Saudis are the producers of the basic non-Shiite doctrine. There are two schools of Islam, so there are two kinds of terrorism, there's Shiite terrorism and Sunni terrorism. Wahabi terrorism, Wahabi terrorism is Saudi, it's a Saudi invention, it's a Saudi product, it's preached in Saudi mosques, it's spread around the world in Saudi textbooks, even in the United States. We know, for example, that, what's it's called, the Saudi Islamic Academy of Fairfax, Virginia, uses textbooks printed in Saudi Arabia, and they teach the same kind of hate that we read every day in the newspapers about what the Saudi newspapers are printing. Kill the Jews, kill the Christians, be a martyr, go to heaven, 72 virgins, the usual.
Gingrich: But, whether it's Saudi Arabia or Syria, Iran, or Iraq, the consensus among all the analysts we spoke to seem to be, those states that support terrorism in the Middle East threaten America as well.
Ledeen: Once you move beyond Iraq you're going to have to look at Iran, you're going to have to look at the Hezbollah and Syria, because when we talk about terrorism in general what we're really talking about is Islamic radicalism. And that the terrorist threats that come elsewhere are really quite small compared to that which issues forth from the Middle East.
Gingrich: So you mentioned Syria, which was not on the president's axis of evil list, how would you compare Syria with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea?
Ledeen: Syria is more of a host. Once upon a time Syria was more of an engine of terror, I don't think that's the case now. Syria has got very real political concerns, the primary concern is maintaining control of Lebanon. Now, one of the factors in that control is the relationship with the Hezbollah, which is the militant Shiite group, which is in the southern part of the country, actually it goes all the way to Beirut. I think the Hezbollah are now what you might call the preeminent holy warriors of the Middle East, with the possible exception being Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. The Syrians, if they wanted to, could clamp down on Hezbollah, but I don't think they want to because it would cause them a great deal of domestic unrest inside of Lebanon. And also, I think the Syrians fundamentally agree with the Hezbollah, and that is they'd rather not have Israel exist. And Hezbollah churns up, keeps the temperature up, and works to Syria's advantage.
Gingrich: In your mind you would not see Syria as being the same kind of active threat that you would see, say, Iraq being?
Ledeen: No, Syria does not have the resources to be. Only Iraq and Iran, those are the two preeminent countries of the Middle East, Turkey excepted. And those are the ones who really drive terrorism, they drive it internationally, and certainly vis-a-vis the peace process, with the Israelis and Palestinians.
Gingrich: But, are Iran and Iraq the same kind of terrorist state?
Ledeen: Well, Iran is a different case, because I think Iran is, in many ways, it's the most politically advanced of all countries in the Muslim Middle East. There is really a democratic movement in Iran. The clergy is very much aware of it, to some extent the clergy is a product of it. And there is no doubt -- I mean, every time, for example, the United States -- U.S. soldiers get near the Iranian border, in the case of Afghanistan, before that in the case of the Gulf War, the domestic temperature in Iran starts to rise. It almost starts to boil. We start seeing pro-American demonstrations. I think that if the United States were to go into Iraq, and to work to establish a democratic system inside of Iraq, the repercussions inside of Iran would be enormous, and I suspect they would even be immediate.
Gingrich: And you expect them to be Iranian, that is, that it's the local people, not an American intervention, or an American involvement, but actually that the younger population is just dramatically pro-democracy, and anti-dictatorship?
Ledeen: Absolutely. I think the clerical regime has been a wonderful antidote for the Iranian infatuation with Islamic radicalism, with Islamic militancy, with clerical dictatorship. I mean, they have lived it now since 1979 and they don't like it. And I would suspect that if, in fact, the United States could ratchet up the pressure outside of the country, certainly in Iraq, that you would see tremendous pressure develop inside of Iran, for more significant change, and you would see the reform movement which I think people then correct identified with President Khatami, which is in fact more a product of that reform, of that movement, he is by no means the cutting edge of it, you would see that reform movement gain tremendous speed. And it would not be unlikely that you would see what I would call productive turmoil inside that country in the movement for a greater democratic system.
Gingrich: You know, there are reports that there are riots on a regular basis in Tehran and other major cities, are those primarily just in reaction to soccer matches, or do they have an underlying political/cultural significance?
Ledeen: No, they're not. I mean, soccer matches are interesting, because whenever you have a soccer match what you have, essentially, is a large group of young men to get together. And that's what the regime fears most, because up until the death of Ayatollah Khomeini they could largely depend upon the young men as being the base of their regime, they can no longer. They fear soccer matches because you get a group of young men together, and in fact their emotions come forward. And it is representative, I think, of the country as a whole. And certainly if they cannot maintain the support of young men, then they know very well they may not be able to control the support of these same type of young men who serve in the army, who serve in the Revolutionary Guard corps, and the other organizations that allow the clergy to rule the country.
Gingrich: In the case of Iran, you really see us more in a diplomatic, psychological, political offensive, trying to ally ourselves with younger Iranians, rather than in the kind of military operation that we might need, say, in Baghdad.
Ledeen: Absolutely, I think the only justification for a military strike against Iran, and even then I think it would be a limited one, if you were to catch the Iranians, again, in some type of terrorist act against the United States. In that circumstance I think you should respond, the United States should respond, and respond forcefully, because if you don't you'll send the wrong signal to the Iranians.
Gingrich: But, like Gerecht, Ledeen feels it would take little more than a taste of democracy to fuel a regime change in Iran, even if it came from across the border in Iraq.
You think if the United States moves to replace Saddam we would actually face a confrontation with Iran?
Ledeen: Yes, automatically. Don't believe for a second that the Iranian people would permit the Iraqi people to be free and not be free themselves. They couldn't put up with that.
Gingrich: So what would the Iranians do?
Ledeen: They would rise. They're probably going to rise anyway. Right now Iranian leaders are talking about insurrection. And the editor of a newspaper recently shut down in Tehran gave a speech a couple of days ago in which she said the scenario of the Soviet Union is about to be now repeated in Iran.
Gingrich: But the rising would be against the ayatollahs, not against the United States?
Ledeen: No, it's against the ayatollahs.
Gingrich: So would you expect the ayatollahs to attempt to confront the United States if we started to take out Saddam?
Ledeen: Yes, they have to, because the first sign of success of the United States in Iraq would generate exactly their death scenario in their own country. So they have to.
Gingrich: So our military preparations have to take into account the potential of both a Syrian and an Iranian coalition with Iraq.
Ledeen: Yes, I think that's automatic. I think there's no escape from that. If we had continued right away, after Afghanistan, when they were all uncertain and living in dread in Baghdad, and Damascus, and Tehran, I think probably we could have chosen one of the three and done it. But, not any longer, we've waited too long.
Gingrich: That ends our first half of "Not If, But When, America and the Axis of Evil." When we return after the news, how to deal with our bitterest enemy, Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and the danger of more terror here at home.
Laurie Mylroie: It's inconceivable that the events of September 11 were carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda alone. There was a state involved in terrorism on that scale -- that state seems to be Iraq.
Gingrich: Welcome back to our report on America and the Axis of Evil: Not If, But When. As you heard in the first half-hour, there is some debate over which countries to add to the list, but there's no debate over the three countries currently on the axis of evil. North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all are major supporters and funders of terrorism worldwide, all three dabble in weapons of mass destruction, each regime is a dictatorship brutal to its own people and fiercely anti-American. But, of the three, one regime, one despotic leader stands out.
Mylroie: There has been continuing Iraqi involvement in terrorism.
Gingrich: Laurie Mylroie is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on Saddam Hussein and his terrorist ties, ties which she says links Saddam directly to September 11th.
Mylroie: It's inconceivable that the events of September 11 were carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda alone. There was a state involved in terrorism on that scale, and that state seems to be Iraq. The Czechs are saying, until this day, that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers in the United States, met at least once in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. There was a training camp for terrorists just south of Baghdad where terrorists were trained to take over -- hijack airplanes using knives and things like that. And there are even satellite photos of that airplane sitting in the terrorist training camp in the middle of nowhere. An airplane has to be in an airport because it needs some runway to take off and land. But that airplane is just sitting there, there's no airport anywhere around it.
Gingrich: So, you see a major investment by Saddam and the Iraqis in developing a relationship with terrorists, and training them and supporting them?
Mylroie: Since the Gulf War, Saddam has lived for revenge against the United States. And he's been taking out that revenge by acts of terrorism. He's been working with Islamic militants, including Osama bin Laden. They are up-front, they provide the cover, the foot soldiers, the ideology. Iraqi intelligence provides the training, direction and expertise.
Gingrich: And, as Saddam continues to fund and train terrorists, his stock among Arab leaders seems to be rising.
Mylroie: I think, in large part, they are afraid of him. They recognize that Saddam is capable of doing terrible things to them. If he did that to the United States, what might he do to them. I think that's part of it. I think another part of it is that the Saudis really aren't the best of allies. It's not clear that they want a democratic regime in Iraq. They might -- they do see it as a threat to their own quasi-authoritarian, if not authoritarian rule, and it may be their judgment that they would prefer to live with Saddam Hussein under sanctions with weapons inspections than to see an effort at democracy in an Arab country.
Gingrich: Some people argue that the road to Iraq lies through Palestine, and others argue that the road to Palestinian-Israeli peace lies through replacing the regime in Iraq. How do you weigh that? I mean, what should the U.S. priorities be?
Mylroie: It has to be removing Saddam Hussein. After all, you know, it was the Gulf War and the apparent victory in 1991 that paved the way for the Madrid conference, and the peace negotiations that followed. Of course, those peace negotiations led to nothing. But it is by removing radical regimes in the Middle East that one will create a climate in which it is easier for Israel and the Palestinians to talk to one another.
Gingrich: If you were advising the president and his choice was to make a higher priority of finishing up al Qaeda or going after the Hussein regime in Baghdad, which would you place as the higher priority for American safety?
Mylroie: I would think we'd be able to do both of them, because the longer we wait -- we want to wrap up al Qaeda as much as possible, but at the same time the longer we wait to go to war with Iraq, the longer Saddam Hussein has time to produce more biological/chemical weapons, even nuclear weapons. He's working on a bomb right now as we speak.
Gingrich: And there is the issue of sanctions and inspection, the means by which some continue to say we can isolate and contain Saddam without having to topple him.
Gerecht: Well, I mean, I think sanctions could have possibly been an argument up until 1995, at least you could have entertained the idea. But when Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, defected to Jordan we suddenly learned the vast quantity of material that he had been successfully hiding from sanctions -- from inspections, and the sanctions regime had already been in place for four years by that time. I think one has to be -- it's fairly delusional to believe that we are going to be able to devise a system that is really going to give us that confidence level to be sure that Saddam Hussein is once again not fooling us, and is able to, in fact, clandestinely construct weapons of mass destruction. I mean, he has an enormous amount of money now. The oil exports in Iraq are about where they were before the war started, the Gulf War started. It is -- he has sufficient funds now to operate a fairly extensive clandestine system. And I think if we couldn't catch him in the past, I don't see why now we would be that much better, or he would be that less efficient and dumber.
Gingrich: Essentially, you think those that argue for continued sanctions and more intense inspections are just kidding themselves about the difficulty of policing this particular dictatorship?
Gerecht: Yes. I think if we're honest with ourselves, the reason we talk about inspections, the reason we talk about sanctions, it's a way of avoiding war.
Gingrich: When we come back, was September 11th just the beginning, is more terror on the way?
Rumsfeld: The fact that we have friends on the north and the south, and oceans on either side was a wonderful buffer for us for a great many decades. It no longer is. We saw that on September 11th.
Gingrich: There's no way to measure the pain and loss that America had on September 11th. But even as we track down the terrorist leaders, there is genuine concern here at home. Is more pain on the way? Will there be more attacks? I put those questions to our team of experts.
When you think about weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, or nuclear, you think about the programs that Iran has, the programs that Syria has, the programs that Iraq has. Should the average American be genuinely concerned that these kinds of weapons could be used here in the United States, or is that a very unlikely prospect?
Ledeen: I'm concerned. So it's fine with me if average Americans are concerned. I'm certainly concerned. Every day when I get home I say, 'boy, that was a lucky day because nothing happened.' I'm very concerned. And I'm concerned, it's not just weapons of mass destruction. You know, Semtex, plastic explosives are terrific weapons of mass destruction. They excel at that. And you know as well as I do that there are all kinds of places here in Washington where you could load a car up with plastic explosives, drive it in front of some monument or some office building and blow it up. We're not detecting those things. We're not ready for that.
I'll give you another one. I flew on a corporate jet the other day, coast to coast, five stops, five different airports. No hint of security, not even a policeman anywhere. And we know these people have money. They can certainly go out and rent a corporate jet plane, walk onto the plane with suitcases full of whatever they wanted, bombs, explosives, and so forth, kill the pilot, take over the aircraft, and there they are. We're not ready for that. We're not doing anything.
Gingrich: Should we be worried about weapons of mass destruction in our own cities? Is that a realistic threat that we should actually be concerned about, or is it a fantasy by those who want us to build up the defense budget?
Mylroie: It is a realistic threat, and we should not forget the anthrax in the letters that were sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy. That material is quite dangerous. Personally, it seems to me far more likely that that material was produced in a foreign laboratory than by some American scientist, deranged American scientist, in his attic. And I tend to think that of the foreign laboratories that might have produced that anthrax, the most likely is Iraq.
There is a real prospect of unconventional terrorism in the United States. And as we move to take down Saddam Hussein, it will grow more real. However, if we don't take him down, it exists also.
Gingrich: And according to Marc Gerecht, if we're waiting for proof that an even worse attack could be coming, we have it in writing.
Gerecht: If you look at al Qaeda documents that have been seized in Afghanistan, there is no question that they have been aiming at trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. It would appear that they haven't been terribly successful. But, I mean, this is an ongoing effort that goes back at least ten years. And I think since September 11th we would be foolish to believe that a terrorist group such as al Qaeda, and the Middle Eastern states who I suspect have probably, certainly have some type of liaison relationship with al Qaeda, that is Iraq and Iran, and may have in fact provided aid to them, it would be foolish to believe that in the future they would not use those weapons if they could get their hands onto it. And September 11th definitively proved that, yes, they can strike us right in the heartland.
Rumsfeld: When we were dealing with conventional weapons only, we knew what the risks were. And lots of people can be killed by conventional weapons, but the reality is that multiples of those can be killed with unconventional weapons, weapons of mass destruction. Here we are in a country where people live close together, where they travel all over the United States, and to the extent a biological weapon is used in a way that infects people and they carry that, why, the risks are sizeable.
Does that mean that we ought to stay up all night worrying about that? No. What it means is that we ought to recognize that reality, that the fact that we have friends in the north and the south, and oceans on either side was a wonderful buffer for us for a great many decades. It no longer is. We saw that on September 11th. We saw that people are able to -- in our free society -- people are able to get into our country, live among us with hostile intent, and then find ways to do substantial damage. To the extent they link up with countries with, for example, chemical and biological and radiological capabilities, then the risk to us and to other free countries is much greater.
Gingrich: And if this kind of talk, these warnings, seem exaggerated, Senator Lieberman says, don't dismiss them.
Lieberman: Unfortunately, after September 11th, nothing is inconceivable, no matter how horrific. And, you know, we have to both combine a renewed sensitivity, defensiveness, willingness to think about the previously unthinkable and defend against it, with a commitment not to have these terrorists destroy our way of life by making us terrified, and inhibiting us from enjoying American life as we've traditionally enjoyed it. So there is a combination. So, once you see a group-coordinated effort to fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the idea that we've been warned about for a long time of weapons of mass destruction being brought into the United States and let loose here, or exploded here has to be put within the range of the plausible. And that's why we're all so focused on homeland security now.
Gingrich: When we come back, we'll wrap up our report on America and the Axis of Evil. What is the road ahead in the war on terror?
Lieberman: In some senses, this will be one of those cases where eternal vigilance will be the price of liberty, because there will always be the danger that there are more terrorists out there.
President George W. Bush (from video): But, it has only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch, yet it must be, and it will be waged on our watch.
Gingrich: In many ways America is still reeling from September 11th. But, now we've declared war on terrorism, we know our enemies, Taliban, al Qaeda, bin Laden, and those who fund and support terrorism. For America, what's the road ahead on the war against terrorism, what's next?
Rumsfeld: It's an important question, and of course, the country needs to know that. The president, in my view, has set the direction correctly. He has focused the world and the American people on the reality that we are in a totally different security environment than we'd been in prior to September 11th. The immediate task is to deal with the completion of the work in Afghanistan, the tracking down to the extent it's possible the al Qaeda, and the Taliban, seeing that they're not able to gather in large groups, and destabilize the Karzai interim authority, see that humanitarian workers are able to move around the country with reasonable security, and that's the first task.
The second task is to face up to the reality that there are terrorist networks elsewhere in the world. They exist, they've been well trained, terrorists have. There are a number of countries that work closely with them, and are on the so-called terrorist list. And the reality is that those countries have been working very hard to develop weapons of mass destruction. To the extent that there, over time, is a link up between the global terrorist networks, who have demonstrated that they're willing to kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children, by flying airplanes into the World Trade Center, and into the Pentagon, where we are today, to the extent those folks link up with the countries that have weapons of mass destruction, we will be looking not at thousands of people dead, but tens, or potentially hundreds of thousands of people dead. So our task, as the United States, it seems to me, is to work with our friends around the world who have been so cooperative so far in the war on terrorism, and see that we continue to put a great deal of pressure on countries that have weapons of mass destruction that are on the terrorist list.
Gingrich: Of course, as September 11th made all too clear, U.S. intelligence needs a make over.
How would you create a 21st century intelligence system for the U.S.?
Gerecht: I think you're going to have to fundamentally change the structure at least of the clandestine service. I think when we talk about the intelligence community and the battle against terrorism, at least in the field, what we're talking about is the clandestine service, which is more formally known as the director of operations. I think you have to shift, alter the structure completely. I mean, right now most offices in the clandestine service serve overseas with what they call official cover, in official U.S. facilities. That doesn't work, it didn't really work in the Cold War, and it certainly doesn't work when you have enemies such as Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda. You are going to have to go where they live, and that is not on the diplomatic circuit.
Gingrich: So a different kind of agent, or a different kind of service?
Gerecht: A completely different kind of service, and I don't see that developing. I mean bureaucracies are very, very tenacious creatures, and the clandestine service is a very well established bureaucracy with its own prerogatives and privileges. So, I think the odds of this are not good. And if you look at what's been going on since September 11th, the intelligence community has been flooded with funds. And money is good, but money is not the key here. What has to take place in conjunction with that is serious reform of how people are actually sent overseas, the type of officers that are recruited to go overseas, so that you have a much better chance of actually meeting a terrorist, actually meeting people who know terrorists, so that the United States is not completely dependent upon liaison services. Take, for example, in Afghanistan, essentially if the Pakistanis didn't tell us what was going on in Afghanistan we had very little information of what was going on there. That should not have been the case. We should have had other networks, our own means of determining what was going on inside of that country, and not have been so dependent upon the Pakistanis. That was really inexcusable.
Gingrich: It's almost as if there was a window from September 11th, and for a period there was remarkable clarity, and President Bush was stunningly clear, and we were moving forward in Afghanistan, we were moving decisively, and the president was clearly committed to taking the risks necessary. Now, it's almost as if we have slid back into a pre-September 11th muddle.
Ledeen: I think that's right.
Gingrich: What then breaks us out of the muddle?
Ledeen: Any day the president decides to do it, because the American people certainly support it. The American people have not gotten muddled. The American people have remained as clear and as consistent as they were September 12th.
Gingrich: So is it the nature of the bureaucracy in this city to be in a muddle? How does the muddle occur?
Ledeen: The muddle comes because a great part of the State Department doesn't want a war, the uniformed military doesn't want to fight a war, never wants to fight a war, and the advocates of waging this war are few and far between. And you have a much greater political mass against it.
Gingrich: There is this whole issue of both world opinion, but also opinion, for example, among our European allies. And it does seem that immediately after September 11th we had enormous support, but that to some extent it's frayed. How do you think America, as diverse and complex as we are as a country, how do we communicate better with the world, so that people in democracies around the world have a sense of common purpose, rather than wondering what we're doing?
Lieberman: That's a big question, and it's an important one. Look, we obviously have to communicate better to the Arab world, to the Islamic world. And we're taking steps to do that, because the picture that a lot of people in Islamic countries have of the U.S. is not one that we're painting, it's being painted by our enemies. Obviously, we'd do well to reach out and try to bring human rights, and more trade, to Islamic countries, so their standard of living goes up. I came up with a conclusion that surprised me, which is that one of the best things we could do to undercut the extremist forces in the Arab and Islamic world was to try to get as many Islamic countries as possible to join the WTO, because their economies are so closed, and if they open them, and we open them through the WTO they can do better.
Gingrich: Senator Lieberman, as you know, the country had a very strong sense of purpose after September 11th, the president described where we had to go in winning the war against terrorism, and then as recently as the State of the Union he described an axis of evil and talked about it. You've studied all these things, you've been a real leader in the Senate on what a responsible foreign policy would be. How do you see as the road ahead for America in winning the war on terrorism?
Lieberman: The key point is persistence. Your question is a very good one, because we were all shaken, and infuriated, and unified after September 11th, and the president gave us strong and principled leadership, we went forward, we organized, we responded in Afghanistan, defeated the Taliban, we disrupted the al Qaeda, but as we've been saying all along, and there's a danger we'll forget, this is not a typical war, not only in the way in which we were attacked, but in the way in which we'll have to defeat our enemies. This will go on for a long time. And it will not end, as others have said, with a signing of a peace treaty on a battleship somewhere. In some senses, this will be one of those cases where eternal vigilance will be the price of our liberty, because there will always be a danger that there are more terrorists out there.
Gingrich: That concludes our look at America and the axis of evil. I hope we haven't so much raised the alarm as indicated there is a road ahead, that America is ready and willing, that it isn't if, but when, and that we Americans will get the job done.
Until next time, this is Newt Gingrich.
"THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS PREPARED BY THE FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE INC., WASHINGTON, D.C. FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE IS A PRIVATE COMPANY. FOR OTHER DEFENSE RELATED TRANSCRIPTS NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH THIS SITE, CONTACT FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE AT (202) 347-1400." | <urn:uuid:e9732b43-1b64-4e65-80c6-bb42ff95d078> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3554 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976529 | 9,189 | 1.640625 | 2 |
A European patent filed by the Japanese company last year, which was recently published and spotted by the Gamechup blog, details a gamepad with a screen, similar to that of the Wii U, which will track your movement using the glowing light on the side of the device, much like the PlayStation Move.
It's not entirely surprising that Sony would give a PlayStation peripheral the 'eye' suffix, given that it's previously launched the 'Eye Toy' and the 'PlayStation Eye', but it does seem cheeky that it's seemingly chosen a name that so closely resembles Apple's iPad.
The patent suggests the EyePad will have a touchscreen at its centre, but the edges will glow -- so it can be picked up by the PlayStation Eye and track your movement. The device also offers two stereoscopic cameras, which according to the patent will be used to detect motion above the screen, meaning you will be able to prod objects which are a closer representation of real life, in a 3D environment.
There's also a suggestion of a future game that may be launched with the PlayStation 4 and the EyePad. The game, called EyePets, will work in much the same way as other pet-stroking games, most notably Nintendogs and Kinectimals, but with the ability to stroke and groom the digital critters in 3D.
While there's no promising this will ever make it to shops -- after all, companies constantly file patents they never intend to use -- it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. Sony has followed Nintendo's lead before, with the PlayStation Move controller resembling a more advanced version of the Wii remote.
Sony's not the only company rumoured to be working on a gaming tablet -- Microsoft is expected to launch a 7-inch Xbox Surface with the next-generation Xbox.
Whether or not the device will launch with the 'EyePad' name is also distinctly uncertain, given Apple has never been slow to get its lawyers involved. But if the EyePad is due to be released this year, we'll no doubt see it at Sony's press conference on Wednesday.
Do you think Sony has got its eye on the ball when it comes to the future of gaming, or do you think it's lost sight of what gamers want? Hit me up in the comments below, or take a look at our Facebook page.
Additional reporting by Jordan O'Brien. | <urn:uuid:55e7b0bb-3f2f-4c42-9a48-4d8d5bc76fee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gamesgear/sony-patents-touchscreen-gaming-device-dubbed-eyepad-50010455/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961678 | 489 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Haj subsidy has Air India fuming
Interestingly, Air India does not even get to set the amount of fare payable to the carrier transporting the pilgrims. This is set by the Saudi Arabia Airlines that also carries out the Haj duty.
“The sheer volumes of people and logistics and resources that go in the Haj duties is huge,” an official attached with the national carrier said.
“Aircraft engaged in Haj duty have to first pick up pilgrims from the smaller towns which have been approved as part of the hub and spoke arrangement, and then after they drop the pilgrims to the final destination, they come back empty,” he added. Similarly, in order to pick up the pilgrims, the aircraft have to go to Jeddah empty, which results in an increase in expenditure. Any commercial airliner does not view huge aircraft flying empty favourably as it implies a loss in revenue.
Last year, Air India had pitched for allowing private airlines to operate Haj flights, saying this could lead to a cut in fares and reduce the subsidy burden.
Under a bilateral agreement between India and Saudi Arabia, any Indian going for the Haj has to fly by Air India or Saudi Arabian Airlines, giving the two carriers a monopoly in carrying the pilgrims.
In a reply to a query under the Right to Information Act, Air India had said: "There is no benefit to the government of India (in giving) AI and Indian monopoly in operating Haj flights. Allowing private airlines to operate on Haj flights may result in reduction in fares and reduction in burden of subsidy to the government."
The reply, by Air India's then public information officer and general manager (finance) A J D'Souza to Mumbai-based activist Attar Azeemi’s query dated June 22, 2007, stated "Air India does not have the capacity to operate Haj flights. Therefore, aircraft are leased by AI for carriage of Haj pilgrims," D'Souza said.
Over and above this, according to Air India officials, one major reason for last year’s severe delays and cancellations in air travel faced by the national carrier was the diversion of aircraft towards Haj operations. Since 1993 (except 1997), due to the heavy volume of passengers going on the Haj, Air India started wet-leasing aircraft from other carriers. The Haj season comes during the peak season for air travel and aircraft for lease come at a premium. Wet-leasing involves the hiring of an aircraft along with its pilot and crew. Last year, Air India wet-leased three aircraft from low-cost carrier Spicejet to aid in Haj operations.
The standing committee on external affairs and the transport and tourism parliamentary standing committee had also recommended that the government progressively reduce and eventually eliminate the Haj subsidy altogether. The expenditure reforms commission in its tenth report has recommended that till the time the modalities of phasing out of the subsidy is decided, it should be frozen and the number of pilgrims availing it should also be frozen.
The Cabinet on Thursday kept the amount paid by the pilgrims for the round trip to Jeddah and Medina at Rs 12,000, as it has remained since 1994. In 1991, the amount paid by the pilgrims was Rs 10,000 as against Rs 14,056 per passenger paid to Air India by the government. This amount was then gradually raised to Rs 12,000 by 1994 against Rs 17,000 paid to the carrier. Last year, while 1,10,000 pilgrims availed the subsidy paying only Rs 12,000 each, the amount paid by the government to the carrier was Rs 47,454 per passenger.
According to sources, the total cost for Haj operations last year (for 1,10,000 pilgrims) was Rs 727 crore of which the subsidy requirement was Rs 595 crore.
This year, in order for the pilgrimage of 1,23,211 pilgrims, the total cost estimated by the government is Rs 847 crore, of which the subsidy requirement will be approximately Rs 700 crore.
Air India has been operating the Haj charter flights since 1954. Before that, pilgrims used to travel by ship with the ministry of shipping paying the subsidy.
The number of Haj pilgrims has risen significantly since 31,000 in 1995. In 2000, Air India carried 71,924 pilgrims to Jeddah and on Thursday the Cabinet approved an increase in the total Haj pilgrims that can avail the subsidy to 1,23,211 from 1,10,000 a year earlier.
According to sources, there are four main elements in calculating the cost of operating the Haj subsidy.
These include ACMI (aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance), other operational costs like airport charges and catering among other services, unrecovered hidden cost like salaries of people working the whole year for smooth Haj operations and the service tax on Haj operations levied by the service tax department for which exemption has been denied by the finance ministry. | <urn:uuid:caf3330d-8892-4658-80e6-8c9386e8a109> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.financialexpress.com/news/haj-subsidy-has-air-india-fuming/360651/0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964034 | 998 | 1.664063 | 2 |
ChristianAnswers.Net WebBible Encyclopedia
the son of Simon the Cyrenian (Mark 15:21), whom the Roman soldiers compelled to carry the cross on which our Lord was crucified
This is probably the same person who is again mentioned in Rom. 16:13 as a disciple at Rome, whose mother also was a Christian held in esteem by the apostle. Mark mentions him along with his brother Alexander as persons well known to his readers (Mark 15:21). | <urn:uuid:eca3883d-25d1-4d68-8ac0-7dbf035f102e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/rufus.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980846 | 97 | 1.5 | 2 |
Now and then.
If you, as a developer and vendor of products, create a new product that has the promise of value for your customer you're onto something.
Say going back a few years starting up Facebook or creating the iPod you would end up with a wildly successful product, tons of happy customers and fat bank accounts.
But if those never happened the world would probably be just the same.
For the supplier of tools and solutions to enterprises, things are a bit different.
If nobody had "invented" the Subprime CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation) and all it's synthetic cousins the world would have been simpler. If Ford did not implement his assembly line (and nobody else for that matter) we might not be as mobile as we are today.
The purveyors of Enterprise systems and tools have a direct effect on everybody's life, wealth and resource use, and the results are sometimes dramatic.
Michael Lewis' last book "The big short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" arrived from Amazon the other day, and being a big fan of Lewis, a former investment banker and a stubborn sceptic I enjoyed reading more about the subprime crisis.
But as I'm fully engaged in areas of enterprise software where I found, and try to address, rather obvious holes in the fabric, it also gave me some serious flashes of deja vu:
Barely Repeatable Processes (BRPs) is where at least 60% of the world's value creation takes place, and in those processes about 65% of the time and resources are spent on manually running the processes and not on value creation.
This means that we, World Wide, spend 40% of all resources and time on things that are basically a waste and that could be automated. Or to put it in other words, by automating the BRP flows we could increase World Wide GDP by 67%. Value damned well needed as it could mean much suffering wiped out and much less limited resource use, but now wasted due to old habits and unwillingness to face reality. Just like in 2007.
Those are the facts, that is the disregarded reality.
Then read about the head-shaking sceptics of 2007 that were pinching their arms (not always able to believe what the saw) while shorting the subprime market with both hands. Know then that I so sympathise with those brave souls while I'm trying to nudge organisations towards the inevitable in today's world.
OK, the Enterprise Software market has started talking about the issue, so far adding "Dynamic", "Social", "Adaptive" and similar prefixes to existing products. For me another deja vu from 2007 when Wall Street added names like "High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund" to their existing products. "High", "Structured" are good words, gives hope, just like "Dynamic" and "Adaptive".
Others of course are saying their "new" stuff "have process", but on closer look it's all DIY process easily reminding me of Moody graciously dishing out triple As. | <urn:uuid:d9484008-1bdc-455a-b90f-cb4a5bde3969> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.thingamy.com/sigs_blog/2010/04/disregarding-brp-is-like-being-long-on-subprime-cdos.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963921 | 637 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Anyone who has previously read this column
knows I’m quite proud of being Greek.
They also know I’m not a full-blooded
Greek, and that a fourth of my genes link
me to the first Mormon pioneers to settle
Utah via my great-great grandfather
Matthew Caldwell, who was a member
of the Mormon Battalion. As I’ve written
before, he passed along a “good sense”
gene, and one of his granddaughters, my
grandmother, married a Greek immigrant.
Actually, the genetic good sense to marry
outside the flock may have come from
Caldwell’s fifth wife, Nancy Lane. Either
way, it worked out for me.
My grandmother never became Greek
Orthodox, and my grandfather never
became a Mormon. When the local Relief
Society women would come by to visit my
grandmother, my grandfather would simply
withdraw to the kitchen and have a glass of
wine. When my grandfather’s Greek friends
would drop by, my grandmother would
say something like, “I wish they’d speak
English!” and go back to her crochet work.
They stayed happily married for 63 years.
They lived in the house right behind us
in Bingham Canyon. I used to love hearing
their stories, she born in a log cabin (still
standing) in Dry Fork, Utah, above Vernal;
he, leaving his family behind in Crete at
17 and, after a month of travel, starting
work in a Sunnyside coal mine his first day
in Utah. She told me about her American
Indian neighbors (in the impolite but
accepted vernacular of the day, btw) and
of growing up with few “white” neighbors.
He told me about the Turkish “barbarians”
who occupied his beloved Crete, and
how his own father was a guerrilla fighter
against them. She told me pioneer stories.
He told me about Zeus and Minos.
Thanks to my grandmother, I developed
a keen desire to learn about the West, and
came to understand that, in her mind,
the West began when her family arrived.
Through my grandfather, I developed the
understanding that Utah didn’t begin in
1847, and the Earth was more than 4,000
years old to boot. He spoke with pride about
the ancient wonders of Greece—nearly none
of which he ever saw—and in reverence
about the cultural Greek legacies of democracy,
medicine and philosophy. She spoke
with equal pride and reverence about the
travails of her own pioneer heritage.
So it is that I can fairly guess where
they would land on the topic of digging
of American Indian
artifacts in southern
Utah. In my grandmother’s
residents of Blanding
were rightful settlers
of the land, heirs
to anything that
land provided. They
developed the town,
brought commerce to
the area and would be
friendly to the natives there as long as the
natives were friendly first. In her world, collecting
artifacts would be a gainful hobby
if not also a way to find additional income.
She would, however, draw the line at grave
desecration—she was a sentimentalist of
the first order in that regard.
My grandfather, while no more simpatico
with the American Indian culture than
with the Mormon one, would nonetheless
question the good of digging up any artifacts
at all. As a witness to his own culture
being robbed of not only its own relics but
even of its cultural heroes, he would not
want to see another culture plundered.
The Crete he was born to in 1887 was under
Turkish occupation. The Utah he moved
to in 1906 revealed to him an occupation
of another type and, in an uneasy way,
caused him to consider if the shoe was on
the other foot. If there was just one thing
he respected most, it was honesty. An honest
Indian was as good to him as an honest
Greek—probably better, actually. If he
knew that the American Indian were honestly
aggrieved, he would be on that side.
And that’s the side I’m on. My grandfather would know what it feels like to have a piece of heritage taken away. While the flamers on local newspaper Websites are all wound up about the events that recently played out in Blanding, all pointing fingers, calling names and doing nothing, a very similar story is playing out on the world stage. In 1817, the Parthenon Marbles—2,500-year-old statues, plus a frieze that once adorned the Acropolis in Athens—were sold to the British Museum by Lord Elgin. He bought them from the Ottoman Turks who occupied Athens at that time for nearly nothing. His motive was to profit. He got his money and fame, too, for now the Parthenon Marbles are in the British Museum and are called the Elgin Marbles.
England thinks they
are better stewards of
those marbles than the
Greeks. Many Utahns
think they are better land stewards than
native Utahns. Must be a British Isle thing.
England claims the marbles belong to the
world. Greece begs to differ. England says
there is no place to properly display the marbles
in Athens. That is not true. This past
weekend, the new Acropolis Museum was
opened to the public. Besides quickly gaining
a spot as a world-class museum inside and
out, a primary function of the new museum
is to draw world attention to the Parthenon
Marbles and for those marbles to be returned
to the place Zeus intended.
There’s no Greek who cannot support the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Equally, there is no reason a Greek cannot support full protection of American Indian lands and of everything that resides on them. American Indian artifacts must not fall into the hands of profiteers; Greek artifacts must be taken from them. Mitts off American Indian property. Return the stolen Parthenon Marbles to Greece. | <urn:uuid:cc05ff46-8146-4258-82a9-bb6b120eb410> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-8324-all-the-marbles.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966504 | 1,337 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Welcome to the McMaster Institute of Environment & Health (MIEH). Building upon the talent and knowledge at McMaster, the goal of MIEH is to facilitate, promote, and publish environmental health research, and to share our expertise with the broader community. Since our establishment in 1996, we have had a long history of interdisciplinary and innovative research studying the complex relationships between the environment and human health. As you look through our list of research projects and reports, you will see that we tend to define both environment and health broadly, recognizing that both are multi-dimensional. We welcome your participation in the Institute, and please contact us to find out more.
Professor of Geography | <urn:uuid:06fc1b63-388d-44bd-aa2f-d422ee6499ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mcmaster.ca/mieh/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949713 | 135 | 1.5 | 2 |
The Australian government is consulting with stakeholders on its proposed hard-line sanctions against Iran, including a prohibition on transactions involving A$20,000 or more. Under the government's proposals any business that wants to make a transaction over this limit would have to seek direct consent from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The proposal follows Australia's recent sanctions against Libya, which go further than the United Nations and other countries by outlawing transactions with a total of 22 individuals. The actions reflect foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd's focus on economic sanctions as a tool of persuasion in diplomatic matters. Rudd has indicated that Australian money laundering compliance officers will need to keep a close eye on sanctions-related issues going forward.
In an announcement yesterday Rudd and Brendan O'Connor, the justice minister, said that the Iranian sanctions would target money laundering and terrorist financing that takes place
This article is only available in full to Compliance Complete
Australasia Middle East Subscribers who are logged in.
Please log in to see if you can view this content. | <urn:uuid:ce36cd09-4887-4780-a55b-918b06eef2df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.complinet.com/global/news/news/article.html?ref=142568 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950319 | 208 | 1.757813 | 2 |
August 16, 2012 | 12:02 pm | Print
Above: the bauxite plant in Linden
By the Caribbean Journal staff
St Lucia Opposition Leader and former Prime Minister Stephenson King is condemning the ongoing unrest in Guyana’s town of Linden, which has claimed the lives of three Guyanese nationals and injured dozens.
The violence, which began following protests over a hike in electricity tariffs, began July 18.
“The deafening silence by CARICOM to this issue is frightening and cannot persist for much longer,” King said in a statement.
King and his United Workers Party are urging CARICOM to “immediately investigate the proposed electricity tariffs” which fueled the initial protest.
“Failure by CARICOM to urgently address this issue will lead to widespread condemnation across the Caribbean and from international human rights organizations,” King said.
The unrest has led to a state of instability in Linden, which is Guyana’s second-largest town, and resulted in the complete destruction of a primary school by fire.
During the school incident, three men armed with cutlasses threatened to kill a security guard if she raised an alarm or did not leave. After computers were stolen, the school was soon set on fire.
Linden is a centre of bauxite mining activity. In large part due to the town’s economic importance, Guyana’s government had been providing a subsidy for electricity there.
But increased fuel prices have made those subsidies “unsustainable,” Guyana President Ramotar said in a letter to Lindeners last week.
A number of bridges and roads have also been destroyed, according to the government.
The protests have also led to a series of “blockages” on roads in the area, leading to the use of tear gas grenades by police. Protestors have also reportedly been throwing molotov cocktails.
Some of the blockages reportedly involved motorists being held at ransom.
Guyana’s government has said that the Linden protest has been “hijacked” by political extremists and criminals, using Lindeners’ situation to “pursue their own agenda.”
Ramotar announced last week that a commission of inquiry has been set up to investigate the three deaths.
After delaying an earlier visit to Linden, Ramotar reportedly arrived there Thursday.
King called on St Lucia Prime Minister Dr Kenny Anthony, who is also the current chairman of CARICOM to “pay urgent attention to the deadly unrest” and devise a swift plan of action.
1 of 1 | <urn:uuid:632b2a98-830c-4a08-af65-e49b4a247db6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.caribjournal.com/2012/08/16/st-lucias-stephenson-king-condemns-caricom-silence-on-guyana-unrest/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972466 | 545 | 1.632813 | 2 |
On the face of it, the short and curious life of the Pacific Economic Development Agency Ltd is a perfect Auckland political story. It connects to power struggles in both local and national politics, and involves millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. And it is subject to an increasingly widespread perception of cronyism.
Radio New Zealand's Pacific correspondent, Richard Pamatatau, identified the story on Budget day last month, noting that $4.8 million in Pacific Island Affairs funding had gone to PEDA, a company "hardly known by anybody in the Pacific Island population" with "no real clear focus" and "no connections and no ability to engage with the population."
What he did know of PEDA was this:
"It's seen by many as a group set up by supporters of the national party to push a different kind of development agenda. It's also very strongly based in church philosophy. It's got big support from people like Michael Jones and Inga Va'aiga Tuigamala, who people say want to get into Parliament."
As National Party candidates, that is.
Pacific Eyewitness expressed a similar measure of surprise and concern:
An interesting find in this budget for Pacific: funding for a privately-owned business with two directors and one shareholder, Pacific Economic Development Agency Ltd, to spearhead Auckland's economic development for Pacific. We've never heard of this organisation which is a limited liability company. Was there a tender for this? Don't know. No information as yet on what exactly they will be doing. They better deliver better than what we presently receive so until then, we'll wait and see.
Radio New Zealand's reporters didn't sit on their hands. While the gallery was gorging on low-hanging fruit from the ministerial expenses files, RNZ's reporters were going through the documents they had received via an Official Information Act request.
They answered at least one of Pacific Eyewitness's questions. No, there had not been a tender for the money. It had simply been handed over. There wasn't a lot to report about what PEDA would do, however, as Pamatatau explained to Sean Plunket:
“…it’s a vague pitch(PEDA proposal), not a lot of detail in there. And this pitch, of course, at a time at a time when governments are looking at line by line expenditure in government dept and great scrutiny on any spending there. And there’s no analysis, no projections, nothing but the cost without numbers for every other part that they are seeking to offer.
The Ministry of Pacific Islands Affairs warned the Pacific Affairs Ministers of the risks and implications for the Minister, and the Government, in dealing with PEDA, says Radio New Zealand’s Pacific Affairs Correspondent Richard Pamatatau.
The Ministry also advises that PEDA doesn’t have a good record of working collaboratively. It accepts that the Finance Minister has allowed the money but the advice is to the Pacific Affairs Minister.
Bizarrely, the ministry didn't get to advise its minister until after the millions of dollars in funding had been announced in the Budget.
From there, it just got stranger. Pacific Affairs minister Georgina Te Heuheu went into a sort of meltdown in the House as she tried to avoid answering questions about who had negotiated with PEDA. And no wonder. Former PEDA director Mose Saitala, had already told Radio 531pi's non-English-language Tuvalu programme that English had been in discussion with the company "from the beginning". He had not, on the other hand, met with Te Heuheu.
Then English appeared to imply that his Pacific Affairs minister was either a liar or an idiot, claiming that the funding had never been granted to PEDA as poor Te Heuheu had said, but simply earmarked for general Pacific development.
In the event, as the
Herald on Sunday's editorial Herald's editorial ventured yesterday this morning:
It does not take too much to identify which of these two versions is correct.
Contrary to what the Finance Minister says, the Budget document specifically allocates the spending to Peda. It does not look like a negotiating position but an outcome. It is hard to escape the impression that in the interests of damage control, the Government is making a lame and obvious attempt to rewrite history.
I believe the shorter word for this is "lying".
The Standard has a more detailed look at English's curious claim, with scans from the actual Budget documents.
The curious thing here is why the New Zealand Herald's reporting of a story on its own damn doorstep has been so half-hearted, and why it was left to its slutty Sunday sibling to raise an editorial flag on it.
[ **Sorry folks, my mistake:** The Herald did finally get around to running an editorial this morning, and that was it.]
Why the Herald was so obsessed with Len Brown's credit card (another story it didn't actually break) that it was prepared to fake up a poll from some Your Views readers for its huge page 3 lead on Saturday – but not to go and do some actual reporting on a story that involved about seven thousand times more money than Brown is said to have misspent.
Because, extraordinarily, there's more. Radio 531pi host Efeso Collins was abruptly taken off air after refusing to stop asking questions about PEDA. The chair of the Pacific Radio Trust, which operates the station, is Tino Periera – the brother of PEDA co-founder and CEO Anthony (JR) Pereira.
Pacific Eyewitness noted some extraordinary behaviour at a public meeting, where Pereira declared "we have a government mandate to represent Pacific people in the SuperCity." This, it seems, was news to everyone.
And then yesterday, Pacific Eyewitness squared the circle by reporting that PEDA's principal partner, the so-called Pacific Islands Economic Forum is linked to Inga Tuigamala – he is the forum's secretary. Tuigamala has previously denied any connection with PEDA.
I mean, really, is there not enough to go on there? I've leaned heavily on the reporting of Radio New Zealand and Pacific Eyewitness for this post, and I think both of them have done a fine job. Quite why Auckland's daily paper – so fond at other times of sermonising about transparency and press freedom – is so ho-hum about it all I'm not sure. But for a paper that will present itself as the voice of the new, greater Auckland, it's frankly piss-poor. | <urn:uuid:af078c8d-8e50-446c-baea-6f7a71497986> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/piss-poor-on-peda/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971377 | 1,374 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Originally Posted by canary52
It's like another language. What is a snipping tool? What is an img?
I didn't know about the snipping tool... although it sounds a hell of a lot easier!
Although, I have an ancient computer.
I went to the food log I wanted on fitday, then pressed the Print Screen/SysRq key (upper right hand corner near the insert key), then opened wordpad, then pressed CTRL and V at the same time (this will insert the image of your compuer screen at the time you pressed the Print screen key), then I saved that file as a webpage instead of rich text format (there's the place you name the file, and the formats for saving are in a drop box right below that).
THEN, I went to my photobucket account, uploaded the saved webpage file, cropped out everything except for the foodlog and saved the html address.
Come back here, quote reply, hit the insert image button up top, entered the saved html address from photobucket and Walah!
And as embarassing as it is, I'm SURE there's a quicker way but I don't know if my computer has the b*lls to do it.
Okay, I'm going to stop thinking about food and typing. <3 | <urn:uuid:07929a1f-ffa8-4e5d-bbd2-8e26da393a7c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fitday.com/fitness/forums/success-stories/2937-ok-canary52-you-asked-2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950057 | 275 | 1.625 | 2 |
Spirit jet clips plane at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport
Airbus A-320's clipped plane's tail on taxiway
2012 ended with an unexpected bump for 162 passengers on a Spirit Airlines flight.
Their Airbus A320 had just arrived from Atlanta at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida Monday night when a wingtip hit the tail of another plane.
"After landing and while taxiing to the gate, our aircraft made contact with another parked aircraft," Spirit spokeswoman Misty Pinson confirmed to Local 10. "There were no injuries and customers deplaned at the gate as normal."
The US Airways plane that was hit was parked in a remote area away from the gate where aircraft are stored overnight. No one was on board at the time.
"An A320 was parked in an approved parking spot when it was struck in the tail by another aircraft," Andrew Christie, a US Airways spokesman confirmed to CNN. "The extent of the damage is yet to be determined."
Broward County sheriff's officers who were called to the scene described the damage as a "gash in the tail section," but found no fuel leaking.
The Spirit aircraft has resumed flying, while the US Airways plane is out of service for inspection and repair of its damaged tail cone, the airlines reported.
In September the National Transportation Safety Board recommended the Federal Aviation Administration require large planes and other aircraft on which the wingtips are not easily visible from the cockpit to have cameras or other devices to monitor the wings.
The safety board said at the time that 12 accidents since 1993 had involved a large aircraft's wingtip hitting another airplane or object on the taxiway.
Most recently, a Boeing 747 hit a regional jet at O'Hare airport in Chicago in May, a 767 hit a regional jet in Boston in July 2011 and an A380 hit a regional jet in April of 2011 at New York's JFK airport.
No one was injured in any of those recent collisions.
Copyright 2013 by Post Newsweek. CNN NewSource contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:ac76d876-d8b5-4f67-a926-d3096b7116e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.local10.com/news/Spirit-jet-clips-plane-at-Fort-Lauderdale-Hollywood-International-Airport/-/1717324/17962922/-/format/rsss_2.0/view/print/-/xk4kcgz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966378 | 434 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Then, he was just Baldy, a faithful loving dog that trotted happily at the heels of the ragged little boy whose unselfishness had given him the great chance of his life.
There was no faltering in the devotion of boy or dog. They believed in each other.
The Great Race
THE GREAT RACE
Another winter had come and gone, and again it was
the day of the Great
Never had the time passed so quickly to Baldy, for he had now become a distinguished member of The Team, for whom every one, even the Woman, entertained a real respect, and to whom all of the dogs turned readily as to their acknowledged leader.
The Allan and Darling Racers were ready for the event.
There was an early stir in the Kennel, and all was hurry and bustle. The Woman came in with the Big Man, the Allan girls, and Ben Edwards, who helped her tie knots of white and gold on the front of the sled, on the collars of the racing dogs, and on other members of the family, about forty in all, who were old enough to appreciate the attention. Even the Yellow Peril apparently considered it an honor, for which he waited with unaccustomed patience.
The preparations were almost complete; and “Scotty” was everywhere, superintending the minute details, upon the completeness of which so much might depend.
Birdie was, in the confusion, about to borrow Mego’s puppies and take them out for an airing. Fisher, delighted that he was not of the elect, basked in a warm and secluded corner; while Jemima, frantic to be a part of the team, was restrained forcibly by Matt, and placed in solitary confinement.
Even Texas, for whom the Kennel had lost its charm—and safety—since the death of old Dubby, followed the Allan girls, and was treated to a becoming bow of the racing colors.
Matt brought out the long tow-line, and placed it carefully on the floor.
“Rex and McMillan in the wheel, like we’ve been usin’ ’em, I suppose?” and at a nod he released them.
“Wheel, Jack; wheel, Rex,” and they took their accustomed places next the sled, and remained motionless, yet keenly alert. “Tom and Dick, Harry and Tracy, Irish and Rover”—name after name was called, and each dog stepped into position with joyful alacrity. They were, one and all, sturdy, intelligent, and spirited; with the stamina of their wild forebears, and the devoted nature of those dogs who have for generations been trained to willing service and have been faithful friends to their masters.
“Scotty’s” eyes rested upon them with justifiable pride. “I think,” he announced happily, “that in all my years of racing I have never had so fine a team; so many dogs I can count upon in every way.” And then came the expected order, “Baldy in the lead, Matt.” | <urn:uuid:f96e4c15-cc88-4bd7-b140-0e74b56ebc0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/11758/77.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978886 | 660 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Monumental Inscriptions in Yorkshire
Saddleworth Height's Chapel
(St Thomas's Old Church)
In Memory of Hannah, Daughter of John and Nanny Hulley of Slack, who died
April 23rd in the 4th Year of her Age.
Also Joseph their Son who died May 8th 1824 in the 2nd
Year of his Age.
Also Mary their Daughter, who died March 14th 1850, in the 20th
Year of her Age.
Also Nanny, Wife of the said
John Hulley, who died April 26th 1852 in
the 60th Year of her Age.
Also the said John
Hulley, who died Nov.30th 1856 in the 66th
Year of HIS Age.
Location: Second row on west side of church, opposite south door.
In Memory of Jonathan Hulley late of Delph, who died 9th of
March 1852, in the 45th Year of his Age.
Also of Martha Hulley HIS Relict, who died 1st Dec 1861, in
the 59th Year of her Age.
Also of James Hulley their Son who died 20th July 1862, in
the 33rd Year of his Age.
Also of Joseph, their Son, who died Octr 24th 1877,
in the 46th Year of his Age.
Also of Ambrose, their Son, who died Jany 11th 1884, in the
40th Year of his Age.
Also of William, their Son, who died July 18th 1887 in the 38th
Year of his Age.
Also HANNAH Wife of John KERSHAW of Lane nr LEES and Daughter of the above,
who died Decr 6th 1889, in the 62nd Year
of her Age.
Location: Fourth row
on west side of church, opposite south door.
In Memory of JAMES HULLEY Son
of James and Anna Hulley of Crowstonegate who departed this life
August 21st 1812 in the 19th Year of his
Also Anna Wife of James Hulley Senr, who departed this life April 5th
1832, in the 66th Year of her Age.
Also the aforementioned James Hulley Senr who departed this life January
22nd 1835, in the 76th Year of his Age.
Also of /JAMES/ William Brierley Son of John and Lucy Brierley, who died
April 2nd 1883, aged 23 Years. GONE,
BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.
Saddleworth St Chad's Parish Church
Lower Burial Ground (consecrated 1824); entry from Record Book
Grave No. 102 (page 7) Child of William
Entry on page 115 of Record Book:
Mr William Haigh Bowker ) wants
7 Miller Hey ) in
Lower Yard Mossley ) (William
Plan of Lower Graveyard - see
Monumental Inscriptions Folder
Grave No. 23 HULLY (in
second row next to No.1 )
Grave No. 102 HULLEY (in
5th row, 5 in from south wall)
stone in place. | <urn:uuid:013e33dc-dfdf-4054-8cf2-6fb466cf7bd4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tiger2.f2s.com/FamilyHistory/monumental/yorkshire/index.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966973 | 678 | 1.585938 | 2 |
MAHOMET -- If the ruling stands, that means law enforcement won't be the only people with guns. But that idea doesn't have them worried.
We talked with Mike Metzler, former director at the Police Training Institute in Champaign.
He says concealed carry is covered during firearms training at the facility, but that students are told that concealed carry doesn't apply to gun owners in Illinois.
Metzler is now the police chief in Mahomet.
We asked if today's ruling would affect how he runs his department. He says it will simply make his officers more aware, not worried.
They're already taught how to handle people with guns thanks to the PTI. Metzler also says those who don't own guns shouldn't be worried either.
"There's no reason to concern. Anybody that legitimately looks at the studies that have gone in those areas that have been granted concealed carry permits show that the incidents of violent crime have actually been reduced," he said.
Although Metzler supports the ruling, he's hoping legislators write up a strict law.
He says anyone hoping to carry a gun in public needs to be properly trained. He also wants them to get a background check.
Before directing at PTI, Metzler served on the Urbana Police Department.
And he says no matter what the size of the town, officers shouldn't be worried as long strict rules are put into place. | <urn:uuid:8ba8e199-9082-4cce-bb25-c459cb0e622a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://illinoishomepage.net/fulltext?nxd_id=446072&nxd_238653_start=21255 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987868 | 296 | 1.617188 | 2 |
SIGNIFICANT FLOOR ACTIONS
H.B. 55 (Branch), prohibiting the use of a wireless communication device (WCD) while operating a vehicle within a school crossing zone unless the vehicle is stopped or the WCD is used with a hands-free device. Passed the House. A House floor amendment provides that a city that enforces this new prohibition shall: (1) post signs informing drivers that WCDs are prohibited, and (2) impose a fine of not more than $25 for the first offense and $50 for a subsequent offense.
H.B. 206 (Jackson), relating to alcoholic beverages. Passed the House. As passed, this bill would: (1) permit the holder of an on-premises alcohol consumption permit to allow an individual to bring alcoholic beverages onto the permitted premises for consumption by that individual; and (2) make it an offense for a commercial establishment to allow customers to bring alcoholic beverages onto the premises if the establishment does not have an on-premises consumption permit.
H.B. 360 (Kuempel), relating to the Texas Municipal Retirement System. Passed the Senate.
H.B. 451 (Allen), requiring health benefit plans to provide coverage for autism in a child up to age nine. Passed the House.
H.B. 1221 (C. Howard), relating to property tax. Passed the House. As passed, this bill would: (1) eliminate the requirement that appraisal value notices must include the estimated tax liability based on an application of last year’s tax rate to this year’s appraised value; (2) require tax assessors to submit the appraisal roll to a city not later than 21 days after the date the appraisal roll is certified to the assessor; (3) require a city to calculate its effective tax rate not later than 30 days after it receives the certified appraisal roll from the assessor; (4) require the person who calculated the effective tax rate to submit the rate to the city council within five days of making the calculation; (5) require the calculation of a “same services tax rate;” and (6) require a city council, before giving notice of tax increase hearings, to take a record vote on the proposal to increase taxes and that the motion for that vote must be as follows: “I move that a proposal to increase property taxes by the adoption of a tax rate of (specific tax rate) be placed on the agenda for the meeting to be held on (date on which the governing body anticipates adopting the tax rate);” and much more.
H.B. 1433 (Lucio), raising the cap on the annual water quality fee imposed on a city by TCEQ. Passed the Senate. As passed, this bill would, on September 1, 2009, raise the maximum fee from $75,000 to $100,000. The bill would also allow the TCEQ to thereafter raise the maximum fee annually by an amount that reflects growth in the CPI, up to a maximum amount of $150,000 annually.
H.B. 1988 (McReynolds), relating to DWI. Passed the House. As passed, this bill would require a peace officer to make and attach a photocopy of a driver’s license to a temporary driving permit issued to a person suspected of an intoxication offense.
H.B. 1998 (McCall), relating to housing and emergency shelters provided by a political subdivision for disaster victims. Passed the Senate.
H.B. 2000 (McCall), requiring health benefit plans to provide coverage for amino acid-based elemental baby formulas. Passed the House.
H.B. 2705 (Gattis), relating to annexation. Passed the House. As passed, this bill would clarify current law regarding provision of services after annexation to provide that, if the annexed area had a level of services for maintaining and landscaping rights-of-way superior to the level of services provided within the corporate boundaries of the city before annexation, a service plan must provide annexed public rights-of-way with a level of maintenance and landscaping that is comparable to the level of maintenance and landscaping available to other public rights-of-way in the city.
H.B. 2828 (Menendez), relating to a property tax exemption. Passed the House. As passed, this bill would: (1) permit property owned by certain limited partnerships to claim a community housing development organization (CHDO) property tax exemption; (2) expand the application of special appraisals for low-income or moderate-income housing to include apartments and land owned by persons other than certain nonprofit organizations; and (3) alter the application of the income method of appraisal to low-income or moderate-income appraisals. The bill’s fiscal note states that the bill “could” impose costs on the state and on local governments.
H.B. 3222 (Hancock), allowing two or more cities to designate a joint tax increment financing reinvestment zone. Passed the House.
H.B. 3255 (Gattis), relating to vehicle financial responsibilities. Passed the House. A second reading, House floor amendment provides that a peace office may impound the vehicle of a person who operates a vehicle without proof of financial responsibility “if the person has been previously convicted” of the same violation.
H.B. 3389 (Harper-Brown), relating to the continuation and functions of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education. Passed the House. As passed, this bill would require police departments to: 1) complete training, every two years, on how to handle persons with mental impairments; (2) provide additional reports in order to receive certain funds from the comptroller; (3) provide additional reporting to TCLEOSE on racial profiling; (3) report when a new police department is formed; (4) complete training requirements in the laws of the U.S. and Texas; and (5) complete training requirements in civil rights, racial sensitivity, and racial diversity for intermediate proficiency.
S.B. 39 (Zaffirini), requiring health benefit plans to cover certain expenses related to clinical trials. Passed the House.
S.B. 254 (Estes), exempting volunteer fire departments from the state motor fuels tax. Passed the House.
S.B. 1011 (Estes), relating to the Texas Commission on Fire Protections (TCFP). Passed the House. As passed, this bill would: (1) create an interim study of volunteer fire departments; and (2) allow the TCFP to enter a default order if a fire department fails to take action to correct a violation found by the TCFP during an inspection; and much more. (Fire chiefs should review this bill thoroughly.) (Note: a House floor amendment eliminated the provision that would have authorized the TCFP to establish minimum education and training standards for volunteer firefighters.)
S.B. 1182 (Wentworth), relating to public information. Passed the House. As passed, this bill includes a House floor amendment that provides that a quorum of a city council may receive and a member of the council may make a report about items of community interest during a council meeting without posting notice of the subject of the report if no action is taken and no possible future action is discussed. (The addition of this amendment is just one example of the way in which lawmakers can use floor amendments to enhance the ability of city councils to govern effectively.)
S.B. 1410 (Jackson), relating to plumbing. Passed the House. On the House floor, legislators added an amendment that will prohibit a city (after January 1, 2009) from requiring a sprinkler system in a new or existing one- or two-family dwelling. (Before this amendment was added, TML had no position on this bill. The addition of this amendment is just one example of the way in which lawmakers can use harmless bills as vehicles to erode municipal efforts to protect the public health, safety, and welfare.) | <urn:uuid:d470252c-e126-4d4b-9f0d-d1d86f8e92d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tml.org/leg_updates/legis_update052109e_flooraction.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934902 | 1,655 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The results are encouraging. Five years ago, 23% of children scored at or above "basic" on state tests; now 48% do. Before Katrina, 62% attended failing schools; less than a fifth do today. The gap between city kids and the rest of the state is narrowing....
By 2013, New Orleans plans to have the country's first "all charter" school system.
October 8, 2011
Says John White, the superintendent of New Orleans public schools. | <urn:uuid:15660d8d-0f89-4f52-a2fa-6653775718f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-other-cities-charter-schools-exist.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949307 | 98 | 1.835938 | 2 |
March 23, 2010
When a smile isn't reciprocated at work, an opportunity to connect is missed.
Too many leaders have a macho attitude about this, only returning smiles to top producers or key team mates. Otherwise, a smile back is feared as a sign of weakness. This is not true. General Patton once praised Ike's ability to "smile back at the grunts". Do you have this power? It'll do wonders for your company or organization culture. This is part of my people skills area of expertise, elaborated on in my second book, The Likeability Factor.
From my 2006 keynote speech at the Maximum Impact telecast, here's my rant on the value of smiling back: Great Leaders Smile Back (video). | <urn:uuid:120b2089-9b54-4137-b49b-076369966898> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sanderssays.typepad.com/sanders_says/2010/03/great-leaders-smile-back.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941755 | 151 | 1.632813 | 2 |
I have blogged previously about the fight currently going in my home town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire over the siting of a supermarket, the “combatants” being Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. I am in the “support the best of a bad case” camp – in an ideal world the town doesn’t need a supermarket – but the Waitrose one makes most sense to me, and would in my view have least effect on the town – partly due to its location and partly due to the arguably better ethics of the operator.
So I am appalled to see in the press over the last few days that English Heritage have in effect just come out in support of the Sainsbury’s deal! Obviously they haven’t said it in so many words – but they have made the following statement about the siting of the Waitrose unit;
“The role of the site as a positive contributor to the setting of the town will be lost as the area will effectively become part of the town rather than part of its landscape, resulting in an undesirable extension of its historic and tightly knit development pattern beyond the river boundary. “In this respect the proposals will cause substantial harm to the character and appearance of the conservation area, the immediate settings of Avon Mills and St John’s Bridge, and in harming the strategic setting of the town as a whole, to that of the Abbey. “
Now I lived in Malmesbury from the age of 8 and can honestly say that the site has no view of the Abbey, yes it adds to the towns area, but within the relief road (or ring road if you prefer). Surely that is preferable to adding a huge development on the far edge of the town outside the road system? Also the site is behind Avon Mills, so has no view of the Abbey or higher town, or can be seen from the town itself.
I understand why English Heritage are saying this – but in my opinion they are wrong!
I strongly believe that Sainsbury’s would kill the town centre, I do not believe their ‘spin’ about complementing the town. They are in business to make money, not help in a philanthropical way to develop a town centre and cherish it!
Come on Malmesbury, wake up and realise what is about to happen! For the Nimby’s there perhaps the realisation that it will make the town less attractive and therefore affect house prices downwards might help you make a decision? What ever happens the town is going to change for ever, but let’s try to make it as minimal and least damaging as we can? | <urn:uuid:9dc299db-c578-4dd9-88b1-3d077fef70b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spuddey.wordpress.com/tag/english-heritage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971057 | 551 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Most people here probably know that, as a wine region, the Loire valley is far from homogeneous. It can be more accurately described as four distinct regions. Moving from east to west there is the “Centre”, where for whites Sauvignon blanc is king and for reds Pinot Noir; then there is “Touraine”, where Chenin blanc predominates for whites and Cabernet franc for reds with some original grape varieties and combinations appearing in some of its eastern appellations like Cour-Cheverny. “Anjou-Saumur” uses similar grape varieties to Touraine but the whites in particular have their own style. Finally the “Pays Nantais” close to the Loire’s estuary is most famous for Muscadet produced from the Melon de Bourgogne grape. The distance from Nantes to Cosne-sur-Loire (near Sancerre) is about 440 km by road and further by the river because of its long loop north though Orléans with the climate become progressively more continental as one moves further from the Atlantic near Nantes. Here is a crude map of the Loire valley’s principle appellations http://www.terroirs-france.com/vin/loire_carte.htm
The two most similar of these regions are “Touraine” and “Anjou-Saumur” and to many Loire lovers they represent the heartland for Loire wines. In passing I mildly reprove Robin for saying of the Loire “where, of course, most of the wine is white". I hazard a guess that at least as much red is produced as white in Anjou-Saumur and Touraine, although it can be argued that more of the whites from Chenin are truly world class than the reds from Cabernet franc. Even in the “Pays Nantais”, reds are produced, e.g. Coteaux d’Ancenis, while in the “Centre” some producers are getting increasingly ambitious with Pinot Noir reds and some Pinot Noir based rosé is truly celestial.
All this is an introduction to my first Loire white of the month, a chenin derived dry wine from Vouvray in Touraine. In a recent post on a divine Vouvray demi-sec, I threw out the observation that, for me, Vouvray is at its best balanced with some residual sugar and this sec does not make me change my opinion.Vouvray sec 2000 – Domaine du Clos Naudin, Philippe Foreau
– Alc. 13%. The nose showed attractive aromas of wax, fine minerals and white fruit with the usual touch of quince. The palate was bone dry and medium bodied with crisp acidity and a lot of nervous tension in counterpoint to the aromas which continued from the nose and to some rounder and warmer undertones. Length was good and the finish was quite structured with saline notes. I found the wine a touch too crisp and tense to be an ideal pairing for sea bass and sadly I had none of the same region’s goat cheese to hand because I know from experience that would have been ideal; 16/20+. | <urn:uuid:0ecdafbd-b36a-41a0-b4fa-f2f478f38413> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wineloverspage.com/forum/village/viewtopic.php?p=329493 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95179 | 703 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Open Day 2013 on Sat 20th July - check events page for more info
Ride/Drive Pony wanted on loan
12.2-13.2hh calm and good natured pony wanted by Sirona. Please contact us if you can help!
Therapeutic Horsemanship is one of a range of activities where people learn about themselves, others and the world through their interaction with horses. Equine Assisted Learning (EAL), Equine Assisted Therapy (EAT), Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) and Equine Facilitated Learning (EFL) are commonly associated interventions
A relationship based on trust, leadership and tranquility facilitates rewarding horse-human interaction. The approach taken by Sirona Therapeutic Horsemanship can be described as ‘natural horsemanship’ as both horse and person are simultaneously learner and teacher. The benefits of horse-human interaction are particularly felt by people for whom self-esteem, trust and confidence has posed challenges
Supporting people to:
• Examine behavioral issues in a non-confrontational way
• Increase self-esteem and self-confidence
• Increase verbal and non-verbal communication skills as well as assertiveness
• Develop trust, respect, boundaries and compassion
• Build a sense of responsibility and empowerment
• Develop transferable skills and provide an educational resource
• Improve physical health with the associated benefits to mental health
• Have fun!
Company no: 6570184 - registered in England | <urn:uuid:a0d7aad3-a7ae-4cfa-a246-3b6776f68552> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sironacic.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941693 | 306 | 1.625 | 2 |
ARMENIAN OMBUDSMAN REVEALS SHORTCOMINGS IN FIELD OF NATURE PROTECTION
- YEREVAN.- Armenia's Ombudsman Karen Andreasyan issues a report on 2011 activities of the Nature Protection Ministry.
The human rights defender presented the problems and achievements in this area:
Shortcomings and problems identified
• Damage to the environment done in the result of activities of people and first of all economic entities is very concerning. Only according to the official data of 2011, 5 cases of environmentally harmful activities were revealed, when there was not any positive conclusion on investigation of environmental impact.
• Destruction of green spaces in the Republic of Armenia did not stop, particularly usage of forests (forest lands) for the implementation of various economic activities- moreover without a proper assessment of appropriate resources and estimation of environmental impacts. Cases of illegal logging continued, which weren't protocoled by the corresponding structures of the Ministry and corresponding administrative proceedings were not launched.
• One worrying issue, which coincides with mining and has environmental impact, is continuously increasing wastes and tailing as a result of the mentioned activities. The Ministry did not properly deal with analysis of lands (tailing, piles of metal mines) in the territory of Armenia broken and degraded as a result of mining industry.
• In certain cases the Ministry failed in the organizational process of informing the society about planned changes of life environment. And in some cases draft legal acts were not discussed with public institutions.
• During 2011 the "Hot Line" service of the RA Ministry of Nature Protection registered 36 calls. Such a low ratio evidences both about low level of awareness of the society, and lack of confidence towards the Ministry.
• The stable rising tendency of the lake Sevan level has been preserved, and public beaches were set up at the lake.
• Construction activities of the small Hydro Power Station on the river nourishing waterfall "Trchkan" are suspended, and the waterfall has been included into the list of monuments of nature of Armenia as a hydrographic monument of a special aesthetic value.
• Some projects for the improvement of forest area were implemented in Armenia with the support of several international donor organizations.
- 554 The Ecclesiastic Assembly in Dvin condemns the Chalcedonian Creed and irrevocably breaks off its relations with the Byzantine "Universal" Church.
- 1001 The architect Trdat, finished the construction of the Main Church of Ani.
- 1592 Birth of Nahapet Koochak. He was Armenia's first troubadour.
- 1827 The first Armenian voluntary brigade was formed in Tbilissi (Georgia).
- 1899 Birth of benefactor Calouste Gulbenkian in Constantinople. He was a Petroleum Engineer. He founded the Petroleum Benevolent Union in Turkey. In 1930, he was voted President of the Armenian General Benevolent Union. Calouste Gulbenkian died in July 1955 in Lisbon.
- 1912 Death of Gabriel Soondookyan (playwright) in Tbilissi (Georgia). He was born in 1825.
- 1914 The Armenian History and Archeology Association is created in Tbilissi (Georgia).
- 1918 Birth of Charles Hrach Papaz, Armenian-American radiophysicist, member of the American Physics and Mathematics Associations and the Electronic Engineers Institute. He is an overseas member of the Armenian National Academy of Science.
- 1921 The first Armenian Art House opened in Tbilissi. It was called after the great writer, Vahan Terian. The president was another great writer, Hovhannes Toomanian.
- 1971 Death of famous actor of the roles of Zimzimov, Iago and Nazar the Brave, Avet Avetisian (Voskanyan).
- 1992 Azeri Turk forces attack Stepanakert from Shooshee, Ghaybalu, Janhasan and Kiosalar. They are defeated and thrown back. | <urn:uuid:c16ed662-73d0-4eee-8f0f-f209174bedfd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.armtown.com/news/en/nws/20120329/99132/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942358 | 815 | 1.601563 | 2 |
In the view of Charles Caleb Colton, “The two most precious things this side of the grave are our reputation and our life.”
But what about the other side of the grave? The press is currently replete with comment on the recent allegations about the late Jimmy Savile. There are of course many disturbing facets to both the allegations and the details emerging about the responses to them when they were originally made. But the affair also has resonance for lawyers who are interested in what protection the law does, should and could give to the reputations of the dead or what rights might be given, and to whom, when the dead are defamed.
The reason for the flurry now may seem clear:
"As any good journalist knows, the dead can't sue – that's why it's now safe for everyone to say they knew Jimmy Savile was up to no good in the 1970s and he can't touch anyone for writing it. It's also one of the reasons why now – rather than 40 years ago – the endless revelations about him are churning out of Britain's media industry quicker than people can turn off Channel 4's Hotel GB."
In a number of ways, though, the legal position is not as clear-cut as you might think.
In the first place, of course, the dead can sue. Or at least, their representatives who are tasked with administering their estate (in Scotland, their executors) can sue. Not only can they sue but they have a duty to sue if that is what it takes to ingather the assets which comprise the estate. If you are due money to someone the debt is not written off just because they die.
It appears that English law does provide what to Scottish eyes seems an odd outcome in relation to claims for damages for defamation where the cause of action accrues before death. The Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1934 provides, at s1 :
"1 Effect of death on certain causes of action.
(1) Subject to the provisions of this section, on the death of any person after the commencement of this Act all causes of action subsisting against or vested in him shall survive against, or, as the case may be, for the benefit of, his estate. Provided that this subsection shall not apply to causes of action for defamation."
So, in England, “the death of a claimant even a day before a libel action goes to court brings the action to a halt.” That is not the position in Scotland to which the 1934 Act does not extend. If a person has suffered patrimonial (financial) loss as a result of defamation of character then the claim for reparation for that is an asset belonging to his estate which his executors can, and perhaps must, realise by raising or continuing with appropriate court action. (And as an aside, the same is the true in England as regards any action based on malicious falsehood). Similarly, the liability of a defamer does not die with him: his estate remains liable to a claim by a living pursuer.
Of course, though, none of this is really what is meant when people talk about defaming the dead. What is being talked about is the defamation of those who have died, post-mortem. And here, it is true, the law in Scotland is quite clear:
“When a person dies, the protection offered by the law on defamation dies too…Essentially, the law on defamation proceeds on the basis that when people die, they are beyond harm and beyond help. A deceased person’s own feelings cannot be hurt by subsequent false allegations about failings in his or her character; his or her own earning potential cannot be compromised by subsequent false allegations about incompetence etc.
It is a long-understood principle of the common law that a deceased person cannot be defamed, because reputation is personal. A defamatory statement about a deceased person therefore does not give rise to a civil action for defamation on behalf of his or her estate.”
The decision in Broom v Ritchie (1904) 6 F 942 suggested that Scots law might recognise a claim by living relatives for upset caused to them by defamation of the deceased. Lord Young said:
“I am of opinion that the widow and the children of a dead man whose character has been defamed are not only interested to clear the character, but it is their duty to take such measures as are necessary to clear the character and to seek solatium for the injury done to their own feelings.”
This is an isolated case, though, and does not appear to represent the current law. The only circumstance in which posthumous defamation might allow a legal claim to be made by the living is where the words used involve an imputation against their characters too. For example, Michael Parkinson received an extra-judicial settlement of £25,000 from the Daily Mail which had claimed that he had lied when he said that his father was honest. The broadcast and print media also do have obligations to be fair and respect privacy in terms Codes of Practice supervised by Ofcom and the Press Complaints Commission so the living may have some remedies. It’s just that the law of defamation doesn’t provide them. Brutally put:
“defamation law is about protecting reputation, and the dead have none.”
Now, some view this as quite wrong. 35 years ago, the Faulks Committee recommended changing the law to allow near relatives a right of action for posthumous defamation. This was recommended only for England and Wales (it being felt that the scarcity of defamation actions in Scotland meant there was nothing to be gained by making the change there) but there was no enacting legislation: in 1991 the Supreme Court Procedure Committee chaired by Lord Justice Neill concluded that the balance of argument was against introducing such a right in England and Wales.
The question has been given consideration in other jurisdictions too. The Draft Commonwealth Bill for an Unfair Publication Act, produced by Australian Law Reform Commission, proposed the following:
"Defamation of deceased individual
11. (1) Where defamatory matter concerning an individual is published within the period of 3 years immediately after the death of the individual, the personal representative of the deceased or the surviving spouse, parent, child, brother or sister of the deceased has a right of action against each publisher of the defamatory matter.
(2) Damages shall not be awarded in an action instituted pursuant to subsection (1).
(3) Where more than one person institutes a defamation action pursuant to sub-section (1) in respect of the publication of the same defamatory matter, the Court shall make such order for transfer, removal, stay or consolidation as is necessary to avoid multiplicity of actions.
(4) Where a defamation action instituted under sub-section (1) in respect of the publication of defamatory matter has been determined by a Court, no further action shall be instituted in respect of the same matter except with leave of the Court in which it is proposed to institute the action."
In Canada, the Draft Defamation Act, produced by Uniform Law Conference, stated:
"Defamation of deceased
3 (1) In this section, "interested person" means a person who, in the opinion of the court,
(a) has a sufficient business, family, professional or other relationship with the deceased person to bring an action in defamation with respect to the publication of alleged defamatory matter about the deceased person; and
(b) in bringing the action, is motivated primarily by a concern about the attack on the reputation of the deceased person.
(2) Where a person publishes matter in relation to a deceased person that would have constituted defamation if the deceased person had been alive, an interested person may bring an action for defamation against the publisher of the alleged defamatory matter for a declaration that the publisher has published defamatory matter regarding the deceased person and for an injunction preventing further publication of the defamatory matter.
(3) No action for damages shall be brought under this section.
(4) No action shall be brought under this section more than five years after the death of the person who was allegedly defamed.”
More recently, the Scottish Government undertook a review and reassessment. The catalyst for this was a petition by the parents of Diane Watson. Their daughter was stabbed to death in school row two decades ago. Their son then took his own life when he read a claim in a newspaper article that his sister had been a bully. The Watsons' principal concern had been to prevent killers profiting by selling their stories to the papers but the Petitions Committee was told by Victim Support Scotland that bereaved families should have a legal remedy to challenge inaccurate and defamatory reporting.
The Government’s resulting consultation paper set out the legal and policy background:
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental and essential human right… The established law on defamation is a reflection of the appreciation of the validity of such countervailing rights, specifically as regards individual reputations... [Defamation] is essentially the legal term in Scotland for what is known elsewhere as libel and slander. Scots civil law on defamation has developed through the common law over hundreds of years, periodically being supplemented by statute, for example by the Defamation Acts of 1952 and 1996. .. Broadly, the delict ( i.e. wrongdoing) of defamation occurs when a person makes a communication which contains a damaging and untrue imputation against the reputation of another person.”
A defamatory statement, so defined, is rebuttably presumed to be false. Further:
“In order to ensure that it does not limit freedom of expression more than is absolutely essential for the proper protection of countervailing rights, the law on defamation is itself subject to a number of limitations. A long-understood limitation is that it applies only to the living. When a person dies, the protection offered by the law on defamation dies too... Essentially, the law on defamation proceeds on the basis that when people die, they are beyond harm and beyond help. A deceased person's own feelings cannot be hurt by subsequent false allegations about failings in his or her character; his or her own earning potential cannot be compromised by subsequent false allegations about incompetence etc.
It is a long-understood principle of the common law that a deceased person cannot be defamed, because reputation is personal. A defamatory statement about a deceased person therefore does not give rise to a civil action for defamation on behalf of his or her estate. Relatives and associates of the deceased also have no right of action, unless the words used reflect on their own reputations. This reflects the central principle in civil proceedings generally that a claim for damages can only be brought by the person who has suffered the injury, loss or (as in this case) harm to his or her reputation as a result of the act or omission of another person”
“Against this general background, this paper focuses on one issue, discussing possible legislative and non-legislative approaches to the provision of a remedy for the families of the deceased, where defamatory comments are made posthumously about the deceased”.
The Government clearly had sympathy with the appalling experiences of families like the Watsons but the specific propositions on which it sought responses were informed by an appreciation of the tensions and competing interests and considerations touched on in the introduction. It referred to the comments of the Australian Attorney General to the effect that:
“three main arguments have been advanced against proposals to introduce an action for defamation of the dead: first, defamation law is about protecting reputation, and the dead have none; secondly, the death of the person defamed makes it impossible for defendants to establish truth through cross-examination; and thirdly, a new cause of action would inhibit contemporary historical writing.”
It felt that:
“These arguments need to be considered in Scotland too. Additionally, there may be other objections which should be taken into consideration. Significant amongst these would be concern about any potentially detrimental impact on journalism, the media and publishing industries, through the creation of the possibility of additional litigation and associated costs. It may also mean that greater caution might be exercised by these industries in handling potentially defamatory material, and this could have an impact on commercial decisions.
Conceivably, it may also have a detrimental impact in other areas. For instance, it may be possible to envisage circumstances in which a police investigation into a suspicious death could be hindered, because fear of being sued might cause the media to elect not to publish the sort of speculative articles that could stimulate useful information and leads for the police.”
And we then got a clue to the approach that would be suggested as a possible way to resolve, or at least accommodate, the tensions when it was observed that:
“the provision of a right to take civil action would appear to have relatively limited implications for freedom of expression, if that right were tightly constrained by being available only in quite limited circumstances involving defamatory material.”
The circumstances envisaged were very much the kind faced by the Watson family. The paper asked, amongst other things:
“If the law were to be extended, would it be preferable and practical to limit that extension only to defamation of people who had died in defined circumstances ( e.g. any or all of the following: the victims of murder; of culpable homicide; of dangerous driving; of warfare; of suicide)?
If the law were to be extended, would it be preferable and practical to limit that extension only to allow actions against alleged defamers who had actually been convicted of causing the deceased's death?
Do you consider that the categories of relevant party entitled to bring an action for defamation should reflect the "immediate family" as listed at paragraph 20 above? If not, what categories of relative or other person should be able to bring an action?”
It also considered the possibility of non-legislative remedies, by reference to the Ofcom Code and the Press Complaints Commission.
Responses were invited from a number of individuals and organisations, including the BBC, Sky, ITV, the Association of Chief Police Officers, a number of universities and academics, the Newspaper Publishers Association, the Samaritans, the Scottish Law Commission, Victim Support Scotland and others. In the event, the respondents included the BBC, the Press Association, the Guardian, the Law Society and a number of individuals and academics. They were, as the Government observed, in disagreement as to whether or not there was a fundamental gap in the law that needed filling. The Government’s Summary of Responses noted that, despite being asked to do so, few of the respondents had produced evidence to support their arguments. Perhaps predictably, “Responses received from individuals and victims' organisations indicated that the law was deficient and required to be addressed” whilst “other responses indicated that there was no deficiency in the current system that required to be addressed.” Those opposing any change highlighted that the law of defamation was there to protect reputation and the extension proposed would be an unjustifiable restriction on free speech and historical research and analysis. Few on either side seemed to have much appetite for the compromise of limiting the right to the relatives of those who had died in a limited range of circumstances or against those who had actually caused the deceased’s death. Again, perhaps unsurprisingly, individual respondents were sceptical about the power or appetite of the industries regulatory bodies to provide a remedy.
The responses having been considered, Roseanna Cunningham, the Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs, wrote to the Petitions Committee at the end of last year. She said:
“In essence, responses were split between those from individual members of the public and victims' organisations (which supported a change to the law) and those from academics, lawyers and media organisations (which opposed a change to the law). The proponents and opponents of reform both argued strongly for their respective positions, but there was little by way of firm factual evidence that the current position is either demonstrably ineffective or demonstrably effective. The opponents, however, did raise a number of significant concerns regarding the practicality of a reformed approach. Amongst this group, there were a number who also argued for a wider review of the law on defamation and privacy.
At this point, our view is that it is right to support the objective of ensuring that the reputation of a recently deceased person cannot be defamed with impunity, but that an extension of the law may not be the most appropriate way of delivering the requisite protection.”
But, she made it clear that this was not an end to the matter:
“This is something of a provisional position, however, because it is relevant in considering this issue that, since the consultation was undertaken, the context has changed significantly. I refer, of course, to the revelations and allegations over the summer about phone hacking. The result of these developments is that media standards and regulation are now firmly in the spotlight and a range of inquiries have been established. Amongst these is the inquiry under Lord Justice Leveson, which was set up by the UK Government and covers amongst other matters "the culture, practices, and ethics of the press". We will want to consider carefully the outcome of that inquiry (in which, I understand, the petitioners have been designated 'core participants') and, indeed, the work being undertaken by the UK Government in order to inform our final conclusions as whether the regulatory regimes relating to the media are, or can be made, robust and reliable.”
And indeed, three weeks after that letter, and the day after Bob and Sally Dowler so memorably appeared, James and Margaret Watson gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The statements and transcripts give full detail of the trauma suffered by the family. But further, Mrs. Watson was so moved by the false suggestion by other core participants that people such as her could always “go to law” that she submitted a supplementary witness statement. She said:
“While I am not asking Lord Justice Leveson’s Legal Team to highlight the lack of human rights families of homicide victims are forced to endure under the current defamation legislation, I feel that those who have stated "that you can always go to law if you are not satisfied with an adjudication of the PCC" be reminded that law of defamation does not apply when the victim of defamation is deceased.”
There is an idea out there that some of the reaction to the revelations about Jimmy Savile amount to revenge being extracted from the BBC for its part in Leveson. Whatever, Mrs. Watson was of course right that Leveson will not directly have any effect on how Scots law deals with defamation of the dead but the UK Government wanted the Inquiry to produce its report within 12 months and Lord Leveson said, at the conclusion of the evidence gathering in July this year, that he will “produce a report as soon as I reasonably can”. Anyone with any interest in how the law might be reformed to give some kind of help to people like the Watsons will look forward to that. | <urn:uuid:2b556042-9f4d-4f44-b7c6-12c62f7814fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hallidaycampbell.com/2012/10/death-and-good-name.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970653 | 3,950 | 1.820313 | 2 |
These days, I am trying to keep my patience and save my energy as much as possible.
I keep telling my students, colleagues, family and friends that one of the biggest challenges in life has become how to keep calm in the face of the numerous reasons you could otherwise be angry. I keep telling them that this is one of the top lessons we need to teach our young generation and children — i.e., those who still want to learn from oldies like us and have some faith and confidence in our wisdom. Honestly, we the older generation is leaving behind a horribly messed-up world for them; its up to them to decide whether they want to clean it up or destroy it even further. If they want to clean it up — and I hope they do — they need to learn how to stay calm, composed and focused in spite of the many provocations and turmoils caused by the people in power. They need to learn how to be stoic, and sift through small, mundane things to deal with the real important ones.
Now, what the heck does it have to do with the title of this post: This is Brooklyn, New York. [This is] Not your United States? What does it really mean? I mean, look at the sentences: on the surface, together, don’t even make any sense!
It has a little, real-life story behind it — as a vast majority of my blogs have had some kind of real-life connection. What happened was that this morning, I went to do some small groceries at a locally-owned store here in Brooklyn. I picked up some fruits and vegetables and stood in the line that had perhaps three or four people in front of me, and no one behind. It is a small store and there is not much space to move around near the cashier’s check-out machine. This is a store run by a Hispanic owner; most workers, if not all, are also Latino women and men.
So, waiting in the line, I saw an old white woman pushing her cart full of stuff she bought and she was tentatively looking at me as if she was trying to find out if she could get in front of me, or behind, in the line. I would have no problems letting her come in front of me especially when I was the last person in the line; in fact, my deep-rooted Indian courtesy for older people often makes me do such little acts of benevolence. So, I said, “Would you like to come in here?” Or, maybe, I thought, she was trying to sneak by me into the isle for milk and dairy products.
And then the old woman said something that was quite out of the blue. She yelled at me, really yelled at me on top of her voice, “This is United States. We don’t do it around here. In the United States, we do not come that way. This is United States…here…”
Oh my Gosh, why did I even bother to be nice and polite to her, I thought! I was so taken aback (a mild way) that I even told the cashier girl about my feelings. Of course, she didn’t want to comment: after all, she wouldn’t want to remark on another customer’s behavior. Maybe, she was all too familiar with such incidents happening regularly in her workplace.
Obviously, this was an old woman who was probably quite a bit on the crazy side and didn’t know what she was talking about; it’s likely she was upset at something else and took it out on me at her first opportunity. It could be she thought she had reached that age where she thought she had the right to yell at anyone she met. Or, it could be that she thought I didn’t know the rules of “her” United States: obviously, with a brown skin, mustache and beard, and with a “non-mainstream” look, I definitely did not fit her traditional concept of someone who belonged in “her” United States, and she thought she could tell me that she was not happy that “we” invaded “her” United States.
I know I’m making a big deal out of it. Sure, I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, so to speak. But I am doing it for a reason. I know that living in Brooklyn, New York, this is not a totally extraordinary incident; in fact, I have had such experiences — more memorable in nature — over the past few years. (No, I’m not talking about the post-9/11 anti-immigrant hate crimes and violence that I wrote about on this blog before; I’m only talking about small, personal, hard-to-deal-with experiences here in New York City, the so-called paradise of diversity and tolerance).
I know such things happen in life, and it was not in any way that bad or hurting. Living in a mega-city like New York, Calcutta or London has its pluses and minuses. We need to know how to deal with it and ignore the insignificant. But the incident still troubled me a little. I would not remember this morning’s experience for too long; but I would want to remember it for at least twenty-four hours before it slipped into oblivion.
I would not even want to say too much on it. But I would want to remind ourselves and our young generation about the absolute necessity to stay calm in the face of provocations — big or small.
Brooklyn, New York | <urn:uuid:6bc2ac67-5e9c-46eb-a00e-e7bfd989dbb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://onefinalblog.wordpress.com/category/face/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985818 | 1,182 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Problems for specific Ford E-250 years:
Problem with your car? See what our experts say or submit your own.
1998 Ford E-250 Problems
The front end may make a rattle noise over bumps. There may be handling issues, and play in the front wheels on inspection. If there is up and down movement on the front wheels while the lower control arms are being supported, inspect the upper and lower ball joints for excessive play. These are prone to failure from moisture entry and lack of lubrication. The ball joints should be replaced as needed.
If the slip yoke in the driveshaft is binding, it can make a clunking noise when pulling away from a stop. The slip yoke will need to be lubricated.
If a buzzing noise is coming from the exhaust at different engine speeds and conditions, this is commonly caused by the heat shields on catalytic converters coming loose at points. The buzzing is the metal on metal contact. Installing a large worm clamp around the catalytic converter and heat shield assembly will prevent the noise and secure the shields.
Electrolysis can cause repeated failures of the heater core and radiator. The diagnosing technician should check for voltage present in the coolant, with the battery disconnected, because electrical current in the coolant causes electrolysis. Corroded or deteriorated parts should be replaced, and the coolant should be flushed. Ground straps can be added to help prevent future corrosion of components.
A defective key-in warning chime switch can cause the ignition cylinder to bind from run to start and / or start to run movements. The key-in warning chime switch will need to be replaced.
This concern relates to vehicles equipped with the E4OD and 4R100 automatic transmissions. Fluid leaks from the rear of the transmission and excessive vibration felt in the vehicle while driving can be caused by a lack of lubrication to the rear of the transmission and rear seal failure. The extension housing (rear portion of transmission) can lose lubrication if the fluid supply hole becomes clogged. This leads to rear seal failure from lack of lubrication, and can cause bearing failure in the extension housing. The extension housing and gasket should be replaced and verify the fluid supply hole is clear of debris.
This concern relates specifically to the E4OD and 4R100 automatic transmissions. Transmission fluid leaking from the front of the transmission bell housing may also be accompanied with shifting and transmission engagement issues. This is often caused by transmission overheating and is the sign of a significant internal transmission problem. The superficial cause is the failure of the front pump seal of the transmission. The immediate repair is to remove the transmission, replace the front pump and seal, replace all fluid with the transmission filter, and verify proper flow through the transmission fluid lines and cooler. It is also recommended to make sure the vehicle is not pulling a load that is heavier than the gross vehicle weight limits because this can cause the transmission to overheat. Depending on the transmission's mileage, this can also be a good time to consider a complete overhaul or replacement with a remanufactured unit, as often just the pump and seal replacement is a short lived remedy.
The Check Engine Light may illuminate, the engine may run rough and have misfires on acceleration. Commonly the ignition coils and/or the ignition coil boots are the cause of this problem. The rubber boot that insulates the coil to the spark plug can dry and crack allowing arcing. Inspect the coils and boots, and replace them as needed. Our technicians also recommend replacing the coil boots any time the spark plugs are replaced.
Engine oil may leak externally from the cylinder head gasket. The gaskets were contaminated with metal debris from the factory – between the block and gasket and/or the head and gasket. To correct, the head gasket must be replaced and the mating surfaces on the cylinder head and block need to be inspected for chips or damage. In some cases the cylinder head will not be repairable and will need replacement.
The spark plugs may become dislodged from the cylinder heads. A loud popping noise can be heard and a subsequent misfire experienced. The threads on the spark plug ports in the cylinder head(s) can become stripped or missing when the spark plug is dislodged. The threads in cylinder heads may be replaced using “Lock-N-Stitch” aluminum inserts. Our technicians tell us thread replacement is performed when the vehicle is out of base warranty. Vehicles under base warranty receive a new cylinder head. | <urn:uuid:da1a8f48-cb41-4915-8fb8-e9d7e2e294c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://repairpal.com/ford-e-250-1998/problems?sort=Newest | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931049 | 927 | 1.703125 | 2 |
U.S. releases names of 55 Guantanamo detainees
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The U.S. Justice Department on Friday made public the names of 55 Guantanamo prisoners who have been approved for transfer to the custody of other countries, releasing information sought by human rights organizations.
The announcement, which reverses a 2009 decision, was a surprise to organizations that had filed FOIA requests seeking the information.
"We did not expect this," said Omar Farah, attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights. "This is an important development."
Farah said the government's action will be a boost for lawyers representing detainees at the U.S. military base in Cuba. "We can now advocate publicly for the release of our clients by name," he said.
The government's move has no immediate, practical effect on the inmates' detention. Inclusion on the list does not mean that the U.S. has absolved them of any wrongdoing or that it believes they pose no threat, and there was no indication of when any might be sent elsewhere.
In 2009, Ambassador Daniel Fried, the Obama administration's special envoy on detainee issues, argued then that it was necessary to keep the prisoners' identities secret while the U.S. negotiated transfers to other countries.
"It is important for the U.S. government to have the latitude to approach potential destination countries in a discreet and confidential manner, in order to minimize the risk of undue publicity," Fried said in a statement at the time.
But the government said in a court filing Friday that the successful transfers of other detainees no longer warranted such concerns. It noted that 40 detainees have been resettled in new countries and 28 were repatriated to their native countries since 2009.
ACLU lawyer Zachary Katznelson welcomed the naming of 55 prisoners approved for transfers, saying it could help speed up their release to another country. "Their lawyers can publicly push for their transfer," he said.
But he urged the government to release the names of 31 other detainees also approved for transfer.
"Today's release is a partial victory for transparency, and it should also be a spur to action," he said. "These men have now spent three years in prison since our military and intelligence agencies all agreed they should be released."
Katznelson said the ACLU has also filed an FOIA request seeking the names of prisoners in three other categories: indefinite detention, conditional detention and prosecution.
Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said the 55 detainees named should be transferred immediately out of Guantanamo.
"Indefinite detention is a human rights violation and it must end," she said.
Most of the detainees on the list are from Yemen, including Mohammed Al-Hamiri, whom Farah represents.
Farah said more than one-third of Guantanamo's prisoners are men from Yemen who have been cleared for transfer. Currently, the U.S. will not move any Yemeni detainees back to their home country because the U.S. believes it is not stable enough to prevent them from potentially resuming militant activity.
There are 167 detainees now at Guantanamo. | <urn:uuid:d6f68cbe-3250-47a8-920f-5ec630acb47e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012/09/21/us-releases-names-of-55-guantanamo-detainees/57821820/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96604 | 640 | 1.804688 | 2 |
UN to post refugee envoy in Iraq
Representative to help millions return home
BAGHDAD - The United Nations refugee chief said yesterday that he is sending a representative to Baghdad to help millions of displaced Iraqis return home, showing a strengthened UN commitment to deal with the crisis and confidence in recent security gains.
Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, also pledged to increase his group's staffing level in Baghdad from two to five people.
"We are here because we are deeply committed to do more," Guterres said at a joint news conference with Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. "We have confidence in the future of Iraq."
As Guterres made his promises, the top Iraqi commander for Baghdad, Lieutenant General Abboud Qanbar, said the number of bodies with bullet wounds found daily has dropped from at least 43 to about four under a year-old US-Iraqi security crackdown in the capital.
The statement was tempered by warnings that the battle was not over.
"An end date cannot be set for this security plan because of the kind of battle we are fighting against an enemy represented by insurgency and terrorism," Qanbar said.
Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi, Iraq's defense minister, said separately that the so-called surge of US troops has helped secure most of Baghdad.
But challenges remain from Al Qaeda in the north and what he called "criminals, gangs, and smugglers" in the south, where Shi'ite militias are involved in a violent power struggle.
He said US troops should remain in Iraq until domestic security forces are able to take their place, and the long-term need for US troops will be mostly related to border protection.
"There is 90 percent security in the capital," Obeidi said on the sidelines of a meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Yet deadly violence in the streets of Baghdad remains a daily occurrence.
Two government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information, said police yesterday found two handcuffed, blindfolded, and shot-up bodies showing signs of torture in Baghdad.
Those killed were apparent victims of so-called sectarian death squads usually run by Shi'ite militias.
That was in sharp contrast to the dozens of bodies found on a typical day before Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his militia fighters to stand down. The six-month cease-fire expires at the end of this month, and it remains uncertain whether the radical Shi'ite cleric will extend it.
Guterres said the new UN representative on the refugee crisis "will be in Baghdad and no longer in Amman, as it has been the case. We believe it is here that the essential work needs to be done."
The UN and many other aid agencies moved from Baghdad to Amman after a couple of devastating attacks, including the truck bombing of the world body's Iraq headquarters in August 2003, which killed 22 people, including the top UN envoy in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The UNHCR estimated this week that 2 million Iraqis have fled their war-ravaged country, many to neighboring Syria and Jordan.
Another 2.4 million are thought to be displaced from their homes but living inside the country, either because of Saddam Hussein's actions during his rule or because of the war.
Zebari said that, with decreasing violence in many areas of the nation over the past year, some internally displaced placed people have been moving back to their neighborhoods.
A recent Interior Ministry assessment found "nearly 4,000 families that have gone back to their homes willingly," he said.
But he and Guterres agreed that much more needs to be done.
The two sides said they will begin talking about how to assess when conditions are right for a more substantial return of refugees.
"There is never a humanitarian solution to a humanitarian problem," Guterres cautioned. "The plight of Iraqi refugees will end with national reconciliation and with their effective reintegration in the country and their contribution to the reconstruction of the country."
Last year, statements from the Iraqi government that the country was secure enough to handle a substantial return of refugees raised concerns from both the UN and the American military.
The United States warned that a massive repatriation could rekindle sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites and that some returnees found their Baghdad homes occupied by members of the other Muslim sect. | <urn:uuid:82680be5-d52b-4749-bde4-5b5611a28b34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/02/17/un_to_post_refugee_envoy_in_iraq/?camp=pm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964849 | 919 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Your State Needs You
Is your state preparing for the grand opening of the new health insurance exchanges next year? Open enrollment will begin in less than 377 days, and most of the newly eligible don't know about the new coverage options or how to enroll.
For many Americans, this will be the first time they apply for financial assistance, shop for a health plan, and use coverage to obtain health care services. It will be essential to ensure that consumers at all income levels learn about the new coverage options, know that they can enroll in many different ways (online, by phone, in person, or through a traditional mail-in application), and understand that help is available to guide them through the enrollment process.
No matter how easy we strive to make the enrollment process for health coverage, there will still be a critical need for states and the new health insurance exchanges to offer consumer assistance from a wide range of individuals and organizations. Without a diverse network of well-trained entities available to help, we will come nowhere near our goals for enrollment. Our latest issue brief on the importance of in-person assistance identifies several ways that stakeholders can help states reach uninsured consumers in their communities and get them enrolled before the end of the initial open enrollment period (October 1, 2013 through March 31, 2014).
Local stakeholders, such as small businesses, consumer groups, faith-based organizations, chambers of commerce, insurance brokers, unions, and other community-based organizations, have the ability to reach people in ways that government efforts simply cannot, and many have longstanding relationships with people who are uninsured. Some ways that organizations can help people enroll include the following:
- Providing in-person assistance with the enrollment process
- Participating in the navigator program
- Serving as a door to their state's "no wrong door" enrollment system
- Partnering with organizations that are providing enrollment assistance
- Spreading the word about the new coverage options
Read our new publication Bridging the Enrollment Gap: The Importance of Providing In-Person Assistance to learn more.
HHS has also recently made it even easier for states to design consumer assistance programs that will meet increased need in 2013 and 2014, during the first two open enrollment periods. In the recently finalized Exchange Blueprint (the application for a state-based or state-federal partnership exchange) HHS outlined a new optional in-person assistance program that is distinct from - and in addition to - the navigator program. Unlike the navigator program, which is subject to federal funding restrictions (federal funds cannot be used to provide grants to navigators), the in-person assister program can be set up and operated with the help of federal establishment grant funds. Navigators are also subject to federal regulations that specify a minimum set of duties and competencies. See Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families series of briefs about navigators to learn more. While we are waiting for additional guidance from HHS to better understand the new in-person assister program and the various roles stakeholders can play, we think it is imperative that states and stakeholders alike begin to think creatively about how to ensure that there is adequate in-person assistance for all the different kinds of people who will need to enroll in coverage starting next year. | <urn:uuid:90c327f8-7a5c-4182-a9d2-276d0765757e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.enrollamerica.org/blog/your-state-needs-you | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957518 | 657 | 1.828125 | 2 |
One of Pauls greatest songs IMO, but who is it that swears during the song ?
At 2:58 of the song, someone can allegedly be heard to say, "f***ing hell!" There is some dispute as to who said this, and whether it was really exclaimed at all. Sound engineers Ken Scott and Geoff Emerick claim the exclamation came from McCartney, and that it was Lennon's idea to leave the mistake in the final mix. "'Paul hit a clunker on the piano and said a naughty word,' Lennon gleefully crowed, 'but I insisted we leave it in, buried just low enough so that it can barely be heard. Most people won't ever spot it...but we'll know it's there.'" However, in the book Recording the Beatles, engineer Malcolm Toft recalls, "Barry Sheffield engineered 'Hey Jude', but I mixed it... John Lennon says a very rude word about halfway through the song. At 2:59 you will hear a 'Whoa!' from him in the background. About two seconds later you will hear, 'f***ing hell!' This was because when he was doing a vocal backing, Barry sent him the foldback level [headphone volume] too loud and he threw the cans on the ground and uttered the expletive. But, because it had been bounced down [mixed] with the main vocal, it could not be removed. I just managed to bring the fader down for a split second on the mix to try to lessen the effect." Others argue that the voice is Ringo Starr's.
Although McCartney originally wrote the song for Julian Lennon, John Lennon thought it had actually been written for him:
But I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it... Yoko's just come into the picture. He's saying. 'Hey, Jude—Hey, John.' I know I'm sounding like one of those fans who reads things into it, but you can hear it as a song to me ... Subconsciously, he was saying, Go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn't want me to go ahead.
Other people believed McCartney wrote the song about them, including Judith Simons, a journalist with the Daily Express.
Still others, including John Lennon, have speculated that McCartney's failing long-term relationship with Jane Asher when he wrote "Hey Jude" was an unconscious "message to himself." In fact, when Lennon mentioned that he thought the song was about him, McCartney denied it, and told Lennon he had written the song about himself.
Writer Mark Hertsgaard noted "many of the song's lyrics do seem directed more at a grown man on the verge of a powerful new love, especially the lines 'you have found her now go and get her' and 'you're waiting for someone to perform with.'" Tim Riley wrote, "If the song is about self-worth and self-consolation in the face of hardship, the vocal performance itself conveys much of the journey. He begins by singing to comfort someone else, finds himself weighing his own feelings in the process, and finally, in the repeated refrains that nurture his own approbation, he comes to believe in himself."
McCartney changed the title to "Hey Jude" because the name Jude was easier to sing than Jules.
Much as he did with "Yesterday", McCartney played the song for other musicians and friends. Ron Griffith of Badfinger (known at this time as the Iveys, and the first band to join the Beatles-owned record label Apple Records), recalled that on their first day in the studio, "Paul walked over to the grand piano and said, 'Hey lads, have a listen', and he sat down and gave us a full concert rendition of 'Hey Jude'. We were gobsmacked."
When McCartney introduced Lennon to his new composition, he came to "the movement you need is on your shoulder" and told Lennon "I'll fix that bit." Lennon asked why, and McCartney answered "...it's a stupid expression; it sounds like a parrot." Lennon parried with "You won't, you know. That's the best line in the song." McCartney thus left the line in, and later said "...when I play that song, that's the line when I think of John, and sometimes I get a little emotional during that moment."
Paul McCartney – lead vocal, piano, bass
John Lennon – backing vocal, acoustic guitar
George Harrison – backing vocal, electric guitar
Ringo Starr – backing vocal, drums, tambourine
Uncredited – 10 violins, three violas, three cellos, two double basses, two flutes, two clarinets, one bass clarinet, one bassoon, one contrabassoon, four trumpets, two horns, four trombones, and one percussion instrument.
Personnel per Ian MacDonald and Mark Lewisohn.
Has there been any discussion about who plays bass? In the video it shows george playing the Fender bass VI but for all I know they could be miming for the film. On the White Album, George plays bass on a number of tracks so it could be him! | <urn:uuid:55094726-5b9d-44ed-a91b-4733a38f171c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/index.php?topic=14660.msg300461 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979176 | 1,076 | 1.578125 | 2 |
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Houston Heritage Society's Candlelight Tour, Margaret Justus and Martha Williams decided to dress the part.
The two Heritage Society board members scoured their closets, searched for family heirlooms and roamed the web to come up with a look that would have been the height of style in 1962.
Jackie Kennedy, eat your heart out!
"It's amazing how the '60s era is in style. It's the Mad Men effect," Williams said, noting the popular television series. "The look is so elegant and clean."
They will discuss the recent damage of Hurricane Carla, the new NASA facility in Clear Lake and recall that just three months earlier, in a speech at Rice University, President John F. Kennedy declared the United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
The two women found it surprisingly easy to come up with their ensembles for the big weekend. Williams ordered the chic blue satin suit from the Talbots web site and purchased the gloves online, too.
"It's amazing how the '60s era is in style. It's the Mad Men effect," she said, noting the popular television series. "The look is so elegant and clean."
Her faux pearl triple strand necklace and earrings — replicas of Jackie Kennedy's favorites — are sold at the Kennedy Center gift shop in Washington, D.C.
The modified pill box hat is a family heirloom that Williams' mother once wore.
Justus found the brown velvet blouse in her closet and accessorized it with a vintage pin from The Guild Shop of St. John the Divine. She is wearing her mother's white kid gloves and a vintage hat owned by Heritage Society board president Evelyn Boatwright.
Her brocade skirt, from New York and Co, was a mini, so she added a four-inch brown velvet band to the hem so it would be an appropriate length.
At each of the other historic buildings on the 10-acre grounds, actors representing such Houston notables as the Allen brothers who founded Houston, Rice University founder William Marsh Rice and Antioch Missionary Baptist Church minister Jack Yates (both as a young man and in his later years), will make history come alive as part of the holiday tour.
"Otherwise, it's a dusty old book in the library," said Heritage Society executive director Alice Collette.
Mayor Annise Parker will join chair Shawn Stephens to kick off the Heritage Society's 50th annual Candlelight Tour Friday at 7:15 p.m. at Sam Houston Park, 1100 Bagby. Tour hours are 6:30-9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 5-8 p.m. Sunday. For ticket information, go to www.heritagesociety.org . | <urn:uuid:d7de50aa-453f-4652-815f-c982c2ac920c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://houston.culturemap.com/news/fashion/12-05-12-16-19-imad-meni-meets-houstons-past-heritage-society-adds-a-60s-touch-to-50th-annual-candlelight-tour/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943312 | 581 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Ed Vulliamy: The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011
This land is our land: pipeline protesters Willie and Mary Corduff at the quay at Rossport. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer
If the sea is calm, you can hear the traffic in New York,” goes the local introduction to the breathtaking beauty of Erris, in the north of County Mayo, where the coastline winds its way through little coves and beneath the cliffs of the wild seaboard at Europe‘s edge. Most nights, though, Manhattan must be quiet, for the only audible sounds are the distant baying of a dog several miles away, the soft bleating of newborn lambs from lush coastal meadows and the sighing of the brine as it moves across rocks and shingle.
Soon, however, this deep peace will be shattered forever. “And this is where it all began,” says Willie Corduff, standing in his farmyard atop fields that tumble down to the estuary of Sruwaddacon. Corduff’s family have farmed here for generations. “It’s been hard,” he says, “but we’ve made a living doing a little bit of everything, you know a little suckling, a little silage, a little hay.” Now that way of life stands to be destroyed, along with that of Corduff’s neighbours, who fish the Atlantic waters as their forefathers have for centuries. Right across the estuary from Corduff’s farm, where meadows and bog once came down to the sands, diggers now chug and churn the earth and security men strut behind the reinforced fencing in fluorescent “hi-viz” jackets. After dusk has fallen, what was once the pure darkness of night is pierced by floodlights. A mile behind this “exempted development” that needs no planning permission, a refinery has been built, heavily guarded, a gash across the land inflicted by lights, concrete, fencing and those ubiquitous fluorescent jackets. The Shell oil company has come to Erris and how.
“It was a Scottish fellow came one morning,” says Corduff. “And you know, it was the arrogance that triggered me off. There was no asking. He told me what was going to happen, taking me for a fool.”
In 1996, a reserve of gas had been found 50 miles offshore by a consortium called Enterprise Energy Ireland and a major stake was bought by Shell in 2002. The plan has been to bring raw, untreated gas ashore by pipe, to the refinery at Ballinaboy, six miles south of the estuary. The pipe is to come ashore at Broadhaven Bay’s widest and loveliest point, and was to skirt the estuary’s northern shore, through farmland. “There’s miles of empty bog out there,” says John Monaghan, one of the leaders of the ensuing protest, “and they chose to take it across the farms. Where there are farms there are farmhouses, and where there are farmhouses there are families.”
The arguments were made: successive government ministers insisted that what became known as the Corrib gas project would decrease Irish dependency on imported Scottish gas and provide up to 60% of Ireland’s needs at peak periods. On the other side, there were immediate environmental concerns: Broadhaven Bay and nearby Carrowmore Lake are EU-designated Special Protection Areas; the lake, near the refinery, provides drinking water. There were concerns about potential explosions and the initial high pressure (345 bar) at which the gas would be piped ashore, and the fact that, as raw gas, it contained impurities, and would be corrosive. And there were issues of history and community.
Maura Harrington, a retired teacher in the village of Inver, who is one of the protest’s most outspoken voices, says: “This is about a sense of place and its people. We may not qualify as indigenous people, but we have our land and culture, to which we belong. All those people who emigrated from Erris through history, Erris never left them. They say we are opposed to progress, and laugh at us. But to me, progress is the ability to sustain yourself, and those who come after you. It’s nature and nurture: what we here call muinhin, which means of the place, and cointeann, which means to get a little awkward when that place and its people are about to be torn apart.”
There had been a choice in Ireland about what to do with the “new frontier” abundant natural gas off its western shores. There were two models: that of the Norwegians, who guaranteed a state-owned stake in exploitation and quota for domestic consumption, and that of British North Sea gas, where profits were largely spirited away by multinational companies. The Norwegian model was favoured by the Irish minister for industry and commerce during the 1970s, Justin Keating, who judged that Britain was wasting resources while Norway was securing its future. But the tide turned, as Keating’s notions of state responsibility were swept aside by enthusiasm for the free market and Margaret Thatcher’s handling of North Sea gas.
In 2000, Enterprise began digging holes for the pipeline through farmland in Rossport, and was granted planning permission by Mayo County Council for the refinery at Ballinaboy. The following year the Irish government awarded itself the right to statutorily acquire the private land it needed the first consent orders issued by former minister Frank Fahey on election day in May 2002.
Enterprise, and later Shell, had courted Irish politicians and the affair was reciprocated, with entertainment for oil executives in Fianna Fáil tents at Galway races but everyone in the loop was dealt a blow when County Mayo’s permission for the terminal was appealed to the national planning board, Bord Pleanála. The planning inspector, Kevin Moore, recommended refusal, concluding that: “From a strategic planning perspective, this is the wrong site. From the perspective of government policy which seeks to foster balanced regional development, this is the wrong site. From the perspective of minimising environmental impact, this is the wrong site; and consequently: from the perspective of sustainable development this is the wrong site.”
Enterprise Oil was taken over by Shell soon after, and the minutes of a meeting of the company’s managing directors laid out a plan for how to deal with Moore’s objections. “The Committee”, read the minutes, “queried whether the Group had sufficiently well-placed contacts with the Irish government and regulators” and “undertook to explore this issue further”. In December 2003, Shell went back to Mayo Council and residents again appealed to the Bord Pleanála. This time a new director approved the plan.
Farmers across whose land the pipe was due to run were offered compensation. Some took it, but six owners of smallholdings along the route refused one of them was Willie Corduff. In response, the Irish government passed, in 2005, the first ever legislation allowing a private corporation the same rights of compulsory purchase afforded to a state agency. Still Corduff and his fellow small farmers refused to admit Shell on to their land. “I think they thought they could break our spirit,” he says. “I don’t think they realised what kind of people they were dealing with. I think they thought we were farmers with 2,000 acres driving Jeeps, not people struggling on a little bit of bog, making it greener by the yard with a shovel.” Corduff keeps his cloth cap on as we retreat to the kitchen of his farmhouse, where he explains how he became one of the first of many to go to jail.
In April 2005, Shell secured interlocutory orders against those refusing to let company agents on to their land. On 29 June, five people, including Corduff, were arrested and tried for contempt of the order, and jailed for 94 days. “When the judge said I was going to jail,” says Corduff, “what little bit of hair that’s upon my head was sticking up on end.”
Corduff and his colleagues became known as the “Rossport Five”, and the case of Shell’s Corrib pipeline became a cause célèbre across Ireland. Now, the story of the uprising that followed has been made into a film, The Pipe, which is picking up worldwide awards, with queues around the block to watch screenings in Bucharest, Phoenix, Boston, San Francisco and New York as well as Galway and London.
The director is Risteard O’Domhnaill, just past 30 years old, who at first covered the dispute as a news cameraman for the Irish-language television service and whose uncle farms sheep and cattle between Inver and the Erris coastline. He was appalled by the way in which many of his peers reported the story: “There was a culture of ‘don’t rock the boat’ the media had got caught up in the Celtic Tiger business, ready to round on anyone who criticised development, or deregulation in this case, anyone who questioned what was happening to my uncle’s community.”
The Pipe, says O’Domhnaill, “is Local Hero gone wrong” it is also a vivid, close-range narrative of a battle unfolding, and a cruel parable of our times.
“People talk about us as though we want to be going back to the Stone Age,” says Corduff. “But those people who farmed here with a donkey and cart and a bucket, they handed it on to their children. If this thing goes ahead, we won’t be able to do that. They say we’re standing in the way of progress, but what is it we’re standing in the way of? We’re standing in the way of the place being polluted and destroyed by Shell, that’s what. They say we’re enjoying ourselves with this protest. But we’re not it’s a terrible sadness, the whole thing.”
The imprisonment of the Rossport Five and nationwide demonstrations in support of them led to the formation of Shell To Sea. One of the most prominent figures in the protest alliance is Maura Harrington, who spent a month in jail for slapping a police officer in the face. On another occasion, she says: “I refused to pay a fine, went to jail for 13 days and saved myself ¤2,700.” When a first attempt was made to lay the pipe at sea, Harrington went on hunger strike for 10 days.
“My mother was one of the few women for the time to have gone to the University of Galway, and my father was a trade union man, so he’d have been politically aware,” she says, by way of introduction over a pub dinner in the homely Western Strands Hotel near Belmullet. “So I’d have been brought up this way But in the end the cause of Shell To Sea is brutally simple: to oppose an assault on the air, the land, the sea and its people and on the nation of Ireland. Shell tries to obfuscate things with environmental-impact statements and spin, but in the end it comes to this: will the traitors who govern this country allow such an assault to succeed, or will we stop it? Will raw gas come ashore to be refined and sold abroad to enrich a multinational corporation, or will it not? In a world of spin and virtuality, this is all very real I don’t want to sound all Marie Antoinette, but when you are living close to the land, air and sea, you are living in the real world.”
Not everyone in the community opposed the project, as Shell and the Irish government point out. Father Kevin Hegarty of the neighbouring parish of Kilmore draws on a line from The Playboy of the Western World set in these parts to describe O’Domhnaill’s film: “‘It’s a great story and he tells it lovely, but he doesn’t tell the whole story. I’d say the majority of this community supports the project. It’s a way to provide employment and an opening towards the development of sustainable fuels in Ireland.” (Father Kevin’s colleague Fr Michael Nallen, in Kilcommon itself, opposed the pipeline.)
There is argument over how many jobs the project would create: a spokeswoman for Shell, Denise Horan, says 450 people are currently employed, with “several hundred” more jobs to come with the building of the pipeline. “When the project is in operation, there will be approximately 130 full-time jobs,” she says. There is also some debate as to how much the gas will benefit Ireland. Ms Horan says: “All the gas from the Corrib field will be consumed in Ireland,” and that gas cannot be exported to the UK because the pipe runs one way; but O’Domhnaill insists that “there’s no compulsion on them to serve Irish interests; in the end, they can sell it wherever they like, at whatever price they like that’s how it is with the multinational oil companies.”
In June 2008, the Irish government gave Shell permission to begin laying its pipeline at sea and the biggest pipe-laying vessel in the world, the Solitaire, arrived to do so. The challenge to this colossus by a fisherman named Pat O’Donnell, his family and supporters, bobbing about on the ocean with the bows of the Solitaire towering above, makes for the most compelling and heart-breaking passage in O’Domhnaill’s film.
The fishermen’s battle against Shell begins heart-warmingly with O’Donnell saying to the camera: “Isn’t it a lovely sight when you see all the fishermen together and fighting for the one thing?” But soon, it becomes a battle that turns fisherman against fisherman, as Shell offers money to those prepared to relinquish their fishing rights.
The scene climaxes with a remarkable piece of real-life action cinema as O’Donnell in his little fishing boat, the John Michelle and two other ships confront the immense Solitaire bow to bow. “I’ve a right to fish here,” says O’Donnell of his lobster pots, but warships of the Irish navy arrive to ensure the Solitaire’s way.
They call O’Donnell “The Chief” for miles around the lovely hamlet of Porturlin where he lives, and it is quite an honour to clamber aboard the John Michelle with him. “If I lived to be 100, I’d never sell this boat,” says the Chief. “This is history, this boat.
“I was born in 1957,” says Pat, “second youngest of 11 children. All my sisters emigrated to the United States at a young age, but we five boys stayed behind to fish, for the sea has been good to our family. I tried a while in London, in construction, but had to come back I missed the sea; I’d known at a young age what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and my oldest, Jonathan, was skipper of his own boat aged 15 he’s 26 now.”
He continues: “I’d be a fella who loved a quiet life,” but that aspiration ended after the fishermen’s group he initially mobilised against Shell commissioned a scientist at Southampton University, Dr Alex Rogers, to survey the impact the pipeline would have on their livelihoods, the stocks at sea. Dr Rogers concluded pessimistically, and, says O’Donnell, “after all I’d read about Shell in Nigeria, who’d want them here as well?” He joined the protest movement blockading the contract workers’ access to the refinery site.
“‘People have the right to go to work,’ we kept being told, but Pat O’Donnell and his son, who have the right to fish at sea under a ministerial licence were arrested for setting their pots,” he fumes. “I’d never think I’d see the day when the Irish navy would turn its guns on Irish citizens fishing Irish waters, for the sake of a British and Dutch company.”
O’Donnell served two jail sentences totalling seven months, only to watch most of the other members of his protest flotilla take Shell’s silver, one by one. “One of them turned his boat into a portable toilet for men working on the jack-up rigs. How low can you get? What a way for a good fishing boat to be ending up, shifting shit for Shell!”
On 11 June 2009, O’Donnell claims his other boat, Iona Isle, was boarded off the western tip of Broadhaven Bay by “four masked men with guns, who went down below. All I could see was their eyes and their mouths. They came up some minutes later, vanished and I noticed the boat was water-heavy. I put out a Mayday call and had 20 minutes to get into my life craft. I wasn’t right for a good while after, for it’s a terrible thing for a fisherman to lose his boat in such an attack. I tried to get insurance, but the broker told me I wasn’t covered for acts of terrorism.” The police and the IRMS security firm contracted by Shell have both denied involvement in the sinking of the boat. Barrister Brian Barrington investigated the incident and that said as the boat was sunk at sea it was impossible to verify the claim.
On the shoreline at Glengad, above Broadhaven Bay’s widest sweep, is the spot where the pipe hits landfall. Above this wild, wondrous foreshore is a standing stone circle. “It goes back to the first farmers on this land, and beyond,” says O’Domhnaill as we clamber up the hill for a better view of the ocean sweep. This is where the pipe will come ashore, after which it will run overland beside the stone circle, beneath the estuary to Rossport, and journey overland to the refinery. It is here that Shell has been obliged to reduce the high pressure at which the gas will come ashore, but those who live here remain exposed to what they believe despite Shell’s assurances to the contrary is the weakest joint, and most potentially dangerous point, in the process.
Above the site and just below the stone circle is the home of John Monaghan, who formed a group that split from Shell To Sea’s absolute opposition, supporting instead a compromise route, proposed by local priests, across open, uninhabited bog at Glinsk, to the north. Its name was Pobal Chill Chomáin, People of Kilcommon. The rift is plain to see in O’Domhnaill’s movie: the sad, inevitable, bad-tempered rupture of the vulnerable neighbour pitched against neighbour when faced by the giant.
Monaghan grew up in Nottingham, but “came back in the 1980s, to the family roots. And it’s changed even since then. When I came back, they were still bringing in turf by horse and cart. Now, the Celtic Tiger has come and gone, and attitudes have changed more selfishness, boom or bust. Bust, as it turned out. Shell is riding the tiger’s back, the idea that greed is good, all development is good, end of story, no questions asked.”
Corrib, says Monaghan, “is an entirely new approach the ‘sub-sea tie-back’ system that brings in dirty gas and refines it ashore. And the idea of compulsory purchase orders by the private sector is also totally new. Also, I wonder if they’ve figured a worst-case scenario into their risk-assessment calculations, as I’d always do as a civil engineer. I was open to the idea at first, but we never got a glimpse of the reality. There’s been zero accountability.”
O’Domhnaill’s film, as it reaches critical mass, becomes a vortex of images of how the pipeline’s route has been forged: police officers and security men confronting protesters and their sympathisers at every turn.
“We keep being told ‘the law must be upheld,’” says Monaghan. “But whose law? Shell’s law. It might be called the law, but it’s not justice. There is no way we can get justice. Even if there’s a judicial review, we’re liable for costs if we lose, and they’d break us. The law is that whoever has the money gets their way. Look at them! Navy warships patrolling, people coming up the beach from inflatables, moving through the village with video cameras filming us, police officers beating people up, Jeeps roaring around with number plates removed and no tax discs. And that’s the law? If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this, it’s that justice and the law are mutually exclusive.”
“The Garda?” Corduff asks. “We put trust in them, used to have craic with them, our kids used to stay over at theirs. Now, if the children see a squad car or a paddy wagon, they’ll be running off into the bog. That’s a sad thing.”
The fenced-in work beneath Monaghan’s house is another “exempted development” without planning permission which Shell argues is unnecessary anyway, as the pipe follows a route authorised at ministerial level. Even so, disruption to the family of Colm Henry, a few fields along from Monaghan, has been, he says, vulgar and extreme.
Henry is a soft-spoken man who plays country music in a band which tours Ireland and the UK. His walls are hung with Native American artefacts he brought back from visits to Arizona. “It’s the most unspoilt stretch on the west coast,” says his gracious wife Gabrielle, peeling potatoes. “There aren’t even many tourists, and when they do find it, we ask them: ‘Please don’t tell anyone.’” “We used to go about our business in peace we were left alone,” says Henry, “and we would be using the beach in all weathers, swimming in summer and walking in winter.”
When Shell’s security dispatch invaded Glengad, they did so “with van loads of men”, recalls Henry. “All night long there were heavy-duty lights directed at our home even with the curtains drawn the house was illuminated. You had 50 cars and vans outside, floodlights and a cameraman sitting on the mound filming us in our house and on our own land.”
The worst intrusions came, says Henry, “when they started filming the children walking on their own family land. My grandchildren went to play on the beach; they’d be changing to swim, when the security would be photographing them. Now I think that if I was to be filming children undressing on a beach, I might be ending up on the front page of a tabloid newspaper. But no they can do what they wish, with impunity. Going around in balaclavas, no ID, they even have gloved hands, Jesus you can’t even tell the colour of their skin and they’re very cosy with the Garda.” When Henry tried to file a complaint at Belmullet police station, “the Super said he felt bad as a family man, like, but there was nothing he could do, it was out of his hands. When I made my statement about harassment, I didn’t get so much as the courtesy of a reply from the Garda” though he did secure back the pictures of his grandchildren changing clothes. “It makes me wonder: who are these people invading our lives and filming our children?”
Ms Horan of Shell said: “We reject the suggestions of heavy-handedness by the security company. IRMS is a reputable company. Their staff are trained to deal professionally with protesters and show them respect.” She added: “The main reason we need to have security on this project is to allow our employees to go about their legitimate work and to protect our sites and our equipment.” Staff had been “verbally abused, intimidated and prevented from entering their place of work. On one night alone, in 2009, ¤75,000 of damage was done.” IRMS was not answering its telephone in County Kildare last week.
The question of official policing of the Corrib pipeline by the Garda made front-page headlines again last month, when tapes emerged of Garda officers joking about raping women protesters. Demonstrations culminated in one outside the Garda station at the Mayo County seat of Castlebar, home town of the new Taoiseach, Enda Kenny. One of the shamed officers had been transferred here, to a desk job. It was fitting that the demonstration was held in Castlebar, for it was here that Michael Davitt, the son of Mayo who inspired the protest movement, formed the Land League in 1879. Davitt mounted a highly effective campaign against big landowners, leading to the right of tenants to buy their land.
Erris is steeped, then, in the ravages and resistances of Irish history, so the protesters are even more aware than most Irishmen and women that the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising is nigh. For them, the moment is charged with meaning. There is a heart-wrenching passage in O’Domhnaill’s film when Pat O’Donnell, arrested, removes and furls the tricolour from the aft of his fishing boat. “The principles of the tricolour were wiped out when they did that to us,” spits the Chief now. “People died for that flag and its principles, and if those men knew what was happening now, they’d be turning in their graves.”
“I was in the third boat behind the Chief that day,” says John Monaghan. “When he took down the tricolour, I felt it, too: they betray everything that was said in the proclamation of 1916, and the constitution. Then the guard puts his hand on the Chief’s shoulder and says: ‘I’m arresting you now, lad.’ It’s a seemingly kind gesture, but it’s the kiss of Judas.”
Mary Corduff, Willie’s wife, laments that: “Everyone knew that a certain amount of money would split people, especially in a poor community.” None of those who took money from Shell are willing to talk publicly. One man, who sold land for road widening, said simply, as we chatted in a Spar petrol station: “It’s best if I’m not making a big thing of it all.”
“People still talk to each other,” continues Mary, “but it’s not the same as before Shell came. All we do now is talk, sleep and eat Shell. You put up another Christmas tree, and all that has happened since you put up the last one is Shell, Shell, Shell. We haven’t the life we used to, when between Christmas trees you’d hope to be getting in a bit of silage and have some hay drying.”
John Monaghan looks back a couple of weeks to “a day when we were coming out of the depths of winter; the sun was shining through the window, the kids getting ready for school. It all looked so beautiful, the shore down there, the sea and a blue sky but there they were: the Jeeps, the jackets, the cops, the navy, the choppers and diggers. This is deep stuff, it spoils the sunshine”.
The Pipe is on More4 on 14 June at 10pm
‘Id be a fella who loved a quiet life’: fisherman Pat ODonnell with his daughter Aisling at Glenamoy. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer
Security guards attempt to move an anti-Shell activist. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer | <urn:uuid:b054e0ca-6548-49d6-a715-44ad02c3d578> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/05/29/shells-battle-for-the-heart-of-ireland/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973151 | 6,117 | 1.609375 | 2 |
|Barked: Mon Mar 18, '13 4:11pm PST |
|Cam is right. Luxating patella is the main concern with Pomeranians and jumping. Sweeney has it (grade two - as in his kneecap pops out and won't pop back in on his own, worse than grade one but nowhere near bad enough to require surgery) and can't do much jumping. He still tries, bless him, and if the jump isn't high at all, I let him. I do NOT let him jump on couches, beds, chairs, or anything of the like. He is not allowed to climb up the steps (but will bounce down without a problem) and before he's taken outside on leash, he jumps on our short coffee table to make it easier for me to put the leash on him (less bending on my part, as I have bad knees, too). We lift him up to put him on most furniture. He won't do much jumping on his own, anyway.
Ninja, my sister's pomeranian, does not have luxating patellas and is just fine jumping. It's never seemed to bother him at all. So, it all boils down to whether your dog seems to have any joint problems. If you notice any, I'd stop letting him jump. If you don't and never do, I wouldn't worry too much about it. As long as the jumps he's making can't cause him to hurt himself just from the fall.
|my posts | my page | msg me | my family's posts | gift me | become pals|| [notify]| | <urn:uuid:33caefec-99f9-4a35-af43-0108351a9938> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dogster.com/forums/Pomeranian/thread/766616/last | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990874 | 338 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Our People in VICDomenic Muleta - Desire to help others
A desire to serve his country and the inspiration of his step father are the reasons that Cranbourne’s Domenic Muleta has been putting his body and mind through an intensive training program to become a soldier in the Australian Army.
Domenic has just completed recruit training at the Army Recruit Training Centre at Kapooka, near Wagga Wagga in NSW.
“My stepdad is in the Australian Defence Force and he’s inspired me to follow the same career. Plus I see it as a really good way to help out others in trouble and serve my country,” Domenic explained.
All soldiers below the rank of officer do their basic training at Kapooka. It’s an intense eleven-week course including weapon skills, first aid, patrolling and platoon level tactics.
The day starts with a bang at 6.00am and ends at 10.00pm, and the time between is jammed full of activity.
The recruits have 15 minutes to wash, dress and make their beds then, after breakfast,
they could have PT, weapons training, pack-marches, and a lot of lectures ranging from Army Law to radios and night vision goggles.
While Domenic had to adjust his body clock for the early starts – something a lot of his fellow recruits have had to do – the physical aspects of his training have not been too arduous.
“I do break-dancing, martial arts and weight training so I’ve felt pretty good during the PT sessions,” he said.
As he is soon to complete the training, Domenic is now considering his options and lists being a physical fitness instructor or a military police amongst his aims. | <urn:uuid:777eccc1-1b4f-4c4b-b476-130c792cea31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defence.gov.au/our_people/vic/20110510/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980449 | 373 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Outreach Strategic Plan for Diversity 2004–09
The mission of Penn State Outreach is to increase access to Penn State's educational resources through linking the expertise of faculty in the University with the needs and interests of external constituents. The interface of Outreach with the spectrum of Penn State's external constituents opens up the organization to a broad and inclusive perspective on diversity. Outreach's audiences are youth and adult; male and female; local, national, and international; rural and urban; location-bound and mobile; racially, ethnically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse; differently abled; and diverse in sexual orientation. This experience reinforces that there are many kinds of differences that characterize human lives, both for Outreach customers/clients/students and in the University workplace, an understanding that is reflected in the core values and strategic goals of the organization as well as the wide variety of programs offered through Outreach and the wide variety of learners they involve.
Among its stated core values, Outreach seeks to be an organization that:
- is committed to diversity and the unique potential that diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and viewpoints bring to our work and learning experience
- creates a humane environment in the workplace and classroom; treats all faculty, staff, students, and customers with dignity and respect; and is sensitive to the need for balance between work life and personal life
A commitment to diversity is further embraced in Outreach's strategic goals, which include:
- enhancing Outreach's environment for work and learning in support of the contributions of individuals from diverse backgrounds
To advance these core values and this strategic goal and to address the challenges identified in Penn State's Framework to Foster Diversity, the Outreach Strategic Plan for Diversity 2004–09 gives special priority to initiatives targeted at (1) enhancing the climate for diversity in Outreach, (2) recruiting and retaining adult learners (3) recruiting and retaining diverse faculty and staff, and (4) enhancing leadership for diversity. The plan also includes the continuation of efforts to serve diverse audiences and provide programming with multicultural content that currently are an important part of Outreach. These initiatives and activities include Continuing Education, Online Education, Penn State Public Broadcasting, Economic and Workforce Development, and central Outreach support units, in partnership with Extension where appropriate. (Extension is included in the plan for the College of Agricultural Sciences.) | <urn:uuid:0e7fdf30-33fd-4fd7-9061-3d3d69b50a58> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.outreach.psu.edu/weidemann/outreach-diversity.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947561 | 475 | 1.75 | 2 |
I've just discovered this thread, and read every post gleefully. A friend and I have a running rant going on, decrying the state of English usage today. I too am annoyed by the misuse and misspelling of common words, but I try to refrain from being too critical of the transgressor. We are not all equal in our capacity to learn subtle (and not so subtle) differences, or in the capacity to give a darn about it! If proper usage is not learned, it is largely the fault of the public education system, which, in my opinion, needs a complete overhaul. My favorite peeves include the common confusion of there, they're and their, its and it's, our and are, your and you're, and so on, but also gross mispronunciations such as nucular, irregardless, ekcetera, and structures such as y'know like (used after every fourth or fifth word), "the thing is, is . . . " and I could go on for hours! I'm a certified English teacher, and I have a degree in Speech and Drama, and I read a lot, so I guess I'm well trained to spot such gaffes. People in general grow up to speak like the people who taught them to speak. I grew up in Texas, which almost has its own language! When I am visiting family, it doesn't take long for me to start sounding just like my sisters, who are all college-educated, but never had any inclination to alter their dialect. To an outsider (a yankee perhaps) we probably sound like a bunch of dumb hicks. The media has unfortunately done a good job of portraying southerners as dumb, so there is an artificial stereotype. Sorry to have gotten a little off-topic. I personally love to read English written in dialect, which requires of the author some creativity and license in the spelling of words to make them "sound" like the dialect being spoken by the character. Terry is masterful at this art. I especially love to read aloud the speech of the Nac Mac Feegles! But his greater gift is seen in his prose, particularly when he arrives at the revelation of the over-arching point of the book; his writing is positively lyrical.
"Ah may not of goan whur ah intinded t'go, but ah thank ah've inded up whur ah neyded t'bey."
(Which is my usual signature transliterated into Texan. However it's not complete without the speaker thumbing his cowboy hat back on his head!)
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. | <urn:uuid:7749b695-94ce-49fc-bbf8-367c0e6b5fb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=258104 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977327 | 562 | 1.71875 | 2 |
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.
One powerful image from Damascus that has become seared into this observers mind these days is when I walk by a Western Union office. Most of them remain open despite the brutal US-led sanctions which in their pervasive effects target almost entirely the civilian population. But all Western Union offices were closed last Thursday and Friday due to heavy snowfall, some say the deepest here for more than a quarter century. Still, some Syrians braved the extreme cold and could be seen huddled outside some branches, evidently in vain hope that they might open and their families might eat.
One of the few economic lifelines not yet cut by the ever strangling, profoundly immoral and illegal US-led sanctions with their throat-hold tightening around the civilian population in Syria in order to achieve regime change, “WU” as it’s known, has become, for some, literally a lifesaver. This is because its money transfer service is still allowing family and friends from abroad to send in assistance to Syria for their desperate families caught up in this regional contest between Resistance and a return to Western hegemony.
Peering in the window or stepping inside a Western Union outlet in Damascus, reminds this observer of scenes from the floor of the New York stock exchange or a European bourse wherein traders wave pieces of paper or other objects trying to get the attention of someone. But in Syria those trying to submit their ten digit MTCN numbers and ID’s in order to collect cash, are not wearing clothes from the fashion houses. Rather, given the frigid temperatures and lack of mazot (heating oil that 90% of the population here relies on for heat) they are tightly bundled. Women and kids generally wrapped tight in thick head scarves.
Last week this observer went into the Western Union office in central Damascus to collect some cash sent from Canada for a family that had managed to escape from Aleppo. The place was packed but orderly. I smiled to myself as I thought about my own country when sometimes during a Black Friday type sale, the scene of waiting in queue collapses into yelling, insults, fights, throwing objects, threats, all to save a few dollars or get ones hands on the, soon to be trashed, ‘must have’ sale item.
The stressed but committed staff behind the WU counter could not give assurance how long I would have to wait but graciously did agree to take my passport and I could return later. On arriving after about three hours, my MCTN # had just been processed and I was in and out fast. I can’t imagine that I will see a yellow and black Western Union sign ever again without thinking about US sanctions targeting the Syrian civilian population.
An historical irony is that it was a Syrian gentlemen, Mr. Hiram Sibley, one of the thousands of Syrians who emigrated to the United States in the mid-19th Century (the first and largest Arab migration then and since came from Syria) who in 1851 established the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company with the goal of creating one great telegraph system with unified and efficient operations. Four years later Western Union was born and became an American icon and thirty three years on it had become one of the top ten companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange the day it opened in 1888.
The reason Western Union is able to avoid the US-led sanctions, whereas in reality, medicines and food are not, White House claims to the contrary notwithstanding, (due to the chilling effects on shipping these essential items given prohibitions on doing business with Syria and international manufacturers not wanting to invite “problems” from the US government even though these items are claimed to be expempted) is quite simply that the US Treasury Department cannot easily face the domestic American political fallout from curtailing Western Union-anywhere.
According to a July 2012 US Senate Banking Committee memo, were Treasury seen as tampering with Western Union’s $ 7 billion annual revenues, its total assets of more than $ 9 billion, employing 8,000 American there would be a significant problem. Already there are growing complaints from US businesses flooding the White House & Congress claiming that sanctions imposed on Syria are costing American businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost profits—even more regarding US sanctions on Iran. So to date the Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC) at Treasury has kept its hands off Western Union and this is good for Syrian civilians.
For these reasons a thin lifeline-a reed really-exists for many in Syria with families and friends abroad able to use WU’s “Money in Minutes” to help them. It’s a relatively small factor in the larger Syrian crisis but it does help many.
Much more significant than Western Union remaining open, and the subject of much current criticism here is the lack of assistance to Syria’s severely sanctioned civilian population from the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, neither of whom lack officials who are wringing their hands in public these days, in mock anguish it is claimed, over their brothers and co-religionists “victimization.”
Claiming solidarity with the Syrian people, on 11/12/11 the Arab League suspended the membership of Syria (Lebanon and Yemen voted no and Iraq abstained) and cancelled its monitoring mission in Syria on 1/28/12. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation suspended Syria’s membership on 5/15/12 at a summit of Muslim leaders in Mecca. Saudi Arabia, the summit’s host, has led all Arab League and OIC calls for the Syrian rebel opposition to be armed, which Foreign Minister Saud al-Fasial described in February and since as “an excellent idea.”
By their actions, the OIC and the Arab League are themselves sanctioning the Syrian people in brutal forms. While doing nothing to object to the immoral and illegal American sanctions. Both organizations stand accused of abandoning their charters in order to maintain profitable relations with NATO countries as they funnel large sums of money and weapons to various militias inside Syria. It is their “agents” who have turned on the Syrian civilian population increasingly resorting to theft, kidnapping for ransom, rape, sale of children and killing hundreds according to UN agencies.
In one poignant interview near Omayyad Square the other day, a solemn, long bearded Sunni Sheik told this observer that the American sanctions are also directly targeting Islam because the sanctions constitute an attack on Islamic values. When pressed for specifics, he reluctantly replied, “Because your countries sanctions are impoverishing our people and forcing our Muslim women into prostitution. These sanctions are also flooding the streets with Muslim beggars, both adults and children. I am sure you have seen them, here in Damascus, across Syria and in bordering countries. But the claimed protectors of our holy sites are silent and shed only insincere tears in public. But if they resisted these sanctions they could defeat them. What is required in a 1970’s type Arab boycott of American and western companies until these anti-Muslim sanctions are lifted.”
The honorable gentleman has a point
The Arab League’s recent ministerial-level meeting held in Cairo was called to focus on the Syrian refugees file. But the rather pathetic quick one day deliberations ignored the causes of the suffering of the civilian population as well as the fact that most of the 22 countries comprising the Arab League have been a main cause behind the displacement of the Syrian civilian population. Both the AL and the OIC stand accused here in Syria of participation in the unilateral economic sanctions which are decimating the Syrian people’s livelihood. Some AL and OIC officials are shedding crocodile tears about the miserable living conditions of the Syrian refugees “in spite of spending millions on recruiting mercenaries and salifi-takfiries, training them and purchasing weapons for the terrorists”, the Sheik explained.
One frustrated American NGO director, affiliated loosely with the World Food Program, expressed her frustration: “If these organizations (AL and OIC) wanted to aid Syrian refugees they should stop supplying the gunmen with weapons and money and stop inciting sedition in Syria.”
The Arab League Secretary General, Nabil al-Arabi, still does not get it.
He used last week’s Arab League session to insist on foreign intervention and regime change, renewing the AL demand that the UN Security Council to deploy international forces in Syria.
For his part, Lebanese Foreign Minister, Adnan Mansour, offered his views of the Syrian refugee’s displacement. First of which he claimed are the flow of weapons and money into Syria, the entry of foreign gunmen and not joining a political dialogue. To his credit, Mansour called on the AL and OIC to “shoulder their responsibilities towards the refugees through ensuring their humanitarian, medical, livelihood, educational and services requirements in order to ease their daily suffering.”
As for the Kuwaiti Minister, he considered that the US-led sanctions were not a problem but rather that the suffering of the Syrian people was caused by the failure of the UN Security Council to meet the demands of the AL for immediate military intervention in Syria. He also insisted that Kuwait has mobilized all its resources to ensure that financial and relief resources alleviated the suffering of the Syrian refugees.
To date, the Syrian refugees, victims of US led and AL/OIC complicity, have not received any of the assistance Kuwait, the Arab League or the Organization of the Islamic Conference has promised. Rather, these organizations appear to be propping us the US-led sanctions.
Meanwhile, Syria’s government has just authorized the UN World Food Program to extend its reach in the country where 2.5 million people are suffering from hunger, according to officials. Ertharin Cousin, spokeswoman of the WFP, announced on 1/15/12 that Syria in allowing the organization to work with local aid groups to reach more of those in need. To boost the number of people receiving emergency assistance, the Syrian government last week drew up a list of 110 local non-governmental organizations to participate in the aid effort. WFP is working closely with the Syrian Arab Republic Red Crescent Society (SARCS) which, thanks to more than 9000 volunteers, are operating the following facilities to serve every Syrian and Palestinian without consideration of sect or political views: Damascus 15, Damascus countryside 68, Suwayda 2, Homs 71, Idelb 2, Aleppo 185, al-Raqqah 52, al-Hasakah 52, Dayr al-Zawr 4, and Quneitra 12.
Unlike the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, The Syrian Arab Republic Red Crescent Society and the World Food Program, and more than 40 other NGO’s can be observed any day of the week confronting and attempting to parry the profoundly immoral and illegal US-led sanctions. Manifold actions, not crocodile tears, in aid of the civilian population of Syria.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and can be reached c/o firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:331a33c1-8a1a-4a69-a9b4-53ecab87551e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/21/are-the-arab-league-and-organization-of-islamic-cooperation-targeting-syrians/print | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956479 | 2,287 | 1.5625 | 2 |
This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history. For a comprehensive list of historians' obituaries, go here.
SOURCE: CNN.com (8-26-10)
Warren, 61, has become something of a cause célèbre as the administration's top pick to run the new agency charged with protecting consumers from abusive mortgage and credit card practices....
"The administration is hesitating because they're faced with the traditional problem that Obama has faced," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
If the White House passes Warren over, Zelizer says, they disappoint liberals whose support has been key throughout the administration. If Warren gets the nod, the White House must deal with "political difficulties on Capitol Hill where centrists have quite a lot of power and Republicans are becoming quite obstinate," Zelizer said.
Warren teaches contract and bankruptcy law as a Harvard University professor and she's also written a number of personal finance books. More publicly, she chairs a congressional oversight panel that has garnered attention for its critical reviews of government spending to bail out Wall Street banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program....
SOURCE: NYT (8-27-10)
The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, said his wife, Carol.
When Mr. Weber began writing about the history of the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the United States, the subject was regarded as a backwater.
“United States historians saw the field as part of Latin American history and ignored it,” he wrote in a 2005 essay. “Latin American historians regarded it as belonging to the history of the United States, and likewise gave it short shrift.”
In “The Spanish Frontier in North America” (1992), his most important book, Mr. Weber presented a complex picture of cultural, political and military interaction among the Spanish, the indigenous Indian populations and Anglo settlers, and explored the roots of a Hispanic legacy that defines the American Southwest today. In the process he dismantled the so-called Black Legend, the entrenched myth of Spain as a uniquely rapacious power, bent solely on conquest and plunder....
SOURCE: NYT (8-26-10)
Mr. Schurmann, who was fluent in as many as 12 languages and read a variety of foreign papers daily, taught history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly four decades. But his life was far more adventurous than that sounds, and he referred to himself not as an academic but as an explorer-journalist.
The son of working-class immigrants, he developed early on the charisma and intellectual heft to attract famous and powerful company. He spent graduate school summers with the family of the German expatriate playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose son Stefan he had met in the Army. At Brecht’s Southern California dinner table he encountered Thomas Mann and other German intellectuals in exile.
An opponent of the Vietnam War and a founder of the Berkeley Faculty Peace Committee in 1964, he toured Hanoi with the writer Mary McCarthy in 1968. An inveterate traveler, especially in Asia but also in Russia and other parts of Europe, he became used to drawing conclusions more from firsthand observations than from secondhand accounts by scholars and journalists....
SOURCE: BBC News (8-24-10)
Dr Elaine Chalus has won a major research grant of more than £100,000 to investigate diaries kept by Elizabeth Wynne....
Dr Chalus will use her funding from the British Academy to bring to light more than 40 volumes of Elizabeth's diaries, most of which have never been published....
SOURCE: John B. Judis in The New Republic (8-25-10)
[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]
In the week since my story on “the unnecessary fall of Barack Obama” came out, I have been accused of being “hysterical” and “ahistorical,” of glorifying Ronald Reagan, of “moving away from” my “previously clear-eyed stance on the primary source of Obama's troubles,” and of relying on the same “white-working-class Theory of Everything” I have been “peddling … ever since summer 2008.” And that’s just in public. Privately, the criticism has been far more withering and has included words far too incendiary to print in a family magazine. But I’ve spent a lot of time considering some of the (quite thought-provoking and reasonable) counter-arguments to my piece, and I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to them here.
1. You shouldn’t be encouraging populism.Or you are wrong to make populism the answer or the main answer to Obama’s political difficulties.
I don’t consider myself a “populist.” I am much more of a Herbert Croly-progressive with a touch of elitism. I wasn’t arguing for populism as a political ideal, but as the means by which Obama could have more plausibly achieved objectives that he, and I, and many Americans share: a return to a buoyant prosperity, a narrowing of inequality, and the reinforcement of the social safety net. To achieve these during the present severe downturn requires strong political majorities. And to get those, Obama—or any president—has to frame his appeal in populist terms.
I am not making the ridiculous assertion that populism is “hardwired” into the American brain. But in the course of American history, certain conceptions—or worldviews—have been passed from generation to generation, and insofar as they have not been repeatedly contradicted by events, have endured. One of these, for instance, is what historian Ernest Tuveson called the idea of America as the “redeemer nation.” When Americans have had to make hard foreign policy choices, the politicians have invariably appealed to America’s role as world savior. Another is Thomas Paine’s idea of government as a “necessary evil,” which invariably pops up as an explanation for our economic ills. Populism—as a defense of the embattled middle class—is a similarly enduring worldview. Populist arguments don’t always carry the day, but during domestic crises, they will be heard, and politicians ignore them at their peril.
Mike Kazin, who wrote the definitive book on populist rhetoric, suggests that I am exaggerating the role of populism in Franklin Roosevelt’s success in his first two years. I disagree with Mike on this point. One can compare what Roosevelt said and did in his first months with what Obama said and did....
SOURCE: Center for Labor Renewal (8-25-10)
In an epoch of imperial hubris and corporate class warfare on steroids, the release of these books could hardly have come at a better time. Soldier, coal miner, Sixties veteran, recent graduate – there's much to be gained by one and all from a study of Lynd's life and work. In so doing, it's remarkable to discover how frequently he was in the right place at the right time and, more importantly, on the right side.
Forty-six years ago, during the tumultuous summer of 1964, Lynd was invited to coordinate the Freedom Schools established in Mississippi by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The schools were an integral part of the Herculean effort to end apartheid in the United States and became models for alternative schools everywhere....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (8-24-10)
But the 57-year-old insists that a mistake by a map maker half a century ago wrongly showed the right of way through the property - ironically called "Garden of Eden".
Mr McNerney and his wife Cate, a nurse, bought the property set in wooded grounds in the village of Banham, near Attlebrough, Norfolk, three years ago.
He said:"I am not being a Nimby but if the council had originally said there was a public footpath through our garden I would have accepted it.
"But the plotted path is incorrect because it shows the route running through a 300-year-old hedgerow and a steep escarpment.
"We have pored over ancient maps and talked to many locals and it is clear that the public right of way never ran through our garden."...
SOURCE: SF Chronicle (8-23-10)
Mr. Schurmann taught at UC Berkeley for 38 years and headed its Center for Chinese Studies. He spoke a dozen languages and wrote more than a half dozen books on China and U.S. foreign policy. His writings early in the Cold War accurately predicted the political rift between China and the Soviet Union....
SOURCE: NYT (8-21-10)
David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes.
Now, as he studies the financial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have something serious to fear from inequality — namely, another crisis.
The possible connection between economic inequality and financial crises came to Mr. Moss about a year ago, when he was at his research center in Cambridge, Mass. A colleague suggested that he overlay two different graphs — one plotting financial regulation and bank failures, and the other charting trends in income inequality.
Mr. Moss says he was surprised by what he saw. The timelines danced in sync with each other. Income disparities between rich and poor widened as government regulations eased and bank failures rose.
“I could hardly believe how tight the fit was — it was a stunning correlation,” he said. “And it began to raise the question of whether there are causal links between financial deregulation, economic inequality and instability in the financial sector. Are all of these things connected?”
Professor Moss is among a small group of economists, sociologists and legal scholars who are now trying to discover if income inequality contributes to financial crises. They have a new data point, of course, in the recent banking crisis, but there is only one parallel in the United States — the 1929 market crash....
SOURCE: Boston Globe (8-15-10)
Without the tomato, pizza would be bread and cheese, spaghetti would seem naked. The North End without red sauce? Impossible. But the tomato’s role in Italian food is fairly recent, according to David Gentilcore, a professor of early modern history at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
In his new book, “Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy,” Gentilcore traces the tomato from its origins in the New World, where it was domesticated by the Maya, then cultivated by the Aztecs. It likely entered Europe via Spain, after conquistador Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Mexico. When it arrived on the scene in Italy, it was strictly a curiosity for those who studied plants — not something anyone faint of heart would consider eating. In 1628, Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala called tomatoes “strange and horrible things” in a discussion that included the consumption of locusts, crickets, and worms. When people ate tomatoes, it was as a novelty. “People were curious about new foods, the way gourmets are today with new combinations and new uses of high technology in preparation,” Gentilcore said. Yesterday’s tomato is today’s molecular gastronomy....
IDEAS: When did the tomato become an integral part of Italy’s cuisine?
GENTILCORE: You can’t imagine Italian food without it. And yet most of these dishes, such as pasta al pomodoro, are fairly recent — from the 1870s or ’80s. Italian immigrants arriving in New York City or Boston were the first generation to eat these dishes as daily things. Making a rich meat sauce with maybe the addition of tomato paste, that Sunday gravy style, is something that happens only in the 20th century....
SOURCE: City Journal (8-19-10)
[Daniel J. Flynn, author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.]
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Joseph Stalin entered the final years of his reign of terror in the Soviet Union, twentysomething Howard Zinn served as a foot soldier in the Communist Party of the United States of America—this according to recently declassified FBI files. Zinn, the Marxist historian and progressive hero who died in January, may also have lied to the FBI about his Communist Party membership. Is it at all surprising that someone who got history so wrong stood on the wrong side of history?
Zinn’s partisans will no doubt jeer at much of what the FBI files reveal. Who cares if Zinn marched in a May Day parade or if his wife subscribed to The Daily Worker? Other allegations are more serious but vague. One declassified report notes: “Information received on 6/12/53, indicated that the subject was possibly in contact with persons operating in the Communist Party underground.” What information, derived from whom? Was Zinn “possibly” involved with spies or really involved with spies? What kind of “contact”? Who in “the Communist Party underground”? And for some, the identity of the accusers vindicates the accused. J. Edgar Hoover’s personally ordering an investigation of Zinn on March 30, 1949; FBI associate director Clyde Tolson’s ominously asking, “What do our files show on Zinn?”; and FBI spooks’ surveillance of Zinn’s home—these stand as badges of honor in some circles, most notably the ones in which Zinn operated.
But amid charges innocuous and amorphous are specific allegations by numerous eyewitnesses that Howard Zinn was indeed a Communist Party member. After interviewing Zinn on November 6, 1953 and again on February 9, 1954, FBI agents described him as “courteous” and “friendly,” yet willing to part with information only after a repetition of pointed questions. Zinn admitted membership in numerous Communist fronts, including the Americans Veterans Committee and the American Labor Party, which employed Zinn at its headquarters in Brooklyn at a time when Communists controlled it. But he steadfastly denied membership in the Communist Party itself....
SOURCE: Debbie Ann Doyle at the AHA Blog (8-23-10)
David J. Weber, historian of the Borderlands, the American West, and Latin America and vice-president of the American Historical Association’s Professional Division, died on Friday, August 20, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma.
Weber was Robert and Nancy Dedman professor of history and founding director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He received his BS from the State University of New York at Fredonia and his MA and PhD from the University of New Mexico. In recognition of his work, he received the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica–the Spanish equivalent of a knighthood–from Juan Carlos, the King of Spain, and the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, (the Order of the Aztec Eagle), the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals. His book Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale University Press) received the AHA’s John Edwin Fagg prize in 2006. He was the recipient of numerous other recognitions for his scholarship and teaching.
A dedicated volunteer and good citizen of the profession, Weber served as vice-president of the AHA’s Professional Division (beginning in 2008), and represented the division on the Task Force on Disability and the LGBTQ Historians Task Force. He was active in several other associations and had been an ex officio member of the board of the National History Center, president of the Western History Association, a member of the executive board of the Organization of American Historians, and a member of the general committee of the Conference on Latin American History. He served on numerous editorial boards and prize committees.
A session dedicated to the impact of his work has been scheduled for the AHA annual meeting in Boston. Organized by the Conference on Latin American History’s Borderlands and Frontiers Studies Committee, the session is entitled “David J. Weber and the Borderlands: Past, Present, and Future.” A tribute will also be held at the Western Historical Association’s annual meeting in Lake Tahoe in October.
Though it sounds like a cliché, David can only be described as a truly nice man. His depth of knowledge, and dedication to scholarship, teaching, and the future of the profession will be sorely missed. Plans for a memorial are pending; per the family’s request, memorial contributions can be sent to the Clements Center for Southwest Studies or the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. Obituaries have been posted on H-Texas and H-West.
SOURCE: NYT (8-23-10)
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.
“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”...
Just a few years ago these sorts of developments would have been unthinkable, said Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. “Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete,” he said....
Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.
“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.
To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”
SOURCE: The Root (8-19-10)
In his latest book, The Substance of Hope, Cobb turns his attention to the 2008 election, the political climate preceding the election and his own involvement as a delegate for the state of Georgia. (He blogged for The Root from the Democratic National Convention in 2008.) His training as a historian comes to bear as he asks, What does this all mean? And where do we go from here?
The interview was conducted via Google Chat.
The Root: In The Substance of Hope, you play both historian and participant as a delegate in the 2008 election. How did these distinct roles help shape your book?
William Jelani Cobb: Initially they made it more difficult because I'm accustomed to writing about things that are more static. This was an attempt to place the election into a context in terms of history, and in some ways in terms of irony. But this was also a rapidly changing subject. The result was that I wrote about three-quarters of the book and then threw it all out and started again from scratch. It was much more difficult to decide what story I wanted to tell.
SOURCE: FrontPageMag (8-23-10)
FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about the proposed mega-mosque next to Ground Zero and how Obama is handling it.
First, what do you make of the controversy surrounding the mosque in general?
Hanson: Thanks Jamie.
Almost everything about the controversy is disingenuous. Mr Rauf, the Kuwaiti born, Western educated physicist, and self-described Sufi cleric, heretofore has had a successful career contextualizing everything from gender apartheid in the Middle East to Sharia law and jihad, in the sense that the onus is always on Westerners not to take radical Islamists at their word or to believe what they see and hearin the Middle East.
The problem is that Mr. Rauf is more apt to fault Western perceptions of Islam when he resides in the U.S., but not so eager to discuss Islamic extremism when he visits his familiar turf in the gulf. He knows well that candid criticism ofAmerica earns accolades among the cultural elite here while candid criticism of radical Islam in the Middle East can earn something not so nice. By the way, that is called a sort of heroic “bridge-building.”...
SOURCE: NYT (8-22-10)
SOURCE: NYRBlog (8-17-10)
Robert Darnton: Brazil’s emergence as a major world player provokes questions about its national identity, some of them hostile, such as the one you said you encountered on your last trip to the US: How can you live in a country overrun with favelas and violence? How do you answer them?
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz: It is strange how nowadays Brazil has a new image coming from abroad. We used to be seen as “exotics”; a country of Capoeira (a Brazilian form of martial art), Candomblé (a syncretic African religion), Carnaval, and the “Mulatas.” Now we continue to be viewed as exotic, but the exoticism has a new ingredient: violence, even a new aesthetics of violence, mainly in the way Brazil is portrayed in contemporary films, like City of God. The fascination with favelas among many people outside Brazil is ambiguous. On the one hand, favelas are seen as violent communities, subject to violent leaders outside the authority of the state. On the other, they are just “different”—scenes of a culture outside the dominant culture, with its own special way of partying, dancing, playing soccer. We do not have favelas everywhere, but foreigners like to think so. We have developed a new kind of tourism, which features a “favela tour.” Everything is fake, but the tourists enjoy the illusion that they are experiencing another world. And what about you Bob? Are you afraid of walking in some parts of New York City? Is Harlem a kind of favela?...
SOURCE: Stuff (NZ) (8-18-10)
He died from cancer yesterday in Te Araroa.
Mr Dewes was a pioneering educationalist in the 1960s and 70s.
He started in adult education at Auckland University and then laid the foundations for Victoria University's Maori studies department, before returning home to the East Coast and helping form Te Runanga o Ngati Porou.
Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples paid tribute to his "outstanding scholarship, the formidable intellect and extraordinary oratory"....
SOURCE: The Scotsman (8-18-10)
Throughout his life, Hitler was portrayed as a courageous soldier who fought in some of the fiercest battles of the First World War and was decorated twice with the Iron Cross for his bravery.
But in a new book, Dr Thomas Weber has used material uncovered for the first time in German archives that reveals a dramatically different picture.
Dr Weber claims that his groundbreaking research shows that Hitler, backed by the Nazi propaganda machine, exaggerated his role as a soldier in the defeated German army in the Great War and, in his role as dispatch runner taking messages to officers, was despised by frontline troops from his regiment as a "rear area pig"....
SOURCE: Lee White at the National Coalition for History (8-6-10)
In July, the National Coalition for History (NCH), and ten other NCH members joined forces with over 20 educational organizations representing other K-12 academic disciplines in issuing a statement to Congress and the Administration calling for the continued robust funding of core academic subjects including history. This includes maintenance of discrete budget lines—such as the Teaching American History grants—for each discipline.
One of the major issues facing the new 112th Congress when it convenes in January will be consideration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). The law was last reauthorized in 2001 during the Bush administration under the rubric of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Since the law’s enactment a major flaw has been the over-emphasis placed on reading and math at the expense of other subjects, such as history.
In fiscal year 2002, due to the leadership of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), Congress authorized the “Teaching American History” (TAH) grants program in the Department of Education. Thanks to Senator Byrd, nearly $1 billion of federal dollars have been allocated over the past decade to improve K-12 history education. A child who was in the first grade when the program started in 2001 would now be a junior in high school. So it is no exaggeration to say Senator Byrd’s love of American history has been passed on to an entire generation of America’s school children. Among his many accomplishments, that is one of his greatest legacies. But with his recent passing the program that he nurtured for so long is now in danger.
TAH improves the quality of instruction in American history. Grant awards assist elementary and secondary schools in implementing research-based methods for improving the quality of instruction, professional development, and teacher education in American history. Funds are used for competitive grants that are allocated to local education agencies (LEAs) though funding proposals must include a partnership component with an educational non-profit and/or history-based organization. Advocacy by my predecessor Bruce Craig was instrumental in getting the partnership requirement included into law.
While Congress will not tackle the ESEA reauthorization until 2011, activity has already begun in earnest as numerous hearings have been held throughout 2010 in both houses. Draft bills are currently being developed in the House and Senate in anticipation of early action on the issue next year.
In the case of the Teaching American History grants program, the Obama administration’s fiscal 2011 budget message to Congress called into question the degree to which the program has reached districts and teachers most in need of federally funded professional development and also stressed the need for better evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. One of the issues that has plagued the TAH program since its inception has been the inability to rigorously assess and evaluate whether teachers, and ultimately students, are benefitting from the program.
On March 15, the White House released “A Blueprint for Reform,” which details the administration’s plans for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Like NCLB, the reform proposal continues to prioritize reading and math over other subjects.
President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget request to Congress for the Department of Education proposed consolidating 38 existing K–12 education programs into 11 new programs. Under the administration’s budget request, grants for history education would now be part of a new program called “Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education.” Teaching American History Grants would be consolidated into this new program and would no longer exist as a free-standing budget line item.
The administration proposed $265 million in funding in fiscal 2011 for the new initiative. Although the fiscal 2011 budget request includes a $38.9 million increase in funding to support teaching and learning in arts, history, civics, foreign languages, geography, and economics, the administration proposes to combine eight subject-specific grant programs into a single competitive grant program.
Unfortunately, under the proposed competitive grant program the various subjects would be pitted against each other for scarce resources. Such an approach could threaten the ability of schools and districts to provide each student with a well-rounded education, a result that seems to be the exact opposite of the administration’s intent.
In years past, the late Senator Byrd always ensured that the program received a stable level of funding, usually around $119 million per fiscal year. In the fiscal 2011 Labor, HHS and Education funding bill (S. 3686) passed in July by the Senate Appropriations Committee, the last one in which Senator Byrd was able to exert his influence, the TAH received level funding of $119 million. The administration had requested zero funding for the program in FY 11, removing it as a separate budget line item.
Given the budget deficit problem, it is expected funding levels for all federal discretionary programs will face major cuts when the administration’s proposed FY 2012 budget is released early next year. In June, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag issued a directive ordering non-security federal agencies to submit a FY2012 budget proposal five percent below the agency’s FY 11 budget as proposed by the administration. In another directive, agencies were directed to identify for termination or significant reduction of “low priority” programs and subprograms that constitute at least five percent of the agency’s discretionary budget.
In June, a meeting was convened by the ASCD (formerly the Association for the Study of Curriculum and Development), an education membership organization focused largely on K–12 issues. The meeting included representatives from several organizations whose communities would be affected by the Obama administration’s Blueprint for Reform for the reauthorization of the ESEA.
On July 29, the National Coalition for History and 20 major history and education organizations, representing a wide array of subject areas, released consensus recommendations for how the federal government can better support core subjects beyond the No Child Left Behind Act’s singular focus on student performance in reading and math.
The various organizations agreed that discrete funding streams, such as TAH, should be created for each of the disciplines to ensure that each retains federal support individually and that all receive a minimum level of resources reflecting collective support for a well-rounded education. Equally important, they decided, grant competitions should occur within disciplines, not between them.
The organizations endorsing the Well-Rounded Education statement represent hundreds of thousands of educators in the disciplines of history, languages, arts, government and other subjects. The National Coalition for History endorsed the recommendation in addition to ten individual member organizations in the Coalition. These include the American Association for State and Local History, American Historical Association, Association for Documentary Editing, Civil War Preservation Trust, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, History Channel, National Council for the Social Studies, National Council on Public History, Organization of American Historians and the Society for Military History. Several other NCH membership organizations have endorsements pending before their leadership and are expected to sign on in the near future.
Over the coming months, the National Coalition for History will be carrying the message to lawmakers and the administration to preserve the Teaching American History grants program.
The text of the recommendation is below:
Consensus Recommendations for a Well-Rounded Education
The Obama administration’s fiscal 2011 budget request and Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) blueprint propose to consolidate eight grant programs that support teaching and learning in the areas of the arts, foreign languages, civics, history, geography, and economics into a single competitive grant—the Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education program. This program would be available to high-need school districts, a high-need district in partnership with a state education agency, or a high-need district in partnership with other entities. However, the proposal puts content areas in competition with one another for funding and recognition and, thereby, further reduces the likelihood that students in high-need schools receive a truly comprehensive, well-rounded education.
We believe each student must receive equal access to a credible, comprehensive, and well-rounded education that includes instruction in all core academic subjects delivered at appropriate times throughout the school experience. “Core academic subjects” are defined as those listed in ESEA—English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography. We believe, moreover, that credible and comprehensive instruction should also apply to physical education and health education.
Each of these subjects is crucial to a student’s learning in its own right, and no single subject should be considered more important than another. Indeed, the combination of the subjects and the interrelationship among disciplines enhances learning and understanding for each student. Moreover, a well-rounded education provides students with the academic preparation and knowledge to succeed in the increasingly global marketplace and in our own complex and ever changing society.
A well-rounded education is an absolute necessity for any graduate to be considered college, career, and citizenship ready. Delivery of a well-rounded education must be reflected in standards, assessments, accountability systems, and public reporting of achievement and must take into account the needs of students and the expectations of educators, employers and public officials in the global environment of the 21st century. In addition, flexibility for schools, local districts, and communities to customize education to meet their unique circumstances is essential.
To achieve these goals, the undersigned organizations call upon the Obama administration and Congress to:
1. Include all elements of a well-rounded education in any definition of college-,
career-, and citizenship-ready standards.
2. Maintain discrete funding streams for each of these worthy subject areas to ensure that each retains federal support individually and that all receive a minimum level of resources reflecting collective support for a well-rounded education.
3. Promote grant competitions within disciplines, not among them, which prioritizes underserved or high-need schools and students and emphasizes best practices, scalability, and cross-subject collaboration and integration.
4. Develop a rigorous evaluation process, including significant input from professional educators, to measure the effectiveness of the funded activities and to propose improvements in the respective grant programs.
5. Establish meaningful public reporting and accountability requirements regarding student achievement in each of these disciplines at the school, district, and state level.
SOURCE: OAH (8-12-10)
In conjunction with the recently adopted strategic plan, the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians has enacted a simplified dues structure for individual members. After studying the dues structures of other learned societies, the Board concluded that the organization needed fewer membership categories. The new structure is not only simpler, but creates a lower-priced membership category for professional historians who are in the first three years of their careers. In addition, the revised structure will reduce paperwork in the OAH office, and it will allow staff to concentrate on improving member service, develop new member benefits, and better promote the organization.
The new dues structure is as follows:
|Associate (not employed as a historian)||$60|
|Early Career (first three years in the profession)||$60|
|Dual (with a spouse/partner)||$60|
|Individual (professional historian)|
|$100,000 and above||$200|
With this new dues structure, OAH members will continue to enjoy the same benefits they receive now. That is, those who are full-time historians will receive the Journal of American History, the OAH Annual Meeting Program, access to Recent Scholarship Online, discounted registration at the OAH Annual Meeting, and other benefits and services. These members also can subscribe to the OAH Magazine of History at a discounted rate. Students, retired members, and associate members can choose between a subscription to the Journal of American History and the OAH Magazine of History, as well as the other benefits described above. History Educator members will continue to receive the OAH Magazine of History as their primary publication.
In addition to simplifying the dues structure, starting in October, membership dues will be billed on an annual basis. Prorated adjustments will be made for those whose dues were billed during other months of the year. Please watch your mail and e-mail for dues notices. Again, the new dues structure is being instituted to increase the efficiency of the organization, allow the organization to expand its membership benefits and services, and most importantly, to enable staff to continue concentrating on providing excellent service to its members.
SOURCE: abc.net.au (8-17-10)
National Museum of Australia spokesman Dr Darrell Lewis has been tracking Leichhardt's trail through Queensland and central Australia.
Leichhardt and his expedition party disappeared in 1848 and Dr Lewis has been looking for trees marked with an "L" to trace the journey.
SOURCE: New Yorker (8-16-10)
ALEX ROSS: I was fascinated by your decision to begin your book with a chapter on Aaron Copland. What led you to start there?
SEAN WILENTZ: I wanted to explore Dylan’s roots in the musical world of the Popular Front, but didn’t want to retell the stories about Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. I’d written an essay on Copland for a wholly different occasion, and started coming to grips with Copland’s Popular Front affiliations, which had helped spur his elevation of American folk music. I had a hunch that, somewhere, there must be links between Copland and Dylan.
For a while after 9/11, I recalled, Dylan opened many of his shows by playing recorded bits of Copland’s music. Then I ran across an enthusiastic review in the Daily Worker of Copland’s early work, written by Charles Seeger, Pete’s father. The chapter just grew from there.
Readers expecting a standard biography, which this book is not, may anticipate learning about how Copland had some direct and profound influence on Dylan’s early work. They will be disappointed, and the book’s introduction tries to ward off such expectations.
In the Copland chapter, I’m interested in making other kinds of connections, not just between Dylan’s work and an individual or several individuals, but between his work and a larger cultural congeries of the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties. The succeeding chapters take different approaches.
SOURCE: NYT (8-17-10)
The cause was a heart attack, said his son, MacGregor.
An American born and raised in Britain, Bernard Knox led a life as richly textured as the classics he interpreted for modern readers. After studying classics at Cambridge, he fought with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. While serving in the United States Army during World War II, he parachuted into France to work with the resistance and went on to join the partisans in Italy.
Returning to the United States with a Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre, he resumed his study of the classics at Yale, where he earned a doctorate in 1948 and taught, becoming a full professor in 1959. In 1961, he was asked to lead the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, a Harvard affiliate, whose directorship he held until 1985....
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (7-9-10)
For many years he was at the centre of the campaigns for Africa's liberation from colonialism and apartheid, endlessly addressing meetings and working on committees. Extremely tall and with a shock of white hair, and possessing the old-fashioned courtesy of the ex-army officer that he was – or even of the country gentleman that he eventually became after his move to the West Country – he was an unlikely figure at many of these often incoherent and sometimes sectarian events, usually run by student activists and exiles.
Among his friends were the historians Thomas Hodgkin, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said placed him in a select band of western artists and intellectuals with a sympathy and comprehension of foreign cultures that meant that they had "in effect, crossed to the other side"...
SOURCE: Washington Times (8-16-10)
Or were they murdered?
Two skulls unearthed at a probable mass grave near Philadelphia this month showed signs of violence, including a possible bullet hole. Another pair of skulls found earlier at the woodsy site also displayed traumas, seeming to confirm the suspicions of two historians leading the archaeological dig.
"This was much more than a cholera epidemic," William Watson said.
Mr. Watson, chairman of the history department at nearby Immaculata University, and his twin brother, Frank, have been working for nearly a decade to unravel the 178-year-old mystery. | <urn:uuid:4c6e58fe-13c2-4a29-8f7e-1c28234fbe7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hnn.us/roundup/archives/14/201008 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963263 | 8,661 | 1.804688 | 2 |
agora, Agora: The United States Constitution and International Law, civil war, Dred Scott v. Sandford, George Soros, Harold Hongju Koh, Media Matters, National Rifle Associatiion, post-conflict, Reid v. Covert, U.N. Programme of Action, U.N. Small Arms Treaty
Amazing KeysToLiberty is not the only website that has caught on to the passage of the Small Arms Treaty, a little late, but onboard is The Independent Sentinel. They appear to have the same conviction on an Executive Order, but quote an article from the National Rifle Association; a fox in the chicken house, as NRA is a United Nations NGO.
Media Matters (George Soros publication) is constantly attacking the NRA, for all the wrong reasons, see here, here and here. Do a search on google for Media Matters and the NRA. Never much about other pro-gun groups, almost like they are helping to advertise for the NRA. (Do a search Media Matters and GOA) Media Matters is helping to set the battle in the courts to “NRA (U.N. NGO member) vs. treaty”. This is a well planned attack on the ‘right to keep and bear arms’ by the globalists.
KeysToLiberty is not the only website concerned with the American Rifle Association and its NGO status.
Another article that was sent in by a reader concerns the Real Danger of the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty is in the Interpretation. The article makes mention of Harold Hongju Koh. Nice photo of an employee of the United Nations and the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton. A legal advisor appointed on June 26, 2009 and still present. Koh also served under President Clinton and Reagan. Koh is almost a permanent bureaucrat around the White House, shifting from Department of Justice to Department of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Ever wonder why unemployment is so high? Koh holds down 3 very high paying jobs, faculty at the United Nations, Dean at Yale Law School and at the Department of State as Legal Adviser.
Back to the ‘Real Danger’ , and yes Koh turned the Declaration of Independence on its head in this article authored by Koh. He quotes a lot of early Supreme Court cases on admiralty law – piracy. None of those cases deal with firearms rights and most of the cases were at a time when a vast majority of the world still had firearms. Koh is trying to sponsor international law over our Constitution. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is restricted from making law, it merely interprets the Constitution as it was originally written, or has in the past.
To show how one-sided Koh’s argument is, here is a case from 1957:
“It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, let alone alien to our Constitutional history and tradition to construe Article VI (the Supremacy Clause) as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement, without observing Constitutional prohibitions. In effect such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V.” and again the same case:
“The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government, and they cannot be nullified by the Executive, or by the Executive and the Senate combined.”
These are quotes from – Reid v. Covert, (1957), 354 U.S. 1
It has been a long time since the Supreme Court issued the decision on Reid v. Covert, on a Treaty must comply with the Constitution. All cases can be overturned, See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1856, upholding slavery. Guess who would represent the case now before the Supreme Court? Why Harold Hongju Koh of course, or at least as an Amicus curiae (friend of the court).
Koh would already have a Supreme Court Justice on his side. Ruth Bader Ginsberg who attacked our Constitutional government in Egypt. “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”
Would you revolt if firearms would suddenly become illegal to own?
There is something you should know about in the U.N. Programme of Action. ‘Post conflict’ is brought up in the document several times. Is it possible they want you to revolt, causing a new civil war in hopes of losing your ‘right to keep and bear arms’ for ever? If that is the case; and it appears likely, then Americans are forced to win at all costs to prevent the government, through the U.N. from permanently disarming the American people.
It has always been the globalists wet-dream to disarm world entirely, particularly America; as we are the last bastian of freedom left. Their New World Order will be totalitarian to the extreme. Life under such a global government would be unbearable for the average American.
Think hard, and plan well, and quit spending your hard earned money for donations to NRA so they can lose the coming battle. Use that same hard earned money to prepare for the coming battle for freedom. Remember the globalists are directing this court battle, setting things in motion. They know the NRA will compromise, yet again. | <urn:uuid:33f7629d-6ab8-4c4d-8797-a1b2b658c37a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://keystoliberty.wordpress.com/tag/agora/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956538 | 1,094 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Full-court press to transform the struggling neighborhood near OSU
Population: 3,845 (2000)
Median household income: $15,863
Single-family properties, as percent of residential properties: 37 percent
Owner-occupied housing: 11.5 percent
Median age: 23
High-school diploma: 59percent
Bachelor's degree: 13percent
Source: Community Research Partners
The City Blog
Neighbor News Blog
Multimillion-dollar efforts to revive the Weinland Park neighborhood include removing blight such as this burned house.
Two symbols of the blight plaguing the Weinland Park neighborhood soon will be reduced to dust.
A pair of brick apartment buildings, long vacant and covered with graffiti, are scheduled to be demolished Nov. 15 and replaced with as many as 12 market-rate houses.
Those 12 will be part of 72 new or renovated homes expected to be finished by the end of 2011 in a multiphase effort to revive the neighborhood at Ohio State University's doorstep.
But the project goes beyond the houses. For example, 24 residents are being trained to help build houses there, said neighborhood leader Joyce Hughes, who lives in the same N. 6th Street home where she grew up.
"In five years I'd like to see a safe neighborhood - the Weinland Park when I was a kid," said Hughes, 63.
The houses are just some of the recent efforts to improve Weinland Park. Some others:
• The community policing center on E. 11th Avenue; the new Weinland Park Elementary School on E. 7th Avenue; and Ohio State's Schoenbaum Family Center, a preschool for children of faculty members and neighborhood residents.
• The 379 apartments renovated by the Ohio Capital Corp. for Housing and Community Properties of Ohio during the past seven years.
• Plans by Wagenbrenner Development to build more than 600 houses on the former Columbus Coated Fabrics site as well as other areas of the neighborhood.
• A multimillion-dollar commitment by foundations to boost housing and other programs in the neighborhood.
• An $864,989 federal grant to plan the transformation of the vacant factory site at N. 4th Street and E. 5th Avenue into a farmers market, restaurant and food-processing center. The money also will be used to plant more community gardens.
The Weinland Park Neighborhood Plan was adopted by Columbus City Council in 2006 and became a catalyst for efforts to transform the area. It spelled out how the neighborhood should revive itself during the next 20 years, including rehabbing or replacing housing, offering job training for residents, creating a "family-friendly social environment," and working with Ohio State and other groups to build up the neighborhood.
The plan's adoption led to the Weinland Park Collaborative, a group with representatives from the city, Ohio State, the Columbus Foundation, the JP Morgan Chase Foundation and 11 other institutions. The collaborative has pledged at least $15 million during the next few years. More than 100 houses are to be built or renovated in the next two to three years.
"This involvement is going to change the neighborhood in a positive way forever," said Jeff Lyttle, spokesman for the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, which already has invested more than $6million in Weinland Park.
Lyttle said he sees this as a model for future efforts in other troubled neighborhoods. "If we didn't think we'd be successful, we wouldn't be investing the time and effort."
The dozen houses that will go up at 4th Street and 8th Avenue will sell for $80,000 to $100,000, said Doug Aschenbach, president of Campus Partners, which is developing the site along with Wagenbrenner.
He said $1.5 million in federal neighborhood-stabilization money is being used. A family of four whose annual income is no more than $82,000 will be eligible to buy them, boosting the area's median income, he said.
Hughes, who leads the neighborhood's civic association, bristles at the word gentrification. The neighborhood has the largest concentration of federally subsidized - Section 8 - housing in the city, she said. And the 2006 plan calls for the neighborhood to remain mixed-income.
Officials have listened to the community, she said. For example, residents persuaded Habitat for Humanity to build two-story houses with porches and basements to match nearby homes, she said. Habitat is building six houses.
Betty Tucker, who has lived in Weinland Park all of her 77 years, said neighbors who now rent are interested in buying new homes. "They want to stay in the neighborhood," she said.
Tammy Forrest, assessment coordinator at the Schoenbaum Family Center, said it's going to take five to 10 years for Weinland Park to noticeably improve.
"That's not a surprise," she said. The community still has many deep-rooted problems to overcome, not only crime and poverty but health problems as well that prevent many residents from working or getting a high-quality education.
"Just housing won't do it," she said. | <urn:uuid:967b3a25-6134-4692-b4d6-5924501c8836> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2010/11/07/full-court-press.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972075 | 1,057 | 1.726563 | 2 |
QUOTE(Alicia Ocean @ Jun 2 2007, 09:07 AM)
This throw up the whole question of what gives an institution/body the right to allow someone to put letters after their name. Does anyone know if there are any laws about this? Rather than buy some (if they are worthless anyway in terms of their value) it would be simpler just to invent some.
In the UK, things which look like degree postnominals are protected by law - so one cannot buy a BA/BSc/MA/MSc/PhD/DSc etc. etc. There's a loophole in the US, though, where an organisation can declare themselves to be a church of some faith, and award degrees - because church organisations can award qualifications in America. Most of the Internet sites from which one can buy degrees are US based, and in the small print one can see that 'Hardwood University' is associated with one of these 'churches'.
What is okay in the UK is for an organisation to give out memberships which entitle the holder to postnominals and academic dress. Membership levels look a lot like music diploma levels - one can be a Fellow of an organisation and put Fsomething after one's name. So, for instance, dcmbarton is a Fellow of the Academy of St Cecilia and puts FASC after his name accordingly - this means he pays a subscription fee to be a member of the organisation. It isn't a qualification - the membership criteria are quite broad, and at least would require one to be 'simply as an enthusiast' about Early Music'. So perhaps they could include a voucher in the complete Byrd Keyboard Works box set
So if you're curious about how to go about awarding membership postnominals, all you need to do is draft up a constitution and away you go. Some time ago I did one for the 'Bouffant College of Music', which can now technically award postnominals just as other societies can: FBCM, LBCM and ABCM. Feel free to edit it to suit, and start your own society to bolster your collection of postnominals
The key to getting membership postnominals respected is to make them difficult to attain - FRS, for instance, is merely a membership, but carries much weight because one has to do a heck of a lot to get it. The first thing I do upon seeing postnominals I haven't heard of is to Google them - and have a chuckle if they're desperate enough to show off that they have tenner-a-year no-strings-attached memberships masquerading as qualifications
Bouffant College of Music
1. The name of this organisation shall be "The Bouffant College of Music", hereafter referred to as the BCM.
2. The BCM shall be an independent learned society composed of musicians and other persons interested in musical matters.
3. The aims of the BCM shall be:
- To encourage the telling of jokes in the 'Come In, Sit Down' thread in the Forums Cafe section of forums.abrsm.org
- To promote the highest standards in the performance of music, especially in Internet-arranged concerts
4. The BCM shall be governed by a Council of Management, the member of which shall be a supporter of Liverpool football club and a talented organist. The Council will consist of a chairman: the officership of chairman shall be granted initially to the person known as 'mrbouffant' on forums.abrsm.org; each chairman is responsible for appointing a successor should they see fit.
Council shall have executive power over all matters associated with the BCM, and is entitled to terminate the membership of any individual whose behaviour it feels to have brought the BCM into disrepute. Any such individual shall be deprived of all privileges of membership.
5. The membership of the BCM shall consist of
- Fellows: musicians, or those interested in musical matters, who have told a joke of notable humour, in the opinion of Council
- Licentiates: musicians, or those interested in musical matters, who have told a joke of reasonable humour, in the opinion of the Council
- Associates: musicians, or those interested in musical matters, who have told a joke containing some humerous element, in the opinion of Council
The minimum age for membership of the BCM, at any level, shall be 5 years, to allow joke-telling skills to develop.
Council may admit to fellowship honoris causa any musician, or person interested in musical matters, who has made a significant contribution to the work of the BCM.
Any person elected to Council who is not a Fellow at the time, shall be created a Fellow de jure.
6. Application for membership shall be made, normally, by telling a joke in the 'Come In, Sit Down' thread in the Forums Cafe section of forums.abrsm.org. The chairman may also grant membership to such person(s) as he or she shall deem worthy.
7. Fellows, Licentiates and Associates of the BCM shall be entitled to use the postnominal letters FBCM, LBCM and ABCM respectively.
8. Council of the BCM shall be at liberty to prescribe appropriate academic dress for members of the BCM, and for the council members. | <urn:uuid:a70750b8-9f49-4e4f-8df6-7eb0c421624c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abrsm.org/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t23525.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953683 | 1,114 | 1.617188 | 2 |
The 116 meter long metro was delivered in two pieces by its manufacturer Alstom. The M5 is being put together at the GVB workplace at Diemen. The M5 will be tested over the next six month on the Amsterdam metro tracks. Travelers will be able to use the new metro later in the year. It will replace the Zilvermeeuwen at that point. Mid-2014, twenty three new M5's will be put into service.
Specially trained metro drivers will soon begin the test runs. These will occur mostly at night when the tracks are not busy.
Economical and comfortable
The M5 was designed with the traveler in mind: wide seats, more doors, and wide walkways to allow quick entry and exit. The seats are placed at the sides and the metro can be walked through from end to end. About 50% more passengers can board because the metros are much longer.
It is the first metro in the world that is fitted out entirely with LED lighting. A lot of attention was given in the design to public safety. The entire metro can be monitored using cameras and the design is transparent.
An electronic map shows passengers the transfer options for each station. The M5 is environmentally friendly because of the LED lighting and low weight. It is also one of the quietest metros in the world. The seats are 20% wider than in the tram or bus.
The significant characteristics of the M5 are:
- Six-part vehicle that is 116 meter long
- 174 seats
- Capacity for 960 passengers
- Maximum speed of 80 km/h
- Tall doors (208 cm), 24 doors per side
- High roof (230 cm)
- Entry is at floor level, which connects at the platform
- Wheelchair provisions at two multi-functional spaces
- Displays with traveler information
- Camera monitoring
- Satisfies the strictest fire regulations
- Noise reduction features so the metro is as quiet as possible
- Equipped with vandal proof materials
- The metro is ready to be in service without a driver
This type of metro is expected to go into service on the Noord/Zuidlijn route in 2017. The City Region of Amsterdam is the financier for the new metro and the commissioning party is the Infrastructure, Traffic, and Transportation Service/Municipality of Amsterdam. | <urn:uuid:fb5edf19-264e-42ab-8456-b6812c84fdf4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.gvb.nl/nieuws/Pages/Eerste-nieuwe-metro-aangekomen.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940527 | 485 | 1.710938 | 2 |
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| | Re: Exposure to fumes...
Re: Exposure to fumes...
[ Back to Messages
Posted by Jeanne
on February 10, 2000 at 17:36:34:
In Reply to: Exposure to fumes... posted by Julie on February 10, 2000 at 16:14:06:
: My husband has a pig operation. I would like to help with chores during my pregnancy while he is away. Are the very strong fumes of ammonia and gases dangerous to my unborn baby? What about heavy dust or manure? Does anyone know?
You should try to get ahold of a genetic counselor to answer this question. They generally have access to the most current information regarding exposures (via a program called Reprotox). Your obstetrician should be able to put you in contact with a genetic counselor. Off the top of my head, I would be concerned about ammonia exposure. Best of luck
All times are GMT -7. The time now is 12:15 PM. | <urn:uuid:a7d83a7d-ebea-46ea-a0ae-e3c323322e8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthboards.com/pregnancy/1673.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945278 | 233 | 1.578125 | 2 |
So we begin the lessons on Recovery this month with "Letting go," because it can be an empowering way to begin the process. And don't fret over this, but let me share with you a secret: Recovery is a lifelong process. That is in no way meant to be a negative. That's definitely a positive. It means you continually get the chance to make a fresh start. We'll never stop making mistakes, missing the mark on something, doing something we wish we wouldn't. We're human. We don't do it all 100 percent. We won't give it all 100 percent. We won't be perfect. Ever. So, it seems to me you're empowered when you realize you always have the opportunity for a fresh start. When you let go, you've gained an immediate sense of liberty. It's liberating to know you get those do-overs--however many you need.
But first you must let go of something.
So let's start with the past. You're hearing a lot of people say something like, "Thank goodness 2009's over. It was a horrible year. I'm ready to let that one go." It's a wonderful exclamation of the freedom I'm talking about today. It means these folks are focusing on moving forward. Letting go. Moving forward. It doesn't mean you forget. To me, it means not holding on to that which holds you back. It's not about pretending nothing ever happened. It's about letting go the grudges, being able to forgive someone of something, accepting what you can't control, being okay with what IS. It's about letting go the FEELINGS that can tie you down.
The great thing about "feelings" that we don't always recognize is that they are fleeting. Holding onto them essentially means you're holding onto an energy that might not even be there tomorrow. Ask yourself this question: Have I ever been worried, for instance, about something I said to someone and they didn't even remember what I said? Have I ever fought with someone, when, not one month later, neither of us could remember what we fought about? That's the kind of stuff you might be ready to let go of in 2010.
Goodman's column quoted something about the "Graceful Exit" from somewhere that I really latched onto when I read it:
"There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over--and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.
"It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out."
I particularly related to the line about "leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives." That's why I say letting go isn't about forgetting. Our experiences teach us lessons. If we forget events, we may forget the lessons as well, which means we may have to learn them all over again. That might lead to uncomfortable or miserable experiences that we've already had. Keep the lessons, but let go of the hurts, if that's what led to them.
Today, let's agree to resolve to let go of what has been holding us back. If it's a friendship that's gone sour (Visit Irene's blog above to learn more about this topic), if it's a job that isn't working, if it's a bad habit, today resolve to let it go. Take it one day at a time or one step at a time, if that's what it takes, and begin to move forward rather than stay behind.
If there is something in your life that you need to let go of, beginning today, tell us what it is right here and also how it's been holding you back. Sometimes, just the act of writing this stuff down can bring about a clarity you didn't even know you needed.
Let it out and let it go. | <urn:uuid:decdfa61-a077-4451-ac05-ecef072cdc16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bikewithjackie.blogspot.com/2010/01/recovery-letting-go.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977219 | 834 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Read ten entrepreneur tips from original Mad Man George Lois, the influential art director with ideas as loud and striking as his ads.
Belinda Lanks of Co. Design collects ten entrepreneur tips from “the original Mad Man” George Lois’ book Damn Good Advice. Lanks reports that Lois, “the king of the one-liner,” has “some inspiring pointers on how to create – and sell – the big ideas while holding fast to some moral integrity.” Lois starts with his “first commandment,” which is to always begin with the words for a campaign and then let the imagery come together with the copy naturally.
Next, Lois says, “keep it short, informative, concise, and literary, where every single word counts.” Be sure to never follow trends, and be willing to put big ideas into your work, even if it means shrugging off the ideas of others. Those are just some of Lois’ entrepreneur tips to whet your appetite. Read the full list of ten and start thinking about how to apply these tips to your own business. | <urn:uuid:d17ff7f6-f01f-42f6-a008-44bf60e052b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://labs.openviewpartners.com/10-entrepreneur-tips-from-the-original-mad-man/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949814 | 230 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Wednesday's letters: A fighting chance
Published: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 6:40 p.m.
To the editor: Perhaps the Capitol and the president should be declared gun-free zones since they seem to think this makes them safer. No more Capitol police, no more Secret Service. Now, does anyone not understand what an idiotic idea this is? How long would it take an assassin to figure out that he could kill the president or anyone else without getting hurt himself?
Please use some common sense in protecting children in schools and people anywhere. When citizens are trained to use and carry guns, they and the people around them are safer. What are your options if someone pulls a gun on you? Do you want a fighting chance or not?
If I were a criminal, I would pick the unarmed man or the unarmed home to attack. Once again, it’s only common sense!
To the editor: Research reveals that 160,000 U.S. students stay home from school each day from fear of being bullied. Bullying affects a student’s ability to learn. Bullied students show a decline in grades and a loss of self-esteem, self-confidence and self-worth. In some cases, bullying has led to school shootings and suicide. Bullying affects witnesses as well as targets.
Bullying is a communitywide issue, mistakenly viewed as “kids being kids.” Students, parents and educators all have a role in addressing bullying situations and changing school culture.
The two keys to creating change are increasing awareness that bullying has lifelong impact, and giving people the education they need to respond effectively. More than 55 percent of bullying situations will stop when a peer intervenes. Student education on how to handle bullying is crucial, as is the support of adults.
Ignoring bullying won’t work. Bullying creates a climate of fear, impacting the lives of victims, bullies and bystanders. Everyone needs to be empowered with options to respond.
On Jan. 23 at 7 p.m., a community conversation on bullying will be presented in First Congregational Church of Hendersonville’s fellowship hall. Inform yourselves. Help make our schools a safe place to learn and succeed.
To the editor: I have been reading with interest many of the op-eds with regard to different states’ proposed changes to gun ownership.
As I understand it, military-type weapons are not sporting weapons. The federal government is not proposing to take handguns or hunting rifles away nor outlawing them. The sick person who killed his mother and the 20 small children and six educators may have had a harder time “getting” such a large number of victims if he hadn’t had semi-automatic assault weapons.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Truer words were never spoken. Shoot your paper targets, your deer or whatever. No one cares, not even President Barack Obama!
Sandra A. Pizzuto
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AAG: I’d like to start out
with a bit of background information. Can you tell me about
yourself, some of the books that you’ve written in the past? I’d
like to learn about what drives you as an author, and what first
inspired you to take on the challenging subject of the
Farrell: Well, by academic training and background I’ve always
dealt with ancient texts, and been trained to notice things. But
when I was younger I quickly developed an interest in physics.
read Einstein’s and Infeld’s
Evolution of Physics when I was in
the 7th grade, and that started a lifelong interest in the
subject, which I try to stay abreast of, reading papers and
books in both the mainstream and “alternative” areas of physics
as much as I can.
Most of my books deal with physics in some way
shape or form, and with the peculiar interface between history
and physics, seeking to answer mysteries of history with physics
I’ve written five books in this alternative
physics-and-history area thus far, plus have a new one coming
out sometime in the next two or three months I’d imagine.
AAG: Now culturally speaking, books on Nazi secret-weapons may
seem a little dated, and yet some of the biggest Hollywood
blockbusters in the last few years have been WW-II movies, such
as “Flags of our Fathers” and “Saving Private Ryan”.
What is it
about the Second World War that continues to captivate us, and
why doesn’t Vietnam, the Gulf War, or even World War I provoke
the same reaction?
Dr. Joseph Farrell:
Author of “ SS Brotherhood of the Bell ”, a
history of Nazi secret weapons research.
Farrell: That’s a great question,
and one, I think, that a lot of people ask, and my own intuition
is that it has something to do with the clear-cut moral and
spiritual aspect of that war; it was a war between real good and
real evil; the Kaiser’s Germany was not, after all, ultimately
out to “conquer the world” and exterminate whole peoples or to
turn them into slaves; Nazi Germany was.
And I think, too, that
World War Two fascinates us because it was the first truly
modern war. From the technological standpoint, most of our
modern weapons - smart bombs, missiles, radar stealth
technology, television guided bombs, even computers and directed
energy weapons - have some prototypical antecedent that dates
from that war, and much of it traceable to Nazi and Allied
secret weapons projects.
Even from the standpoint of military
doctrine I think there is a fascination, because the Germans
really invented modern mobile combined arms maneuver warfare and
the basic concept of firepower attrition. So I think there’s any
number of ways or reasons that we find the war so fascinating.
AAG: In terms of research for the book, I understand that you
consulted extensively with defense journalist Igor Witkowski,
who is also a primary source for Nick Cook’s coverage of this
topic in “The Hunt for Zero Point”. Can you tell us about
working with Witkowski, and what came out of that collaboration?
Farrell: Yes I did. Igor and I exchanged some letters and emails
as I was writing the book, and swapping information and
brainstorming ideas, many of which did not actually make it into
the book at all. Like you, I have a tremendous respect for
Witkowski’s work in his book The Truth About the Wunderwaffe.
And we both share the opinion that it was certainly worth the
$80 we paid to get it. Igor is very easy to work with, and
considers his sources and evidences very rationally and
carefully. One thing I think that he and I would both be agreed
upon, and that is that there is certainly more work that can and
should be done on the Nazi Bell story, as your own articles on
that subject also indicate.
I think he and I now are both sort
of re-grouping and considering where to go from here: Do we
pursue the historical line and aspect of the story, or the
technological and physics one?
I think in a story like this it’s
difficult to disentangle the two and that any further work on
the subject will be along the lines that Igor and I pursued in
Defense-journalist who broke the Bell story in “Truth about the Wunderwaffe”
AAG: Now “SS Brotherhood of the
Bell” covers more than just the Bell - what are some of the
other secret weapons that you describe in the book, and are
there any revelations about new devices that might surprise us?
Farrell: Well, actually I don’t speak a great deal about other
German secret weapons in The SS Brotherhood of the Bell other
than to reference some of the inter-continental rockets that
they were developing, plus some discussion on their
over-the-horizon phased array radars that they also developed as
guidance systems for them.
That in itself is a revelation,
because the standard Allied Legend about German radars was that
it wasn’t as sophisticated as Allied radar and so on. In some
respects that is true but in others - such as these
over-the-horizon radars - it is not. I also mention these radars
because it’s my belief that they played a role in their late-war
RAM experiments, where I believe they discovered aspects of
wave-mixing and phase conjugation by multi-beam interferometry
on some of their RAM material.
Of course, your readers will
recognize those same elements in the presentations of
physics that Lt. Col.
Tom Bearden has been making over the
This fact, plus certain things about the Bell itself,
indicate to me that the Nazis may have been deliberately seeking
or doing research into various aspects of scalar physics and the
related ideas of vortex mechanics and torsion fields and so on.
AAG: Now in terms of breakthrough propulsion, there seems to be
a lot of confusion about,
Can you help us better understand the delineation between
these separate projects, and perhaps help us to understand why
the Nazi’s would run so many overlapping secret-projects
Farrell: This is really an excellent question. The short and
simple answer is that the Bell is not in any way similar to
Schauberger’s research, the purported research of the pre-war
Vril Gesellschaft, or even the Coanda Effect saucer research
associated with various names and the Peenemuende rocket
There is some resemblance between Schauberger’s
research and the Bell in that both projects - in my presentation
of the physics of the Bell - involved a well-developed vortex
mechanics and vorticular theory of the medium. And in that
respect, I suspect that there was some liaison between the
projects. Though I don’t go into this at all in the book, I’d
like to speculate a bit here on what I think that liaison may
Both Schauberger’s project and the Bell fell under
the aegis and jurisdiction of the Waffen SS, and there are
strong indicators that both projects were part of SS
Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Kammler’s super-secret black projects
empire, headquartered out of the Skoda Munitions Works’
engineering project at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Bohemian
Czechoslovakia was, of course, at that time, a “Reich
Protectorate” and was under the direct jurisdiction of the SS,
which made it the perfect place to headquarter and coordinate
such black projects.
Most people don’t know it, but one aspect
of Kammler’s black projects empire was its coordination via a
“think tank” of scientists that he recruited for these projects.
This department actually published and circulated its own Top
Secret “journal” of their scientific papers to each other. In
other words, these scientists were expected to brainstorm and
think outside the box, and to map out the technologies trees
necessary to bring various technologies to fruition.
I believe that this is precisely what we see with the various
Nazi saucer projects. What we’re seeing is not “absence” of
coordination or an “inefficient duplication of effort,” but
rather the steps in a technology tree that had been worked out
towards the acquisition of field propulsion machines. We see the
Coanda Effect saucers, which we may interpret in this
speculative context as a kind of “Mark I” or first step.
there are Schauberger’s devices, which are based on his
understanding of what he called “implosion”, which on
examination are devices relying on the creation of vortices,
feedback loops and so on, which would be a “Mark II”, a step
along the way toward the Bell. At the top of this tree is the
Bell itself, a project overseen by Dr. Walther Gerlach of Nobel
Prize winning fame.
Gerlach’s specialty was, of course,
gravitation, magnetic spin and resonance, and so on. So one sees
here the theoretical brains that can make sense of it all. The
projects “overlap” in other words, because they were meant to
overlap, with each stage designed to research certain aspects of
In this light - again speculating here in this interview for the
first time on this question - I believe the real purpose of the Coanda Effect saucer research was not so much to create a craft
based upon it, but to research the lift and drag problems
associated with such a craft for use in later projects.
could be made practical devices in their own right along the
way, then so much the better. The Schauberger research would
then have been to research aspects of vortex creation as a
motive power for such devices. In fact, I think in this regard
that it is interesting that the Schauberger project was started
around 1943, after the “Mark I” research was well under way.
This research would have been the ideal experimental context in
which to research and test certain concepts of vortex mechanics.
Then of course, there is the last step, the Bell itself.
I should also stress that I speak more about the Kammlerstab and
its “method of operation” in the prequel to The SS Brotherhood
of the Bell, a book called Reich of the Black Sun.
Again, at the
risk of being redundant, I don’t view these as “separated”
projects but as interrelated projects, since they bear the
signature of the Kammlerstab’s modus operandi of mapping out
technology trees and putting into place the practical projects
necessary to bring their ideas to fruition.
the subject of Nazi secret weapons has to bear this in mind,
that while the various projects - sound cannon, wind and tornado
cannon, disintegration rays and death rays, and lasers, grasers,
EMP devices, endothermic bombs and fuel-air bombs - all of it,
is not a messy or inefficient squandering of resources or
duplication of effort, since these projects were coordinated at
an extremely high level by the SS, which oversaw all patents
applications in the Reich.
AAG: Dr. Eric Davis speculated that the Nazi Bell was a
centrifuge for refining nuclear materials mined in the nearby
mountains and not any type of propulsion system or advanced
Does his speculation answer all of the
unresolved questions associated with the Bell project?
Repulsine inventor but not associated with the Bell
Farrell: That is an
interesting observation, because it is an observation I myself
made in my book
Reich of the Black Sun.
Nazi uranium enrichment centrifuge
technology is one of the little known aspects of their secret
weapons research, but in point of fact, the Nazis brought this
technology to such a state of perfection that one may safely say
that this method of uranium enrichment is a uniquely “German”
It is my belief that the Nazis used this technology
Von Ardenne’s modifications of cyclotrons with mass spectrometer
separation tanks (much like Lawrence’s beta calutrons in the
United States) - in a large uranium enrichment plant at
Auschwitz. I get into this story in Reich of the Black Sun, but
it is an essential story for the Bell, since German success with
centrifuges would have given them the necessary experience in
dealing with high rpm rotation machinery and the close precision
tolerances that were necessary in such devices.
This, of course,
was an essential component in the Bell as well, which consisted
of high rpm counter-rotating cylinders in a modified “plasma
focus” device. So yes, I believe that there is a connection
between the Bell and their centrifuge technology and their atom
That being said, there are two other connections to their atom
bomb project as well. The first is the Bell’s scientific project
Walther Gerlach himself, who is by 1944 also in charge
of the Reich’s nuclear research. But the Bell is Gerlach’s
“special baby” as it were.
I present a certain amount of
evidence in the book from the Farm Hall Transcripts plus Igor Witkowski’s research that indicate clearly that Gerlach was
investigating some very esoteric areas of physics indeed, areas
that could only have been associated with the Bell. And it is
significant that only Gerlach was subsequently interred and
interrogated by the USA after the British were through with him
at Farm Hall.
The rest of the scientists, including Hahn, Diebner, Korsching, Hartek and Heisenberg were allowed to return
to Germany. Only Gerlach was thought to be valuable enough to
In itself, this is significant, because Gerlach’s area of expertise, once again, was not related to
nuclear or quantum physics at all, but to areas associated with
magnetic resonance, particle spin, gravitation and so on.
A modern version of what the Nazi-Bell is speculated to
have looked like.
The other connection is with the
Bell’s “fuel” itself, the mysterious liquid compound called “IRR
Xerum 525” itself. I devote a whole chapter just to this aspect
of the problem in the book.
In a nutshell, though, I believe
this Serum 525 to have been an isotope of mercury which also
contained other elements, most likely themselves radioactive
isotopes, in solution or chemical composition with this mercury
isotope, and even speculate that these substances might have
been isomers, though it should be noted that if isomers were
present in the compound, it would have been in extremely minute
amounts given the technological difficulty of isolating them at
But even if this extremely speculative notion is not
actually the case, there is a certain bit of coincidental
evidence that at least one element possibly also present in this
compound may have been thorium, for it is a little known fact
that one the Nazis literally scoured Europe and denuded it of
almost all of its thorium.
This fact led to a post-war Allied
inquiry into this, which came to a dead end: no real answers
were ever found as to what happened to this thorium nor what the
Nazis were really doing with it. So it’s my suspicion that it
may have been a needed element in this Serum 525 compound.
Here is where I believe Witkowski’s analysis breaks down a bit,
though it is true as far as it goes. The mercury component of
the compound would, of course, be ideal for plasma research,
which self-evidently the Bell was designed to do.
But how does
one explain the possible presence of other isotopes?
speculation is - and again it is very speculative - that the
Nazis may have also been trying to access certain other effects
with these materials via the stress that the Bell created in
These effects might be analogous to something like the
Mossbauer Effect which is used in part in the cohering of gamma
ray emissions and so on, and thus the strange effects that the
Bell had on “jellifying” various organic materials and its
initial and quite deadly effects on humans and animals might be
explained by some such mechanism.
And I believe, and present a
certain amount of speculative reasoning in the book, that these
effects may be related to the torsion field effects or
longitudinal electric waves in the medium itself that I believe
the Nazis were really after.
Put this way, then, the Bell was
early on recognized by the Nazis as having not only a potential
for “field” propulsion, but also a weapons potential that would
have made the hydrogen bomb look like a kitchen match.
And all of this, incidentally, was right up Gerlach’s alley, for
as I also present in the book, Gerlach had actually written a
short article in a pre-war German newspaper, many years before
the Nazis came to power in fact, what sorts of amazing things
might be done with mercury when subjected to high electrical and
in-depth documentary on the secret “Brotherhood
of the Bell”
AAG: One of those biggest unresolved
questions is what happened to
Hans Kammler after the war. If he
managed to get away - and get away with the Bell, then why
haven’t we seen any hints of this technology or Kammler himself
in last half a century?
Farrell: Well that is - allowing for inflation - the sixty-four
trillion dollar question! Nick Cook, Witkowski, and I all
present evidences in our books that would seem to indicate that
General Kammler disappeared, along with the Bell and most of its
project documentation, into the bowels of some post-war American
But there is also a certain body of evidence uncovered
by British researcher Geoffrey Brooks that indicates that Kammler and the Bell wound up in Argentina at the plasma physics
laboratory that General Peron built for fleeing Nazi physicists
in Bariloche province in Argentina. While initially I followed
Witkowski and Cook’s idea that it disappeared into the USA,
lately I lean more toward the idea that the Bell remained in
independent Nazi hands.
Now, as for the question about why haven’t we seen or heard more
about this technology since the war, in fact, I think we have
heard about it, and I present this evidence in a chapter in
Reich of the Black Sun and also repeated it, in slightly
condensed form, in The SS Brotherhood of the Bell. And that
episode is: the Kecksburg UFO crash in December of 1965 in
On any number of data points the Bell and the Kecksburg “acorn” are similar, from their shape, to the
dimensions recorded by eyewitnesses for both objects, to the
peculiar sound both objects made and so on. But for me the
clincher is this: the Kecksburg “Acorn” was supposedly seen by
an eyewitness at Wright-Patterson airbase.
According to research
done by Kecksburg researcher Stan Gordon, this eyewitness worked
for a local construction company in Dayton, where one day
shortly after the incident an order was placed for thousands of
Now this is interesting, because Witkowski’s research made it
clear that the Bell was housed and tested in an underground
chamber that was constructed from ceramic bricks! So in other
words, we have not only the same dimensions and shapes recorded
for the two objects, but also the same physical environment is
reported for both. I think this is highly significant and
suggestive, since the Kecksburg accounts pre-date the
descriptions of the Bell uncovered by Witkowski.
In other words,
the possibilities of collusion between the two stories is almost nill.
SS Gen Hans Kammler:
Military leader in charge of the secret
Nazi-Bell development effort in Poland.
It is also intriguing to me that by
any account, the American military showed up in Kecksburg so
quickly after the object there had crash-landed.
in other words, was ready to go, and, it would seem, merely
waiting to find out exactly where the object came down in order
to recover it. To my mind then, the parallels between the two
objects is significant and a possible connection - or even
identity - between the two should not be too readily dismissed.
If this is so, then it puts a new spin
- not to coin a pun - on
the question of what happened to Kammler and the Bell, for if
the Bell was not in American hands at the end of the war, then
by the time of Kecksburg, it or a similar device was recovered
AAG: Is this a dead story, or is somebody actively trying to
keep this technology a secret? A friend of mine visited the Bell
test-site in 2006, and was told by the local villagers that a
business conglomerate had bought the test site, and would be
demolishing it to build a factory on the site. In my friend’s
case, he decided to quit asking questions and move on to another
Do you think that was simple paranoia, or do the
proverbial walls have eyes?
Farrell: No, I don’t think it’s paranoia at all, and I do think
there is evidence - and I go into this extensively in the book - that someone, somewhere, is using “active measures” including
so-called “wet operations” to maintain the secrecy surrounding
Even on the view that the Bell is “merely” a
field propulsion device relying on torsion fields or
electro-longitudinal waves in a kind of hyper-relativity, that
would be a technology well worth protecting, for it implies the engineerability of local space-time curvature.
Once we have said
that, we open the Pandora's box to the use of the same type of
technology to engineer or stress local space-time for
weaponization purposes, i.e., for destructive purposes. And
that, of course, would - to be repetitive here again - make a
hydrogen bomb look like a kitchen match. So yes, anyone having
access to such technology would seek to suppress it for two
reasons: to maintain their monopoly, and to prevent a
proliferation nightmare beyond the wildest nightmares of cold
war think-tank wargamers from occurring. In a certain sense I
guess what I am saying is that, given mankind’s propensity for
warfare and destruction, such a technology would have to be
But however one looks at it, I don’t think
suppression can ever be a successful strategy, simply because
the type of physics the Bell represents will inevitably get out.
After all, your own website has numerous references to various
physicists and engineers - people like Bearden, Dering, and so
on - whose theories I believe play directly into the theoretical
development that I believe lies behind the Bell.
AAG: Now in terms of conspiracies, the part that bothers me is
that neither the USA nor the Russians seem to have this
technology. So if something is still going on, where is it, who
has it, and why hasn’t it ever gone public?
Maybe this leads
back to the question of where Hans Kammler fled to after the
A photo taken from the top of the Bell
‘flytrap’ by an anonymous source in mid-2005.
A photo of the
Nazi Bell 'flytrap',
showing heavy-duty steel mounting bolts
sheared off by what appears to be a welder.
Farrell: Well, to some extent I have
answered this already.
If my Kecksburg speculations are true,
then something like the Bell clearly ends up in American hands
by 1965, if it was not already in American hands at the end of
the war. But as I mentioned previously, I am increasingly
inclined to the view that the Bell simply disappeared into the
labyrinth of post-war independent Nazi research conducted in
places like South America and under the nominal oversight of
Nazi-friendly governments like Peron’s Argentina or, later,
Nazi connections and influence in the vast
Latin American drug cartels and their criminal activities would
have provided a nearly inexhaustible supply of funds, plus
accomplish at the same time a strategic goal of weakening a
former enemy, namely the USA.
The reason I incline increasingly
to this “independent and continuing Nazi” development for the
Bell is simply, as you say, the fact that the technology and
science simply seems to have disappeared entirely.
AAG: In addition to Kammler, you’ve raised a number of questions
about German scientists such as Von Braun and Debus. They came
to the USA as
Operation Paperclip scientists, and what made them
valuable was their knowledge of these Nazi secret-weapons
programs. Can you tell us which of them were prominent in your
research, and what you found about their activities during and
after the war?
Farrell: Oh wow, another excellent and provocative question!
Well, to me, beyond Gerlach himself, the most interesting of
these characters has always been Dr.
intriguing for the speculative possibilities that he represents,
because he ends up, of course, as a senior administrator in NASA
of the Kennedy Space Flight Center during the Apollo program. As
an administrator, then, this means that he has his fingers in
almost every pie there is inside NASA, and thus he as a very
clear picture of what’s really going on.
This is intriguing, then, for yet other reasons, for as I make
clear in SS Brotherhood, Debus was an ardent Nazi, and nearly
created chaos in the Bell project by denouncing a fellow
engineer to the Gestapo. One of the firms involved with the
Bell, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gemeinshaft,
A.E.G., had to
intervene to free the man whom Debus had denounced to allow the
project to continue.
It is due to this intervention that we know
that the Bell was given its own unique classification, the
highest classification, in fact, in the Third Reich, a
classification that made the Bell not only a Geheime Reichsache
but Kriegsenscheidend, or “War Decisive”, a classification found
in absolutely no other secret project in all of Nazi Germany,
including its successful fuel-air, and its atom bomb, projects.
But beyond this, Debus is interested for what his specialty in
science was, and for his connection both to Von Braun’s
Peenemünde rocket team and to the Bell project, connections
which were, in each case, direct. With Debus, then, we have one
of those “overlaps” that is so characteristic of the Kammlerstab.
Debus was the man who designed the powerplant for the Bell! Now
this is very intriguing to me, because his specialty was the
measurement of extremely high voltage direct current discharges!
I find this very suggestive, for I
present evidence in the book, based on Witkowski’s observations,
that the Bell may have also been a pulsed device utilizing HV DC
pulses, a fact made the more interesting in that the Nazis
apparently built an entire power plant very near the Bell’s test
sites in lower Silesia, a fact that would possibly indicate
another connection to the use of DC electricity in the device,
since close proximity to such a power source would have been
required if DC were used, much like Edison’s DC power plants
would have had to have been placed every few miles or so for
practical electrification along DC lines.
But whatever one makes of these speculations, Debus is
interesting of course because he ends up as a senior
administrator in a space flight center in NASA during the Apollo
program, and his specialty is not even rockets at all! I suggest
in the book that this is because there may have been a hidden or
alternative technology involved in the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM)
that got us OFF the Moon.
Please don’t get me wrong here. I’m
not one of those “Apollo was hoaxed” people at all. I am not
even remotely sympathetic to such views. But I do share the
concern that I don’t really see the signatures of a rocket
taking off from the Moon in those films of the LEMs taking off.
It doesn’t look like an acceleration that is geometric enough to
be a rocket; it just sort of “pops up” and off it goes at more
or less - it looks to me - like uniform velocity, though I must
admit I haven’t actually done any measurements or not to see if
this is the case. I am merely reporting what my eyes see and my
mind tells me based upon those perceptions.
So, lacking this “geometric enough” signature of a rocket’s
acceleration, we might be dealing with an alternative
technology, a field propulsion technology, in getting us OFF the
Moon, and the presence of Debus in NASA in his position would be
the perfect place both to place someone who was once involved in
such a project, and as well the perfect place to put someone in
order to keep that technology quiet.
In short, the Paperclip
Nazis in NASA reconstructed as much of that technology as they
could, and used it to get us off of a Moon which they possibly
knew to be more massive than popularly reported, which, if the
case, would have made a return vehicle based merely on rockets
AAG: As I understand things, in “SS Brotherhood of the Bell” you
challenge the notion that the
Majestic 12 was founded in
response to a UFO crash in Roswell, and instead speculate that
they were somehow a product of American worries about these Nazi
technologies, right? Can you elaborate a bit of this notion?
Farrell: Well, it’s an idea I elaborate both in Reich of the
Black Sun and in The SS Brotherhood of the Bell. Basically I do
not question the
Roswell crash or the MJ-12 Cooper-Cantwheel
documents. I accept them as “givens” in order to make an
academic argument, i.e., to present an alternative explanation
of the crash and the documents’ own contents.
As such, many
people do not really understand what I’m trying to do and
misinterpret it. In short, my method is to examine the internal
evidence of the documents themselves by way of a comparison to
known Nazi secret weapons projects such as the Coanda effect
saucers, and so on, and to compare these known technologies with
the technological descriptions found in the documents
The long and short of it is, that the documents do
not describe a technology exotic enough to be extraterrestrial,
though they do describe a technology exotic enough to be Nazi.
Thus, the documents themselves also allude time and again to the
involvement of the “paperclip” people in the assessment of the
crashed vehicle. So I my view, what really would have set the
alarm bells ringing in the American military was if something
Nazi had crashed there, for it would mean that the former
“defeated” enemy was alive, well, and continuing its projects
somewhere out there.
On this view, then, the “ET” line, at least
as far as Roswell is concerned, would merely have been a final
deeply embedded layer of disinformation, a final “deep cover”
story to cover up the exotic, though still terrestrial, and Nazi
nature of what was recovered there.
Dr. Kurt Debus:
Part of Von Braun’s V2 team, and later a Launch
Director at NASA
AAG: You know, I think “Dr
Strangelove” effectively made the point that ex-Nazi scientists
had their own agendas, and letting them work in our government
after the war might have some unintended consequences. In
Kubrick’s film, Strangelove mistakenly calls our President “Mein Führer” on two occasions… suggesting that these scientists had
their own agendas, regardless of which government they worked
Any thoughts on this?
Farrell: I believe I’ve answered this in some respects with my
Kecksburg and Roswell speculations. But to expand on it a bit,
Paperclip was but the tip of the iceberg in post-war Nazi
penetration of various departments of the American government.
We must remember that long before President Truman had even
signed the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA
and NSA, their civilian character and charter was already
severely compromised by the fact that the CIA’s predecessor, the
OSS, had taken over, lock stock and barrel, General
Gehlen’s Fremde Heere Ost, or “Foreign Armies East”, the
Wehrmacht’s military intelligence on the Eastern front, inside
of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
From a certain
standpoint, then, the entire “Soviet Operations and Analysis”
desk of the CIA was staffed almost entirely by Nazis, who
remained under Gehlen’s direct control.
And the American who did
this wonderful “service” for our country was none other than OSS
Zurich station chief Allen Dulles. And I’ll let your readers
work out the connections and implications from there, because
AAG: Before this interview, we had a few interesting
conversations on topics relating to WW-II secret weapons, and it
seems that references to W.A. Harbinson’s Projekt Saucer series
keep coming up - especially in reference to his fictional novel
“Genesis”, which speculates that the worldwide wave of UFO
sightings that started in 1947 might actually have been from
Nazi technology developed near the end of the war. How do you
think this fits with your speculation about the origin of
Farrell: Well it fits quite well with it. In fact, one thing
that I find rather unusual is that so many novelists seemed to
be ahead of the curve of more factually based researchers on
this question. For example, years before Witkowski’s research
was published, in fact, before even the German reunification
itself, the famous novelist Dean Koontz wrote a novel called
It is about a German secret weapon which is a “time
travel” machine. While that sounds rather extraordinary and
fanciful, it is Koontz’s descriptions of his fictional time
machine that give one pause, for he describes a rotating
cylinder using tremendous electrical power, which gives off some
extreme electrostatic displays and effects! Now, I find that a
little too coincidental to be coincidental…
How did Koontz know
this or come up with this?
Harbison’s Projekt Saucer novels are another case in point, as
you observe. But what I find very interesting with his novels is
that there is no real parallel with the Bell, while there are
plenty of parallels with the Coanda Effect and Schuaberger
devices. But Harbison is interesting precisely because his
novels present the view that this type of research was continued
by some independent group of Nazis after the war.
Martin Caidin’s novel
The Mendelov Conspiracy, in which, again,
an independent group of somewhat cranky scientists pursues their
independent technological development of saucers.
Now here’s the decisive point: the only hard evidence that
exists tends to point to the line of continued Nazi post-war
research and development, and not to any other group.
evidence, once again, consists of,
the disappearance of the
Bell, its documentation, and General Kammler
establishment of a plasma physics research lab in Bariloche
province in Argentina by General Peron, a facility established
for his Nazi scientists; such a laboratory would be congruent
with the type of physics and engineering involved with the Bell
General Kammler and the Bell disappear, apparently, in a
massive six-engined Junkers 390 heavy-lift airplane, a plane
capable of flying non-stop from Europe to Argentina
Geoffrey Brooks’ evidence, based allegedly on examination of
classified Argentine government documents, that Kammler and the
Bell did indeed fly into Argentina; and finally, and no less
the probable disappearance of the Nazi financial
mastermind Martin Bormann, de facto and most probable chief of
any post-war “Nazi International”, into South America, as the
research of Ladislas Farago (Aftermath) and others indicated,
and Bormann’s and the post-war “Nazi International’s” deep
financial penetration into various corporations and also into
There’s your money supply.
My belief, then, is that if there was a continued and
independently coordinated and controlled Nazi development of
their wartime black projects, that this was probably done not
only in totally independent projects, but also “inside” of the
black projects of other nations, using those nations’ own
compartmentalized security features against them, and to cloak
their own covertly coordinated activities.
When one thinks about
it, it would not be all that difficult to do, and it also
supplies another source of funding.
Projekt Saucer - Book Two - Genesis
Author W.A. Harbinson’s account of Nazi UFO
Projects at Peenemunde during WW-II.
A fictionalized account of Nazi UFO Projects at
Peenemunde during the Second World War.
AAG: Interestingly, in Harbinson’s
later novel, “Inception”, he speculates that secret-weapons and
advanced propulsion technology have been around for decades
before the war, and that Germany’s involvement during the war
came only from being fertile ground in which to develop existing
Do you think there’s any merit to that
Farrell: Yes I definitely do think there’s merit to it, and in
fact, present evidence that the Bell project may have been the
legacy of secret research actually begun under the Weimar
Republic, and again, under the aegis of Walther Gerlach.
Tom Bearden has never tired of pointing out, one of the
seminal papers for “scalar” physics was the paper “On the
partial differential equations of mathematical physics,” by
renowned Physicist E.T. Whittaker, a paper which I have and have
It is as breathtaking as Bearden makes it out
to be, but what I think he misses, to a certain extent, is the
significance of where it was published: it was published in Mathematische Annalen, in Germany.
So we have a very fertile
conceptual and socio-scientific climate inside Germany with
figures like Gerlach, Thirring (who was actually Austrian),
Einstein, Hilgenberg, Krafft, and so on, who can look at certain
experiments, or, for that matter, certain tensor expressions in
Einstein’s late 20s and early 30s versions of his unified field
theory, and conclude that locally engineerable stresses in
space-time - a kind of “hyper-relativity” - was possible via
certain types of plasma and electromagnetic phenomena.
With Hilgenberg, particularly, we have an entirely worked out
vorticular theory of the medium that is an alternative to
relativisitic physics, and therefore would have been of interest
to the Nazis.
And Gerlach, of course, would certainly have had
the mental prowess capable of dressing up Einstein’s UFT, or
even of extending it, and making it presentable to the Nazis.
AAG: What does strike me about this “pre-war secret weapons”
notion is that
Unified Field Theory research became well-known
Kaluza-Klein Theory in 1921, which was one of Einstein’s
own inspirations in trying to unify gravitation with the other
Does it seem difficult to imagine military-scientists
attempting applied physics projects during the war that might
produce effects like those described in the Bell experiment?
Farrell: Oh no, not at all. In fact, not just Kaluza-Klein but
there is also Vaclac Hlavaty’s six dimensional extension of it - if I recall correctly it was six dimensions. Someone like Gerlach could certainly have extended these theories and
additionally would have been able to appreciate the longitudinal
wave work of Tesla, or for that matter, would have understood
the enormous significance of Whittaker’s paper.
And his student,
of course, was Hilgenberg.
AAG: I understand that you’re a deeply spiritual man, with a PhD
in Patristics - the study of early (pre 8th-century)
Christianity. As someone with a deep and abiding spiritual
faith, is it difficult to write about topics involving the type
of evil that the Nazi’s seem to have embodied?
Farrell: No, quite the reverse, actually. In a way, it’s almost
a moral imperative to write about it, and to warn people of the
nastier and destructive implications of these types of
technologies. By the same token, I’m not a Luddite, and don’t
believe technologies like this can or should be suppressed.
Similarly, though, it gives me a perspective from which to
appreciate the possible ethically sound reasons why various
elites would wish to suppress such technologies, for they are,
as I have already averred, capable of spawning a proliferation
nightmare of weapons far more dangerous than hydrogen bombs,
and, from a certain standpoint, weapons much easier to design,
engineer, and assemble.
Any physics based on these types of
stresses in the medium, or in local space-time curvature,
whether one calls it torsion physics or scalar physics or
quantum potential physics or whatever, has the potential for weaponization of just horrendously destructive capabilities. I’m
trying to let people know, in addition to the many good benefits
that such a physics would have - benefits many others have
written about - that this physics also has some very disturbing
negative potentials as well, and that to handle them we should
have some spiritual enlightenment or maturity.
It is, in a way,
similar to Einstein’s activism in his later life, for he also
had his religious and philosophical foundations and these, in
turn, gave him some unique insights into the ethical problems
posed by modern physics.
AAG: Is it possible that the public’s fascination with Nazi
secret-weapons might be a type of coping mechanism to let us
avoid having to emotionally deal with the evils of that War?
Certainly WW-II embodied depravity on an entirely new level, and
I wonder if perhaps some of the mythology surrounding
secret-weapons might not be a means of avoiding the cold, hard
reality of the atrocities that occurred during that period.
it more comfortable for us to think of scientists in white coats
building UFO’s than to think of groups of starving prisoners
huddled in war camps, and being slaughtered in numbers too large
Farrell: Well, it might be possible to imagine that, and perhaps
that forms some of the motivations for some people, but if so,
they are massively misinformed, for as I point out in both
books, but particularly in Reich of the Black Sun, the Nazis
were able to fulfill the massive labor requirements of their
atom bomb program and other secret weapons projects with
concentration camp slave labor, which was, of course,
What we must absolutely recognize is
that all Nazi secret weapons, including the Bell, were purchased
at an enormous and incalculable cost in human suffering and
misery, and not just their rockets.
This is why their atom bomb
project was so easy to portray as an inept, bungling,
miserly-funded effort, when in fact it was none of those things.
Secret Weapons: Reich of the Black Sun
an early foray into
WW-II secret weapons by Joseph Farrell.
AAG: I’d like to close by asking
where people can buy a copy of “SS Brotherhood of the Bell, as
well as learning about any plans or ideas for future books that
you might working on. What’s next from Joseph Farrell, and when
do you expect we’ll see it?
I just finished a new book called
The Cosmic War: Interplanetary
Warfare, Modern Physics, and Ancient Texts, which should be out
by the fall of 2007, and am scratching some notes down for a
couple of ideas for two different books, one a kind of sequel to
Brotherhood and another having to do more with hidden political
histories of the Second World War.
The Cosmic War more or less
extends the method I’ve used in my other books of taking modern
conceptions in alternative physics and using them to examine
some ideas in ancient texts. | <urn:uuid:6f4cdcea-62e3-4b2e-876c-f9a5b6314c54> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_flyingobjects102.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950844 | 10,095 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Friday Morning Worship: "Giving Up God"
General Assembly 2000 Event 202
Giving Up God at General Assembly
By the Rev. Daniel Budd
My wife was scanning a recent issue of the UU World one morning, and read this letter to the editor to me:
In his column, President Buehrens lauds "a God who is not self-involved or fearful but creative and therefore always giving away being and power. A God who is not static but growing and changing, who is hurt or given joy by what we do or leave undone...."
I can't guess what he's talking about. Does he mean a supernatural spirit, or some facet of human psychology, or what? Similar baffling comments are heard from UU [Unitarian Universalist] pulpits.
Well, I've been engaging in just such "baffling comments" for most of my career, and will continue to do so this morning; and furthermore I submit to you this letter as a concise example of all that we need to give up about the image of God.
First of all, we need to give up the allergic reaction which occurs whenever we hear or read the word, God, and which causes us immediately to assume it refers to "a supernatural spirit or some facet of human psychology," or any other similarly simplistic and unimaginative idea. This, my friends, is not the kind of broad-minded thinking we keep saying we pride ourselves upon. It is, instead, every bit as narrow as the narrow theologies we rightly criticize.
Second, we need to give up the notion that we can even begin to capture the idea of God in human definition. The idea of God cannot be contained in any brief or lengthy exposition. It was not contained in John's remarks (evocative as they were); it was not contained in the scope of this letter; and it most certainly will not be contained by this sermon. It is a concept that cannot be contained at all, as illustrated by the 15th century philosopher, Nicholas of Cusa, who stated, "God is circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere."
The letter concludes, When a UU says "God," it causes confusion because nobody can be sure what is meant. Again, narrow and limited thinking in the magazine of a religious tradition that values broad and expansive thought, feeling and action. Our tradition has given us ways we can understand one another to mean when we hear that little three-letter word, God. Why so many of us persist in attaching old, outworn definitions—like supernatural spirit, for instance—is quite frankly what baffles me. I wonder, if what is really going on is that we simply enjoy quarrelling about it....
A friend once returned from a trip through parts of the western United States with a simple gift for me from Crazy Horse Mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota: a sign, of sorts, containing words attributed to Chief Joseph. It said:
They will teach us to quarrel about God, as Catholics and Protestants do. We do not want to do that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that.
Unfortunately, we have; and we have not been alone. Practically the entire Western religious tradition has learned to quarrel about God all too well. History is full of far too many examples of how we make up definitions about who and what God is, declare them definitive, proclaim our perspective to be primary, and then proceed to mistreat, murder and maim in the name of this god, to separate and divide people based upon these beliefs, to justify bigotry and wars and crusades and progroms, to demean and belittle, to strip dignity and integrity from any who do not share this particular tiny, narrow, brittle and rigid view of this Great Spirit of Life, of the Engendering Energy of the Universe, of the Mystery, of the Ground of Being.
We certainly have learned to quarrel with one another about God all too well. A good deal of this quarrelling has been within our own Jewish and Christian traditions. I guess most of the folks who engaged in the numerous quarrels of, between, and among these faith expressions simply forgot an ancient story that comes early in the Hebrew scriptures (early, as if to let us know something from the outset, from the very beginning, lest we become confused about it later). It is the story of God calling Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. It is the story where Moses, always one to question God and make certain he understands just what is going on, says to God:
"If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"
And God replies to Moses:
I AM WHO I AM [or I Will Be Who I Will Be, or I Am What I Am, or I Do What I Do].
This God replies to Moses:
"Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"
(Exodus 3:13 & 14)
No doctrines or dogmas there. No definitive definitions. No exclusionary proclamations. A simple statement of being. I am what I am. Very Zen; very Taoist; very . . . So Many Other Things. A simple, profound statement that Being Itself is what God is, and is what best names God.
Yet things got terribly muddled as time went on: Growing numbers of people forgot this story and decided that they had the Only Definition of God Possible. Growing numbers of people decided that they could tell others exactly what God was and is and evermore shall be, amen.
Now we should thank these people, from the bottom of our hearts, for without them, we wouldn't be here today. The history and heritage of the Free Church grew out of women and men who rebelled against confining the image of God by human creed or dogma (that is to say, by human definition). The Free Church grew out of individuals who sought to live in the freedom of a faith that did not "fence the spirit, nor close off the sincerity of conversation with which souls must meet in religious association." (Wallace Robbins)
But even as we are grateful, we need to acknowledge that more often than not, we still bring these rejected definitions of God along with us. Sometimes we continue to allow them to be the One and Only Definitions of God, which we again reject, but then continue to quarrel about. This is the God we have to give up, to let go, for this little, human idol of a god is nothing but an irritation that does not effect our lives in any positive, helpful way. It can do one thing particularly well, however: it can help us avoid looking outside the god-box toward any expanded and expansive, deep and deepening notion of the Ground of Being and our relationship to it.
I believe that we have been so embroiled in our own liberal version of the God quarrel, that we have all but institutionalized it. We call it: the Humanist/Theist Controversy. Allow me to offer an all-too-brief and inadequate overview of how I understand the evolution of this controversy.
At our beginning, the Unitarian church was the church of liberal Christianity. Unitarian beliefs were based upon a liberal interpretation of the Biblical story. We believed in the God of the Bible, and that Jesus was not divine but rather an example of the greatness possible in the human spirit. As William Ellery Channing wrote:
I see the marks of God in the heavens and the earth, but how much more in a liberal intellect. . .in a philanthropy which forgives every wrong, and which never despairs of the cause of Christ and human virtue! I do and must reverence human nature.
"In ourselves," he wrote, "are the elements of the Divinity." (Lyttle 1 & 11)
Then came Emerson and the Transcendentalists who expanded upon this basic interpretation by thinking outside the 19th century Christian box altogether. Emerson saw not just human nature, but all of Nature and Creation itself as Divine. Like Channing, he saw the marks of God throughout the heavens and the earth as well as in each individual.—Let us learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to our hearts, he wrote in his essay, "The Over-Soul," that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.
Yet, instead of embracing the broad vision of Channing, Emerson and the Transcendentalists, many of our ancestors continued simply to bump up against Christianity, to say "no" to this and that. In response, many others became entrenched in what might be called a conservative, liberal Christianity that clung to old ideas and interpretations. I suggest that this may be seen as the early evolution of the so-called Humanist/Theist controversy. I also suggest that it is not a creative or helpful dialogue for us any more. It is, instead, a stand-off, a stalemate, with both views, in essence, rejecting the same thing, saying "No" to the same narrow view of God,—but too embroiled in saying "no" to one another to notice that there is a way to say "Yes" to Something More.
What both are rejecting is what the Rev. A. Powell Davies called in a 1946 sermon the "the God of miracles and interventions, of revelations and salvations, of tyranny and sentimentalisms." This God, as Davies pointed out, is dead. "There is no longer any kindness," he said, "in letting anyone cling to such a fantasy."
Yet, he goes on to say, "The only God who ever lived is living still." "...there is a power, a spirit, a presence far beyond our intellectual grasp but utterly alive in human minds, awake in human hearts, and moving us onward to our own fulfillment...."
What is the nature of this God who ever lived? Another Unitarian voice, that of the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, offers this perspective:
...when I say "God" it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that the poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas and the saviors of the race and God—whoever God may be—has at one time or another reached my soul!... The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library, but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted with my tears.
Davies said, "We shall weep for the god who never was until we accept the God who forever is." (27)
I say, we shall argue about the gods who never were until we accept the God who forever is:
The Poet of the world, of the universe. The Mystery that reaches out beyond any distance we can imagine; the Love that will not let us go. Everything that is not us, that we do not control. All that engenders and enlivens, that creates and destroys and creates again. All that is us and the vast Otherness that is not us. All that is deeply who we are and can be, all that draws us out of ourselves and connects us to one another. All that we know, and all that we do not, and never will, know. All That Is.
I believe that we come to our churches and their communities, as we come to this place this morning, expecting (to slightly paraphrase what Alice Walker once wrote) to find this God. We expect to discover more the ties that weave us together. We expect to learn more about the intricate patterns of living. We expect a moment, when the awareness of the Presence that looks out from another's eyes allows us to glimpse that greater Presence in which we all live and move and have our deepest being.
May we open our hearts and our minds to these moments—may they be many, and may they immeasurably enrich and ennoble us along our ways.
Amen, and amen.
References and Sources
- F. Forrester Church, God and Other Famous Liberals, Simon and Schuster, NY:1991.
- A. Powell Davies, The Faith of an Unrepentant Liberal, Beacon Press, Boston:1947.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Oversoul."
- Charles H. Lyttle, The Liberal Gospel, Beacon Press, Boston:1925.
- John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, HarperSanFrancisco:1998.
Spirit of Life, God of our hearts and minds:
we seek You, each of us, out of that profound Uniqueness
which draws us together in wonder and thankfulness.
We seek You, each of us, in our own ways;
our words and images revealing both
our diversity and our commonality,
our ideas and speculations reflecting both
our hopes and our aspirations.
In this place, where our individual paths converge,
we seek an unhurried moment
to remember and to give thanks:
may we remember that which we often believe
we will never forget: to be kind to one another,
willing to seek understanding,
willing to offer compassion and respect.
may we be thankful for all that blesses us, for all
that reminds us of how precious each moment is,
for all that renews in us an abiding astonishment
that we even live at all.
May we look to Life with humor and humility,
courage and curiosity,
along all the roads we may travel,
alone and together.
Blessed be; amen.
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Last updated on Thursday, September 8, 2011.
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I received this book to review quite awhile ago and I'm so glad I've had the opportunity to not just read it once but twice. As I was perusing the list of books to choose, this one popped out at me as it's such a struggle an adult seeking to make good media choices and more so as parents to help our children discern the media before them. I admit that we, as Christians, need help negotiating our way through these forms of media and thankfully the Catholic Church has given us tools to help us to do so. I had no idea that the Church had much to say about Facebook, Xbox and twitter. In his book, Infinite Bandwidth: Encountering Christ through the Media, Dr. Eugene Gan offers us tools that teach us how to wade through all the choices and make good ones. He unpacks what the Church has written through the 60+ documents on social communication and shows us the 7 principles, what he calls the 7 keys, that can become our guide for blogging, texting, movie watching and video game playing. While the church does not mention those forms of media specifically, it does show us broadly through guidelines and basic doctrinal principles how quickly media is changing and developing. Eugene Gan takes specific media and media applications to illustrate the principles and guidelines laid out by our Church.
Here are the keys, as Eugene Gan illustrates through his chapters:
Dignity of the human person
Motivated by and relative to experience
In each of these "key" chapters, you will find current examples of media to illustrate the point.
If I had to choose a favorite chapter I suppose I'd land on the 5th key, inspiring. I found it, well, inspiring! In it Dr. Gan talks about how God uses media as a sign that points the way to Him and the way to Him is heaven! Now if that doesn't elevate your view of what media is and should be, not sure what will. I could truly quote the whole chapter, there are so many gems tucked inside it. In a document by the Congregation for Catholic Education, the Church outlines that "through media, we share in God's work of communicating love to others. It tells us that God helped man to develop media so that we could use it to inspire people to pursue virtue and a relationship with Him. Simply put, it tells us media exists to be a sign pointing the way to holiness."(pg. 85)
In the rest of the chapter, Dr. Gan uses the films, It's a Wonderful Life and Batman Begins as examples of movies that inspire us and move us to hope. In the later, he points out that while evil is still evil, in the movie, good triumphs! These examples show us that hope still exists for the fallen world. He juxtaposes these examples with a movie that won several Academy Awards, Unforgiven, with Clint Eastwood. He points out that this movie is devoid of all hope and light. It is filled with nihilism which points people in the wrong direction and leaves us only with despair. So you see, media arouses feelings in us that directly contradict what we believe to be true and right. So what does he say we should do? Turn off the tv and never watch it again? Not at all, remember we are called to be in the world but not of it!
There are practical things we can do to help us discern what we see and hear.
First, pray for prudence. Ah, prudence is such an amazing virtue! It helps us see the true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it. Prudence is what guides the judgement of conscience. And with the help of this virtue, we can apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid. All of that is not my own words or thoughts but comes directly from the Cetechism of the Catholic Church, 1806 (an incredible resource I might add).
After we pray, do a little research. Read reviews, find out the target audience, watch a movie's trailers or search Internet databases like IMDB dot com for info about what we are about to watch.
Then ask questions. In each chapter, Dr. Gan outlines specific questions we can ask to help us discern what we are watching.
Next, is integration: talk about it with a friend or spouse, practice an occasional media fast to help gain perspective and regain balance.
Lastly, he recommends passing it on. Watch a show with your kids so you can better understand what they're viewing. Talk to them about what you just watched or used (if its a video game). Ask questions that allow them to think and see the bigger picture.
so much good stuff, every page has something underlined or starred!
This review was written as part of The Catholic Company's book reviewer program. I received a copy of Infinite Bandwidth, by Eugene Gan, to review but no other compensation was awarded. All thoughts are my own opinion. Visit the Catholic Company for more great books, gifts for Sacrament celebrations and other excellent Catholic resources.
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Last week we reported on an Iowa bill aimed at preventing undercover investigations at concentrated animal feeding operations that was on Gov. Terry Brandstad's desk.
At the time Brandstad's office said it was still considering but late Friday he quietly signed it to the dismay of activists who'd hoped to stop it.
"Governor Branstad has failed Iowa, and the American people," said Nathan Runkle the executive director of Chicago-based Mercy for Animals. "By siding with those who seek to keep Iowa’s corrupt factory farming practices hidden from public view and signing this bill into law, he has created a safe haven for animal abuse and other criminal activity in the state. Mercy For Animals, along with a broad coalition of national groups representing a wide spectrum of public interests, including animal welfare, civil liberties, public health, food safety, environmental protection, food justice, workers' rights, and First Amendment interests, is exploring all legal avenues to overturn this dangerous and un-American law."
The bill in Iowa focuses on criminalizing the use of false pretense to gain access to CAFO and Monday, Brandstad commented on that aspect.
"My feeling is if somebody comes onto somebody else's property through fraud or deception or lying, that is a very serious violation of people's rights," Branstad said at his weekly news conference according to the Associated Press. "People should be held accountable for that...this is a reasonable public policy for the state of Iowa. I think a number of states will probably follow us."
Many Illinois sustainability and environmental groups--including the Illinois Coalition for Clean Air and Water, Mercy for Animals and the Humane Society of the U.S.--hope this will not be the case and have pledged to make their voices heard as Illinois holds hearing on its own similarly-aimed Animal Facilities Bill HB5143 on Wednesday. Illinois recently launched an online program where citizens can register their support or opposition on "witness slips" even if they don't attend the hearing. They can be filled out for that bill here.
"This bill will criminalize neighbors of CAFOs from taking photos of environmental violations in their community," said Karen Hudson an Illinois farmer and spokesperson for ICCAW. "We are the EPA's local eyes and ears. The EPA needs photographs to document alleged environmental violations. This ignores public health in our community."
Illinois Farm Bureau's Kevin Semlow, however, says that bill will protect farmers from videos of their operations taken out of context and broadcast to the world.
"Our biggest concen has always been how someone could come in and take something out of context withiout looking over the whole process," he said. "We, in no way, condone bad practices but we believe our current laws allow someone to investigate if there is any cruelty to animals going on."
State Representative Ann Williams (D-Chicago) says she also has reservations about the bill.
"I'm not sure it's necessary as there are numerous laws on the books pertaining to trespassing so I don't know what it really accomplishes," she said. "I think it's critical that we ensure that whistleblowers are protected if they bring to light unsafe or dangerous conditions with our food.
"There's a long history of whistleblowers and exposes from groups that have really affected our food industry from Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' to the more recent issue with McDonald's," which changed its meat buying practices after undercover investigations exposed animal welfare practices in certain CAFOs.
Runkle worries that Iowa has set a dangerous precedent by passing its industrial farm law."At the behest of the multibillion-dollar meat, dairy and egg industries, similar Ag-Gag bills are being proposed in states all across the country, including Illinois, New York, Utah, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri and Nebraska," Runkle noted. "Unfortunately, Iowa’s flawed and misdirected new law could set a dangerous precedent nationwide by throwing shut the doors to industrial factory farms and allowing animal abuse, environmental violations, and food contamination to flourish undetected, unchallenged, and unaddressed." | <urn:uuid:d61b4df2-a214-4d3f-bf28-b6af1c4cb786> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.herald-mail.com/topic/chi-food-policy-cafo-protection-bill-gets-hearing-in-illinois-20120305,0,1404351.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964331 | 835 | 1.625 | 2 |
A few weeks ago, my co-bloggers were doubtful that it is possible to watch 36 hours of television in a week. The main factor that makes television viewing on this scale possible for me is the DVR, which allows
me to tape two shows simultaneously. It also allows me to easily fast-forward through commercials, and because of the DVR, the only commercials I see anymore are when I’m watching live sports. While the ability to easily record a show and watch it later (and fast forward through commercials as you watch it later) has improved the quality of life for my roommates and me, I’ve often wondered how it affects advertisers. After all, it’s their money that pays for my favorite shows.
A recent study in the Journal of Advertising Research addressed this very question. Erik du Pleiss of the South African advertising agency Millard Brown gathered 68 average TV watchers for an experiment on ad recall.
Participants were first shown a series of ads at normal speed, and then were shown the same ads fast forwarded. They were asked if they remembered the ad and how much they liked the ad. Here are their results as presented in the Harvard Business Review article on this topic:
As it turns out, if you’ve seen an ad before, even seeing it for a split second while fast forwarding will make you think of the product. I know that this works on me- when I’m fast forwarding through a show and see an ad for Wendy’s, I crave a baconator even if I don’t see the whole ad. Mmm… baconator.
Interestingly, whether people watch a show at normal speed or fast forwarded doesn’t seem to affect how much they like the ad. Though fast forwarded scores were always lower, they weren’t significantly lower.
Du Pleiss correctly points out that fast-forwarding through commercials to get back to your show requires paying pretty close attention to the TV. I can attest that it’s very easy to go too far and miss some of your show. This increased attention might actually benefit advertisers if they create an ad designed to be viewed very fast with no sound.
DVR’s are here to stay. They are just too convenient- thanks to our DVR, I can now leave my house during “Shark Week”. Advertisers must adapt to this new technology instead of just complaining about it. I’m very interested to see what they come up with, and how I can learn to skip it so I can watch my show.
DU PLESSIS, E. (2009). Digital Video Recorders and Inadvertent Advertising Exposure Journal of Advertising Research, 49 (2) DOI: 10.2501/S0021849909090345 | <urn:uuid:f3affd91-b212-4470-ae07-97ef794f025d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=5002&cpage=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965224 | 580 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Early Educators Access and Advocacy Initiative
BTWIC is currently engaged in its Early Educators Access & Advocacy Initiative, which has been the initiative’s focus since 2009. In 2011, our activities to support this project ranged from filing our first piece of legislation to two separate education and awareness campaigns expected to reach more than 10,000 early educators. And that’s just the start of BTWIC’s work to support low-income children and the early educators who teach them. Learn more about our various projects on the “Initiatives” page. | <urn:uuid:937c4762-8717-4c77-91ff-0a1f8d1cf0c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.btwic.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966339 | 120 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Readers of the magazine are the top public school administrators in the country, and they know from experience what does and does not work within their districts. As part of its annual award program, District Administration asked for nominations of innovative products and services that have made a positive difference in their districts in 2010.
The winning products were determined by the quantity of nominations received per product, as well as evaluating the quality of readers’ nominations and explanations.
“This year’s winners were a very diverse group of products, ranging from classroom resources to district-level management tools,” says Kurt Eisele-Dyrli, products editor. “Many of them, from online assessments and notification systems to thin clients and projectors, enabled readers to do more with less, which reflects the challenging times faced by many school systems.”
BoardDocs has helped over 400 organizations dramatically reduce costs, save time, increase transparency and become more effective from day one. All BoardDocs SaaS offerings are fully supported on most mobile devices, including the Apple® iPad™. Only BoardDocs includes dedicated project management, on-site training and US-based, 7 x 24 technical support with every subscription.
For more information about BoardDocs’ solutions, call (800) 407-0141 or visit www.boarddocs.com to experience our premier eGovernance solutions firsthand.
Developed and marketed exclusively by Emerald Data Solutions™, Inc., BoardDocs is the market leader and pioneer of eGovernance solutions. Serving more than 400 organizations nationwide, BoardDocs’ paperless agenda services offer governing bodies turn-key electronic solutions for processing virtually any type of governance document, including agenda items, supporting documents, policies, procedures and more. BoardDocs’ services alleviate the enormous task of assembling, printing, distributing and revising board packets. BoardDocs’ unique, state-of-the-
About District Administration:
District Administration is a monthly publication covering all of the important topics faced in today’s K12 school systems. With a circulation of more than 73,000, District Administration reaches top decision-makers in virtually every school district across the country. Subscribers are district-level leaders in K12 education, including superintendents, assistant superintendents, curriculum directors, business officers, IT directors and federal funds administrators.
* District Administration is the leading provider of practical solutions and management insights for K12 leaders.
* District Administration delivers top-quality coverage and analysis of the unique issues, challenges and opportunities faced by K12 district executives.
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Emerald Data Solutions™ Inc. develops BoardDocs® industry-leading eGovernance solutions, serving more than 400 organizations nationwide. BoardDocs’ paperless agenda services help organizations save money, save time and make a difference. | <urn:uuid:83ac406e-a1a3-4918-8cb4-b18d3c7d10f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prlog.org/11116462-boarddocs-named-to-top-100-products-of-2010-by-district-administration-magazine.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936367 | 585 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Written by PETA
On a hot Labor Day weekend, Los Angeles–area
residents showed their warm hearts by turning out in droves to speak out
against notorious elephant abuser Have Trunk Will Travel's (HTWT)
elephant rides at the L.A. County Fair. Then, as the first demonstration was wrapping
up, another wave of people came to
protest, so fairgoers were treated to back-to-back demonstrations.
Standing outside a busy entrance and screening
undercover footage that shows
HTWT trainers as they strike and shock elephants,
demonstrators received honks and waves of support from passing cars and handed
out almost 3,000 leaflets to interested fairgoers. Because of the overwhelmingly
positive response, chances are good that the elephants gave far fewer bullhook-prodded
And we're not about to ease the pressure
on HTWT or the L.A. County Fair—PETA has secured a demonstration spot near an
entry gate to the fair for the rest of the month. As long as HTWT is trying to
make a buck off elephant suffering, animal advocates will be out in force convincing
fairgoers that their money is better spent on the Ferris wheel.
It's not too late for you to tell the L.A. County Fair to send
cruelty to animals packing.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to
an animal, please click
here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the
animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local
police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA
immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
Follow PETA on Twitter!
Almost all of us grew up eating meat, wearing leather, and going to circuses and zoos. We never considered the impact of these actions on the animals involved. For whatever reason, you are now asking the question: Why should animals have rights? Read more. | <urn:uuid:78ea64da-ade7-4382-93d2-1d06f3be1cb9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://origin.www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2011/09/06/l-a-residents-unite-against-elephant-abuse.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952552 | 453 | 1.554688 | 2 |
How to become an expert winemaker | port and sherry
Winemakers have always tried to make something that tastes a little like sherry or make their own champagne. I’ve tried most things and the sherry did taste like cheap sherry so it’s worth having a go. You can make something that tastes a lot like port too and so if you like your port and lemon, you can try that too.
There are lots of recipes in winemaking books that involves things like bananas and raisins. If you make wine with ripe bananas, it does taste a little like sherry! Raisins also give a wine a sherry flavour. However, I think it’s better to do it the easy way!
You’ll need to make it stronger than most wines and so will need a wine yeast that will ferment to quite high alcohol. This is easier to make if you make 25 litres, because you can mix you fruit juices. You can use 4 litres of apple and a couple of litres of white grape juice for a full-bodied wine. If you’re only making 5 litres of wine, than use 1 litre of white grape juice.
Sherry is quite high in tannin and so use extra. I always use tea to add tannin because it tends to be better quality than the grape tannin you buy. You will also need more sugar than usual, about 1200 grams.
Pour you sugar into your food grade bucket, add a pot of tea that you have made using about 3 spoons of tea (or teabags). Then add a litre of white grape juice and stir to dissolve the sugar. Then you can add water to about 3 litres to dilute it and then add the yeast that you should have cultured earlier. Then syphon it into a demijohn and allow it to ferment. Secure a plastic bag over the top of the demijohn to allow the carbon dioxide to escape and to keep out bugs like fruit flies. Top it up after a few days to about 4.7 litres.
When it’s finished fermenting, test with an hydrometer and the SG should be about 1.000. Then add you wine stabiliser to stop it fermenting and 1 campden tablet. After about 24 hours in a cool place add the wine finings. The wine finings should be mixed with a little of the wine in a soft drinks bottle and then added to the bulk of the wine.
Let your wine clear and syphon it off the sediment. You might need to syphon it off the sediment a couple of times before it’s filtered. When you have a finished and filtered the wine, you should have about 4.5 litres (you lose some when you remove the sediment).
Now you need a proper Spanish sherry from Spain and you can top your wine up with this, so the enzymes from the sherry make it all taste like sherry. Then you leave it for a few months until it has thrown another sediment, syphon it off again; then filter it for a second time. Now it can be bottled, sealed and labelled.
Then it’s finished!
To make a port substitute, do it the same as for sherry except substitute the white grape juice for red and when you top it up at the end; top it up with port from Portugal, rather than sherry from Spain.
I’m not sure why I have less readers this week, but I need help getting more readers so please share with your friends on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. You can also check out last weeks blog that was about making punch. Please comment, if you have a question. | <urn:uuid:0c8d0a84-ba9b-4de0-ae67-1a438967bac0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://azillionideas.com/how-to-become-an-expert-winemaker-port-and-sherry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939385 | 771 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Ode To Sales
Amidst all the odes to capitalism and capitalists on this site allow me one to the lowly foot soldiers of this glorious enterprise. Let's toast the guys and gals who carry that bag and with that smile and shoeshine, look the free-market system point-blank in the face almost daily — if it's not good fishing, golfing or shopping weather that is.
"Nothing happens until something's sold" they say. Problem is, "they" always say this in a patronizing tone. "Awww those poor saps," they're really thinking. "Those poor Willy Lomans.. How can they go through that? All that rejection? Let's stroke them a little, put their name up on the front billboard and stuff, make them feel better."
If they only knew. After a twenty-year tour of duty on the front lines myself, I contend that (successful) salespeople are the highest paid screw-offs in the land. In the lucre-made- for- effort- expended department, they shame even musicians and actors — on average that is. But I've yet to meet one who was a Democrat.
Strange, hunh? Usually people who rake it in from ludicrous effort decide that capitalism's "unfair" and champion pink or outright red politicians.
Forget the salesman stereotype. Forget the glad-handing, intellectually- shallow, self-deluding oaf with the Mr Haney accent of classic sales legend. Salespeople, on average, constitute the most sharp-witted, intellectually curious and well-read people in the realm of business today. Make sense actually — they always have the most time to read, not to say hunt, fish, and golf.
You'd be surprised, but nowadays Sales is largely a dumping ground for those whose intellectual curiosity, restlessness and voracious reading appetites saddled them with a degree (or even degrees) in the Liberal Arts or Humanities, and technical knowledge in nothing.
In the rest of the world these snotty pseudo-intellectuals go into Government work and harass businesspeople. Therein lies the problem of much of Third-World statism, regulation and poverty. Castro's first government ( 1959-60 before he declared himself a "Marxist-Leninist") was infested with these vermin. The new European super state is already plagued by them. Here in the U.S. these parlor Mensheviks go into government work too, but not nearly at the same rate, though it's getting worse every year.
But though our Government grows yearly it can't keep up with the mass production of Liberal Arts graduates. So they herd into the private sector by default. 15 years ago they might have landed a job as a "facilitator," a "systems analyst," an "implementer" a "coordinator," or some such wasteful idiocy.
Here they'd put out reams of flatulent memos for us to immediately trash. They'd constantly herd us into conference rooms for endless indoctrination and humbug, squandering our valuable golfing and fishing time (I exaggerate, of course. Many of us wouldn't be golfing or fishing, we'd be at Tiffany's or the Gold Club with an open account and a handful of tens, diligently at work, doing more for the company's bottom line than all the "facilitators" combined.) Worse, these vague administrators and managers maintained a degree of power over the people who actually made it possible for them to earn their salaries. Thus many remained Pinkos.
No more. Took a few years but the free market always flushes out freeloaders. Now they're dumped into Sales and that snotty Pseudo-intellectual sneer, that disdain of "trade," gets wiped their mugs in short order.
But an amazing thing happens to many Liberal arts, free-spirit types when they enter Sales with a sigh and a grimace: they find the footloose, unstructured, unsupervised set-up ideal. Soon they discover what many Fortune 500 recruiters are just coming around to: there's no better training for a life as bullshit artists than a curriculum which features nothing but essay questions. It's ideal.
Talk about that "law of unintended consequences!" Turns out, four years of BS-ing your way through essay exams on Baroque architecture and Thomist philosophy (of expertly camouflaging your ignorance of the assigned reading that is) made you a top software peddler! Now you can expertly camouflage your ignorance of the product to the client!
By now it's a cliche among salestrainers: product knowledge is the least important skill in selling. Delivery is everything. Same for passing the Philosophy, English, History, Psychology, Poli Sci or Sociology exam when you hadn't cracked the book. Skim the dust-jacket, get a few buzzwords right, find a way to flatter the prof (especially if its his book) — bingo: B+
Successful Salesreps apply the principle vocally, to the gain of our Gross National Product Soon they're picking up the tab for all their friends starving in the arts and academia. Nightly they festoon G-strings with their lucre in front of gaping friends who toil in office cubicles and banks.
Ex-teachers abound in sales. Journalism majors are legion. As a freshman, after a pitcher of beer, it's nice to dream of covering a Capitol Hill news conference. As a senior you're probably paying for your own beer, you've got your eye on that Lexus, and that starting salary at the Chigger Hollow Morning Bugle looks pathetic next to the draw against commission at Gulf Coast Sprockets or Reliable Insurance Agency.
English and History majors find that the life of a bank-teller gets old quick. The Peace Corps quicker. And Burger King assistant managers outearn any "editor" except those in Manhattan. Many of these wise up and start peddling.
Mencken wrote in Prejudices that his favorite dinner and drinking companions were always — not writers and assorted "artists" — but business men. "Because in their company you never hear any cant."
January 24, 2002
Humberto Fontova [send him mail] holds an M.A. in History from Tulane University. He's the author of Helldiver's Rodeo described as "Highly entertaining!" by Publisher's Weekly, as "Terrific!" by Salon.com, and as "Just what the doctor ordered!" by Ted Nugent.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com | <urn:uuid:e3c67edb-d217-431d-b4f3-9aab7dc76b44> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lewrockwell.com/fontova/fontova33.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955204 | 1,377 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Home owners will have access to affordable flood insurance for the next five years now that President Obama has signed a five-year reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program.
Congress passed the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 late last week as part of a transportation funding bill and the President signed it Friday. The legislation extends NFIP authority through September 30, 2017.
NFIP protects more than 5.6 million properties in about 21,000 communities where flood insurance is required for mortgages. Private market insurance companies offer flood insurance on high-value homes, but not policies for the lower-priced homes.
Flood-related disasters claim more lives and damage more property than any other type of natural disaster because they happen anywhere rain or snow falls — including every state in the U.S.
Federal flood insurance reduces the amount of money the federal government has to spend on disaster relief for flood victims.
Since September 2008 there have been more than 17 short-term NFIP extensions and authority the program has expired two times, delaying or cancelling 1,300 real estate transactions each day of the lapse, according to NAR research.
During the June 2010 lapse, NAR survey data estimates that more than 40,000 home sales were delayed or cancelled, which undermined home buyer and investor confidence.
Reps. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.); as well as Sens. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), and David Vitter (R-La.) were instrumental in passing the extension, NAR Presdient Moe Veissi said. | <urn:uuid:971e8b92-6ef1-45a0-b598-d14469936121> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.houselogic.com/news/floods/long-term-reauthorization-flood-insurance-program-brings-certainty-real-estate-markets/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94833 | 363 | 1.578125 | 2 |
What do you say when the University of Tennessee football team, after playing so admirably in the first half against Florida, falls apart in the second? What do you say when Auburn, playing well against Clemson, turns sour as milk ever since? What do you say when nationally-ranked Arkansas withers with such dispair they lose to Monroe before giving up 52 unanswered points to Alabama?
In search for words, we turn to the dean of all sports writers, the Murfreesboro-born and Vanderbilt educated Grantland Rice, maybe the most prolific writer ever. The grandson of a Confederate Major, Mr. Rice died in 1954 but – once in New York – penned the greatest opening paragraph of a college football game story in history.
Minutes after Notre Dame beat Army at New York’s Polo Grounds, Grantland wrote: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”
So how does that relate to college football today? Just this – Mr. Rice wrote a famous poem called “The Answer” and – to me – as I survey the college landscape of the day, it fits perfectly …
* * *
By Grantland Rice
When the battle breaks against you and the crowd forgets to cheer,
When the Anvil Chorus echoes with the essence of a jeer;
When the knockers start their panning in the knocker’s nimble way,
With a rap for all your errors and a josh upon your play.
There is one quick answer ready that will nail them on the wing;
There is one reply forthcoming that will wipe away the sting;
There is one elastic come-back that will hold them, as it should,
No matter where you finish in the mix-up or the row,
There are those among the rabble who will pan you anyhow;
But the entry who is sticking and delivering the stuff,
Can listen to the yapping as he giggles up his cuff;
The loafer has no come-back and the quitter no reply,
When the Anvil Chorus echoes, as it will, against the sky;
But there’s one quick answer ready that will wrap them in a hood,
* * *
That said, here are my Top Ten Picks for tomorrow’s college games:
MISSOURI (2-1, 0-1 SEC) at No. 7 SOUTH CAROLINA (3-0, 1-0 SEC), 3:30 p.m. (CBS Sports) – Mizzou’s 41-20 loss to Georgia and the fact Arizona State lost by only four to UM last week tells us that USC, with Steve Spurrier’s SEC brand of football now ranked 7th in the country, doesn’t bode well for the Tigers in “the other” Columbia. UM coach Gary Pinkel handled his star QB James Franklin badly last weekend while USC won its second straight game by over a 38-point margin. Carolina, a 10-point pick, should waltz with the Gamecocks' linebackers paving the way. MY PICK? South Carolina, 38-14.
MIAMI (2-1) at GEORGIA TECH (2-1), 3:00 p.m. (ESPN3) – The Hurricane’s 39-point loss to Kansas State was ridiculous, especially with sensational frosh RB Duke Johnson’s 638 all-purpose yards through three games. GT has been untested after the close loss to Va. Tech in the opener but a top WR quit the team in Atlanta this week and the notion is UM owns GT after winning the last 3 games between the two. Tech is a 14-point favorite so the logical thinking is that’s too heavy. MY PICK? Miami, 22-20.
No. 2 LOUISIANA STATE (3-0) at AUBURN (1-2, 0-1 SEC), 7:00 p.m. (ESPN) – LSU is a 21-point favorite over a floundering Auburn, this because AU had to go OT to beat Monroe after giving up 28 points last Saturday. So as the Bayou Bengals dip their toes into SEC waters, the feeling here is that LSU will romp on The Plains. AU will be idle next Saturday so the true litmus will come out against Arkansas Oct. 6. Look for LSU to win easily until the Alabama game in Tiger Stadium Nov. 3. MY PICK? LSU, 42-13.
RUTGERS (3-0) at ARKANSAS (1-2, 0-1 SEC), 7:00 p.m. (ESPNU) – Let me make this real simple. The Scarlet Knights beat Tulane by 12 and South Florida by 10 so they are hardly Alabama. UA was “embarrassed” last week so with a fiery QB Wilson returning and RB Knile Davis determined, Arkansas is much stronger than the 7 points the bookies claim. Look for UA to use speed and pride in Fayetteville, where there is now more unrest than I can remember. Everybody knows a big win here will help immeasurably. MY PICK? Arkansas, 31-14.
No. 18 MICHIGAN (2-1) at No. 11 NOTRE DAME, 7:30 p.m. (NBC) – ND has just allowed 30 points in three games – the biggest 3 coming in the 20-3 upset over then No. 10 Michigan State last Saturday – so the Irish are very real. Trouble is, ND doesn’t have the brawn to snuff UM’s Denard Robinson like Alabama did so look for this to be a thriller. Notre Dame is favored by 6 and coach Chip Kelly is trying to snap the stranglehold that UM holds, winning five of the last six between these two. "You want your team with confidence and you want people to talk about your team in the sense that this is a big game," Kelly said. "Those are the kind of things that coaches want to try to balance.” MY PICK? Notre Dame, 28-24.
No. 15 KANSAS STATE (3-0) at No. 6 OKLAHOMA (2-0), 7:50 p.m. (Fox Sports) – In the best game of the night, the Sooners are a 14-point favorite but who can forget last year when K-State, 7-0 before the game, got warped 58-17 by Bobby Stoops and Co.? Landry Jones can tie Steve Davis as the winningest QB in UO history in this game but the better focus will be on KS QB Collin Klein who ranked 9th in the country right now. OU has won the last five in the series. MY PICK? Oklahoma, 38-18.
VANDERBILT (1-2, 0-1 SEC) at No. 5 GEORGIA (3-0, 1-0 SEC), 7:45 p.m. (ESPN2) -- The ‘Dores are not in the same league with Georgia – of the two it’s the Bulldogs that are playing the “old man” brand of football that separates the haves and have-nots in the SEC. UGa, a 16-point favorite, is playing with greater strength and intensity every week and has the balance between the pass and the run to stifle VU. The ‘Dog defense is giving up too many points – averaging 21 per game – but Vandy didn’t score more than 13 in either of the first two games against like opponents. UGa is favored by 16. MY PICK? Georgia, 37-15.
No. 10 CLEMSON at No. 4 FLORIDA STATE, 8:00 p.m. (ABC) – The ‘Noles are a 14-point pick and Clemson’s Dabo Sweeney understands why. “On the outside looking in, I’d probably pick them too,” Sweeney said this week. “But I’m not on the outside. I’m on the inside. It’s ESPN College GameDay, a top-four team in the country and playing well with a great quarterback. It might be a lack of respect on people looking at it from the outside, but they’re a really good team. Outside of Alabama or LSU, I don’t know of anybody that would be favored going to Tallahassee.” My point precisely. MY PICK? Florida State, 37-21.
ELSEWHERE IN THE SEC
OLE MISS (2-1) at TULANE (0-2), 12 Noon (FSN) – The Rebs gave up 66 to Texas last week – which spoke volumes – but Tulane is still in college football purgatory and can’t compete with a much-improved Ole Miss. For the record UM is a 17-point favorite but the Rebels will enjoy the SuperDome and have a chance to show off a little before next week’s come-uppance in Tuscaloosa. MY PICK? Ole Miss, 28-10.
KENTUCKY (1-2) at No. 14 FLORIDA (3-0, 2-0 SEC), 12:21 p.m. (SEC Network) – Florida is favored by 24 but some think the Gators had a big growth spurt during the second half of last week’s 37-20 win at UT so this could really get out of hand in a hurry. UK just doesn’t have the heart for “The Swamp”after the Western Ky. loss so look for this to be a rout. MY PICK? Florida, 45-9.
FLORIDA ATLANTIC (1-2) at No. 1 ALABAMA, 4:00 p.m. – There was a special “revision” on this week’s Top 20 that the jokesters were sending each other on the Internet this week and the Top 5 looked like this: 1. Alabama; 2. Alabama’s B-Team; 3. LSU; 4. Alabama’s C-team; 5. Florida State. So now you know why Alabama is picked by 51 in this one. MY PICK? Alabama, 45-0.
SOUTH ALABAMA (1-2) at MISS. STATE (3-0, 1-0 SEC), 7:00 P.M. – This is a laugher, despite the fact State only beat Troy last week by 6. But what makes it interesting is that MSU will be idle next week before playing at Kentucky. In theory, State could be unbeaten when the Bullies host UT on Oct. 13 before the Vols go back to Neyland for the annual “Third Saturday in October” festival. MY PICK? Miss. State, 45-13.
S.C. STATE (1-2) at TEXAS A&M (1-1, 0-1 SEC), 7:00 p.m. (FSN) -- The visitors have a big appearance guarantee here so this is the Aggies' last tune-up before resuming the Arkansas rivalry next week. Keep an eye on A&M in the weeks to come – they could be a spoiler in the LSU-Auburn-Miss. State-Alabama gauntlet if they continue to improve. MY PICK? Texas A&M, 45-10.
AKRON (1-2) at TENNESSEE (2-1, 0-1 SEC), 7:30 P.M. – UT will “Zip” past Akron but will still be a heavy underdog at Georgia. The Vols folded like a jack-knife against Florida after playing a respectable first half so tomorrow Tyler Bray will sling it around a lot and the running backs will be pretty yet the question will linger – when will UT finally win a big one? MY PICK? Tennessee 35-14.
AND ONE MORE ….
No. 17 APPALACHIAN STATE (1-2) at CHATTANOOGA (1-2), 7:00 p.m. – It’s Homecoming at UTC and, as the Mocs play in the 105th season, it is high time UTC snaps a seven-game losing streak to Appy State. UTC has the best football team ever assembled here, as last week’s 35-0 rout proved, but the cure for snake-bite, as evidenced in the Jacksonville State game’s final second, is still evasive. With good crowd support, there is no foreseeable reason UTC should not win every remaining game – quite a tribute to what Russ Huesman has done since returning to coach his alma mater. MY PICK? Chattanooga, 34-24. | <urn:uuid:70cd1088-fa1a-40cf-86fb-897083df92cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chattanoogan.com/2012/9/20/234743/Roy-Exum-.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949918 | 2,803 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Although polls don’t find differences between men and women on what everyone calls “women’s issues,” they do find differences on policy issues we don’t usually consider in terms of gender. Women are more liberal on health care, on defense spending and on anti-poverty programs. A smarter approach to abortion, however necessary for Republicans, won’t change that.
The common theme here is that the current Republican economic message isn’t very compelling to any of these groups. If Republicans addressed that problem, they would find their numbers improving in all of these groups, and outside them too. White, working-class voters, who supported Romney for president but seem to have had low turnout, might have shown up in greater numbers if Republicans had retooled on economics.
Men and women, whites and Hispanics, the young and the middle-aged: All of them want politicians to offer a practical agenda to create jobs, raise wages, and make health care and higher education more affordable. Most of them aren’t wedded to liberal answers on those issues. They will take them over nothing, and that’s what Republicans have been giving them.
Republicans are unlikely to return to majority status, or even keep their current strength, unless they do better. Looking at voters in categories of race, sex and age won’t help them do that. | <urn:uuid:d9d9c731-d069-4e4d-bd92-8b53955cd056> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2012/11/13/its-not-about-demographics-its-about-economics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96273 | 286 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Developing a game for Android and iOS
I'd just like to share a bit about my experience in developing software for mobile platforms, namely Android and iOS. Why am I posting this here? Because we're trying to use as much open-source software as possible. We'll also share code we develop along the process. However there are some problems with this approach. First, here's a screenshot of the game as it is today:
I belong to a small team of two working on a new castle defense game for mobile devices. You can check out our site here. I'm developing the graphical parts of the game and most of the work has been done on a PC running Ubuntu 11.04 and using some of the excellent FOSS graphical tools available. These include Blender 2.58 for 3D modeling and animation, including 2D animation, Inkscape for most of the drawing part and Gimp for post-processing and assembling of images. Coding is mostly done in Mac or Windows because of the Corona SDK we use being only available for Mac and Windows. Still, I have done some coding with Gedit myself.
The problems start when we need to do some work related to the final stages of animation: the packing the frames together. Manually adding frames together is very time consuming and there are several tools available for this task, however there are only Windows and/or Mac versions of these programs.
Also, there aren't good and easy to use SDK's for developing games for mobile platforms. What bothers me the most is the lack of software for linux for developing games for android. Sure, Java development can be done in Eclipse but that just means we have to do an iPhone version and a separate Android version from scratch (code-wise). Corona SDK is the only effort I've seen of multi-platform support from a single code base, but that's only for Win and Mac like I said before. I doubt there will ever be a linux simulator for Corona, but one can dream.
Lastly I just want to point out that it's a real shame there isn't any mobile games SDK for linux since there are already some very good tools for programming, like the amazing Meld for comparing and merging software projects, the various IDEs with excellent capabilities, not to mention that Ubuntu is a really wonderful desktop environment to work on.
Partially related rant. If one doesn't want to do Java (or indeed, uses a cross-phone-OS SDK), the default target is ARM. No problem there, but nobody usually bothers to do more, or isn't even allowed to (via the SDK coming as ARM binaries, etc).
This is starting to be a real issue, because MIPS Android phones and tablets are becoming available. Cue x86 Android, and even more arches.
A surprisingly small part of all Android apps are pure Java, most have at least some ndk parts, and thus only work on ARM. Limiting your market there, app devs.
Of course it would be nice to have a more unified setting (ala iOS), but meh.
Tags for this Thread | <urn:uuid:a50cc66c-fd55-443a-9e5c-8ec5c502c42e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?57374-Developing-a-game-for-Android-and-iOS&mode=hybrid | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956364 | 634 | 1.546875 | 2 |
On January 11 the first new patrol vessel of the Rotterdam Port Authority got its name and came into operation. The body was constructed in Poland (Stocznia Tczew) and completed at the Damen Shipyard in the Netherlands. The RPA 12 is the first in a series of seven vessels of which five are capable to fight fire as well. Total costs of the renewal of the fleet are 25 million euro.
NYK Engineering Co., Ltd., has become the first new shipbuilding consultancy in Japan to obtain ISO 9001:2000 certification. By obtaining the certificate, NYK Engineering has verified the establishment of a quality management system in their new shipbuilding consultancy service, which includes design of new shipbuilding, approval drawings, and site supervision. Source TMCnet
Celebrity Cruises has exercised its option to order a second 118,000 gross-registered-ton ship. German shipbuilder Meyer Werft will build the new tonnage, with delivery of the first ship planned for Fall 2008 and the second ship in Summer 2009. Celebrity also announced names of both new ships. The first new ship will be called Celebrity Solstice, and the second ship will be named Celebrity Equinox. The new series of ships will be known as the
Horizon Lines, Inc. took delivery of its first new containership, the Horizon Hunter from the Hyundai Mipo shipyard in South Korea. The Horizon Hunter is the first of five new, U.S.-flag, foreign built, sister vessels that the Company is chartering from subsidiaries of Ship Finance International Limited under definitive long-term charters and related agreements closed on April 11, 2006. The gross tonnage of the vessels is 28,592 tons, they have a capacity of 2,824 TEUs
The Iraqi Oil Tanker Co. launched its first new ship in 27 years, according to an AP report. The 14,000-ton, Chinese built Dijlah was inaugurated in Basra, officials said.
According to a June 1 report from the Los Angeles Times, the State Lands Commission lashed out at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to reverse its rejection of the first new oil drilling in California waters since 1969. At a contentious hearing in Santa Monica, the commission passed a resolution urging legislators not to go along with Schwarzenegger's plan, which would revive a drilling project off the Santa Barbara County coast that the commission killed in January.
Some University of Hawaii officials and faculty members are still pushing for a Navy research center on campus despite the Faculty Senate's rejection of the project, according to an AP story. University lawyers are reviewing the contract for a Navy University Affiliated Research Center to address concerns of faculty leaders who recently voted against the proposed military partnership. The vote against the center could be overturned if 100 professors sign a petition asking for a vote of all
Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard, Inc. (KPSI), of Philadelphia, PA., today delivered the M.V Manukai, a CV 2600 Philadelphia Class Containership. This is the first ship to be constructed at the new yard located in the former Philadelphia Naval Base. The M.V. Manukai is the first ship in a series of two containerships to be built for Matson Navigation Company, a shipping company based in San Francisco, CA. The U.S. Jones Act ship was christened by Margaret Inouye, wife of Hawaii Sen
ClassNK Chairman and President Noboru Ueda called upon the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) to play an expanded role in the future as he stepped down from his position as Chairman of the IACS Council. “Even as IACS must continue to maintain the highest quality standards,” said Mr. Ueda, “I hope that IACS will strengthen its relationship with the wider maritime community
The BALPURE ballast water treatment system, which received Type Approval in July 2011, has been selected for use on two flattop oceangoing heavy deck cargo barges. The Type-Approved BALPURE ballast water treatment system from Severn Trent De Nora has been selected for use on two oceangoing heavy deck cargo barges being constructed for Norwegian-based Greenway Shipping by Dalian Shipyard, at its shipyard in Dalian, China
Gas production has begun from the Rhyl gas field in Morecambe Bay, helping to secure the future of 400 North West jobs and boost energy security for the U.K. The Rhyl field, located 39km off the coast of Barrow, was first discovered in 2009 and is wholly owned and operated by Centrica Energy
ABS granted engineering company GTT approval in principle (AIP) for a 32,000 m capacity LNG carrier design. "While a few membrane LNG carriers in the 20,000 m capacity range were built in the 1990s, this is the first new design to be introduced since that time
Falvey Insurance Group has formed a new division, Safe Harbor Pollution Insurance. Offering some of the broadest terms available in the commercial market, Safe Harbor's Global Vessel Pollution Policy provides comprehensive protection for any vessel, owner or operator
Viking Cruises launch Viking Ocean Cruises, the first new cruise line in nearly a decade. Developed from the ground up to return the focus of cruising to the destination, Viking Ocean Cruises will begin sailing in May 2015 with its first vessel—Viking Star—embarking on maiden voyages
Construction for two new research ships funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) officially got underway with a keel-laying and dedication ceremony Aug. 17 in Anacortes, Wash. Contracts for both state-of-the-art Ocean-class Auxiliary General Purpose Oceanographic Research (AGOR)
EnQuest PLC, the largest UK independent production company in the UK North Sea, has reached a new North Sea safety milestone by recording five years free of Lost Time Incidents (LTIs) on drilling operations in the Thistle field. The LTI achievement covers a period of major operational activity
At the STX shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, France, two commemorative coins are welded to 'MSC Preziosa’s' mast radar, to mark a construction milestone. Earlier this year, following the termination of the agreement with the original owner, MSC Cruises signed a contract to take over the 140
American Petroleum Tankers (APT) affiliate intends to order the new ships from NASSCO Shipyared, San Diego. An affiliate of American Petroleum Tankers Parent LLC (“APT”), a company majority owned by funds managed by Blackstone on behalf of its investors
Aberdeen-based subsea installation contractor Bibby Offshore has announced investment of around £11million in Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) systems for its latest division, Bibby Remote Intervention Limited (BRIL). Initial investment of close to £4million has been made in ROV
Due to continuous delays in the construction and delivery of two Kamsarmax bulkers, Ultrabulk cancels. The bulkships were originally to be built at Zhoushan Jinhaiwan Shipyard Co. Ltd., China, but the yard failed to finish the construction within agreed contractual delivery terms
CMA CGM, the world’s third-largest container shipping line, purchases a stake in the Port of Long Beach’s Pier J. The deal will bring an additional 2.6 million container units to the Port and increase Port revenues by about $70 million over the next five years.
BAE Systems joined with Mid Ocean Tanker Company (MOTC), Mid Ocean Marine and Alterna Captial Partners earlier this year to commission the American Phoenix, a U.S. Flag/Jones Act-qualified product-chemical tanker. Measuring 616 x 105 ft. with a laden draft of 36 ft
STX Pan Ocean takes over the 83,000 dwt class Panamax, 'STX Horizon', its first new-build delivery of the year. Having concluded strategic contracts for long-term transportation with domestic and international shippers including POSCO, Hyundai-Steel, KEPCO subsidiaries, Vale and Fibria in Brazil
InterManager, the international trade association for the ship and crew management sector, has started the year by welcoming a new member. Ukrainian crew manager Alpha Navigation has been approved for Full Membership in what InterManager Secretary General Kuba Szymanski says is a significant
Feadship has launched the 57.60-metre twin-screw motoryacht with an interior from Bannenberg & Rowell Design. Larisa features a contemporary classic exterior profile, with a wide range of modern features. The strong curvaceous signature lines of the design are supported by a straight | <urn:uuid:a3712a9b-5404-4c7d-b39d-da6ad754a608> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marinelink.com/maritime/first-new | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950559 | 1,815 | 1.648438 | 2 |
The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, reports on the controversy over boat taxes in Kentucky. Some Kentucky boaters might go as far to as move their watercraft to the other side of the Ohio River, a drastic step to avoid paying a tax many feel is unfair.
The Kentucky Department of Revenue rarely enforced a tax on boats, but that changed this year. The Department of Revenue also has the option to impose back taxes up to five years. The average tax bill for a boat is $700.
Some boat owners are angry that the boat tax is being enforced now because the state never bothered to collect it before. To defy the tax, some boat owners have considered movoving their yachts and houseboats the Ohio side of the river, where there is no personal property tax for boats.
What do you think? Would you go as far as to move your boat to another state to avoid paying taxes? Let us know and post a comment below. | <urn:uuid:24d30829-73cc-4df8-a117-b63cd06ecd7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.boattrader.com/2007/01/boat-tax-in-kentucky-causes-controversy-on-ohio-river.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97911 | 194 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Abbas: No peace without freedom for prisoners
Published Wednesday 27/02/2013 (updated) 06/03/2013 10:17
RAMALLAH (Ma’an) -- President Mahmoud Abbas said Tuesday that the issue of prisoners and releasing them is the central issue of the Palestinian people and its leadership.
He insisted there would not be peace with Israel side without releasing prisoners.
Abbas’ remarks came at a reception with prisoners advocates at his residence in Ramallah, where he affirmed that the leadership was doing its best to save the lives of hunger strikers and end their suffering.
He said talks were ongoing with all factions to resolve the issue.
Abbas called on the Israeli side to implement agreements related to prisoners, especially those who were detained before Oslo, and agreements with the former prime minister of Israel.
Abbas also condemned the death of Arafat Jaradat in Israeli custody and called for an international investigation. | <urn:uuid:5391bafb-9a91-4476-9713-3d0e9803b6fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=569580 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968851 | 191 | 1.5625 | 2 |
GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz told the Detroit News that he felt there was a 10% chance the Volt wouldn't succeed, and after reading the article "GM tries to unplug Volt Hype", blogger Bob decided further clarification was needed. From the very beginning, the guys and gals over at GM have tried to temper enthusiasm surrounding the Volt, since production is dependent on battery technology that as yet does not exist. Lutz points out in his blog that he and the company are trying to keep the public abreast of every development as it unfolds, good or bad, in order to keep everyone informed.
The Detroit News talked to industry analysts and competitors alike to gauge opinion on whether the Volt would happen or not. Writer Sarlon Terlep also brought GM's failure with the EV1 program into the fray as evidence that the General has unplugged electrics in the past. In the article, Ford's director of sustainable mobility technologies and hybrids, Nancy Gioia, states that if Ford says they're going to do something, "you're going to see it." We'll hold our breath in anticipation of Ford's 250,000 hybrids per year by 2010. Oh wait, Ford unsaid that less than a year after they said it.
In the end, we feel the article offered little in the way of evidence that GM is unplugging the hype. Quite the contrary, GM's "vote for Volt" website, which has received 440,000 votes, is only one component of the Volt hype. Blogger Bob is using every opportunity available to speak about the virtues of Volt. As he says in his blog, GM is 100% committed to the Volt, and we're 100% committed to hoping it happens.
[Source: FastLane Blog via thegmsource.com] | <urn:uuid:09fda74c-b6cb-4a42-8e6e-9452e9d12746> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/26/lutz-refutes-attack-on-volt-and-its-production-potential/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977673 | 368 | 1.65625 | 2 |
In the Country of Men
by Hisham Matar
Viking £12.99, pp245
The eponymous men in Libyan-born Hisham Matar's outstanding debut novel are impenetrable, austere, terrifying. For nine-year-old Suleiman, they are a flickering but potent presence: hands in smoke-filled rooms that he is instructed to kiss. But Suleiman is growing up in 1970s Libya and a far larger force looms over even these goliaths: Muammar Gaddafi, 'The Benefactor', 'The Guide'.
Oppression is with us from the opening page in the form of the relentless summer heat from which humans and ants scuttle into shady hiding. Suleiman's days lack form; school is out and he spends his time playing on the roof of his parents' house or in the streets of their affluent suburb.
Baba, Suleiman's father, disappears on various business trips. Mama dolls herself up for Baba's returns, but falls into a strange distemper whenever he is away: giggling, chain-smoking and forgetting to turn the gas off. Her medicine is procured under the counter from the local baker. It is her and Suleiman's little secret.
When Mama was 14, she was spied hanging out with boys at the Italian Coffee House. She was locked in her room for a month and forced into marriage. Suleiman is bound up in the guilt and rage that emanate from this. Baba is 'the man who was her punishment', Suleiman 'the boy that sealed her fate'.
An already mystifying world becomes markedly more so. There are strange meetings between the grown-ups and whispered words of political dissent. Suleiman spots his father crossing the street when he is supposed to be abroad. Baba is wearing shades and Suleiman is panicked by the concealment. More men turn up to ask aggressive questions and search the house. Ustath Rashid, the father of Suleiman's friend, is carted off; then Baba too disappears.
After his father's disappearance, Suleiman watches Ustath Rashid being interrogated on television. Rashid later appears on screen at the national basketball stadium, where he is harried up a ladder and hanged. When the image becomes too gruesome, the screen is washed out with images of flowers and the national anthem is played. Gaddafi, it is rumoured, controls this piece of programming with a switch in his room.
The spectacle has left Suleiman with a permanent sense of 'quiet panic, as if at any moment the rug could be pulled from beneath my feet'. As a child, he is unable to process the horror, lashing out at his playmates (and the local beggar) with a befuddled sadism. As an adult, exiled in Egypt, he is disengaged and empty. 'Nationalism,' we are told, 'is a thin thread'; but Egypt has not replaced Libya in his affections. As for men, Suleiman has gained little understanding of their ways: 'It's a sign of madness, I know, to claim to know what is in another man's heart.'
At a time when western leaders have been cosying up to Gaddafi, it is salient to be reminded of the cruelty of his reign. In the Country of Men is a powerful political novel and a tender evocation of universal human conflicts - over identity, forgiveness, love. It is due to be published in 13 languages and, despite its short length, took several years to write. It was more than worth the wait. | <urn:uuid:cadc5c87-92bd-4674-bf4a-26da365f095e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/16/fiction.features2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973597 | 748 | 1.5 | 2 |
Six days a week the United States Postal Service delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail -- 40 percent of the entire world's volume.
The U.S. Postal Service is trying to come up with a way to make a five point five billion dollar payment due next month.
Patrick Donahoe, Postmaster General testified yesterday that unless congress comes up with the money to help, it may be forced out of business. The payment is to fund its retirement program.
To save money they've already consolidated offices. Two post offices, one in Golden HIll and the other in Coronado were on the closure list in San Diego.
The Post Office is also looking at eliminating Saturday mail service.
The post office says it needs to cut 120,000 jobs. They say the people hardest hit would be minorities and veterans. The agency says it's one of the largest employers of all minorities with African Americans making up 21 percent of its work force.
Right now, 3,700 offices are scheduled for a possible closure. | <urn:uuid:0fd9afe9-20df-4a5c-be54-9dce4b615a9a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/129374828.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955415 | 211 | 1.742188 | 2 |
There is a school of thought on productivity headed by super-duper prepare-o-matic David Allen and he has written a few books on the subject. I really like his approach which basically says that, it really doesn’t matter how much you have to do, if you have a system for capturing and processing your projects and tasks your stress will be relieved.
I am always looking for tips on being able to get more done with the paltry sum of hours that passes for a workday. Here are 2 tips I recently passed on to a family member:
1. Keep a single small notebook with you at all times. If you think of something you need to do or need to remember write it down immediately. The less things you keep in mental RAM, the less you will feel like you are drowning.
2. If you are feeling overwhelmed, sit down and set a timer for 10 mintues. For these 10 minutes, write continuously ALL of the things (no matter how obscure) on your mind that seem to be plaguing you. This is called a “mind sweep”. If you are still writing when the timer goes off, reset it and keep on going. When you are done you should have a pretty thorough to-do list.
I frequently read 43folders.com the site has tons of productivity/technology info. If anyone else has tips or resources, please share. | <urn:uuid:e20f1b20-1da2-490f-85c1-859c8bd2faee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://adearone.net/category/getting-things-done/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971351 | 290 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Using Big Data to name Marissa Mayer's baby
If the goal is to promote the Yahoo brand, the data points to a clear choice for the Mayer-Bogue baby
Congratulations to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and her husband Zachary Bogue who welcomed their first child, a baby boy, into the world on Sunday. As I write this the baby has not yet, so far as I know, been named; in fact, Mayer has invited friends to suggest names, meaning they are (sort of) crowdsourcing the naming of their baby! No word on whether they’ve started a Kickstarter campaign for his college fund.
Many have already jumped in the pool, suggesting clever names for the lad. I’d like to take a different approach, one based on Big Data. Big Data, it’s been pointed out recently, can be used for all sorts of things like protecting troops on the battlefield, telling football coaches when to go for it on fourth down and ensuring sustainable sushi. So why not use it to pick a name for the Mayer/Bogue baby?
Some have already turned to data to pick a name, in particular one that will result in a good outcome for the baby. But, really, is that the right outcome to focus on? This kid has already hit the lottery with these parents and should have every opportunity to succeed in life, whatever his name.
Instead, how about using data to pick a name that will resonate with as many of Yahoo’s target users as possible? Mayer, after all, was hired away from Google in July to breath new life into Yahoo. What better opportunity to generate some positive buzz for the company then the naming of the new CEO’s new baby?
Let’s start with popular names. According to the Social Security Administration, the top five names for baby boys in the U.S. in 2011 were: Jacob, Mason, William, Jayden and Noah. Delightful names, all.
But do we just want the most popular name? In the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner find that baby names are correlated with their parents’ socioeconomic status. So how about names that correlate with more well off families (i.e., those with more money to spend on Yahoo Shopping or who may be more valuable to those using Yahoo search marketing)?
Dubner and Levitt found that the most common boys name with both high-income and high-education white parents was Benjamin. Hmm. Benjamin was also the 19th most popular boys name in the U.S. in 2011, not to mention the #1 name in Argentina in 2011, #3 in Finland, #4 in Liechtenstein, #7 in Canada, and #9 in New Zealand, among other places. Now we’re talking!
I think the choice of a first name is now clear.
Now, for a middle name, I’d say we think more internationally. So how about a name that will resonate in, say, China (lots of people there, quickly growing economy, etc.). The top surname in China in 2007 was Wang, shared by around 93 million people. They might take notice if Yahoo’s new CEO names her baby after them, right?
I think we now have our middle name.
So, we’re done? Not quite. This kid is basically internet royalty. Royals, you may have noticed, tend to have several middle names. How about adding one more name that might win over a few million more hearts and minds? Based in the data, I have a good one.
Huh, you say? Well, consider that it was the third most popular boys name in India in 2011, and - shocker - it was the most popular boys name in the Arab world as a whole, including being #1 in Iran, Libya, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and the UAE. Again, we’re thinking outside the box here to build global brand awareness.
So, put it all together and you have... (drum roll, please)....
Benjamin Wang Mohammed Mayer Bogue
I can almost smell Yahoo stock rising as I type this.
To me, this is the obivous choice. But, hey, if this doesn’t sit well with Mayer and her husband, they can always go with Jacob, a perfectly nice name for a future CEO, but, you know... (yawn). | <urn:uuid:752696fd-4888-4039-9f4c-7e7c638f1708> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.itworld.com/print/300257 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953444 | 921 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Volunteers determined to make the city glitter from a lack of litter, rolled up their sleeves and worked on beautifying the outside of the Jacksonville Senior Center and Vanishing Texanna Museum on Thursday.
Emily Morrow, president of Keep Jacksonville Beautiful, said a group of volunteers has steadily been working on the project since February.
She said they pulled out rotten timber, old and dying shrubbery, and removed a large tree stump.
The perimeter of the building was lined with an “Austin Chalk” rock border, and on Thursday four volunteers and a couple of city workers shoveled in two truckloads of dirt to start forming flower beds. The dirt and a few extra hands was donated by the city of Jacksonville.
“It's a city-owned building,” City Manager Mo Raissi said. “Really, they are helping us. We are not helping them. They are helping the city keep Jacksonville beautiful.”
Morrow said volunteers hope to start planting shrubs next month, once they have enough funds to purchase the plants. She said right now they are looking at planting camellias, roses and oleanders.
“It's good to plant in the fall,” she said. “The plants will have all winter to take root and not cook.”
As the plants are getting comfortable in their new home, the group plans to add a fresh coat of paint to the building.
Morrow said the top border around the building will be deep rust color to match the tile roof. The second tier of windows will be bordered with a light orange and the ground-level windows will be bordered with a light green.
Morrow said the building is one of the oldest in town, and a good opportunity to show the public the work Keep Jacksonville Beautiful does.
“I remember taking my kids to the library here,” she said. “Every time I come to vote here, I think 'something needs to happen here.'”
Raissi said city workers made a new sign for the building and did the masonry work that surrounds it. He said the circular flower bed next to the sign has been taken out to improve the look of the building.
“The brick was already gone by (Thursday) afternoon,” he said. “They are going to bring a back hoe to move the dirt sometimes after (Friday). It was OK when we didn't have the sign, but we have a beautiful tomato that was donated, so we need to showcase that.”
Raissi said the fire department’s dumpster was moved to improve the look of the area, and the fire department has taken over lawn maintenance of Hazel Tilton Park and the Senior Center.
“They take pride in the park, and they keep it well maintained,” Raissi said.
Spelling bee rallies community for Literacy Council
How do you spell "oops?"Continued ...
Good thing a little misstep by judges at the 19th annual Jacksonville Literacy Council's Corporate Spelling Bee Wednesday didn't change the ultimate outcome of the event.
- Council sets date to canvass runoff election results
- Excess volume stalls phone lines
- Area has systems in place for emergency communication
- Red Cross champions efforts to help Moore, Okla. tornado victims
- Spelling bee rallies community for Literacy Council
- LOCAL NEWS
- Tornado watch sparks concern; thunderstorms kill power, knock over tree limbs, wall of downtown building
- Wells man arrested on suspicion of second-degree felony sexual assault
- Welcome Home
- HEALTH: New electronic record system meant to give doctors instant access to patient information
- Keep safe during a tornado
- LOCAL SPORTS | <urn:uuid:582e8351-364b-478d-bd8b-aa5e910161fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jacksonvilleprogress.com/x766434356/Senior-Center-and-Museum-get-a-fresh-fall-facelift | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957683 | 780 | 1.664063 | 2 |
NORWICH – Self awareness, goal setting and building a better future are just some of the topics covered throughout the Leading Edge program held at Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego BOCES six times a year.
Matt Asma, program instructor, said this is his second class since his hiring in January, and already he feels he has helped individuals strive toward their goals.
The class is comprised of individuals who are looking for work, wanting to change career paths or people who simply need assistance learning the skills to succeed in the job market. “Each four-week course is like having a job with 100 percent attendance anticipated and students having class from 9 to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday,” said Asma.
Fifteen individuals graduated the course Friday with a special ceremony including a guest speaker, gifts of appreciation and certificates of completion. | <urn:uuid:9d2903f4-6a61-43a4-b1f6-2ba9ca22863f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.evesun.com/news/stories/2008-04-16/4110/Program-gives-participants-the-Leading-Edge/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977107 | 179 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Everybody's talking about electric utilities dabbling in telecommunications. That's fine. But how about vice versa? Maybe what we've really got is telephone companies (and cable television, too) getting into energy. That's different. A whole lot different.
Swing Your Partner
The last few months have seen a flurry of deals and strategic alliances between telephone or cable companies and electric utilities, all aimed in some way at marrying energy services with information technology and software. I can think of at least five:
s Entergy + First Pacific Networks
s PSE&G + AT&T (also includes Honeywell, GE, Intellon, American Meter, and Andersen Consulting)
s Tampa Electric + IBM
s SoCal Edison + Cox Cable
s PG&E + Microsoft + TCI
These alliances promise a cornucopia of energy services: automatic meter reading, remote on/off switching, residential demand-side management, temper (energy theft) detection, outage detection, customer surveys, real-time pricing, power-quality monitoring, and distribution system automation (SCADA services via broadband could save telephone charges over the public switched network).
But those features all serve the electric side. What's in it for telcos and cable companies? (Better yet, what's in it for Microsoft, which seems to own a piece of everything except a telephone network.)
Paul E. Spaduzzi, energy consultant for Cox Cable Communications, suggests ulterior motives: "Telcos want to get into energy because energy plus information equals real-time pricing. That makes for greater efficiency, giving electric consumers the cash they'll need to buy other services on the information highway" (that telephone companies are itching to sell). And then there's cable television.
"Enthusiasm among cable companies for telephone service is unbelievable," says Spaduzzi. But market penetration holds the key. "Cable serves only about 65 percent of households," Spaduzzi notes, while electrics reach just about everybody (em which is what you need for a switched service like telecommunications. Thus, cable companies see energy management services as an entry into telephony. Are cable companies really interested in energy? Spaduzzi notes that electric utility transformer failure represents the biggest single cause of cable TV outages. So yes, there's a possible synergy. Maybe.
Cree Edwards, vice president of business development for CellNet Data Systems Inc., a company that designs and builds wireless meter reading systems for electric utilities, tends to agree: "It's not so much that electrics are getting into telecommunications as it is the other way around."
At Itron, which also markets wireless meter-reading technologies, you'll also hear a word of caution. Robert Neilson, vice president of marketing, points out that meter reading, load control, and data acquisition break down into two markets. First, you've got to collect the data from your meters. Second, you want to transport the data to the utility. What works for one job might not work for the other.
Neilson sees wireless radio frequencies as ideal for gathering utility customer data from meter to interim collection point, even if that collection point resides in a smart box located within the customer's home. It's that last 25 feet (em from collection box to the meter (em that forces costs up. Fiber or coaxial is too expensive for this leg, says Neilson, unless the utility really wants to enter the video or telephone business. But for transporting data back to the office, utilities can profitably employ a wide variety of media (em
including fiber or coaxial (em depending on cost.
"Identify your need; then make the technology pay for itself," advises Neilson. He's not against fiber to the home, but questions whether utilities need it for meter reading. "With the available compression techniques, wireless meter reading is well-suited for load control or real-time pricing," says Neilson. "Especially for gas meters, where the power supply must come from low-power batteries."
Edwards, at CellNet, acknowledges that broadband offers muscle for data transport, but notes that most of the costs actually lie in data format conversion, which is made easier and cheaper via wireless networks. "If utilities want to go into broadband," says Edwards, "then fiber and coaxial is the way to go." But are electrics really ready to compete in that market?
"They're chasing phantom markets," says Edwards. "I can't see electric customers paying for these superhighway services."
These alliances focus on retail energy service, which remains largely a regulated monopoly. That fact carries important implications for electric investment in superhighway projects.
Wholesale power is becoming (has become) a commodity business. People like Robert Mango (manager of derivative products at Niagara Mohawk) or John Woodley (senior trader at Morgan Stanley) will talk your ear off on how financial commodity markets will shrink wholesale electric margins down to nothing.
Now the wholesale market is exactly where the new power marketers and brokers have been earning their living (em using databases, software, and risk-hedging to siphon off profits. But as margins evaporate, these marketers will probably turn more to the retail side. Is that why some of these electric utilities are seeking out alliances with telcos and cable companies (em to put their own software in place before they get squeezed out again by the marketers and brokers?
One of the interesting things about the PSE&G project with AT&T is how the utility has managed to share the risk with other partners. In this case, AT&T is heading up the project, but is drawing on many other prominent customers with niche expertise, such as Honeywell (for thermostats), General Electric (for two-way electronic meters), Intellon (for chips and the in-home local area network), and Andersen Consulting (for a user-friendly, computer-customer interface). PSE&G will not build its own fiber network. Instead, it will lease either fiber or coaxial cable, linked to its own gateway in the telephone central office. PSE&G won't enter the telecommunications business as a competitor.
I asked Ralph Izzo, a vice president at PSE&G, "You're assuming, aren't you, that you can fight off competition from marketers by playing their own game in retail distribution." Izzo paused and listened carefully. I continued.
"But if electric distribution remains a regulated monopoly, isn't it possible that state regulators will force utilities to disclose or share customer profile data collected on the information superhighway, for the reason that distribution information is clothed with a public interest? What happens if you can't keep your data proprietary?"
Izzo nodded and smiled. "We're looking at
Articles found on this page are available to Internet subscribers only. For more information about obtaining a username and password, please call our Customer Service Department at 1-800-368-5001. | <urn:uuid:8c1de4e9-e646-4e82-856f-b0059de294bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fortnightly.com/print/9241 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949582 | 1,430 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Generally speaking, Afro-Europeans see my natural hair as something that needs to be fixed with perm or covered up with a wig and this kind of thinking frustrates me. Living in Berlin I can honestly say that I miss seeing women wear two strand twists, afro puffs and dreadlocks. Apart from the occasional American tourist, black women in Europe typically rock straight hair, weaves and extensions. I imagine the pressure for a women of color to appeal to the European standard of beauty must be stifling in Germany. Ironically, that pressure doesn’t come directly from the Germans themselves but from other Afro-Europeans.
I experienced similar peer pressure in America when I went natural ten years ago. The most vocal critics of my decision were my black family members, colleagues and friends. The naysayers took their own insecurities and misconceptions about natural hair and tried to pass them off as the overall perception of the dominant culture. I see the same behavior here in Germany but even more so, as if to wear your hair in its natural state is an indicator of being “too black to handle” or unwilling to conform to the German way of life.
The pursuit for long, straight and “manageable” hair sometimes creates casualties. Not only does the quest take its toll on the tender psyche of young German colored girls but concern for overall hair health is thrown out of the window. The primary motivation of many is to cover up, not cultivate their hair so little time is spent learning how to keep their locks growing healthily. When I take a quick visual survey of Berlin’s colored girls, I often see missing edges, fried ends, matted extensions and poorly executed weaves. I do not have hard statistics but I am amazed at the number of side-eye-worthy heads I have seen during my time living and traveling around Europe. The women here seem to prefer “damaged yet straight” over “healthy and nappy.”
There are a few contributing factors to the state of black hair care in Europe, beginning with black women don’t make up a significant percentage of the population. The small brown numbers result in less demand for products which leads to less hair care techniques and tools, leaving stylists being years behind their counterparts in places like America. There is almost no pressure to have any representation of black women in the media due to the low buying power of the black woman in Europe. There are no magazines like ESSENCE and few websites like Parlour Magazine are published in European languages. Many women don’t have high expectations for their hair because they don’t see many examples of black women, nevermind black women with healthy hair. Environmental factors such as climate and water can also be damaging. Berlin has some of the hardest water I have ever experienced, it’s loaded with calcium and other minerals that leave my hair dry and damaged. It took me months to sort out the right routine for my dry scalp (hint: water filters are awesome).
Black hair care in America is not perfect but it is light years ahead of Europe. Outside of major cities with larger black populations like London and Paris, black women in Europe rarely take advantage of their hair’s versatility and usually linger around the straight end of the spectrum. Permed hair, weaves and extensions are not bad but they seem to be the only options many women entertain due to limited education about natural hair. | <urn:uuid:d2509ddb-ccbf-4ed8-b818-13b25c23e876> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://parlourmagazine.com/2011/07/black-in-berlin-black-hair-care-europe-afro-europeans/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966817 | 708 | 1.570313 | 2 |
One of the most important covers of comic book history.
"Sexual stimulation by combining 'headlights' with the sadist's dream of tying up a woman."
Created by the Eisner & Iger Studio
, the Phantom Lady - civilian name Sandra Knight
- debuted in August 1941 in Police Comics
#1 (alongside Plastic Man
, Firebrand and The Human Bomb). To the world she was the rich socialite daughter of Maryland senator Henry Knight; in her spare time she fought crime and war saboteurs with the aid of a flashlight that could shoot darkness, a car that could do the same, and the occasional right hook.
One of the earliest female superheroes, the Phantom Lady was very much an early distaff expy
. The stories were set in a somewhat realistically depicted Washington, DC as opposed to New York or a fictitious equivalent, which lent the stories the atmosphere of a spy thriller
. However, as the artists drawing Phantom Lady were lost to the draft one after the other, the feature was discontinued with Police Comics
#23 (October 1943).
In 1947, Fox Features took over publication of the title until 1949. These stories were much more in the traditional comic book style, and introduced a Rogues Gallery
including nefarious evil-doers such as Firefiend and Red Horn. More prominently Matthew Baker took over drawing, changing her costume from a fairly modest swimsuit to something considerably more emphasizing.
Fredric Wertham made her one of the most prominent cases in his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent
. The cover image shown to the right was used extensively to discuss the sexualization and degradation of women in comics. This was one of rallying cries that lead to the creation of The Comics Code
Authority. Her costume was redesigned to be much more modest when a third company, Ajax-Farrel, briefly revived the character in 1954-1955.
Even though DC acquired the rights to Quality's heroes in 1957, the Phantom Lady had to sit out the Silver Age
, not coming back until 1973 in DC's Freedom Fighters
, where she had joined The Resistance
to fight back against the Nazi overlords of the series. She gained the powers of full invisibility and teleportation, but was largely relegated to a support role.
A year earlier, Bill Black had brought back his version of the now-orphaned Fox and Ajax Phantom Lady for Paragon/AC Comics as the Blue Bulletteer, who was later transformed into the sorceress Nightveil to avoid trademark conflicts.
In 1988, the Phantom Lady became a backup character in Action Comics Weekly
, now a Legacy Character
, with Dee Tyler, the niece of the original, having taken up the mantle. After dying in 2005's Infinite Crisis
, the title passed to Stormy Knight in 2006's The Battle for Blüdhaven
. Stormy Knight has since flirted with a number of DC superhero teams as a secret agent/quantum physicist/socialite/actress
, Phantom Lady gained her own 4-issue miniseries named Phantom Lady and Doll Man
. Set on a path of vengeance by the murder of her parents when she was just a child, Jennifer Knight (Phantom Lady) now gets a shot to take down the family responsible. When she goes deep undercover to investigate, what she gets instead is something neither she nor her pint-size pal (Dane Maxwell) could expect.
The Phantom Lady comics have often been accused of being little more than excuses for fan service and Good Girl Art
. However, while her image was sexualized, the stories were for the most part not. Her foes did not much care that they were fighting a woman. In an era when most female supers were often treated as inferior to their male peers, the Phantom Lady simply was.
Tropes Associated with the Comic Character:
- Action Girl: One of the earliest examples in comics, although she was preceded by, to name eight, Sheena, Fantomah, the Woman in Red, Lady Luck, the Golden Age Red Tornado, Bulletgirl, Miss Fury, and Hawkwoman. Phantom Lady in most versions is pretty good at throwing a punch.
- Alternate Company Equivalent: Nightveil is the AC comics version, Shadow Lady is Big Bang's. Silk Spectre is DC's.
- Alternate Continuity: The Phantom Lady has appeared in a lot of comics over the years, not all of them published by DC.
- Badass Cape: All versions have them. They never make much sense.
- Badass Normal: Originally had no real power. However, she was pretty damn tough for a 120 pound 18 year old.
- Bare Your Midriff: The 2006 version does this.
- Bathtub Scene: The original comic had a few of these.
- Bondage Is Bad: Despite Wertham's comments, Phantom Lady was rarely captured or tied up by her enemies. Well, no more then any superhero in the '50s.
- However, she appears on what are arguably the two most iconic "bondage" covers of the Golden Age.
- Building Swing: The '40s and '50s version did this on occasion.
- Casting a Shadow: Her primary superpower from the '40s onward. Not always very useful, and pretty easy to get around.
- Chest Insignia: The 2006 version features this.
- Clothes Make the Legend: Though DC and other publishers have tried giving her more conservative costumes or body suits, she inevitably goes back to wearing a bathing suit and cape.
- Clark Kenting: Notably subverted in the '40s version where a frequent challenge was the fact that her costume featured no mask of any kind, leading to her having to disguise her face using various methods from people who would recognize her.
- Cleavage Window: The '50s version is arguably the original Trope Codifier.
- Cool Car: Well, considering it's the '40s, pretty cool.
- Crime Fighting With Cash: Not above doing this on occasion.
- Damsel in Distress: Notably subverted in her original run, where she was never saved by outside forces, and got out of all her jams by herself.
- Depending on the Artist: The post Matthew Baker/Farrel books where notorious for having poor internal continuity. Sometimes in the same story she would be a brunette and a blond.
- Depending on the Writer: Since coming back in the '70s the WW 2 version is either a bored senator's daughter or a secret agent trained since birth.
- Domino Mask: The '40s version wore one on occasion.
- Fanservice: Yep.
- Fan Service Cover: That quite nearly ended the entire comic book industry.
- Some of her Late '40s Books had her on the cover while being mostly 'true' crime stories.
- Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Usually present but occasionally subverted. Despite wearing a bathing suit in all her appearances, her post-Baker costume was somewhat loose.
- Imagination Based Superpower: The New52's Phantom Lady has black light gloves that can manifest darkness into black fog, blacklight objects (like razors and shields), living shadows, and can turn her intangible.
- In the Hood: The New52 version's costume has a hood with a neural interface woven into it that allows her to manipulate backlight into anything she can think of.
- Invisibility: Since the '70s she can do this. Whether she's intangible while doing so depends on the version.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The '40s version would occasionally feature this from a political character.
- Legacy Character: Dee Tyler in the '80s and Stormy Knight since 2006.
- Leotard of Power: The Trope Founder of this, though the 2006 version is only technically one piece. The 40s stories featured fairly practical version of this.
- Loves My Alter Ego: Don Borden was in a bit of a love triangle with both Phantom Lady and his fiancé Sandra. Somewhat subverted by the fact that Sandra never seemed all that interested in Don in either version.
- Mad Scientist: The '40s version fought more then her share.
- Meaningful Name: "Knight" in general; Stormy Knight in particular.
- Most Common Super Power: What people tend to remember.
- Imperial Japan: Some of the earliest stories feature her fighting expy versions of the Japanese. Technically before World War 2 started.
- Odd-Shaped Panel: As befitting a character created by Will Eisner, a lot of her early stories featured this.
- Power Creep, Power Seep: The Freedom Force version of her powers; especially her teleportation, which tended to fluctuate in strength based on the needs of the story.
- Required Secondary Powers: As a character whose primary power is to create darkness she has need of her special glasses, with which she can see in the dark. Oddly, they only made their first appearance in the '70s.
- Retcon: The DC version has retconned a lot of stuff from the '40s version. Notably Don Borden went from her fiancé to her intelligence agency handler, posing as her fiancé, and the original Starman became her cousin (since they already had the same last name).
- Rich Idiot with No Day Job: Possibly justified by the fact that well she was a rich woman in the '40s. A day job would be suspicious.
- Romantic Interest: Originally Don Borden, though all iterations of the original character have flirted with other guys.
- Secret Identity: Only the '40s version made much of this, but all of them had one.
- She's Got Legs: If Matt Baker's art wasn't emphasizing her chest, it was emphasizing her legs. Sometimes it was both.
- Single Power Superheroes: The Phantom Lady could originally only shoot a ray of darkness at people. By her third issue people learned they could duck underneath it and see fine.
- Something Person: The Phantom Lady.
- Stealth Expert: Beyond her ability to create shadows, Phantom Lady was always good at being places where she wasn't allowed and observing things she shouldn't.
- Stripperific: Her costumes have moved back and forth on this. Usually forth.
- Super Hero School: Sandra Knight eventually became the dean of the Université Notre Dame des Ombres.
- Super Heroes Wear Capes: Yep.
- Teleportation: When in the Freedom Fighters.
- The Cowl: The original Lady was very much of one of these. The Freedom Fighters and modern day flashback to the '40s mostly depicted her as The Cape. The 2006 version is back to the cowl.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Though the 2006 version does.
- Utility Belt: Sandra Knight usually had one of these. The post-Baker iterations were particularly notable.
- Will Eisner: It is disputed whether he created her or not. No one is listed as writer of any of the books and he created most of the characters for the Eisner & Iger Syndicate at the time, though he did not necessarily write them.
- Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys??: The '40s version apparently found a top secret government blacklight device lying around the house. | <urn:uuid:f7c5a272-b2d9-4e3e-b3e4-43e712d28599> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PhantomLady | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961486 | 2,360 | 1.59375 | 2 |
January 19, 2013
Hall of Famer Stan Musial dies
By SPORTS NETWORK
ST. LOUIS - Hall of Famer Stan Musial died Saturday evening at his home in Ladue. He was 92.
A three-time National League MVP and seven-time NL batting champion, Musial played his entire 22-year major league career (1941-63) for the St. Louis Cardinals. Nicknamed "Stan the Man", Musial was a 24-time All-Star selection and was a first ballot Hall of Fame selection in 1969.
"We have lost the most beloved member of the Cardinals family," Cardinals chairman William DeWitt Jr. said in a statement. "Stan Musial was the greatest player in Cardinals history and one of the best players in the history of baseball. The entire Cardinals organization extends its sincere condolences to Stan's family, including his children Richard, Gerry, Janet and Jean, as well as his eleven grandchildren and twelve great grandchildren." | <urn:uuid:7a9a3b7e-b6ea-478a-bdd0-d2a73a84ff8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Baseball/MLB/2013/01/19/pf-20509961.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981557 | 200 | 1.515625 | 2 |
ST. PETERSBURG, Florida -- Some bystanders are calling it a cruel case of animal abuse, but a trio who apparently snatched up ducks from at least two areas of the city won't be charged.
According to the St. Petersburg Police Department, three people were reportedly grabbing ducks by the neck and tossing them into cages in the back of a pickup truck. Dispatchers got a call that the ducks were being taken from a pond at 110th Ave. N. and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St. N., then received another call from 16th St. N. around 62nd Ave. N.
"They probably already had about 25 to 30 ducks in the back of their truck," said one witness who didn't want to show her face.
But regulations regarding the taking of ducks basically say no harm, no foul.
"We have parts of our city ordinance that identify these wild ducks as nuisances, so from the standpoint of the police department doing anything, there's really nothing we can do," said Mike Puetz with the St. Petersburg Police Department.
Florida Fish and Wildlife rules don't consider the ducks a protected species, so taking them isn't against the law unless there's abuse or cruelty involved. That's where there's a difference of opinion.
"To throw a net over a bird and cause it to sink to the bottom of the water, in my eyes, would be abuse," said the witness who called police. "If you did that to a human, without a doubt, it would be abuse." | <urn:uuid:9ece8407-62c7-47ec-b9ef-2d6ed62624f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wtsp.com/news/national/article/266931/79/Ducks-taken-from-ponds-but-snatchers-wont-face-charges | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982393 | 317 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Period remodel of Petaluma home takes it back to its origins in the 19th century
Published: Friday, February 15, 2013 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 3:15 p.m.
It's often been said that old walls hold secrets, a phrase that usually refers to mysterious deeds that took place within them.
But old houses can be persuaded to spill their secrets, at least architecturally speaking. What it takes is a smart and tenacious house detective to ferret out the hidden clues, and an injection of “happy accidents,” as professional preservationist Diana Painter puts it.
Such was the case with Ernie and Deb Ongaro. When the couple bought their 2,000-square-foot house on Petaluma's Prospect Street in 2010, it was something of a cypher.
The house clearly was old, dating back to around 1865, when it was built by a family named McCleave. That would make it one of the oldest homes in the city. But sometime between 1871 and 1885, a new front porch was added that extended the full width of the house, and an addition was built in the back.
Between 1888 and 1894, another addition was built, the front porch was altered again and the house given a bit of a Victorian look. Another wing was added between 1894 and 1906 on the east side. Somewhere along the way, it acquired a dormer.
Fast forward into the 20th century. In 1963, it got another update, with new asbestos shingle siding, brick steps and a wrought-iron rail.
In short, the house had suffered so many changes the Ongaros weren't sure what to do when it came to restoration. What exactly would they restore it to? Should they try to take it to its 1860s vernacular or should it be made to look more Victorian, like many of the other homes in their Brewster/Oak Hill Historic district?
At one point, before they retained Painter as a consultant, they had even considered re-doing it in Greek Revival.
Their solution came in the mail. Out of the blue, said Ernie, they received a photograph from a woman in Oregon who said she had found it among her father's effects after he died. It was a picture of the Petaluma house taken in the 1940s when the woman said her parents apparently lived there. She knew where to send it because the address was on the back of the photo.
That photo provided important clues on which the entire project would turn. It showed a more Victorian porch, probably the same porch that had been on the house before the turn of the last century. So they decided to use it as their template, and bring the house back to the way it looked in that picture.
But other clues remained to be uncovered. Once they ripped off the cement porch, they discovered remnants of the old porch beneath it, key pieces like the old post, which they took to woodworker Philip Nereo of Windsor. Using that and the photo, he was able to recreate the rails and posts of the 1890s porch.
“Really, everything we needed was underneath the old porch,” said Ernie Ongaro, a third-generation heating and plumbing contractor.
But their detective work didn't end with the porch.
The house had more secrets to spill. Underneath the old asbestos-shingle siding they found multiple clues to what the house would originally have looked like.
First, they discovered that the original redwood siding was intact. They also found clues to the original color. Although the siding had been painted white, they could find traces of an earlier shade of yellow. From Sherwin-Williams historical collection, the Ongaros were able to find a close match.
“Fortunately that (added) siding had protected the original siding over the years. So it was in beautiful shape,” Ongaro said. “I was able to strip the paint down to the bare wood, prime and paint it.”
Those asbestos shingles had also hidden another important clue for historical accuracy. When they were put on 50 years ago, the old trim pieces were removed. But because the trim had originally been installed first before the paint, they left marks that created a shadow effect, an exact outline of their shape. Petaluma woodworker Chris Lindeman was able to reproduce the original windows, window trim and some house trim based on those shadows and the historical photo.
“It's been a really fun project,” said Ernie Ongaro, who has re-done other homes in Petaluma and still has a long way to go with this house, includng the roof, gutters, backside and interior. “But it's so rewarding. You really get attached to a house when you do a project like this.”
You can reach Staff Write Meg McConahey at email@example.com or 521-5204. | <urn:uuid:9acd1408-3adc-4324-b011-bedc3711b3f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130215/LIFESTYLE/130219755/1329/lifestyle?Title=Roots-remodel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983036 | 1,051 | 1.84375 | 2 |
In our corporate training and ivy league consulting experience, we've discovered ways to accelerate knowledge and application that are ten times more effective than traditional lecture, sermon, and small group methods. We've been given a chance to study how change actually works, both individually and organizationally, and found that the right combination of people, information, methods and technology has incredible power to create transformation. Our mission is to promote these innovative methods in the church.
Here are some of the method elements:
Every campaign or discipleship initiative should provide a compelling answer to the question, "What's in this for me?" As much as we don't want to admit it, we all make decisions in terms of personal payoffs, and we live very busy lives. Without a clear sense of the benefits of any particular discipleship program, few are willing to commit to a multi-week process of learning and transformation. Kickoff events have the power to solidify focus, boost motivation, and set people up to participate fully and succeed.
No one gets on a bus without first knowing where it's going. Same is true for a discipleship initiative. People are much more motivated when they have a clear sense of where they are and where they're going. Once these are known, they can take steps in the right direction. By offering an online pre-assessment and discipleship program, Project 28 offers participants the ability to achieve measurable outcomes, dramatically increasing motivation and participation.
Frequent, Short-Form Self-Study
In Ecclesiastes 12:12, Solomon said, "Much study wearies the body." Church members will heartily concur. Experience has shown that when information is presented in a concise, relevant way, the participant has the ability to retain and apply the information much more effectively than if they are given a lot of information in one setting. We need to feed our minds like we feed our bodies, in small portions over time. Otherwise, we experience the fatigue of mental gluttony.
Structured Group Interaction and Reinforcement
When a discipleship group or small group gets together to reinforce and apply what they learned during the week, they sharpen each other. "As iron sharpens iron," wrote Solomon, "so one man sharpens another." Group interaction energizes the content, gives you different points of view, and helps you put it to work much more effectively than when you're going solo.
When groups get together to reinforce learning and assess how each member is doing, it creates a powerful accountability that motivates us to excel. This is why office pool weight loss challenges are often so effective. Whenever we have leadership and peer groups holding us accountable to a clear standard, our performance goes up. We participate in a whole different way, and we accelerate our transformation.
Once a group has cycled through a six to ten week small group program, participants can measure their improvement and see what's needed next by taking the same online assessment again every month, comparing with their initial results as they go. As they see measured progress, they feel empowered, and strive to continue on to mastery of the material.
Celebration of Mastery
Once a participant reaches a certain assessment score, it is vital that their accomplishment is celebrated publicly. Leaders who offer graduation certificates and reward participants publicly motivate and inspire others to do the same.
By using the right mix of these vital principles, church leaders will be much more effective in creating disciples and fulfilling the Great Commission. | <urn:uuid:be1eabce-d0f6-498a-b624-06708860204d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://project28today.com/about3.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95375 | 705 | 1.578125 | 2 |
The San Antonio Water System has given the San Antonio City Council a proposed rate increase of 9.9 percent for 2013.
That would be an average of $4.93 more a month.
“I don’t believe people have a problem with paying for things that the sewer system and the water system need," said Mayor Julian Castro.
The water company needs the increase in revenue to help deal with sewer clogs and infrastructure repairs.
"Five dollars does not seem like an outrageous amount and I do know we have water problems in this city," said SAWS customer Darie O’Connor.
The main problem they have, SAWS officials say, is grease mucking up the works. Grease sent down the kitchen sink sticks to pipes. Enough grease will eventually cause a sewer backup.
"You have grease that floats on the top and then there is sewage down at the bottom and there is the grease that sticks on the sides of the pipes," said Anne Haydens SAWS spokeswoman.
That sewage is more than just human waste.
"What we call 'rags' -- the flushables, the paper towels, the janitorial rags -- don’t flush those because they don’t go away and they get stuck in the pipes," Hayden said.
Add that to the grease, she said, and you have got problems.
Over the years, she said, SAWS workers have found a turtle, construction site debris -- including rocks -- and even an engine in the sewer system.
The proposed rate hike will get looked over in-depth before the mayor will agree to it.
"I will be blunt with the public: We have a huge challenge with our sewer system. Different parts of it are falling apart," Castro said.
The other part of the equation: the city’s water demands are rising.
"So that’s going to mean the rates are going to go up. There is no way to sugar-coat that," Castro said.
It could be a few weeks before a final decision on the proposal is made.
"If it’s to fix the water system, I am definitely in favor of it, " said Daniel Riojas, a SAWS customer.\ | <urn:uuid:84c9c567-1217-4403-830e-e4f2a886a400> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ksat.com/news/San-Antonio-Water-System-proposes-rate-hike/-/478452/17433128/-/1dkf7h/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958786 | 470 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Make your Coffee Table Happy!
EASY on the eyes, PLEASING to the soul.
The Bellarmine Forum Magazine is a quarterly review by some of the finest Catholic commentators today! The magazine discusses a wide variety of issues of concern to Catholics especially as we seek to build the Kingdom of Christ in a secular world. Incisive and wide-ranging, witty and serious, The Bellarmine Forum analyzes issues with a dogged fidelity to the Holy Father and the Magisterium of the Church. Discussions in the magazine include such relevant and hard-hitting topics as: the new English liturgical translations of the Latin Rite, the hostile and secular political reality in the United States, and a recent three-part series on Catholic Social Teaching. As one reader put it, “The Bellarmine Forum is for the plumber and the professor! A great resource for solid Catholic commentary and accessible to all.”
BONUS: We like the Magazine so much that we send it to regular donors and those who donate above $50. Become a supporter of The Bellarmine Forum by making a donation and receive the magazine as a Thank You for your generosity to our efforts to bring the truths of Christ and His Church to North America. Your kindness will also allow us to send this magazine to, among others, our military chaplains to help and aid them in their most important work with our fellow Catholics in the military.
Our Most Recent Publication Offers
- The Second Vatican Council: Tradition and Continuity
How Could “They” Get It So Wrong?
- Did Pope Benedict XVI say that Vatican II was wrong?
- Read Frank Morriss, who has been part of the Bellarmine Forum from the start, explain Lumen Gentium for what it really says.
- Includes a Quick Fact Sheet — A handy reference on Vatican II that helps to understand the Council, its documents, and what is really there.
- Enjoy discussion that is free of the “Spirit of Vatican II” and anything else that stinks.
- Laurene Conner’s Historical Survey of the Popes of Conciliar Renewal is a concise tracing of the lead-up to Vatican II — showing the trends that formed the real Council.
The Documents of the Second Vatican Council are plainly written, yet the so-called People of God got shafted: churches stripped of their beauty, teachings twisted, sacred hymns replaced by hand-clapping folk music–all in the name of a “spirit” of Vatican II that bears no resemblance to that sacred gathering.
How could this be? In the words of Benedict XVI, the “Council of the Media” created their own version of that historic event. And the experts who attended with each prelate could interpret, write, lecture, invent what they wanted about the Council, thus adding fuel to the fires of change by spreading personal opinions instead of the age-old teachings the Council Fathers really discussed.
The Council Documents Need to be Read Correctly
Pope Benedict XVI suggested that the Council was misinterpreted, that the documents had not been read correctly, with the mind of the Church. It is to look at the Second Vatican Council with the mind of the Church that the Bellarmine Forum Magazine has committed its four issues in this Year of Faith. What did the Council really say about the liturgy, about religious life, about the role of the laity? Open our pages and find out.
“No one can claim to be a Conciliar Catholic, a believer in Vatican II, and at the same time be an anti-Papal Catholic.”–Frank Morriss, Board of Directors, Bellarmine Forum
“It is the virtue of Faith that we must cultivate in the one true Church that Christ has established, for faith in the Church is faith in Christ Himself.”–John M. DeJak, President, Bellarmine Forum
“The Church sees herself at the service of humanity, not just of her members.”–Michael Adkins, Academic Dean, Saint Agnes School
- Catholic Social Teaching: Discernment
In earlier decades of the twentieth century, Catholics in America felt they were bound to a higher loyalty. As St. Thomas More put it, the King’s servant and God’s servant first. Social problems like abortion, poverty, and moral decline were viewed as departures from the normal values and truths society held. Now these problems are part of the established culture. The tsunami of societal revolution in the 1960s upended traditional values, morphing personal responsibility into social sin, the Works of Mercy into government handouts, and morality into doing whatever feels good.
Can this American Detour Be Fixed?
The answer is a resounding YES! Education is the key. In this, the third of its trilogy on the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church, the Bellarmine Forum Magazine establishes the means for discernment, the ability to distinguish the true path for a just society from the rocky road toward a country full of sheep led by a wolf. The Church has the roadmap in her age-old teachings to uplift mankind. Her words must be taught to every generation to maintain right order in society. The Bellarmine Forum Magazine begins that task with this issue.
“Catholic education recognizes the transcendent quality of every human being, and thus seeks to promote wholeness and holiness.”–Michael Kenney, Madonna University
“Through an education that forms young people by means of a free and open dialogue, that engages a proper anthropology and the Natural Law, [Pope] Benedict [XVI] proposes that man may once again begin to see the spread of true justice and peace in the world.”–Michael Adkins, Saint Agnes School
“[T]he Church is the authority on matters of morality and human dignity, and when an economic system degrades humanity, the Church must speak.”–Prof. Ronald Rychlak, University of Mississippi Law School
$4.95 ($1.55 S/H)
- Catholic Social Teaching and The American Detour
Living and working in the world but not of it may have been the mantra of Catholic thought and education in the first half of the twentieth century, but the tsunami of societal revolution in the 1960s upended rationality in favor of action-oriented programs in the name of social justice. The wisdom of the Church about striving to attain the ultimate Common Good, which is God Himself, was swept into the background as personal responsibility morphed into social sin, the Works of Mercy became government handouts, and the Church in America lost its sense of discernment to tell the difference.
In this, the second of its trilogy on the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church, The Bellarmine Forum examines the American detour away from the Catholic Church’s roadmap for a just society based on the dignity of man.
“Older Catholic Action groups attended Mass together, said communal rosaries or novenas, went together on pilgrimages, and engaged in other traditional spiritual practices that had as their object, the worship of God. This wasn’t to rubber-stamp the program or to ‘create community’ among participants but to foster a deep spiritual life.”–Stephanie Block, “A Study in Contrasts: Catholic Action and Social Justice.”
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- Catholic Social Teaching and The Common Good
Part of the renewal of the temporal order to which Catholics are called involves an understanding of man’s ultimate Common Good, God Himself, and the need to direct our actions toward attaining this Good in an increasingly secular society. In examining the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church as promulgated over the last 120 years, The Bellarmine Forum magazine presents a clear roadmap for societal restructuring, based on human dignity, respect, and truth.
The Bellarmine Forum magazine is published by The Bellarmine Forum, Inc. (formerly known as The Wanderer Forum Foundation). The Foundation began in 1965 to promote and defend true Catholic teachings and educate Catholics in their Faith. The Forum’s national and regional conferences and published materials represent some of the finest Catholic thought in the last 30 years. Now operating under the patronage of the great Jesuit, St. Robert Bellarmine, the Forum will continue its efforts in the service of the Church.
“Many in the field of Catholic social activism work energetically for the temporal common goods of peace and justice, and yet fall mute when it comes to the order that society should have to God Himself, the most universal Common Good.”–Dr. Arthur Hippler, Chairman of Theology, Providence Academy
“Now is the time to speak of human obligations along with human rights, bottom up as well as systematic solutions, and the rise of a Catholic economy as an evangelical light in our age of darkness.”–Richard Aleman, Editor, The Distributist Review
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- Englishing the Liturgy
In presenting background for the 2011 linguistic changes in the Mass, the Wanderer Forum Foundation hopes to initiate a revitalization of faith. While many instructions to the faithful merely concentrate on the change in the words, we hope this background on the Mass explains why the change was needed to safeguard the true teachings of the Catholic Faith.
“The words of the Mass–preserved in the Latin texts–are centuries old. They speak of salvation, the conquest of death by the very Son of God. Bishops, Popes and Doctors of the Church gave much thought to the exact meanings and exact teachings to be conveyed by the words of the Mass to uphold the Catholic faith….What we habitually pray must reflect correctly and clearly what we believe, for the more we hear or recite a text, the more it becomes part of us interiorly.”–James May, Professor of Classics, St. Olaf College
“The Sacred Liturgy makes saints and saints are what the world needs more than blogs, websites, and twitter accounts.”–Fr. John Paul Erickson, Director of Worship, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
$4.95 ($1.55 S/H) | <urn:uuid:6da5ddce-d777-4616-8b70-7d2f73397591> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bellarmineforum.org/publications-2/the-bellarmine-forum-magazine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939587 | 2,139 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Something that I do quite a bit on my own blog is collect news from around the literary and literacy blogospheres. I work with Terry Doherty from The Reading Tub in providing weekly children's literacy round-ups (this week's roundup is available on my blog today - the next roundup will be at Scrub-a-Dub-Tub on June 8th). I also publish regular (usually once or twice a week) round-ups of other news and interesting posts from the Kidlitosphere.
What I've decided to do on an occasional basis is publish some of the more parent-focused of that Kidlitosphere and literacy-related news here to Booklights instead. I'm calling these items Literacy 'Lights from the Kidlitosphere (encompassing highlights, spotlights, etc.). I welcome your feedback.
At The Book Chook, Susan Stephenson recently announced a new endeavor. She says: "It's called Literacy Lava, and it's a digital magazine (in pdf format) that you'll be able to download and use, share with others, or print and keep. The contributors are bloggers and parents who are passionate about children's literacy. This first issue is erupting with great tips for parents and suggestions for literacy activities to share with kids." I will certainly be staying tuned for this one. Susan was one of the tireless organizers of the 2009 Share a Story - Shape a Future literacy blog tour, which I've mentioned previously.
Jill T. over at The Well-Read Child also recently launched a new feature -- a weekly What My Children are Reading Meme. She explains: "Thanks to Sandy at Stories Are Light for giving me the idea to create this weekly feature. Want to share what your kids are reading or get ideas from other bloggers for other books to read with your children? Create your own post on your blog, and then come to The Well-Read Child every Thursday to submit your link". The first week's post already includes 18 links to summaries from other blogs, a smorgasbord of children's reading updates. Even if you don't have a blog, these weekly posts will make a great starting point for book ideas. And (though I haven't actually asked Jill this) I'm sure that your own family's recommendations would be welcome in the comments.
Five Minutes for Books, edited by Jennifer Donovan, has a similar feature, that one hosted once per month (and representing a different set of bloggers). You can find an archive of past Kids' Picks carnivals. See also an interesting discussion on Five Minutes for Books about the difficulty for parents of (and techniques for) holding back kids from reading books for which they might not be emotionally ready. Be sure to read the comments. There's definitely anecdotal evidence to support one of my personal recommendations: that parents try to read the books that their children are reading, when possible. (See a longer post that I wrote about that here).
Reading the books your children read also crops up in Tim Shanahan's suggestions at Literacy Learning for Encouraging Summer Reading. Tim is Professor of Urban Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is Director of the Center for Literacy. He says: "Encourage your children (teens, too) to read over the summer. It's one of the most loving things you can do for them!". His suggestions include: "read the same book they are reading for class over the summer so you can discuss it. The point is to share the reading experience... Even if you are not reading the same books they are, talk to your children about what they are reading." But do click through for lots of additional ideas.
In Missouri Passages (the Missouri Humanities Council e-Newsletter), Julie Douglas calls upon parents to: "Be extraordinary. Read to a child." She also discusses the Dean's speech at her daughter's graduation ceremony: "He reminded them (the graduates) that we, the parents, had most likely gotten the students started on this educational journey by doing the one thing that was so vital to their learning....we read to them when they were very young." Reading aloud makes a life-long difference.
Speaking of reading aloud, Trevor Cairney has a post up at Literacy, families and learning about how to listen to children reading. He warns: "There have been many young readers demoralised by the comments of a listener while they are reading, and the stress of performing in front of others", and then offers a host of positive suggestions. For example: "After the reader makes a mistake you pause for about 3 seconds and say nothing, this allows time for self-correction."
And last, but not least, if you're looking for children's book recommendations, next weekend will be a prime time to find them in the Kidlitosphere. Our own Pam Coughlan is hosting the fourth annual 48 Hour Book Challenge at MotherReader. The idea is to choose a 48-hour period over the course of the weekend, and spend as much time as possible reading books (and blogging about them) during that window. This will be my third time participating in the 48HBC. I've found these challenges an amazing excuse to prioritize reading for a few days. I'll report back next week, and let you know which books I read. Even if you don't have a blog of your own, you could certainly participate in spirit by making reading a priority between June 5th and 7th.
That's all for this week. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other parent-friendly news items from around the blogs to share with you in the future. Happy June! | <urn:uuid:f656bbb0-c7a9-48dc-8505-ce5bdf0639f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/parents/booklights/archives/2009/06/literacy-lights-from-the-kidlitosphere.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96634 | 1,155 | 1.625 | 2 |
Tales from the Trail
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took what appeared to be a coded swipe at Republican refusals to consider raising taxes in U.S. debt limit talks, saying on Tuesday that all leaders must make hard decisions to put their countries on the right track.
Clinton, a Democratic candidate for president in 2008 but now “out of politics” as top diplomat for her one-time rival President Barack Obama, sounded pointedly political as she recounted a meeting with an unnamed president facing serious fiscal challenges.
“Often times leaders are struggling to get the political support they need to make the hard decisions,” Clinton said at meeting on government transparency at the State Department.
When officials in Washington describe talks as “frank,” the usual translation is: “didn’t go my way.”
Uh-oh. Doesn’t sound like the president’s persuasive personality prevailed.
The longest day of the year probably seemed even longer for some.
Jon Huntsman started the day in New Jersey to formally throw his hat into the ring against the picturesque backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. Here’s the thing about backdrops and TV… Huntsman made it into every shot, but not Lady Liberty. And then he was off to New Hampshire for a rally.
At the Capitol, it was scheduled as a two-hour meeting, but the issues seem never-ending as Vice President Joe Biden and lawmakers negotiate on the deficit and debt limit. Some speculation swirling that perhaps a short-term increase in the debt limit may be an option if agreement is out of reach.
Not exactly a sunny day for the economy. Data out today point to a housing market still struggling to regain footing.
“What’s important now is action, not words,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
White House spokesman Jay Carney concurred: “President Assad needs to either lead that transition or get out of the way … I’m not saying the words are meaningless, but he needs to act on them … But first, he needs to stop the violence.”
President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner get to flex their golfing skills tomorrow and we’re guessing there’s plenty of pre-game strategizing going on.
Is Ohio Governor John Kasich giving Boehner advice on how to keep the Veep off-guard so they can ruin his handicap and have bragging rights on the Republican versus Democrat scoreboard?
Pop quiz: What’s the debt limit?
As the August 2 deadline for raising borrowing authority nears, House Republican leaders have been holding a series of workshops for their 240 members to help “educate” them on the debt limit, according to senior aides.
In the past couple weeks, a few dozen House Republicans have attended each of the meetings to hear House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan discuss options for cutting spending and field questions about the debt limit.
“Any member (can) come in and have a presentation on debt limit,” one aide said, adding, “they can get facts and have a conversation about what it means.”
Jon Huntsman is in. Well, technically, the Republican announced that he will announce that he is in next Tuesday.
He advocated “getting our own house in order” to improve ties with China. “As we have a very weak economic core, we are less able to project the goodness and the power and the might of the United States,” Huntsman said.
CORRECTS POLL NUMBER ON OBAMA’S HANDLING OF ECONOMY
The United States is due to hit its $14.3 trillion debt limit today, and tensions are understandably on the increase with Republicans and Democrats wide apart on the budget deal the GOP wants in exchange for increasing the ceiling.
World markets and America’s economic future could be jeopardized if negotiators still have no deal when the Treasury Department runs out of tricks to stave off default.
But do those fears a crisis make?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggests not. “Rather than thinking of this as a crisis, I think of it as an opportunity to come together and those talks are under way led by the vice president.”
Anyone in public office for more than a nanosecond is likely to have words and deeds come back to haunt them. New political realities sometimes demand a new world view 180 degrees from the old one. And then comes the explanation.
President Barack Obama, who is urging Congress to raise the debt ceiling, is finding his 2006 Senate vote against raising the debt limit when George W. Bush was president has come back to bite him.
The White House has decided to confront the discrepancy head-on.
Asked about the five-year-old vote, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president “now believes it was a mistake.” | <urn:uuid:d4e63daa-fec2-44e4-858a-a9bd003b8630> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/tag/debt-limit/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960873 | 1,031 | 1.5 | 2 |
Skip to comments.Supermodel: Ignore your kids on ‘No Mother’s Day’ to support global abortion access
Posted on 05/11/2012 6:33:22 PM PDT by Morgana
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, May 11, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) This Sunday, children of all ages will celebrate the role mothers play in their lives. But Vogue model Christy Turlington Burns and a host of female celebrities are encouraging mothers across the nation to ignore their children as part of No Mothers Day, a sign of their support for reducing maternal mortality by supporting family planning and global access to abortion.
The campaign asks women to disappear on Mothers Day to raise awareness of maternal mortality rates and underscore just how much a mother is missed when shes gone. But amidst positive initiatives such as improved health care for complications such as hemorrhage and sepsis, the campaign promotes safe abortion, and the legalization of abortion in nations where the practice is currently illegal, as a means of lowering maternal deaths.
A press release for Every Mother Counts, the nonprofit Turlington launched in 2010, notes a new PSA features moms encouraging other moms to join in solidarity by disappearing on May 13th, Mothers Day. No phone calls. No emails. No social media. No gifts.
Turlington told Time magazine, Its a day to stop going through the motions Its about taking that [day] back.
The spot, which was posted online last Wednesday and is directed by Ed Burns, features Turlington, former Will and Grace star Debra Messing, NBCs Ann Curry, Jennifer Connelly, Kelly Rutherford, Blythe Danner, Dayle Haddon, and other high-profile women.
Amongst the projects partners are the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the extreme pro-abortion group Women Deliver, and the United Nations Population Fund. The UNPFA is well known in pro-life circles for the fact that the U.S. State Department confirmed over a number of years that the organization provides financial and technical assistance for Chinas vicious one-child policy.
Over 200 million women who would like to choose when they get pregnant dont have access to family planning, Turlingtons website states.
As part of the Every Mother Counts campaign, Turlington is promoting the film No Woman, No Cry, her two-year-old directorial debut, which features vignettes from four countries. The segment on Guatemala highlights the legal barriers to basic human reproductive rights and hails the work of Linda Valencia, MD, a program officer with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Planned Parenthood announced on its website it is proud to partner with Christy Turlington Burns in the release of her documentary film, No Woman, No Cry. Together, and with your help, we seek to increase dialogue and action on issues of maternal and child health, including access to safe abortion.
In Guatemala, the abortion provider is collaborating with the pioneering feminist organization, Tierra Viva, which is pressuring key political and legal players, such as attorneys and judges, in the battle to gain access to safe reproductive health services.
Turlington called my friend Linda of Planned Parenthood a champion for the women of this country. She also saluted Marta Julia Ruiz from the Population Council (who I met when we were both honored at UNFPA), Mirna Montenegro who runs the maternal health observatory in Guatemala OSAR, and Zury Rios, the dynamic congresswoman who has championed this issue of legalized abortion.
The doctumentary has been screened before the UNPFA, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the World Bank, in a private screening with the president of Tanzania, at Princeton University, the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, and Planned Parenthood of Utah. It has been shown on NBC, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), and Israeli television.
The films assertion that legal abortion is safe is belied by worldwide data on the matter. A recent study out of Chile shows maternal mortality declined after the nation outlawed therapeutic abortion in 1989. The percentage of women dying during childbirth is lower in that South American nation than the United States. Ireland, another country where abortion is illegal, also boasts one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world.
Although the No Mothers Day projects support for abortion around the world paid for by U.S. taxpayers and supported by the United Nations has raised few eyebrows, controversy has surrounded its suggestion to separate mothers from children who have already been born.
According to the supermodel, some mothers have voiced their support. I had a few people that said, `Good. I hate this holiday and I can say Im not participating, she said.
However, Turlington says she plans to have a Mothers Day meal with her own children and female relatives.
While CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment honoring her efforts, Turlington has suffered a backlash from commentators and mothers who say the proposal is callous and ineffective.
Meanwhile, other pro-abortion organizations have also attempted to stake a claim on Mothers Day.
Planned Parenthood used the natal holiday to launch a fundraising campaign asking donors to join us in celebrating women everywhere this Mothers Day by making a special gift to Planned Parenthood Global.
Lezlie Lowe, in a column for The (Halifax) Chronicle Herald entitled, A Day to be Thankful for Abortion Access, wrote: Lets talk about Mothers Day, why dont we? Because if theres any day to be thankful for abortion access, thats the one. Thats what Ill think about when Im woken way too early by wiggling weasels crawling on the bed to wish me a Happy Mothers Day.
Isn’t a large part of the problems in this country because mothers(and fathers) are ignoring their offspring the other 364 days of the year also?
They’ll try anything to advance their sterile, pro-abortion agenda. And don’t let their ‘concern’ for women fool you, they are all about NO babies at all.
director/producer, No Woman, No Cry; founder, Every Mother Counts; global maternal health advocate; model; mom
I just ran across this part. Typical liberal, "do as I say, but not as I do"
Killing humans to save humans?
I always called these people shallow, but now I think they are hollow.
How about encouraging women to ignore Christy Turlington this Mothers’ Day? That woman is a wind tunnel.
Yeah, let’s celebrate Mothers Day by killing lots of babies. And sell their aborted little corpses for supermodel make up (no I am not kidding).
it was the first thing I thought of when I read this!
Totally sicko...AND anti-woman!
Under supermodel standards, I find her quite homely.
While this is Mother's day and it's centered around the recognition of Mothers by their children, as a mother I have a confession to make; I'm celebrating the presence of my children in my life and I'm thanking God for his blessings.
The sad question you have to ask: How many of them would be glad if they did just disappear? Look at how the media portrays parents as being ecstatic when summer is over and their kids go back to school. Look at how Mom's are always fighting for time for themselves. It cuts to the quick that children are portrayed as just a nuisance by the media. They harm the ability of "good women" to pursue her career, and become just another task to juggle. Celebrities live in a strange world that doesn't cherish motherhood. Thank goodness they aren't normal.
I’m old enough to remember when a supermodel was gorgeous, and not just a working model of the day...
I think she is, physically, OK looking. No better than OK. And maybe if others thought the same, she wouldn’t have become such a self-centered witch.
Many pagan societies sacrificed their babies to appease the gods.
I believe you.
I dont think it evil as much as being dumber than a bag of hair.
And urban moms have been ignoring their kids for years. The other day one of the ignored was seen walking down the street here wearing only a dirty diaper. That mom must have gotten the memo a few days early.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works. | <urn:uuid:56e136e9-8549-491c-8539-142c7e5d0484> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2882813/posts?page=68 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953924 | 1,771 | 1.539063 | 2 |
This small fishing village with about 5,000 residents used to be only accessible by boat, but now daily domestic flights within Belize bring newcomers every day. And Punta Gorda (locally called PG) is also the final stop of the Southern Highway, which connects Punta Gorda with Belize City and the rest of the country. There are only 5 main streets in this town, which is the capital of the isolated and sparsely populated Toledo district, but tourists have discovered its charm and it’s not as lonely as it was not long ago.
What makes Punta Gorda special
The population is mostly made up of the Garifuna people, who are black Caribs with their own unique culture. English is the official language and is widely spoken, but several local languages are also in use among residents. Belize’s cacao production is centered here and chocolate-type drinks have been popular among residents for centuries. There are also Maya villages not far inland, and a program allows visitors to stay with families there to observe the culture up close.
What to do
Its location on the Bay of Honduras and close proximity to nearby islands makes this a popular spot for day or overnight trips of scuba diving, snorkeling, and sea-kayaking. Many tour operators are based near the public dock and run regular excursions off shore.
There are several Maya villages just inland from Punta Gorda, so those with cultural interests can visit them and even arrange to stay with a local family overnight.
Market days are every Wednesday and Saturday morning and these bring out most of the town in addition to people coming from across the border in Guatemala. You can buy handcrafts, household items, and local produce among other things.
Bird watching is big in the area with around 500 different species found nearby.
As a fishing village, it’s no surprise that that sport is a big attraction in PG. This town is called the Permit Capital of the World, but tarpon and bonefish are common as well.
Where to stay
There are about 20 hotels, inns, and guest houses in the Punta Gorda area, and most of them are in the budget price range, and only about half of them have online booking available. There are a few lodges and resorts in the area with rooms from between US$100 and US$200 per night, but there are also many small and simple places with prices close to or below US$50 per night. It’s usually easy to just show up and find one of these cheaper places available, but during peak season this could be a problem, and the city is very remote so you don’t have many nearby backups.
Punta Gorda is about a 4-hour drive from Belize City and there is also a daily express bus that takes about 5.5 hours at a cost of around US$6. The airstrip also has several daily flights from Belize City by the country’s two local airlines. More information can be found on the domestic Belize flights page. | <urn:uuid:e86a86aa-1cd4-47d8-aa37-e7c878fe8553> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.belizelogue.com/punta-gorda | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971682 | 634 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Our Experience with Primavera
How This Online Pioneer Changed Education
Students Who Benefit
What types of students attend an online high school? The answer may surprise you. Geographically, 75 percent of Primavera's students are located in Phoenix area with other student populations representing the smaller cities of Tucson and Prescott. A significant part of the school's student population also resides in rural areas. The reasons students choose Primavera are just as varied. Whether it is a desire for accelerated learning or in response to bullying, overcrowded classrooms, behavioral issues or a life changing event - every student has something in common - the demand for an alternative quality education.
Teachers With A Common Philosophy
Primavera also boasts of an excellent roster of teaching professionals, each highly qualified and accredited by the State of Arizona. In fact, 73 percent of the school's teachers have a Master's degree or higher and each receives extensive training and ongoing professional development. Many have extensive classroom experience but were drawn to Primavera's online model because of the unique teaching benefits it offers. Each enjoys the extensive personal contact they have at Primavera and many credit the school's educational philosophy as a key factor in their choice to teach online.
Inspirational Academic Choices
Many of today's brick and mortar high schools offer a selection of academic courses that may be limited by budget, space or teaching expertise. Primavera overcomes these obstacles to provide students with a selection of hundreds of courses, from general education requirements to exciting electives, each in alignment with national standards. Students receive meaningful personal attention from experts in the field in variety of subjects in an engaging environment that inspires lifelong learning.
A Model of Success
As a result of over ten years of research and development, including years of consulting with students, parents, teachers and administrators, Primavera has developed a model for online success that features:
Shorter, manageable courses keep students engaged and focused through periods of defined start and end dates. Keeping students active and moving forward in their educational goals helps the school reduce student churn to maintain a steady enrollment.
Extensive Teacher Interaction
At Primavera, online learning is not an isolated experience. Students and parents regularly comment on the impressive quality of the school's teachers and the extensive amount of personal attention received as compared to a traditional school.
Proprietary Curriculum Solutions
Through more than ten years of online education experience, Primavera has developed one of the top curriculum models in the country based on a highly interactive platform that not only engages students but also adapts to their personal learning style.
There's More To The Story
With the overwhelming success of Primavera, it's easy to see how this online high school can serve as a model districts and schools interested in developing and managing their own online learning programs. For these institutions, the future is now and Primavera is leading the way.
|Primavera Administrators||Primavera Student Advisors||Primavera Teachers|| Primavera IT Department | <urn:uuid:b700ad46-faa6-46ec-8ec8-50ddfaba4d0b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flipswitch.com/Experience | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952922 | 626 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Longtime Rouse home is up for sale
James and Patricia Rouse moved into waterfront Wilde Lake home in 1974
Exterior of the home once owned by Columbia founder James Rouse and his wife, Patricia. The yellow doors were selected by Rouse. (Karl Merton Ferron, Baltimore Sun / October 18, 2012)
It is the home's first time on the market since the newlyweds purchased it for $95,000 more than 38 years ago.
"They would put music on in here and dance. They had this incredible record collection," said Maria Gamper, Patricia Rouse's daughter, as she showed off the modern living area that her mother and stepfather shared for more than two decades. "This was their retreat."
There was brief talk of turning the home into a museum dedicated to the Rouses, Gamper said. But a museum is not what Jim and Patty, as they were known to friends and colleagues, would have wanted, she said.
The down-to-earth couple did not maintain a perfectly manicured home ready for elegant cocktail soirees. The Rouses covered the walls of their house on Waterfowl Terrace walls with pictures, filling the rooms with the scent of James Rouse's terrapin soup and stacking piles of paperwork on desks in the kitchen.
"They collected everything. It was just full of so much of Columbia," said Gamper, who is administering her mother's estate. James Rouse died in 1996 and Patricia Rouse died in March. Many of their treasures have since been cleared out of the home and placed in Columbia's archives.
James Rouse was the urban development visionary who produced a diverse array of projects, including Harborplace, Boston's Faneuil Hall and the villages of Columbia, including the Village of Wilde Lake. He bought this home about 11 years after announcing his plan to "build a comprehensively planned city" and the purchase of 14,000 acres in Howard County, according to the archives.
Patricia Rouse, the first woman to head the Norfolk, Va., Redevelopment and Housing Authority, later co-founded with her husband the Enterprise Foundation, which has grown over three decades into a family of companies under the Enterprise umbrella that is focused on financing and promoting affordable housing.
"They would just want somebody who appreciates it" to buy the home, Gamper said. "They would just want someone who enjoyed the serenity."
The light-filled home offers much to appreciate, including clerestory windows at the peak of the living room's angled ceiling and giant windows in the kitchen that fully open to let the outdoors in.
Wilde Lake is visible from nearly every room, thanks to an abundance of glass. Though neighbors are close on either side, their presence is minimized by the home's orientation. The eye is directed toward the tree-lined lake from the time the front door threshold has been crossed.
"To know that you're so close to Baltimore and D.C. and have this environment: It's just so peaceful," Gamper said.
The home was built in the late 1960s by Howard County homebuilder John N. Bowers for the family of Malcolm "Mal" Sherman, an executive of the Rouse Co. — the development firm James Rouse started.
"The house was designed for our needs," said Miriam "Mimi" Sherman in a Sun Magazine piece about the home that was published in December 1969. "And planned so that my husband and I can live on the upper floor when the children no longer live here."
The Shermans moved out within several years, but the Rouses, who both had older children from previous marriages, used the home in the way the Shermans intended, Gamper said. They spent most of their time on the main level, in the kitchen in particular, she said. It was the heart of their household, where they worked and ate. "He cooked all the meals," Gamper said.
The master bedroom is on the main level, just off of a 21-by-16-foot living room and on the opposite side of the house from the open kitchen-dining area. All of the main floor rooms offer access to a deck that stretches across the back of the home.
The lower level has three smaller bedrooms, a master suite and a large living area with walk-out access to the backyard, which slopes down to the lake's edge. There's also plenty of walk-in closet space.
The Rouses purchased the land — about a third of an acre — and the 4,000-square-foot home for less than $100,000, but they put nearly $200,000 into expanding and renovating the property in the '70s and '80s. They really made it their own, Gamper said, with big changes including the addition of a breakfast nook and small touches such as installing handmade clay tiles on the kitchen counters and around the wood-burning hearth.
The house could use updating, said Mike Gary, of the realty firm Mohler & Gary, which listed the home for $795,000 a week and a half ago. | <urn:uuid:f24faab8-4fee-48aa-b94a-a2987f1666bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.courant.com/features/home-garden/bs-re-rouse-house-20121101,0,5568346.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981009 | 1,052 | 1.625 | 2 |
When a bottle of liquor is sold in Maine, the bottle's supplier, through a broker, first negotiates a retail price with the state. The state taxes the supplier based on how much it costs to make and ship that bottle. The state then purchases the bottle and stores it at the Maine Beverage Co. warehouse in Augusta. Next, the bottle is sold and distributed to one of 400 agency stores, which sell it to consumers for a set profit based on the bottle's retail price. Maine Beverage collects its guaranteed profit margin of 36.8%, based on sales of all liquor in a given year. Any remaining profit gets split 50-50 between Maine Beverage and the state.
The state generally defines liquor, regulated by the Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations, as distilled spirits higher than 13% alcohol, or 26 proof. Beer and wine, on the other hand, are overseen by the Department of Public Safety's Liquor Licensing and Compliance Division. The segregation dates back to the repeal of Prohibition, after which many states sought to retain tight control over spirits while developing a more relaxed attitude toward beer and wine.
After 70 years under the Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations, lawmakers approve privatizing the state's wholesale liquor business
The state awards a 10-year wholesale liquor distribution contract to Martignetti Cos. of Massachusetts
Two losing bidders for the contract, Pine State Trading Co. of Augusta and MaineCentric of Auburn, appeal to the state. Distillers White Rock and M.S. Walker demand the state vacate the contract award, fearing unfair promotion of competing products.
The appeal is denied.
After a court filing, three of the parties compromise. Martignetti agrees to share profits with Pine State and its New York financial backer, forming Martignetti Cos. of Maine, which operates Maine Beverage Co. MaineCentric drops its appeal.
Gubernatorial candidate Libby Mitchell pitches renegotiating the liquor contract to pay for education programs
The state budget passes with a provision that Maine renegotiate its contract with Maine Beverage Co. by June 2013. The contract expires in 2014.
As we blend margaritas or shake up martinis this summer for some warm-weather imbibing, it's no wonder the furthest thing from our minds is the journey our bottles of gin or tequila take to get to our glasses. And though we may cringe as the local cashier rings up our purchase, most of us give little thought to who decides how much we pay for our alcohol.
But now that the Legislature wants to wring more money out of its contract for the state's wholesale liquor business, the distribution and pricing of alcohol returns to the forefront. Legislators have voted to renegotiate a state contract signed in 2004 that privatized Maine's liquor operation and gave the state a quick $125 million to balance its budget, but cost taxpayers about $100 million in lost revenue in the long run. Now, lawmakers hope to earn a bigger share of that business, today valued at more than $350 million, well over twice the price they agreed to seven years ago. For perspective: The liquor contract dwarfs the value of the Maine Turnpike widening project by more than double.
Maine oversees and regulates liquor like no other product sold within its borders, a reflection of the state's uneasy relationship with alcohol since becoming the first dry state in the nation in 1851, beating federal Prohibition to the punch by nearly 70 years. "It's not bread," says Dan Gwadosky, head of the Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations. "It can be used very responsibly. When it's not, it can have devastating consequences." Beer and wine, on the other hand, are handled under an entirely separate system.
Maine is one of 18 control states that opted against reverting to the sale of alcohol through private sellers after Prohibition's repeal. While all states control the sale of spirits through regulation, Maine and its 17 counterparts, to varying degrees, substitute state government for the private marketplace when it comes to liquor sales.
Maine's arrangement — contracting the entire wholesale distribution and storage business to a private company for a commission — is unlike any other in the country. "Maine is really the only one that contracts the wholesale out to a private entity," says Steven Schmidt, a spokesman for the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association, which represents the 18 control states and several control counties in Maryland. As in the other control states, the setup creates a legalized monopoly of the lucrative liquor business. The state retains control over prices and in Maine, a private entity — a partnership among a Massachusetts company, a Maine business and a New York private equity firm — enjoys a profit margin that would make even Steve Jobs envious.
Under its arrangement with Maine Beverage Co., the company that holds the current wholesale liquor contract, every bottle of liquor sold in the state passes through Maine Beverage's warehouse in Augusta. Whether it's Glenlivet single-malt from Scotland or vodka made right here in Maine, it eventually calls the state capital home before making its way to your closest retailer. One true but counterintuitive example: When Bow Street Market in Freeport places an order for Cold River Vodka that's distilled from potatoes fewer than two miles away, those bottles head to Augusta first before doubling back to Freeport.
Regardless of whether it's Bow Street Market in Freeport or the Hannaford store in Falmouth, the wholesale price the retailer pays remains the same. Whether it's a mom n' pop convenience store or a major supermarket chain, located five miles or 50 miles from the Augusta distribution center, each pays, to cite Maine's perennial bestseller, the same $10 for a fifth of Allen's coffee brandy.
That's because a handful of bureaucrats in Augusta decide how much we pay for liquor (when we're not heading south to New Hampshire to stock up). Suppliers tell the state's five-member Liquor and Lottery Commission how much they want to charge for their products, but the commission has the final word, and adds its markup based on a formula that includes nine criteria, including how much other states are charging. The commission also decides which products can be sold in Maine.
Each of the 2,600 products sold here are priced with the state's contract with Maine Beverage, which promises the company a healthy profit margin of 36.8%, in mind. "We establish margins for each category," says Gwadosky, of the state's alcohol bureau. For example, a single-malt scotch, an expensive product that sells only so many bottles, has a low typical gross margin of 32%. New, untested products, on the other hand, start with a higher margin and "earn their way to a lower margin," Gwadosky says. Allen's coffee brandy is an exception, a proven product that nevertheless has the highest margin of any product at 43%.
After earning its guaranteed margin, Maine Beverage splits any remaining profits with the state 50-50, an amount that will total more than $60 million over the life of its contract. Not a small sum, but the state would have earned $280 million over the same 10 years if it hadn't privatized, about $100 million more than it earned from the $125 million upfront payment plus profit-sharing proceeds.
In general, control states like Maine generate almost double the revenue per gallon that non-control states earn, says Schmidt of the NABCA. With influence over pricing and distribution, control states tend to earn more per bottle, even though per capita consumption is lower, he says. But that can come at a cost to consumers, who are in some cases taxed more for spirits than for beer and wine, says David Ozgo, chief economist for the Distilled Spirits Council, a national trade association representing leading distillers. Ranked by revenue per gallon of alcohol sold, including beer, wine and distilled spirits, Maine ranks a middling 23rd in the nation, he says.
Suppliers' representatives, known as brokers, come to price-setting meetings well-informed of the margins the state seeks, and can adjust their costs per case to settle on a given price. Any special price cuts apply to all retailers that buy that product. "If it's on sale at one store, it's on sale at another store," Gwadosky says. While the state wants fair prices for its residents, it also must avoid slashing prices to the point of encouraging binge drinking and other alcohol-related problems. But at the same time, higher alcohol sales mean more revenue for state programs. "It's managed every day... It's a calculation, businesses do the same thing every day," Gwadosky says.
Once suppliers and the state settle on a price, the product makes its way to agency stores, which earn a set profit percentage based on the item's cost. For example, a 1.75-liter bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream retails for $45.99. An agency store purchases that bottle at wholesale for $40.47, earning a profit of $5.52, or 12%. Retailers then sell the product to a consumer or to a bar or restaurant, which can charge whatever they want to mix up an Irish coffee or a mudslide.
Maine Beverage Co.'s 10-year contract for the state's liquor business expires in 2014. In June, as part of the $6.1 billion biennial budget, lawmakers included a provision to renegotiate the contract by June 2013. Instead of a large upfront payment like the one the state netted in 2004, legislators are seeking $20 million up front, but also to right a past wrong and earn more revenue over the life of the contract.
Of the money allocated to the state under the new contract, 15% would be used for clean water programs, 20% for the highway preservation and rehabilitation paving program, 30% for the budget stabilization fund and 35% for the general fund.
Maine Beverage is keen to renew the contract. The state will choose whether to simply renew with Maine Beverage or put the contract out to bid. "We've been pitching [to renew] since the first day we took over," Dean Williams, president and CEO of Maine Beverage, says in half-jest. By shortening lead times for stores to receive orders, bumping up delivery frequency, improving marketing and streamlining the warehouse and distribution process, Maine Beverage has grown the business from $87.5 million in 2004 to $126 million today, enriching the state as well as itself, he says. "We have brought a lot of value to the state," Williams says. "We think we're the best operator for the business."
Maine Beverage is made up of an alliance that would have appeared unlikely back in 2004. At the time, Martignetti Cos. of Norwood, Mass., the country's seventh-largest wine and spirits distributor, beat out two competing bidders for the contract, MaineCentric of Auburn and Maine Liquors LLC, a company created by Pine State Trading Co. of Augusta and its New York-based financing partner, Lindsay Goldberg. MaineCentric and Maine Liquors both appealed the state's decision and later took their complaint to court.
But under a compromise agreement, Martignetti agreed to share liquor sales and distribution profits with its former adversaries, Pine State Trading, which operates the Augusta warehouse, and the deep-pocketed Lindsay Goldberg. "We couldn't have ended up with a better partner," Williams says. The three formed Martignetti Cos. of Maine LLC, in which Lindsay Goldberg has a two-thirds ownership stake and Martignetti the other one-third. Pine State holds no ownership interest.
The other competitor, MaineCentric, a company affiliated with SPC Transport Co. of Auburn, which distributed the state's liquor before privatization, dropped its appeal. SPC President Todd Prawer says he hasn't given much thought to whether he'd bid for the contract renewal in 2013, but wouldn't discuss the events of 2004.
Maine Beverage, meanwhile, hopes to hold onto a contract that will cost it more in the future, but no doubt still prove profitable. "It's not often that a company is excited about paying more money," Williams says.
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So for the first time I saw an autism pin on a lapel at an awards show. Steve Carrell was wearing the blue puzzle piece of Autism Speaks, NBC's almost official charity, just one more reason to love Mr. Carrell.
UPDATE: So looking around the room I am seeing many an NBC star with said pins.
Babies with colic often cry for hours, and it's challenge to find ways to soothe them. New research may have found a cure for colic.
NewsCenter 5's Heather Unruh reported Tuesday that Jocelyn Levinson knows a lot about colic. She takes care of infants at the Waltham YMCA.
"A lot of the colicky babies tears will come down their face, and it will last a long time -- not just two or three seconds," Levinson said.
That chronic fussiness affects about one-quarter of all babies. There is no cure. Trying different treatments or folk remedies can be a struggle. But a new study is out in the journal Pediatrics about a new treatment for colic.
"It was statistically significant," Children's Hospital Boston registered nurse Lisa Keeler said.
Researchers followed two groups of colicky babies who were breastfed. Half received a probiotic known as lactobacillus reuteri.
"The good bacteria that are found in the intestinal system," Keeler said.
This probiotic is in breast milk, many over the counter pills and yogurts.
"It took almost four weeks, but by day 28 of the study it was a greater than 50 percent decrease in the crying time as compared to the gas drops," Keeler said.
In fact, after a month only 7 percent of the babies, who got Simethicone, or gas drops, saw relief, crying an average of 25 percent less.
But among the babies who received the probiotic, almost all of them -- 95 percent -- were less irritable, and they cried less than half as often as before.
While the probiotic seemed to really soothe the babies, and it is safe, experts said that you shouldn't run out to the drug store and buy it just yet.
"Although those results were statistically significant, the bottom line was that they recommended more research," Keeler said.
They're not sure why the probiotics worked, but the bacteria might boost a baby's immune system and help them cope better with the symptoms. Also, babies showing the early signs of allergies fared well in this study, finding some relief after being given probiotics.
The Age of Autism: The AOA Awards '06 By DAN OLMSTED UPI Senior Editor
WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- As this column heads into its third year, the time is right to cite those who made 2006 a memorable year in the history of autism -- and set the stage for even more remarkable ones to come.
And the winners are:
Person of the Year: Anne Dachel. This Chippewa Falls, Wis., mom and member of the National Autism Association keeps chipping away at the mainstream media's wall of indolence and incuriosity.
She sent e-mails to just about every reporter who wrote about the subject this past year along with letters-to-the-editor of their publications, as well as penning articles of her own.
She praises, she pushes, she relentlessly raises the questions at the heart of the matter: Why have the number of cases risen so dramatically? Why aren't journalists asking tougher questions of Important People?
A recent example: "We need the press to continue to investigate and report on the generation of affected children in the U.S. We're being overwhelmed by a disorder that was unheard of a few years ago, yet the press isn't calling for answers. If one in every 166 children were suddenly developing blindness, I'm sure it would be a front page story."
Some no doubt find this a bit much. But what Dachel represents is persistence. Private citizens have every right to question elected officials and keep the media on their toes, whether the pooh-bahs like it or not. It's an old-fashioned thing called citizenship.
Person of the Century: Bernard Rimland, who died this year, is all that. What's more, you can pick the century -- in the one just past, he made a massive contribution by demolishing the idea that parents' behavior can make their children autistic.
In his landmark 1964 book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior," he laid out the case against the then-conventional wisdom. What's more, he laid the foundation for all serious research on the subject when he wrote that "conviction (must be) subordinated to evidence. The history of science proves this to be the first step toward progress."
Using that same approach, Rimland concluded that medical treatment could help many autistic kids. That's his contribution to the century just begun and the promise it holds for both prevention and treatment.
He thus exiled himself from most of mainstream medicine, but he may have helped thousands of children. Which would you rather have as your legacy?
Because of his guts, grit -- and perseverance -- he'll be remembered for leading not one, but two, medical revolutions.
Not So Hot National Magazine Story of the Year: Newsweek, which did a cover story on the looming caregiving crisis as thousands of autistic children "age out" of mandated care into an uncertain adulthood.
So far, so good. But the magazine failed to come to grips with the obvious: Why are there so many kids with autism?
Fishy Factoid of the Year Award: ABC News, which did a story much like Newsweek's and simply asserted that "up to 1 million" adults are living with autism.
Where are they?
Quote of the Year: From Irva Hertz-Picciotto, chair of an expert panel convened by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at the request of Congress. The panel poked some gaping holes in the kind of data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses to assure Americans that there's no link between autism and the mercury preservative in vaccines called thimerosal.
"I think there's more work to be done," said Hertz-Picciotto, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine.
"We know there's a major genetic component to autism, but genes cannot explain a rise over a short time period of a few decades," she said, sounding a lot more like Anne Dachel and Bernie Rimland than Newsweek, ABC and the CDC.
"It's an 'open question' whether anything about vaccines -- timing, dose, preservative -- is related to the rise in diagnoses," she said.
That's right -- an open question, one that requires an urgent and definitive answer.
Not So Hot Magazine Story of the Year, Local Division: The Washingtonian, which ran an article in its November issue titled, "Something Happened and We Don't Know Why," about twins with autism.
Although the twins' mom thinks vaccine mercury did trigger their autism, she is brushed off with the author's comment that "many large-scale studies have disproved a link between thimerosal and autism."
Yeah, large-scale studies like the one the NIH expert panel just dumped a bucket of cold water on.
Prediction for '07: The pace of change is accelerating in ways that are not entirely in the control of the government and its often defensive bureaucracies.
I believe 2007 will be a very good year for the truth -- for the subordination of conviction to evidence, as Bernard Rimland so elegantly put it. And that would be a very good year, indeed. | <urn:uuid:67131f7a-cea7-4504-b69e-3327ed798371> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968719 | 1,617 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Janklow Remembered In His Hometown
January 13, 2012, 4:59 PM
Bill Janklow with Jim McGlone and his wife
FLANDREAU, SD -
Few places in South Dakota are feeling the loss of Bill Janklow more strongly than in the former governor's hometown. People in Flandreau knew Janklow long before he emerged in the public spotlight.
Jim McGlone has known Bill Janklow since they were 7th graders in Flandreau during the 1950s. Back then, McGlone and others in Flandreau might not have predicted Janklow's rapid rise in politics. But they did see glimpses of the brashness that would later become a Janklow trademark.
Janklow and McGlone's 60-year Flandreau friendship began when McGlone's precocious classmate was the new kid on the block.
"Bill was a typical high school kid who was mischievous. He never went out for any sports, but he was always around hanging out down at what we call the, 'Sugar Bowl.' That's where all the kids hung out," McGlone said.
And when Janklow wasn't hanging out in Flandreau, he was on the road to somewhere else.
"He loved to drive his mother's car. It was a big old Oldsmobile I recall. One time he wanted to know if we wanted a hamburger and this other friend of mine said, 'Yeah,' and he drove to Sioux Falls. We didn't know where he was going," McGlone said.
Both McGlone and Janklow racked up a few school demerits along the way.
"Back then, you got like five demerits and you were out. Well, you could get a demerit for chewing gum," McGlone said.
McGlone remembers Janklow's earliest foray into politics: organizing a sit-down strike against a teacher that led to him getting kicked out of school.
"He asked for his locker fee back and that made the superintendent mad," laughed McGlone.
McGlone says Janklow's years in Flandreau helped shape the future politician. A small town that made a big impression on Janklow.
"Maybe if he hadn't been in Flandreau, he might have turned out different. Like Hillary Clinton says, it takes a village to raise a child. We'll everyone around town knew Bill and they might have gave him a break now and then," McGlone said.
Janklow left Flandreau to join the Marines. McGlone says Janklow returned home a much more serious person, but still able to have fun with his friends.
© 2012 KELOLAND TV. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:c30c074b-a522-41a3-8181-bb63f6a1fe6d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm/janklow-remembered-in-his-hometown/?id=126182 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988008 | 587 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Valentine’s Day Program at Kent State to Discuss the Connection between Love and the Jewish Bible
Kent State University’s Jewish Studies Program continues its Lunch and Learn series this Valentine’s Day with an event titled “Love and Temptation in The Song of Songs.”
Doron M. Kalir, Esq., adjunct professor at Siegal College of Judaic Studies in Cleveland, will present on Tuesday, Feb. 14, from noon to 1 p.m. in the Kent Student Center, Room 310 A and B. The event is free and open to all. Attendees can bring their own lunch. Drinks and desserts will be provided.
“On Valentine’s Day, people’s thoughts turn to love,” says Chaya Kessler, director of Kent State’s Jewish Studies Program. “The Jewish Studies Program sees this as an opportune time to explore the idea of love as it is expressed in the Biblical text of the Song of Songs.”
Kalir first studied law in Israel, where he obtained Bachelor of Law (cum laude) and Master of Law (summa cum laude) degrees. He then obtained another Master of Law degree from Columbia Law School (Kent Scholar - highest honors), where he also taught a seminar on Biblical Jurisprudence. Kalir lectures regularly on the biblical narrative. He blogs on the portion of the week at http://portionoftheweek.blogspot.com/.
The Lunch and Learn series is supported by an anonymous friend of the Jewish Studies Program.
For more information regarding Kent State’s Jewish Studies Program or the Lunch and Learn series, call Kessler at 330-672-8926 or visit www.kent.edu/CAS/JewishStudiesProgram.
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Jewish Studies Program, Center for Entrepreneurship and Hillel Host Digital Media Producer and Indie Jewish Educator
Kent State University’s Jewish Studies Program has partnered with the university’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation and Hillel at Kent State to bring Sarah Lefton, a successful businesswoman who turned her creativity into a career, to campus on Monday, Feb. 20. Lefton will talk about her start-up company that is dedicated to raising worldwide Jewish literacy.
Lefton is executive director and producer of G-dcast (www.g-dcast.com), a nonprofit media production company, and an indie Jewish educator. Her G-dcast raises basic Jewish literacy with fresh, funny animation and games distributed online. She will speak on the topic of “Animating Torah: Why Bible Literacy Matters and How YouTube Videos Can Make an Impact” at 7 p.m. in Bowman Hall, room 137. The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a desert reception. This public lecture is sponsored by the university’s Jewish Studies Program and Hillel at Kent State.
A graduate of New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), Sarah left the glamour of New York publishing (The New York Times) and the fast pace of Bay Area tech marketing (UGOBE's robotic Pleo dinosaur) in 2008 and started her own company. She was named one of the Forward 50 most influential Jews of 2009 and is a recipient of the Joshua Venture Group fellowship for Jewish social entrepreneurs. Lefton was a guest of the Obamas at the 2010 reception at the White House for Jewish Heritage Month.
“Within the Jewish studies world, Sarah Lefton is very well-known,” says Chaya Kessler, director of Kent State’s Jewish Studies Program. “We are very excited to bring this dynamic entrepreneur who, in her own words, ‘applies start-up thinking to the sometimes dusty world of Jewish education.’”
Earlier in the day and coinciding with National Entrepreneurship Week, Lefton will participate in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation’s Speaker Series class. She will speak to Kent State students, faculty and staff and then hold a meet-and-greet in the John Brinzo Entrepreneurship Lab.
“Our students love to hear the start-up stories of successful entrepreneurs, and I’m looking forward to the pearls of wisdom that Sarah Lefton will share with us,” says Julie Messing, director of Kent State’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation. “So much of her business is using contemporary media with so much of it being online, so I think her presentation will be very interesting and beneficial to our students.”
Kessler says hosting Lefton during National Entrepreneurship Week is a wonderful fit. “Sarah is very energetic and positive, and she’s a good role model for our students, particularly those women who are interested in business,” Kessler says. “She applied her energies to do something new, and I suggested her to our entrepreneurship center as a possible speaker. It turned out to be a great fit with it being National Entrepreneurship Week and that we are able to have her speak to three different audiences throughout the day.”
Messing also comments that bringing this speaker to campus is a nice collaboration between different areas of the university. “We get excited about working together with other schools, centers and programs outside of our own colleges. It benefits our students, and we’re also able to reach a wider audience through these collaborations.”
A students-only event also will be held for Kent State students to enjoy dinner with Lefton at the Cohn Jewish Student Center in Kent. Students will have the opportunity to meet the guest speaker and learn how she turned her creativity into a career. The students-only event is sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and Hillel.
For more information regarding Kent State’s Jewish Studies Program, call Kessler at 330-672-8926 or visit www.kent.edu/CAS/JewishStudiesProgram.
For more information about Kent State’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation, call Messing at 330-672-9430 or visit www.kent.edu/cebi.
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Kent Keyboard Series Features Duo Piano Recital by Ehlen and Tai on Feb. 19
Original guest, Huang, cancels due to eye surgery complications
Due to complications with a recent eye surgery, the previously announced guest artist Chu-Fang Huang, 2005 winner of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, has had to cancel her performance at the Feb. 19 Kent Keyboard Series concert.
Appearing in her place, on Feb. 19 at 5 p.m. in the Ludwig Recital Hall at 1325 Theatre Dr. in the Hugh A. Glauser School of Music, will be the dynamic duo of Timothy Ehlen and Yu-Chi Tai.
Ehlen, International Steinway Artist, recently performed locally with the Cleveland Orchestra’s Schubert Bi-Centennial Series. He also received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree with Paul Schenly at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He first gained international attention after winning the World Piano Competition in 1987. He has performed internationally at music festivals in France, Korea, Austria, and nationally at numerous universities, including Indiana University, Eastman School of Music and Northwestern University, just to name a few. In addition to being the director of piano studies at the University of Illinois, he regularly presents master classes at major universities and conservatories all over the country and the world.
Tai has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia as a solo recitalist, chamber pianist and collaborative musician. She has won numerous international competitions and appeared in many concerts. Last year, she was invited to play the Brahms Piano Quartet I at the CoCha Chamber Music Festival in Illinois, and collaborated a concerto with the South Texas Symphony.
The program will include Mozart’s Sonata I D Major, K. 448, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Haydn, Opus 56b, Chopin’s Rondo in C Major, Opus 73 and Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2, Opus 17.
Tickets are available at the door. Cash or checks will be accepted. Cost for adults and seniors is $10. Cost for Kent State students with a valid FLASHcard is $5.
For more information, visit www.kent.edu/music or call 330-672-3609.
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KSU Dancers Premiere Original Works in Two Concerts
B.F.A. Senior Dance Concert and the Student Dance Festival
Kent State University’s School of Theatre and Dance will continue its 2011-12 production season with the B.F.A. Senior Dance Concert: At(ten)tion to Detail. The concert will run from March 1 - 3, in the Louis O. Erdmann and William H. Zucchero (EZ) Black Box Theatre, located at 1325 Theatre Dr. in the Music and Speech Center. Performances begin at 8 p.m. every evening.
Tickets are $8 for students, $12 for seniors, $14 for faculty, staff and Kent State alumni, and $16 for adults. Tickets can be purchased at the box office by calling 330-672-2497 or online at www.dance.kent.edu. The Box Office is open weekdays from noon - 5 p.m., and one hour prior to each performance. The Box Office accepts Visa, MasterCard, Discover, checks and cash. Free parking is available and the theatre is fully accessible.
At(ten)tion to Detail will offer audience members the opportunity to see original works that demonstrate the versatility and creative choices of 10 B.F.A senior dance performance majors. This concert represents the culmination of their choreographic endeavors at Kent State and will reflect a dynamic array of work addressing a variety of topics using modern and jazz dance.
Jessica Kraft’s piece, 27 Million, addresses the dark truth of the existence of masses of enslaved people in the world today. Through dance and video projection, this piece explores the global reality of sex trafficking and forced labor. Miles Davis’ words, “Sometimes, you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself” serves as point of departure for Jordan Deckert’s jazz dance, Off the ‘Hinge.’ Jessica Mego’s piece, Tenacity, showcases the strength of women through modern dance choreography inspired by Maya Angelou: “The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination.”
Sifting, choreographed by Diane Skerbec, explores the concept of revealing the purest, most genuine form of self, and Michelle Brown’s, Six Miles Out, uses a series of vignettes to portray life’s overwhelming moments through humor. Original works by Ebby Howarth, Jessica Elizabeth Kinsey, LaRonica L. Southerland, Sabatino A. Verlezza, and Colleen M. Weiher will round out this vibrant and innovative concert.
To close the concert, the 10 graduating senior choreographers will perform together in an excerpt of Pursuit of Happiness, choreographed by modern dance pioneer May O’Donnell. Reconstructed by faculty member Barbara Allegra Verlezza, this piece was created in honor of the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial and is set to the quintessential American music of the Big Band era.
Junior and senior dance performance and dance education majors will debut works in the EZ Theatre at the annual Student Dance Festival: 1 and itself, on Sunday, March 4, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. The performances are free and open to the public. Drawing from modern, jazz and hip hop, the choreographers express ideas that are individual and meaningful to them. Audience members are sure to find something they can relate to in this diverse presentation of dance.
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Department of Residence Services Invites Faculty and Staff to Campus Conversation Events
The Social Justice team within the Department of Residence Services is dedicated to creating awareness about and advocating for social justice issues.
The team is in charge of organizing and implementing the Campus Conversation program, where students, faculty and staff get together to talk about relevant topics on social justice issues.
This semester, there are three upcoming Campus Conversations events.
LGBTQA Sexuality Panel with Pride! Kent and KIC Diversity Committee
Date: Feb. 22
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: 106 Manchester Hall
Short Fuse (Upheaval 14:45) – short film followed by a discussion
Themes: Classism, trust, national origin, race, gender roles
Date: March 14
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: 106 Manchester Hall
Short Fuse Short (Fueling the Fire 22:16) short film followed by a discussion
Themes: Assumptions, beliefs, values, relationships, perception vs. reality, point of view, holding the right people accountable
Date: April 16
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: 106 Manchester Hall
All students, faculty and staff are invited to attend and join the campus conversations.
For more information, contact Eron Memaj at firstname.lastname@example.org or 330-672-2795.
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The School of Art Continues Season with 65th Student Annual
The Student Annual celebrates 65 years and will be open to the public from Feb. 23 to March 14 with a reception on Thursday, Feb. 23, at 5 p.m. in the School of Art Gallery located on the second floor of the Art Building at Kent State University. The exhibit will feature work by Kent State students majoring in art, studio, art education or art history.
“This offers students some real world experience because not everyone who submits something gets into the exhibition,” says Anderson Turner, director of galleries for the School of Art. “Several professional grants, artist residencies and exhibition opportunities are determined by a juror or a panel of jurors.”
Students can submit any kind of work, including but not limited to paintings, textiles, glass, ceramics, jewelry and sculptures. Only School of Art students can have their work entered for the exhibit. Amy Craft, executive director of Arthouse, will serve as juror.
“It is beneficial anytime students have the opportunity to exhibit their work,” Craft says. “It creates networking opportunities, offers a firsthand look at what other artist are creating--specifically their contemporaries, and it builds experience in terms of exhibition participation.”
Craft earned a M.A. in Arts Management from The University of Akron and a BFA in Interior Design from Youngstown State University. As director of Arthouse, a non-profit organization that offers visual arts classes and programs for children and adults, Craft has a busy schedule, but she still finds time to serve as juror. In January, she juried two shows, the Orange City School Scholastics Competition and Guitar Mania organized by United Way of Cleveland.
For more information about the School of Art Galleries, contact Turner at 330-672-1369, email@example.com or visit http://galleries.kent.edu.
back to top | <urn:uuid:44e0e63f-03c0-465b-9417-9a6a2cb70f01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kent.edu/einside/events.cfm?issueweek=2012-02-13%2015:06:44 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932697 | 3,204 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Anson was one of 97 North Carolina counties in which unemployment decreased during the month of September. The September 2012 unemployment rate for Anson was 11.8 percent, according to figures released Friday by the North Carolina Department of Commerce — Labor and Economic Analysis Division. That’s down 1.2 percent from the August rate of 13.0 percent.
The county report comes on the same day as the U.S. Labor Department’s unemployment report, also released Friday morning, which shows that more companies were hiring in October, for a total of 171,000 new jobs, but the unemployment rate inched up from 7.8 percent to 7.9 percent in September.
On the state level, North Carolina’s unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) was 8.9 percent in September. This was a 0.8 of a percentage-point decrease from August’s revised rate of 9.7 percent, and a 1.5 percentage-point decrease over the year.
Anson’s neighboring counties all experienced declines in unemployment during the month of September. Richmond’s unemployment rate fell from 12.7 percent in August to 12.3 in September, while Stanly’s decreased from 9.8 to 9.1 and Union’s unemployment declined from 8.3 to 7.6 percent. Currituck County had the state’s lowest unemployment rate in at 5.1 percent, and Scotland County had the highest at 16.1 percent.
The state’s unemployment rate for October will be released Nov. 16. | <urn:uuid:718d9cf7-280c-4bd9-99da-9aa6167c3583> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ansonrecord.com/pages/home/push?class=&per_page=5&rel=prev&x_page=33 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952601 | 325 | 1.71875 | 2 |
It is amazing how completely different my two girls are. Their personalities, their likes and dislikes, and their habits.
Right now those differences are most apparent in the realm of sleep. Gabi was such an easy sleeper. She had her moments. Like with all babies, sleep comes and goes. In retrospect, it was predictably cyclical, though.
We (and if you’re a new parent take notes) expect to see sleep regressions around the time of growth spurts and milestones. Four months and eight months are a very big deal. Milestones and growth spurts all converge during those times and sleep takes a hit. A big hit.
But it passes. I remember with Gabi wondering if I was doing something wrong. I remember thinking, “Gosh, do I have to sleep train her?” I wondered if she just wasn’t able to sleep because I never taught her to do those things that my coworkers were talking about. I remember words like “self soothe,” “bad habits,” and others whirling around my brain.
Thank heavens for the Kellymom.com forums. They stay absolutely on message and make it very clear that you can no more “train” a baby to sleep than you can “train” a baby to walk and talk. Sleep, Kelly says, is a milestone that many kids don’t reach for several years.
From Kelly’s article Sleeping Through the Night:
Your baby will begin to comfort herself and to sleep for longer stretches at her own developmental pace. If your baby wants to nurse at night, it is because she DOES need this, whether it’s because she is hungry or because she wants to be close to mom. Sleeping through the night is a developmental milestone (like walking or toilet training) that your baby will reach when she is ready to. Trying to force baby to reach this before her time may result in other problems later on.
I’m so glad that the Kellymom forum moderators take such a strong stand on this issue. It’s coming out more and more that leaving a child alone to “cry it out” (cry what out exactly?) can actually cause brain damage.
So I just plugged along through those mercifully short sleep regressions with Gabi, and, just like Kelly promised, the constant waking passed.
Thank goodness I know that now. Katie is really giving me a run for my money. Her 4 month sleep regression merged into a 6 month sleep regression and when we hit 8 months last week, all bets were off. We are deep into the 8 month sleep regression with no end in sight.
She’ll take an hour to nurse herself to sleep at night. She wakes hourly to nurse. This week we’ve added a new element to the mix. She’ll nurse to sleep starting around 8:30 PM, but then when she’s finally asleep and letting go and I’m thinking I can drop off to sleep too, those little eyes pop open, and now YAY! It’s happy baby fun time! She crawls all around, practices pulling up on the side of the crib we have Macgyvered to our bed, climbs over me to try to get to the exciting looking alarm clock, chews on my shoulders, sticks her fingers up my nose and in my ears, and just generally has a cheerful and noisy time.
This went on from 9:45 last night to 11. Finally, she went to sleep. And then woke up every hour afterwards to sit up and crawl in a circle and then nurse again. At 5:30 AM, she decided it was time to greet the morning. So up she got.
No point in going back to bed. I had work to get ready for. So up I got, too.
I fantasize about a 4 hour stretch of sleep. I can’t remember what that’s like.
Thank goodness for Gabi. Thank goodness she taught me that this will pass and things will get easier. Thank goodness for cosleeping! Right now I can nurse her and then just roll over and fall back asleep. Imagine if I had to get my tired self up, haul my carcass down the hall, try unsuccessfully multiple times to put her down in the crib without waking her, haul my carcass back down the hall to my bedroom, and then try to fall asleep? Good lord! That sounds like a nightmare!
I didn’t talk much about it when Gabi went through her wakeful cycles. I didn’t have the same kind of supportive community, and I wanted to avoid the inevitable, “Well, maybe it’s just time to let her cry. I let my kids cry and they turned out just fine.”
I’m more confident now, and I know from experience that this isn’t a forever thing. So now, when people ask, I’m open about it. I say, “We’re smack in the middle of the 8 month wakeful period. It’s really hard, but I know it will pass, and I know that she needs me right now.” Sometimes I follow with an, “I’m so glad we’re cosleeping. It makes things so much easier for all of us.”
At any rate, I am seriously sleep deprived now. I think I’m handling things pretty gracefully, but wow. I’m tired.
Which is probably why this post is so disjointed. Maybe tonight will be the night that she sleeps. | <urn:uuid:86570b34-3618-4d6e-95b2-1bb9fc4b76f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://knockedupknockedover.com/tag/nursing-to-sleep/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954984 | 1,183 | 1.585938 | 2 |
§ Captain Plugge
asked the Home Secretary whether he can give the number of children killed and injured, respectively, since 1st January last in the different districts of London from which they could have been evacuated?
§ Mr. H. Morrison
The number of children under 16 years of age who were killed by enemy action in the whole of the London Civil Defence Region between 1st January, 1941, and 28th February, 1941 (the latest date for which figures are available) inclusive was 76. The number injured and detained in hospital during the same period was 136. Separate figures are not available in respect of those portions of the area which have been declared evacuation areas for the purposes of the Government evacuation scheme | <urn:uuid:23fe0221-892e-4d3b-bcb6-c1494da6bae2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1941/apr/01/casualties-children-london | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982622 | 144 | 1.78125 | 2 |
A new series of articles about the affects of technology on our bodies, our consciousness, and ultimately our species as a whole. *** Warning this post contains a poll.
An how-to guide on staying sane, real, and human in a technological world present and future.
I am starting investigations that have been inspired how my call for engineers of recreating my eye with a camera, went viral across the far reaches of the cyber-sphere. I found myself in a new landscape with looming questions and controversial challenges. Needless to say my persona has traveled the blogo-globe more than my physical body has – and I’d like to fill in the gaps.
I have been blogged about more that a simple one-eyed girl should (okay maybe I’m more complicated than I’d like to admit!); but really, a virtual woman with my name has made an insane amount of cameos throughout cyberspace carrying less characteristics belonging to me and more it seems of the blogger’s projections and to many this quantified composite cyber me is just as real as the real me. This is why I’m telling it like it is - to find my voice in the sea of other mes, to set the story straight from the source, not RT, Twitter, Facebooked, overheard, misunderstood, bastardized to sell papers, or to shock an audience. No just a simple or not so simple one-eyed girls story on needing a metamorphosis.
With my bizarre Internet presence (go to http://personas.media.mit.edu/ to find your online identity,) so far several publications and hundreds of bloggers have speculated on what this means in the context of our time and what my impetus is for deciding to implant a camera in my ocular prosthesis – and I thought hey, who better to document then from the one doing it. Apropos to 1st person P.O.V. of the eye-camera project.
Today’s persona: culture critic and auto-ethnographer, I propose to share with you the current process of building my bionic eye and the artistic process. I will be publishing my research and findings; questions and frustrations. This is a partnership and the rules are to be civil, no more stupid comments about keeping the camera on in the girls locker room, will I keep it on while I go to the bathroom, or during sex – (Channel 5, I’m talking to you!) I’d much rather hear about new developments in bionic vision, funding, collaborations, exhibitions, video journalism, eye-deas!, etc. Let’s get a real dialogue going.
Body-Tech Critique, a series of articles about current trends in:
All told through my experimentation and interviews with experts in these areas.
This summer I presented my Camera Eye proposal to the MIT Media Lab. This is is launching a partnership with the Camera Culture Group who are currently developing many powerful and new cameras. Although there are many hoops to jump, like funding, still having difficulty in sustaining this process — either way I am determined to move forward and build this damn eye already!
These are my words, my thoughts, with Moore’s Law and advancing rate of technology it is a trend sweeping our planet whether we know it or not. I’d like to be a part of this discussion as a participant – join me in my research, my questions, the conflicts, the ethics, and the response. It will surely promise to be a highly unusual ride.
I’ll leave you with a trailer for cautionary tale “We Live in Public” “Internet pioneer Josh Harris has spent his life implementing his unique vision of the future, where technology and media dictate human social interaction and define our personal identity.”: | <urn:uuid:ffcfee43-5c0e-4127-a8ad-12686867c797> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tanyavlach.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/body-tech/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941499 | 788 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Bruijin's Brush Turkey
Victoria Crowned Pigeon
West Papua 2008
14th July to 10th August
Worldbirders participants Steve Webb and Carlton Collier
See our forthcoming trips for details of our 2009 trip to West Papua
We started our adventures on Biak Island which is home to 11 endemics, most of which were seen without to much trouble, but as always there were some tricky ones. We enjoyed many excellent views of Biak Paradise Kingfisher of which we saw up to 8 a day. Two of the commonest pigeons are real stunners: Claret-breasted and Yellow-bibbed Fruit Doves, which were both seen really well. The endemic Black-winged Lory was a colourful and common sight feeding on flowering trees. A Biak Scops Owl was spotlighted shortly after dusk on our first day along with some Large-tailed Nightjars, which were flying up and down along the track. Biak Coucal appeared to be quite common vocally but proved to be a real challenge to see, eventually a couple gave themselves up albeit briefly.
After the incredibly hot Biak we were all looking forward to cooling off in the Snow Mountains. A migrant Australian Hobby flew past us as we boarded our airplane at Jayapura airport. Soon we were searching successfully in some grassland for the endemic Black-breasted Munia and our first BoP of the trip, a female Superb Bird of Paradise. The next morning we drove up to Lake Habbema, seeing Black Sittella on the way. The birding here was excellent with Alpine Pipit, New Guinea Thornbill, Snow Mountain Munia, Snow Mountain Quail and a very close Spotless Crake and dusk. The next day our main target was eventually tracked down – MacGregor’s Bird of Paradise. We had close views as it sat by the roadside – wonderful!! After bagging our target bird and with the pressure off we made our way down to the lower elevations and our campsite with another 2 MacGregor’s seen on the walk down. We had nice views of New Guinea Woodcock at dusk just near to our camp and brief views of an Archibold’s Nightjar. During the next 2 days we saw Papuan Treecreeper, Chestnut Forest Rail, a wonderful daytime Feline Owlet Nightjar, Lesser Ground Robin, Brown Sicklebill, Archibold’s Bowerbird, Splendid Astrapia, Torrent Lark and Lesser Melampitta.
After the cool highlands we were back in the very hot lowlands at Nimbokrang. After our long hike into Muaib Jungle Camp we felt we had earned some good birds, and we were not to be disappointed. In fact some magic moments were going to be our reward. First up was Victoria Crowned Pigeon, which allowed us scope views for 45 minutes, what a bird, certainly a trip highlight. Blue Black Kingfishers seemed to be common and allowed us great scope views. The call of Northern Cassowary could be felt as it rumbled hauntingly through the forest, how could we see this? Many footprints around some fallen fruits seemed our best shot, so a blind was constructed near them and at before dawn the next morning we stumbled our way in the dark to the blind and waited. Amazingly soon a huge Northern Cassowary was standing there in full view and here is lingered for 15 minutes, Wow, can it get better than this? Oh yes! Just before noon I heard a whurr of wings and I had to have a double take before I uttered “ Shovel-billed Kingfisher” and there she sat in the scope in full view for 15 minutes, she even turned around for us to see her back and then jumped around again before flying off, fantasy birding! Pale-billed Sicklebill gave us the run around before giving itself up and allowing us point blank views, other BoP’s we saw were King, Twelve- wired and Lesser along with Magnificent Riflebird and Glossy Mantled Manucode. On our walk out we saw the long toed Buff-faced Pygmy Parrot the delightful Coroneted Fruit Dove and a good flock of Streak-headed Munias.
Our trip to the Arfak’s were dogged by poor weather – low cloud and continuous rain. On the fine days we did well by seeing a perched New Guinea Harpy Eagle, a female Arfak Astrapia and a noisy Black Sicklebill. Each day we were able to see a brilliant Mountain Owlet Nightjar on its favourite perch. Other birds we saw included a regular Long-tailed Paradagalla round the camp, Western Parotia and Vogelkop Bowerbirds both seen from the hides. We each took turns in the other hide to watch the display of the male Magnificent Bird of Paradise, what an incredible bird!!
Waigeo was a real adventure, but an incredible one, which we all enjoyed. The habitat seems unspoilt here with the forest coming down to the sea, a very rare site in Indonesia. As soon as we arrived we could tell this was going to be our birdiest site. A welcoming party of Rajah’s Shelducks were waiting for us as we got out of our boat and Blyth’s Hornbills noisily flew overhead. To get to our first camp we had to cross the river many times, sometimes waist deep and one section it was chest deep and we had to a great chance to swim! Sitting up on a branch we had wonderful views of Waigeo Spotted Cuscus a beautiful endemic mammal. A sure sign this island's fauna is still in pristine condition. Near to our second campsite a display tree of Red Bird of Paradise gave us 1of the 2 endemic BoP’s that we were hoping for. The next day was another one of those magic days, to see a displaying male Wilson’s Bird of Paradise down to a few metres is the pinnacle of your birding career, surely the best looking bird in the world. Just two birders had seen the island’s only true endemic and our chances of seeing this bird outside its breeding season were not good. Our best chance was to take a full days hike to a third camp, which we was never going to have time to do. After watching a Cinnamon Ground Dove something else caught my eye, just a snatch of bare skin in the dense undergrowth, could it be? I quickly set up my camera without not daring to take my eyes of what I hoped would be something really special, with my tripod and camera at the ready, amazingly an adult male Bruijin’s Brush Turkey wandered out into full view, incredible luck!! Just one target bird left, and after walking down several small streambeds we eventually tracked down a perched Western Crowned Pigeon. On the way back we spent a few hours on the idyllic Wai Island were we watched Rufous Fantail, Island Whistler, Olive Honeyeater and the brilliant Beach Kingfisher.
Our visit to Sorong lowlands was a big contrast to the unspoilt Waigeo, lots of people and deforestation, rather depressing. Luckily the birds are still there, Blyth’s Hornbills still seem to be abundant and Red-billed Brush Turkeys called around us. We managed to find the crippling Red-breasted Paradise Kingfisher at a new site, a wonderful bird to end the trip on.
Red-breasted Paradise Kingfisher | <urn:uuid:f1b3b125-5400-424d-866d-e142186ba2a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://worldbirders.com/index.asp?PageId=123&PageName=West-Papua-2008 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972738 | 1,591 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Hizballah, Damascus Under Siege
August 11, 2011
Syrians have peacefully demonstrated for change in their country for nearly five months, only to be met with a murderous wave of terror from their own government. Government forces have killed more than 2,000 demonstrators, human rights activists say. Tens of thousands more Syrians have become refugees, fleeing from President Bashar Assad's rampaging security forces.
In deference to Turkey, which wants Assad to remain in power while instituting "reforms," the Obama administration has stopped short of calling for the dictator's ouster. On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced additional sanctions against Syria, and the White House said Syria would be "better off" without Assad.
The Syrian military responded with more military assaults, killing 35 people.
Whether Assad continues to use brutal force to cling to power or is toppled, what happens in Syria could send neighboring Lebanon toward its most tumultuous period since its bloody Civil War ended in 1990. The loss of a reliable ally in Damascus - coming as Hizballah tries to fend off a United Nations tribunal implicating its members in the 2005 car-bombing assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri - could prompt the Shiite terrorist group and its Iranian patrons to provoke a new war between Lebanon and Israel, analysts say.
Hizballah has been trying to discredit the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon. On July 29, the tribunal, located in The Hague, Netherlands, announced the names of four Hizballah operatives it indicted in connection with Hariri's assassination.
Sources close to the tribunal have said the working assumption for its investigation is that the order for the killing came from the Syrian leadership (possibly in coordination with Iran) and that a unit within Hizballah may have been given a contract to kill Hariri.
Taken together, the Syrian revolution and Hariri investigation are making life uncomfortable for some of the most powerful players in the jihadist terror world today: Hizballah and its state sponsors in Tehran and Damascus.
Tony Badran, who monitors developments in Syria and Lebanon for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, believes Assad will be ousted. This development would be a "major blow" to Hizballah's ability to re-supply its forces with weapons, he said. Sending weapons through Syria is the "cheapest, most direct way" for Iran to send weapons to its terrorist proxy, and having a friendly regime in Damascus provides Hizballah with critical strategic depth.
"The balance of power in the region would change," Badran told the Investigative Project on Terrorism. With the loss of Syria - a strategic ally of the Islamic Republic for more than three decades - "Iran would no longer be seen as ascendant in the region."
Both Hizballah and Syria have worked to derail the Hariri investigation. In October, Damascus issued arrest warrants charging 33 people, many of them international and Lebanese officials, with misleading UN investigators about the case. In January, Hizballah and its allies toppled the Lebanese government headed by Prime Minister Sa'ad Hariri, Rafik's son, in a dispute over government cooperation with the tribunal.
Five months later, Lebanese Prime Minister Nijab Mikati (appointed head of a caretaker government following Hariri's ouster) announced formation of a government dominated by Hizballah and its allies. Until June, the pro-Hizballah bloc held 10 of 30 Lebanese Cabinet ministries. In the new Cabinet, it holds 18, ample opportunity to influence government actions in favor of the radical group, which receives an estimated $100 million to $200 million annually from Iran.
The Tribunal's Challenge
Hizballah and company could "interrupt any real cooperation with the court," said Walid Phares, a Middle East scholar and advisor to members of Congress and the European Parliament. "There will be no arrests, no further information given to the tribunal."
Hizballah and its allies exercise "de facto control over Lebanon's national security apparatus," said Phares, professor of global strategies at the National Defense University. In effect, a "war room in Tehran" can decide which Lebanese military officer gets sent to Caracas and which security officer controls Beirut International Airport and who "will end up getting training in Washington and walk in the halls in the Pentagon."
For many Lebanese, the indictments confirm what they already believed: that Hizballah, along with Damascus and Tehran, is "behind the assassination of Hariri and many other Lebanese politicians," said Phares. Sa'ad Hariri has been outside Lebanon since April, reportedly fearing that Hizballah and Syria are planning to kill him.
The four accused of murdering his father include Mustafa Badreddine, a senior Hizballah commander and brother-in-law of the late Hizballah military operations chief, Imad Mugniyeh. Mugniyeh, who masterminded scores of attacks, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American service members, is also believed to have directed Hizballah military operations during its 2006 war against Israel. Israel is widely suspected of carrying out Mugniyeh's February 2008 assassination in Damascus.
Badreddine reportedly was appointed Hizballah's military operations chief to replace Mugniyeh. He is a member of Hizballah's Shura Council, the organization's top governing body. Badreddine is said to have trained Mugniyeh in bomb building. In the early 1980s, the pair served in the "Oppressed on Earth," an Iranian-backed Shiite militia that evolved into Hizballah.
Badreddine (operating under the Christian alias of "Elias Saab") was one of the "Kuwait 17," a terrorist cell that organized a coordinated series of bomb attacks on targets including the U.S. embassy and French embassies, Kuwait's main petrochemical plant and airport, and a residential neighborhood. Six people died in the December 1983 bombings; hundreds more would have been killed if the bombs had not malfunctioned. Badreddine was convicted and sentenced to death by a Kuwaiti court for his role in the plot. During the 1980s, Mugniyeh orchestrated a series of hijackings and kidnappings in an effort to free his brother-in-law. Badreddine escaped from jail in the chaos that followed Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and disappeared.
In a televised address last month, Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah praised Badreddine and the others charged with killing Hariri, calling them "brothers with an honorable past." They would not be extradited to the Netherlands for trial "even in 300 years," Nasrallah said, and he vowed to "cut off the hand" of anyone who tried to do so. Nasrallah denounced the tribunal as part of an "American-Israeli conspiracy" to reignite the Lebanese civil war, and claimed Israel was behind Hariri's assassination.
The threats don't appear to be having much of an effect. The international police agency Interpol is searching for the suspects. Tribunal officials have indicated that it may soon release information linking the suspects to other assassination attempts in Lebanon. Badran suspects the four are in Iran or are in hiding in Lebanon under Hizballah's protection, and says there are rumors that one individual involved in the plot may have been "liquidated" to silence him.
Difficult Choices Ahead
A critical question is whether Hizballah and/or Assad will try to divert attention from their domestic problems by going to war against Israel on issues such as the current Israel-Lebanon maritime dispute. For more than 40 years, the Assad family has used the Israeli "threat" to justify dictatorship. But today, as Bashar Assad seeks to crush pro-democracy demonstrations, the old formula isn't working very well.
On May 15, Assad tried to capitalize on hostility towards Israel by sending Palestinians to swarm the border with Israel to commemorate "Nakba" (catastrophe) Day, the date of Israel's founding. Three weeks later, he tried the same tactic again on Naksa Day - the 44th anniversary of the Six-Day War. Neither action has helped him silence the Syrians protesting against his regime.
Recent reports have indicated Hizballah has been moving equipment and weaponry from Syria into Lebanon. This could be read as preparation for war with Israel - a desperate attempt to divert attention from Assad's slaughter of his own citizens by going to war against the Zionist enemy.
But Badran said the movement of weapons may be something different: an indication that Hizballah is worried that Assad will fall, and that the organization may lose access to storage facilities in Syria.
Nasrallah likely understands that if he acts on his threats and provokes Israel into war as he did in 2006, he will trigger massive retaliation. But in the end, neither Hizballah nor Syria will make the decision on provoking Israel into another war. That will be decided by Iran, Badran said.
Yet given Assad's weakness, it may be too late to save him by starting a war. Doing so could result in "a badly damaged Hizballah without making any difference in Assad's fortunes," he added.
Badran is sharply critical of the Obama administration's handling of events in Syria. As Syrians have risked their lives for freedom, he wrote last month, Washington "is now helping confer legitimacy on [Assad's] farcical 'reform 'process," consisting of a meeting with a handpicked group with no influence over the Syrians protesting across the country. U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford's support for the conference "did little other than to provide US cover for this crude propaganda."
Badran added that, in June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized that Syria's neighbors are working "behind the scenes" in an effort to get Damascus to stop "engaging in horrific, revolting attacks on its own people." In practical terms, this strategy has meant that instead of recognizing the inevitable - that Assad must go - Washington has ceded the lead diplomatic role to Turkey, which is pushing Assad to institute "reforms" instead of declaring him an illegitimate leader.
U.S. policy towards Syria over the past five months has been characterized by "dithering and incoherence," Badran told the IPT. "Nobody knew where the president was on this. There's been a lot of hand-wringing." | <urn:uuid:1784d6c4-d6c8-4fa8-a60f-75b8c14dbb63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.investigativeproject.org/3095/hizballah-damascus-under-siege | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965515 | 2,160 | 1.523438 | 2 |
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