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Money is obviously tight this holiday season, which means charities are likely to take a hit. If your holiday traditions usually include a monetary donation that you can't seem to make this year, try volunteering instead (and guess what—you can add that volunteer experience to your resume!).
If you don't have a favorite charity, here are a few sites to get your volunteer wheels rolling:
- VolunteerMatch.org and Serve.gov are search engines that work like online job boards, finding volunteer opportunities based on your search terms. Just enter your location and keywords and the system matches you up with organizations in your area.
- The Red Cross is always looking for volunteers to respond to disasters, support blood drives, and connect families displaced by disasters or conflict.
- Habitat for Humanity is one of my personal favorites and should be easy to find in your area. I don't know how much they do in the snowy winters, but it's worth a look!
- Idealist.org is like a community of volunteers and a search engine all in one. Straight from their site: "Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives." To start your search, click on Volunteer Opportunities under the Find tab on the left.
And of course, you can't forget your local soup kitchen, food bank, Salvation Army, Goodwill, and other service organizations.
I hope this gives you a few new ideas on giving back this holiday season. If you participate in any opportunities found on these sites, tell us about your experience in the comments below! | <urn:uuid:acfec89d-9d72-4f18-a68a-71532221d61d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pongoresume.com/blogPosts/429/can-t-spare-a-dime-volunteer-your-time.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956943 | 344 | 1.5 | 2 |
Four posters for the documentary, which originally drew 372 complaints, featured the words "Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier" over an image of a young boy looking directly at the camera and others of two teenagers wearing low-cut bra tops and three young girls dressed for their first Holy Communion standing in front of a caravan.
In February the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) judged that although the adverts "might not be to everyone's taste", they were unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence as they reflected the content of the programme.
But an independent review recommended that the ASA reinvestigate the campaign following the request by the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain (ITMB) which had complained that the ads racially demeaned them and exposed their children to bullying and abuse.
Defending the campaign, Channel 4 said it centred on using real and intimate photographic portraits of gypsy and traveller life "in a style to reflect the journalistic intent of the series".
Informed consent had been obtained from all subjects or their relevant parent or guardian and final copies of the ads sent to all the families involved, with no objections.
But the ASA, which took advice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, found that the ads featuring the young boy and the teenagers wearing low-cut tops could enforce prejudicial views against the gypsy and traveller community and were likely to cause serious offence to some members.
It also ruled that Channel 4 acted irresponsibly by depicting a child - one of the two young teenagers pictured in low-cut tops - in a sexualised way.
It found that two other ads showing a man leading a horse across a field with caravans in the background and the three young girls dressed for Holy Communion did not breach the advertising code.
The ASA said: "We noted that the boy in the image was shown in close-up and had his lips pursed in a manner that we considered was likely to be seen as aggressive.
"We considered that negative image, when combined with the strapline which suggested that such behaviour was "Gypsier", would be interpreted by many members of the gypsy and traveller communities and some of the wider public to mean that aggressive behaviour was typical of the younger members of the gypsy and traveller community. We considered that implication was likely to cause serious offence to some members of those communities while endorsing the prejudicial view that young gypsies and travellers were aggressive."
It said of the ad featuring the two teenagers: "We understood that the photo was an accurate depiction of how the young women had chosen to dress for the occasion at which they had been photographed and we considered that it was clear that they were dressed for a night out.
"However, we noted that they were heavily made-up and wearing low cut tops and we considered that, when combined with the strapline and in particular the word "Gypsier", the ad implied that appearance was highly representative of the gypsy and traveller community in a way that irresponsibly endorsed that prejudicial view and was likely to cause serious offence to the gypsy and traveller community."
It said that Channel 4 "acted irresponsibly" because the girl on the right of the poster was 15 when the picture was taken.
It added: "We noted that she was heavily made-up, her bra was visible and that she was wearing a low-cut top that revealed much of her cleavage and raised her breasts. Although we understood that the girl was depicted in her own choice of dress we considered that, in choosing that image for use in a poster, Channel 4 had acted irresponsibly by depicting a child in a sexualised way."
It ruled that the two ads must not appear again.
A Channel 4 spokesman said: "It was not Channel 4's intention for these adverts to cause offence but we are sorry this was the case among some members of the Gypsy and Traveller community.
"All responsible action was taken pre-publication. The posters were voluntarily submitted to the industry's independent CAP copy advice team who advised that they believed they complied with the advertising code, consent was obtained from contributors, and the posters were shared with those featured, who had no objections."
But ITMB chief executive Yvonne MacNamara called on those responsible for the ads to issue a full apology.
She said: "The ITMB applaud the decision of the ASA. As a result of this decision, Channel 4's Big Fat Gypsy brand has been held up to be morally bankrupt.
"In its evidence to the ASA investigation, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission described anti-Gypsy and Traveller racism as the last respectable racism. The ASA has today made clear that it is no longer acceptable.
"This is a stunning victory for Travellers and Gypsies. The ASA has condemned Channel 4's advertising campaign for the appalling harm it has done to the mental and moral wellbeing of Gypsy and Traveller children. It has done this in unequivocal terms and Channel 4 should hang its corporate head in shame.
"The ITMB and the Gypsy and Traveller co-complainants call upon those responsible for these adverts to issue a full apology for the harm they have caused to children with their offensive campaign. We call on Channel 4 to repair the incredible harm they have done to the UK's most vulnerable minorities."
She added: "In the wake of this pioneering adjudication by the ASA, the ITMB and the co-complainants would like to pose this question to Channel 4 and (sponsor) Honda UK: If the billboards are likely to stir up prejudice and are harmful to children, then what are the implications for the TV shows that they advertise?"
David Enright, a partner with Howe & Co Solicitors, which has been representing the ITMB and the other complainants, said: "The ASA's powerful findings represent a fundamental turning point in how Travellers and Gypsies can be portrayed in the media in the future.
"No longer will it be acceptable for the media and broadcasters to portray Travellers and Gypsies in racist stereotypes without regard for the quantifiable harm done to those vulnerable communities.
"Travellers and Gypsies have been subjected to racist vilification and abuse for generations. History will recall today as the moment that the tide turned and Travellers and Gypsies stood up for themselves and their children, and said 'no more'." | <urn:uuid:c875ed75-fda1-4df2-a43c-eb8b529c12e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9581353/Offensive-Big-Fat-Gypsy-Wedding-adverts-banned.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979903 | 1,318 | 1.515625 | 2 |
2001, "Perished Nations"
Tataristan – Novosti
Novosti, which began publishing in 1993, is a monthly magazine devoted to informing the Russian Federation's Tatar population about major political and cultural developments. From the first days, it has regularly carried articles by Harun Yahya dealing with the errors of the theory of evolution, the collapse of Darwinism's most basic claims, the proofs of creation, and the essence of faith in Islam.
1) April 2002, Information about Harun Yahya's life and works
Kazakhstan - Dil
Dil, a weekly newspaper, printed Harun Yahya's "Noah's Flood" in its 5 March 2002 edition. In it, he analyzed how the story of Prophet Noah (pbuh) is described in the Qur'an.
5 March 2002, "Noah's Flood"
Russia - Turk Dunyasi
Turk Dunyasi, a monthly Russian-language magazine, seeks to inform Turks living in Russia of developments in the Turkish world and of Islamic activities taking place in Russia. Harun Yahya regularly contributes his articles, such as "Islam Denounces Terrorism," "Perished Nations" and "The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution."
Kazakhstan - Juldiz
Juldiz, one of Kazakhstan's largest magazines, published an article on Prophet Abraham's (pbuh) life in its February 2002 edition. It contained the following information:
February 2002, "The Prophet Abraham (pbuh)"
Bosnia-Herzegovina - Preporod
Preporod, published by the Bosnian Religious Affairs Office, serialized Harun Yahya's The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution.
July 2001, "The Evolution Deceit"
Malaysia - Seruan Magazine
Seruan Magazine featured Harun Yahya's "The Scientific Miracles of al-Qur'an: The Birth of a Human Being" as its cover story for its April 2004 edition. His writings appear in the magazine on a regular basis.
April 2004, "The Birth of a Human Being" Miracles of the Qur'an (in Malay)
The magazine's February 2004 issue introduced Harun Yahya in the following terms:
The titles of other articles by the author that have been carried by the magazine include:
Bosnia-Herzegovina - Kun
2 May 2001, "The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution"
Kun, a leading Bosnian newspaper, published a review of "The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution."
Siberia - Ikhlas
The newspaper Ikhlas, published in Iseyk, regularly carries Harun Yahya's articles on science and faith-related issues.
Indonesia - Suara Hidayatullah
The monthly magazine Suara Hidayatullah has carried a large number of Harun Yahya's articles. In a six-page article entitled "Perished Nations" (April 2003), the author discussed the end of peoples destroyed by Allah because of their cruelty, from the people of Noah to the inhabitants of Pompeii. The article, which analyzed the historical and scientific facts in the light of the Qur'an, also described the disasters that befell Prophet Lot's (pbuh) people.
Another article, "The Miracle in the Cell," appeared in the July 2003 edition. This six-page article consisted of such subheadings as "The Cell: The Miracle in Your Body" and "The Cellular Telephone and the Cells in Our Bodies."
Azerbaijan - Elçi
This weekly paper has carried the following articles by Harun Yahya:
Azerbaijan - Ekspress
Ekspress serialized Harun Yahya's important work The Miracles of the Qur'an and published an interview with him on 1 November 2002. During the course of that interview, Harun Yahya described his twenty-year intellectual struggle against Darwinism.
1) 1 January 2003, "Miracles of the Qur'an."
Kazakhstan - Ruhani Emir
The fortnightly magazine Ruhani Emir deals with scientific, social, and faith-related subjects. Articles by Harun Yahya on such subjects have appeared in it.
Albania - Drita E Dijes
This magazine, a publication of Albania's Drita Culture Club, carried an article of Harun Yahya's "The Collapse of Materialism" in its October 2002 edition.
October 2002, "The Collapse of Materialism"
Malaysia - Al-Nahdah
Published in Malaysia by the Regional Islamic Dawah Council of the South East Asia and Pacific (RISEAP), Al-Nahdah has carried Harun Yahya's "Scientists Confirm the Signs of Allah" and "About the Rain in Qur'an."
Morocco - El-Attajdid
El-Attajdid published Harun Yahya's "The Creation of the Seed."
23 July 2001, "How Does the Camel's Body Withstand the Harsh Desert Environment?"
USA - Pakistan Link
This weekly newspaper, intended for Los Angeles' Pakistani population, carries articles by Harun Yahya, such as his "The Eminence Islam Attaches to Women." In this article, he describes how Islam protects women's rights:
"Islam Is a Religion of Peace"
Indonesia - Sabili Islamic Magazine
In its April 2003 issue, Sabili Islamic Magazine carried "Behind the Scenes of the Iraq War." In this article, Harun Yahya discusses how plans for the Iraq war were drawn up long before 9/11 and how the ongoing anti-Islamic propaganda campaign can be eliminated by establishing an effective Islamic Union.
May 2003, "Behind the Scenes of the Iraq War"
Azerbaijan - Camaat Weekly
Every issue of this social-religious newspaper contains scientific and religious articles by Harun Yahya. In addition, it carried a special interview with him, "The Man Who Is One with Islam," in its 20 September 2002 edition. Some extracts from that interview read as follows:
Kashmir - The Weekly
A weekly newspaper published in Indian-controlled Kashmir, The Weekly Muslim has carried "The Evolution Misconception."
Kuwait - Al Mujtama
"Hieroglyphic Writings Confirm Information about the Noble Qur'an and the Prophet (saas)"
This monthly Islamic magazine published Harun Yahya's "Hieroglyphic Writings Confirm Information about the Noble Qur'an and the Prophet (saas)."
Oman - Al Watan
A number of Harun Yahya's articles have appeared in the daily Al Watan, among them "Behind the Scenes of the Bosnian War" and "The Wars in the Balkans."
"The War in the Balkans," the subject of an article published on 30 May 1998
Russia - NBAH
The article "The Evolution Deceit" was published in the Russian newspaper Nbah (Faith).
Great Britain - The Muslim Weekly
The Muslim Weekly, a political and scholarly publication aimed at Muslims living in Britain, has carried a great many of Harun Yahya's articles. Through this paper, with its circulation of 100,000, the author shares his writings about the importance of Qur'anic moral values as well as his proposed solutions to the oppression experienced by the Muslim world.
November 2003, "Muslims of the World Greet the Month of Ramadan"
USA - CIMIC
The August 2002 issue of CIMIC, a monthly paper published by the Central Illinois Mosque and Islamic Center, carried Harun Yahya's "Allah's Inspiration to Every Man: Conscience."
Kazakhstan - The World Of Islam
The World of Islam, a bi-monthly magazine, prints news from the Islamic world, activities organized by Kazakh Muslims, and faith-related issues.
It has also published an introductory piece on Harun Yahya and his works. In an article published on the same page, Harun Yahya described the need to demolish Darwinism, which represents the foundation of the fascist ideology that inflicted terrible chaos on the world, in the scientific and cultural arenas.
Kazakhstan - Ahiska
Ahiska, a weekly newspaper published by Ahiska Turks, carried "Islam Denounces Terrorism."
30 September 2002, "Islam Denounces Terrorism"
Kazakhstan - Islam Erkaniyet
Many of Harun Yahya's articles have appeared in Islam Erkaniyet, an organ of the Kazakhstan Religious Affairs Office. These include "A Call to the People of the Book" and "The Creation of the Universe."
Kazakhstan - Panaroma Chimkent
Harun Yahya's "Antisemitism Is Racism" appeared in Panaroma Chimkent, a weekly Russian-language publication of the Chimkent Municipality.
2003, "Antisemitism is Racism"
USA - Muslim Kid's Journal
This monthly magazine, aimed at American Muslim children, continues to publish age-appropriate articles about the signs leading to faith.
Kazakhstan – Chimkent Newspaper
Çimkent Kelbeti (The Face of Chimkent), one of the Chimkent Municipality's weekly publications, published an article by Harun Yahya about the problem of Palestine.
28 November 2003, "The Palestine Problem"
Bosnia-Herzegovina - Glas Islama
Glas Islama (The World of Islam), a monthly political journal, published a series of Harun Yahya's articles on "Communism in Ambush" over four months during 2002. Part of this series reads as follows:
Yemen - Yemen Times
Published since 1991, the Yemen Times is the country's most popular and only English-language newspaper. It carries articles by Harun Yahya on day-to-day issues and also reviews his books.
1) February 2003, "The Responsibility of Believers"
Greece – Hur Hakka Davet
Hür Hakka Davet, a journal of ideas published in Turkish in the Western Thrace area of Greece, carries Harun Yahya's articles.
May 2004, "The Qur'an's Statements Regarding the Future"
USA - Al Arab
Ever since 2001, this bilingual English-Arabic publication has regularly carried full-page articles by Harun Yahya on various scientific and faith-related issues.
Holland - Euro Huzur
Euro Huzur, a Turkish-language monthly social, news, and cultural magazine, is distributed in Europe. The magazine regularly carries Harun Yahya's articles.
June 2003 July 2003 May 2002
October 2001, "Consciousness in the Cell" September 2003
USA - Illumination
Published by young Muslim Americans, Illumination magazine carries Harun Yahya's writings on Qur'anic moral values. Articles that have appeared include "Deep Thinking" and "Compassion Shown Towards the Poor."
UAE - The Gulf Today
Brazil - Revista Criacionista
Revista Criacionista, published by Brazilian Christian Creationist groups, frequently carries Harun Yahya articles on evolution.
Several pages of the 2003 half-yearly edition were devoted to articles by Harun Yahya on evolution.
Great Britain - Forum
The Forum for Social Studies (FSS), established to spread Islam and support Islamic education in Britain, has become an information forum for Muslim academics, writers, and members of the clergy. It has produced a monthly bulletin, Forum, since 1988 and distributes it free of charge worldwide. Articles by Harun Yahya frequently appear in it.
Indonesia - La Republika
La Republika, one of Indonesia's largest newspapers, has carried "The Preserved Tablet," "The Qur'an and Science," "The Expansion of the Universe and the Qur'an," "Man Is Not an Animal," "The Miracle in Plants," "Creatures That Emit Light," and "Solution: The Values of the Qur'an."
1) 3 December 2002, "Proofs of Our Lord's Creation of the Earth"
Sri Lanka - Al Hasenat
Al Hasenat regularly carries articles by Harun Yahya, such as his "The Design in Oxygen."
2003, "The Design in Oxygen"
Russia - Islam Gazetesi
Islam Gazetesi, published monthly in Moscow, has printed many articles by Harun Yahya, such as "The Oppression of the Muslims of Kashmir," "Islam in Britain," and "The People of the Book."
1) January 2003, "Islam in Britain"
Turkistan -Turkistan Gazetesi
The weekly Kazakh-language newspaper is published in Kazakhstan. In addition to Harun Yahya's two-part "The Fruits Discussed in the Qur'an," it also carried his "The Miracle of Human Creation."
The article "Who Is Harun Yahya?" published in 2002, contains detailed information on his work.
USA - Culture Wars
Published monthly by Christian academics, Culture Wars carried "The Iraqi War: Behind the Scenes" in its May 2003 edition. The article sheds light on the reality behind the conflict in Iraq.
Holland - Platform
Platform magazine, a Turkish-language monthly magazine, devotes a great deal of space to Harun Yahya's articles. Subscribers also receive the magazine Ilmi Mercek, which is based on his collected works.
December 2002, "The Universe Was Created from Nothing"
Indonesia - Tarbawi
One issue of this monthly magazine devoted its back page to introducing The Evolution Deceit, The Miracle in the Atom, The Creation of the Universe, The Design in Nature, Wonders of Allah's Creation, Darwinism Refuted, and The End of Darwinism. It has also published an interview with him.
Tarbawi publishes advertisements for Indonesian-language documentaries based on Harun Yahya's works.
February 2002, An Interview with Harun Yahya
Azerbaijan - Ilgım
The daily Ilğım regularly carries Harun Yahya's full-page articles on the signs leading to faith, the miracles of the Qur'an, and signs of the End Times.
1) November 2003, "The Hour Is Close at Hand"
Poland – Na Poczatku
Published monthly by the Polish Creationist Institute, Na Poczatku carried "The Latest Dino-Bird Tale and the True Facts" in its May 2003 edition. In it, Harun Yahya revealed, with full supporting evidence, the Darwinists' unsupported claims.
May 2003, "The Latest Dino-Bird Tale and the True Facts"
The September 2001 edition carried Professor Kazimierz Jodkowski's "Harun Yahya: The Leading Proponent of Islamic Creationism." The article concentrated on the author's works and their global impact.
Ilmi Mercek magazine, based on Harun Yahya's works, is also published outside of Turkey in several languages. Some of these take the form of:
One publishing house active in Syria published a copy of İlmi Mercek in Arabic under the title Al Afaq. The publishing house gave away free copies of the VCDs "The Creation of Man," "Marvellous Creatures 1," and "The Truth of the Life of This World" with this edition. The magazine also carried advertisements for other documentaries.
İlmi Mercek has been published regularly in Indonesia since April 2003, under the name Insight, and attracts great interest from the Indonesian public.
A publishing house in Bosnia-Herzegovina prints Ilmi Mercek in Bosnian under the name of Ogledalo. Its first issue, published in November 2004, contained a wide-ranging interview with Harun Yahya. Every month, it gives its readers a free VCD based on his works.
The Russian-language edition of Ilmi Mercek met with very positive reactions when it began publication in 2002.
İlmi Mercek has been published in English by two different publishers in recent years. The American publisher brings it out under the name of Islamic Insight. The Malaysian publishing house brings it out (in English) under the name of Insight. | <urn:uuid:62dacd4a-04e5-474b-b88f-d84fe7511261> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://harunyahya.com/en/books/5085/Global_Impact_Of_The_Works_Of_Harun_Yahya___Vol_2/chapter/4658 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93363 | 3,413 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Beloit College eyes renovating old power station into rec center
Blackhawk Generating Station is located along Rock River
Some riverfront real estate could reshape the Beloit College campus.
The college has its eye on a piece of history -- Wisconsin Power and Light's Blackhawk Generating Station along Highway 51.
Beloit College is exploring the possibility of renovating the power station to create a new recreation and activity center. Beloit College said it will need to raise $30 million in private donations to make the project a reality.
Those proposing the plan said it's a chance for the college and the city to redefine life along the river.
The Rock River is where Bill Moore remembers Beloit's vibrant industrial days.
"They've done a remarkable amount of work beautifying the river," said Moore, who has walked along the river since 1973. "I remember when they used to generate power there. There used to be a large coal dump on the end of the building there. Freight trains would drop off cars full of coal."
Those cars full of coal have long since moved away, as the Blackhawk Generating Station sits empty, just a stone's throw from Beloit College.
"We have always thought of ourselves as a river college, but we don't have a foothold on the river. This gives us an opportunity to have that," said Beloit College spokesman Jason Hughes.
Hughes said Beloit College would get the money for the project from donors.
"Those are renovation dollars -- all donor dollars. So we need to go out and find that money. That's no small task, as you can imagine," Hughes said.
Students said the concept could rejuvenate life on campus as well as the community.
"Our union is nice the way it is now, but compared to some other schools, it's a little small," said Beloit College freshman Rory Klean. "It doesn't afford a lot of luxuries. It could be great for alumni and a new attraction for students to come here."
"To renovate the old power station would probably be a plus for the beautification of the river area," Moore said.
Copyright 2012 by Channel 3000. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:41128d7b-45cb-4e75-b770-17e2c4ed1581> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channel3000.com/education/Beloit-College-eyes-renovating-old-power-station-into-rec-center/-/1624/17017302/-/view/print/-/cvl3vx/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972587 | 468 | 1.796875 | 2 |
|S - U - S|
Jock Smith worked for the Clydebank local education authority and was active in the Transport and General Workers Union throughout his working life.
He worked for the Communist Party full-time for a period and later became a long-standing Communist councillor in Clydebank.
He played a major role in tenants’ and pensioners’ movements at a local and national level and died aged 70 in 1985.
Source: Morning Star November 23rd 1985 | <urn:uuid:61c6cbe8-e28a-4bc0-b311-56345dcfd4a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=541:jock-smith&catid=19:s&Itemid=105 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980553 | 100 | 1.507813 | 2 |
- uploaded: Sep 20, 2012
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Over the past few years, the dollar has been falling in value relative to the currencies of its major trading partners due to many reasons including the ballooning national debt and increasing budget deficit.
The US central bank has persisted in holding its target interest rate essentially at zero. At the same time, the Fed has continued to buy Treasuries on the open market, keeping demand for them higher and in the process reinforcing its stance of low rates.
Together, those policies have had the effect of making financial assets in other countries more desirable and maintaining downward pressure on the dollar. | <urn:uuid:f49a936a-80a8-4ed2-b691-1a2b90faba98> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/112409/Decline_of_Dollar_hegemony_Money_Trail__PressTV/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966385 | 129 | 1.765625 | 2 |
July 7, 1997
ACLU's 1-2 Punch Claimed
Knockout Over Censorship
By PAMELA MENDELS
f Guinevere is free speech on the Internet, then the American Civil Liberties Union, and in particular, a trio of lawyers at the New York-based rights organization, is her Lancelot.
Scarcely three weeks ago, in Georgia and New York, the ACLU won the first two court cases ever in the United States challenging state attempts to regulate speech on the Internet.
Then came the announcement June 26 of the free speech victory in the United States Supreme Court in the case that bears the name Reno v. ACLU. In a landmark and near-unanimous decision, the court ruled that the federal Communications Decency Act, intended to protect minors from indecency on the Internet, was so broad that it violated First Amendment free speech rights.
"We're on a roll," says Christopher A. Hansen, the lead lawyer for the ACLU in the federal case and a primary lawyer in the state cases as well. "The three opinions are as strong a vindication of free speech on the Internet as you can possibly imagine."
Credit: Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
The team that argued Reno v. ACLU in the Supreme Court. From left: Marjorie Heins, Christopher A. Hansen and Ann Beeson.
Hansen is a 49-year-old veteran of major civil liberties litigation, such as the re-opening of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case. For the last year and a half or so, he has also immersed himself in the complexities of cyberspace to begin to extend to the Internet the free speech rights Americans take for granted for the printing press.
He has two partners in combat. Ann Beeson is a 33-year-old, net-savvy lawyer, four years out of law school and interested in flying planes when she has the time. Marjorie Heins, a 50-year-old expert in obscenity and indecency law, dryly describes herself as having been "mildly computer-phobic" when she first began work on the Internet cases.
No litigation of the magnitude of the Internet cases could be carried on by three lawyers alone, and, indeed, Hansen and company have been assisted by many others, from lawyers in local affiliates of the ACLU to the group's legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, to outside counsels from both private law firms and nonprofit organizations.
And in the Decency Act case, a second set of plaintiffs, led by the American Library Association, was represented by a well-known Washington, D.C.-based law firm, Jenner & Block. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court it was a Jenner partner, Bruce J. Ennis, Jr. -- himself once an ACLU lawyer -- who presented the case against the Decency Act.
Nevertheless, last month's triad of victories owes much to the little team at the ACLU's new downtown Matnhattan offices overlooking the Hudson and, in some spots, the Statue of Liberty.
About three years ago, Hansen, who has spent almost 25 years working for the ACLU or its affiliates, noticed increasing references to something called cyberspace in the press. He was yet not online -- that would not happen until early 1996 -- but, he says, "It became fairly obvious to me fairly early on that the Internet would become a major free speech battle ground."
Shortly thereafter, Beeson, who had started using the Internet in law school for e-mail and membership in mailing lists on subjects like jazz, joined the ACLU as a fellow. She began to monitor Internet-related legislation in the states and to lobby against similar efforts in Congress.
By the summer of 1995, the ACLU lawyers became convinced that Congress would sooner or later pass laws regulating free speech on the Internet -- and they wanted to be prepared to pick up the gauntlet as soon as Congress threw it down.
Beeson began looking for plaintiffs, relying in large part on the Internet for searches that eventually resulted in about 300 possibilities. That list was whittled down to about 20.
Beeson wanted to make sure that even though computer terminals resemble television monitors, judges understood that the Internet was different from broadcast, which, unlike print, may be regulated for indecency. Therefore, she sought out plaintiffs who not only posted Web sites -- the most static and TV-like part of the Internet -- but maintained the more conversation-like features of cyberspace, like chat rooms and e-mail lists.
Heins, meanwhile, as director of the ACLU's Arts Censorship Project, had vast experience battling indecency speech laws. "It turns out that three-fourths of censorship issues, especially in arts, entertainment and literature, focus on sexual speech, so I became the expert," she says.
It was Heins, Hansen and Beeson who drafted the complaint that asked a Philadelphia court to block the Decency Act -- and that was filed with court clerks within minutes of President Clinton's signing the bill on February 8, 1996. Eventually, a panel of Philadelphia federal judges struck down the law, paving the way for the Supreme Court case.
Meanwhile, the states were increasingly attempting to regulate the Internet. By the end of 1996, the ACLU lawyers were focusing on three statutes: a Georgia law restricting anonymity in online communications; a Virginia law limiting state employees' access to sexually explicit material online and a New York State law similar to the federal Decency Act.
It was in the course of discussing the New York case that someone -- Beeson believes it was Shapiro -- came up with the idea that the statute violated the "Commerce Clause" of the United States Constitution, which leaves regulation of interstate commerce to Congress not the states. The notion was exciting because it raised the possibility that Commerce Clause grounds alone would bring state attempts to regulate Internet speech to a standstill.
In the New York case, Judge Loretta A. Preska of Manhattan federal district court bought the argument, basing her decision to strike down the law solely on Commerce Clause considerations. Her decision establishes a powerful precedent.
Did the ACLU lawyers plan a one-two knockout punch against all government attempts at online speech restrictions, seeking to ban such laws on Commerce Clause grounds at the state level and on First Amendment grounds at the national level? Hansen and Beeson both laugh and respond that they wish they had such acumen. The tactic, they insist, was a happy accident.
And all three lawyers say that the trio of cases marks just the beginning of courtroom battles over free speech in cyberspace. The Virginia case, says Heins, will probably go to trial in the fall. Down the road, Heins foresees cases on obscenity and the Internet, while Hansen predicts lawsuits over whether public libraries can with impunity use "filtering software" to block access to certain sites on the Internet.
For now, each of the three can take some time to bask in the victories. All can list memorable moments of the last year-and-a-half.
For Heins, one such moment occurred as the Philadelphia decision was relayed to the ACLU offices in New York and lawyers huddled around the printer to read pages of it. For Hansen, another such moment occurred when a government witness testified in Philadelphia that he would find a Vanity Fair cover featuring a pregnant and naked Demi Moore -- clearly legal in print -- arguably illegal under the Decency Act if posted online.
For Beeson, a memorable moment came on a rainy day in March in Washington, D.C., in the august court room of the nation's highest court as Justice Stephen G. Breyer asked a question about teen-agers chatting online and discussing what they always talk about: sex. It was a question, Beeson says, that, after all her hard work, indicated that the Justices got it, understanding that the Internet is more than broadcast. It is often dialogue.
"My eyes welled up with tears," she says, "because everything we thought about the Internet was crystallized in that question."
DIGITAL METROPOLIS is published weekly, on Mondays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this column. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears.
Pamela Mendels at email@example.com welcomes your comments and suggestions. | <urn:uuid:9e0f5ea9-b37a-4e4d-9248-d703c7fb6fb6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://movies.nytimes.com/library/cyber/digimet/070797digimet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96554 | 1,796 | 1.5 | 2 |
Young mum who had rare form of 'pregnancy' cancer praises hospital (From Darlington and Stockton Times)
Send us your pictures, video, news and views by texting DST to 80360 or email us
Young mum from Malton, North Yorkshire, praises hospital which discovered her rare cancer
5:52pm Tuesday 12th March 2013 in News
A young mother who had a rare form of cancer that mimics pregnancy has paid tribute to the hospital that discovered her condition 12 months ago.
Frankie Wedgewood, 22, from Malton, North Yorkshire, and her fiance Will, 25, welcomed their first child Freddy into the world in September 2011.
But just six months later Frankie was being treated at Weston Park Hospitals Teenage Cancer Unit (TCU) in Sheffield after a rare form of cancer was discovered when she went to her doctor with stomach pains.
Initial tests showed she was pregnant, but Frankie said: "I knew I wasn't pregnant as my fiance is in the Army and had been away serving so it was impossible. At first the GP thought I had an ectopic pregnancy, but tests revealed this wasn't the case and nothing showed up on scans.
"It was a confusing time, I just didn't have a clue what was going on. I was then transferred to Weston Park Hospital for scans and further tests."
Last March doctors discovered Frankie had Choriocarcinoma - a quick-growing form of cancer that originates from a pregnancy but can spread anywhere in the body. She was treated at Weston Park Hospital due to its expertise in this area.
Weston Park Hospital Cancer Charity helps to fund the work of the specialist unit, which aims to provide a home from home environment for patients, along with a range of recreational and social activities.
Frankie started a four-month course of chemotherapy in March 2012 and was treated on the TCU where baby Freddy was also able to stay with her.
She has now completed her treatment and will return to the hospital soon for a check-up.
She said: "The nurses are great and if I have any problems or queries I know I can contact them. But now I am looking forward to the future and walking down the aisle this summer where I will be thinking of all the amazing staff that helped to get me there." | <urn:uuid:42d1e40c-dae7-4198-8e53-cb4c129fe569> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/news/10284154.Young_mum_who_had_rare_form_of__pregnancy__cancer_praises_hospital/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983781 | 475 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Saturday May 25, 2013
Surprise Returns of Deployed Military: The Sweetest Moments of AllTim King Salem-News.com
Deployed Military Veterans surprising their loved ones; these videos will zap your heart.
(SACRAMENTO, CA) - There are few things that affect a person more than the unexpected and unanticipated return of a deployed member of the military.
Being in war is a risk at all times, never let anyone tell you it isn't true. Family members have every right to be terribly concerned and sometimes they get the worst possible news.
When members of the military aren't being injured and killed by roadside bombs and poor military planning, they fall victim to trauma and stress and often to environmental hazards that the government doesn't bother disclosing the danger of.
We all know somebody who has been sent off to war, and that empathy is why it is such a powerful thing.
Plus the fact that people just miss their loved ones as expected. Fathers, sons, daughters and moms, brothers and sisters and children, and as you will see in the videos below, even 'master' and the reunions with family dogs may be the most powerful of all!
So get out your box of Kleenex and prepare to take a little journey into the hearts of American families who are taken by surprise by these videotaped reunions.
Americans of all ages are sent to the most dangerous places on earth. Women are in combat,
Salem-News.com Vice-President/Executive Editor
Tim's Facebook: Facebook.com/TimKing.Reporter
Tim's myspace: MySpace.com/timsalemnews
Tim King's articles explore political and social injustice. He believes that Genocide and Human Rights violations are unacceptable in this world, across the board with no exceptions; and that resolving and isolating this dramatic problem should be a primary goal of all of the world's governments, and that all other political goals, particularly those related to the American military industrial complex, need to undergo a massive reorganization. The Human Rights Tim and other writers demand are called for under international law, by the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
At the center of the problems that lead to human suffering, are religious governments, followed by religious interference in western politics, where there is no measurable success- only more war.
As a news editor, Tim believes there are other massive issues that mainstream media should better address.
These include human trafficking, which is a massively ignored issue, the erosion of the rights of American citizens and associated, increasing police brutality, U.S. connections to Mexican drug cartels, the nearly unregulated big pharma industry and FDA.
Also of paramount importance, are clean air and water issues and the environmental impacts of contaminated U.S. military bases. He believes all of these subjects need to become a larger focus of all media.
Tim reports regularly on developments relating to the 2009 Sri Lanka Genocide of Tamil people that left well over 100k people missing or dead. He also writes about the constant Human Rights violations and Genocide in Balochistan, and other regions.
Articles for December 8, 2012 | Articles for December 9, 2012 | Articles for December 10, 2012
Hear Raymo's Songs
|Contact: firstname.lastname@example.org | Copyright © 2013 Salem-News.com | news tips & press releases: email@example.com.| | <urn:uuid:3159bf7e-8061-49cc-b790-7435670a33b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.salem-news.com/articles/december092012/xmas-returns-vets-tk.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93889 | 707 | 1.515625 | 2 |
By Susan Crabtree
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is touting the passage of healthcare reform as her greatest accomplishment in Congress so far.
“Healthcare reform is my proudest achievement in Congress,” she said. “But it would not have been possible without the leadership of President Obama.”
Pelosi made the statements in a commencement speech Saturday at Mills College, a women's liberal arts college in Oakland, Calif. She was flanked by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a Mills College graduate who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.
In the speech, Pelosi recalled a conversation with Obama the day after the healthcare bill passed the House.
“President Obama called me to say he was happier than the day he was elected,” she said. “I told him, ‘Mr. President, I'm very happy, but not happier than the day you were elected. Because if you hadn't been elected, this day would have never happened.'”
She also promoted the impact she believes the new health insurance law is having on the lives of American families and young adults.
“For young people, for the first time in history, you are allowed to stay on your parent's healthcare plans until you are 26 years old,” she said. “For children, and for all Americans, we ended the days where you can be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
“For seniors, we closed the Medicare prescription drug donut hole, and strengthened Medicare for generations to come,” she continued. 'For all Americans, health insurance reform gives you freedom: to change jobs, open a business, pursue your dreams and be creative and entrepreneurial.”
As the first woman Speaker, Pelosi also told the graduating class there is no right path for women trying to balance work and family.
“I'm often asked by young women about the best path to take - whether to have children early in life or to focus on career and then family,” she said. “I've found there is no best path; there is only your path.”
When Pelosi was trying to decide whether to run for Congress in 1987, she was concerned because her youngest child, Alexandra, was entering her senior year in high school. She prayed over the decision and said she asked her daughter “with deepest sincerity” what she thought.
“My teenage daughter looked back at me and said, ‘Mom, get a life,'” she said. “And so I did.” | <urn:uuid:1f94c29e-ae70-4ce6-82d2-bd80825f4919> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.democraticleader.gov/news/articles/hill-pelosi-touts-healthcare-reform-her-quotemarkproudest-achievementquotemark-speech?qt-photos_video=0 | 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 | 0.979432 | 532 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Although France's "graduated response" proceedings have attracted the most attention, the UK is in the midst of a consultation of its own on how to involve both content owners and ISPs in some sort of response to P2P file-sharing. The government is pushing a co-regulatory approach that would task industry groups with hashing out the details of such a plan, while the government would make sure that any agreement is fair, competitive, and preserves privacy. With all the responses now in, the UK music industry is clearly pleased that it won't have to pursue 6.5 million copyright infringers on its own. Digital rights groups are... less excited.
The entire consultation is helmed by BERR, the UK agency that handles Business, Enterprise, & Regulatory Reform, and it stems from the famous (in certain circles, anyway) Gowers Review of intellectual property that we covered extensively back in 2006. That report, which took a top-to-bottom look at UK copyright and IP policy, was stuffed with plenty of consumer-friendly ideas, such as no new copyright term extensions. But it also contained good news for rightsholders, such as a suggestion that the government step in if ISPs and rightsholders couldn't agree on how to handle the issue of P2P file-sharing.
With this legislative Sword of Damocles hanging over its head, major UK ISPs agreed this year to a Memorandum of Understanding with the music business in which ISPs would notify (but nothing else) customers suspected by the music industry of sharing files illegally. The BERR proceeding looks set to formalize this arrangement and add some form of sanction to the mix as well.
In responding recently to the BERR proceeding (PDF), blanket group UK Music expressed satisfaction with just about everything. The one thing it still hopes to see, though, is a tremendous expansion of the process to include not just P2P software but "illegitimate one-click hosting, illegal subscription FTP sites, and paid download sites which do not compensate creators." In addition, they want the government to "influence the discussion at international and European levels" in hopes of achieving some kind of international consensus on graduated response.
Oh, and finally, don't bother to ask the opinion of economists who don't work directly for the music industry. UK Music makes the "slightly self-interested, if not arrogant, point" (its own words) that most academics don't understand the music business and that "economists within the music industry need to work hand-in-hand with government to help build a robust evidence base that’s conducive to sound evidence based policy making." Sounds completely fair to us!
Open Rights Group
UK digital rights groups are appalled, however. In its comments to BERR (PDF), the Open Rights Group tried to depict the issue largely as a business issue, not a criminal one (as noncommercial song-swapping is a civil offense only). John Phillip Sousa famously called the player piano a threat to the "artistic development of music in this country" back in 1906, while Jack Valenti of the MPAA compared the VCR to the "Boston Strangler" back in 1982. In reality, neither invention killed art, overthrew copyright, or destroyed incentive; the VCR, in fact, created huge value for Hollywood.
Before rightsholders get government support, ORG insists that they first alter their business models and deliver a collective licensing solution incorporating seven principles from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If they don't want to do this, fine, but they shouldn't ask the government to simply aid an outmoded method of selling music.
But if the process goes forward, the ORG takes issue with most possible sanctions. Filtering won't work for a simple reason: encryption. Termination of 'Net access is a stunningly harsh penalty that affects entire households and could create a "No Fly"-style government blacklist. Only "notification," in which people receive notice that their P2P activities have been identified and that they could (if the copyright holder chooses) end up in court gains grudging acceptance (though ORG remains "keen" to see legal penalties against companies that file false accusations).
It's not all disagreement, though. Take the idea that ISPs must turn over subscriber information directly to rightsholders who complain about particular IP addresses. ORG calls this "unacceptable" since it does away with due process and makes rightsholders into "police, judge, and jury." But the music industry hates it, too, because it continues to put the onus on them, and UK Music has no interest in paying to go after millions of individuals. It's inefficient and expensive.
So what about creating a third party that would judge the requests for information? We already have one, says ORG, and it's called the legal system. A new process would likely be just as expensive for everyone involved, something that UK Music admits as well.
Image credit: BMR
And both groups want to see new business models. UK Music is committed to "continued development of new compelling music services" so that consumers can watch and listen how and when they want; the industry points to its work with sites like We7, Qtrax, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, and 7Digital, though none of these follow the model advocated by ORG and EFF. The Memorandum of Understanding signed earlier this year also balances enforcement with both education about copyrights and new business model development.
Given that UK consumers have already expressed their willingness to stop swapping files if notified, and their willingness to pay some sort of voluntary individual music license if they can get music how and when they want, all sides in this process seem to have an overlapping core agreement about how to solve the problem. But substantial disagreements about graduated response sanctions and due process could perpetuate the antagonism between rightsholders and consumers, at least in the short term. At this point, no new action is expected until the New Year, when the government is expected to wrap up its inquiry and start doing what it does best: making rules. | <urn:uuid:ade2a05c-3797-4e62-b90d-37819b80f366> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/12/uk-consumers-big-content-battle-over-three-strikes-rules/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960325 | 1,256 | 1.625 | 2 |
Today is Memorial Day, with all the varied meanings attached to it, all of which are deemed by their interpreters to be the proper meaning, all of which commemorate the tragedy of war.
An e-mail from Mel in California on Friday, May 23, led me back to a treasure trove of copies of old letters I’ve had for years. Most of them were written on my grandparents kitchen table, which would have been within the grove of trees included in the photo on the cover page of this blog. The others would have been written on another kitchen table on a farm about three-fourths of a mile to the right of Sam and his photographer, myself.
These letters were all written in 1944-45, and provide a snapshot of the impact of one war on one tiny community in the United States. The quotes were interspersed among mundane bits of news: harvesting, cold weather, going to town and church. I could have included more than these, but they suffice. Grammatical and punctuation errors are as they were. No editor was looking over the shoulder of these writers. They wrote from the heart to their son, brother, cousin….
My correspondent, Mel, my mother’s first cousin who grew up on the neighboring farm in North Dakota, wrote about “Francis [Long] (marine killed in Tarawa)”. I knew of Francis; Tarawa particularly interested me, as my friend, Minneapolis businessman Lynn Elling, was a young Navy officer, early in his tour, when his LST arrived at the gosh-awful remains of the Tarawa campaign in late 1943. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tarawa His experiences there, and later, seared into his memory, led him to a life long and still continuing quest for peace. http://www.amillioncopies.info .
Mel had his facts slightly wrong: his Aunt, my Grandma Rosa, wrote her son, George, an Officer on the USS Woodworth in the Pacific Theatre, on August 20, 1944: “Fri we had a Memorial Mass for Francis Long killed July 2 on Saipan…”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saipan
George kept letters he received in WWII, and a few years ago I incorporated all of the letters from home into a family history of two neighboring farm families, the Buschs and Bernings, rural Berlin, ND.
Deadly World War II comes alive simply from pull quotes from a few of the letters written to George from the kitchen tables. Following are a few samples:
Grandma, September 22, 1944: “I must give Francis Long a spiritual bouquet yet in a Mass they feel so badly.”
September 22, 1944, Uncle Vince writes his brother: “Threshing is coming along fine…[one hired man], a ex-marine from Guadacanal.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Guadalcanal
October 22, 1944, Aunt Edith: “[our sister Florence] wrote they were afraid they were loosing their hired man to the Army. He got his 1-A….”
Also October 22, Grandma Rosa “[my neighbor and sister-in-law Tina and her daughter Agnes] are going out to Whyoming… to see [their daughter and sister] Rose as Pinkey [Rose’s husband George Molitor] has to go across now too she expects a baby in Nov. so its to bad he has to go at this time. Mrs. Heim says Elmer is in Holland now was in England & Belgium driving a tank so is in the front too at times Delores is in Italy….”
October 30, Grandma writes “[Vincent] got a card from the draft board saying he was in class II-C till Feb… How I wish it were all over.” (II-C was likely a military deferment for essential work at home. Vincent was needed on the farm.)
November 5, Grandma: “The Bernings are well Aug[ust] is still at camp LaJeune NoCar… Ruby is in cadet nurse training in [Rockford] IL. Rufina is in training at Iowa City.”
January 1, 1945, Grandma writes “[three] are leaving for the service soon…[another Long] is in Class A 1 now too….”
There is “radio silence” on the letters until June, 1945. Doubtless letters continued, but don’t remain for posterity.
June 11, 1945, Aunt Tina, Rose’s mother, writes “[daughter] Ruby has gone on to Montana to cheer up Rose a bit as her hubby is missing now for a month or so. I hope…that he turns up liveing.” (George Molitor KIA over Italy April 4, 1945, leaving Rose with two daughters, aged two and six months.)
July 25, 1945, Grandma: “…had a letter from [Marine Captain] August [Berning] is on Okinawa he had a bad battle there got shot through his jacket…The boys were to a show last night in LaMoure “30 seconds over Tokyo”….” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
August 8, 1945, Grandma: “Lorin H____ is at home now again they say he is nervous and has some shrapnel in his body but I bet he is glad to be home and will soon mend.”
August 26, 1945, Grandma: “Hurrah! The old war is over I can’t say what that means to me….”
The surrender documents were signed by the Germans on May 7; and by the Empire of Japan on September 2, 1945.
War continues. “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.” | <urn:uuid:931c4a8d-f1c6-42b2-9b60-4b9c21e70c0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.outsidethewalls.org/blog/2009/05/25/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982019 | 1,268 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Most Active Stories
The Upstate Economy
GE unveils new battery plant
General Electric is getting ready to unveil a new battery manufacturing plant in the very same place where the company got its start.
The CEO of GE, Jeffrey Immelt, will be in Schenectady on July 10 to celebrate the grand opening of the new plant.
The batteries are also new. They're designed to be used as backup power and energy storage in the telecommunications industry and for utility grids.
Todd Alhart is a spokesman for the company and says GE is also developing the batteries for eventual use in mass transit and large construction vehicles.
"We think this battery could work very well in a heavy duty vehicle like a transit bus, or a mining truck, or a locomotive," said Alhart.
The battery plant unofficially opened earlier this year and already employs 250 workers. GE expects to add another hundred people in the near future.
For more stories by the Innovation Trail and Marie Cusick, visit the Innovation Trail website.
The Innovation Trail is a collaboration between five upstate New York public media outlets. The initiative, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), helps the public gain a better understanding of the connection between technological breakthroughs and the revitalization of the upstate New York economy. | <urn:uuid:072c414b-6a66-4e80-a7cb-f7fba37fcf0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wrvo.org/post/ge-unveils-new-battery-plant | 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 | 0.954927 | 267 | 1.625 | 2 |
Leukemia Drug Adulteration
Chinese generic versions of the anticancer drugs, methotrexate and cytarabine hydrochloride, have been reported to be contaminated with an undisclosed substance according to several wire reports this morning.
Several children in a Shanghai hospital were reported to suffer leg pain and difficulty walking after being injected with methotrexate. A common drug used in many chemotherapy regimens for leukemia, methotrexate is not normally associated with these side effects.
The Xinhua news agency reported that the drugs had been traced to one manufacturer, Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Co. The report also noted the Chinese government had suspended manufacture and sale of these two drugs earlier this month. I was unable to find details on the unexpected side effects of cytarabine, another antileukemia drug, but I infer from the AP reports that the leg pain was also the signal something was wrong with that drug preparation. No information was provided as to whether any of the offending products were exported to other countries.
China has been suffering a great deal of bad publicity over tainted products exported to other countries, such as toothpaste contaminated with diethylene glycol and toys finished with lead-based paint.
The Ractopamine Pig Wars and a Pharmacology Lesson
But in a report I missed, the Chinese noted that they have also been subject to adulterations of imported US and Canadian pork that contained the growth stimulant, ractopamine. While the Chinese are reported to have a “zero-tolerance” policy to this growth stimulant, British-based ThePigSite.com reported last month that the ractopamine had also been detected in Chinese domestic pork as well. (FYI, the EU also forbids ractopamine use in livestock.).
In preparing the following quick pharmacology lesson on ractopamine (for myself as much as for readers), I was prompted to give thought to the health of farm workers who might handle the product.
Ractopamine is sold in the US under the brandname, Paylean®, by Elanco, a division of the pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly and Company. The compound is not a steroid but acts as predominantly as an agonist (or stimulator) of the adrenergic β2 receptor to cause reduced fat deposition and increased lean muscle mass in swine when given for the final 28 days prior to slaughter (or “barn closeout” as they say in the biz).
For comparison, agonists of the same β2 receptor like albuterol are used in humans to prevent or reverse the airway constriction of asthma. Animal science researchers at Purdue have reported that ractopamine also is a partial agonist at the β1 receptor, the same receptor that we try to block with the antihypertensive, atenolol (Tenormin®).
So, would Paylean® cause pigs to become hypertensive prior to slaughter. The label does at least state that, “Ractopamine may increase the number of injured and/or fatigued pigs during marketing.”
Another concern is what might ractopamine do to agricultural workers who handle it?
In defense of Elanco, the label for Paylean® (PDF here) does note that people with cardiovascular disease should exercise “special caution” in handling the product, particularly to avoid inhalation of the powder.
This discussion is not merely an intellectual exercise. We have seen over the last few years, perhaps even as early as 1985, that workers in microwave popcorn plants have been experiencing irreversible lung damage (broncholitis obliterans) due to inhalation of the butter flavoring agent, diacetyl (or 2,3-butanedione). The Pump Handle blog also recently broke the story of the first consumer with the same type of lung damage due to inhaling the vapors of freshly-microwaved popcorn.
What we do in manufacturing our food does indeed matter – no just to the consumer, but to those who labor to put food on our tables. | <urn:uuid:756bc1e7-4c5e-439b-ad86-5cc73a6398fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/09/16/chinese-anticancer-drugs-taint/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963646 | 838 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Saturday, October 27, 2012
10:00 am - 2:00 pm
The National WWII Museum, 945 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA
Most museums state loudly "Hands-Off!", but with The National WWII Museum's teen Victory Corps program, it's HANDS-ON. Explore and learn about WWII history in an exciting, new way - through touching actual artifacts from the war that changed the world. At stations placed strategically throughout the Museum's world-class exhibits, guests can feel what it was like to have their future placed in the hands of a lottery system by participating in a mock draft, while in the D-Day Landings Gallery guests get a chance to experience some of the smells of the battlefield likely encountered by American servicemen from a selection of glass test tubes. Staffed by our dedicated teen volunteers, the Victory Corps program runs most Saturdays and is free with Museum admission. For more information call 504-528-1944 x 304. | <urn:uuid:564d3678-a116-41a7-ac46-b3977e3a022a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.neworleanscvb.com/articles/index.cfm?action=view&articleID=7214&menuID=2955 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942392 | 197 | 1.726563 | 2 |
On Tuesday, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was officially repealed. A new era for our military has been ushered in. The constant refrain has been that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve honorably in the military, just like everyone else does. Of course, gays and lesbians already could serve honorably in the military — they just had to keep their private life private.
Most people don’t have a problem with gays and lesbians actually serving in the military. Honorable service was never an issue; there were plenty of gays and lesbians who did and still do serve their country with honor and courage. It’s the serving openly part. DADT allowed the military to remain neutral on the gay rights question that will inevitably begin to flood the military now that the repeal has taken effect. Gay marriage, benefits for spouses/partners, on-base housing, public displays of affection — these are all issues that the military will have to take a stance on. And while the current status is that gays and lesbians, and their partners, will not be eligible for these benefits, it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be satisfied with that. How long will it be before they start campaigning for gay marriages to be recognized as well? For their partners to get benefits? To be able to live in base housing? Right now, transgender Americans are still not allowed to serve in the military. How long until they start fighting for that as well?
There’s also, of course, the issue of unit cohesion. Repealing DADT throws a huge wrinkle into that. Now they have to figure out a way to handle it if a straight service member isn’t comfortable sleeping in a foxhole next to a gay service member, or showering next to them. And will we see people using their sexual orientation as an excuse for why they didn’t get promoted, or why they were “unfairly” disciplined?
Repealing DADT opened all of these floodgates. The claim was that gays and lesbians just wanted to be able to serve honorably like everyone else. But is that really true, or is repealing DADT really about advancing the Left’s agenda to politicize every aspect of public life?
Early on, anyone who didn’t agree with repealing DADT was quickly smeared as a bigot and a homophobe. Any suggested possible problems that could arise from the repeal, such as a negative effect on unit cohesion, were brushed off as excuses to justify hate. The advocates for repeal claimed they wanted tolerance for their lifestyles, but where was the tolerance for opposing viewpoints? It’s interesting how that works out — the people who claim to want tolerance the most usually end up as the least tolerant people out there.
Several days before the repeal this attitude was on display, as the Marine Corps Times, a popular newspaper that is sold on and around Marine Corps bases around the world, ran a cover story titled “We’re Gay, Get Over It.” The entire premise of the story revolves around the supposition that Marines are inherently homophobic, and serving alongside gay Marines is something that straight Marines will need to “get over.” I don’t think the gay Left realize that it has never been about the fact that someone is literally gay (believe it or not, most of the time they already know who in their unit is gay). If it was only about honorable service, then why does everyone need to know who is gay and who isn’t? Not only is everyone apparently required to know who is gay, they’re also required to approve of it — and thus, the thought policing begins. So much for tolerance.
HBO filmed a documentary titled The Strange History Of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, claiming to tell the full story about DADT and the journey to repeal.
Of course, that’s not quite the truth. The channel makes no efforts to even pretend to give a balanced perspective on the repeal. On the website, the synopsis made that clear.
A timely and historical look at the legacy of gays and lesbians in the military, THE STRANGE HISTORY OF DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL illustrates the tumultuous evolution of the controversial policy that fostered hate and intolerance within the military – and undermined the very freedoms American forces defend – by forcing many soldiers to lie and live in secrecy.
They mention that, like the Marine Corps Times, they interviewed gay service members to get their opinions on DADT and the repeal. Apparently, the opinions of straight service members who might oppose the repeal were not wanted. So much for getting the full story.
What would a little agenda advancement be without a public display? At midnight on the day the repeal took effect, a gay sailor married his partner in a ceremony planned to coincide with the repeal:
Just as the formal repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy took effect, Navy Lt. Gary Ross and his partner were married before a small group of family and friends.
The two men, who’d been together 11 years, decided to marry in Vermont in part because the state is in the Eastern time zone.
That way, they were able to recite their vows at the stroke of midnight – at the first possible moment after the ban ended.
Lt. Ross wore his dress uniform for the ceremony. The Navy is now considering a proposal to allow chaplains to conduct same-sex civil unions.
Here’s the big elephant in the room. If this is solely about honorable service, and nothing else, then why is all of this needed? The in-your-face attitude, the admonishments to get over it, the slurs and accusations of homophobia, the possibilities of same-sex civil unions — none of these things have anything to do with service in the military. When you join the Marine Corps and go to MCRD Parris Island, for example, there isn’t going to be a line for gay recruits and a line for straight recruits. They all go through the same training and they all have the same job to do. We don’t differentiate between races in the military, so why all of the hoopla around sexual orientation?
There seems to be a kind of obsession among the gay Left to constantly celebrate their sexuality. It’s great for someone to be proud of who they are, but it doesn’t fit in with military service. As a service member, it isn’t all about you — it’s about the team, the unit. It’s about everyone as a whole, and if you are constantly preaching about your lifestyle, and tolerance for your beliefs, it isn’t going to make for a strong team. To be a Marine or a soldier in combat, you cannot constantly be thinking about “I” and “me.” The military is all about discipline and conformance; consistently flaunting your homosexuality and demanding that everyone accept it (while never being tolerant of other views) doesn’t fit in.
This is about much more than just honorable military service. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. The push for recognizing gay marriage, giving gay spouses benefits, allowing gay partners to live together on base — a cans of worms just got cracked wide open. How long will it take for Lt. Ross, for example, to start demanding benefits for his husband?
Race, gender, sexual orientation: none of these things have anything to do with a career in the military. Most service members don’t care who is gay as long as they aren’t disrupting or endangering the unit. DADT is over, yet those who wanted the repeal are not shutting up. They got what they wanted, and instead of just putting their heads down and doing their jobs, they’re carrying on with the squabbling. All this will do is continue to divide service members and pit them against each other.
I thought ending DADT meant that the controversy was supposed to be over. But of course, that’s assuming that the repeal of DADT was all they were after. | <urn:uuid:dc59bbe9-55a0-480b-b124-e818719143c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pjmedia.com/blog/dadt-repealed-but-the-lefts-war-to-politicize-the-military-continues/?singlepage=true | 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 | 0.975037 | 1,724 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Kids and reality television are a popular, if controversial, mix. What happens when you add competition to the mix? The situation can become volatile.
It seems that kids are appearing more often in what are “competitive reality shows,” as opposed to “candid reality shows.” What’s the difference? Candid reality shows, which would include the Real Housewives and The Real World franchises, follow people in their everyday lives or as they prepare for a specific event. That event could be a competition, as in Toddlers & Tiaras– but the show itself isn’t a competition. American Idol and Survivor, on the other hand, are competitive reality shows. The competition is the show, and because we get to know the contestants over a season a narrative arc develops (which separates them from straight game shows, for example).
Long before the boom of reality TV Star Search ruled the airwaves. If you’re like me, or hundreds of other children of the 80s, you wanted to dance like the kids from America’s Apple Pie who won many consecutive weeks in 1988.
After Star Search the next big talent show to hit the airwaves was, of course, American Idol, in 2002. The biggest show on television tried to add a children’s competition during the summer of 2003– American Juniors. The show, meant to create a kids’ superstar pop group, faltered in the ratings and never returned (though it did bring us Lucy Hale, who now stars in ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars). I suspect that many viewers felt uncomfortable voting out tweens, preteens, and teens, crushing their dreams. (At the time I read that many of the parents were difficult behind the scenes as well, but it’s unclear if this had anything to do with the decision not to renew the show.)
Shortly after American Idol lowered its entry age, allowing minors to compete. While this has produced several stars and winners, like Jordin Sparks, it’s hard on both the show and contestants to be limited in rehearsal time, fit in schooling, and deal with guardians who must be present (even on tour). Other shows have emerged, briefly, to stage similar competitive talent competitions in the high school age group, including 2008′s High School Musical: Get in the Picture (which also was a ratings flop). It seems like Americans want their (Disney) pop stars produced behind the scenes, rather than eliminated in front of them, and even at our own hands in audience voting shows.
But in the past week two new shows started that have made me wonder if times are changing and we are now willing to put kids through the same televised competitions as adults. First of all, Simon Cowell’s new show, The X Factor, allows kids as young as 12 to compete. This is much lower than the American Idol minimum age requirement (just lowered to 15 last year). I know the show is trying to attract new and different talent, but to me this decision (and lack of protest) suggests a new willingness in the American viewing audience to subject kids to the same rigors as adults.
And, then there is a new series on The Hub: Majors & Minors. Majors & Minors (I’m sure the pun was intentional) focuses on twelve aspiring musicians aged 10-16. The host said at the beginning of the show that no contestant would be eliminated and no one would vote. Yet, the first episode centered on the “final callbacks,” in which 29 kids were cut to 12. Clearly there was a cut– but unlike other reality shows, the eliminated contestants weren’t really featured (you could get glimpses of them in footage of classes from the final callbacks). Some of the kids seem extremely talent, so I’ll be interested to watch as the series unfolds. While there aren’t eliminations, this is a “music competition series,” and the kids are competing for a recording and tour deal. There will be a “winner,” and I’m sure all the parents and kids want that prize.
In both Majors & Minors and the X Factor, Justin Bieber was was mentioned. I am guessing his pop superstardom (along with others of late, like Willow Smith) has shown record execs that young kids can succeed and sell a lot of records (my sense is that Michael Jackson’s young success may have sullied these waters for some time, for multiple reasons). Do you believe there can and should be another Justin Bieber, or even Taylor Swift, who started out as a successful songwriter and performer at a young age?
A final interesting kids/competition/reality twist this week: Last night while watching the premiere of The Amazing Race, I realized that one of the teams is the father and son from the Sunderland family. Who are they? Well the son, Zac, became the youngest person to sail around the world at age 17 in 2009. You may recall that his younger sister, Abby, made international headlines in 2010 when she attempted to break his record.. but had to be rescued out at sea. At the time the rumor was that the Sunderlands, especially the father, had been/were shopping around a family reality show. I wrote about them, in light of the Balloon Boy scandal, and other kid reality scandals, in USA Today. The reality show never materialized, but their appearance here makes me wonder. Was reality TV always the focus, as was rumored? How far will the father/son duo go and will they now parlay this competitive reality appearance into their own show? | <urn:uuid:382488bf-8529-4761-9f2e-775fb1e7aaa4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hilaryleveyfriedman.com/the-justin-bieber-effect-kids-and-competitive-reality-shows/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974186 | 1,172 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Today, Oscar the Grouch is hungry for a special kind of ice cream sundae: namely a baked bean one with chocolate ice cream, chopped pickles, whipped cream, and a radish. Poor Mr. Hooper has no choice but to oblige.
Today on Sesame Street, Big Bird struggles to get his bags of birdseed to his nest. His adult friends help him figure it out. Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letters A, H, and T, and by the number 10. This episode includes guest appearances from James Earl Jones and Burt Lancaster, who demonstrate counting and saying the alphabet. Ernie shows Bert his 'A' making machine, and Kermit the Frog tries to demonstrate the word 'in'.
It's such a nice day on the Street that Susan, Gordon, and two kids set up chairs in the arbor and go on an imaginary car ride. Then Oscar puts in a call to a certain Melvin Meany, and the two of them have a heated argument over the phone. | <urn:uuid:8ebb2ae2-3d37-4651-ae7e-249d412ca12d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063951/episodes?season=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957524 | 212 | 1.625 | 2 |
International Gamco v. Multimedia Games (Fed. Cir. 2007).
A single patent can have multiple ‘exclusive licensees’ where each licensee has exclusive rights to a portion of the patent rights. Rights are often divided temporally, physically, by field of use, and by type of use. Here, Gamco received an exclusive license grant from gaming giant IGT to sell state authorized NY lottery games covered by the ‘035 patent.
On appeal, the CAFC found that Gamco does not have standing to file suit without the cooperation of the patentee, IGT.
An exclusive licensee possesses standing to sue in its own name if it holds “all substantial rights” to the asserted patent. Historic cases have held that an exclusive territorial licensee has standing without joining the assignee. Here, the court drew a line at exclusive field of use licenses — holding that an exclusive license to a portion of the patented subject matter does not include sufficient rights to create licensee standing. Relying on the Supreme Court’s 1892 Pope v. Jeffery opinion, the appellate panel found that field of use divisions create a real potential that a defendant could face suits from multiple licensees.
“In Pope, as in this case, the license only conveyed rights to a subset of the patented subject matter. For that reason, as in this case, the conveyance posed a threat of multiple suits based on the same allegations of infringement. This court therefore holds that Gamco lacks standing to sue in its own name without joining IGT.”
Senior Judge Friedman gave a different reading to Pope and filed a dubitante opinion — doubting the correctness of the decision. | <urn:uuid:15e4f435-1a6d-43d2-9b27-ebf68ac2f3da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2007/10/patent-licensee.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941354 | 343 | 1.84375 | 2 |
OECD International Conference: What Policies for Globalising Cities? Rethinking the Urban Policy Agenda
Opening remarks by Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary-General
Madrid, 29 March 2007
Ministers, Mayors, Experts on Cities, welcome.
It was less than a year ago, at the OECD Forum on Balancing Globalisation in May, that Mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, President Ricardo Lagos and I launched the proposal to hold a conference on “rethinking the urban policy agenda”.
I am confident that this conference, bringing together Ministers and officials from national governments, Mayors, and a number of the world’s top experts on cities, will be an important step in redefining the urban policy agenda so that it can respond to the dynamic and increasingly global world in which we live.
Your attendance, from about 30 different countries around the world - from Russia to Singapore, Denmark to Mozambique, Brazil to Egypt - attests to the importance that is now attached to cities around the world.
At the OECD we have recognised the need for increased attention on cities and urban policy for some time. We have conducted more than 15 analytical surveys of the issues facing different cities and their policy responses, from Stockholm and Montreal to Milan, Seoul and Mexico City. New surveys are underway, including for Madrid and Istanbul, but also Toronto, Sao Paulo and Copenhagen.
Last year we published a major report, Competitive Cities in the Global Economy, which brings together much of what we have learned so far on how cities can thrive in the new global economy. It contains many valuable policy ideas and I recommend it to you.
Why have cities become so important in the work of the OECD?
Cities play a central role, for they are clearly engines of growth for national economies.
Cities are drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship, where new ideas are developed and turned into commercial opportunities, leading to new products and services and creating jobs. Cities have been leaders in innovation: such as high-speed broadband and information technologies.
Cities typically account for a disproportionately strong share of a country’s GDP per capita, thanks largely to higher productivity. For example, our host city, Madrid boasts a per capita GDP more than 20% higher than the national average.
Cities create wealth to finance the health, education, pensions and other social dimensions of high-value society. The more advanced cities embody the knowledge economy, and act as a magnet for the talented people who generate new ideas.
But cities also fall victim to what is sometimes called the “urban paradox”-- alongside high concentrations of wealth and employment, they also tend to concentrate a high number of unemployed and marginalised people. Cities have to deal with the challenges of economic adjustment, poverty and social cohesion, and in many cases with higher criminality.
What can cities do to meet these challenges? A key role for public policy is to provide the soft and hard infrastructures and services that help to make the city a competitive environment for firms and an attractive place to live for their employees.
To help firms, cities must play to their strengths. The clustering of large companies alongside competitors, dynamic smaller companies and research institutions represents a tangible advantage when innovating and competing in global markets. This is the comparative advantage that large cities have over other regions. Executives in Helsinki, Montreal and Stockholm, for example, underlined to us that the international competitiveness of their companies was strongly helped by the dense and specialised research environment present in their regions. The success of Nokia and other Finnish companies has helped to transform a natural resource-based economy into one of the most innovative and dynamic high-technology economies in the world. Initiatives to better link regional research institutions with industry are one example of how governments can use “soft” instruments to reinforce the competitiveness of a regional economy.
But hard infrastructure is also important. Careful planning of transport infrastructure makes the difference between managing growth and being the victim of growth. Many cities have road and commuter rail systems that have been poorly maintained. Reversing this underinvestment and dealing with congestion and pollution represent expensive challenges. More coherence between urban land use and transport infrastructure development can make a crucial difference to the daily lives of citizens. But decisions are often still taken from a narrow sectoral perspective that misses the essential linkages between the provision of infrastructure and economic strategies.
That is why in the last 5 years OECD has been focused on the links between urban competitiveness and governance.
These different policy issues still need to be addressed in order to strengthen the competitiveness of cities and contribute to their development. And the OECD will continue to improve the indicators of socio-economic performance of cities and produce specific case studies.
But I would like to stress now the need to go further. Globalisation is raising a number of important new issues for cities that need to be addressed as well:
First of all, climate change. Cities generate almost 70% of total gas emission. There is no doubt that improvements in urban design, housing stock, traffic congestion and accessibility, disaster prevention and waste management, are crucial component of a strategy to combat global warming. If cities fail to deal effectively with environmental challenges, our planet is in serious trouble. I am happy to see that this dimension is recognised and taken on board by this conference. I am particularly happy that we have the participation of the Clinton Foundation who launched the Climate Change Initiative for Cities last August where the 22 mayors of the largest metropolitan areas signed a commitment against gas emissions.
The second global issue we need to consider is migration. As markets become more integrated, it becomes clear that the movement of people is one of the most difficult aspects to manage globally. OECD metropolitan regions show that the contribution of foreign migration to population growth in large cities can be significant and positive. Madrid is perhaps one of the best examples. I saw that the immigrant population pass from 4 to 16% of the total metropolitan area in just over 5 years. Like many other cities, Madrid would like to attract foreign skills, but needs as well to make better use of the existing migrants’ skills. How can policy become more opportunity oriented, better integrating immigrants and valuing multiculturalism and diversity?
The third aspect linked with globalisation is international attractiveness of cities. Major sporting events such as the Olympic Games or cultural events like Expo can transform both the structure and image of cities, giving a strong boost to the local and even national economy. How can policy makers ensure that the benefits of staging major events continue to act as a driver of growth in the city and its country after the event? In many cases, cities have struggled to capitalize on the impact of the events, leaving the city with long-term debt, underused infrastructures and a disillusioned population.
Let me stress here the crucial point: the necessary condition to deal with the different challenges and opportunities faced by our cities is to mobilize different stakeholders. Cities and regions have become key actors in delivering policies. National governments need to better align their respective policies and actions with that of cities and regions.
We should pursue this goal: Bringing together Mayors, Ministers and other key actors in an open dialogue to discuss how to redefine the urban policy agenda in a context of globalisation is a worthy and meaningful initiative. My hope is that this event will serve as a cornerstone for building a comprehensive set of tools to assess and improve cities’ competitiveness.
The challenges which our cities face are not easy, and I look forward to our discussions as we have much to learn from one another.
Summary and conclusion of the conference by Mr. Gurría | <urn:uuid:822f85e5-65d5-43c3-8c16-b0f50b279ed5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oecd.org/fr/gov/politique-regionale/whatpoliciesforglobalisingcitiesrethinkingtheurbanpolicyagenda.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946952 | 1,550 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Beware the coming of the ROGUE CLOUDS, wails Symantec
Some of your firm's vital data is already on Dropbox
With one eye on Larry Ellison's Oracle in 2011 Salesforce chief Marc Benioff attacked “fake clouds” saying they aren’t the future.
Oracle - late to clouds - threatened to challenge Benioff’s message of using public clouds that house your data next to other customers' data in a secure, multi-tenant model with the idea of keeping things snugly private - on, say, an Oracle virtual stack.
Now we have “rogue clouds” where firms are buying online services without meaning to or having any control over them, thanks to well-intentioned and cost-conscious employees looking to cut costs.
A survey from Symantec promoting its security and backup offerings reckons three quarters of businesses have reported the existence of rogue clouds in their IT infrastructure.
The bigger the company, the more likely an employer has a rogue cloud - 83 per cent for enterprises versus 70 per cent for small and mid-market employers.
That’s a problem, according to Symantec: because 40 per cent reported the exposure of confidential information through such services with more than a quarter suffering from account take overs, the defacement of web properties and stolen goods of services.
The most commonly cited reason for firing up a rogue cloud was to save time and money, according to Symantec.
Symantec’s 2013 Cloud Survey polled 3,236 organizations from 29 countries between September and October last year.
Symantec didn’t name names, but it is plainly talking about services such as Dropbox, which you can set up quite easily without the permission of the IT department. Dropbox was hacked last year, with users receiving spam after accounts where hacked using people’s passwords and usernames used on other sites. The year before, Dropbox admitted it had inadvertently published code on its web site that let anyone sign in to any Dropbox account without credentials. ®
Re: Solution: Block dropbox at the proxy.
You just bypassed your own security policy?
If you can do it, whats to say another 'cunning-user' can't do it?
Blocking stuff doesnt help anyone. Doesnt help the business, doesnt help the users, doesnt help you either.
Better off actually providing a service that you control and trust, than playing whack-a-mole on whatever service you spot someone using that you dont like that month.
Bottom line is ...
... snake-oil is snake-oil.
So-called "clouds" are separating fools from their money.
"save time and money, according to Symantec"
Is exactly right.
"We would rather you spend much more money on our services instead" is what they didn't say. Reasuringly expensive is getting harder to sell.
(Pint of very expensive lager). | <urn:uuid:60ccf3d1-00f4-436b-be65-4934279d31aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/22/symantec_fake_cloud/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938325 | 618 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Nashville Globe – February 22, 1908
Renda Dilliard Kills Mollie Thompson – They Were Rivals For White Man’s Blandishments — The bloody sequel of the love affair between these two young negro women and their white paramour should be warning to those similarly involved.
The common saying, when there is a tragic difficulty between men, that a woman is at the bottom of it, is reversed in the tragedy enacted in the alley back of Seventeenth avenue, between State and Patterson streets, Sunday night, Feb 17, by Renda Dilliard and Mollie Thompson. The cause of this fatal encounter, it is said, was a white man. He was playing court to these two dusky damsels and this double dealing on his part when discovered aroused the green-eyed monster, jealousy, which had its tragic sequel in the death of the rascal’s paramours Sunday night….
the article continues, but I’m not posting the full-text here. | <urn:uuid:d8d90a3a-3707-4a69-be1a-2d374fed85b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blacknashville.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/a-bloody-tragedy/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=9233933e84 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962087 | 204 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Island Falls is a four-season destination that was a favorite getaway for Theodore Roosevelt in the late 1870s. Roosevelt visited the area to camp, hunt, fish, snowshoe, paddle, and reflect in solitude.
A 27-acre point of land at the confluence of the West Branch of the Mattawamkeag River and First Brook where the future president often went to walk and read now has a plaque erected in his honor, and is known as Bible Point State Historic Site.
Four town lakes - Upper Mattawamkeag Lake, Mattawamkeag Lake, Caribou Lake, and Pleasant Lake - are popular for fishing, canoeing, kayaking and boating. The 18-hole Va-Jo-Wa Golf Course is one of the most scenic in northern Maine with views of Mt. Katahdin and the front nine holes beside Pleasant Lake.
A section of Maine's Interconnected Trail System passes through Island Falls, making it easy for snowmobilers to explore the local landscape, or travel to Houlton, Millinocket or Lincoln. Ice fishing on local lakes and ponds is also a popular winter activity.
The Island Falls Historical Society preserves the early-1900s Tingley House, a restored potato house, and a former jail house that contains a museum of local artifacts. | <urn:uuid:7c492ec8-c582-446d-bc08-71e59fbe8795> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.visitmaine.com/region/aroostook/island_falls/?font-size=14&slidebar=close | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937869 | 272 | 1.84375 | 2 |
A fairly placid cat, the affectionate and sweet Burmilla is easy to get along with and requires minimal care.
Burmilla At a glance
Male: medium: 8-12 lbs.
Female: medium: 8-12 lbs.
Longevity Range: 7-12 yrs.
Social/Attention Needs: Moderate
Tendency to Shed: Moderate
Colors: Black, Blue, Chocolate, Lilac, Caramel, Beige, Apricot
Pattern: Tortoiseshell, Shaded
Less Allergenic: No
Overall Grooming Needs: Moderate
Cat Association Recognition:
The Burmilla is rarely seen. In Britain, it is still an experimental breed, and it is not yet accepted by the major registries in the U.S.
The Burmilla is a medium-sized cat, but it is also stocky and heavy. This cat is somewhat compact while being very muscular with heavy boning.
The Burmilla is a cat that is very rounded. The head is round and the tips of the ears are round. The profile shows a "break," and the eyes are very slightly slanted.
The coat of the Burmilla is short and soft. Because of the original pairing, the coat is also thick and dense.
The Burmilla is a fairly placid cat. He tends to be an easy cat to get along with, requiring minimal care. The Burmilla is affectionate and sweet and makes a good companion.
Burmillas are good climbers and jumpers and should have cat trees and perches. The Burmilla is a sturdy, stocky cat and you might have to watch his weight carefully, particularly if he does not get enough exercise. Modify his nutrition if you need to do so.
While Burmillas are placid cats, they also love their daily playtime. They love being adored by their guardians and having their stomach rubbed and being petted. A daily petting session is a must for any Burmilla.
The Burmilla must be brushed daily to remove the loose and dead hairs from the coat. The brushing can be incorporated with its playtime.
The Burmilla started out as an accident. In 1981, a Chinchilla Persian male and a Lilac Burmese bred, and the female delivered four kittens. These kittens had an unusual black-tipped coloring. The look of these cats was so attractive that a breeding program was inaugurated to produce a cat that would have the short hair of the Burmese, the roundness taken from both breeds, and the unusual coloring seen in the initial kittens.
The Burmilla is rarely seen. In Britain, it is still an experimental breed, and it is not yet accepted by the major registries in the United States.
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& LoveTM program. | <urn:uuid:8b9a1862-f3aa-4a6e-9c89-0a7e4e65d9f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hillspet.com/cat-breeds/burmilla.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945745 | 605 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Image by Allison Stillwell via Flickr
Ghana is a wonderful place to visit for not just its beautiful natural attractions and friendly people but also for it is wonderful and varied cuisine. Unlike other African countries, there is a lot to choose from for both vegetarians and non vegetarians.
The cuisine in Ghana varies according to the regions. You will get fish, trout and others seafood in the Volta region because of the proximity to the river. On the other hand, you will find diverse non vegetarian cuisine when you go in to the interiors where agriculture is not sustainable. Fertile parts of Ghana where crops are grown will give your cuisine that is filled with vegetables and meat dishes. You will have our lot of fun experimenting with local cuisines as long as you are bold enough to give them a try.
It does not make sense to travel to a culturally rich country like Ghana to eat your standard western staple food. However, you need not worry if you have a sudden yearning for a hamburger. The urban centers in the Ghana play host to numerous outlets that serve proper western cuisine. You will find it difficult to get such foods as you walk into the interiors but there is no point in traveling to the interiors unless you are prepared to experiment with your food.
When in Ghana, make sure you try the various drinks available in the country. From coconut water based drinks to palm wine – there are many choices and each and every drink will leave you yearning for more. | <urn:uuid:26eb7157-b9f8-4047-88b5-a191b0d46445> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cepsghana.org/category/customs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964511 | 303 | 1.84375 | 2 |
MUMBAI: The state government will now be trying 'gandhigiri' to arrest declining girl child sex ratio in Maharashtra. The state government has decided to give a letter to every rural couple who gets married, explaining why female foeticide is a sin against humanity.
Satej Patil, minister of state for rural development said, "If government has to arrest the declining child sex ratio, there is need to create awareness about girl child among couples getting married. Also besides stringent laws, there is need for more target oriented awareness on the issue" "Roping in couple getting married in the drive would help the government in dealing with the issue. Hence, the rural development department has decided to direct gram panchayat members to keep tabs on marriages happening in their areas. The member of the said gram panchayat will be asked to attend the marriage ceremony and hand over a government letter explaining the importance of a girl child in the society," Patil added.
The move from the state government comes following the recent incidents of female foeticide found in Beed district of Marathwada region. The census reveals that Maharashtra's child sex ratio in 2011 was 833 girls per 1000 boys as against 913 per 1,000 boys in 2001. Beed district is the worst affected, with a drop of 93 in the last decade-894 girls in 2001 as against 801 in 2011.
Further replying to a query on when will be the first letter dispatched, Patil said, "Modalities to work out the plan is on. Next week, the draft of the letter that will be handed over to the couples will be finalised and subsequently the orders for initiating the drive will be issued."
Also the minister has asked for a crackdown on medical shops selling abortion pills without proper prescription. Patil, minister of state for food and drug administration said, "There are reports that abortion pills are freely available as medical shops are selling these drugs without prescription from appropriate authority. To curb such practices, the department has asked FDA officials to conduct special drive in the state, especially in the districts having low girl child sex ratio."
While many are criticising the state government for its failure to handle the issue, actor Amir Khan in his letter to public health minister Suresh Shetty has appreciated efforts taken by the Maharashtra government to deal with the declining girl child sex ratio. Last month the state government had written a letter to Khan, thanking the actor for taking up the social issue---declining child sex ratio. | <urn:uuid:29a538ef-07af-4294-b6b4-8fe7de5a5dae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-13/mumbai/32213935_1_girl-child-female-foeticide-ratio | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964163 | 515 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Did Kapil Sibal, the Union HRD Minister, pull a fast one on IIT alumni on the issue of joint entrance exams for engineering education?
If you were to ask Somnath Bharti, president of the IIT Delhi Alumni Association and Supreme Court lawyer, the answer is a clear yes.
Bharti told Business Standard in an interview that Sibal promised them that he would not implement the common entrance exam if there was any dissent from the IITs, but he didn’t keep his word. Says Bharti: “We sent our analysis to the government’s proposed plan and then met Kapil Sibal, the minister, on 24 May and voiced our concerns. Sibal categorically declared the government would not go ahead with the proposed common entrance examination or (make) any change if there was even one dissent. He obviously did not keep his promise.”
Bharti also believes that Sibal’s promise of “one nation, one exam” is a myth since the joint exams will cover only the IITs, the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs). Not the regional engineering colleges and other institutions.
Sibal’s reason for having a common entrance exam, where equal weightage is given to Class 12 marks, is simple: to reduce the number of exams a student has to give. A side objective is to reduce the importance of coaching classes.
But Firstpost believes that what he will end up achieving is a diminution of the IIT brand and an increase in the importance of coaching classes.
The IIT brand’s value comes from the quality of the students getting in, and this is in no small measure due to the Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) which the institutes administer. If IIT-JEE is going to be diluted with the addition of “normalised” Class 12 marks from various boards all over the country, JEE will lose its importance and credibility.
A better alternative would have been to make IIT-JEE the qualifier for all engineering colleges – with the higher rankers getting into the IITs and the rest into the other institutes.
As we noted some time back, the proposal to give weightage to class 12 results is even more controversial. There is an assumption that once Class 12 marks become important, students will depend less on coaching classes.
But will it happen that way?
When Class 12 results are given equal weightage for entry to IITs and the National Institutes of Technology (which get their student feeds from the AIEEE exams), will students go more to coaching classes or less? Even today, students take a year’s break to go to Kota and other special coaching centres to focus on IIT-JEE. If Class 12 becomes important, some students will, no doubt, drop out of coaching, but more of them will take even more coaching – for both IIT-JEE and Class 12. Their future now depends on maxing both exams. Who will take chances?
All Sibal would have succeeded in doing is making entrance exams an even bigger lottery. To insure against that, students will invest even more in coaching.
The challenge in Indian engineering education is not the quality or number of entrance tests we have, but what one gets after crossing these hurdles to reach the portals of an IIT or an NIT or REC. Unfortunately, this is not an area receiving much focus since the attempt, as Sibal says, is to get the aam aadmi into engineering institutes.
No one can object to the democratisation of education, but this calls for an improvement in the supply side of things – better faculty, better curriculum, better research, better mentoring of backward class students – not a lowering of the entry barriers which the entrance exams now set.
Last year, the negative impact of enhancing reservations for OBCs was obvious on IIT campuses: a huge faculty shortage of 2,500. RK Shevgaonkar, IIT, Delhi, director, said last October: “Every IIT is short of 30 percent faculty. This has happened due to the addition of 54 percent seats to accommodate more students in the OBC quota in the past few years. IIT, Delhi, has 416 faculty members against the required 800 teachers.”
But we are still talking only numbers – a shortage of 2,500 faculty for the IITs – not quality.
Little wonder, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said some time ago that the IITs were known more for the quality of students they got than the quality of education they imparted.
Sibal’s initiative will level the field: now, both the standard of students getting in and the quality of education received will be in better alignment at a lower level.
This, of course, is not the best way to build excellence.
To understand why, look at Harvard. It is (arguably) the world’s greatest educational institution because it is autonomous – both financially and otherwise. It does not depend on the government for funds. The virtuous circle of autonomy works like this: first, you build a great institution by refusing to compromise on quality; then, your products will succeed and plough back their own wealth into the alma mater, and this money, in turn, will allow the institution to continue hiring the best faculty and students – if necessary by subsidising the best and brightest who can’t afford to enter Harvard.
Governments can legislate equality, but only institutional autonomy will ensure that quality is not compromised on the way to inclusivism.
What do we see in India?
The government continues to interfere with how the IITs are run, not only by lowering entry standards, but also by legislating expansion without the necessary investment in quality faculty and research facilities. The net result: a steady deterioration in the quality of IIT end-products, too. Not to speak of engineering education in general.
As Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy lamented some time ago, the top 20 percent of IIT students “can stand among the best anywhere in the world,” but the quality of the remaining 80 percent is variable – from average to pathetic.
His solution: get government out of managing the IITs. According to Murthy, most of the IIT governing councils should come from past alumni. “Nobody is bothered about an institution more than its alumni. We must somehow persuade the government of India to let go of its control and make sure a majority of the council members is the IIT alumni.”
But Sibal’s move on the common entrance test shows that he is heading in the opposite direction.
The message to Sibal should be clear: standardisation of entrance tests is fine, but without institutional autonomy we will merely be standardising mediocrity.
For this reason alone, one hopes that the IIT Delhi Alumni Association’s PIL does some good. Kapil Sibal’s unnecessary meddling in the IITs’ autonomy needs to be exposed for what it is: a political ploy.
(Parts of this post were published earlier in another Firstpost article. Read the full earlier report here)
The association has also decided to file public interest litigation in various high courts within a week and try to get the petition heard before 5th June.#AIEEE #All India Engineering Entrance Examination #Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination #President #Somnath Bharti
Even as students and IIT alumni get set to oppose the changes to the selection format, some argue the new changes will improve schooling and performance there.#Education #GoodReads #Indian Institute of Technology Delhi #Indian Institutes of Technology #National Institutes of Technology
The director of one of the biggest coaching classes for entrance exams to the IIT says the new system will affect students from smaller towns and board exams should not be included in the selection process.#Education #Entrance examination #Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination #Indian Institutes of Technology #Kapil Sibal #TheySaidIt
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With the playing field level, from now on it will be a battle of strategies for the Congress and the BJP
A slew of economic reforms has been promised this month, but one should not expect anything more than fancy footwork from the FM.
Forget all this surrogacy business. The reason we love Shah Rukh Khan is that he’s been one of Bollywood’s smarter actors. But of late, SRK’s been a bit disappointing, complains a fed-up, die-hard fan.
Rohit, Kohli, Raina, Jadeja, Ashwin, Bhuvneshwar, Umesh – that’s the core of the Indian team today and perhaps it wouldn’t be wrong to say that they are Dhoni’s boys.
From Vajpayee to Advani to Modi –the Sangh Parivar has come a long way, presenting before India every few years a Hindutva face rendered presentable through a shrewd makeover
While prima facie it might seem to be a clash of two strong personalities i.e. Modi and Kumar, there is much more to the split than that.
The current tensions in India can directly be traced to three visions of India – one of which will involve breaking the country
Sympathy for a Pakistani cricketer, especially a batsman, is a novel emotion for those of us coming from the 90s.
Although the party is maintaining a brave face, the eventuality of a split has left many leaders on tenterhooks.
Bengal tops the list in violence against women. There have been several reports of gang rape in the past few weeks. The Mamata government has taken quick and stern action – against the women protesting the rapes in front of the CM’s residence.
The subsidy to the rich accounts for more than 7 percent of the GDP while that for the poor, with the food security act, would account for 1.1 percent.
Many patients who were administered blood from the same blood bank fear the worst.
Neither UPA nor NDA is an alliance. And the BJP and JD(U) were mere power-sharers, not allies. To grow, alliances have to be built around principles not just power-sharing
At a press conference, Finance Minister P Chidambaram, however, did not reveal any concrete steps but promised more reforms by August. He said the rupee’s decline is in line with that of the currencies of other countries with high current account deficit like India.
The index of industrial production (IIP), a measure of the industrial activity in the country, grew by a meagre 2% in April 2013, in comparison to the same period during 2012. The index was expected to grow by around 2.4% (source: India: Weak growth and sticky retail inflation. Sonal Varma and Aman Mohunta, Nomura). In [...]
If one was simply to go by numbers, young and jolly Jadeja is on course to be a great. That’s not overrating him — it’s the simple logic of statistics one cannot argue against.
Political parties need to have a process for electing leaders. This problem relates more to cadre-based parties such as BJP and CPM.
A drop in the US dollar index does not seem to help the rupee; this shows that the Indian currency seems to be marching to its own gloomy beat.
The new design has sparked debates over whether Apple stole the design from Android or Windows 8 or just created an unholy union of the two. We take a look at what the critics are saying:
Is Vladimir Putin the Salman Khan of world politics? Our new columnist, stand-up comedian Gursimran Khamba pontificates.
What was the senior leader’s specific problem? Well, one is the indecent hurry in which Modi’s is being shoved down the throats of other leaders in the party.
Is Barack Obama about to sit for an exam for a junior level engineer in India? A man in Rajasthan says he’s got an admit card with Obama’s picture on it from the Staff Selection Commission. Actually on second thought that might not be such a bad second career for the President.
US companies are blatantly violating international agreements or purely lying, when they accuse India of using TRIPS flexibilities. Americans have spoken the same language against other countries such as Brazil and Thailand, but failed. | <urn:uuid:bc7e52c4-9c8d-4594-a51c-abab69d1f92c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstpost.com/india/sibal-drives-another-nail-in-the-coffin-of-iit-autonomy-333114.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95252 | 2,774 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Divorce isn’t easy on anybody, but children are especially affected when their parents split. Now a new documentary, produced by Rosie O’Donnell takes on the subject of how parents can help their children cope with divorce. “Don’t Divorce Me! Kid’s Rules for Parents on Divorce will be part HBO’s fall lineup.
According to a press release from HBO the film will, “combine candid interviews, drawings, songs and photos, this insightful film gives kids the chance to share poignant stories of how divorce has impacted their lives -- and helpful advice to their parents.”
Rosie is no stranger to divorce. She split with Kelli Carpenter in 2004 after three years of marriage so she knows a little bit about the topic. She will be the films executive producer.
Rosie previously produced a critically acclaimed film for HBO “A Family is a Family Is a Family,” which focused on the family unit of same-sex marriages.
When a couple with children decides to divorce, their primary concern will be child custody and support. Though parents may be concerned about their child’s or children’s well-being, an ugly divorce can thrust their children in the middle while their parents fight over who gets primary custody.
When couples cannot come up with a custody agreement on their own, they often turn to divorce attorneys to help them get a fair custody arrangement they can live with. | <urn:uuid:178247f8-ef8f-4192-b519-b8a49ff6eeb3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.transworldnews.com/1121225/a74523/rosie-odonnells-new-film-focuses-on-helping-children-cope-with-divorce | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957149 | 300 | 1.773438 | 2 |
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Pete was the first horse that walked through our gates. Eight months old, he had been abandoned in a pasture, gathered up by a new owner and take to an auction, there to be purchased by a killer-buyer. I talked the man out of taking a yearling to slaughter and ended up bringing Pete home Full Article
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Nicole finds love “There’s something about kids and horses,” is an often heard statement in the horse world. Kids and innocence, kids and hope, kids and the belief in ...Full Article | <urn:uuid:4112ba7e-84aa-4a59-ad7d-f6447dcc3669> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.habitatforhorses.org/tag/stories/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950458 | 520 | 1.625 | 2 |
6emeia brings artists together for a common goal to spread creativity around city streets.
Artists Leonardo Delafuente and Anderson Augusto took on the task of livening up San Paulo storage drains and manhole covers. The two creative minds came up with idea of painting cartoon characters on the face of drains accompanied by graffiti drawings to make comical commentaries. Delafuente and Augusto have turned ordinary landscapes into wonderful art pieces. The pieces are quirky and fun-loving. Cute renditions include storage drains with animals illustrated on them like a bunny eating a carrot and a blue mouse eating a piece of cheese. Another amusing work is the manhole cover that has been altered to appear like the face of a watch.
6emeia is changing the visual art game and making streets interactive art galleries.
Comical Storage Drains
7,435 clicks in 23 w
More Stats +/- | <urn:uuid:4c5b4e18-fe86-42c4-bcc5-864610e313c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/6emeia | 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 | 0.941661 | 184 | 1.5625 | 2 |
September 4, 2003
by Andrew Ward
Kim Jong Il yesterday staged a rare cabinet reshuffle, replacing several top officials with younger men in an apparent attempt to strengthen his power base.
Mr. Kim face a twin threat to his Stalinist regime from looming economic collapse and increasing pressure from a US government angered by the state’s development of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Kim replaced his prime minister, two of his three deputy premiers and five ministers in what South Korean reporters said was the most far-reaching government shake-up for five years.
Analysts in the south speculate Mr. Kim was replacing ageing officials associated with Kim Il Sung his late father and former leader. In their place, had come younger officials more loyal to the current leader.
Diplomats and intelligence officials, who admit their assessments about the reclusive regime are little better than guess work, hoped the promotion of younger officials would clear the way for political and economic reforms resisted by the old guard.
Economic reforms introduced last year – wages and prices were raised to meet market values – fuelled hopes that North Korea might open up, but there have been few further signs of change.
Some of those replaced held important economic planning posts, perhaps reflecting Mr. Kim’s concern about the parlous state of the country’s economy.
South Korea‘s Yonhap news agency said 52% of North Korea’s new power elite was aged under 55. However there was no sign of a shift away from Mr. Kim’s “army first policy” of concentrating power and resources with North Korea’s 1.1 million-strong army.
Most top military leaders kept their jobs – including Mr. Kim himself, who was re-elected Chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country’s most powerful body – and the legislature approved measures to strengthen the “nuclear deterrent force”.
Pak Pong Ju, former minister for the chemical industry, was elected prime minister, replacing Hong Song Nam, according to North Korean media monitored by Yonhap.
“The cabinet will work out a scientific and bold economic strategy and operational plan as required by the new century and dynamically implement them to build a strong national economic power suited to the great prosperous powerful nation,” Mr. Pak said. | <urn:uuid:892e8457-42a0-4a0d-a477-7425a58000b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/dprk-organizations/state-offices/ministry-for-chemical-industries/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971618 | 472 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Richmond shook and swayed, but as of late Tuesday afternoon there was no significant damage to report from the 5.8 earthquake that occurred just before 2 p.m.
Office towers downtown evacuated, as did City Hall, and more than a dozen elderly residents of the Fay Towers near Gilpin Court reportedly received medical treatment after the building was evacuated, but no injuries were reported, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Officials at the Richmond Metropolitan Authority, which operates the downtown expressway and Powhite Parkway, including the Powhite Bridge, were busy inspecting the roadway and multiple bridges, but there were no reports of damage.
“For right now we are doing some drive-bys around the facility, and everything is looking good so far,” says Linda McElroy, public relations manager for the authority. “We haven’t had any reports of any damage at this point.”
City Hall evacuated shortly after the earthquake, and closed early. In a press release this afternoon, Tammy Hawley, a spokeswoman for the mayor, says there were no reports of injuries or structural damage to city facilities.
“Presently, there are no reports of any employee injuries and all evacuation efforts have gone well,” she says in an email. “City Hall and other city facilities are being checked for any structural damages or damages to operating systems. There are no reported damages to the city’s infrastructure at this time.”
The earthquake originated in Mineral, and occurred nearly four miles below the surface, according to geological reports. The impact reportedly stretched as far as Maine, and led to evacuations of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Dominion Resources’ nuclear power plant in Lake Anna, near the quake’s epicenter, shut down without incident, as did the Dominion’s other nuclear plants around the state, according to a statement from the power utility.
“The reactors have been shut down safely and no major damage has been reported,” the company said in a statement. “No release of radioactive material has occurred beyond those minor releases associated with normal station operations.”
Local police and fire departments were busy much of the afternoon responding to emergency calls, but so far no serious injuries or damage has been reported, aside from a possible collapsed stairwell downtown and a collapsed wall in the East End, according to the Times-Dispatch. Phone service was out in some areas, however.
The region is expected to experience aftershocks from the quake over the next few days. While none as been reported in the Richmond area thus far, there have been some reports of aftershocks earlier this afternoon closer to the quake’s epicenter in Mineral. | <urn:uuid:a9bf92b7-16b0-4cb3-b851-7057b9a4c820> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/aftershocks/Content?oid=1603044 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97637 | 559 | 1.578125 | 2 |
I marvel at all the people raising chickens…in the city. My food colleague, Janice Cole, has written a lovely book about it: Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Recipes (Chronicle Books, 2011). More about that in another post. Back to the actual animals.
Up to the 1960s and 70s in chickens were raised for what was called, ‘egg money.’ Farm wives sold eggs to have a little more money for groceries, things for their kids, and maybe a bit for themselves. Eggs were 30 cents a dozen. I rode my bike a half mile into the country from Irene, South Dakota, to Gladys and Edwin Larson’s farm to pick up cartons for my mom.
Gladys and I walked into the hen house, the chickens scattering out of our way, as we picked the warm eggs, sometimes marked with a light smear of feces. All this seemed only natural. Though it was natural, as well, that we didn’t raise chickens ourselves.
I won’t be joining the ranks of chicken keepers in Minnesota. However, I do have a duck. I’d noticed a Mallard pair in my garden in early April. I’m a block from a pond, only accessible by crossing two streets. Didn’t think they’d find my yard very hospitable. And, then, there is the neighborhood coyote (I pronounce it ‘KY-yote.) But, last week, I saw the ducks quite close to the house and not particularly concerned that I was nearby:
Yesterday, I saw her, the hen, nesting in a pile of last fall’s maple leaves. She’s made a thick nest of those neglected leaves between a peony and the brick planter wall.
Today, the male was watching from further out in the yard. I understand that duck gestation is 28 days. We’ll see. | <urn:uuid:97713374-7869-48d7-8c4c-46d18e352e80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://marygunderson.com/?m=201105 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969486 | 412 | 1.5625 | 2 |
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6 Months : From Nov 2012 to May 2013
--Gorgon project 40% over initial budget
--Cost overrun will squeeze profitability
--Australian currency, material costs up
By Ben Lefebvre
Chevron Corp. (CVX) said Wednesday it would spend $36.7 billion in capital projects in 2013, up 12% from 2012, an increase partially due to rising costs in a mammoth liquefied natural gas project in Australia.
The second-largest U.S. oil company after Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) said the Gorgon natural gas project in Western Australia will rise to A$52 billion (US$54 billion), up more than 40% from its latest estimate in U.S. dollar terms.
The increase emphasizes how the mining and energy boom in Australia has inflated prices for manpower and materials, threatening to stifle further projects. It will also add pressure to Chevron to target high prices for the natural gas eventually coming out its wells to pay for one of the largest LNG project-cost overruns in memory.
Fueling the surge has been the rise in the Australian dollar--up 49% since the Gorgon project began in 2009--and the competition for skilled labor in the country amid large-scale mining and energy projects by Woodside Petroleum (WPL.AU) and others.
Gorgon, now 55% completed, is slated to ship up to 15.6 million metric tons of LNG a year beginning in 2015 from three production units about 80 miles off the northwest coast of Western Australia.
Chevron also said it will spend big on oil and natural gas projects in Nigeria, Angola, the Republic of Congo, Kazakhstan and the deep water U.S. Gulf of Mexico. About $3.4 billion would be spent on scouring oil prospects offshore Sierra Leone and Suriname, and in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Chevron said its $29 billion Wheatstone project, also in Australia, is 7% complete and on budget. The project is set to start production in 2016 with an annual capacity of 8.9 million tons of natural gas a year.
An overrun for Gorgon was expected. Deutsche Bank analysts said in September they expected Gorgon's final cost to approach $50 billion.
Still, the steady climb in oil prices will save the project, said Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst for Oppenheimer & Co. LNG prices are normally tied to the price of oil, which Chevron says have increased by 80% over the course of the project.
"This will squeeze the heck out of the profitability of the project," Mr. Gheit said of the budget increase. "If Brent oil prices drop below $80, this project would barely be competitive." Brent traded at $108 a barrel Wednesday.
About two-thirds of Gorgon's expected LNG supply has already been sold via contract to customers. But Chevron and other LNG suppliers are facing pressure from buyers to lower prices as the U.S. makes plans to start exporting its natural gas at prices much lower than the global average.
"Even if the US is not yet exporting LNG, it is already having an impact on suppliers around the world," said Leslie Palti-Guzman, global energy analyst at consultancy Eurasia Group. "It will definitely put downward pressure on pricing."
Chevron isn't the only company dealing with runaway costs in the region. Exxon said last month that costs for its LNG facility in neighboring Papau New Guinea had risen by 20% to $19 billion. Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA, RDSB), are partners in the Gorgon project.
Write to Ben Lefebvre at email@example.com
Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires | <urn:uuid:7fcde6e8-1817-4291-be31-68c02a31375c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://in.advfn.com/news_Chevron-Raises-2013-Capital-Spending-by-12-to-36-7-Billion_55333088.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94377 | 806 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Posted on Oct 5, 2011 in Travel
I am traveling with my 3 week old baby and I know there are certain rules that apply to items that can be taken on a plane. What will they allow me to carry for him?
With all the new rules it can be super hard to know what you can and cannot take on the airplane. Let’s talk about the basics of air travel with your tiny one.
According to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) the 3-1-1 rule for carry-ons is the easy way to remember what you can bring on the plane, and how to pack it. Stated simply, it reads like this:
In general, you are not allowed to carry on containers with more than 3 ounces of fluids or gels. If you want to split hairs, the TSA does allow up to a 3.4 ounce (100ml) bottle, but for simplicity’s sake, this is usually stated as 3 ounces. The clear, zip-top plastic bag containing your gels and liquids must be removed from your carry-on luggage and placed in one of the bins (like the one your shoes go in) and be put through the x-ray machine. By taking the bag out while going through security it takes much less time for you and the other passengers, as any bag still containing liquids must then be hand searched by the TSA screeners.
Additionally, don’t forget that any container larger than 3 ounces containing liquid or gel is always allowed in checked luggage, so if you are planning on checking bags anyway and won’t need some of your larger bottles for the flight, this is a hassle-free way to bring those items.
There are however some exceptions to the rule when traveling with little ones. Again, according to TSA, you must declare larger liquid items. This includes medicines, baby formula and breast milk. These are allowed in quantities that are considered reasonable, with “reasonable” meaning amounts that you can reasonably say will be required for the length of the trip. Getting through security with these types of items may take a bit longer, so try to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. While you will not be denied carrying on these items, they will be inspected by the security staff and may need to be opened and inspected before you are allowed to pass through to the gates.
This rule goes for older children as well. Toddlers enjoy their sippy cups and apple juice (at least mine do!) and these items may be carried on by following the same procedure. If you’d rather bypass the hassle of security hand inspecting your juice, once you pass security there are typically stores that sell many items your child may want. You can purchase these items after you have gone through security, and these are allowed to be carried on the plane. You will, of course, pay a premium over what a small bottle of apple juice would cost in the supermarket, but such is the price of convenience. A good tip is to check ahead by looking at the airport website to see what types of stores they have past security, so you can plan ahead.
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© Synchronista LLC. Format designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress | <urn:uuid:94134b11-0fa9-4b4a-a0f0-73be2bef3915> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://findersfree.com/traveling/bring-airplane-newborn | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96132 | 672 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Signing Global Warming's Certificate of Death
by ALAN CARUBA
February 1, 2012
The sixteen names of the scientists who jointly signed the article in The Wall Street Journal, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27th are mostly unknown to the general public. Perhaps the best known would be Harrison H. Schmidt, a former Apollo 17 astronaut and U.S. Senator. Others might recognize Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer and designer of Voyager and SpaceShip One.
Moreover, not only were the signers distinguished scientists, but they came from places like Paris, France and Cambridge, England, Jerusalem, Israel, and Geneva, Switzerland. Mostly climatologists and meteorologists, some were physicists and astrophysicists. Antonio Zichichi, one signer, is president of the World Federation of Scientists. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the combined credentials of these men represent some of the best minds on planet Earth in their respective fields.
What brought them together? On the surface it was just another of the countless articles that have been published over the years as scientists of real merit and courage took on the juggernaut of those for whom global warming had become a vast flow of government and foundation funding.
The effort was to “prove” that carbon dioxide (CO2) was building up in the atmosphere and would soon incinerate Earth by trapping the heat from the sun. It had not done that in the 5.4 billion years of the Earth’s existence, but the “warmists” claims came day after day and year after year. They permeated every aspect of society and you can go into any school in America and find textbooks still selling this garbage.
Until, that is, 2009 when thousands of emails between the small clique of scientists working for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were leaked on the Internet and it became clear that even they knew the Earth had entered a cooling cycle around 1998. The challenges to their bogus computer “models” were coming like cannon balls against their academic castles in America and England.
Starting in 2008, The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based 27-year-old, non-profit research organization, sponsored four international conferences on climate change, attracting the top scientists and world leaders courageous enough to speak out against the global warming hoax. The momentum of opposition began to build against those who, from the late 1980s had warned that, in Al Gore’s words, “the world has caught a fever.”
The Wall Street Journal article said, in the plainest language, that candidates for public office “in any contemporary democracy…should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true.”
In fact, scientists had been signing petitions opposing the global warming hoax for a very long time. The problem was that the mainstream media either paid them no attention or dismissed them as "skeptics" and "deniers".
With a light touch, the Wall Street Journal article noted that “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over ten years now.” It wasn’t as if the warmists did not know it. It was more like they regarded it as a problem to be solved by changing references to global warming to “climate change.”
Their current dying gasps have to do with warnings about “extreme climate events” that have been occurring for eons; tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, floods and earthquakes; now all routinely attributed to too much carbon dioxide.
The article calmly said, “The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant.” Indeed, more CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing, aiding increasing crop growth and healthier forests and jungles worldwide.
Someone needs to tell that to the Environmental Protection Agency that is striving mightily to shut down coal-fired energy plants for emitting CO2. Add their efforts to do the same to a wide swatch of American industry and you get an agency that is in great need of being abolished.
“There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.
In time, historians may look back and conclude that the January 27th article was, in fact, global warming’s death certificate, signed by an international group of scientists who could not be disputed no matter how many times the warmists jump up and down and cry that the sky is falling.
It has taken a very long time for most of the public to come to the conclusion that they have been the object of an elaborate hoax.In America polls demonstrate that global warming is at the very bottom of their concerns these days. In time, wind and solar power, electric cars, biofuels, and other environmental delusions will join that list.
© Alan Caruba, 2012 | <urn:uuid:9341facd-e581-4c2e-8c9d-d7feae2ddad0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/signing-global-warmings-certificate-of-death | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966809 | 1,027 | 1.804688 | 2 |
For the last two centuries people have been fascinated by the art of Rocking Horse Making. Rocking horses have graced the homes of people all over the world since before Victorian times. With the passing of time these original horse have become valuable pieces and grace the rooms of many people from all walks of life.
Not only in the hearts of children has this love grown but in the hearts of those who appreciate the time, work and love that goes into producing these Works of Art. In more recent years they have become so much more than treasured companions of children, they have become a valued collectible for 'Horse Lovers' the world over.
A well made 'Heirloom Quality Horse' that has been well loved can be passed down through your family's generation as a keepsake to the children that have loved and ridden him/her in years past. The absolute joy of passing along a horse that was ridden by you or even your child's grandparent can be one of the most precious gifts that you can give to your child.
With an emphasis on using first quality timbers and the highest quality accessories, 'Delfryn Rocking Horses' endeavors to bring joy to many generations of fellow horse lovers. Many hours of care and attention to detail go into the production of each individual horse. Each of our 'Horse's' are handcrafted, to make each one an individual 'Work of Art' with its own unique character and personality.
Rocking Horses are one of the most cherished and enduring memories of childhood toys. Wouldn't you like to give those same memories to your children...and grandchildren? | <urn:uuid:3a584051-b3b9-46c6-8a79-da55a6fdf4f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.delfrynhorses.com/pages/home.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966331 | 329 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Connect Locally With Members of Congress
If we don’t educate our elected officials about pulmonary hypertension, who will?
Your elected officials work for you. Meeting with them to share your story is the most effective way to gain their support for the Tom Lantos PH Research and Education Act and other PH legislation.
Learn about three easy ways to connect locally with your elected officials and choose the one that’s best for you:
Invite Members of Congress to your Support Group Meeting
Introduce your senators and representative to the PH community by inviting them to speak at a support group meeting. Learn more
Visit a Local Congressional Office
Schedule meetings with your senators’ and representative’s local offices. Take along your support group members, family or friends! Learn more
Attend a Town Hall Meeting
Visit your elected official’s websites to learn about community events where they will be speaking. Participate in the question and answer session to raise awareness about PH. Learn more | <urn:uuid:403158c2-528c-4a60-9983-ca1bdaf7e783> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phassociation.org/page.aspx?pid=1222&chid=263 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947304 | 204 | 1.523438 | 2 |
MARKETS sure seemed invigorated by the Federal Reserve's commitment to embrace quantitative easing on a large scale. Today, the economic writer reviews are coming in. First, our own:
The plans are awe inspiring in their scale, but they are different only in degree rather than kind from the steps the Fed has already taken. In December, it exhausted its supply of conventional monetary ammunition when it lowered its short term-interest rate to between zero and 0.25%. At that time it had already started unconventional operations: expanding loans to banks and other financial institutions; buying private commercial paper; making enormous and controversial loans and loan guarantees to AIG, Bear Stearns, Citigroup and Bank of America; and setting up a facility, capitalised by the Treasury, to buy securities backed by car, student and small-business loans, and mortgages. By the time its new steps are done, the Fed’s balance sheet will reach $4.5 trillion, or about a third of GDP, up from less than $1 trillion a year ago, Capital Economics estimates...
In the short term at least, the Fed’s actions raise the odds that the economy, in recession since the end of 2007, will pull out by the end of this year. There have been signs the housing market has stabilised, albeit at deeply depressed levels, and lower mortgage rates will bolster demand. If share and home prices stabilise, that will mitigate the astonishing loss of wealth that is depressing consumer spending.
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok seem pleased. The latter says:
It's about time. Shows how peculiar it is to define a liquidity trap in terms of short-term rates. The fact that the Fed usually buys short-term bonds is a minor issue as far as monetary theory is concerned, like the fact that the Fed usually prints $1 bills but not $2 bills.
The former offers a list of thoughts, some of which are more compelling than others:
It is cheaper and quicker than fiscal stimulus; this should have been our first move. It is more likely to work... It does not address most of the underlying problems in the real economy and as you know I see the "sectoral shift" element of this downturn as very much underrated... It shows that at the limit fiscal and monetary policy blur together. The more the Fed takes on its balance sheet, the more the long-run independence of the central bank is damaged. Monetizing so much government debt is what Third World nations do. Draining the new money from the system will someday be a problem. It may introduce a round of "beggar-thy-neighbor," central bank-engineered currency depreciations. "Operation Twist," from the 1960s swapped short- for long-term assets but did not seem incredibly effective, although it was done under very different circumstances...If this fails the U.S. economy, and the stock market, will test new bottoms. The most articulate advocate of quantitative easing is Scott Sumner.
Just taking one complaint: a round of beggar-thy-neighbour depreciations? Who will depreciate? The eurozone? I think we'd all be ecstatic if Jean-Claude Trichet suddenly decided to start printing money in order to boost European exports. Our own analysis takes on other of these points, such as the worry over Central Bank independence. | <urn:uuid:94df1f24-9485-4f8c-919c-72d1a2df3cea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/03/easing_does_it?zid=292&ah=165a5788fdb0726c01b1374d8e1ea285 | 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 | 0.960482 | 701 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Marriage is the most beautiful ceremony that could ever happen to two people who are in love. It is the union of two persons who are tied together legally and religiously. For a woman, after the marriage she needs to have all of her papers changed into the family name that her husband have. This is the tradition that is already there since the birth of marriage or ever since the civilization has evolved into writing. Actions on how to change your name after marriage in the U.S. may differ according to the state where one resides.
Now to go deeper into the matter of the issue, the change of name after marriage depends upon the choice of the two contracting parties. To start changing your name, you need to reproduce an extra copy of your marriage because they have to be certified by the civil registrar of the state where you belong and after which they will be authenticated by the national archive. On the part of the male partner who wanted to have a change of name, he must first check their marriage certificate if there is a space to have a change of name and if there is none; the involvement of an attorney is needed to make the action. This kind of process is not applied for women because this is only for the male genre. This is how to change your name after marriage on male.
Through a step by step procedure, things will all fall into their proper places legally. After having all of your papers are done changing, you need to have amendments on your Social Security Card and this is applicable for both male and female. Amendment forms are available at their office which involves instructions on what to do as well as the requirements that are needed to do as such. Then for your driver’s license, you are personally required to visit the department of the motor vehicles to procure a new drivers license by which you will make amendments on your status as a married man and a married woman. Now if you have a passport, you are also required to have an amendment, because your passport also serves as one of the most important document, no more any less.
how to change your name everything from requesting new checks with your name on it; old I.D.’s while you were still single should be replaced with your new name on it, your car’s registration’s name also must be change to avoid problems when it comes to selling your car, must also notify your nearest post office that there is a change in your name so that mails that would come along the way would be easy for your notification.
Now, take note that a married woman’s identification in her change of name is her authenticated marriage contract. It is the sufficient evidence that she is already married and that is the main reason why her name was changed. | <urn:uuid:9d926daf-55bc-4052-a60e-d68020a0137b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.goods4girls.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983222 | 559 | 1.585938 | 2 |
August 1st, 2011
Earlier this summer, I was on vacation and I stumbled upon an adorable looking children’s book called Mischief in the Forest: a yarn yarn in a bookstore. Obviously, as a yarncrafter, I had to flip through it. It was a wonderful story about a grandmother, her woodland neighbors, and what happens to her yarn while she was out of town visiting her grandkids. It seemed like a wonderful way to help your kids (or grandkids, nieces, nephews, etc.) to appreciate the wonderful world of yarncrafts–I say get them while they’re young, so that they become yarncrafters later on!–so I began to wonder what other books feature knitting, crocheting, and yarn?
Well, it turns out quite a few, according to a quick search online! Here are just a few that I thought were cute (highlighted text will take you to the books’ pages on Amazon):
The story of a unique sheep who marches to the beat of his own drummer (and spins his own fleece!), this charming book is all about being yourself (and maybe spinning, dyeing, and knitting your own yarn on the way).
Nell is a little girl who just loves to knit, and wants to do it just about everywhere. She may be shy, but she lets her creative voice shine through her hats, scarves, mittens, and more.
That Darn Yarn!
Two stories in one, this book follows the journey of a sock-monkey that starts to unravel and a little girl who finds some yarn and starts to make a sock-monkey.
Do you have any favorite yarny literature, whether it’s for children or adults, that you want to share? Tell us about it in the comments! | <urn:uuid:771384f4-f00b-48b9-8c8e-ee14cf1c000c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.lionbrand.com/2011/08/01/start-early-childrens-books-featuring-yarncrafts/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97472 | 379 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Syrian President Bashar Assad urged his armed forces Wednesday to step up the fight against rebels as the U.N. reported a significant escalation in the civil war with the military using warplanes to fire on opposition fighters in the battle for Aleppo.
Sausan Ghosheh, the spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Syria, said that international observers had witnessed warplanes firing in Syria's largest city, where intense fighting has been raging for 12 days. She said the situation in Aleppo was dire, with "heavy use of heavy weapons" including tanks, which the rebels now possess as well.
"Yesterday, for the first time, our observers saw firing from a fighter aircraft. We also now have confirmation that the opposition is in a position of having heavy weapons, including tanks," she said, adding that for civilians, there "is a shortage of food, fuel, water and gas."
Residents of Aleppo have told The Associated Press over the past week that jet fighters have been strafing rebel positions and there are numerous videos on the Internet posted by activists showing rebels commandeering regime tanks after conquering their bases.
Aleppo, a city of some 3 million, has been wracked by violence since rebels attempted to take it over and succeeded in holding several neighborhoods despite daily assaults by regime tanks, helicopters and warplanes.
On the 67th anniversary of the Syrian army's founding, Assad pushed his armed forces to redouble their efforts in the fight in a speech that was not televised but only appeared in the army's magazine and the state news agency.
"Today you are invited to increase your readiness and willingness for the armed forces to be the shield, wall and fortress of our nation," he said.
The regime has characterized the rebellion as the work of foreign terrorists, and Assad claimed "internal agents" are collaborating with them.
"Our battle is against a multi-faceted enemy with clear goals. This battle will determine the destiny of our people and the nation's past, present and future," he said.
Assad has not spoken in public since a bomb on July 18 killed four of his top security officials during a rebel assault on Damascus and has only appeared on television once. His whereabouts are unknown and it is not even clear if he is in the capital.
He was echoed by his newly appointed defense minister, Gen. Fahd al-Freij, whose predecessor was killed in the bombing. He told the army to chase after armed groups and "kill them, preserving the homeland from their evils and restoring peace and security to the country."
Syria's powerful military, which has largely held together over the course of the uprising, is vital to keeping Assad in power. The pace of defections has been rising recently, however. Neighboring Turkey reports that 28 generals have already crossed the border.
In recent weeks, the military has unleashed heavy weapons against the increasingly bold rebels who have brought the fight to the country's two largest cities. The military managed to drive the rebels out of the capital Damascus a week after their assault with fierce bombardments of neighborhoods followed by house-to-house searches. | <urn:uuid:98491eeb-ce68-4ea0-89af-3eef354d8bea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/aug/01/syrias-assad-urges-his-army-to-step-up-the-fight/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981178 | 630 | 1.507813 | 2 |
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
REBECCA ROBERTS, host:
And I'm Rebecca Roberts.
Twenty-six miles off the coast of Southern California a wild fire is burning on Santa Catalina Island. Residents and visitors have fled the island as the fire bears down on the main town of Avalon. Several homes have burned overnight. Captain Andrew Olvera(ph) is with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Captain ANDREW OLVERA (Los Angeles County Fire Department): The biggest challenge for fighting fires on Catalina Island is getting the firefighters here. That's the biggest challenge. And obviously once we get here it's getting everybody in place. And dealing with the steep terrain and the rocky terrain, that's also a big challenge for us.
ROBERTS: NPR's Carrie Kahn is on Santa Catalina Island with the latest.
Carrie, where are you and what can you see there?
CARRIE KAHN: I'm at the water's edge right at the marina across from the beautiful Avalon Casino, which is still standing. The sun has come up, and I - the smoke is so thick, Rebecca. It is really hard to see beyond this edge of the town here. We can see the homes on the hillside, but beyond that on the high canyon walls - these steep hills are smoking. The flames, you can't see them anymore like we did last night. But you can just see the smoke coming out from the canyon. There's a very, very smoky situation here.
But the town is doing okay right now. There were some structures lost, can't see them from here and we don't have confirmation on just how many were lost.
ROBERTS: What are fire officials saying?
KAHN: Well, they were saying in the dark, at about - in the early morning hours, that they had to suspend the helicopter, water-dropping aircraft, and they also had to suspend the hand crews. That it was just too dangerous of a situation, that they couldn't see what they were doing. And it seems that they're having a difficult time now even with the light of day because it is so smoky here. I heard the helicopters beginning at about 6:30 this morning, but they are far and few between. It's just so smoky and a dangerous situation for them still.
ROBERTS: Tell us a little bit more about this island. Some of our listeners may have been, but more have probably seen it in the movies, in "Chinatown" or "Mutiny on the Bounty."
KAHN: Well, where I am now is in Avalon. It is the main city of Catalina Island. And it's a tiny community. It's a very small, picturesque town. The houses come down from the hillside and drop into the tiny, little marina that edges the beautiful casino that you have seen in a lot of movies. It's a very tight-knit community. About 3,000 residents year-round, and on a beautiful summer day it could swell to about 10,000 coming from nearby Los Angeles, just 26 miles away.
And I was taken around on a golf cart, because that's the mode of transportation on the island, by Joe Guadagnino(ph) - they just call him Joe G. because it's so hard to pronounce his name. But he took me around and he showed me a bit of the devastation last night. He rents jet skis at the beach.
Mr. JOE GUADAGNINO: A lot of people in California don't realize, you know, they travel to Mexico and Hawaii, and paradise is 26 miles away. And anyone who has questions about that should come visit. It's a great island, some great people, very hospitable, very giving. It's an amazing little place.
KAHN: They took about 400 people off the island on ferries for the hour-long ride back to Los Angeles. People were just carrying whatever they could - baby carriages, they had grocery bags, they had suitcases. It was quite an exodus off the island last night.
ROBERTS: Carrie, this is your second fire just this week. It's not even officially fire season yet.
KAHN: We're supposed to have a month before fire season starts. And you could hear my voice getting a little husky from a lot of smoke in Southern California. It's devastating already. We saw Griffith Park burn, about a fifth of the park, earlier in the week. And now we're watching this beautiful island and resort - the fire line when I was coming in in the dark seemed to go on for miles. It's devastating to this beautiful resort area. And it's just a testament to how dry it's been this year. Catalina Island has only had two inches of rain this year, when they usually get about 13. Pretty much the same in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Our fire officials are concerned and city officials are concerned it's going to be a long fire season.
ROBERTS: NPR's Carrie Kahn reporting on wildfires on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast to Southern California. Thanks, Carrie.
KAHN: You're welcome.
ROBERTS: And we'll continue to follow this story as it develops.
INSKEEP: And the fire season is also underway in the Southeastern United States. From southern Georgia across the state line into Florida, fires have burned almost 300 square miles now. These are hundreds of separate fires, by the way, on dried out land. One started when a power line fell on a tree. Others were started by lightning. And some are blamed on arson. Taken together, they forced many people to flee their homes. Some people may be hearing this broadcast today while stuck in traffic because heavy smoke has forced the closure of some highways.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio. | <urn:uuid:ce511a3b-2354-4ac4-857d-fe64d094e2aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=10131851 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972395 | 1,299 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Summer Search and Rescue Costs Start to Stack Up
51-year-old man had to be airlifted from Flattop Tuesday
ANCHORAGE - Every summer, hundreds of hikers lace up their boots and make the trek up Flattop Mountain: those who have made the climb before know there are a few things to keep in mind.
“It’s rocky up there, especially near the top,” said Rachel Gantt, ending her hike up the hill Wednesday afternoon. “It’s so easy to twist your ankle.”
Melanie Dittrich, who chose the path behind the hill with her two children, said she knows how quickly things can happen. Once, years ago, she said her mother-in-law had slipped on a patch of leftover snow and tumbled 15 or 20 feet down the steep incline. She snapped her ankle, and Dittrich said it took a helicopter and paramedic crew to bring her back to the road.
Tuesday evening, another hiker found himself in a similar situation: After slipping on a patch of snow, 51-year-old Marc Sierra was ultimately lifted from the mountain by the Alaska Air National Guard. The whole effort, which lasted several hours, involved six agencies, two helicopters and dozens of search and rescue personnel.
The Alaska State Troopers said its helicopter Helo 1 cost roughly $1,000 per hour to operate. The National Guard Pave Hawk racked up a $6,000 per hour tab. Search and rescue team members said it’s an expensive operation that happens all too easily.
“I’m surprised there’s not five incidents a day, seeing how many people slide off,” said Wayne Todd of the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group. “It’s all fun until you get out of control and someone gets hurt.”
Besides the troopers and National Guard, Tuesday’s rescue also involved Anchorage Fire Department medics who would go on to perform yet another rescue in a different part of town hours later. When three people became stranded on a rock in Turnagain Arm by one of the biggest bore tides of the year, it took an AFD water rescue team to pull them safely to shore through the rushing tide.
They said it’s a situation that’s happened more than once, and whether it happens in the water or on a peak, they said they’re prepared for an active summer. While it only takes a pair of hiking boots to get outdoors, sometimes the trip back isn’t so easy. | <urn:uuid:d03f5942-0ce6-4f04-b608-6a2461f7e081> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ktva.com/home/outbound-xml-feeds/Summer-Search-and-Rescue-Cost-Start-to-Stack-Up-157669915.html?corder=regular | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96358 | 535 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Karen_S2 on Family Tree Circles
Journals and Posts
Looking for information on William Gaoling Millard formerly of Bristol, England he was born in 1810, and came to Halifax, Nova Scotia with the Royal Miners and Sappers. He was In charge of Masons whle working on the Halifax Citadel.
- Displaying 1-1 of 1 Journals | <urn:uuid:76317d25-8086-4e3c-bfc0-be50db923eb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.familytreecircles.com/u/Karen_S2/?format=&sort=doe | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930692 | 78 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Avik Roy, Contributor
The Apothecary is a blog about health-care and entitlement reform.
During the campaign, President Obama blasted away at Mitt Romney’s proposal for Medicare reform, because, according to Obama, “no American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.” And yet, the President is subjecting some of the poorest seniors in America to the tender mercies of private insurers. If he thinks private insurers are good enough for low-income retirees, why doesn’t he think they’re good enough for everyone else?
One of the thorniest entitlement-reform problems in America is what to do with so-called dual-eligibles: poor seniors who are eligible for both Medicare, our single-payer system for retirees, and Medicaid, our program for low-income Americans. Approximately 9 million Americans fall into both categories, representing 21 percent of Medicare beneficiaries in 2009, and 15 percent of all Medicaid beneficiaries.
Because dual-eligibles are older than the average Medicaid patient, they represent a disproportionate share of Medicaid spending: 38 percent in 2009. But dual-eligibles aren’t just expensive because they’re older, but because of massive inefficiencies in the way these patients are managed.
Obama: Private insurers are great for poor seniors
Hospitals and nursing homes are experts at gaming the system so that they can maximize the reimbursements that they get from these two poorly-paying programs. If Medicare pays more than Medicaid for a particular treatment or service, providers will bill Medicare. If Medicaid pays more, they’ll bill Medicaid. In other words, a significant chunk of the extra cost of these “dual-eligible” patients is not that they’re older and poorer, but that their care is paid for by two separate government agencies that don’t always talk to each other.
Under a new provision in Obamacare, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—CMS—created a pilot program called the Financial Alignment Initiative to put dual-eligibles under the management of private insurers, using either a capitated model (a fixed payment per enrollee) or a fee-for-service model (the traditional Medicare reimbursement approach).
For states to gain CMS’ approval to participate, CMS required that states promise that the private plans they employ cover the full range of traditional Medicare benefits, and that the savings would benefit both Medicaid (which is partially funded by the states) and Medicare. 15 states have already been approved for the program, and 26 more have applied for it.
There are considerable ironies in CMS’ approach, given that Obama and his allies claim to think it’s a terrible idea that Mitt Romney sought to let future seniors send their business to private insurers, if those insurers can cover the same people at a lower price than traditional Medicare.
Unlike the Romney plan, which would have given seniors the option to stay in the traditional, government-run program, Obama’s plan would require all seniors in the approved states to move to private insurance on the Medicaid side. (On the Medicare side, the dual-eligibles could choose between traditional, fee-for-service Medicare and the more market-oriented Medicare Advantage program.)
Washington drags its feet
Not everybody is happy about Obama’s move. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, known as MedPAC, sent CMS Acting Administrator Marilyn Tavenner a letter in July, arguing that the pilot program was moving too quickly, without adequate safeguards. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) sent his own letter to Kathleen Sebelius, urging her to “take immediate steps to halt this initiative as currently structured.”
MedPAC’s concerns basically boil down to bureaucratic foot-dragging: Obama’s privatization of dual-eligibles moves too quickly and affects too many people. “If all of these state proposals are approved,” the MedPAC commissioners wrote, “approximately 3 million dual-eligible beneficiaries will be enrolled” in the pilot program, “approximately 40 percent of all full-benefit dual-eligible beneficiaries…The scope of the demonstrations as proposed is too broad.”
MedPAC argues that private insurers lack the experience to manage such complicated patients, and, paradoxically, that “there may not be sufficient numbers of dual-eligible beneficiaries” in certain states to evaluate the demonstrations.
The MedPAC criticisms don’t make a whole lot of sense. Private insurers have plenty of experience dealing with complex patients, and indeed are more likely to be able to handle such cases in an integrated fashion, when compared to the Keystone Kops approach currently employed by Washington and the state capitals. Indeed, the whole idea of care coordination was pioneered by private insurers. More than two-thirds of all Medicaid beneficiaries already are enrolled in some form of privately administered managed care.
Doing nothing is not an option
Most importantly, doing nothing is not an option. Rapidly rising Medicaid costs are forcing states to make impossible choices between drastically cutting health-care services or pulling back on spending on education and other social services. “California is already counting on more than $500 million in budget savings from its own program this year” for dual-eligibles, reports Margot Sanger-Katz of National Journal.
If we don’t employ private insurers to improve the efficiency of these services, the only alternative is blunt cuts to benefits, payments, and access. Low-income seniors would fare far worse under the go-it-slow approach favored by MedPAC. State governments understand this, which is why so many of them are banging down CMS’ doors.
Migrate dual-eligibles onto Obamacare’s exchanges
The best long-term reform would be to create a customized insurance product for dual-eligibles that could be added onto Obamacare’s exchanges. Here’s why.
As I’ve discussed previously, raising Medicare’s retirement age is now the easiest and most important component of entitlement reform, because these younger seniors will have access to Obamacare’s exchanges. But unless you address the dual-eligibles, younger seniors below the poverty level who have the retirement age raised on them will not have access to the exchanges, but rather to Medicaid.
Creating an exchange product for all dual-eligible seniors older than 65, even if the broader retirement age is raised, would eliminate this problem. In addition, migrating the duals onto the exchanges will mean that these low-income seniors will get better-coordinated, higher-quality care, because they’ll be dealing with one insurer instead of two.
The downside of this approach is that it would also reduce the fiscal savings from raising the retirement age, because the exchanges are fully funded by the federal government, whereas Medicaid is partially funded by the states. But that trade-off is well worth it, especially if moving from two insurers to one results in greater cost-effectiveness.
It takes a lot of brass, as Bill Clinton would put it, for President Obama to carp about Republicans putting seniors in the hands of insurance companies, when his own administration has been aggressively doing just that. But now that the election is over, perhaps there’s a way for both parties to come together, by using private insurers to bring higher-quality care to the poorest, sickest, costliest patients in America. | <urn:uuid:a3342ffe-82f0-4404-857d-0d7cd0a11f2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/11/30/forward-obama-privatizes-medicare-for-3-million-dual-eligible-low-income-seniors/?commentId=comment_blogAndPostId/blog/comment/1314-9473-4542 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94618 | 1,541 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Chicago’s Board of Education votes today on closing an unprecedented number of elementary schools. WBEZ reporters asked Chicagoans to tell us in their own words what would be lost if their school closes.
The biggest reason Chicago’s school district says it’s closing 53 grammar schools is to give students a better education. But how “better” is defined has become a point of contention in a heated debate.
Two things seem to be on the minds of most parents whose kids attend Chicago Public Schools: A longer school day and school closings; both of which came up at Wednesday's school board meeting. The meeting was much more subdued than last month's, which was taken over by Occupy protestors.
Chicago Public Schools will hold hearings just about every night this week on a slate of schools the district wants to close or phase out. School closings are controversial every year. And this year has been no different--but there have been some new twists to the controversy.
This year Chicago Public Schools announced plans to close, turnaround or phase out over 15 schools. If the latest round is approved, Chicago will have shut down or turned around more than 100 schools over the last decade.
Every month WBEZ education reporter Linda Lutton joins Eight Forty-Eight for Cheat Sheet - the unofficial, irreverent guide to Chicago’s Board of Education meetings.Parents and teachers sounded off on the district’s newest list of school closings. | <urn:uuid:832d413f-ea3d-4e98-b369-fe0f7cc57036> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbez.org/tags/linda-lutton | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964981 | 300 | 1.765625 | 2 |
State Gets Poor Marks For Openness, Anti-Corruption laws
Just how well did Maryland rank compared to neighboring states in the nation?
The state, with it's grade of 61 percent, performed better than Nevada, Michigan, North Dakota, South Carolina, Maine, Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota and Georgia, according to the report released by a group that includes The Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity, and Public Radio International.
Four states— New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, California, and Nebraska—received a grade of B. Overall, however, the group wrote there were no winners in its study.
The organization graded the Maryland and 49 other states on 14 different categories. Most, but not all, of the grades were D or worse. | <urn:uuid:f4a2a865-9561-44f3-9295-7e7103b0eb11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://potomac.patch.com/articles/state-gets-poor-marks-for-openness-anti-corruption-laws | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964793 | 154 | 1.804688 | 2 |
It almost seems a shame that you can land on Porto Santo. The runway-laid middle of this tiny Portuguese isle, which floats 50 kilometres north-east of motherland Madeira, formerly nurtured a vineyard. It would have been nice to see: that such ranks of fruitful green have ever thrived here seems implausible today. Swept by Atlantic winds, Porto Santo is barren indeed: 12km by 6km of largely brown.
It wasn't always this way. After the island was discovered by Portuguese explorers in 1418, Porto Santo's early settlers (largely farmers and fishermen) found native dragon trees. However, these were soon felled for their dye-producing sap. Without their wind protection - and with imported rabbits decimating crops - farming here has since been a challenge.
The island has had several admirers, though. Christopher Columbus lived here for a while; his former casa now houses the island's Columbus museum.
French and Moorish pirates followed, unwelcome guests who raided the land and sent residents running into the hills.
Recent fans are the neighbouring Madeirans, who sail over for weekends, drawn by the uninterrupted 9km-long beach that fringes Porto Santo's south side - something their own rocky-shored island lacks.
Madeira-born footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has reportedly invested in a soon-to-open luxury hotel here.
I started my exploration on the main island of Madeira. This is part of the same volcanic chain as Porto Santo, and certainly feels topographically adventurous.
Its vertical cliffs and gullies were immediately evident on the short drive from the airport into capital Funchal. There was barely enough flat space for a bowling alley, the land erupting from the sea with dramatic fervour and scant regard for coastal niceties such as promenades and beaches.
That evening, as I sat on a terrace sipping rum-and-honey ponchas, I gazed at the city lights pitching down the hillside. I rather fancied a few days of hiking in the wild interior, but my date with Madeira's sandier little sister couldn't wait.
Sailing out of Funchal at first light, I stood on the deck as the ship curled east, around the rugged Ponta de Sao Lourenco peninsula as it trailed off Madeira like a dinosaur's tail.
It's not uncommon to see species such as sperm whales or bottlenose dolphins on this two-and-a-half-hour inter-island journey, but I wasn't in luck. Instead I watched as squadrons of red-blue flying fish burst out of the waves.
Approaching Porto Santo by boat, you get a good sense of the place: the way it's bookended by knobbled peaks, the highest looming in the north, and descending to a central saddle and the lovely long south-coast beach.
The main "town", Vila Baleira, is the biggest hub behind the sand; otherwise there's an appealing lack of development, especially at the island's southern tip.
Soon (nothing's far in Porto Santo) I'd left the docks, passed through Vila Baleira, and was ensconced in my comfortable hotel, planning the first adventure. This came courtesy of Andre, who relished in off-roading a 4x4 around the island's highlights.
First he drove up to Miradouro das Flores, a lookout conspicuously lacking in namesake flowers, but with fine views over to the islet of Ilheu de Baixo ou da Cal (Lime Island), where locals once excavated the dangerous cliffsides.
We carried on, past the Seve Ballesteros golf course - an incongruously vibrant green - to the basalt columns of Ana Ferreira peak and the sea stack that looks like King Kong.
"Look right," Andre instructed at a turn in the road.
"There's nothing there, but it's better than what's on the left!"
The desalination plant is not a must-see.
There are, in truth, few major sights on Porto Santo - though the hillier north-east, bevelled into conical peaks reaching up to 516m, is wilder. But Andre's commentary added charm, and in just a few hours I'd had an excellent overview.
Next, I was going to investigate at a gentler pace. I hired a bicycle and pedalled down to Ponta da Calheta, the south-west tip of the island. Here, a weathered cliff and boulders smooth as bones put an abrupt end to the seemingly endless stretch of beach.
Terns paddled in the rock pools, alongside a Portuguese Adonis, tensing his abs to impress his girlfriend. They were the only others around.
The whole of Porto Santo's sand strip (reputedly rich in minerals that are good for rheumatism) was uncrowded. Down at Calheta, where there are no resorts, just a beach bar and a ripple of dunes, it felt positively deserted.
"We used to swim from Calheta to Lime Island, to collect crabs," my guide Idalino told me the next day as we drove up to Pico Castelo.
The slopes of this 437m peak once boasted 12 cannons, mounted in the 17th century to defend against marauding Spaniards. Now, just one heavy gun remains; fortifications have been replaced by flora.
We hiked up through pine trees, tentacled aloe vera and prickly pear cacti to a hut, where a caretaker was weeding and sweeping.
As we walked, Idalino talked.
"We need to be more self-sustaining," he lamented.
"People used to grow crops, keep chickens; now everything is imported."
As we continued up Castelo and on around Pico do Facho (Beacon Peak, the island's highest), we saw the remains of what used to be agricultural terraces; a few cherry tomato plants poked through the soil.
"The rabbits don't like them," he explained.
No one else was out walking - most people come to Porto Santo for the beach. From our vantage we could look across that lovely strand, over the terracotta rooftops of Vila Baleira, and also into the rugged valleys and geological folds of the north, where streams sneaked down to tiny pebbled coves, where a little tavern offered wine-tasting.
Off the distant west coast sat Ilheu de Ferro - Iron Island.
"There's a blowhole in the rock," Idalino explained, "but my mother used to tell me the sea spray was smoke from the fire of an old lady, baking bread for her many children."
The talk of freshly baked bread was making me hungry, so we headed for Pe na Agua ('Feet on the Water'), a chic shack-cum-restaurant on the sandy southern beach, and favoured spot of Ronaldo when he's in town. Happily, its delicious caldeira de peixe (fish soup) doesn't require a footballer's wage.
On my final evening I wandered down to the sea. Porto Santo looks prettiest at night, a twinkle of lights adrift in the Atlantic.
I dug my feet into the therapeutic sand and smiled.
Columbus and Cristiano might just be on to something here.
Further information: See visitmadeira.pt.
- INDEPENDENTBy Sarah Baxter | <urn:uuid:3821f446-c910-4f63-a48e-6c33d922f300> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/europe/news/article.cfm?l_id=7&objectid=10803273 | 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 | 0.959178 | 1,594 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Southern Utah News Articles
Top Stories for July 29, 2009
Body of missing backpacker found in Grand Canyon National Park
Search teams found a body believed to be that of overdue backpacker Bryce Gillies in the Bonita Creek drainage on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park on Saturday, July 25.
On July 21, the National Park Service (NPS) was notified that one or more hikers were overdue from a backpacking trip in Grand Canyon National Park.
Initial efforts by investigators located the car of Bryce Gillies at the Bill Hall Trailhead on the North Rim of the park, and determined that only one person had gone on the backpacking trip.
With no backcountry permit to work from and no knowledge of Mr. Gillies specific plans, searchers began covering a large area from the Deer Creek drainage across Surprise Valley to the Tapeats Creek drainage and down to the river.
Rescue personnel narrowed their search to the Bonita Creek drainage and surrounding area based on the discovery of personal items, including a backpack, in that vicinity.
At approximately 9:30 a.m., a search team, moving up Bonita Creek from its confluence with the Colorado River, found a body at the top of a 100 foot pour-off. The body, located less than one-half mile from the river confluence, has been presumptively identified as that of 20 year-old Bryce Gillies, a student at Northern Arizona University.
The body was recovered by helicopter via long-line operation and transferred to the Coconino County Medical Examiner.
The multi-day search involved approximately 50 NPS personnel and volunteers from Grand Canyon National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Zion National Park. | <urn:uuid:6aae7197-c15f-4df8-83b4-b835121be945> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sunews.net/article.cfm?articleID=215 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957159 | 350 | 1.773438 | 2 |
The seminar will examine the FTC as an institution in its many facets. The Commission's two main missions, consumer protection and antitrust, provide it with a platform for involvement with major sectors of the economy. We will examine the Commission's structure, its legal authority, and how it uses that authority in pursuing its many activities. We will address numerous issues that currently occupy so much of the agency's time, including intellectual property, health care, privacy, consumer fraud, and many others. The seminar will conclude with presentation of research projects involving particular issues the Commission faces.
Course Sections for Summer 2013
There are no sections of this course currently scheduled for this semester. | <urn:uuid:e0733490-401a-40c2-8d15-5500e911134a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.law.gmu.edu/academics/courses/law612 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954592 | 132 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The mood at the Vatican is apocalyptic. Pope Benedict XVI seems tired, and both unable and unwilling to seize the reins amid fierce infighting and scandal. While Vatican insiders jockey for power and speculate on his successor, Joseph Ratzinger has withdrawn to focus on his still-ambiguous legacy.
Finally, there is clarity. The Holy See has cleared things up and made the document accessible to all: a handout on checking whether apparitions of the Virgin Mary are authentic.
Everything will be much easier from now on. The Roman Catholic Church has taken a step forward.
This “breaking news” from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) reveals the kinds of issues the Vatican is concerned with — and the kind of world in which some there live. It’s a world in which the official Church investigation of Virgin Mary sightings is carefully regulated while cardinals in the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative and judicial apparatus, wield power with absolutely no checks and the pope’s private correspondence turns up in the desk drawers of a butler.
It’s a completely different apparition of the Virgin Mary that has pulled the Vatican and the Catholic Church into a new crisis, whose end and impact can only be surmised: the appearance of a source in the heart of the Church, a conspiracy against the pope and a leak code-named “Maria.”
Since the end of May, the pope’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, has been detained in a 35-square-meter (377-square-foot) cell at the Vatican, with a window but no TV. Using the code name “Maria,” he allegedly smuggled faxes and letters out of the pope’s private quarters. But it remains unclear who was directing him to do so. Continue reading
News category: Features. | <urn:uuid:12ae0e37-95b7-4bf5-ad83-2f3ba2232a6a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cathnews.co.nz/2012/06/29/exhausted-vatican-final-battles-pope-benedict-xvi/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937878 | 390 | 1.804688 | 2 |
The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday has left much of the country in need of relief. Consumers will obviously be looking for ways to help and organizations they can send money to in order to help the victims in Haiti. To make the best decision possible, consider these 11 tips so you can be sure your generosity will be received by a trustworthy source and not a scammer.
1) Before making a contribution, visit www.bbb.org/charity to view detailed reports on many of the relief organizations providing assistance.
2) Think twice about donating to any charity that is inexperienced in carrying out relief efforts, but is suddenly soliciting for aid to Haiti. Although well intentioned, such organizations may not have the ability to quickly deliver aid to those in need.
3) Be wary of charities that are reluctant to answer reasonable questions about their operations, finances and programs.
4) Do not hesitate to ask for written information that describes the charity’s program(s) and finances such as the charity’s latest annual report and financial statements.
5) Find out what the charity intends to do with any excess contributions remaining after they have fully funded the disaster relief activities mentioned in solicitations.
6) Do not give cash. Checks or money orders should be made out to the name of the charitable organization, not to the individual collecting the donation.
7) Keep an eye out for fake charities that imitate the name and style of well-known organizations in order to confuse people and potentially steal personal information such as credit card numbers.
8) Don’t give in to excessive pressure for on-the-spot donations. Be wary of any request to send a “runner” to pick up your contribution.
9) Be wary of appeals that are long on emotion, but short on describing what the charity will do to address the needs of victims and their families.
10) Do not give your credit card number or other personal information to a telephone solicitor or in response to an e-mail solicitation.
11) To help ensure your contribution is tax deductible, donations should be made to charitable organizations that are tax exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Go to IRS Publication 78 on www.irs.gov for a current list of all organizations eligible to receive contributions deductible as charitable gifts. | <urn:uuid:6080064a-d67a-410d-8c7d-8812c51cb8fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://corpuschristi.bbb.org/blog/archive/1-2010 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936151 | 478 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Welcome to Marquette! As you join our campus community, know that Marquette has a strong commitment to inclusivity and diversity in all of its many forms. We are aware that LGBTQ students have unique experiences and face unique challenges. The Division of Student Affairs and its many departments, including Student Development, Recreational Sports, Student Health Services, Residence Life and the Counseling Center, have been working diligently to prepare events to welcome and support you in your transition to campus. Ultimately, we want you to feel that you are a valued member of the campus community.
Please take a moment to review Marquette’s Statement on Human Dignity and Diversity and the Division of Student Affairs Mission Statement. You will see that we strive to aid in the holistic development of all students and aim to enrich your out-of-classroom experience.
Marquette is committed to supporting its LGBTQ students and educating the campus community about LGBTQ issues/concerns. Below is a list of links that provide information on activities at Marquette and educational sites that provide support and information about the LGBTQ community. Consider affiliating with the Gender Sexuality Alliance and take note of a few of the many activities and initiatives that include an LGBTQ Orientation Welcome Reception, the LGBTQ Discussion Group, the LGBTQ meeting/resource space and the Ally Program. These are a few of the many options you have here at Marquette. Watch for other opportunities for support and involvement as they arise.
The Division of Student Affairs also sponsors the Diversity Advocates, a network of faculty, administrators and staff who are committed to supporting diverse students. Look for the Diversity Advocates placard, as seen on the Diversity Advocates website, to guide you to a university professional who is willing to listen and support you. I wish you the best during your time as a student at Marquette.
I look forward to meeting you and hope your transition into the Marquette family fulfills, engages and impacts you.
L. Christopher Miller, J.D., Ph.D.
Vice President for Student Affairs
Student leadership awards | <urn:uuid:ed603076-4395-488d-a1fa-72b5b282f0b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mu.edu/dsa/lgbtq/index.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961231 | 421 | 1.523438 | 2 |
'Job Is Getting Done' in Iraq, Despite US Press, Veterans Say
July 7, 2008
(CNSNews.com) - A group of veterans from Operation Iraqi Freedom said Thursday that U.S.-led coalition forces are getting the job done when it comes to defeating insurgents and helping Iraq establish a democratic government -- despite the U.S. news media's negative portrayal of the conflict.
"I am not here to debate the choices that were made, only to tell you that today, the job is getting done" in Iraq, Marine Corporal Richard Gibson said during a news conference hosted by the conservative group America's Majority at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Gibson based his optimistic assessment of the situation in Iraq on several factors, including the strength of coalition forces. "The old Iraqi army was no match for what we, the Marines, had to offer and neither is the insurgency," he said.
However, "we were not there as conquerors but as liberators," Gibson stated. "That was our mission."
Gibson also pointed to what he called two "tipping points" in the ongoing conflict that took place during 2005. "These junctures are decisive indicators of coalition victories over the insurgency," he said. "Most Iraqis understand them, but most Americans do not."
The first "tipping point" occurred last March, when the number of Iraqi security forces on the ground surpassed those of coalition troops, he said. Then on Dec. 15, Iraqis elected their first national four-year legislature with a turnout that was impressive even in the central and western areas of the country, where rebels are the strongest.
"This obviously strengthened the government, but more subtly, it splintered the insurgency," Gibson asserted, noting that the two primary insurgent groups - leftovers from the Baathist Party of former dictator Saddam Hussein and members of the terrorist al Qaeda network -- have different political goals.
"The Baathist diehards simply want power. They hope to wait the coalition out; then re-assert their traditional dominance over the Shi'a and the Kurds," he said. "But al Qaeda in Iraq wants an Islamic theocracy.
"As long as the coalition remained the primary target, the Baathists and al Qaeda could operate together, but that has changed with the growth in the numbers and confidence of Iraqi security forces," Gibson added. "The insurgents are no longer dealing with an occupation army but with the forces of an elected government -- and these forces are extremely popular."
Gibson found another sign of progress in Iraq in an unlikely place: the daily death toll in that nation.
Human rights organizations that have counted civilian deaths in Iraq since January 2003 estimate that between 25 and 28 people are killed each day, he said. While that total may sound horrific to Americans, it is a huge improvement over the 70 to 125 deaths that took place daily when Saddam Hussein ruled the country.
"A lousy day under the coalition yields a body count far under the Baathists," Gibson stated. "In Baghdad today, terrorists may kill you with an ill-timed IED (Improvised Explosive Device), but the Baathist secret police no longer comes to your door, takes your relatives, puts them in a cell, tortures them, kills them and then bills you for the bullets."
Also, American casualties are declining as U.S. troops are withdrawn and Iraqis step up to defend their country, Gibson said. "According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, U.S. military deaths declined from 714 in 2004 to 673 in 2005. The number of U.S. wounded declined from 7,990 to 5,639. That's a 27 percent decrease in U.S. casualties over a one-year period.
"And this year, U.S. casualties are running 62 percent lower than 2005," he added.
Richard Nadler, president of America's Majority and host of Thursday's news conference, agreed with Gibson's analysis of the Iraq war.
"In both tactical and strategic terms, coalition troops and Iraqi patriots are winning the war," Nadler said. "A terror-sponsoring, totalitarian apparatus state is being replaced, piece by piece, by the elements of civil society -- free speech, free association, democratic elections and a market economy.
"And if the press will not report it, then the men who accomplished it will," he added.
The news media's depiction of events in Iraq was the focus of another speaker at the event -- J. D. Johannes. The Marine sergeant noted that the history of wars is usually told by the victors, but the story of Iraq "is being written by the losers."
Johannes, who has served as both a soldier and a reporter in Iraq, said that the terrorists' main battlefield is America and to win here, they need help from an unusual ally: the U.S. news media.
One method insurgents use to manipulate reporters is to intimidate them into staying in their hotels, he said. Unwilling to risk venturing out into combat, the journalists are forced to rely on local "stringers," who often pass along hearsay or propaganda instead of confirmed facts.
Johannes cited the example of a minor battle that lasted only 30 minutes but was reported as a major conflict that caused high coalition casualties. The general who was involved in the fighting later said that he and his forces had been victorious on the ground, but the terrorists "had won it on CNN."
Nadler said that such instances of lazy or inaccurate reporting are what led his organization to initiate its "War on Words Project" to help veterans get out the message about "the war they, along with Iraqi patriots, were clearly winning," even though it is regularly portrayed by the news media "as a quagmire or another Vietnam."
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Send a Letter to the Editor about this article. | <urn:uuid:f1fbd84d-077e-4597-8591-26697086238e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cnsnews.com/news/article/job-getting-done-iraq-despite-us-press-veterans-say | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97517 | 1,262 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Dr. Jorge Minera of Piedmont Family Practice has a special interest in women’s health issues; he believes that education is the most important ingredient for healthier living.
Heart attacks in women, for instance, are largely misunderstood. Dr. Minera said, “Heart attacks have always been thought of as a man’s malady. Although equivalent numbers of men and women suffer heart attacks, more women than men die of heart attacks because women’s symptoms are different and are not as easily recognized.”
The doctor said that as a family practice physician, he has an advantage because of his previous experience with his patients. “We have the time to get a complete history, and consider all the risk factors -- tobacco use, cholesterol, blood pressure, is there diabetes in the family, or heart disease? Has there been a recent increase in stress? We can look at the patient as a whole and maybe see things differently.”
When Dr. Minera and Piedmont Family Practice nurse practitioner Angelina Harman are asked, “What’s the most serious health problem women face today?” they agree wholeheartedly: obesity.
Dr, Minera said that he spends a lot of time with his patients on weight management education. “As someone who was once overweight myself, I understand that it is a struggle. But the rewards of achieving a healthy weight are tremendous. Sensible eating and exercise are the keys.
“I don’t want my patients to think of exercise as something they set aside time for and have to fit in. Being active, playing with your kids, taking long walks, they should just be part of your everyday life.”
Dr. Minera said that when it comes to weight management, having a previous relationship with a patient is extremely helpful. “Because we have seen the patient -- and maybe their family --- over a number of months or years, there is trust there, and they may feel comfortable telling us things they might not tell someone they are seeing for the first time.
“We want to find out what the stumbling blocks are. Is there a history of weight problems in the family? Has the weight gain been progressive or sudden? What is the diet history? Has there been a change in the stress level? After I have the history, I always get blood work done, test lipids (cholesterol) and thyroid to really find out what’s going on.”
Dr. Minera would like to see the “ideal weight” charts and BMI tests thrown out. “Waist to hip ratios are a much better indicator of health risks than just weight or BMI.”
Sometimes, Dr. Minera prescribes medication to assist with weight loss, but these require close follow-up.
And obesity is not the only weight management concern. Dr. Minera and Harman both see a fair number of adolescent girls and agree that eating disorders are not uncommon. For these teens, their weight can drop quickly into the danger zone. Harmon said, “We see a lot of it.”
Weight issues are complex, long-term problems that require careful monitoring and a lot of listening, said Dr. Minera. “These are not situations where one visit is going to ‘fix it.’ They require the patient and doctor to work together toward a long-term solution.”
The HPV vaccine
Better education is also needed about the vaccine that protects against human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer. This is especially true now that the state of Virginia mandates the vaccine for rising sixth grade girls. Enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 2007, the regulation went into effect Oct. 1st of this year.
Dr. Minera said the vaccine has been misunderstood and blamed for causing serious side effects. “There have been a lot of extreme reports floating around about problems attributed to the vaccine, but the connection has never been proven. The fact is that the types of HPV prevented by the vaccine cause 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts cases.”
Even though the legislation mandates that girls be vaccinated before they enter middle school, parents can opt-opt for their daughters. Dr. Minera believes that with education, parents will see how important the vaccine is and agree to protect their children - before they become sexually active.
Dr. Minera said he is happy to be in family medicine. “I am able to see children and geriatric patients and everyone in-between. I do simple biopsies, screen for depression and even do a little counseling. Between me and my patients, it’s a good partnership.” | <urn:uuid:f6d608d2-7c76-4119-b394-cd6b9cb83e93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fauquierhealth.org/videos.womens-heart-health | 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 | 0.964676 | 979 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Sydney, May 3 (ANI): Two new dating websites have confirmed that infidelity is on the rise in Australia, with more 293000 people signing up for their services.
More than 280,000 people, 36 percent of them women, have signed up to ashleymadison.com since it was launched three weeks ago, and about 13,000 people have visited gleeden.com in its first week.
They follow the basic structure of most dating sites, where members publish profiles outlining their interests, passions and sexual proclivities.
But instead of singles, the pay-to-join sites specifically cater for married people looking for secret dalliances or long-term affairs.
“It is not in anyone”s DNA to stay with the same person,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted ashleymadison.com founder Noel Biderman as saying.
“So this notion that [our site is] generating this kind of behaviour is wrong,” he said.
American TV host Dr Phil McGraw agrees. Last week, the clinical psychologist known as Dr Phil told female viewers how to tell if their man would cheat on them.
He said men with a ring finger longer than their index finger have higher testosterone levels and were more likely to cheat. He also said that men with a short gene, the vasopressin receptor gene, were predisposed to infidelity.
But University of Sydney professor of medicine and molecular genetics Ron Trent said proving that a “cheating gene” existed would be difficult.
“There may be some sort of connection but these are complex traits and a lot of these situations involve a combination of genes and environmental factors,” Dr Trent said.
“For one, we cannot prove infidelity runs in families,” he explained.
Running an adultery website has not made Biderman insecure about his marriage but it has made him more pragmatic.
“It has challenged the paradigm I grew up with, that you should just get married. But there is more diversity than that out there,” he said.
NSW Family First representative the Reverend Gordon Moyes said the popularity of such sites was disappointing, if not surprising.
“Infidelity solves nothing. It is not surprising that there are significant numbers of people who think they can get out of their rather boring malaise within their existing marriage by having an affair,” Moyes said.
“However, you only have to read the celebrity pages to realise that the other partner often responds badly,” he stated.
Biderman said the Australian site had higher levels of female participation than sites in the US and Britain.
“Women who use the service haven”t been paid attention to, these women who were once such objects of desire that someone married them,” he said.
University of Sydney behavioural scientist Dr Di Sansom said some people rediscovered the love they felt for their spouse after partaking in an affair.
“They find it is not as fulfilling as their marriage and so they end it,” he revealed.
Biderman said his website was allowing more than 5.8 million people internationally to test the waters.
“It is hard for people to shed that idea of monogamy. When they are tired of vanilla, they want to try different flavours,” he added. (ANI) | <urn:uuid:66ebf7f9-3fa1-4d13-bb08-b2b8272d49d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://silverscorpio.com/tag/index-finger/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977706 | 703 | 1.53125 | 2 |
While private employers added 64,000 jobs in September, government layoffs resulted in a 95,000 position reduction in total U.S. payrolls. Despite the cuts, the nation's unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent.
Wall Street took the day's news in stride, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed above 11,000 Friday for the first time since early May.
And the Federal Reserve reports consumer borrowing declined by $3.3 billion in August as consumers cut back on credit card use for the 24th consecutive month.
While less debt is often prescribed to treat a host of financial maladies, reduced use of credit by consumers weighs heavily on the economic recovery.
But there is one kind of credit that continues to be popular in rural America... a 45-cent per gallon tax credit for ethanol blenders. And a coalition of farm state governors is poised to advocate on its behalf.
Scheduled to be sent to senate leaders next week, the letter specifically asks for a one-year extension of the volumetric ethanol excise tax credit "to allow time to transition from the blenders' credit to a refundable credit available only to domestic biofuel producers for a period of five years."
The letter, signed by Iowa Governor Chet Culver, who chairs the Governors Biofuels Coalition, and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, the coalition's vice-chair, affirms the importance of the domestic biofuels industry to their state economies which "keeps billions of dollars at work in our states instead of paying for imported oil."
In the letter the governors also wrote:
"We believe these improvements will effectively open the market for biofuels, reduce taxpayer costs by billions of dollars, and enable the domestic biofuels industry to compete on a more level playing field with petroleum transportation fuels."
The blenders' credit is set to expire at the end of the year. According to economists at the Farm and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, if current tax policies are allowed to expire the volume of corn processed into ethanol could be reduced by 485 to 540 million bushels per year. In turn, farmers could see a reduction in corn prices ranging from 11 to 20 cents per bushel. | <urn:uuid:80950673-2d2b-4bad-aebc-da540fa72404> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iptv.org/mtom/story.cfm/lead/3535/mtom_20101008_3606_lead | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956862 | 450 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The right-wing reactionaries who accuse Clinton of ignoring Al Qaeda and who attempt to blame his administration for 9/11 should perhaps read what Condoleezza Rice has to say:
The al Qaeda terrorist network posed a threat to the United States for almost a decade before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout that period -- during the eight years of the Clinton administration and the first eight months of the Bush administration prior to Sept. 11 -- the U.S. government worked hard to counter the al Qaeda threat.Comments
During the transition, President-elect Bush's national security team was briefed on the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda. The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the president and his national security principals. | <urn:uuid:8f471257-907e-4be4-ac79-6080a078a762> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thestoppedclock.blogspot.com/2004/03/and-there-you-go.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964132 | 151 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The quickest way to get started is simply to use the setup tools provided by your vendor. Assuming that this includes support for your driver, and assuming that your vendor shipped the driver for your printer, then it should be easy to get a basic setup going this way. For information on vendor-provided setup tools, see Section 9.
If your vendor's tool doesn't work out, you should figure out if your printer is supposed to work at all. Consult the printer compatibility listings in Section 5.3.1 as well as the online version described there.
If your printer is known to work with a driver, check that you have that driver, and install if it not. Typically you will be able to find a contributed Ghostscript package including newer Ghostscript code and assorted third-party drivers. If not, you can compile it yourself; the process is not trivial, but it is well documented. See Section 10 for more information on Ghostscript.
After installing the proper driver, attempt again to configure your printer with your vendor's tools. If that fails, select a suitable third party tool from those described in Section 8. If that also fails, you'll need to construct your own setup; again see Section 8.
If you're still stuck, you've got a little troubleshooting to do. It's probably best to read most of this document first to get a feel for how things are supposed to work; then you'll be in a better position to debug.
The Usenet newsgroups comp.os.linux.hardware, comp.os.linux.setup, and comp.periphs.printers all have a share of general printing questions. These are well-trafficked newsgroups where an answer is sure to be found; check in the Google Groups archives, too. There are also the linuxprinting.foo newsgroups; these are available both as web-based forums and via NNTP; see the website.
Please also poke around the web looking for your answers. LinuxPrinting.org is an excellent place to start; other websites and projects are linked to from there.
If you need more help, please try newsgroups, mailing lists, your distribution's support line, and so forth. If do want to contact me, please do so via the discussion forums on LinuxPrinting.org; this will give others a chance to respond, and will archive your problem and any solution publicly for the next hapless user. | <urn:uuid:28039569-c510-48da-bdac-308ab8df4774> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/quickstart.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944026 | 503 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Florin Vasilica and Andreea Stanciu, Ernst and Young
December 31, 2012 | 2 Comments
Developers, manufacturers, investors and other renewable energy industry stakeholders need to know where the next big market is going to be so that they can adjust their business decisions accordingly.
Since 2003, global consultancy Ernst & Young has released its Country Attractiveness Indices, which gives a numerical ranking to 30 global renewable energy markets by scoring renewable energy investment strategies and resource availability. The indices are updated on a quarterly basis and the most recent report can be found here.
Here is the firm’s assessment of Romania.
Eastern Europe’s Renewables Haven
Romania, already the shining star of renewables in Eastern Europe, may benefit further from a slow exodus of institutional investors from Bulgaria following dramatic subsidy cuts in the country. A favorable regulatory environment, combined with a lack of investment outlets in other sectors, has already led to a rapid increase in RE capacity in Romania, although policy-makers should also be alert to the perils of overgenerous incentive schemes in the face of stringent austerity measures.
Further Amendments to Energy Legislation
Since Romania’s introduction to the CAI two years ago, the country’s legislative framework covering renewable energy has undergone significant development. The amendments to Law 220/2008, which were approved in late 2011 and became applicable earlier this year, have provided strong indications that the renewables market in Romania seeks to mirror the interest of investors in the region, as well as supporting a very attractive GC incentive scheme.
In July, yet further amendments were made to this legislation, including the following key revisions:
Q3 also saw the introduction of a new energy law (Law 123/2012) as a further step toward the liberalization of the energy market and alignment with EU efforts to harmonize electricity and gas markets across the EU-27.
The new law seeks to ensure that transactions are performed on the competitive market in a “transparent, public, centralized and non-discriminatory manner.” However, the obligation of power producers to trade on centralized electricity operator (OPCOM) platforms has caused some concern for clean energy producers, as this limits the possibility of selling power directly through bilateral agreements. An inability to close PPAs may result in some projects becoming unbankable.
The Minister of Economy has, however, admitted that the law is far from perfect. A recent public statement indicates that an amendment to Law 123/2012 was being prepared by the authorities, expected to provide greater clarity and speed up the financing of renewables projects.
Wind Market Remains Active
Wind energy has experienced significant growth since the start of the GC scheme, from just 12MW in 2009 to 1,440MW in September 2012. A further 600MW is currently under construction and expected to come online by the end of 2013.Q3 saw the Fantanele-Cogealac wind farm become the largest in Europe, with 540MW of the total 600MW now connected to the grid. Project developer, CEZ, is looking to install as much as 1.5GW of wind power in the country by 2016, while France’s Filasa International announced in August its intention to invest around €1.4b across 10 wind farms.
Other utilities such as Enel, Steag GmbH, and EDP have also become active in the wind sector, while turbine manufacturer, Vestas, has located its new Eastern European hub in Bucharest.
Solar still playing catch-up
Uptake of solar projects in the country is still relatively slow, with only 5MW of installed capacity. However, the sector is expected to experience significant growth in the medium term due to the attractive incentive scheme (6GCs/MW), shorter construction schedule and smoother development process.
Lead image: Romania flag via Shutterstock
To add your comments you must sign-in or create a free account. | <urn:uuid:27c6b96e-19ac-486c-ad92-3ca469009214> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/12/renewable-energy-review-romania | 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 | 0.954793 | 800 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Shauna Doll doesn't want you to trash that jacket in need of a new zipper or toss that small furniture item in need of a little TLC.
The Dalhousie University environmental sustainability student is so committed to recycling, reusing and repurposing that she organized an ‘upcycle' workshop taking place this weekend.
The Mended Blender Upcycle Cafe is opening its doors for a day long event on March 16. Doll has solicited the help of at least 15 volunteers skilled in everything from bike, furniture and computer repairs to sewing. They'll be offering their services and showing the skills of their respective trades free of charge.
"I want to help raise awareness that small things can make a big difference. You don't need to throw everything away because often it can be repaired," she said.
The environmental sustainability student said people are often too quick to throw things away when a minor repair will bring it back to life. So if you've got something that needs mending, she encourages you to drop by the upcycle cafe.
"People really like the idea of building a community and teaching other people how to do things themselves," Doll said. "I know some people who have furnished apartments with great furniture they've found by the curb that they've worked on and fixed up. They're saving money and the environment."
From feedback she has received so far, Doll suspects many attendees will be students. She's guessing that both computer and bike repair will be most popular.
"It's so close to bike season and people have had their bikes in all winter. You don't have to pay to get a tuneup," she said.
The cafe day will also include free yoga and worm composting sessions, a knitting workshop, and a volunteer who'll show you how to make your own soaps and shampoos.
"This is a pilot test. I'll be here throughout the summer, so if there's a lot of interest I'm going to continue doing this as a monthly thing," Doll said.
Doll encourages anyone interested in contributing a skill to contact her.
The Mended Blender Upcycle Cafe:
When: March 16, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Fort Massey United Church, 5303 Tobin St., Halifax
What: Workshop to encourage people to repair instead of throw away | <urn:uuid:53d312ef-fcde-4e04-8fa8-2f2afdc09717> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.halifaxnewsnet.ca/Arts-Living/2013-03-12/article-3198148/Mending-more-than-fences/1 | 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 | 0.976275 | 486 | 1.835938 | 2 |
A person’s activities on Facebook, Flickr, training sites like Nike plus, and credit card purchases all generate data, and Me-trics wants to put it together in one place, co-founder James Vreeland told me after his presentation at TechCrunch50 last Tuesday. He describes the company as "Google Analytics for your life."
Me-trics wants to unearth trends from correlations in the data and use that information to help a user achieve goals, like losing weight or saving money.
Users have to input some data themselves, which drew criticism from the TechCrunch judges as too arduous. Me-trics is working on SMS and mobile integration so that users don’t have to go to the actual site to input data, and will rely increasingly on automated data as more of it becomes available.
"The ideal end state will be that you say, ‘I want to lose weight or I want to save money,’ and the system knows what you’re doing across the net, and will send you notifications on how you’re doing and how you get where you want to be," he says.
Knowing a user’s goals and habits will allow Me-trics to provide targeted advertising, according to Vreeland.
–Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
Posted on 09/16/2008 at 2:19 PM by admin | <urn:uuid:817000af-c739-48df-a367-24a074fa5f67> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beet.tv/2008/09/me-trics-tracks.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957385 | 288 | 1.65625 | 2 |
What she said about Mitt Romney can't be printed in a family newspaper.
To folks on the left, the prancing woman is a bit of an embarrassment.
To folks on the right, she is affirmation that the Nov. 6 election boils down to a contest between those who give and those who take; between those who see government as an endless source of goodies and those who understand we can't all ride in the wagon, leaving no one left to pull it.
Her "gimme, gimme" tirade will not win friends for the president. Indeed, it may cost him votes - and 3 million might swing the election one way or the other.
But let's take the lid off this "free phone" thing. Let's look more closely who are "givers" and who are "takers."
The program offering "Obamaphones" was actually begun 25 years ago by the Federal Communications Commission during the administration of a president named Ronald Reagan.
And the request for what started as a deeply discounted monthly service for poor folks did not - and this is important - come from poor people or any advocacy group for poor pople.
It came - you guessed it - from phone companies. The pitch was that portable phones had so much potential to save lives that America simply could not afford to limit cell service. Everybody should be able to dial 911.
Another pitch has been that "free phones" help people get off welfare because all job applications require a phone number.
And the rest of the story, also familiar, is that a well-intended, simple plan has blossomed and, according to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, "created perverse incentives for some carriers" and "invited fraud and abuse."
Unsubstantiated, as yet, is the presence of politics in the mix. There are some reports that, mysteriously enough, more "Obamaphones" are being passed out in battleground states - where the president needs to motivate voters - than in states where the president has a comfortable lead or, as in Mississippi, he is deemed too far behind to make such "vote-buying" necessary.
The program was initially dubbed "Lifeline" and funded by a discrete surcharge on the monthly statements of those who do pay cell bills.
The discrete charge now amounts to $1.75 billion collected from paying customers each year.
The actual phones are given to applicants by service providers who know a good thing when they see it. Indeed, any carrier will give any paying customer a free phone in exchange for a contract for a year or longer. So, do poor folks benefit from the handout? Sure. They get the free phones.
But so do all participating phone companies who get thousands of customers whose bills are paid in full without the expense of envelopes, stamps, posting payments and such. Pure profit. And this cash flow figures quite favorably into their corporate bottom lines and into dividends for their investors, many of which are pension funds that have been seeing losses.
It's cheap and easy to say the election will decide whether America's "givers" or America's "takers" emerge victorious. It only takes a moment to realize that the prancing woman is not alone in the "gimme" category. She's just more honest about it.
Government spending and government programs of all types and at all levels are deeply wired in to the national and global economy. Farmers would go belly up without subsidies and revenue from food purchased for federal programs. Doctors, clinics and hospitals would shut down without Medicare and Medicaid. We're all government-dependent.
The election might decide whether the trends of the past 50 years speed up or slow down. Stop the giveaways? Halt the prancing?
Not going to happen.
Charlie Mitchell is a Mississippi journalist. Write to him at Box 1, University, MS 38677, or email firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:387f99e6-4049-44e2-a855-3f1ef9598ee0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://djournal.com/view/full_story/20407784/article-OXFORD---A-video-on-the-Internet-featuring-a-prancing-woman-lavishing-praise-on-President-Barack-Obama-has-had-more-than-3?instance=special_coverage_bullets_right_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962457 | 807 | 1.679688 | 2 |
143rd Regiment Infantry
New York Volunteers
Civil War Newspaper Clippings
THE 143D REGIMENT
The latest authentic information from the 143d Regiment left them on transport
at Fortress Monroe, and about sailing for some unknown point—probably
A late Suffolk paper pays our boys the following high compliment:
The last few days here have been pregnant with events. Yesterday (Sunday) morning,
about 10 o'clock, Gen. Getty, in command of a division, moved upon what is
here known as the Petersburg Road, and after a stubborn resistance, drove the
enemy from their first line of rifle pits, and some three miles beyond. The "Rebs" contested
the ground inch by inch, but the rapid and exact firing of our artillery, under
command of Capt. Phineas Davis, 6th
Massachusetts Battery, and Lieut. Hasbrouck, 4th Regulars, (Howard's) proved
too much for them, and they fell back as stated. The conduct of the 103d and
143d New York Volunteers, who supported these batteries, is spoken of as beyond
praise. They behaved nobly.
THE 142d NEW YORK VOLUNTEERS ON THE MARCH.
Ogdensburg, N. Y., October 6.—The 142d regiment New York Volunteers left
this morning at 10 o'clock, with full ranks, via Rouse's Point and Lake Champlain
and the Hudson River railroad, for New York.
Colonel David P. Dewitt, of the 143d Regt., has resigned his command of that
regiment, on account of ill health, and his resignation has been accepted.
143d Regiment—Death of R. L. Tillotson, Esq.
We are indebted to the editor of the Watchman for the following items of news,
which will interest many of our readers:
Robt. L. Tillotson, Esq, of Co. A, 143d Regiment, N. Y. Vol., died at Nelson
Hospital, Va., on the 13th inst., of typhoid fever. He was taken there on the
The 143d left Yorktown a few days since. They moved by land up the Peninsula.
When last heard from they were 18 miles above Williamsburg.
—Col. D. P. Dewitt, of the 143d Sullivan) Regiment, has been compelled
to resign on account of ill-health.
David Fredmore, of Co. B, l43d Regt., died in hospital on the 1st inst. Mr.
F. was formerly a resident of Bethel.
Letter from Chaplain Gibbard—Strategy of Railroad Travel—Tobacco
vs. Ladies—Sightseeing in Washington—Curious Meteorological Facts—Interment
of Deceased Soldiers.
WASHINGTON, D. C., April 27th, '63.
MESSRS. EDITORS:—Having said farewell to my people at Dansviile, secured
the services of Rev. A. V. R. Abbott, of New York East Conference, as supply
satisfactory to the church—receiving a letter of releave both from P.
E. and Bishop Scott, and having removed my family to my father-in-law, at Rush,
and giving the Russians another slice from the gospel table, I took the cars
for Washington to enter upon the duties of the chaplaincy of the 143d Regiment,
N. Y. V. Fortune, gallantry, or impudence, I will not stop to decide which,
favored me in circumventing the practice, which has grown to the dignity of
a R. R. law on these Southern roads. At Elmira the cars for Baltimore are made
up of one well furnished ladies' car attached to a string of huge boxes, resembling
very much cattle cars with windows. On the platform of the ladies' car stood
an army sentinal, who, at the approach of a gentleman, bar rover, rowdy, street
loafer, or any thing looking like a man, cried out amid a flourish of arms, "Gentlemen
take the front cars." I looked into them and backed out, went into the
depot, found a lady with two good looking children, and having left my ladies
at home, determined to make an experiment. Found that the lady was traveling
to Washington. No gentleman accompanying her, engaged her in conversation.
As the crowd was dense, I purchased her tickets, checked her baggage, and interested
the children, when the welcome shout cam, "A1l aboard." I took one
of the children and motioned the others to follow. The guard saw me approaching,
and prepared himself to motion me into the "cattle cars," but before
the order was fully given he discovered the child by my side, and the mother
with the other child following, and undoubtedly tracing a strong family resemblance,
opened the door of the ladies’ car and politely said “pass in.” The
same strategy I practiced till we had made our last change for Washington.
The cause of this separation I understood to be, that in this country of tobacco,
where everybody raises it, of course to make it popular everybody must smoke
it also, and since they practice the latter to a most rigid slavery , and much
to the annoyance of the fairer sex, and, if I am any judge and have observed
correctly, to the annoyance of a sex equally as fair, though not so fairly
treated, the highest executive ability of which the R. R. authorities are capable,
has admitted a nuisance and reestablished a barbarism. But I have no reason
to complain, only, if I had the conductorship of the Southern cars, I would
do as our Northern roads do, peremptorily forbid smoking on the cars if it
damaged the tobacco market beyond recovery.
As soon as I had safely cleared myself of the runners, porters, grab-boys,
and every other pest that infest the depot at Washington, I took street cars
to the provost marshal’s office to secure a pass to the other side of
the Potomac. Having had a slight acquaintance with Gen. Martindale, while at
Rochester, and his headquarters being in the same building with those of the
Provost Marshal, I called on the general, and learned that my regiment, in
connection with a large force from about Washington, had been sent forward
Having therefore a few days to spend in Washington I improved them as far as
the mud and rain would allow to visit the public buildings. But previous to
this and as soon as I learned the departure of our Regiment, I cast about for
acquaintances with whom I could spend the time of my day. I soon bethought
me of Misses Mary Williams and Maria Halstead, formerly students and graduates
of the G. W. Seminary at Lima, N. Y. I found my friends without difficulty.
With Miss Halstead it was never my pleasure to have an acquaintance. She was
known to me only through other students, and being an old Lima student felt
a right to an acquaintance. Miss Williams I had known during her connection
with the same Institution as assistant teacher. Five years ago in connection
with Miss Halstead she came to this city by invitation from Prof. Lafayette
C. Loomis, an Alumni of Wesleyan Univerrsity, Middletown, Conn., and engaged
in teaching in the Lafayette Institute for young ladies which Prof. L. had
just opened. At present Prof. Loomis is connected with the War Department,
and the Institute is conducted by the lady teachers, the Professor having the
supervision and lecturing to the young ladies out of office hours. Loomis is
a gentleman of rare abilities, a ripe scholar, of fine tastes, and a thorough
disciplinarian. Any of our Colleges would be fortunate in securing his services.
It is impossible to give any fair description of the public buildings in any
ordinary letter, and then no description could ever answer the reality. As
with the Queen of Sheba and the magnificence and wisdom of Solomon we may hear
all, and read all both said and written relative to these grand structures
of the nation, and then be compelled on beholding them with our eyes to acknowledge
that "the half was never told." I doubt the beauty in ornament, the
art in paintings and sculpture, the granduer in design and construction, the
material in variety and elegance, everywhere to be seen in the Capitol, being
excelled on this continent. This is decidedly the finest structure in the city.
The visitor is held in admiration at every step of his progress. There is but
one criticism, and that is that many of its halls are narrow and dark. The
President's house, in architecture, is inferior. The famous east room is elegant
almost to excess, but illy constructed. It has but one main entrance, and often
at the President's levees and New Year's parties, the crowds that attend those
gatherings enter at the door, but pass out at window. Getting out of windows
don't look very civil in any house, much less in the President's of the United
States. In the green room there is nothing that markedly strikes the attention,
except its greenness. I was much pleased in the south yard, with the flowers
and shrubbery; and when I plucked a flower from the hedge to send to a dear
friend as a relic from the White House, I did not consider it theft, as what
I was examining belonged to the nation, and I counted myself in as a part of
At the Smithsonian Institution, among thousands of rare specimens in mineralogy,
zoology, botany, conchology, ornithology, snakeology, and every other conceivable
ology, I saw a living Salamander brought from Japan, the only living specimen
ever taken. Prof. Henry the living head of the Institution, is the oracle of
the city. His observations are too well known to need any comment in this correspondence.
Already have they resulted in great practical benefit to this, and other parts
of the country. Through, his meteorological observations, he has established
the fact that as the weather is in Indiana, so will it be in this locality
six hours hence. Prof. H. often avails himself of this discovery, once in particular
daring a course of lectures; The day, on which a certain lecture was to be
given in the evening, was exceedingly stormy. The lecture-going people anxiously
watched the clouds, and pray for fair weather, but the storm increased in fury.
Out came the evening papers and much to the disappointment of their readers,
a notice from Prof. Henry declared no postponement of the lecture, it would
certainly take place at the usual hour. But before that hour came, the sky
was clear, not a cloud darkened its face. Six hours before the lecture hour
Prof. H. had telegraphed his station at Indiana, to know what weather they
were having, and received in reply "pleasant," and though Washington
was at that time being drenched with storm, the Indiana reply was sufficient
grounds for his evening notice that the lecture would surely take place. But
still more practical are these observations in Boston harbor. Meteorological
observations have shown that as the weather is at Buffalo, so is it at Boston
six hours hence. The shore of the harbor for several miles has signals placed
on prominent locations, which are visible to ships several miles out of harbor.
When, therefore, indications of a storm are apparent at Boston and the merchants'
vessels are several miles on their course, Buffalo is telegraphed to ascertain
the state of the weather at that time, and if an answer is returned that a
terrible storm is raging, the signals are hoisted; and if the vessels are but
five miles out of harbor, and have fifteen miles to make the next harbor, the
commanders know it is wisdom to turn about and put in. Prof. Henry is of the
opinion that the origin of storms is near Behring Straits, at the Polar sea;
that they proceed in current across the Rocky Mountains to Texas and the Gulf,
and then sweep in an easterly direction across the continent. To ascertain
the correctness of this opinion, he has agents in the northern localities making
meteorological observations and submitting
the results to him.
It is to be hoped that still greater practical use will be made of these observations,
and the laws adduced from them. I have already strung out this scribbling at
too great a length, and if you will retain your patience for one more item,
I will have done. What I have now to say will, undoubtedly cheer and comfort
thousands of mothers and families in the loyal North.
What I refer to is in relation to the burial of our brave soldiers, who die
in our hospital stations in and about Washington. A contract has recently been
completed between the Commissary Department and a civilian of this city, which
secures to each of the deceased soldiers an honorable and decent interment.
Some of the previsions of the contract are, that there shall be furnished a
coffin, which shall be stained the usual color, lined on the inside, a pillow
furnished for the head of the corpse to rest upon, the coffin drawn in a hearse
which shall not proceed faster than a walk, upon the coffin to be placed the
American flag, or a pall, carriages accompanying the hearse, one of which shall
carry the Chaplain, who shall conduct the religious services at the grave;
the grave shall be two feet deeper than ordinary graves; it shall be covered
while the attendants are present; they shall be buried at the "Old Soldiers
Home," and but one shall be buried at a time. All this for six dollars.
I feel confident that thousands of desolate, bereaved families, will be gladdened
by the announcement of this contract. Those who are not able to pay the expenses
of embalming their dead, and having them expressed to their homes, have at
least the consolation that they are honorably interred here.
I hope hereafter to keep you informed as to the doings of our Regiment, and
what other news I can gather. ISAAC R. GIBBARD,
Chaplain 143d Reg., N. Y. S. Y.
Gallant Conduct of the 143d Regiment, Col. Boughton—Death of Col. Ringgold
and Chaplain Butler—Letter from Chaplain Gibbard.
SUFFOLK, May 4, 1863.
EDITOR NORFOLK UNION :—The last few days here have been pregnant with
events. Yesterday (Sunday) morning about 10 o'clock, General Getty in command
of a division, moved upon what is here known as the Petersburg road, and after
a stubborn resistance, drove the enemy from their first line of rifle pits
and some three miles beyond. The "Rebs" contested the ground inch
by inch, but the rapid and exact firing of our artillery under command of Capt.
Phineas T. Davis, 6th Massachusetts Battery, and Lieut. Hasbrouck 4th Regulars
(Howard's) proved too much for them, and they fell back as stated. The conduct
of the 103d and 143d New York Volunteers who supported their batteries, is
spoken of as beyond praise. They behaved nobly. In this connection it grieves
me to say that Col. Ringgold of the former Regiment was mortally wounded while
heroically leading his men into action. I am unable to state the exact number
of the killed and wounded on our side, but if any reliance can be placed on
the statements of deserters and natives, the rebel loss greatly exceeded ours.
Providence Church, five miles beyond Suffolk, which was used by the enemy as
a hospital, is said to have been filled with the wounded and dying, The new
made graves in the immediate vicinity of the Church corroborates this statement.
EDITORS OF EXPRESS:—The above is copied from the "Norfolk and Portsmouth
Union," and as it refers to our Regiment, I send it to you for publication.
The 143d Regiment N. Y. V. is now, and has been for some time past commanded
by Lieut. Col Horace Boughton, formerly of the old 13th Regiment, N. Y. V.
Col. Boughton gallantly led his regiment in the action of Sunday referred to
above. The enemy was driven from their position and on the day following made
a precipitate retreat towards Richmond.
I visited the several hospitals where our wounded men were brought during the
day, and though many were very severely wounded and the operations must have
been exceedingly painful, yet they uttered no complaints whatever.
The 103d was very severely cut up, losing their Colonel and fourteen officers
in killed and wounded. The sharpshooters would not aim at a private—but
when they spied the double round button and shoulder straps, their aim was
determined immediately. Hence a greater proportion of officers fell, during
the action of the day. Rev. Mr. Butler, a graduate of Yale College, and Chaplain
of the 25th Regiment N. Y. V., was shot through the abdomen while giving water
to his men. He was much beloved by his regiment and greatly lamented in his
fall. He died the day following the battle, after great suffering. Col. Ringgold
of the 103d is spoken of as an officer of high merit, brave and noble. I stood
beside him when he expired. His body was brought into the Methodist Church
at Suffolk which is used as a hospital. The last words he uttered were a request
for something to put him asleep to east him of the severe pain he was enduring.
The privates were mostly wounded in the arms and legs. The officers were shot
through the vitals. I should judge from what I saw, our loss must have been
about 60 in killed and wounded. Since that action we have moved to West point,
on the York river, and are about two miles above the junction of the Pamunkey
and Mattapony. Truly yours,
ISAAC R. GIBBARD,
Chaplain 143d Reg't N. Y. S. V.
Camp 143d Reg., Warrenton Junction, Va.,
XI Army Corps, 3d Division, 1st Brigade,
Army of the Potomac, July 27, 1863.
James E. Quinlan, Esq.,--Dear Sir,
As your readers will be interested in hearing of the whereabouts of the 143d
Regiment, I conclude to drop you a few hasty lines.
We left White House, Va., on the 8th day of July, 1863, with orders to move
to the Army of the Potomac. We marched to Yorktown by the same route that we
came to the Peninsula, the details of which I gave in a former letter.
At Yorktown we took transports for Washington. As it was expected that our
army would be engaged before we reached, they hurried us along by railroad
to Frederick City, in Maryland.—From Frederick we marched to Middleton,
Boonesboro, and other villages, and through the finest country I ever saw,
until we joined Gen. Meade's army.—Scarcely had we reached the breastworks,
before it was rumored that Lee had crossed the Potomac; and soon the story
was confirmed, the whole of his army having crossed the river at 10 o'clock
A.M. of the 14th, at or near Williamsport. We were at once ordered on, and
continued the march until night, and in the morning returned by the same route
to Middleton. In passing through Hagerstown, I was very much surprised as well
as delighted to meet the Rev. W. C. Stilt, formerly connected with the Presbyterian
church in Monticello. I could stop but a moment, as our column did not halt.
He described the feeling of the place to be strongly Union, and was very indignant
at the treatment the citizens of Hagerstown had received from the rebels. Enclosed
I send you a paper handed to me, which demonstrates the feelings of the clergy
From Middleton we marched to Berlin, a small town on the Potomac, where we
crossed on pontoons. It seemed again like home to get into Virginia.—From
Berlin we marched to Middleburgh, then to New Baltimore, and now at Warrenton
Junction, a small place on the Rail Road running from Alexandria to Richmond.
We are said to be about thirty-five miles from Washington, seven from Manassas,
and about twenty from Fredericksburgh. The boys are worn out by our fatiguing
marches, as well as incensed at Lee's escape. It is perhaps improper that I
should in any manner reflect upon the course of the military authorities in
permitting Lee to escape, and when he had crossed the river, in not following
him up. With a victorious as well as a reinforced army, it seems certain that
an attack made upon them on the 13th inst. could not but have been crowned
with success. If Gen. McClellan was censurable, as his traducers claim, in
allowing the rebels to escape after the fight of Antietam last year, how much
greater must be the blunder committed by the military authorities, in allowing
Lee to escape now. History alone will unfold why a well inaugurated campaign
against a weakened and demoralized foe, has thus proved a failure. To-morrow
we are again to march. Already the sound of bugles denote the advance of cavalry
and artillery, and we must follow, where, none of us know.
Last night our Regiment was favored with a mail, the first that has been received
since the 8th instant, and all day the boys have been eagerly devouring the
messages from loved ones at home.
The sad intelligence of the death of John W. Carpenter, of Co. A, and Marcus
L. Brown, of Co. B, has just reached us. They both died at Hospital—I
think at Fortress Monroe. The long and tedious marches we have been called
upon to endure have already told the strongest constitution, and the result
is that our ranks have been decimated. By the Adjutant's report this morning,
I see that we number for duty only 495 men.
The Eleventh Army Corps, to which we are assigned is commanded by Maj.
Geo. Howard, the division by Gen. Carl Shurz, and the Brigade by Gen. Tyndale.
It is principally German. Ours is the only American Regiment in the Brigade.
This Corps, you may remember, immortalized itself at Chancellorsville by a
famous skedaddle; but retrieved its name at Gettysburgh. It was formerly commanded
by Gen. Seigal, to whom the Germans are very much attached, has been through
nearly all the battles, and after the Gettysburgh fight, numbered but about
five thousand effective men. Since then, by being reinforced, they number some
10,000 to 15,000.
Captain Watkins of the 143d Regiment, arrived in town on Monday
NELSON HOSPITAL, FORT YORKTOWN,
Va., July 11, 1863.
The 143d N. Y. Vols. left this place for Washington yesterday afternoon.—
They are still in Gordon's Division, 4th Army Corps; and the whole corps have
embarked on board of transports and are bound for Washington, I believe.—Below
I give a correct list of all the sick left by them in this Hospital. There
have been no deaths from the regiment here of late.
J. M. Hoyt, Co. E., Acting Nurse; C. H. Everett, Co. C., Ward Master; Geo.
H. Everett, Co. C., diarrhea; J. S. Brewster, Co. G., remittent fever; Ira
Serrine, Co. E., remittent fever; R. Young, Co. H., debility; Andrew Mc-Curd,
Co. A., nurse; Samuel Lord, Co. A., typhoid fever; W. J. Fraser, Co. B., remittent
fever; Jefferson Harding, Co. D., remittent fever; George Myers, Co. D., remittent
fever; Reuben A. Lewis, Co. C., remittent fever; Joseph White, Co. B., remittent
These are all doing well with the exception of two or three.
A. P. CHILDS, Hospital Steward.
How the Soldiers Talk.
From a private letter written by T. C. Van Siclen, formerly an apprentice in
this office, we make the following extracts:
CAMP 143d REGIMENT, N. Y. Vol.,
NEAR WARRENTON JUNCTION, Va.,
August. 10, 1863.
* * * * "We get the mail quite regular now. At one time we did not get
any for two weeks. I am well—have not been sick. The health of the Regiment
is very good, considering the hard marches we have had. * * *
Wm. Fisher is at the Convalescent Camp quite sick; John and Arch. Allen have
gone to the Hospital; the Cantrell boys are well; Tom Bates is well, but detailed
on duty in a Hospital near Alexandria; Chas. Smith and Orrin Smith are in the
We are guarding the railroad at present. There are lots of guerrillas * *
Have they drafted in Sullivan yet? The Copperheads are making quite a time
in York State. The soldiers curse them beyond measure. There is not a soldier
here who would not shoot one of them as soon as he would a rebel in arms. *
* * Things begin to be a little brighter--the day is dawning. I hope the time
will soon come when we will be needed here no more, and can return to our homes
* * * I have seen some of the rebel barbarities. If their cause was ever so
just it could not prosper in such hands. If I live, I am a soldier as long
as this trouble continues. I could not stay at home while such cold blooded
murders are being perpetrated in our once happy country. As our army was coming
here, some rebels took three brothers to the woods—asked them to join
the Confederate army, which they refused to do. One was shot dead, the second
was so badly wounded that he lived but a short time, and the third is getting
well, although a ball and some buck-shot had been fired into the back of his
head and neck. That is the way Union people are treated down here.
It is very warm here at present. We have to drill twice a day. * * Seth
Terry is clerk for Gen. Howard.
T. VAN SICLEN.
From the 143d Regiment.
LETTERS FROM CAPR. DECKER.
[From the Ellenville Journal.]
CAMP 143d N. Y. V.,
Under Pt. Lookout, Tenn., Nov. 1, 1863.
* * I am quite well, and can complain of nothing but the little food we get,
and the hard labor we have to perform. For two days our regiment has been on
duty, night and day, on one quarter rations of food; and for two days previously
we had none at all, on account of the bad condition of the roads from the late
heavy rains. During those two days we lived on parched corn, which we gathered
from the fields.
Our being short of rations is due chiefly to the fact that the rebels until
yesterday held the Tennessee River, and they had previously destroyed all railroad
communication when they retreated from Bridgeport.
On the 28th of October we left Bridgeport with the 11th and 12th Corps, and
arrived at this place on the afternoon of the 29th. The same night we were
attacked by a rebel force of about 11, 000 infantry. The two corps were soon
got in line of battle, and at once a fight commenced by moonlight, which lasted
until 4 o'clock in the morning, when the firing ceased, the rebels driven from
their position, having fled to the mountains. We charged their rifle pits repeatedly
and completely whipped them. Out of our regiment six were wounded, one of whom
has since died. Our loss and that of the enemy was equal, amounting to some
four hundred killed and wounded. We captured about 100 prisoners.
I was not with the regiment in the fight, but received my full share of attention
from the flying bullets nevertheless, having that night been placed in charge
of the picket line put out.—Along this line it was the main part of the
fighting occurred. It was wholly a musketry and bayonet fight, and probably
the biggest one fought in this war during those hours when all should be hushed
in sleep. Having driven the enemy from this point we gained possession of the
Tennessee River to within six miles of Chattanooga, and yesterday boats arrived
with provisions, and half rations were issued, which is more than the army
at this point has received since the Chickamauga fight.
Since Gen. Grant assumed command of this army it has been more than ever active,
and points of great strategic importance have been gained. Grant and
Hooker passed through our camp day before yesterday.
Point Lookout is the strongest point held by the enemy in these parts. It is
a knob on Lookout Mountains, which are about the height of the Shawangunk range,
and the Point another just such work of nature as "Sam's Point" only
this faces to the north and from its crest frown tiers of cannon which have
been unceasing in their compliments to us in the valley. We lie in a valley
within 1 3-4 miles of the summit of the Point and our camp has been shelled
every day; the majority of these shells either fall short or go screaming harmlessly
over our heads. Many however fall directly in our camp. One burst yesterday
directly over us, and a piece weighing about three quarters of a pound struck
just beside my second lieutenant. So far only one man has been hit, receiving
a wound in the hand from a piece of shell.
The enemy is exceedingly vigilant on the Point, and clusters of soldiers, working
parties, moving bodies of troops, wagon trains, &c., are instantly discovered
and made aware of the existence of rifled twelve-pounders by the whistling
of the shells about our heads. To avoid these marked attentions as far as possible,
we place our guards by night, and do the principal part of our digging under
cover of the darkness.
All manner of rumors are afloat here —one to the effect that we shall
speedily be attacked by Bragg, others that his army is in full retreat on Atlanta.
What may prove to be the truth I cannot tell, of course; of one thing you may
be assured—this army will never be driven from the position it now holds.—On
the contrary there is every reason to believe we shall soon possess ourselves
of the enemy's position. There is no doubt in my mind that another terrible
battle will soon be fought here, and one that will effectually decide the fate
of Tennessee. G. H. D.
November 7, 1863.
Communication on the Tennessee is established, and we and drawing full rations
of hard bread, coffee and bacon. I have not tasted a vegetable, except a
handful of onions, since, the 1st of October. This morning I just came off
picket, having been out twenty-four hours.—Day before yesterday we
extended our picket line about four hundred yards farther to the front, to
the brink of a stream about the size of the Beerkill, only deeper. This move
brought on a fire between our own and the enemy's pickets, which lasted about
five minutes. We lost no men, the enemy two. We occupy the west and they
the east bank of the above mentioned stream, being apart in some places and
not more than twenty paces, and at others sixty. Yesterday afternoon I visited
the picket line of which I was in charge and saw their pickets and some others
straggling about without arms. This morning they threw some tobacco over
the steam and chatted to our boys a little. Yesterday three hundred deserters
from the enemy came over and gave themselves up.
Direct 143d N. Y. Vols., 3d Division 11th Amy Corps, Department of the
GEO. H. DECKER.
From the 143d Regiment.
[From the Ellenville Journal.]
Letter from Dr. Craft.
Camp of the 143d Regiment, N. Y. S. V.,
Lookout Valley, Tenn., January 12, 1864.
MR. EDITOR:—Excuse my presumption in asking a place in your paper for
this article, but as it may be of interest to those in your section who have
friends in the Regiment, and as yours is the only paper I take in the army,
I justify my claims to occupy a small space in your columns. Our Regiment is
in an alarmingly unhealthy condition. Day after day the destroying Angel continues
to visit our already thinned ranks, and one after another our bravest and once
most robust boys, are numbered among the dead. Chronic diarrhoea is the prevailing
disease. We have had since we came into this Department, upwards of seventy
deaths from this direful malady, and probably before this article reaches your
paper, there may be added to this number ten or fifteen more of our bravest
and best boys, who are now tottering on the verge of the grave. The boys are
very much depressed in spirits, which makes them less able to resist the onward
coarse of the diarrhoea. We report in the morning, at Surgeon's call, eighty
unfit for duty, but there are actually some one hundred and seventy-six suffering
in the Regiment from the same disease, but some so slightly that they continue
to duty until they get alarmed about themselves, and are obliged to report.
We have besides this number, 184 in the different military hospitals, making
in the aggregate the enormous sick report of Three hundred and Sixty. The aggregate
strength of the Regiment, that is counting those present and absent, is 680,
so you see at a glance that over half the regiment is suffering from sickness.
Upon post mortem examination of those who have died of the disease, it has
been found that the mucous membrane of the bowels is thickened, congested and
ulcerated, and tubercular deposits are frequently found, the same as occur
in the bowels of marasmatic children, commonly called consumption of the bowels.—The
remedies recommended for this condition are a change of climate, and a confinement
to milk or vegetable diet. The friends of the regiment, will undoubtedly be
glad to learn that Colonel Boughton, who always has been indefatigable in his
efforts to promote the welfare of the regiment, is making every effort to have
this brought about, and they may rest assured that nothing on his part will
be left undone to alleviate the suffering of the afflicted. From the encouragement
the Colonel is meeting with, I should not be surprised if the Regiment was
either sent home, furloughed for a short time, or sent north to garrison some
place. The causes of the sickness and mortality in our Regiment will, I do
not doubt, be attributed by many, to the unhealthiness of this climate, but
such an opinion would be in a measure, erroneous. The climate of Tennessee
is as healthy as any in the United States, but while making this statement
I do not deny that the locality in which the army is encamped is made artificially
unhealthy. The hundreds of dead and putrifying horses and mules that lie unburied,
and strew the ground for miles around, and offal from cattle killed for the
army, combine to render the locality peculiarly adapted to diarrhoea, dysentery
and malarias fevers. But this is by no means the primary cause of our unhealthy
condition. You are aware, I doubt not,
that our Regiment was enrolled in a high salubrious district--indeed as salubrious
as any section in the whole North, where malarias are almost entirely unknown.
When we were organized and sent to the field, we were sent to Washington, where
the climate is termed villainous by the resident physicians. From Washington
we were sent to Suffolk in the southern part of Virginia, a still worse climate.
From Suffolk we were ordered to West Point, Va., at the confluence of the Pammunky
and Mattapony Rivers. Here the seeds of disease and death were sown. The climate
of this place is as unhealthy as the climate along the coast of the Mediterranean
Sea—where the malaria floats as a halo over its victims—indeed
this place is so notoriously malarious, that the rebel journals predicted that
sickness would soon thin our ranks, sand-flies fatten on our carcasses, and
we would be compelled to abandon the place.—Their predictions were too
true, for before we had been here three weeks over half our regiment was prostrated
by fever, dysentery and diarrhoea. From this place we were ordered back to
Yorktown, and from Yorktown to the Peninsula. The unhealthiness of this latter
place is too familiar with every reader in your section to need description
by me. Suffice it to say, that in these unhealthy localities were sown the
seeds of disease, which are now ripening into sickness and death, and threatening
to annihilate the Regiment.
Ass't Surgeon, 143d Regt. N. Y. V.
ALBANY, MONDAY, OCT. 24, 1864.
Lieut. Col. Strain.--We have learned with regret that our brave young townsman,
Lieut. Col. Alexander Strain, One Hundred and Forty-third Regiment, N. Y. V.,
was wounded in the right arm while gallantly performing his portion of the
glorious achievement of the 19th inst., in the Valley of the Shenandoah. We
hope the hurt is not a serious one, for the country can ill afford to lose
the services of men of the stamp of Lieut. Col. Strain. By his bravery and
soldierly bearing, "Alex." Has risen from the rank of Adjutant to
his present position; and his superiors, we understand, have lately recommended
him to the proper authorities for the Colonelcy of his Regiment. "His
meed hath brought him honor."
[From the Republican.]
THE 143D REGIMENT.
We give below a list of the brave men of the 143d Regiment who have been killed
or wounded in battle, and also the names of those who made the march with Sherman
from Atlanta to the sea coast,—the greatest undertaking ever made in
military history on this Continent. Each of these brave men deserve more than
regal honors, and will be long remembered by a grateful country which they
have loved and served so well.
We should be glad to have a like list of the killed and wounded in the 56th
Regiment, and those of other regiments:
List of Officers and Enlisted Men,
Killed and Wounded of the 143d Regiment,
N. Y. Vols., —Infantry.
Joseph B. Taft, Lt.-Col., killed before Chattanooga, Tenn., Nov. 24, 1863.
William Hill, Corp., Co. C, wounded at Lookout Valley, Tenn., Oct. 29, 1863.
Charles H. Simpson, Private, Co. C, wounded at Lookout Valley, Tenn., Oct,
Benjamin Conklin, Private, CO. C, wounded at Lookout Valley, Tenn., Oct, 29,
Lewis H. Short, Private, Co. F, wounded at Lookout Valley, Tenn., Oct. 29,
Horace D. Teller, Private, Co. G, killed at Lookout Valley, Tenn., Oct. 29,
George S. Cain, Corp., wounded at Lookout Valley, Oct. 29, 1863.
Marcellus Dickinson, Private, Co. G, wounded by shell at Lookout Valley, Nov.
William H. Brewster, Private, Co. G, wounded before Chattanooga, Tenn., Nov.
Samuel Lord, Sergeant, Co. A, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864—slight.
Robert Drennon, Private, Co. a, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,—flesh,
Scipio Crosby, Private, Co. B, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864.--leg,
William H. Newman, Private, Co. C, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--head,
George W. Cross, Private, Co. C, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864.--thigh,
Reuben A. Lewis, Private, Co. C, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--breast,
Selar B. Decker, Corp., Co. E, killed at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864.
John W. Pierce, Private, Co. E, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--knee,
William Murray, Private, Co. F, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--shoulder,
George H. Anderson, Serg't, Co. F, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--wrist,
William Rose, Private, Co. G, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--arm, severe.
Nathan M. Thomas, Corp., Co. G, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,--leg,
Jerry Crary, Serg't, Co. H, wounded at Resaca, Ga., May 15, 1864,—leg,
Harrison Conklin, Private, Co. I., wounded at Resaca, Ga., by shell, May 15,
David Darling, Private, Co. A., wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,—side,
Edward R. Cantrell, Private, Co. A., wounded near Dallas, Ga., June 3, 1864,—foot,
John McWilliams, Private, Co. A, wounded near Dallas, Ga., June 8, 1864,--foot,
Isaac Morgan, Private, Co. C, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,—thigh,
James D. Gorton, Private, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1884,—thigh,
George W. Cross, Private, Co. C, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,-thigh,
Luther G. Bunnell, Corp., Co. D, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,--foot,
James W. Davis, Private, Co. D, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,--head,
Edwin Fralick, Private, Co. D, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,--shoulder,
John R. Groo, Lieut., Co. D, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, l864,--neck,
William Traviser, Private, Co. E, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864.
William Davis, Co. E, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 24, 1864,—head, slight.
George W. Parker, Co. F, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,—arm.
John Long, Co. F, wounded near Resaca, Ga., May 16, 1864,—hand, severe.
Verdine H. Miller, Co. G, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,—leg,
James Brown, Co. G, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864,—hand, severe.
Joseph A. Lent, Co. K, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864.—face,
Burrough P. Williams, Co. K, wounded near Dallas, Ga., May 25, 1864.—head,
William M. Ratcliff, Adjutant, killed at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Peter L. Waterbury, 1st Lieut., Co. E, Mortally wounded at Peach Tree Ridge,
Ga., July 20 '64.
Amos P. Akins, Serg't., Co. A., killed at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Philo Buckley, Serg't., Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Frederick W. Burns, Serg't., Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July
Thomas H. Litts, Corp. Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
*John M. Lounsbury, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July
Adam Lohman, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Thomas Bates, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
*Peter Van Orden, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Joseph J. Beebe, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
*John McWilliams, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
R. W. Purvis, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Nathaniel V. Lent, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Gilbert I. Young, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Lewis J, Kauise, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Edwin J. Everdon, Private, Co. A, killed at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Theodore Van Sielan, Private, Co. A, killed at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July
Edward B. Cantrell, Private, Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July
George Young, 1st Lieut., Co. A, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Gustis Rose, Corp., Co. B, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
John H. Jaycox, Private, Co. B, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Charles H. Decker, Private, Co. B, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
McKendree W. Dodge, Serg't, Co. C, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Gilbert B. Lawrence, Private, Co. C, Mortally wounded at Peach Tree Ridge,
Ga., July 20, 1864.
John Houghtaling, Private, Co. D, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Aaron Hoagland, 1st Serg't., Co. F, mortally wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga.,
July 20, 1864.
George W. Miller, Corp., Co. F, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
John Wingert, Private, Co. F, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
George Murray, Corp., Co. F, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Andrew Hanschen, Private, Co. C, killed at Peach Tree Ridge, July 20, 1864.
Robert S. Jacoby, Private, Co. F, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Charles H. Baker, Private, Co. G, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Rufus W. Porter, 1st Sergt., Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July
Andrew Stickles, Corp., Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Seymore R. Falkerson, Private, Co. H, mortally wounded at Peach Tree Ridge,
Ga., July 20, 1864.
Amos W. Chapman, Private, Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Charles G. Reese, Corp., Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Aaron Dudley, Private, Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Jonathan French, Private, Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
Selah Atwell, Private, Co. H, mortally wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July
John Grant, Private, Co. H, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
William M. Roe, Corp., Co. I, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Albert A. Kizer, Private, Co. L, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20,
David N. Dibble, Corp., Co. K, killed at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
Elias B. Hill, Private, Co. K, wounded at Peach Tree Ridge, Ga., July 20, 1864.
John Akers, Corp., Co. K, wounded before Atlanta, Ga., July 28, 1864.
Aaron Loomis, Private, Co. D, wounded before Atlanta, Ga., July 28, 1864.
Richard Gould, Private. Co. G, wounded before Atlanta, Ga., July 28, 1864.
John Pringle, Private, Co. D, wounded before Atlanta, Ga., Aug. 8, 1864.
Lawrence D. Smith, Private, Co. I, killed in skirmish before Atlanta, Ga.,
July 30, 1864.
Jacob Sarine, Private, Co. E, wounded in skirmish before Atlanta, Ga., Aug.
William H. Yeomans, Private, Co. B, wounded at Atlanta, Ga., Oct. 17, 1864.--accidentally
while on foraging expedition.
Headquarters, 143d Regiment, N. Y. V. Infantry,
Station near Savannah, Ga., Jan. 18, 1865.
HEZEKIAH WATKINS, Lt.-Col. Com'dg.
Names of Officers and Enlisted Men of the 143d N. Y. Vols., who were in the
Campaign from Atlanta to Savannah, Ga.:
FIELD AND STAFF.
Hezekiah Watkins, Lieut.-Colonel.
John Higgins, Major.
Rensselaer Hammond, Adjutant.
Edwin C. Howard, R. Q. M.
David Matthews, Surgeon.
William H. Stewart, Assistant Surgeon.
William T. Morgan, Ser'gt-Major.
Seneca W. Perry, Q. M. Sergeant.
George Sturdevant, Com. Sergeant.
August Rambour, Principal Musician.
Charles J. McPherson, do
Wm T Young Capt
Samuel Lord Sergeant
Thos H Litts do
Geo R Wright do
Wm H Myers do
A C Allen Private
W C Allen do
Wm H Ashton do
Jas L Brown do
John Black do
T O Connor do
O F Corby do
Ed Casterline do
E Drennan do
Joseph Pierce 1st Lieut
Wm Laraway Corporal
H M Krum do
G M Atkins do
W D Myers do
Moses Young do
Henry Dice Private
S J Gregory do
C S Hollis do
E Houston do
J Hadden do
J W Joscelyn do
David H Keeler do
Henry Laraway do
James Lord do
Thos. Newman Private
Louis Richards do
A W Smith do
Geo W Travis do
Chas Wright do
Bailey A Keeler do
Chas A Bailey do
Joseph Cammer do
John Cantrell do
Thomas Cantrell do
Abraham Cox do
Geo D Eldridge do
Herman Yorke do
Samuel J Weller do
James Price do
Levi Robertson do
Tobias Sheeley, do
Hezekiah Wood do
William Smith do
H F Taggett do
John Thompson do
D W Whiston do
Peter A Fisher do
Wm J Fisher do
M Laraway do
Wm McMillen do
Geo W Stratton do
Seth A Terry do
Isaac Jelliff 1st Lieut.
David A Wasim Serg't
Renwick Brown do
Robert Cantrell do
Phillip Robinson Corp
Benj F Allyn Musician
U M Brodhead Private
C Bollman do
E Conklin do
A Cromwell do
S H Divine do
Jas Furguson do
Geo W Haines do
Joseph Joiner do
Geo A Kent do
Burr S Kent do
Jacob Kent do
Charles Kent do
Daniel L Kinnie do
James D Morris do
J L Mc Intyre do
George Ralston do
Orrin Travis do
George B Watte do
Rufus Palmer do
James Smith do
Joseph Wright do
John Weber do
Wm R Bennett Captain
Bruce Elmore Serg't
Geo V Mannett do
Henry Eberline do
John W Darbee do
James C Dekay Corporal
A J Coddington do
George Atwell do
Charles Wicks do
W H Newman do
Wm B Brown Private
Asa A Bennett do
Wm P Bennett do
M Coddington do
J Crossman do
S L Dollinay do
C Darbee do
F Denmann do
J G Denniston do
George Furch do
J C Vredenburgh do
H Whittaker do
A A Brown do
Wm Finkle do
J T Gorton do
A Gardner do
J Hornbeck do
G W Hood do
F. Hitt do
P E Lawrence do
W B Lewis do
J E Leslie do
R A Lewis do
James Low do
L Matthews do
R Powell do
O D Rowe do
J W Stuart do
A E Swarthout do
C J Stratton do
Peter G Tripp do
B Terwilliger do
Dewitt C Sprague do
G W Upham do
G W Van Wagner do
L N Stanton Captain
DeWitt Apgar 1st Lieut.
W A Bennett Sergeant
P A Weaver do
D Haliday do
Samuel Merus do
Geo V Order Corporal
T Deschner do
C Fralick do
Henry Shaw do
Albert Bennett Private
Wm Berry do
H Cornelius do
F Conklin do
Wm Crance do
Jas W Davis do
Elias Depew do
J Haughtailing do
J C Holley do
C Hendershott do
N C Johnson do
A S Jacobs do
J H Matthews do
Barney Mellon do
W McWilliams do
George Myers do
Chester Morgan do
C B Personias do
Aaron Poyer do
Chas Randolph do
J H Stewart do
Chas Schyver do
George Trew do
O V Valkenbergh do
Nelson White do
A Breitenbucher do
Edwin Curtis do
John Collins do
A B Havens do
*C Layton do
Lewis Stevens do
Timothy Turney do
T Slocum do
Samuel Wood do
* Captured on March to Savannah, Dec., 9, 1864.
J F Anderson Captain
C A Smith 1st Lieut.
J A Lichenberg 1st Serg't
F F Bennett Sergeant
A A Race do
M W Race Corporal
E Schoonmaker do
H Adams do
H J Reynolds do
R Pollock Wagoner
I J Bennett Private
Jacob Bennett do
T Barber do
C L Breece do
Elisha Clark do
Miles Clark do
J Cuddington do
Wm Dunlap do
Wm Davis do
Chas DeGroot do
M B Galloway do
S S Graham do
J L Knapp do
D W Masten do
H C McLaughlin do
P Mc Govern do
Samuel Reed do
Lewis Skinner do
G W Scott do
T Skinner do
S C Shaw do
L W Tarket do
A Terwilliger do
J S Wade do
E H Pinney Captain
Dwight Divine 1st Lieut.
Geo Anderson 1st Serg't.
J M benedict Corporal
G Swarthout do
A Blackman do
G W Parker do
J Bugebee Wagoner
John Briner Private
F A Biffer do
Fred Birri do
A Brady do
W H Brown do
O A Baird do
E R Cook do
Henry Coons do
J De Witt do
A H Ferdon do
Olando Fuller do
Chas Hardie do
N Huber do
Ulrick Huber do
J D Ferdon do
David Fraser Serg't
J S Beattie do
Geo Albee Corporal
Lewis Hitt Private
Charles Jackson do
T Lied do
Wm Mitchell do
John Priestly do
James Rose do
Wm Rose do
Caleb Rose do
J Trimper do
A J Thompson do
H Van Arx do
P Van Tassell do
H Yankee do
Granger Hill do
John Hoffer do
E A Hansie do
L Siebecker do
Henry Miller Corporal
J A Conklin Private
B Reynolds Captain
R W Hardenbergh 1st Lt
Peter Kellan 1st Serg't
T Delaney Sergeant
M Chandler do
D Johnson do
A P Budd Corporal
T Doolittle do
L Tompkins do
C S McWilliams Musician
S Allen Private
T E Boyle do
J H Babcock do
P C Billings do
C Carpenter do
J Cramer do
A W Chandler do
J W Clark do
W Cook do
J Davis do
D Corton do
A B Hull do
J Hazen do
RC Hendrickson do
J P Hosie do
W Knapp do
S Near do
G W Osterhout do
W Robertson do
H Turner do
W H Reynolds do
C J Shields do
J Gorton do
S Laning captured on march to Savannah Dec. 9th
G H Decker Captain
A H Brown 2d Lt
C S Fisk Sergeant
W D Annis Corporal
J H Grant do
A Murray do
S Armstrong Private
I Brace do
H Bardon do
S Barnhart do
W Bradley do
G W Burton do
E H Baker do
G W Benson do
J H Benton do
G Barnhart do
G H Caulkins do
L Conklin do
J Caulkins do
W H Campbell do
M Conklin do
T D Collins do
G Clark do
W M Rose do
J E Shafer do
S Sprague do
C Sheeley do
S Slater do
W Smith do
H Ward Sergeant
W Cole Corporal
M Decker do
G W Decker Private
G M Ellis do
W Force do
W Gord do
S W Gillet do
E H Huntington do
S H Stevens do
H Hector do
B Kniffen do
J D Lair do
J Lewis do
S Lewis do
J W Morse do
F Moffatt do
E McKellips do
J B Marvine do
O Porter do
H E Rose do
S B Rose do
G Rose do
G Rose do
C C Whipple do
A Woodword do
G Waring do
J Ward do
E C Young do
H Marvine Captain
W Hill 1st Lt
H H Hemingway 1st Sergt
E Hilderbrant Sergt
O A Bates Corporal
L Robinson do
C Arnold Private
W Baldwin do
G R Ballard do
D D Davenport do
W Edsall do
W Fisher do
C Hemingway do
J Kyzer do
D Nash do
B P Starr do
J W Shafer do
H Shaw do
G Woodmancy do
P E Palen 1st Lt
A B Gordon 1st Sergeant
D A Bedford Sergeant
G W Davenport Corp
W Bessmer do
P Marrold do
W H Hill Musician
J Brining Private
G L Bamper do
J R Calkins do
J Hill do
S Keesler do
C B Layton do
C Lent do
M McGuey do
H Lilly do
R Ferguson do
B D Dexter do
C L Baird Sergeant
W V Woodruff Corp
W Keesler do
C Osterhout Private
J Powell do
J Pendergrass do
J H Quick do
H VanWagner do
L Swalm do
B Boults do
P Cornell do
P Conner Jr do
J H Hendrickson do
J A Foster do
H L Miller do
A Sutton do
W Tyler do
P Muck captured on march to Savannah Nov. 19th.
Names of Officers and Enlisted men who remained on account of wounds.
P Buckley 1st Sergeant D Darling Private
F W Burns Private L J Kanise do
T Bates do N V Lent do
E R Cantrell do A Lohman do
J W Lounsbery do G W Purvis do
J H Jaycox Corporal S L Crosby Private
C D Decker Private W H Yyeomans do
J R Groe 1st Lt Mc K N Dodge Sergeant
G W Gross Private J D Gordon Private
I Morgan do
E Fralick Private J Pringle Private
J WC Pierce Private.
G Miller Sergeant J Long Private
G Murray do J Wingert do
R E Jacoby Private
N W Thomas Corporal C H Baker Private
J Brown Private R Gould do
V H Miller do
R W Porter 1st Sergeant J Crary Sergeant
C G Reese Corporal J French Corporal
A Stickels do A Dudley Private
W M Roe Corporal
J Akens Corporal J A Lent Private
E B Hill Private B P Williams do
Headquarters, 143d N. Y. Vols. Station, Near Savannah, Ga., Jan. 10th, 1865.
HEZEKIAH WATKINS, Lt-Col. Com'dg
MONTICELLO, N. Y. FEB. 15, 1865.
More Volunteers Wanted
For the 143d Regiment!
That I may stand squarely before the friends and relatives of the men who
volunteered under my command, at the President's previous call, and to show
why I am not sharing with them the discomforts of a camp life and the dangers
of an active campaign, I offer the following explanations:
I received authority from the Governor of this State to recruit and subsist
an independent company, which when organized was to be attached to the 143d
Regiment N. Y. St. Vols. I believed it to be judicious to have the volunteers
subsisted in the regular way and forwarded as soon as enlisted to the Provost
Marshal's, 11th district, requesting that they should be kept together until
organized into a company, less the number of men that were advised to leave
me by unscrupulous persons. Had it not been for the carnival held by the brokers
at Goshen, and the assistance they received from certain citizens in this town,
whom the people have cause remember, this explanation would not have been necessary.
After enlisting eighty one men, and with difficulty procuring certificates
from the Provost Marshal of their enlistment, I went to Hart's Island, and
to my surprise learned that my independent company had been split up into detachments.
A few had been forwarded to the Regiment; some had been placed on permanent
duty on the Island, and according to Lieut. McDonnelly's statement, some of
them had skedaddled between Goshen and dart's Island, or had received a twelve
months furlough from a committee of brokers. Out of over one hundred men
enlisted for the 143d Regiment, only regular channel to the War Department:
HEAD QUARTERS 143D N. Y. V.
Near Purysburgh, S. C.,
January 22, 1865.
L. Thomas, Adjutant General:
I have the honor to request that authority may be granted for the muster of
Edwin Bruen, as Captain in Co. B, 143d N. Y. Vols. I make the application for
the following reasons:
August 24th, 1864; he was authorized by the Governor of New York to raise an
independent company to be attached, to this Regiment, and was at that time
conditionally mustered by H. B. Reed, 1st Lt. 5 U. S. A r t y (See authorization
and muster endorsed, marked A.) A company of eighty one (81) men was raised,
and a commission issued to him as Captain, October 19, 1864, by the Gov. of
N. Y. The certificate of the District Provost Marshal is attached (marked B.)
showing that these men were recruited for Mr. Bruen's organization. They were
forwarded to my regiment as having been recruited by the District Provost Marshal,
and were assigned to different companies before notification of his appointment
as Captain reached the Regiment.
Mr. Bruen started to join the Regiment Nov. 12, 1864; was put on duty
at Nashville; thence ordered to Chattanooga and Cleveland, Tenn., the Regiment
meantime having left Atlanta in its march to the coast. He returned to Washington,
and has today reached the Regiment above Savannah.
There are two vacant captancies in the Regiment, in Companies B. and K.; but
not a sufficient number of men in either to authorize a muster.
I beg leave to request that special permission be granted for his muster as
Captain in Company B., to date from his conditional muster, Aug. 24, 1864,
or that such other action be taken in his case as to the Department of War
seems just. I am very respectfully,
Your obedient servant.
Lt. Col. com'd'g Regiment.
CAPTAIN BRUEN WANTS!
Union of hearts and union of hands.—Yes, a glorious Union forever, from
the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. But how are we to bring about this happy
state of affairs in the present disorder of the country? A nation divided against
itself, how shall it stand? We have the power in the North to settle this unhappy
quarrel, with the assistance of a few more brave volunteers; their duty in
the field for no less a purpose than to insist at the point of the bayonet
upon the disaffected states rejoining us and assisting in the race for national
importance, and helping us to become the free and greatest nation on the earth.
We want not the volunteers who grudgingly girds on the armor; but volunteers
who rally gladly, and rushing to the battle cry, liberty to the manacled and
freedom for all men. These are the men we desire.
Brave hearts, and strong arms from every town in the county, we need you one
and all. Will you not join us in the struggle and come off with us wearing
as an evergreen in memory the bright laurels you won as one among the many
who restored peace and unity to the disordered land that Washington bequeathed
us as a free and happy country. In after years when we gather around our happy
firesides, we can with satisfaction relate to the dear ones how we bravely
answered to the call of our country, to prove that no body of men may arise,
and overthrow our government.
I trust we will not need you long; but we need you immediately. Many of you
perhaps have ties to bind you to your home, and for the safety of that home
will you not help to end this cruel war?
Sooner or later we must have men. Will you not come freely?
Brave men in the field are calling to us to join the one hundred and forty
third to fight with them.
See where this regiment has been, and in history let your names be mingled
with the gallant one hundred and forty third.
The regiment was transferred from the army of the Potomac to the Western army
under Grant; previous to the battle of Chattanooga, in which Lt. Col.
Taft was killed in Nov., 1863. Since these battles it has been under the command
Gen. Sherman, in the Knoxville campaign of the winter of 1863; in the campaign
from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and in its march through central Georgia from
Atlanta to Savannah.—Starting from Washington, it has been within twelve
miles of Richmond, and on the borders of North Carolina, and going nearly around,
and entirely thro' the so called confederacy, it is now in South Carolina.
It has been through the battles of Nansemund, Wauhatchie, Lookout Mountain,
Chattanooga, the Knoxville Campaign, Ressecca, Dallas, Kenevau Mountain, Culpepper
Farm, Peach Tree Ridge, Atlanta and Savannah.
It is not an honor to be one or them? and is not the memory of their victories
a badge worth treasuring in every heart?
CAPT. EDWIN BRUEN,
143d Reg., N. Y. State Voll's.
DEPARTURE OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-THIRD NEW-YORK FOR HART'S ISLAND.
At 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, the One Hundred and Forty-third New-York,
Brevet Brig.-Gen. Horace BOWTAN, left for hart's Island to be paid off. On
their way to the boat, the regiment halted in front of the Astor House, and
saluted Gen. Hooker, their old commander. The event drew together a great
crowd of citizens, who wished to hear and see Gen. Hooker. The General came
out on the steps of the hotel, and in answer to the hearty cheers of the
men drawn up in line before him, spoke as follows:
GENERAL, OFFICERS AND MEN OF THE ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-THIRD NEW-YORK: I cannot
speak to you amidst this great noise. I cannot make myself heard. I can only
say to you that I rejoice to see you once more; that I rejoice to see you thus
coming home laden with honor and fame safe from the perils of war. I cannot
be heard and can only give you welcome through the voice of the great multitude,
and I intend with their help to give you three of the loudest cheers ever heard
in this great city.
The General, taking off his hat, led the people in three glorious cheers, which
were answered by the One Hundred and Forty-third New-York with roll of drum
and colors drooped. As the regiment turned to go down Broadway, three more
cheers were given by the boys for their old General, who said:
GENERAL: I wish I could be heard while I told your history, (cries of "Go
on,") but I cannot. The history of your gallant regiment is the history
of the East and West combined. [Cheers.] Come and see me, General when you
get fixed, and bring all your officers.
Turning to those gentlemen standing near him, Gen. HOOKER said: "I wish
there was some quiet place where could meet these men. Why, that regiment was
with me at Lookout Mountain and all through the campaign before Atlanta. It
has a noble history."
The regiment went down Broadway, cheering right lustily for their favorite
commander, and a bystander remarked, "all the boys love old Joe," which
was the signal for several officers and citizens to press around the hero of
Lookout Mountain and shake the hand that directed the "battle above the
clouds." After exchanging some few civilities with his old companions
in arms, the General retreated to his room and the crowd dispersed.
(N. Y. Times - July 5, 1865)
Back to 143rd Regiment During the Civil War
New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs: Military History
March 25, 2007 | <urn:uuid:f3e7d85a-d805-4209-8b53-4c2ee6fdce0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/infantry/143rdInf/143rdInfCWN.htm | 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 | 0.945877 | 15,847 | 1.84375 | 2 |
SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN, DIVORCE AND FAMILY LAW
I’m the father of two special needs children and the office manager in a MN family law practice. I’m a bit of a magpie when it comes
to gathering up useful links. Here are some articles I’ve culled about handicapped / special needs children, their parenting, the role of the
law, lawyers, and attorneys.
By the way, Huffington Post has a good section called Huffpost Parents , which has run insightful articles on divorce.
Special needs children and the alternatives available for their treatment under the law These sorts of decisions become especially important at the critical and –usually – heart rending times when your child needs to be placed in a hpspital, assisted living facility,or other more restrictive environment.
Touette Syndrom Association (TSA) Minnesota - a scrappy parent run and effective group for those with Tourette Syndrome. Fair Warning – my son has Tourette’s and was in the TSA for years; both my former wife and myself were active in the Tourette Syndrome Association and now my daughter and son and their mom are getting involvedi n it again. It’s been a great group where you can commune with others in the same boat not to mention draw courage inspiration and ideas from others.
My own take on this. I hope this helps. Someone once told me that having a special needs child was like having a child who dies not once but over and over – as when you discover they are handicapped. When you learn the handicap is serious indeed. When you learn she is going to die young, never learn to read, live the rest of their life under the care of strangers, be so alone – you fear- so all alone when you and his other caretakers die. When you see that she really does not grasp the world in its consistency and wonder, when you have that insight as to how the world appears, sounds, acts to her. When you lose one dream, then another—the dreams every parent has for their child – You’ll not be able to care for her. Professionals are required. He’ll never join the Army and be a hero. She’ll never get out
of that wheelchair. He will not get a driver’s license. The sickening realization that yes the government, Wall Street, and most public
institutions are irremediably corrupt and actively maliciously and for profit destroying what little safety net he has. I know for me experiencing events similar to these marked some of the worst days – and nights—of my life. | <urn:uuid:e55fc197-af29-4f0d-9779-d722f8dd08d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moorefamilylawmn.com/category/mn-lawyer/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956117 | 551 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Date of publication
11 October 2012
Buy a paper copy or browse online
Access for subscribers to OECD iLibrary
Access for OLIS users
This report addresses the corporate governance framework and company practices that determine the nomination and election of board members. It covers some 26 jurisdictions, including in-depth reviews of Indonesia, Korea, the Netherlands and the United States.
The nomination and election of board members is one of the fundamental elements of a
functioning corporate governance system around the world and has accordingly been
chosen as the theme for the fourth peer review by the OECD’s Corporate Governance
Committee. Four jurisdictions have volunteered for an in-depth review – Indonesia, Korea,
the Netherlands and the United States. Twenty two participating jurisdictions in the
Committee have provided more general background information. As in the past three
reviews, the objective is to:
- assess governance practices against the Principles to see how they are implemented and
in what way they might need to be improved to better address the reality of different
corporate systems and;
- provide advice to policy makers in the reviewed jurisdictions.
The main principles under review include II.A which defines a basic shareholder right to
elect and remove board members and principle II.C.3 which calls for the “facilitation” of
“effective” shareholder participation in, inter alia, the nomination and election of board
members. These principles are underpinned by V.A.4 which covers the disclosure of
information about board members, including their qualifications, the selection process,
other company directorships and their status, particularly whether they are regarded as
independent or not by the board. Principle VI.D.5 recommends that the board play an
essential role in the nomination process both with regard to process and with respect to
determining the desired profile and identifying candidates. There are also relevant
principles covering the voting process.
With respect to the jurisdictions under review, shareholders with ten per cent of shares
(Indonesia), and one per cent in Korea and the Netherlands can nominate board members,
much the same as in other participating jurisdictions although in many there is no
threshold. The United States is the exception, the board generally having the prerogative
of nomination unless it decides otherwise. However, around the world contested elections
are rare even though in the United States this might be due, in part, to high costs of a
challenge. It seems the shareholder right is a bargaining mechanism with boards and
controlling shareholders either over corporate policy or to have a board member elected or
changed. Indeed, it seems that in a number of jurisdictions, such as the United States and
the Netherlands, shareholders, and especially institutional ones, have significant
communications with the company. It is thus hard to say categorically whether
shareholders have an “effective” participation, especially in jurisdictions with controlling
shareholders which is the typical pattern outside the United Kingdom and the
Some jurisdictions such as Italy and Israel have special voting arrangements to facilitate
effective participation by minority shareholders. A number allow cumulative voting
although, with the exception of Chile, it is seldom used, perhaps because it assumes
shareholder co-operation that is rare. A number of others such as Korea have simply a
requirement for the number of independent board members which are necessarily elected
by controlling shareholders. This raises questions around the world about what
independence means in such circumstances.
A practice that reduces effective participation by shareholders is voting by a show of hands.
This is important when there are significant shareholders such as institutional investors.
Cross-border voting remains an unresolved issue among a number of jurisdictions. In the
United States, the ban on brokers exercising their temporary voting rights has improved
the overall situation while in the Netherlands, since 2004 foundations that have issued
depositary receipts must now also issue voting rights except in hostile takeover situations.
The possibility for empty voting has thus been reduced.
The board’s role in selecting candidates for nomination is changing in many jurisdictions
with a greater role for board assessments facilitated by outside advisors who also play a
role in locating suitable candidates. In the United States, it is not necessary to disclose the
selection search advisor, only compensation consultants and any conflicts of interest they
With respect to transparency, Indonesia needs to make further improvements especially
with respect to disclosure of directors’ qualifications and, also in the case of Korea, with
respect to other board appointments that they may hold. This would serve to clarify any
conflicts of interest.
An effective role for shareholders in selecting board members is not an end in itself: the key
question is what boards actually do and how selection of members can contribute to
effective board performance. The Principles recommend a monitoring board that has
authority via its appointment powers: principle VI.D.3 states that the board selects,
compensates and, when necessary, replaces key executives and oversees succession
planning. Moreover, the functions include “reviewing and guiding corporate strategy, major
plans of action, risk policy, annual budgets and business plans; setting performance
objectives; monitoring implementation and corporate performance; and overseeing major
capital expenditures, acquisitions and divestitures”.
Although the description fits the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia
(although the legal powers of the board are quite different in the United States), it is
doubtful whether the principles describe the situation where there are controlling
shareholders and especially, company groups. It might also not be a good normative
proposition. As observed in the previous reviews of India, Italy and Sweden, the company
group will often appoint executive management of a group company and determine
strategy centrally. This is probably also the case in Korean company groups and family run
companies in Indonesia where the supervisory board appears to be more in the way of an
However, the board of an individual listed company does have a role that it could and
should fulfill; overseeing conflicts of interest (e.g. related party transactions) and the
integrity of the accounting system. This would demand a different type of board member
and election process. The largest Korean companies need a majority of outside directors
who meet certain independence requirements. They comprise two thirds of the audit
committee including its Chair. In similar situations, Italy and Israel additionally impose
special voting arrangements to seek to balance the powers of the controlling shareholder.
Especially in European jurisdictions, the accountability of the board is defined rather
widely to include the company and stakeholders. As a result, employees are frequently
represented on the board of the company. In the Netherlands, in some companies works
councils can nominate a third of the board, but the nominees are approved by the meeting
of shareholders. This is not the case in Germany, thereby dividing the board into
shareholder and employee representatives. The modalities are different again in Sweden
that participated in the first peer review (OECD, 2011a) where two or three employee
representatives with their deputies are elected to the board.
In sum, the Principles are a good guide to the outcomes that should be expected from
companies with respect to key corporate practices. However, in the context of controlled
companies and corporate groups, other outcomes and practices are usual in some
jurisdictions and might need to be considered by others. | <urn:uuid:e933dfeb-b4fc-439a-82ae-f5895a229395> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oecd.org/corporate/ca/boardmembernominationandelection.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945727 | 1,527 | 1.609375 | 2 |
UVN was created to broaden our reach to all prospective college-bound students, parents, and enrolled students nationwide.
To better serve our readers and customers, we have created the University Visitors Network website. This multi-faceted site includes the following components:
College Search - A profile of 1500+ 4-year colleges across the U.S. providing each university’s contact information, a variety of statistical data, and information regarding campus lifestyle and athletic programs, as well as community information.
- Provides a college search using a large variety of criteria, including:
Name, City, State, Majors, Public or Private, Housing, Population Test scores, Size of community.
- Using My School My Friends Comparison tool:
provides the ability to benchmark colleges against each other for comparative purposes
Create your personal profile
Enter your information, compare the schools you're interested in and share them with all your friends.
Return as often as you want
You can update, change and review your college selections anytime.
Invite your friends
Your friends can set up their own profiles and compare their schools with yours.
Link it and email it
Link your profile to your Facebook or MySpace account, so all of your friends can see what you're up to. You can email it to them too!
Informational Resource pages Features college resource information provided through blogs, links, videos, and book recommendations for prospective and enrolled college students.
UVN College Blog
UVN College Blogs is the latest addition to University Visitors Network. College students are now writing about their college lifestyle experience firsthand. With many different topics, the UVN College Bloggers are covering the entire college scene. Parents of college-bound students are writing about the experience of sending their children to college. Hear the perspective of real people that have been through or are currently going through the transition into the college world. http://universityvisitorsnetwork.com/blog/
Online Visitor's Guides
UVN features University Visitors Guides for major colleges, including a local search to find information about the lifestyle in the college community you are interested in. | <urn:uuid:16c5fd6c-8f65-476b-87c7-8e976382244a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.campuspublishers.com/uvn/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936256 | 436 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Bill on Bankruptcy: Lawyers Easily Make Simple Words Complicated
In Peek v. Commissioner (May 9, 2013), the U.S. Tax Court ruled that two taxpayers had engaged in an indirect “prohibited transaction” with their individual retirement accounts (IRAs) when they provided personal guarantees...more
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The Obama Administration recently released its budget proposal for the federal government’s upcoming fiscal year of October 1, 2013 to September 30, 2014. The budget proposal contains a variety of changes to the tax laws...more
The President’s recent budget proposal would impose a new cap on tax-favored retirement benefits.
Annual contributions and accruals under tax-favored plans are already limited, but this would be a complex new limit...more
In This Issue:
ATRA 2012 – How Does it Affect You?; Planning and Paying for Long-Term Care; and Obama Revenue Raising Proposals.
Excerpt from ATRA 2012 – How Does it Affect You?:
The American Taxpayer...more
On April 10, 2013, the White House released its Fiscal Year 2014 Budget (the Budget), which includes a number of proposals related to employee benefit plans. Although it is unlikely that all of the proposals will ultimately...more
From time to time, we hear about threats to the Social Security System – even talk about eliminating it for younger workers. Some reports indicate that about half of Americans have less than $10,000 in savings, while other...more
April 24 (Bloomberg) -- With $64 million at stake for creditors of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., lawyers can find complexity even in simple words like "immediately proceeding," as Bloomberg Law's Lee Pacchia and Bloomberg...more
Would you leave money on the table for the government to take instead? Would you not maximize your retirement savings because your accountant or third party administrator (TPA) told you that you had to give the same amounts...more
For many couples, Pension plans, IRAs, 401ks and other retirement plans represent a significant portion of their net worth. These assets are addressed as marital property in divorce settlement agreements, to be divided...more
The Internal Revenue Service (the Service) recently released PLR 201310043 (December 11, 2012), which addresses account - opening bonuses credited to an individual retirement account (IRA) or section 529 college tuition...more
The following are select tax topics affecting individuals and businesses for tax year 2012.
Personal Exemptions: The personal exemption is $3,800 for 2012, an increase of $100.
In This Issue:
- February Interest Rates for GRATs, Sales to Defective Grantor Trusts, Intra-Family Loans and Split Interest Charitable Trusts
- IRS Issues Revenue Procedure 2013-15
- Private Letter Ruling...more
For the first time in more than a decade, clients and advisors can plan their estates with a significant degree of certainty. The new tax law passed by Congress on January 1, 2013 and signed into law by President Obama...more
Table of Contents:
Remember to file your gift tax return and other follow-up related to 2012 gifts; Review estate plans in light of $5 million exemption becoming permanent; Annual exclusion amount for gifts increased for...more
Originally published in the AICPA Tax Insider on January 17, 2013.
After months of senseless haggling, the Senate early in the morning of Jan. 1, 2013, by a vote of 89–8, and the House of Representatives late in the...more
The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (the "Act") extends for two more years — 2012 and 2013 — a popular provision that enables an IRA owner to make gifts to charity directly from his or her IRA account without causing the...more
The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (the “Act”), signed into law by President Obama on January 2, 2013, extends favorable tax treatment for qualified charitable distributions made from IRAs (”Individual Retirement...more
The recent “fiscal cliff” tax law, the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA), includes a provision effective Jan. 1, 2013 that greatly expands the ability of plan participants to convert pre-tax plan accounts to after-tax Roth...more
In the early morning hours of January 1, 2013, the Senate approved the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (the “Act”) by a vote of 89-8. Less than 24 hours later, the House of Representatives also approved the Act by a vote...more
Earlier this month we notified you that that under the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012—i.e., the “fiscal cliff legislation”—Congress extended the ability of employers to pay or reimburse an employee on a tax-free basis...more
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On January 2, 2013, President Obama signed into law the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012” (ATRA). In this Alert, we explore the good news and the bad news that charitably minded individuals received with the passage of...more
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JD Supra gets your content noticed, increases your visibility and makes your marketing efforts hassle free...
Learn More or Schedule a demo | <urn:uuid:bcaf2705-c301-4bb2-b42e-39f040a56830> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jdsupra.com/topics/ira/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93801 | 1,271 | 1.5 | 2 |
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak waited to deliver his annual address at the Capri Theater in north Minneapolis. He also spoke from the Capri six years ago.
Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune
The North Side, with 6,000 homes foreclosed since 2006, is still reeling, as well, from a tornado last May. Dozens of homes are still damaged.
Kyndell Harkness, Star Tribune
A billboard for crime victim Terrell Mayes Jr. looms just down the street from the Capri, where the mayor spoke.
Kyndell Harkness, Star Tribune
Rybak links fate of city to North Side
- Article by: MAYA RAO AND ERIC ROPER
- Star Tribune staff writers
- April 12, 2012 - 12:40 PM
Minneapolis must grow, and drawing people to the struggling North Side is the way to do it.
So said Mayor R. T. Rybak during his nearly hourlong State of the City speech Wednesday at the Capri Theater on West Broadway, echoing themes from his annual address in the same place six years ago.
The mayor sought to link the fate of north Minneapolis -- still isolated and plagued by poverty -- with the city's overall success.
Rybak's speech was largely a reflection on past accomplishments and existing programs, though he shared several announcements and goals for the North Side.
"[Minneapolis] can only grow if we get north Minneapolis right," Rybak told a room packed with elected officials and activists.
It was Rybak's first such address since census figures released last year showed that Minneapolis' population had remained flat at about 380,000 over the past 10 years, despite predictions by the mayor and other leaders earlier in the decade that the city was growing.
And it did - throughout the city's midsection and downtown. But the loss of at least 7,700 people in north Minneapolis, which was ravaged by foreclosures, canceled out those gains.
Recalling Minneapolis' peak of 500,000 residents, Rybak said more people paying property taxes would mean lower taxes for everyone, and a greater population would create a vibrant economy as more people shopped locally.
Concentrating on the North Side does not require new investment in infrastructure or opening up a new part of town, Rybak said. The housing already exists, he said.
"What we need ... is to bring more residents in to join these neighborhoods," said Rybak.
The challenges have been all the more pressing since the May 22, 2011, tornado that devastated the North Side. Rybak said the city had given loans and support to victims, although 113 buildings still have roof damage. One of the city's latest efforts has been securing a $50,000 anonymous donation to plant flowering trees in north Minneapolis.
But are the mayor's aims for north Minneapolis within reach?
Council Member Don Samuels, who represents part of the North Side, said many of today's accomplishments were considered improbable when they were first proposed. "The future things we're planning are no more ambitious or unrealistic," he said.
Council Member Gary Schiff said that while Rybak's goals are admirable, "there's a disconnect" between the speech and his advocacy Tuesday night of a Vikings stadium subsidy, which was not mentioned in the State of the City address.
"We're not putting the money into north Minneapolis commensurate with what we're putting into professional sports facilities," Schiff said.
Wednesday's message also offered a window into just how much the area has changed since the 2006 speech at the Capri.
In that speech, Rybak similarly touted the need for Minneapolis to grow. But he homed in on increasing population elsewhere, rather than on the North Side.
That address focused more on the area's violent crime, which Rybak said Wednesday has since fallen 45 percent.
But progress has been clouded by other problems.
Rybak said more than 6,000 homes have been foreclosed on in north Minneapolis since 2006 -- nearly 43 percent of the city's total.
Calling attention to the 20 percent unemployment rate among blacks in the city, Rybak said Minneapolis will also begin an internship program called Urban Scholars to bring college students, largely those of color, in as City Hall interns.
Additionally, Rybak announced that plans to renovate the library on Emerson Avenue into a workforce development center would break ground with a pledge of $250,000 from the UnitedHealth Foundation.
He also touted an initiative to build 100 "green" homes on the North Side over the next five years, with help from the state.
Crime and poverty are tough realities here, but "that toughness has also created a remarkable strength in the people in this part of town," said Rybak.
It has also created a grim perception that may be hard to reverse.
Just down the street from the Capri Theater stands a billboard asking for help finding the killer of 3-year-old Terrell Mayes, who was shot in his North Side home in December. The camera crews gathered outside the theater Wednesday prompted one man to call out from his car: "What happened? Somebody get shot?"
© 2013 Star Tribune | <urn:uuid:c87405e7-a2e0-400a-9782-f18b879f2448> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.startribune.com/printarticle/?id=147089385 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97217 | 1,076 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Recently, car manufacturers have been indicating that some of their vehicle designs have been influenced by motorcycles; the Chevy Sonic and the Hyundai Veloster are two examples.
2013 Sonic RS
Husqvarna Motorcycles has just released two new motorcycles, the TR 650 Strada—for on-road riding—and the TR 650 Terra—for light off-roading.
Before looking at some of the design details, it is interesting to note that these bikes both use a liquid-cooled, single-cylinder, 652-cc engine that produces 58 hp @ 7,250 rpm and 60 Nm of torque (44 lb-ft) @ 5,750 rpm. The engine is a version of the G 650 GS by BMW Motorrad—as although you might think Husqvarna is a Swedish company, it belongs to BMW Group.
Because the Terra is designed for off-road, note the use of the high fender on the front wheel and the light spoked wheels, contrasted with the close fender on the Strada and the cast aluminum wheels.
There are red side trim elements for the Strada and black side panels for the Strada. Both have black-coated chassis elements, such as the swing arm and frame.
Both bikes have light-grey sand cast engine cases, which are accented by a “Husqvarna red” cylinder head.
And as another twist on the expected, the TR 650 Strada and TR 650 Terra are not built in a plant based in Sweden, nor in Germany. Rather, at the Husqvarna Motorcycles plant in Cassinetta di Biandronno, Italy. | <urn:uuid:ae46a685-0f0a-46c2-9939-976a8d8c341f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.autofieldguide.com/blog/post/design-of-new-husqvarna-motorcycles | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93508 | 338 | 1.625 | 2 |
Children Standing Around the Altar During Mass?FATHER JOHN HARDON, S.J.
It is still common at "children’s masses" for the priest to invite the children present to come up to stand around "the table." Is this permissible?
As stated in the Vatican instruction of November 18, 1997, “every effort must be made to avoid even the appearance of confusion which can spring from anomalous liturgical practices” (Article 6). The standard dictionary definition of anomalous is “deviating from a general rule or method; being out of keeping with accepted notions of fitness or order, inconsistent with what would naturally be expected.”
On these terms, for children or adults to stand around the altar while the priest offers the Holy Sacrifice is, to say the least, misleading.
As the Vatican document of 1997 makes clear, “the crisis of faith of the past generation has been express in consistent efforts to downgrade the sacred character of the ministry of the priesthood (turning the priest into a mere community leader) and to upgrade the priesthood of all believers ....Those attempting to hold on to their faith in the midst of a hostile secular culture have not benefited from this confusion” (Introduction).
What makes the situation even more serious is when children are exposed to this confusion. They will grow up identifying themselves with the ordained priest at the altar.
In the sixteenth century, this was the basic premise of Luther, Cramer, Calvin, and Zwingli. They placed the laity on the same par with the “minister” of the Holy Eucharist. The “presider” did not change bread and wine into the living Body and Blood of Christ. Why not? Because he was not an ordained priest whose priesthood is traceable to Christ’s ordaining the twelve apostles as bishops. The apostles, however, did pass on their priestly powers to the bishops and priests whom they ordained.
Hardon, John A. “Ask Father Hardon.” The Catholic Faith 4, no. 2 (March/April 1998): 54-55.
Reprinted by permission of The Catholic Faith. The Catholic Faith is published bi-monthly and may be ordered from Ignatius Press, P.O. Box 591090, San Francisco, CA 94159-1090. 1-800-651-1531.
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000) was a tireless apostle of the Catholic faith. The author of over twenty-five books including Spiritual Life in the Modern World, Catholic Prayer Book, The Catholic Catechism, Modern Catholic Dictionary, Pocket Catholic Dictionary, Pocket Catholi Catechism, Q & A Catholic Catechism, Treasury of Catholic Wisdom, Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan and many other Catholic books and hundreds of articles, Father Hardon was a close associate and advisor of Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. Order Father Hardon's home study courses here.
Copyright © 1998 TheCatholicFaith
Not all articles published on CERC are the objects of official Church teaching, but these are supplied to provide supplementary information. | <urn:uuid:18162a11-d93f-4433-9a47-369003a9acc7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0276.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9345 | 663 | 1.84375 | 2 |
|The balance of the Ark.|
You might ask, "Hey, shouldn't you have done another evolution game?"
Let me tell you, in times of christian religious fundamentalism, this is an evolutionary game. You might want to use it in the class in Tennessee.
What was the design principle of this game?
Well, to give Doris
as many nice animals to draw as possible!
|Players||3 - 5|
|Age||8years and above|
| Get the animals on board, without capsizing the Ark. |
|Timing, Bluff, Luck|
|Reviews: BGG, LU, LZ, YG|
All pictures on this page are thumbnails. Please click.
Noah is tearing out his beard and the time-pressure is difficult. Clouds are gathering and the rain could come anytime. The weather forecast is not good. Meanwhile, animals are gathering before the ark.
Now, a handful of people are offering to help, but they look like gamblers and game players!
The animals slowly drag along and nothing can be said to speed them up. Fortunately, the helpers manage to keep the animals from attacking each other. And, now someone has cleverly stored 2 loads of grain with the Tyranno. His reasoning was that there was room AND the animal would not eat it as it is a meat-eater!
|Surprise, we have a Hedgehog Card|
Now, if only the ark can be launched without capsizing......
|The dreaded Woodworm|
There were too many endangered species left and a few helping hands from fellow artists from ... so we put it out another deck of arround 20 potential inhabitants of the Ark topped with a rule quick reference card.
The helping Artists (in no special order) are:
|Chinese Box Cover|
|Box Cover of the Chinese Expansion|
2011 July 15th: There is now also a Chinese edition of Franks Ark. They have also produced the Expansion immediately.
Due to repeated request: A picture of a little big fan of Doris artwork with a huge little Lemming.
Another bunch of friendly species hoping you save them from extinction. | <urn:uuid:08203f5a-cf6d-4201-89f3-0b98dcd6ef86> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://doris-frank.de/arche.html | 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 | 0.950172 | 456 | 1.546875 | 2 |
FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR
Romney explains Obama’s ‘all of the above’ energy policy
Obama’s for all the sources of energy that come from above the ground. Wind and solar. He just doesn’t like the things that come from below the ground. — Mitt Romney
Speaking at Consol Energy’s Research and Development Facility in South Park Township, Pennsylvania the day before that state’s presidential primary, Mitt Romney took on President Obama’s energy policies, blaming them for increasing energy prices:
“The onslaught of regulations — holding off on drilling in the Gulf; holding off on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf; holding off on drilling in Alaska; trying to impose the federal government into fracking regulations…all the regulations relating to coal,” Mr. Romney said, ticking off a list of policy decisions made or continued by the Obama Administration. “These things have made the cost of energy go up.”
Romney went on to explain what Obama means when he talks about “all of the above” when it comes to energy. Watch the video:
Transcript of the video clip:
MITT ROMNEY: “The road we’re on, as Mr. Axelrod described it, the road we’re on is one that says that energy’s going to become more and more expensive. It’s going to be harder and harder to get coal; harder and harder to use it here of course. It’ll be sent to other nations around the world and used. But the cost here will go up. Harder to use natural gas.
You saw the President kicked off the regulation, re-regulation of natural gas until after the election. Harder and harder to use oil. How in the world the President says, as he did the other day, he’s for ‘all of the above’ when it comes to energy? I couldn’t figure that out given his policies. And then it struck me: he’s for all the sources of energy that come from above the ground. Wind and solar. He just doesn’t like the things that come from below the ground.
That’s the course he’s on. The course I’ll put us on is to take advantage of what comes from above the ground as well as what comes from below the ground so that America can finally become energy secure and independent of the oil cartel.”
Obama’s policies are raising energy prices and blocking American energy independence. Obama has never had a problem with higher energy prices.
Obama wasn’t bothered by the prospect of higher gas prices. Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, revealed the administration’s support for support for higher gasoline prices when he told the Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” This week the national average price of regular gasoline is $3.87 per gallon. It was $1.838 the week Obama became president.
Obama wasn’t concerned that his Cap-and-Trade plan would have raised energy prices. During the 2008 presidential campaign Obama admitted that: “[U]nder my plan of a Cap-and-Trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama said his Cap-and-Trade plan would bankrupt anyone that built a coal-powered plant.
From Right Side Politics. | <urn:uuid:06bae0e7-8242-4209-841a-8e6552756fc7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redstate.com/2012/04/24/romney-explains-obamas-%E2%80%98all-of-the-above%E2%80%99-energy-policy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954158 | 737 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The New York Times is reporting that Iran may be about to open its Parchin military facility to international inspections. This is a biggish deal, but not a complete breakthrough. Parchin is where Iran may have been conducting experiments on weaponizing its nuclear fuel; there has been speculation that the facility housed a chamber to test nuclear triggering devices. No doubt, if the inspections are allowed at Parchin, there’s not going to be anything there to inspect. (Although if uranium was present in the past, it will be detectable.) This is part of a flurry of Iranian activity on the eve of the next round of nuclear talks in Baghdad tomorrow.
Iran is also attempting to launch a space satellite tomorrow. It has been making renewed, obnoxious noises about obliterating Israel. It has declared victory in the nuclear negotiations. All of which could mean…anything. But the sheer volume of signals blasting out of Tehran indicates that something is up, that actual negotiations–and maybe even concessions–may be on the horizon. The most important concession would be the one toughest to judge–complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on rigorous, unannounced inspections of anything that IAEA wants to look at. This can’t be a one-shot deal. It has to be ongoing.
These negotiations are extremely complicated. Breakthroughs will be achieved over time, as trust is built, and that will require a constant, daily set of negotiations–if the Iranians don’t agree to that level of intensity, if they want another 5-week breather between sessions, it’s likely that they’re stalling.
The point is, no concessions should be made until Iran has taken credible, irreversible first steps. The economic sanctions are obviously working. The Obama Administration and its allies, especially the Chinese and the Russians, need to maintain that pressure until the deal is done…if it can be done. | <urn:uuid:5f50d5da-40bd-4195-942a-ff575628c7bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://swampland.time.com/2012/05/22/iran-nuke-concession/?iid=sl-author-arenapage | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961308 | 397 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Re-design your Organisation to Empower your Employees to Perform
What good organisational redesign achieves
Good organisational design provides access to the skills and knowledge needed to implement organisational strategy. Great design goes further; it empowers managers and employees, giving them the autonomy, resources and organisational support they need to work effectively.
The purpose of organisational re-design (or re-structuring) is to ensure that people are employed within a structure that both enables and encourages them to make the full range of their expertise available to the task of implementing of the organisation’s strategies. People are enabled by giving them the resources they need to do so, the autonomy and authority to make necessary decisions and the access they need to expertise in other parts of the organisation.
Some people feel that re-design is only important for large organisations. I beg to differ. Small, but growing businesses can also benefit from a dispassionate review of how their employees are arranged in their structure. These structures have usually grown piecemeal in response to issues that were urgent at the time but may have since lost their relevance. Similarly, one need not re-design a whole organisation. A division or business unit within a large organisation can be redesigned to use its own people more cost-effectively or to improve its fit with the rest of the organisation.
Organisation re-design Vs Restructure
I try to avoid the use of the term ‘re-structure’ because it is so often associated with downsizing. True, some organisations may be downsized because of re-design, but it should not be assumed that smaller is necessarily better. Similarly there has been a craze lately to reduce the number of levels in organisations on the assumption that ‘flatter is always better’. Sometimes this is true; it removes bureaucracy, improves customer focus and makes people more accessible. In other cases, it causes fewer and fewer middle managers to do the work of many with the result that the important (strategic) work is lost at the expense of the urgent (operational) work. The point that I am making is that there is no one right design or structure that will suit all organisations. The structure must be aligned to the particular strategies the organisation is pursuing.
Organisational Designs that Assist Change
There is, however one well-founded strategy for designing ‘change readiness’ into an organisations. It is to identify processes that naturally run across organisational boundaries and to make employees accountable for the outcomes of these processes as well as through their reporting lines in the structure. The two most common forms of this are what I call the Customer Focus Structure and the Resource Allocation Structure. Both use internal customer / supplier relationships between organisational units. The decision as to who is the customer and who is the supplier is critical and must be determined by the organisation’s strategic direction. The internal customer is empowered by the process.
The Customer Focus structure should be used when the strategy has indicated that service delivery units need the power to mobilise the whole of the organisation’s resources to satisfy their, (the service delivery unit’s), customers. For example, when service delivery units are geographically based and supply generalist services directly to their customers but their customers also require occasional access to technical services that are provided by other parts of the company. In this case, the technical service units become internal suppliers and the customer service units the internal customers.
The Resource Allocation Structure is used where the strategy has indicated the need for both centralised strategy development and for service delivery units to interpret the strategy to satisfy local needs. For example, the organisation is funded to design and deliver government programs. Centralised program managers design the programs and control the organisation’s resources. Geographically based units deliver the programs’ services to their community. In this case, the program mangers become the internal customers of the service delivery units by only funding services that fit within their programs.
For further assistance visit the Change & Perform Organisational Redesign Service or contact Kerry Feldman
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Click here to provide feedback on this paper | <urn:uuid:cab9f17c-76ac-4867-9e19-c89429b93546> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.changeperform.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=42&Itemid=55 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945531 | 841 | 1.625 | 2 |
The Upside of the Downturn
There are good reasons why consumers keep spending
September 11, 2001
by Irwin Stelzer
EVERYONE WHO WATCHES the financial news channels and reads the generally depressing economy stories in the daily press knows one thing: Trillions of dollars of wealth have been destroyed as the stock market continues its descent from the stratosphere. What they can't figure out is why American consumers haven't abandoned the shopping malls in order to have more time to compute the exact losses they have suffered in their 401(k) and other accounts. Easy. Americans know a gamble when they see one. And they gambled on becoming very rich very quick. Many lost their bets. But instead of whining, they have shrugged and gone about their two businesses -- working and spending. This is not irrational denial of reality. Rather, in part at least, it reflects the fact that wealth destruction has been accompanied by a less easily observed phenomenon -- wealth redistribution. In short, the plunge in the Dow and the Nasdaq has created some real winners.
Start with the two-thirds of Americans who own their homes. The new census data show that the median value of single-family, owner-occupied homes rose from $ 79,100 in 1990 to $ 120,162 in 2000, a nice increase of over 50 percent. The National Association of Realtors, using a slightly different method, shows a similar result for a more recent period. In the second quarter of this year the median price of existing homes in 125 metropolitan areas rose by 6.4 percent ($ 9,400) over last year's levels, to $ 146,900. Although the figures are not strictly comparable, it is interesting to compare these increases in house values with the declines in the average value of 401(k) portfolios. Since 1999 the median value of those retirement accounts has fallen by $ 5,700 (from $ 47,000 to $ 41,300); in a roughly similar time period, the median value of existing homes has risen by $ 13,800.
No one thinks this torrid rate of increase in house prices can con-tinue, especially if the job market takes a turn for the worse. But neither does anyone think that house values will shrivel. It seems that falling share prices and a weakening economy have forced Alan Greenspan and his monetary policy colleagues at the Fed to lower interest rates. Lower interest rates make it cheaper to carry mortgages, in turn making it easier for buyers to bid up house prices. Wealth has shifted from shareowners to homeowners, as the Fed has fought to keep the economy on an even keel by lowering interest rates. And there are a lot more families for whom their home represents the biggest item on their balance sheets than there are folks whose wealth is pre-dominantly in shares.
Then there is the little-noticed transfer of wealth from capitalists to workers, if I may be permitted to use those old-fashioned designations. Daily there are reports from America's leading companies of profit targets missed or losses incurred. "Where did all the profits go?" asks a recent edition of Business Week. When oil prices were soaring, some of them went to the producers' cartel. But more went to American workers. New government data show virtually no growth in the profits of non-financial companies since 1995, if account is taken of the increase in payments to employees who exercised stock options when those options were still worth something.
What these revised data also show is that labor compensation has grown much faster than anyone realized. The Commerce Department now estimates that in the past three years the share of national income going to compensate workers has risen from 70 percent to 73 percent, while the share going to profits has fallen from 12 percent to 9 percent. That's pretty close to $ 250 billion going from dividend checks into paychecks. No wonder, then, that "house-hold demand has been sustained," as the Fed announced last week in the statement accompanying its latest rate cut, even as "business profits and capital spending con-tinue to weaken." Against the suffering of the corporate sector, and of those who profit from profits (including a lot of workers with profit-sharing plans and stocks) must be set the joy of workers who are watching their real incomes rise.
This shift in dollars from corporate bottom lines to workers' pay packets reflects the tight labor markets of recent years and, de-spite the headline layoffs now, the ongoing shortage of skilled workers. The unemployment rate for white collar workers is a mere 2.2 percent, and the Information Technology Association of America estimates that some 420,000 openings for program-mers, software engineers, and other high-tech workers will remain unfilled this year. Remember: Most high-tech workers are employed by non-high-tech firms, not the busted dot-coms and telecommunications companies about whose woes we read so much. Layoffs and increasing competition from immigrants may keep wages from rising at the unskilled end of the labor market, but increases at the upper end are likely to continue to outpace inflation -- unless, of course, the combination of the tax rebate now hitting consumers' mailboxes and the Fed's interest rate cuts fail to prevent a major recession.
Finally, bad news for producers is good news for consumers. Ford and GM are having trouble making money because competi-tion from foreign car makers is forcing them to offer huge discounts to move their metal off the showroom floors. Dell can't get into the black because its computers are selling for 20 percent less than they did at the beginning of the year. Intel is in trouble because its Pentium 4, 1.4 gigahertz processor now goes for about $ 180, compared with $ 574 on January 1. Small startups are finding that they can afford to rent office space in Silicon Valley, furnish it with swanky furniture bought for 25 cents on the dollar from failed dotcoms ($ 699 Aeron desk chairs -- a back-saving and prestige-enhancing feature of high-tech executive offices -- are in such plentiful supply that the Salvation Army won't pick any more up), and equip it with the necessary gear, still in original boxes, at 10 cents on the dollar.
And then we have the airlines. This is an industry that can't stand prosperity: As soon as it gets into the black, it shovels money to its pilots, to its customers, or to both. Only lowfare carriers such as Southwest seem capable of sustained prosperity. Right now, having given or offered their pilots huge wage increases, carriers such as United find themselves trying to fill empty seats by lowering fares, although it is difficult to say by how much. Nancy Paul, a top business getter with Executive Travel Associates in Washington, D.C., points out that the round trip fares of $ 296, $ 376, and $ 244 between Chicago and LaGuardia, Los Angeles, and Dulles reported recently in the New York Times vanished from sight within a relatively few days. But American Express Business Travel Monitor, which tracks fares on 215 frequently traveled domestic routes, says that airfares are now lower than at any time since 1954, and the industry's trade association reports that average fares are more than 8 percent lower than they were last year. No surprise, then, that the industry will lose $ 1.5 billion this year. That represents a transfer of real wealth from shareholders to workers and consumers.
None of this is to denigrate the role of profits in making the economy go. Without the prospect of a reasonable return, in-vestors will not make their capital available to entrepreneurs and to corporations. Which is what is happening in the high-tech industries right now. Sooner or later, no profits mean no investment and fewer jobs. But in the face of excess capacity in the high-tech and other industries, declining profits are the market's way of saying "no more." Which means that the ability of businesses to claim a larger and larger share of the nation's income for their bottom lines is over, at least for now. And that's no bad thing. Meanwhile, excess capacity and for-eign competition are forcing a transfer of wealth to consumers, and tight labor markets are forcing a transfer of wealth to work-ers.
If this trend doesn't go too far, and there is no reason to believe that it will, profits are likely to remain under pressure even as the economy recovers. But a growing economy with lower profits is not the end of the world. Keep that in mind when watching the depressed analysts on the financial news channels.
Irwin Stelzer is a Senior Fellow and Director of Economic Policy Studies for the Hudson Institute. He is also the U.S. economist and political columnist for The Sunday Times (London) and The Courier Mail (Australia), a columnist for The New York Post, and an honorary fellow of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies for Wolfson College at Oxford University. He is the founder and former president of National Economic Research Associates and a consultant to several U.S. and United Kingdom industries on a variety of commercial and policy issues. He has a doctorate in economics from Cornell University and has taught at institutions such as Cornell, the University of Connecticut, New York University, and Nuffield College, Oxford. | <urn:uuid:c8548a67-5f56-45fe-bedb-0fdef1f99e11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=974 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962115 | 1,888 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Kids Week is an audience development initiative organised by Society Of London Theatre (SOLT).
SOLT recognises the importance of protecting children (i.e. those under 18 and also vulnerable adults) who participate in Kids Week activities from harm. The purpose of Kids Week is to introduce children to theatre in a fun and stimulating way, but at all times in a safe environment.
SOLT co-ordinates the provision of Kids Week activities. All individuals involved in the provision and running of Kids Week activities are employed or engaged by other organisations. It is the responsibility of those other organisations to ensure that appropriate child protection policies and procedures are in place and adhered to in relation to the Kids Week activities they provide.
Given the nature of Kids Week activities SOLT believes the risk of abuse to be minimal, particularly since it is unusual for an adult to be alone with a child, the activities are of short duration and children are required to be accompanied by an adult at many of them. Nevertheless, SOLT has a number of safeguards in place to ensure that Kids Week is a positive experience for all involved.
- All children under eight are required to be accompanied by an adult at all times.
- All unaccompanied children who participate in a Kids Week activity are required to submit a registration form which must include written consent and a contact telephone number from their parent or guardian.
- All organisations are expected to provide at least one member of staff who has undergone a criminal record check at their Kids Week activities. Where this is not practicable SOLT will, where possible, provide a supervisor who has undergone a criminal record check.
- All organisations providing Kids Week activities are made aware of SOLT’s child protection policy. SOLT expects them to adhere to the good practice guidelines set out in its policy.
If you would like a copy of SOLT’s full child protection policy, please email firstname.lastname@example.org with your name and full address. | <urn:uuid:77985fd6-de05-494b-9c82-535922778143> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kidsweek.co.uk/child-protection/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957167 | 404 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Kids! Learn how to defend yourself with Chung So Nyun Hapkido (Youth Hapkido) taught by Ed Ricciuti, co-president of Green Hill Martial Arts in Killingworth. Ricciuti teaches afternoon classes for boys and girls, ages 7 to 13 years, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
Adults! Combat Hapkido for men and women - 13 and up - Wednesday evenings from 6PM to 7PM. "Seniors are welcome at adult classes," says Ricciuti, 73.
Accomodations are made for each student's individual age and physical condition. Learn joint locks and throws, take downs, ground survival and common-sense self defense tactics such as how to recognize threats before they develop.
Develop basic kicking skills and learn the right way to throw a dynamic punch. At Green Hill, we teach the same "science of self defense" that has been taught to our military men and women around the world. Combat Hapkido is designed so that each indidual can adapt its techniques to his or her own physical abilities.
Try a class for free! | <urn:uuid:a0261d87-3a33-48ad-8a6a-7911cabf4a0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://middletown-ct.patch.com/groups/sports/p/ev--chung-so-nyun-hapkido-youth-hapkido-a481cb3a | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955998 | 231 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Race, the War on Drugs, and the Collateral Consequences of Criminal Conviction
Gabriel J. Chin
University of California, Davis - School of Law
April 14, 2011
Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, Vol. 6. p. 253, 2002
This essay explores the impact of racial discrimination on the imposition of collateral consequences on those convicted of crime. The category of serious crime which is intrinsically most subject to discretionary enforcement is drug law violations; the number of violators far exceeds the criminal justice resources available to investigate, prosecute and punish them. Accordingly, a high level of selectivity is inevitable. At the same time, the best evidence for racially discriminatory prosecution is in the area of drug violations; while most drug offenders are white, most people imprisoned for drug violations are not. African Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses at rates that far exceed their representation in the general population, in the population of drug offenders, in the population of those arrested for drug crimes, and in the population of those convicted of drug crimes.
The essay also notes that of all categories of crime, drug convictions have been freighted with the most severe collateral consequences. Under statutes which do not apply to convicted rapists, murderers or terrorists, drug offenders may lose student loans and other educational benefits, their drivers' licenses, access to public housing, food stamps and other benefit providing necessities of life. These collateral consequences are so numerous and burdensome that they may interfere with former prisoners' ability to reenter society and support themselves without reoffending. Unfortunately, the legislative history of the development of collateral consequences such as disenfranchisement, like the development of the drug laws themselves, suggests that the laws were enacted with racial minorities in mind. The essay concludes by proposing that jurisdictions reexamine the way in which collateral consequences are imposed.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 24
Keywords: Drugs, narcotics, discrimination, Jim Crow, collateral consequences, punishment, sentencing
JEL Classification: K14, K49, J71Accepted Paper Series
Date posted: May 6, 2003 ; Last revised: April 14, 2011
© 2013 Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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The unscheduled meeting, taking place on the side of a wider international security conference in Dublin, Ireland, marks an intensification of diplomacy just three days after CBS News reported Syria's isolated regime was preparing its chemical weapons for use in bombs.
U.S. officials tell CBS News the meeting may be a sign that Russia is now willing to consider supporting further U.N. action against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime -- to send a message that he must stop his deadly assault on rebels forces and areas they control. Opposition officials say the 21-month assault has left more than 40,000 people dead.
Russia, one of Assad's few remaining allies, has thus far opposed any U.N. measures against him, and the U.S. and Russia have remained at odds over the level of the threat posed by Syria's weapons stockpiles.
If Clinton can cement Russian support and reach a compromise in her meeting with Lavrov on Thursday, the U.N. Security Council might be able to pass a resolution implementing harsh economic sanctions against the Syrian regime, -- possibly cutting it off from all of its remaining financial support. Both Russia and China have used their veto power as permanent members of the Security Council to block any such resolutions thus far. It remains unclear how China would react if Russia were to get behind tougher sanctions.
The key sticking point in a peace plan forged by Brahimi's predecessor, Kofi Annan, which was agreed to by both Russia and the U.S., was a provision aimed at forcing the Syrian regime to comply with terms of a phased cease-fire. Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have put the threat of international punitive measures against Syria in place for failure to comply.
If Brahimi is hopeful of striking a similar deal now, or reviving the one crafted by Annan, getting the U.S. and Russia on the same page on how any cease-fire terms are enforced on Assad's regime -- or even whether they are enforceable -- will be crucial.
On the ground, rebels have now surrounded the Syrian capital of Damascus, threatening Assad's stronghold. In recent days, Clinton has said that an increasingly threatened Assad regime may resort to extreme measures -- even using its stores of chemical weapons -- to try to maintain its grip on power.
CBS News correspondent David Martin reported Monday that Assad's regime had begun preparing its chemical weapons for use. Martin said orders had been issued in Syria to bring together chemical ingredients that are normally stored separately for safety, but that form the deadly nerve agent sarin when they are combined.
The Syrian government, meanwhile, refuses to even confirm that it possesses chemical or biological weapons.
"I assure you that Syria does not own banned weapons, and if we just admitted -- hypothetically speaking -- if Syria had all the weapons in the world, it would never use it against anybody, neither inside Syria, nor abroad," Syrian Information Minister Omran Ahed al-Zouabi told CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer in a November interview. "The real reason for this, is that we believe that acquiring chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as in the case with Israel, is gravely immoral."
The U.S. government said Wednesday, meanwhile, that it was aware of several offers of asylum made to Assad and his family by countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, if he were to agree to leave his position. Clinton told CBS News in September that the Russians had refused to offer Assad asylum. It is unclear whether he'd be able to negotiate an exit, however, as the U.S. the U.N. and the Syrian opposition have said he should not be permitted to evade justice.
Next week, Clinton will attend a meeting of the "Friends of Syria" in Marrakesh, Morocco, and it is expected that the U.S. will officially recognize a newly-formed Syrian opposition group as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people, helping to pave the way for a new government to take shape even with Assad still in power. Several European and Middle Eastern nations have already recognized the coalition as the sole representative.2012 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:26d0ad9c-4a61-4bf9-b994-19ba26ab4f5a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://everythinglubbock.com/fulltext/?nxd_id=139272 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973051 | 842 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The tributes to Steve Jobs continued to flood social media platforms from around the world on Thursday with millions of 140-character messages on Twitter, more than 3,000 videos uploaded onto YouTube and tens of thousands of people sharing news links and making comments on Facebook.
A video of the commencement address that Mr. Jobs, a co-founder of Apple, delivered at Stanford in 2005 drew more than 1.5 million views on YouTube starting shortly after his death was announced Wednesday night and into Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for YouTube said. Already the most viewed graduation speech on YouTube, it now has more than five million views.
By noon on Thursday, people had uploaded more than 3,000 videos tagged “Steve Jobs” onto YouTube. In many of the videos, people are solemnly sharing their sadness and reflections about Mr. Jobs.
Others are proudly displaying the Apple products they love and use.
There were also multiple mash-up videos, where people combined music, video and photos as tributes to Mr. Jobs and the impact his work has had on their lives.
At 8 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, shortly after news broke about the death of Mr. Jobs, Twitter counted 6,049 posts per second, making it one of the most discussed news events ever on the micro-blogging platform, exceeding the 5,008 posts per second recorded moments after President Obama announced the death of Osama Bin Laden on May 1. But the volume did not break the record set for conversation last August during the MTV Video Music Awards, when there were 8,868 posts per second recorded, according to a Twitter spokesman.
Here’s a link to a collection of Twitter posts gathered Wednesday night from @nytimes users with people sharing their thoughts about Mr. Jobs and the contributions he made to the personal computer world.
Crimson Hexagon, a social media analytics firm, counted almost five million posts on Twitter from Wednesday night until 5 p.m. on Thursday. Its analysis showed there were more than seven million posts from the time that Mr. Obama made the Bin Laden announcement on a Sunday night through the following day.
To show how the conversation spiked about Mr. Jobs, there were 50,016 mentions of him on Wednesday, rising to more than 879,000 on Thursday, which was the single largest volume of conversation about him since he resigned as Apple’s chief executive, according to General Sentiment, another firm specializing in social media analytics.
On Facebook, some people changed their profile picture to the Apple logo as a tribute. Others found their way to this official Steve Jobs Facebook page that now has more than one million fans with more 7,000 people posting comments and sharing items on the wall.
Many memorial pages were created for Mr. Jobs on Facebook and what appeared to be a record number of people were sharing news links and making tributes.
But at least one company took advantage of the occasion. People who clicked through one “R.I.P. Steve Jobs” link on Facebook found themselves victims of a scam as a company promising to give away free iPods and iPads used it as a way to automatically direct users to a survey site. | <urn:uuid:f2bd8de1-4c09-44d8-8a36-4b97ccc6a5e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/tributes-to-steve-jobs-flood-social-media-platforms/?n=Top%2FNews%2FBusiness%2FCompanies%2FFacebook%2C%20Inc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97331 | 651 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Four years after his high-profile purchase of the iconic Jaguar Land Rover carmakers, industrialist Ratan Tata has said the British economy is so uncompetitive that it’s no longer a favoured destination for manufacturing investments.
“The economic situation, the high cost of undertaking manufacturing, the supply chain – which is dying out as manufacturing undergoes hardship – make the UK not the first place you would look at to make a manufacturing investment,” said Tata, who has turned JLR into a profitable concern. In 2011-2012 the group made pre-tax profits of £1.5bn, up from £1.12bn the year ago, and sales are up 27%.
“In some form, there has to be something like Japan did in the 1960s and 1970s, of saying they would have a major thrust in electronics or the auto industry, and do everything possible for x number of years to make that industry globally competitive [such as] provide incentives to set up plants, to have R&D, to buy technology,” Tata added.
The comments to the Daily Telegraph by the head of Tata Sons, Britain’s largest industrial group, came as Chancellor George Osborne told parliament the economy is predicted to slide into one more year of negative growth at -0.1% in 2012.
Slowdown in services, accounting for 75% of the economy, triggered warnings of ‘triple-dip’ recession. November’s sector growth was the weakest in almost two years. | <urn:uuid:5a7d9b96-8cba-4945-8a7a-bad8f4f9fe7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/autos/latest-news/tata-warns-on-uk-business-as-growth-dips/article1-968895.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964677 | 312 | 1.59375 | 2 |
For some family law problems, you'll need legal advice from a lawyer. A lawyer can:
- listen to your story,
- explain the law, and
- tell you what your options are.
If you're working on your own case, you may want to contact a lawyer for specific advice only (not for your whole case). For example, you might ask a lawyer to advise you about how successful you might be at arguing undue hardship in response to an application to increase support payments.
To determine this, the lawyer would need to know about:
- your financial situation,
- obligations to other family members,
- work history,
- and any unusual expenses you've taken on to support your previous family.
Or you might ask a lawyer to look over court forms you've completed and let you know if there is anything you might change or add to make your application more effective.
You may be able to get the name of a lawyer who specializes in family law problems from a community agency (such as a women's centre) or a community advocate. Or use one of the other resources listed under "Other services" (see the links on the right) to find a lawyer you can speak with.
Tip: Whatever service you use, you'll make better use of your time if you are well organized. See our fact sheet How to work well with a lawyer. | <urn:uuid:a6a72e2e-88e0-4ae0-93e3-4c8ea68036bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.familylaw.lss.bc.ca/help/who_LegalAdvice.php | 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 | 0.973942 | 283 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Fund Library Collections
The Library is the heart of the University…. The intellectual growth and vitality of every school and every division, of every professor and every student, depends on the vitality of the Library. — Robert Gordon Sproul, 11th President, University of California (1930).
To be a first-class research university requires that we have a first-class library. It is what ensures we are on the frontier of knowledge and why, in good budget times and bad, we must preserve its excellence. — Robert M. Berdahl, 8th Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley (2002).
The print and digital Library collections at the University of California, Berkeley represent the bedrock of the Library's support to campus faculty and students. A significant percentage of the funding for acquiring these collections comes from the contributions of individuals, foundations, and corporations. In many cases the acquisitions made with donor support are the types of material that help make the UC Berkeley Library collections so distinct. In the coming years generosity of Library donors will play an increasingly critical role in the ability of the UC Berkeley Library to meet the research needs of students and faculty and to maintain the Library's preeminence among public university libraries in North America.
For more than a century, the generosity and loyalty of UC Berkeley alumni and friends have enabled the Library to address the changing needs of Cal's students and faculty. The Library continues to add an astounding amount of print and electronic resources, rare and unique materials, and new and innovative collections each year. The Library depends on the support of those who understand how important an outstanding library is to the education of students who will one day shape our future.
Individuals and organizations can help to play a role in this through a variety of means.
Give to the Library Fund. You can make a gift to the Library Fund online. Please specify in the remarks section: "to support Library collections."
For other ways you can help support the Library's Collections program, contact the Library Development Office, by calling 510-642-9377 or visit their website.
For further subject-specific information on the Collection program's critical needs, please contact Bernie Hurley, Director of Collections.
What an inexhaustible blessing the Cal Library was to me as I wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay! My job in that novel was to try to make an entire vanished world — a time, a place, a mood, and an art form — come to life again. So many of the traces of that world — images, sounds, magazines and newspapers, congressional transcripts and cigarette ads, personal memoirs, histories, photographs and travel guides — were preserved for me in the Library. It was a miracle, one for which I was grateful every time I passed through those doors.
— Michael Chabon, 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. | <urn:uuid:e545e271-e589-4a51-81d8-3008d7335aad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/fund_collections.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936435 | 579 | 1.640625 | 2 |
I want to write multiple spaces in code say
but I want to do this in code block ``. But in this case spaces are merged into one. I found this question but there is no solution... Maybe now somebody knows how to do this?
Looks like the hack suggested in the answer to the question you referring to no longer works, neither in post body nor in comments. (
The backticks are not exactly code blocks.. they won't highlight the code inside them they're used more to "escape" tags so they appear in the post or to distinguish code parts written as part of the sentence.
You can write multiple spaces as part of a paragraph using
However when part of
You also have the
However this can't be inline, even
if it's part of existing paragraph(see the source) it will be parsed into its own line.
To type spaces at a random place, I use two different methods: | <urn:uuid:6e246f72-b5f1-4c74-b626-801df3372789> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/122520/how-to-write-multiple-spaces-in-the-post | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953403 | 192 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Christians shouldn’t support same-sex marriagePublished 12:00am Sunday, October 14, 2012
I am writing in reference to an article in the Sept. 12 issue of the Gallipolis Daily Tribune: “Why Does Marriage Matter So Much?” by Mary Jo Kilroy. She wrote correctly on the beauty of the wedding ceremony and on marriage itself.estimates
However she seemed to have succumbed to pressure of the homosexual community.
I want to state up front that I do not agree with the practice of homosexuality. I also want it known from the outset that, on a personal basis, we should not mistreat those who do.
As persons, they deserve the same respect as all others and that I expect from others. I am not a “homophobe” (a made up word to put people like me on the defense).
However, because some choose to practice homosexuality does not mean that the whole of society must endorse, approve, nor change civil laws because of their choices. We all have the liberty to live as we please, but we do not have the privilege of having the State of Ohio alter its laws to mold to our choices.
If a couple of males or a couple of females decide to cohabitate and after a number of years decide to call it “marriage,” the people of the State of Ohio should not then enact a law calling it such.
If they chose to call their situation a marriage that doesn’t affect the rest of the state. The whole population should not write a law approving it. Ms. Kilroy cites the fact that some states have caved in and due to the nature of politics some officials and the President have endorsed same-sex marriages as a reason for the State of Ohio to do the same.
The discussion should go much deeper than that.
For example, what does nature teach us? Two men or two women can’t reproduce, but in order to have it appear as a normal relationship, they adopt a child (created by one male and one female). That may give it the appearance of a normal marriage, but they would have to have the help of a natural relationship to produce that child.
In addition, that child must grow up not knowing father and mother role models, and the State of Ohio, through civil law, would be party to that situation all because two same-sex individuals chose to cohabitate. This may not seem to be a problem with Ms. Kilroy, but well over 70 percent of the population in the State of Ohio claim Christianity as their faith.
While some may be nominal Christians, they still claim the Bible as their guide.
She is saying to them that they should vote for a law or politicians that support what their faith calls sin.
I do not wish to be mean spirited but do want to defend my belief that God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, and that was by creative design.
If someone wishes to practice drug use, they have the liberty to do so, but we don’t need to change civil law to support and endorse it. If some want to practice homosexuality and lesbianism they have that liberty also, but we don’t need to change a law in Ohio to encourage it.
I know that Ms. Kilroy wants to be “politically correct” because she has served as representative in Ohio’s 15th Congressional District. I also know she is serving with a group called the Freedom Ohio campaign for marriage equality (pushing same-sex marriage) which may be why she submitted her article.
My motive is not to be “politically correct,” nor to push some new organization. Rather it is to be morally correct and oppose those who would attempt to lower the moral standards of individuals and the State of Ohio.
I am not defending any new organization, but I am writing in support of Biblical truth which has served well for more than 2,000 years helping millions escape sin and giving a defense against those who would try to lower its standards.
Using the words “love,” “marriage,” and “companionship” in her article are touching, but they are used to sell an idea that is wrong even if practiced by some.
In that book I mentioned, we are told to watch out for those who “call evil good and good evil.”
The bottom line is: Christians should not sign any petition to support same-sex marriage. | <urn:uuid:ccc40d20-1e1b-48a1-9de0-99b8a97e14d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irontontribune.com/2012/10/14/christians-shouldnt-support-same-sex-marriage/ | 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 | 0.973705 | 929 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Hamilton Wood Type needs your help
November 21, 2012
The historic Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is being forced to shut its doors, and needs your help in finding and moving its vast collection to a new location where it can open them again. From the museum’s press release:
Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum will no longer reside in the building that bears its name. The property owners recently informed the museum that the 1619 Jefferson St. building in Two Rivers, Wisconsin will close and must be vacated, perhaps as early as February 2013. Hamilton Wood Type is urgently seeking donations to address this sudden need and to protect its vast collection of wood type, antique printing equipment and rare type specimen catalogs. The museum’s director Jim Moran, artistic director Bill Moran and assistant director Stephanie Carpenter remain committed to transitioning to a new space. [Read the full press release.]
Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum houses one of the world’s largest collections of wood type, with over 1.5 million specimens. Read more about their history and continued efforts in preserving, producing, and teaching about wood type. And check out HWT American Chromatic, a collaboration between Hamilton Wood Type Foundry and P22 Type Foundry, here at Typekit.
Please join Typekit and Adobe in donating, volunteering, and spreading the word. | <urn:uuid:3e61a195-b8c6-44c6-8813-6116a059687c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.typekit.com/2012/11/21/hamilton-wood-type-needs-your-help/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938744 | 272 | 1.835938 | 2 |
- “Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”
― , Notes from Underground
- “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
- “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…”
― Leo Tolstoy
- “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
- “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
― Leo Tolstoy
- “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
- “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
- “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
- “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
March 31, 2012
March 28, 2012
Yesterday morning my high/low thermometer recorded 23 degrees (-5 C). I have been afraid of this, as many fruit trees had already blossomed out and and a hard frost destroys the blooms, ergo no fruit this year. Fortunately the apples haven’t come out yet, but they are getting cranked up and unless we get some cooler weather they will arrive early this year also. Our average last frost is May 7th, so we have lots of potential for frost yet.
I had a pear tree and a peach tree in full bloom. I haven’t walked up the hill to check them out yet, but I am pessimistic. I have two peaches and they bloom one after the other, so maybe one of them will make it.
I have two varieties of bush cherries. The Nanking had already bloomed and dropped its petals before the freeze. You can see the little pollinized cherries had started to form, thanks to the bees and pollinating wasps that had been working them. As of last night they were still green so will probably be viable. It is the period from just before they open until they start to form little fruits that the trees are vulnerable to frost.
The Hanson cherries were showing bud break and color, and the night before the freeze I noted that the next day the early blooms would open, a few per cent of them. Sure enough after the freeze some did open and I checked their centers which didn’t turn brown. As most hadn’t opened yet, I am hopeful they will make it yet. Maybe cherry blossoms are naturally better at taking some frost than other fruits, because I know apples will take damage even if not quite open. The staggered timing of the blooms opening will also be a survival trait for the cherries.
There was definitely some casualties, as the variegated ivy that had started to grow was brown by evening. The butterfly bushes had a lot of emerged foliage and that is all wilted. It shouldn’t affect the bloom as that is not until August.
Most notable was the forsythia. My wife and I had been mentioning to each other how brilliant the color in the forsythia had been this record setting high temperature spring weather. Later she told me another gardener had made the same comment to her.
That is a bit subjective, and after a long gray winter forsythia with its blaze of yellow always is spirit lifting and seems bright, but for some reason it seemed especially bright this spring.
Although it was still yellow, by afternoon it was noticeable that the chroma had been sucked out of it. This morning, out feeding sunflowers to the birds in the last moments before dawn, it almost has a faint browning to them. Oh well, we had a great display that lasted about ten days and we are grateful for that, and it may continue for a while yet, but that intensity is gone. Faded as my youth.
March 27, 2012
A DEA officer stopped at a ranch in Texas , and talked with an old rancher.
He told the rancher, “I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs.”
The rancher said, “Okay , but don’t go in that field over there…..”, as he pointed out the location.
The DEA officer verbally exploded saying, ” Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me !”
Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removed his badge and proudly displayed it to the rancher.
“See this badge?! This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish…. On any land !!
No questions asked or answers given!! Have I made myself clear……do you understand ?!!”
The rancher nodded politely, apologized, and went about his chores.
A short time later, the old rancher heard loud screams, looked up, and saw the DEA officer running for his life, being chased by the rancher’s big Santa Gertrudis bull……
With every step the bull was gaining ground on the officer, and it seemed likely that he’d sure enough get gored before he reached safety. The officer was clearly terrified.
The rancher threw down his tools, ran to the fence and yelled at the top of his lungs…..
(I just love this part….)
“Your badge, show him your BADGE…….. ! !”
March 26, 2012
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I was scheduled to have a conference call and the usual conference moderator wasn’t going to be there so I had the moderator’s pass code number to start the call.
Although it was the same call in number we had used for years as we hadn’t used it for a few months I called in the night before to verify it was still working so in case it wasn’t I would have time to make other arrangements. It was fine.
Ten minutes before the conference call, at 1:2o pm, I dialed in and initiated the conference with the moderator’s pass code number in case anyone came early. Ten minutes went by and no one. Another 5 minutes passed and I was really starting to wonder because this group was always punctual.
I had an incoming call so I used call waiting and took it. It was one of the members calling and wondering where I was because when he called in at 1:25 pm, no one was there and the auto response told him that the phone number had been changed. He dialed the new number and was able to get in the queue waiting for the moderator to arrive.
Sure enough, I called in again and got the same message he had gotten– that the call in number had been changed although the pass code numbers remained the same. I called the new number, logged in and there were all the members of the conference waiting for me.
That was so bizarre, what are the odds? We use the same number for years and then the very day we go to use it after months of not, the number changes between 1:20 when I log on and 1:25 when the next member tries.
I had even tried the number the night before to be sure it was working, doing the best I could to assure success, but Krishna decided to have a little joke on me and my illusion that I was the doer and that I could do anything to assure success when He wanted it to not succeed. Man proposes, God disposes was demonstrated once again.
March 25, 2012
‘Therefore the statement of Bhagavad-gita that a devotee should see Krsna everywhere (yo mam pasyati sarvatra) can be understood in terms of the example of a lusty man’s thinking that the world is full of beautiful women. Similarly, one should become transcendentally so desirous of seeing the Lord that one can perceive within the entire universe nothing but Krsna and His potency. “
Srimad Bhagvatam 11.2.45
“When we love God’s will we find Him and own His joy in all things.”
A Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas P. McDonnell, (New York: Image Books, 1989): 65
Psalm 95: 1 “Come, let us sing joyfully to the LORD; cry out to the rock of our salvation.”
Contemplative Pause: “Throughout this day, pause, take a breath, and listen with your heart. Name the joy in your life.”
The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living
March 24, 2012
March 23, 2012
My granddaughter Sydney, Manjari’s daughter, came for a visit last weekend. One of the activities was going out to pick the early daffodils that were starting to open up. Later there will be an abundance of blooming flowers but we were just getting the varieties that are the earliest to take to the temple to the Deities.
Sydney got right into it and was as productive as an adult. I am sure she would have eventually gotten bored with it but for the time it took us to get what was ready she stayed excited.
Vidya had an early Easter egg hunt since she won’t be here at Easter and there was a full day of other things for Sydney to do as well.
In the evening we went to the local roller skating rink. That is mostly a tween type crowd, and Sydney, at almost 6, was the youngest skater there but that didn’t dampen her enthusiasm.
I know that she will eventually be a great skater because she has balance and determination. She kept at it in a very focused way, and although she would accept a helping hand from time to time, mostly she was pushing herself on her own. Sshe is not afraid to fall and no matter how many times she went down she got herself back up and kept at it.
I have always said you can learn how to skate and not fall, or you can fall and learn how to skate. She is not afraid to fall. Falling means you are pushing the edge of the learning curve and that is required if you want to improve.
I had hoped to be able to demonstrate better than I was able to because if you can see someone else can do something, it makes it easier to do it yourself. The mental barrier of knowing it can be done is breached if you can see someone else doing it.
That is why the principle of association is so important in religious and spiritual life — if you can see someone performing strong sadhana, spiritual practices, you know it can be done, even if you yourself are struggling to improve.
I was trying to do an aerial but the best I could manage was a 180 degrees, I couldn’t pull the trigger on a full 360, something I used to do routinely. I just don’t get skating often enough to do some of my old tricks. plus the energy it takes to pull some of them off is lacking.
Still, I was able to do a lot of moves and hopefully she will have a few memories when she gets older of me being able to skate.
March 21, 2012
“Our philosophy is that you produce your food anywhere you stay, and keep cows, take milk, produce vegetables, food grains, and chant Hare Krsna. That’s all. This is our philosophy. Make your life successful. By becoming Krsna conscious, you become free from al these troubles of material condition. This is our education.” Srila Prabhupada, Conversations, May 25, 1974
Daiva Varnasrma Ministry (In) unveiled its new publication titled – “Village Life – Our Philosophy, Our Life and Our Education” in an attractive paperback design. The tasty and insightful articles of author – His Holiness Bhakti Raghava Swami draws one to deep topics such as Dharma, Tehnology, Development, Women, Traditional Education, Food, Astrology, Health and Guiding Principles of Rural Communities of Villages.
The central theme of the book reflected through the main essay titled – “Village Life – Our Philosophy, Our Education and Our Lifestyle” draw one attention towards the importance of village living.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
“The basis of ‘Simple Living and High Thinking’, the norm for civilized human beings, lies in the acceptance of village life centered on the performance of sacrifice, yajna, which is born of prescribed duties as delineated in the scientific system of varnas and asramas. Such a social system, being very intimately connected with land, cows and higher consciousness, namely Krsna consiousness, is the most perfect and holistic way to live. When human society, due to neglect, bad leadership or misfortune, all based on lust, anger, greed, illusion, madness and envy, deviates from this established norm, a norm scientifically designed and created by the highest of authorities, Lord Krsna Himself, a system meant to uphold, protect and foster the universal principles of dharma or religiosity, we should know for certain that only chaos will prevail and immense sufferring must follow”.
For devotees interested to collect this valuable piece kindly write to the following id:
** firstname.lastname@example.org **
For bulk orders (min 25 copies): Rs80/- Retail price : Rs100/-
Bharat Chandra Dasa National Coordinator ISKCON Daiva Varnasrama Ministry (In) email: Bharat.Chandra.BRS@pamho.net | <urn:uuid:e4da40cd-758e-4f7b-a0a5-ec71ba8cdac4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://walkingthefenceline.wordpress.com/2012/03/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975736 | 3,110 | 1.828125 | 2 |
.- It was still dark, almost an hour before sunrise on Sept. 5, but the freshly decorated white marble tomb of Blessed Teresa gleamed as the feast day of the saintly nun began.
According to UCA News, activities began early in the morning with the arrival of more than 150 women, men and children from slum areas where Blessed Teresa had begun her mission among "the poorest of the poor."
The program of activities that day marked the 10th death anniversary of the world-renowned nun, who lived in this eastern Indian city formerly called Calcutta. Her tomb sits inside the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity (MC) congregation that she started in 1950.
The tomb, adorned with flowers and the words "Happy Feast, Mother" formed with yellow marigold petals, was lit up by the glow of candles held by people who came for the morning program.
Archbishop Lucas Sirkar of Calcutta led the 6 a.m. Mass in the motherhouse chapel with 12 priests. The chapel was crowded with MC novices, all in white, professed nuns in their blue-bordered white saris, Religious brothers, priests and people of various religions.
The archbishop asked the congregation to meditate on the words Blessed Teresa spoke or wrote. "They were very simple," but revealed a person of great depth, he added.
After the Mass, the MC novices walked down to the courtyard and sang "Happy Feast Day, Mother, and may God make you a saint" before a huge picture of Blessed Teresa. The picture had been displayed at St. Peter's Square when Pope John Paul II beatified the nun on Oct. 19, 2003, at the Vatican.
Sister Nirmala Joshi, Blessed Teresa's successor, told the gathering she was "overwhelmed with joy" and "a great feeling of gratitude for what God has given to each one of us, especially in Kolkata," through Blessed Teresa.
She wanted all to "pray to Mother to instill in us love for God and all his children, especially the neglected, poor and those who have nowhere to go."
In an August interview with UCA News, Sister Nirmala said the Vatican has cleared most formalities for declaring the MC founder a saint. All that is required is "one more miracle" through Blessed Teresa's intercession, she added.
When a reporter asked Sister Nirmala if everyone experiences the "crisis of faith" revealed in a recently published book of Blessed Teresa's private letters, she answered in the negative.
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, a collection of some of the nun's letters to confessors, has stirred controversy.
"Only those of an advanced level of spirituality" experience this, Sister Nirmala said, calling it a sign of being close to God. It is like being close "to the sun and so blinded by the brilliance," she explained.
At the tomb, people continued to pray. Harihar Sahu, who was born blind and a Hindu but later became a Protestant, sang his own composition at the tomb. The nuns said he regularly visits on her birthday and feast day.
Also seen around the tomb were people from Motijhil, the slum area where Mother Teresa began her work. One of them, Polly Ghosh Roy, told UCA News she believes the saintly nun is still with them.
The MC nuns prepared for the feast with a special novena, nine days of prayers, and daily Mass at the tomb starting Aug. 27. The archdiocese celebrated Mass in English and in Bengali at Blessed Teresa's Christ the King Parish. | <urn:uuid:a3eb4825-bf1d-404f-9963-471e4ebafa16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/blessed_teresas_feast_brings_slum_people_others_to_her_tomb/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973871 | 756 | 1.632813 | 2 |
The weather during the winter is very comfortable in Kolkata. December to February is the winter season in Kolkata. The temperature varies between 12o to 26oC and does not go below 10oC.
HOW TO REACH
Well connected by Air with nonstop flights from London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Bangkok and with all Major cities of India like New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad etc. The Institute is around 22 Km from the Airport and about half that distance from Howrah and Sealdah Railway terminus. The nearest metro rail connection is available at the nearby Rabindra Sarobar metro station that provides a fast and easy connectivity with the central and northern parts of the city. Gariahat, a traditionally active commercial hub of the city is also located close to the Institute.
Computer Section, CGCRI | <urn:uuid:1d521303-9e2d-4065-a373-3de542b61d0b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cgcri.res.in/isem-2011/location.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952726 | 174 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Updated: 23 Aug 2008
Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s running mate, has earned an 83 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters during his 35 years representing Delaware in the U.S. Senate, voting fairly consistently with environmentalists and the mainstream of his party. In 2007, while running for president, he said “energy security” was his top priority, and argued that he was well-suited to deal with the challenge thanks to years of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he now chairs. Biden is also a big booster of biofuels.
Read Grist’s 2007 interview with Joe Biden.
- Primary cosponsor of a “Sense of the Senate” resolution calling on the U.S. to participate in U.N. climate negotiations. He introduced it with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in the current Congress and the previous one.
- Cosponsor of the Boxer-Sanders Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, the most stringent climate bill in the Senate. It would establish a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions and require the U.S. to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. (Biden became a cosponsor of it more than three months after it was introduced and just days after both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama signed on.)
- In 2007, during his most recent run for president, called for raising fuel-economy standards for automobiles to an average of 40 miles per gallon by 2017 by increasing fuel-economy targets within vehicle classes by about one mile per gallon per year.
- Called for increasing ethanol and biodiesel production by upping the national renewable-fuel standard to require that the fuel supply include 10 billion gallons of renewable fuel a year by 2010 and 60 billion gallons a year by 2030.
- Called for 20 percent of the U.S. electricity supply to come from renewable sources.
Video and Audio
Watch Biden ask: What are you willing to do to break our dependence on oil?
Watch Biden answer a question about moving toward renewable energy at a July 20, 2007, campaign event in Iowa:
Listen to a clip of Biden’s interview with Grist and Outside:
- “If I could wave a wand, and the Lord said I could solve one problem, I would solve the energy crisis. That’s the single most consequential problem we can solve. It’s what you have to do to get greenhouse gases under control.”
– March 3, 2007, at a rally in Hartsville, S.C.
- “I personally believe that the single most important step we can take to resume a leadership role in international climate-change efforts would be to make real progress toward a domestic emissions-reduction regime. For too long we have abdicated the responsibility to reduce our own emissions, the largest single source of the problem we face today. We have the world’s largest economy, with the highest per-capita emissions. Rather than leading by example, we have retreated from international negotiations.”
– Jan. 30, 2007, in a statement given before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee | <urn:uuid:079be07c-38d5-41d4-b41e-7f57719918a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://grist.org/article/biden_factsheet/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953914 | 670 | 1.695313 | 2 |
There's a certain free-spirited quality to long hair—and it looks like that fact hasn't slipped by the North Koreans. Word's gotten out that their famously secretive government has issued a list of 28 state-sanctioned haircuts for men and women, as reported by the U.K.'s Telegraph—and none goes past the collarbone. The approved cuts have been deemed the "most comfortable" styles that also protect against the "corrupting effects of capitalism," reports New York's Daily News. Think of the worst hairdo your least-favorite grade school teacher had, and it's probably on the list of the 18 options for women.
(Apparently, middle-parted, feathered bangs are supereasy and socialist.) Single women are instructed to keep their hair shorter than married women, and guys are prohibited from growing their hair longer than two inches—unless you're "older," in which you case you can get away with a full three. The good news? Looking like Kim Jong Un is a no-no—that rad, semi-'80s fade is reserved for the supreme leader alone.
It's not the first time North Korea has weighed in on acceptable hairstyles: In 2009, women were urged to keep their hair braided, tied back, permed, or in a bun. So...progress?
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES | <urn:uuid:ce43c51a-ea18-4980-9055-c8e501c1d51c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.allure.com/beauty-trends/blogs/daily-beauty-reporter/2013/03/north-korea-government-sanctioned-hairstyles.html | 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 | 0.978685 | 284 | 1.585938 | 2 |
PATNA: Cold wave situation eased in Bihar on Friday with minimum temperature being around 5-6 degrees Celsius at different places except at Motihari where the minimum temperature was 3 degrees Celsius. Cold wave condition receded in Jharkhand also with minimum temperature recorded in Ranchi and Jamshedpur being around 9 degrees Celsius.
According to director, meteorology, Patna, R K Mukhopadhyaya, the cold wave condition in Bihar may recede in three-four days. Showing satellite pictures of Bihar, taken at 2.30 pm on Friday, he said that the "status cloud", i.e. thick sheet of fog in higher altitude in air, covering the Sun, remain only in the northern part of the state.
The pictures showed clear sky in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh due to absence of "status cloud". This indicated a gradual easing of the cold wave situation in Bihar--it is likely to recede within three-four days. The satellite pictures over the last four days showed extension of "status cloud" from the north-west and northern region upto Bihar and Jharkhand, explaining the severe cold wave sweeping the entire northern India.
On Friday, the minimum temperature recorded at various places was as follows: Patna 5.5 degrees Celsius, Gaya 5.8 degrees Celsius, Bhagalpur 6.3 degrees Celsius and Motihari 3 degrees Celsius.
On Friday morning in Patna, there was thick fog. It got cleared only by 11.30 am. The maximum temperature recorded was 18.3 degrees Celsius, with wind getting quite calm. In Gaya, the maximum temperature was 25.1 degrees Celsius.
Mukhopadhyaya said that severe cold wave situation prevailed in Bihar and Jharkhand due to formation of "status cloud" and wet westerly wind that reached here sweeping the northern part of the country. This happened because of absence of western disturbance in Jammu and Kashmir, due to which low pressure was not induced in Rajasthan. | <urn:uuid:7e077b0a-3b44-461f-8737-bc88f1cf96de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2003-01-25/patna/27267160_1_cold-wave-degrees-celsius | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944347 | 416 | 1.53125 | 2 |
For the longest time, our society has programmed us to believe that being small was not a good trait, in almost anything. To go even further, it's being looked down upon. Unfortunately, many believe that nonsense which is saddening and unhelpful to those who are below the average size. Bigger does not mean better. It only means bigger or taller people have more mass structure. The good news is that there are ways to deal with it which require self-discipline and daily self-reminders:
- Accepting and embracing who you are make you unique
- Strengthening self-respect prompts respect from others
- Ridiculing the belief that being short or small is a drawback
- Learning to laugh at yourself
- Prioritizing on other things that matter most in your life : your projects, your goals, your dreams (other than wishing to be taller)
By applying the above methods, you'll notice a definite change in your perspective of things in life. So what if you're being called names and finger-pointed for stretching your muscles a little more than the others to be able to reach out for the cookie jar that's purposely placed on the highest kitchen shelf? Just get a chair. Yes, it's more work, but at least you're moving and you are getting that darn cookie jar. Problem solved. Nothing else matters more than your well-being and your happiness.
Now you'll ask, 'what does this have anything to do with food?'. Well, being small can have its advantages. These mini pot pies can be the perfect appetizers or the original entree that can wow everyone during a holiday dinner party. Their size makes them practical for a buffet-style dinner for your guests. They're easy to eat and so fun to prepare. Invite your guests or your kids to prepare them. Kids love helping out in the kitchen and they have fun cooking when you make a game out of it.
I enjoy making those so much more than making a regular sized chicken pot pie only because it's a different way of making chicken pot pie. In addition, they're cute. Who doesn't like biting into canapés or amuse-bouches just before dinner? They're fun and eye-popping treats that never fail to amaze your guests with 'Ooohs' and 'Aaahs'. When it comes to cooking, I love being creative and making something a little out of the box for the sake of making my experiments in the kitchen all the more interesting. The minute I start falling into a routine, I get bored and lose my sense of creativity.
That being said, I hope you will try those for the holidays and I promise that they are treats that you and your guests will love sinking your teeth into. Adding some cajun spices adds a nice kick to those pies.
1/2 tsp ground cajun spice (found in any local supermarket)
2 tbsp flour
pinch of coarse sea salt
Preheat oven at 350F
Pop the chicken pot pies in the oven and bake for about 10-12 minutes or until the crust is golden and flaky.
Serves 4 - 6 people.
share and enjoy! | <urn:uuid:8f806db7-1aa1-4b95-a9e5-34a77f922dd4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://qlinart.blogspot.com/2011/11/being-small-has-its-advantages-mini.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963073 | 658 | 1.84375 | 2 |
With the 2012 Summer Olympics now officially behind us (unless you live in London anyway, where you all are probably still recovering from it all), a documentary feature film about 17 year-old Claressa "T-Rex" Shields, the youngest woman - and one of the first - to ever box in the Olympics, is in production.
The tri-continental effort (North America, Europe and Asia) comes from directors Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari, who've been shooting the film since the beginning of this year, and recently successfully completed a $64,000 fundraising campaign - funds that will now be used to complete the film in another 4-6 months.
Here's a long description of the project:
T-Rex isn't her real name. Her real name is Claressa. Friends and family just call her Ressa. She's from Flint, Michigan. She's in high school. Next year she'll be a senior. The first day we met, it was her 17th birthday. She had a water balloon fight and a big, yellow cake. She carries her money around in a plastic bottle. She wears her hair in braids (sometimes). She takes the bus to school. She likes twitter. She likes boys. She writes in her journal. Pretty everyday for a teenager. But this is hardly an everyday story. Six years ago her dad took her to a local boxing gym. She said she wanted to box. He said, "Hell no. Boxing is a man's sport." She ignored him.
Skip ahead to the 2012 summer Olympics in London, where women's boxing was a first-time-ever sport, with Claressa being the youngest of all the competitors. Claressa would eventually claim her sport in history as the youngest, and the first woman boxer to win a Gold Medal in her weight class.
She returned home, to Flint just yesterday, as a new chapter in her life begins...
This would be a doc primed for the Sundance Film Festival next January, but with 4-6 months left of production, it's unlikely it'll premiere there.
But it's on my watch list.
Check out a preview of what to expect below: | <urn:uuid:5b628764-9bde-441b-a85d-fabae7139302> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/doc-on-17-year-old-claressa-t-rex-shields-youngest-woman-to-ever-box-in-olympics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974282 | 452 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Before going, my image of Hong Kong was one of a huge, crowded fast paced city that never sleeps...
I wasn't exactly wrong about that part, but we also found out that there is a more serene side to Hong Kong. The city itself is home to many small oases of peace, like parks and temples. And aside from that the administrative region of Hong Kong is much more than just the city. It's filled with hills, forest, wetlands and hundreds of islands -both inhabited and uninhabited.
Religion in Hong Kong has thrived uninterrupted by the Cultural Revolution and other tragic events that oppressed religious communities in Mainland China. Most temples are Daoist, and many of them are very atmospheric places, where locals drop by throughout the day to light incense sticks and perhaps even burn so called ghost money as a way to worship their ancestors.
Hong Kong thankfully has many well maintained parks, which we used as a place to relax and to recharge our batteries. This was especially important since the Nitoli was 6-month pregnant at this time. One of our favourites was the not very inventively name "Hong Kong Park", which is home to the fantastic Edward Youde Aviary full of 600 exotic birds that you see from wooden walkways at tree top level. And it's 100% free to enter.
Islands & Seas
During our days in Hong Kong we took to the water several times. A couple of times we took the iconic Star Ferry connecting Kowloon to Hong Kong island, giving a great view of the skyline both ways. But we also made a point of taking a longer ferry ride to one of Hong Kong's many smaller inhabited islands, Cheung Chau.
Cheung Chau Village on the Island of same name. The Village is located on the narrowest part of the island, so you can walk from one side to another in a few minutes.
Finally we also went on an organized boat trip to look for the elusive and endangered pink dolphins living in the Pearl river delta. It was slightly disappointing that we only saw one dolphin after several hours of scouting, but even so it was a nice trip out on the open waters and I do recommend it for other visitors.
More pictures of some of Hong Kong's serene side:
Forest Temple on the southern part of Cheung Chau
Beach on Cheung Chau
Rock carving, probably done by local fishermen some 3000 years old
Fishing vessels in the harbour of Cheung Chau
Star Ferry - taking locals and tourists across Victoria Harbour since 1888
The Aviary in Hong Kong Park, seen from the outside. Lots of room under the big net for the birds to fly around and live almost as in the wild
Two pidgeons enjoying each other's company in the Aviary
Susanna in the Aviary
City worker watering the trees and plants from the central walkway
One of the many beautiful birds
Nicely landscaped park
Turtles sunning themselves on top of each other in the park pond
Flamingoes in a different park, this one "Kowloon Park"
Burning ghost money outside a temple
Incense burning inside a temple
Deities on display
Revelers light incense outside one of Hong Kong's large temples, Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin
Chi Lin Buddhist Nunnery in the northern part of Kowloon. Allegedly built of wood without using a single nail
A golden temple with very orange bridge near Chi Lin
And finally a little "house temple" this one from a small restaurant near our hotel | <urn:uuid:f67fd780-d9f6-455b-a3c9-0233c63cd4bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eagersnap.blogspot.com/2010/07/serene-side-of-hong-kong.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966797 | 730 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Port of New Orleans Expected to Remain Open
May 16, 2011
May 16, 2011. All leased cargo facilities, including those used by Seaboard Marine, in the Port of New Orleans remain open, and continue to have regular access to waterborne commerce and truck and rail deliveries.
The Port of New Orleans is monitoring the Mississippi River situation and is coordinating efforts with the U.S. Coast Guard, Corps of Engineers and the local maritime community.
The water level at New Orleans remains below 17.0 feet and with the opening of the Morganza Spillway on May 14, the Corps of Engineers expects the water level to stay below 17. 0 feet for the coming weeks.
The Coast Guard has indicated that it will restrict vessel traffic only if the water level reaches 18.0 feet at New Orleans. In the unlikely event that the Mississippi River rises at New Orleans and vessel traffic and cargo operations are impacted, this article will be updated accordingly. | <urn:uuid:aae2671b-a6e6-40a8-a855-bd2605537975> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seaboardmarine.com/SML/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=251 | 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 | 0.93668 | 195 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Whitney Houston’s tragic passing took me back to the Super Bowl at Tampa, Florida in 1991. I remember because I was there. It was the first Super Bowl where security was amped up to a high level because the US was in the Gulf war.
Everyone was feeling patriotic when Whitney stepped up and sang her resounding Star Spangled Banner. Actually, she didn’t just sing it. She BELTED it out. It stuck with you. The dramatic game between the Bills and Giants was decided on a missed field goal by Buffalo’s Scott Norwood. Still, afterwards, players on both teams were talking about Whitney. Her version was SO good, it actually became a hit recording.
It was one of those moments that reminds you of how sports and music always dance together. I tune out the endless hip hop at NBA games. But I remember real singers bringing their “A” game at major sporting events.
Marvin Gaye at the NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles in 1983 was another such moment. Marvin sang the anthem as only he could, with unmistakeable soul. Its the only time I ever recall an audience clapping in unision during the anthem. We were at a basketball game, but Marvin took us to church.
Prince singing “Purple Rain” IN the rain at the 2007 Super Bowl. You couldn’t have scripted that any better. Great theatre. It took our minds off of the fact that this was the soggiest Super Bowl in history.
Whitney’s gone, but my memory of how she blended sports and music will stick with me. As athletes often say about each other…she had game. | <urn:uuid:ef25def0-5dd6-4f0b-9c84-424f0761ad41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://andreacalleblog.com/tag/star-spangled-banner/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986359 | 350 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Read here. Although the original Swiss article does not mention "climate science" specifically, everyone and their mama knows the AGW-based scientists have totally trashed the peer-review journal process - they are the poster boys of science corruption.
Here's but just one example of how biased the peer-reviewed journals have become due to AGW-scientist influence. How about this recent gem from the AGW scientists? And of course, there is the entire realm of Climategate, which revealed to the average layperson why the peer-reviewed process was in the crapper.
"...the peer-review process and the problems plaguing it. Peer-review has become a leading topic in science in Europe and all over the world. The NZZ starts off: Irritated by multiple scandals over the last years, many scientists are up in arms over the peer-review of scientific articles and are hoping for improvement. Many say there’s a need for reform. Scientists say manipulation is as easy as pie.....And it is unclear whether the current large-scale peer-review process yields the correct, important results every time. Also publishers and peer-reviewers can make mistakes, as hanky panky like copying text and manipulating charts is especially easy in today’s computer age."
The quickest way to clean the peer-review process is for governments to mandate the science journals to publish all data and coding associated with research that is published in the peer-reviewed journals. Of course, the science journals that propose CO2 and energy mandates on the public and industry will fight any mandates imposed on them. Too bad. Time for the whining and resistance to end. For the reputation of science and peer-reviewed journal process to be restored, the first step requires transparency. It's a simple, quick fix that will weed out the majority of bogus science, naturally. | <urn:uuid:2c06b207-5d70-4a32-b3bc-ebca16a79c17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/08/mission-accomplished-climate-alarmist-scientists-achieved-flushing-peerreview-reputation-down-toilet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945 | 379 | 1.75 | 2 |
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