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This is the second of a two part series about the Feb. 25, 2012, joint retreat of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and the Fairfax County School Board.
Part I, Board of Supervisors, School Board Team Up, was published Monday.
Providing a skilled work force for the next decade is going to require collaboration between public school systems, community colleges and four-year universities, according to local educators.
Dana Kauffman, director of College Government Affairs at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), said local communities need to grow their own front-line work force. He addressed the joint retreat of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and School Board Saturday.
A 2011 study conducted by Dr. Stephen Fuller of George Mason University found there will be more than 300,000 new jobs coming to Fairfax County in the next 10 years, said Kauffman.
Forty percent of those are predicted to be in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, referred to in educational circles as “STEM.” “That’s larger than the next four fields combined,” said Kauffman.
Kauffman said a study by a leading labor economist from Georgetown University estimated two-thirds of the new jobs will require post-secondary education.
“As the baby boomers retire, we will lose one of the best educated work forces the county has ever seen, replaced with one that is less educated and doesn’t have the skill sets to fill the new jobs,” said Kauffman. That’s because many people in the upcoming work force are from families in which no one has gone to college.
“We need your cooperation and partnership to work with business to provide better college access for first-generation college goers,” Kauffman told the supervisors and school board members.
More Access and 'SySTEMic Solutions'
Kauffman said Virginia HB 1184, which passed the Virginia House on Feb. 6, and the Virginia Senate on Feb. 20, would stretch enrollment at NOVA, and contribute to the needed work force. HB 1184 provides dual enrollment for high school students, giving them college credit for work in high school.
In addition, NOVA is working with Delegate Jim Scott (D-Fairfax) and Delegate Tag Greason (R-Loudoun), supporting Budget Amendment #212H, which would provide $1 million for NOVA’s STEM initiative called SySTEMic Solutions.
“A $1 million commitment ($500,000 each year of the biennium) would bolster and expand SySTEMic Solutions beyond the current service area of Prince William to include Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, and Alexandria. The $1M from the General Assembly will be matched by corporations to be able to sustain and continue to expand these programs,” says a NOVA SySTEMic Solutions document.
NOVA projects the investmet will place more than 16,000 students in the technology worker pipeline by 2015 - 2016.
“SySTEMic Solutions provides a replicable model to supply skilled workers through bringing a comprehensive STEM curriculum, intensive teacher training process and numerous dual enrollment student enrichment opportunities together in one research-based approach,” says the document.
“In the last 10 years, 30,000 students who started at NOVA have gone on to Mason,” said Kauffman.
Kauffman said a cooperative relationships between teachers and employers provides better understanding of what kids need to know to get into and hold a job.
NOVA is already working with Arlington High Schools on a class system, which would provide high school graduates with both a high school diploma and a two- year degree.
Remedial Education Needed
Superintendent Jack Dale reported about 20 percent of FCPS graduates go into NOVA, and 50 percent of those require some remedial work before beginning their core courses.
“Those FCPS graduates coming into NOVA are not ready to handle college level English and math," Dale said. “That means about 10 percent of our total graduates are showing need for some kind of remediation,” said Dale.
Dale believes the state’s Standards of Learning (SOLs) are creating a hurdle for college readiness. “The misalignment comes because we teach to the what the SOLs want, not what colleges expect."
Dale said this kind of disconnect is not common in all states. “Virginia is probably one of the least aligned education systems at the state level,” said Dale. “There is no compelling reason at the state level for school systems, community colleges and four-year university’s to work together.”
“It’s stunning to me that you can get through our system without knowing the basics,” said Jeff McKay, Lee District Supervisor.
Dale said many FCPS students come late into the system. “Our drop-out rate has been less than 10 percent over the last four years,’ said Dale. “The majority of those entered FCPS in the late elementary or middle school grades, and had not mastered reading by graduation,” he said.
Students also move from one school in the county to another, and their identified needs fall through the cracks, said Dale.
Deputy County Executive Pat Harrison said the county is also looking at a county funded adult education partnership with NOVA. Mason District Supervisor Penny Gross wanted to know where the school system's Adult and Community Education fit into that. “I’m getting a lot of emails about the cuts in that,” Gross said.
Kauffman said a forum on preparing the new workforce will be scheduled this fall for all stakeholders. | <urn:uuid:87d34237-9348-40bb-823d-6f40314b47d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lorton.patch.com/articles/va-educational-changes-needed-to-prepare-local-workforce | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95987 | 1,194 | 1.59375 | 2 |
(NNPA)—Nearly two years ago, we as a nation witnessed an unparalleled moment in our own history. Exhausted, frustrated and simply fed up with destructive policies that only benefited a few elite, citizens in every single state achieved the unimaginable. It wasn’t simply that we elected the first African-American president to office—which itself was an undoubtedly remarkable moment.
But it was primarily the push that took place prior to hitting the voting booth; the momentum that literally changed the course of this country that truly transformed us. It was, after all, the people that organized and mobilized for change. It was the record-breaking number of voters that turned out on Election Day ’08 and stood in line for hours in order to exercise one of their most basic rights as Americans that resulted in this change.
And It was the enthusiasm and intense involvement of the body electorate that created one of the most engaging presidential elections ever. It is time for us to reinvigorate those very sentiments.
Labor Day, in political terms, is chiefly marked as the unofficial start to the fall campaign cycle.
Less than two months away from the coveted mid-term elections, we are guaranteed to witness an up in the ante of hate rhetoric, attacks against the president, vitriol hurled at Democrats and an overall hostile environment. In an attempt to garner as many seats in both the House and Senate, Republicans will and already are pulling out all the stops to discredit President Obama and those that push for progress.
Engaging in fear-mongering and other disruptive tactics, many of these politicians will say just about anything in order to rile up their base and get voters to the polls. Therefore, those of us that choose to progress and not regress, cannot sit idly at home come November.
Imagine for a moment if the youth of America weren’t actively involved in organizing and voting for change in ’08. What would have happened if there wasn’t a historic voter turnout on Election Day? Just try to picture if you will, what our country would be like if John McCain was president and Sarah Palin vice president? No one is saying that we should never question President Obama or any other elected official; critiquing those in authority is one of our duties as Americans. But we must remember that there is a massive difference between critiquing and between becoming unengaged in the entire process.
Last year, we witnessed the dangerous effects of remaining apathetic and uninvolved in elections. The state of N.J.—a long-time Democratic state—elected Chris Christie for governor and hence went Republican for the first time in a dozen years. Elections have serious consequences. Campaigns signify the sentiments of their respective Party. With so many seats up for grab across the country in November, we cannot afford to sit at home. We may have elected the first African-American president, but we cannot think that our responsibility as citizenry ends there.
At a speech in Milwaukee the other day, the president reminded us not to relive the past. I echo that sentiment. We must continue progressing. But we cannot simply demand progress, we must push and fight for it ourselves. So why not do so in the biggest battlefield we have—the voting booth.
Digital Daily Signup
Sign up now for the New Pittsburgh Courier Digital Daily newsletter! | <urn:uuid:72d7a3b5-ec5d-411b-b021-df79f0942c32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newpittsburghcourieronline.com/index.php/opinion/2990-our-responsibility-to-vote-didnt-end-with-the-obama-election | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965437 | 681 | 1.757813 | 2 |
As soon as the soil can be worked, plant thinly, 1/2" deep, in rows 12" apart. Allow 2 weeks for germination. Thin to 4 inches apart. An earlier crop can be obtained by starting 3-5 seeds in a peat pot in early May and transplanting them outside in early June. A packet contains 25 seeds unless otherwise stated. One oz. contains from 150 to 300 seeds depending on size. | <urn:uuid:a47c2604-d23c-4e5a-a40f-718188f2d26c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vermontbean.com/dc.asp?c1=Summer+Squash&c=50 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949509 | 88 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Updates to this story
When asked in an interview with a Swiss TV channel if he might move the highly controversial website to Switzerland, Assange replied saying ''That is a real possibility''.
''We are examining whether I should apply for asylum,” he added, saying that the country was, alongside Iceland, the only place he believed he would feel safe for his site to operate.
Assange has endured a tough time in Sweden, with his application for citizenship followed swiftly by allegations of rape and molestation, claims he maintains were a “set up” by someone on his presumably long list of enemies.
Despite the noise being made by US officials with regards to actually attacking the site - essentially calling for Wikileaks to be classed as a foreign enemy of the country - it appears that such negative attention has not perturbed another document-leaking website from being set up.
According to the WSJ it appears that a former top operator at Wikileaks Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left the site two months ago, will be joined by other former staff to launch a new whistleblowing site which focuses on slightly less sensitive information than the highly controversial Wikileaks.
"It would be good to have more organisations like Wikileaks," said a Wikileaks spokesman, adding that they wished Domscheit-Berg luck.
With apparently 70 percent of WIkileaks resources being taken up by defending its own financial structure as well as its sources and collaborators it seems as though Assange could do with the help.
He recently attacked US authorities for a lack of reaction to incidents of torture leaked through his site, citing England and Denmark as examples of countries who reacted positively to leaks, telling reporters ''It is time the United States opened up instead of covering up”.
A spokesperson for the US Defense Department said that they would be conducting their own inquiry into actions by their troops. ''They're our internal reports,'' said Major Chris Perrine. ''The idea that we haven't investigated any of these is false.''
Wikileaks recently announced that it would be expanding countries from which it would be leaking documents with Russia and Lebanon being mentioned as sources of future leaks. | <urn:uuid:ce6ec838-56f9-438c-b62b-9b6c1a7b4724> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.techeye.net/security/wikileaks-founder-may-seek-refuge-in-switzerland | 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 | 0.979343 | 436 | 1.5625 | 2 |
It's All Politics
Thu October 4, 2012
That's Why Incumbents Used To Say No
Originally published on Thu October 4, 2012 5:44 pm
In case anyone was wondering, this week's presidential debate demonstrated why incumbent presidents and others leading in the polls used to refuse to debate their challengers.
After John F. Kennedy used the first TV debates to boost his campaign against incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960, there simply were no debates until 1976. Running again with a big lead in 1968 and 1972, Nixon declined to debate and won both times. Lyndon B. Johnson also demurred in 1964 without damage en route to a landslide.
Since then, we have seen seven sitting presidents agree to debate their major challengers, and nearly all of them suffered for it.
Gerald Ford in 1976 might have held on to the White House had he not debated challenger Jimmy Carter, who four years later saw his own re-election bid die after debating Ronald Reagan.
In 1984, as the incumbent, Reagan seemed dazed and confused through much of his first debate with Walter Mondale, and an otherwise ho-hum contest briefly got hot.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush was already trailing when he took the stage with Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot. His lackluster showing confirmed the dynamic that cost him his office.
His son, George W. Bush, also had a rocky outing against challenger John Kerry in 2004, although he recovered well enough to minimize the damage and win narrowly in November.
The one exception to this pattern came in 1996, when President Clinton was running for a second term and used the debates to slam the door on Republican Bob Dole. Clinton was arguably a better president on stage than he was in office, but he was surely better on stage than Dole. In fact, he made it look so easy that the team in the current White House might well have thought their man would do the same.
So we have had three presidents who debated and lost (Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush) and three who debated and went on to win (Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush). The Obama case will be the tiebreaker.
That is not nearly so reassuring a scorecard as Democrats seem to think it is when they bring up the "incumbents stumble in first debate" argument. On the other hand, it can also be said that the debating incumbents who lost had a lot of other problems and might well have lost anyway, and a less than stellar performance has not been consistently fatal.
One thing is clear at this point. The change this first debate has already wrought in the campaign dynamic is more than a cautionary note for President Obama. It casts his entire re-election rationale in an unflattering light.
In essence, the question posed is this: If he was not focused enough to represent himself well in this critical meeting with former Gov. Mitt Romney, how well focused is he on the rest of his job? Is the president the inspirational orator or the magisterial professor we have seen in the past? Or is he as halting and hesitant about the problems he confronts in the Oval Office as he seemed in confronting his rival onstage in Denver?
Romney stole the headlines with his star turn as a corporate executive fighting a boardroom battle with the weapons of his trade. But he would not have been so clear a winner if the president had been on his game, sure of his aces, returning fire point for point. In those moments when Obama did have strong points to make, he barely seemed able to find the words.
This was where the trifecta of incumbency, a lead in the polls and high voter expectations hurt the incumbent. Most Americans told pollsters this week that they expected the president to win the debate. They and much of the media imagined the law school professor Obama cutting through the blustering corporate executive Romney. Instead, the professor seemed not to have prepared for the lecture, and the businessman was making the pitch of his life.
Had he been at his best, Obama might have begun the end for Romney last night. But he manifestly failed to do so.
We may have gotten a glimpse into just how overconfident Obama and his inner circle had become. They clearly do not regard Romney as highly as they did John McCain four years ago and perhaps cannot imagine themselves losing to him. That is classic incumbent behavior and provides the challenger with a marvelous opening.
So the crucial question is whether the president will take Romney seriously enough to change his demeanor in the latter two debates. He has to punch back without becoming petulant, get tough without being unpresidential. If he can do that, he can recover. If he cannot, the small cushion he built up in September will not be enough to secure a second term.
After his weak performance in the first 1984 debate, Reagan came back in the second with his famous vow "not to exploit my opponent's youth and inexperience."
His chief of staff, James Baker, was asked the next day whether it was a good idea for the incumbent to debate. Baker said he wouldn't comment on whether having a debate was a good idea, but added "it was a good idea to have two." | <urn:uuid:d00ef432-43e4-43c5-be9e-f02c6ef4de20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wkyufm.org/post/thats-why-incumbents-used-say-no | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987373 | 1,076 | 1.59375 | 2 |
By Tom Wilemon and Walter F. Roche Jr. | The Tennessean
Nearly 150 patients who were exposed to potentially contaminated
steroid injections in Tennessee got medicine that was more than 7 weeks
old, even though industry guidelines say its shelf life should have been
no longer than 24 hours.
Almost one in five of those patients
developed fungal infection -- a rate dramatically higher than for those
who were treated with fresher medicine, according to the Tennessee
Department of Health.
The methylprenisolone acetate produced by
Massachusetts-based New England Compounding Center is blamed in a
nationwide outbreak of fungal meningitis that has sickened 424 people
and killed 31, including 13 in Tennessee.
guidelines from the U.S. Pharmacopeia Convention, the drug would be
considered a "high-risk" product -- made from nonsterile ingredients and
lacking antimicrobial preservatives. In the absence of a sterility
test, storage time should not exceed one day at room temperature or
three days at a cold temperature, the guidelines say.
Tennessee, NECC's vials were stored at room temperature, as specified in
the package instructions, state health officials said in a paper
published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
compounding laboratory claimed to have performed sterility tests on its
products, but the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy has said that testing
was inadequate and shipments were made before the safety of medicines
had been verified.
The preservative-free steroid should never have
been mass-produced to begin with, said Loyd V. Allen Jr.,
editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical
"If it is not preserved -- if it is only intended to
be used in one patient -- then it has to be packaged in a single-use
container and its contents have to be used all at one time," Allen said.
"If it is going to be used on multiple patients or at multiple times,
then it has to have a preservative."
NECC violated its license by
mass-producing drugs without prescriptions for individual patients,
according to officials with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and
the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy.
The company shipped 17,676
units of preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate that have been
linked to the outbreak. A sterility test should be conducted for any
batch larger than 25 units, Allen said.
The state health
department's analysis of infection cases in Tennessee found that
patients treated with medicine packaged longer than 50 days had a 19
percent infection rate, while those treated with newer vials had only a 3
percent infection rate.
"We found a strong association between
the age of methylprednisolone vials and the rate of infection in one
clinic," the physicians wrote. "One possible explanation for this
observation is that the level of contamination in the vials may have
increased over time, with subsequent higher fungal burdens present in
The article does not identify the clinic by name but
does note that the clinic had used 1,663 vials of the medicine. The
only one of the three clinics in Tennessee that had that much product,
according to prior information released by the state health department,
was Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery Center.
said the responsibility for providing guidance on shelf life rests with
the drug manufacturer or compounding lab. The best-practice standards do
allow compounding labs to recommend usage for up to six months if
certain criteria, including a program for sterility testing, are met.
Michael A. Carome, deputy director of health research for Public
Citizen, a nonprofit that advocates for public safety, said the medical
journal article is further proof that New England Compounding violated
"Had each dose of the drug been prepared on demand
and as needed for individual patients consistent with the traditionally
narrow scope of a compounding pharmacy, then each dose -- even if
contaminated -- likely would have been used very soon after production,
thus minimizing the risk to the patient because there would have been
less time for the fungus to grow and multiply." | <urn:uuid:0c4aab6c-9b05-4ee1-a231-f9e6432ca102> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbir.com/news/article/241024/2/Meningitis-outbreak-150-patients-received-older-medications | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9478 | 883 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Two words guaranteed to send a flutter of fear through the heart of any 17 or 18-year-old contemplating their next life stage: “Personal” and “Statement.”
Utter the mere words and watch your children hug the wall in fright, retreat back towards darkened bedrooms or shove their hands in their pockets, shuffle a bit and mumble something only they can hear.
But let’s show some sympathy here. Come on. In front of them lies a confusing ocean of choice: what course to do; what city to live in; whether to go where their friends go; whether to follow in the footsteps of their elder siblings; whether to go it alone; whether to go at all.
It’s not an easy call to make at any time, not least at that hormonally volatile age. Remember? Tough, wasn’t it?
One way to help condense and focus those thoughts and cut through the all the cloudiness that the murk of all this choice throws up is to think it all through via the writing of the UCAS personal statement.
By thinking of the Personal Statement a good deal in advance, and how you might help your child to connect their extra-curricular interests, achievements and hobbies with their academic pathway of choice, you can steal a march on all of the rest of the university applicants.
Karen Martin, from the Admissions & Student Recruitment Department at the University of Dundee, explains: “Remember that your Personal Statement is the only piece of written work we will see when selecting the best applicants.”
Pretty crucial, then.
None of this is of course a direct substitute for quality academic performance but, done well and properly, the Personal Statement is often the deciding factor between so many applications of equal weight.
Outlined at the outset on the Personal Statement, there need to be cast-iron reasons for why your child has chosen that particular subject, that university and why exactly they want to go to continue in Higher Education in general. This is the Personal Statement bread and butter.
But, the essentials aside, what other ingredients can you think about in advance that could help boost your child’s application and save you all a whole world of heartache at a later, more stressful date?
Charity work, voluntary social contributions or a part played in a fundraising campaign can demonstrate a nice variety of skills and personal qualities.
The nature of the contribution may be organisational – like setting up a raffle competition to raise money for an African orphanage, it may be physical – like walking 47 miles in 24 hours to raise awareness of Cancer research, or it may be just taking part – as in something like Children in Need, for example.
Key thing is – and this is going to be a running theme here – make whatever the project is have a useful connection with the subject to be studied. For example, contributing to a wildlife conservation project on a Gap Year is going to help with biology, zoology or natural sciences, or organising an auction event for a charity of your choice is going to help with Management, PR or Communications courses.
Find the link and play it up.
Making a clear and relevant connection also applies to holiday jobs or part-time work.
It’s definitely a good thing to have some “real world” experience but make sure the link with the course is pointed out. As such, a newspaper round, though laudable (I know, I lugged luminous orange bags bigger than my bike around every evening for two years), is not that relevant to an undergrad course in pharmacology, but a part-time job in a chemists would be.
Most children at some stage will pick up a musical instrument, whether it be a ukulele or a violin or a tuba, and many will take music lessons (some enforced (!) and some not…).
Obviously music learning is of intrinsic importance of those going to study directly music-related courses but there is also a great cross-over with the patterns of learning associated with languages, the reasoning and practice behind science and maths, as well as the dedication and self-motivation which are crucial to studying things like management or business. The key here is to think laterally. Music learning is a real goldmine of different skills which can be applied to many courses.
Outdoor Pursuits and Sports
Another way to show useful skills and abilities is via sporting successes, passions or outdoor pursuits.
This is doubly interesting for Personal Statement readers when there is a genuine qualification like a Duke of Edinburgh award involved. Integral to activities like these involve teamwork, communication, organisation, resilience and adaptability.
Direct connections to subjects like Sport Science stand out, but they can also be relevant to Geography, Management, Human Resources and other areas of science or medicine – physiology for example.
So, sneak ahead of the chasing pack and give yourself some time to think about these little tips well in advance of the writing of the Personal Statement so that you can give it the turbo boost your child deserves. | <urn:uuid:4dd93aa8-dbdc-4fbb-a02e-3f8a5307a2e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.muminthemadhouse.com/reviews/?bib_page_offset=10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945388 | 1,047 | 1.6875 | 2 |
The ability of leaders to grow people in their organizations has become essential. With this new emphasis, leadership skill enhancement is more likely than ever to cascade through the organization. The synergy of team and leadership development can create a virtual epidemic of positive change.
To navigate the challenges and changes of today's business environment, leaders must focus on four key areas:
Strategy Where do we want to go, and how do we want to get there?
Talent Do we have the right people with the right skills in the right places with the right attitude? Do we successfully develop and retain our talent?
Process Do we have the processes and organizational structure that we need to remain competitive and continue to grow in our chosen strategic direction?
Culture Does our organizational culture support or impede the achievement of our strategy?
Positive Impact has the knowledge, experience, and tools to help leaders navigate the turbulent waters of today's changing business environment. | <urn:uuid:5d880368-638c-466b-8381-2a190e118750> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.p-impact.com/nav.pia | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938158 | 188 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Bribery Act - what you need to know
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Helen Besant-Roberts, business services partner at accountancy firm Hurst, points out some of the pitfalls of the Bribery Act from a deal makers perspective and what action businesses need to take.
Helen Besant-Roberts, business services partner at accountancy firm Hurst, a firm which specialises in providing accountancy services to entrepreneurial businesses across the UK, points out some of the pitfalls of the Bribery Act from a deal makers perspective and what action businesses need to take.
The Ministry of Justice has finally published its guidance on the provisions of the Bribery Act. This is both good and bad news for businesses.
The key points are that ‘hospitality’ can be considered bribery in some circumstances, responsibility for ensuring that bribery doesn’t occur rests with the organisation and extends to many of its connections, and all businesses must assess their bribery risks and put appropriate safeguards in place.
What action do you need to you take?
All commercial organisations in the UK are affected to a greater or lesser extent. It follows that anyone involved in running, acquiring or disposing of a business is bound by this law. Although your response should be proportionate to your risks, doing nothing is not an option. The following steps are recommended:
- Review the Ministry of Justice guidance and ‘Quick start guide’
- Attend a seminar or training course
- Perform a risk assessment of your own bribery risks and the bribery risk of any enterprise with which you have dealings, especially where you are involved in a corporate deal.
- Develop a proportionate anti-bribery implementation plan
The Act comes into force on the 1 July 2011 and includes 3 key bribery offences:
- Bribing another person
- Bribing of a foreign official
- Failure of a commercial organisation to prevent bribery
Hospitality and promotional expenditure
There have been two generally accepted conventions about corporate largesse. The first was that the level of hospitality and accommodation afforded to someone should be broadly in line with that which he or she might enjoy in their own home.
The second was that when doing business in foreign territories, the practices and customs considered acceptable in that culture should be taken into account. In short, ‘When in Rome...’
That’s all changed. Under the strict rules of the Act, hospitality and promotional expenditure could be deemed to be bribery offences. The definition of what constitutes bribery is now extremely broad.
Making bona fide, proportionate and reasonable hospitality and promotional expenditure will not be offences. However, it makes clear that these and “other similar business expenditure can be employed as bribes”.
Failure to prevent bribary
The Act introduces a new offence of a failure to prevent bribery by a commercial organisation. A company will be liable if a person associated with it or acting on its behalf commits a bribery offence, even if the offence is committed without the knowledge or agreement of the company. This includes employees, agents, subsidiaries and may also include contractors and suppliers if they are performing services rather than merely acting as the seller of goods.
The only defence available to companies if a bribery offence is committed on their behalf is that they have ‘adequate procedures’ in place. This is an area still untried in Court and open to interpretation.
It suggests that a formal policy document should be available to all those connected with the organisation, with clear evidence that this has been brought to the attention of relevant connections and, where appropriate, training has been given.
The draft Ministry of Justice guidance sets out a principle-based approach to adequate procedures and identifies 6 key principles. The 6 key principles are:
- Proportionate procedures
- Top-level commitment to implementation of the Act
- Risk assessment
- Due diligence
- Communication (including training)
- Monitoring and review
Due diligence does not have to be undertaken on all organisations along the supply chain.
The presence of a joint venture entity does not automatically make that joint venture an associated party. However, a risk assessment is required.
Tel: 0161 477 2474 | <urn:uuid:a972b42f-5210-40d0-ad6c-ab2b9832c483> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/growing-a-business/business-regulations/1626938/bribery-act-what-you-need-to-know.thtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956059 | 849 | 1.648438 | 2 |
European Decorative Arts and Sculpture
Plate from a Dinner Service
Made by the Sèvres porcelain factory, Sèvres, France, 1756 - present. Decorated by Cyprien-Julien Hirel de Choisy, French, active 1770 - 1812.
Soft-paste porcelain with enamel and gilt decoration
2002-220-1Gift of Miss Letitia Roberts, 2002
LabelIn January of 1784, Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, ordered a dinner service for use in her newly redecorated apartments at the Tuileries palace in Paris. The service, numbering two hundred and fifteen pieces, was completed in May 1784. However, before it could be delivered, King Louis XVI presented the service as a diplomatic gift to Gustave III, the ruler of Sweden, on the occasion of his visit to Paris. Marie-Antoinette, determined to have a service without further delay, ordered the Sèvres factory to continue production of the pattern, and in August of the same year she received two hundred and thirty-nine pieces. Many of the same painters worked on both sets of porcelain, and it is therefore difficult to determine the service from which this plate comes.
* Works in the collection are moved off view for many different reasons. Although gallery locations on the website are updated regularly, there is no guarantee that this object will be on display on the day of your visit. | <urn:uuid:ee754a8f-d779-4bdd-b358-8125d67e3195> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/32895.html?mulR=24741%7C10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943674 | 309 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Oracle and the Java Ecosystem
After an undeniably rocky start, which saw high profile resignations from the JCP, including Doug Lea (who remains active in the OpenJDK), and the Apache Software Foundation, Oracle is making significant efforts to re-engage with the wider Java ecosystem, a theme which it talked up at the most recent JavaOne conference. The company is working hard to engage with the Java User Group leaders and Java Champions, membership of the OpenJDK project is growing, and the company is making efforts to reform the Java Community Process to improve transparency. The firm has also published a clear, well-defined Java roadmap toward Java 8 and Java 9. Problems still exist however.
JCP.next: Reforming the Java Community Process
The Java Community Process, through a series of initiatives lead by chairman Patrick Curran, is aiming to improve its transparency and agility. JSR 348, which is the first in a series of reforms Oracle plans for the JCP, has passed final approval ballot. It represents relatively minor changes, but it is still an important step, requiring that in the future all Expert Groups conduct all of their business in public, using a public mailing-list and a public issue-tracker. Java.net will be used to provide the core infrastructure. Curran told us
I ran JSR 348 as a java.net project, and this worked very well - everything we needed was there. I expect that many Spec Leads (and probably all Oracle Spec Leads) will similarly rely on java.net.
Similar rules are also applied to the Executive Committee, which already publishes all of its minutes and meeting material, but will now be required to hold at least one public face-to-face meeting, which will typically be held at JavaOne according to Curran, and two public teleconferences. The EC is also required to create a public mailing list for community feedback. The EC is still able to go into private session. Curran told us
I think this is an option that the EC should retain, but that it should be exercised very rarely (as indeed it is). The last time we went into private session was in September 2010, when we discussed announcements that were planned for JavaOne, but that we wanted to keep confidential until after the event.
In addition, JSR 348 requires that any requests to join Expert Groups will be published, and defines formal processes for dealing with situations where Expert Group members or Spec Leads are not performing their duties, as well as penalties for Executive Committee members who do not attend meetings. From the EC Standing Rules document (PDF)
- Missing two meetings in a row (whether teleconference or face-to-face meetings) results in the loss of voting privileges in all JSR ballots and EC votes that have not yet started. An EC member who has lost voting privileges cannot make or second a motion. Privileges are regained after full attendance at two consecutive meetings.
- Missing five meetings in a row, or missing more than two-thirds of all meetings in any consecutive twelve-month period, results in loss of EC membership.
- The PMO shall provide regular attendance reports to the EC, and shall issue warnings to those who are at risk of losing membership.
- Under exceptional circumstances, to be determined on a case-by-case basis, the EC may waive either of the above penalties.
Finally 348 introduces time-outs for JSRs, such that they have to reach various stages in the process within a defined time limit or face being shut down. From the Java Community Process, version 2.8 document
If a JSR does not begin Early Draft Review within 9 months of completing its JSR Approval Ballot, or does not begin Public Review within 12 months of first submitting an Early Draft, or does not reach Final Release within 12 months of commencing Public Review, then the EC should initiate a JSR Renewal Ballot unless it is agreed that there are extraordinary circumstances that justify the delay.
Beyond this, Oracle is planning two additional JSRs. The first will look to combine to two JCP Executive Committees. Currently Java ME is represented by one Executive Committee, and Java SE and EE by a second, a position which makes little sense given Oracle's stated intent to combine Java SE and ME. This change should make the whole process more efficient, and may also help to promote more synergy between the different parts of the Java ecosystem.
The second JSR will be rather more involved, since it will look at the complex issues around IP and licensing rights, which were at the heart of the dispute between Sun Microsystems and the Apache Software Foundation, and which ultimately resulted in Apache leaving the JCP. Curran told us
As we worked on JSR 348 we created a list of items that were considered out of scope for that JSR. This will be used as a starting-point for our discussions on the follow-on JSR, but of course we haven't yet decided which of them to actually address.
One area of potential conflict is the licensing terms that the spec leads use for the TCK, which are controlled by the JCP participation agreement, generally referred to as the JSPA (PDF document). The JSPA governs IP issues and mandates fair access to the TCK and contains the RAND language. InfoQ had understood that spec leads could choose to charge for the TCK, though Curran told us that this wasn't entirely correct
Implementers of JCP specifications have a choice. They can create Independent (clean-room) implementations on Royalty Free terms, or if they wish to incorporate elements from the Reference Implementation in source or binary form they can license the necessary rights on RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms, which must be disclosed in advance. Note that in either case the implementer must license the TCK in order to prove that the implementation is compatible. RAND licensing terms (disclosed in advance) may also apply here.
It is encouraging to see Oracle tackling some of the problems in the JCP, and there are other promising signs. At JavaOne, Oracle noted that there were five new candidates for the open vote to the Executive Committee this year - Azul, CloudBees (though it should perhaps be noted that Steve Harris, formerly SVP of Oracle and a long-term member of the JCP, recently moved to CloudBees as SVP of Products), Terracotta, Twitter and the Central Ohio Java Users Group. In the end, a total of nine candidates stood in the election, the strongest field for some time, with Azul and Twitter the successful candidates. Some more analysis on the election can be found here. It is good to see Oracle encouraging the engagement of Java User Groups, in addition to ISVs, in the process.
The OpenJDK has seen a great deal of activity since Oracle took over the helm with a number of companies joining the project. New firms over the past year include Apple, Azul Systems, IBM, SAP and Twitter. The full list of participants is impressive.
Twitter is, perhaps, particularly noteworthy since it isn't an ISV, a point Donald Smith made recently on his blog
In my mind, there are three waves of participation in open source projects. First, it's usually initiated by an ISV and other ISVs in the same industry. If the project is very niche, or doesn't really flourish, that will be it. But if successful, and if the project is platform/infrastructure oriented, we should expect to see a second wave of participants that are largely software companies, but where the software license is not the product itself. Twitter would be a great example of this – Twitter is software, but the software license is not the product. Beyond that, if the project continues to be successful we should see a third phase of participation from non-software companies. Companies where the software is critical, but it's not largely the product. More consumer oriented organizations, where the software is a means to an end. I'm thinking of banks, insurance companies, auto makers, etc.
Of course, what's more interesting than who has signed up to join is what they might contribute. IBM announced at JavaOne 2011 that, amongst other things, it would be starting a project to work on Jigsaw/OSGi interoperability. Twitter's Chris Aniszczyk has stated that the firm plans to "contribute in the areas of performance and metrics gathering around garbage collection in the JVM", and Azul Systems' CTO Gil Tene told us that the firm will be looking to contribute improvements to the HotSpot VM itself, such as enhancements to locking and the thread model.
In terms of actually making contributions, that OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (hereafter OCTLA) is the key document, so it is perhaps surprising to find that the OCTLA for Java 7 was released over six months after Java 7 shipped (see here). Tene emphasized the importance of the TCK when we spoke to him for this article
We are excited about participating in and contributing to OpenJDK. It's great to see Oracle following through on their commitments to enable others to meaningfully participate in the OpenJDK project. Substantial contributions require rigorous compatibility testing, and Oracle's recent moves to make the OpenJDK TCKs available to several additional third parties is a critical and positive enabler for both OpenJDK and the Java Community Process as a whole.
Until the TCK and its accompanying license were made available, it is hard to see how external contributors could work on the platform, for a number of reasons. For one thing, without being able to regularly test and verify that changes of any size do not subtly break compatibility, development cycles become impractically elongated. In addition, even the smallest one line bug fix proposed and contributed by an individual community member would benefit from being tested against the full TCKs before being submitted, and before the project's committers have to consider it and waste precious resources evaluating it. Moreover TCKs are essential for maintaining compatibility: There is nothing inherent to the OpenJDK license terms that would prevent someone from shipping code that has not been verified against the TCK tests as a whole, risking fracture and fragmentation of the platform.
The Android-Shaped Elephant in the Room
Whilst Oracle is working hard to engage with developers, the firm's decision to sue Google over its use of Java for Android has caused a lot of ill will amongst that same group, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the actual lawsuit. Partly this reflects growing unease amongst Java developers about Java's relevance in the mobile space. Whilst Java ME was an early success story for Java, and is still shipped on a large number of phones, the rise of the current generation of smart-phones and tablets, led by Apple with the iPhone and iPad, largely consigned Java ME to irrelevance in the space. Nokia, a long-term supporter of Java ME, continues to have an interest, but has shifted its focus to Windows mobile. Likewise beleaguered BlackBerry manufacturer RIM, who is shifting away from Java ME to a new OS based on QNX with native C/C++ as the preferred development language. In this context Android becomes incredibly important for Java.
The OpenJDK Contribution Agreement (OCA) is an interesting document in this context. It defines some obvious things, such as clarifying GPL rights and asserting that the code contributed is not known to be problematic, but it also does something else: it allows Oracle to take the code into its commercial products, and outside of the realm of GPL, and use it for whatever purpose it wants (including sub-licensing it under non-GPL terms to commercial companies like IBM). Such a provision is far from unique: MySQL, well before it was acquired by Sun, worked in a similar fashion. It is also essential. Without it, Oracle would be forced to split the code, developing it only on the closed side and, if they wished to, contributing only downstream. Such a flow would make it practically impossible for any third party to contribute to OpenJDK, as the acceptance of such code into the project would necessarily fork it (along licensing lines) from Oracle's commercial work. Were that to happen OpenJDK would get left behind.
Perhaps more importantly, the OCA does not restrict the downstream use of OpenJDK code in any way. The only license that governs the OpenJDK code is GPLv2 + classpath. The only thing that the OCA is a gateway for is accepted contributions into the upstream OpenJDK project. If someone wants to develop OpenJDK code and maintain their code purely under GPL (without licensing that piece of code back to Oracle under the OCA), they are free to do so, and they can distribute it in any way they want, and even refer to it as "derived from the OpenJDK code base" or "based on the OpenJDK source code".
Signing the OCA does not prevent non-OCA-based development. The OCA is just a vehicle for making actual contributions to the OpenJDK project. It only applies to specific code explicitly contributed under the agreement, and does not preclude orthogonal development of pure GPL code that would not become upstream-integrated into OpenJDK. In other words, a community member could potentially decide to contribute, for instance, a bug fix, under the OCA whilst keeping other pieces, such as an academic project experimenting with large module changes and major surgery under pure GPL if they wish to do so. Those pieces would then never become part of the upstream OpenJDK unless contributed later.
In the context of Oracle's dispute with Google over Android, there is a fairly widely held belief that Oracle does not allow people to use OpenJDK for embedded and mobile devices, wanting instead to collect licensing revenue from OEMs. Whilst Sun (and presumably therefore now Oracle) did have a field of use restriction for commercial licenses to third parties, and indeed it was to a large extent how Java development was paid for, there is no such limitation in the OpenJDK code license. In other words, all Google would need to do would be to ship a version of Android based on OpenJDK, and keep it under a GPLv2 license. It's the insistence of Apache and Google on being able to build things outside of the GPLv2 envelope that is the point of contention, and the area around which "field of use" restrictions do come up: Oracle, and before them Sun, has consistently refused to license Java source code without a field of use restriction under open source licenses other than GPLv2 with the classpath exception. What Apache and Google want to do is take Java source code (and/or use the TCKs to test clean-roomed Java source code like the Harmony project) and provide it under an alternative license (like Apache V2, for example).
This was also IBM's position, until a major shift last year. It seems probable that Oracle and IBM reached some sort of long-term agreement on licensing the same OpenJDK code back to them without GPLv2 restrictions - something Oracle is allowed to do commercially under the OCA - although Oracle declined to comment when approached by InfoQ on this. Assuming we are correct, such an agreement would mean that IBM does not have to worry about GPL contamination in their commercial products: they and others contribute to OpenJDK in the open, let Oracle re-license the code via the OCA, and IBM then gains a license to what is essentially the same code commercially via what ever agreement they have for this purpose. Theoretically then, a similar accommodation could be reached with Google.
Whilst a theoretical accommodation could be reached with Google, Oracle's decision to pursue the search company over IP infringement in Android is fraught with risk. Much as Microsoft did with .NET when sued on similar grounds by Sun, Google could simply decide to drop support for Java from Android, moving instead to a language it owns and controls, such as Go, or more probably Dart, and thereby leaving Java without a credible mobile story. Moreover the decision to pursue Google, a company well regarded by many developers, has generated a lot of bad feeling.
With regards the JCP, JCP.next and JSPA it is noticeable that some of the more difficult, but most important, items are being put off until last. As we've seen, it is the interpretation of the RAND language contained in the JSPA, and the surrounding debate over how binding it is, that is core to the Apache/Oracle split. It is also of a wider concern to commercial and other open source projects. Now, whether or not Apache is entitled to a TCK that allows them to test Apache licensed code may be debatable: Oracle has not offered such access to the TCK to any other licensees, so it is at least not being discriminatory. The vendor can reasonably argue that, on the commercial side, all licensees accept a field-of-use limitation, and that on the open source side, licensees accept the requirement to only ship tested products under GPLv2, which ensures the products will remain in open source. What Apache wants does not fall under either category. However, wherever you stand on that particular debate, the fuzzy RAND language in the current JSPA is of great concern, especially with the Apache issue as a precedent, since it casts doubt and uncertainty about future access to the TCK in the minds of people who may want to get behind the platform (either commercially or in open source). If it is felt that TCK access can be shut off in some arbitrary way, that will ward off investment of time and effort. A clear message on TCK access and availability is critical for the JCP to remain credible.
Equally, the fact that participants have to build and maintain their own TCK test environment makes it difficult for individual contributors. It would be good to see a community-reachable OpenJDK test bench that would allow 3rd parties, who have signed the agreements and received the TCK license, to test their OpenJDK based code against the OpenJDK TCKs. Ideally this would also be made available much earlier in the process, long before the actual release (i.e. when the specification is completed and the code is in advanced Beta/Release candidate states), and maybe even have "draft" TCKs available whilst the release is being developed. We did ask Oracle if they had any plans for this, but did not receive a response.
There are, however, grounds for cautious optimism. Oracle worked hard at JavaOne to engage with Java champions and user group leaders, and the success of that at the conference was noticeable. The reforms to the JCP are much needed, and it is good to see them happening. Equally welcome are the signs that OpenJDK is starting to gain momentum. Perhaps most welcome of all though is the fact that, after a long period of hibernation, Java itself is moving forward again.
About the author
Charles Humble is CTO for PRPi Consulting with overall responsibility for the development of all the custom software used within the company, and the lead Java editor for InfoQ. He has worked in enterprise software for around 15 years as a developer, architect and development manager. He co-founded Conissaunce, a UK based enterprise computing consultancy focused on the retail and financial services industries, and remains a director of the firm. He spends as much time as he can with his young family, and writes music with twofish.Twitter: @charleshumble
Expert Group Mailing Lists
Certainly not the Java SE JSR's. Some of the most far reaching changes proposed for Java 8 are being done behind closed doors. Take for example project Lambda. It has a mailing list but it's certainly not where any decisions are being made. The real work is happening on the "Expert Group" mailing list which only the Expert group has access to. As per JSR 348 those deliberations are suppose to be on public forums so the "community" can provide input which they are not.
Re: Expert Group Mailing Lists
Re: Expert Group Mailing Lists
And you can browse (and join) the Lambda dev mailing list here mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/lambda-dev
We've also tracked the progress on InfoQ quite closely - most recently here: www.infoq.com/news/2011/12/state-lambda
Re: Expert Group Mailing Lists
Re: Expert Group Mailing Lists
RIM and JavaME
RIM never had JavaME, Blackberry phone apps runs on a RIM flavored, truncated here and there but still regular java
Re: RIM and JavaME
Harnomy and OpenJDK | <urn:uuid:d5f47e01-5532-46f4-aa36-227ed5006c8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.infoq.com/articles/oracle-java-ecosystem | 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 | 0.957937 | 4,288 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Originally Posted by Smallaxe
Why would someone in Iowa, use Logan Labs in Ohio??? Are you hawking for Logan Labs???
Why does it matter where the lab is? Logan Labs happens to use the same soil testing methods (extractions, calculations, etc) that the Iowa State lab uses. So, the results would be the same, whether they were tested in Iowa or at Logan Labs.
Why is soil testing such a hard thing for people to understand? | <urn:uuid:93501037-0485-4b24-8c14-d7f906bdf4c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lawnsite.com/showpost.php?p=4571012&postcount=11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956297 | 95 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Sedation and Relaxation Dentistry
We understand that many of our patients have had to cope with the issue of dental anxiety or fear. Over 35 million Americans admit to some level of anxiety when visiting the dentist. But for many, fear is only one part of the issue. Some of our patients are physically or mentally challenged and require special treatment. Others are patients suffering from severe phobias related to a previous traumatic dental experience. For some, time is the issue. Many of our busy executives prefer to have their dental care performed in one visit.
Whatever your reason, we address your anxiety with compassion and provide real solutions to help you get the care you need. We offer wand anesthesia (a nearly pain-free alternative to general anesthesia), nitrous oxide (laughing gas), oral medications, and intravenous sedation.
Sedation dentistry is a modern alternative to classic dental treatment that effectively eliminates anxiety and accelerates our ability to conduct multiple procedures in a single sitting. If you struggle with any of the following issues, we invite you to consider sedation:
- Moderate to severe anxiety
- Difficulty getting numb
- A sensitive gag reflex
- Very sensitive teeth
- Limited time
- Complex dental problems
- A Novocain allergy
- An aversion to dental noises, smells and tastes
Our office is one of only a handful of dental practices in the United States that routinely performs full-mouth rehabilitation using the entire array of sedation and anxiety-free dentistry techniques.
Our sedation dentistry options include oral medication, intravenous sedation and general anesthesia. Before starting treatment, we will review your medical history and explain how sedation dentistry works. For your safety, we do require that a family member or friend drive you home from our office. Most patients feel no discomfort during treatment. You will receive just enough sedation to be unaware of the treatment and you will leave our dental office with little or no memory of your visit!
I suffered for many years of anxiety and fear going to the dentist. I went to see Dr. Carpenter at Dental Excellence of Napoleon. I was greeted by a professional and friendly staff in a bright and cheerful atmosphere. I met Dr. Carpenter, who is honest and multitalented. I needed to go through four long procedures. Dr. Carpenter explained sedation dentistry, so I tried it. I found the solution! I awoke calm, pain free, and remembering nothing. I went ahead and had the three other procedures, all with the same results. I would never do it any another way again.
Imagine visiting the dentist with no anxiety and accomplishing all of your dental care in as little as one appointment. This can be a reality with sedation dentistry. Call Dental Excellence of Napoleon today to schedule your complimentary consultation. | <urn:uuid:fb9a6aae-a823-45e5-8c78-c95e4ee9d814> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thenapoleandentist.com/sedation-dentistry/index.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937659 | 571 | 1.546875 | 2 |
In the flurry of holiday shopping and parties, the rush to complete end-of-year business, we are also reminded that this is the season to remember those less fortunate than ourselves.
Year-end fundraising appeal letters arrive by mail and e-mail from those to whom we have given before, encouraging renewed giving – a task many people set aside for the week after Christmas, when things have slowed down.
Yet there are many for whom the holidays could be considerably brightened by some giving right now – families that might face hunger rather than a feast, children whose stockings could be empty of toys, people whose very lives and livelihoods have been visited by illness or disaster beyond their control.
And there is still time. With Christmas still two weeks away, Patch has put together some giving opportunities that can put a gift of food, clothing, shelter – even fun – in front of someone who can use it now.
These organizations all have easy-to-access, easy-to-use online donation pages. In just a couple of minutes, you can make a difference to someone in your community or beyond before this holiday season passes.
No one should go hungry for the holidays
Hunger is often the first thing that comes to mind when we pause to think about those in need. It has been said that no one starves in America, but that doesn't mean that no one goes to bed, or to school, hungry, and it certainly doesn't mean that everyone gets a big holiday dinner with all the trimmings.
Nearly every community has a food pantry or food bank that will gladly accept your local donation of food, funds or both. But we are also very fortunate that in the Milwaukee area we have one very strong umbrella organization, Hunger Task Force, that tracks and coordinates needs throughout the area.
Hunger Task Force represents more than 70 member organizations throughout the greater metro area, with nearly all communities represented. By donating through Hunger Task Force online, you can specify where and how you want your gift used. You can also make a decision to extend your giving with an automatic monthly installment – which is most appreciated, because hunger never takes a holiday.
The Food Pantry of Waukesha County has a more local emphasis for those wanting to give to their neighbors. Serving thousands in Waukesha County each month, the food pantry can use food and monetary donations.
Brighten a needy child's face with toys
There are a number of organizations, large and small, that can help put a smile on a needy child's face come Christmas morning. These are a couple of the more prominent ones in the Milwaukee area.
The Salvation Annual Toy Shop allows needy families to come to their local Salvation Army location and choose from donated Christmas presents for their children. To qualify, families must register for the program, be below a certain income level and have children ages 15 and under.
Registration usually involves providing proof of identity, being the head of the household, providing their Social Security number and address. Families generally can pick up gifts until a few days before Christmas.
There are area chapter of the Salvation Army in Milwaukee County, Waukesha and Racine. You can direct your gift toward your community or spread the joy 'round the world through Salvation Army's main donations page.
In Waukesha, the Christmas Clearing Council of Waukesha County is matching families to hundreds of children who might not otherwise receive a present this year. And the Big Bundle Up is taking donations of new and gently used hats, mittens and gloves to bring warmth to those who can't afford winter gear.
Another local organization that coordinates an annual toy drive is The House of Peace–Milwaukee, a Capuchin Franciscan ministry. House of Peace provides needy families with both a meal for Christmas and toys for children to open on Christmas Day.
Toys are generally donated by both organizations like Toys R’ Us or community members, but you can also donate funds to support the programs online. Food baskets are generally uncooked to allow families a chance at a traditional day with both cooking, eating together and opening presents.
Helping the sick – directly or through research
Few things dampen the holiday spirit more than having a loved one, especially a child, sick and hospitalized. Check with your local hospital to see whether it has a specific holiday giving program that can brighten the season for those who can't be home.
Children's Hospital of Wisconsin has numerous ways to give, including a program that provides toys, games and art supplies year-'round, and a way to share globally through the Center for International Health.
Ronald McDonald House of Milwaukee helps the families of those who have a sick child at Children's Hospital, typically, and provides lodging, counseling and activities. The organization relies heavily on donations, which can be made online.
Anyone is certainly encouraged to donate to the disease-fighting organization or organizations of their choice, whether it be the American Cancer Society, Muscular Dystropy Association, American Diabetes Association or others.
But did you know you can also keep your dollars local while fighting for cures of the disease of your choice? Medical College of Wisconsin, which has become one of the leading medical research institutions in the nation, doesn't just take donations – its online giving page allows you to donate specifically for research and even for research in a specific disease field, whether it be cancer, heart disease or one of many others.
Imagine your first Christmas – in Sandy's wake
One thing that should still be on everyone's mind is the continuing plight of tens of thousands of American's whose homes, businesses, schools and hospitals were wrecked by Hurricane Sandy.
The American Red Cross has an online donation center set up specifically for Sandy victims, many of whom remain out of their homes and face a bleak holiday season – that could still be brightened a bit more with a better meal, clothing or a move to better shelter.
A living gift keeps on giving
There are far too many international organizations helping people in need around the world to name, but one that has always stood out for its resourceful, creative yet down-to-Earth efforts to fight hunger and poverty is Heifer International.
Through Heifer, every year thousands of people worldwide make gifts of sustainable livestock – goats, chickens, cows, and many others including hives of bees – to families in remote and impoverished areas.
There's something about giving the gift of a living animal that is also sustaining to the giver, and Heifer provides a whole catalog of opportunities for choosing your farm away from home.
These are just a few of the ways to give, now, to those who need help through the holidays.
Have a favorite charity that can still brighten someone's season? Tell us in the comments, and provide a link for giving if possible. | <urn:uuid:4e3275e2-69e6-452c-842f-af5cee4b2cbe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://waukesha.patch.com/articles/you-can-still-give-to-those-in-need-this-holiday-season-8f639c7f | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959112 | 1,398 | 1.796875 | 2 |
What’s the difference between poker and politics? Some would argue nothing — they’re both games, contests of will and skill that crown a winner and bury a loser. Some would argue everything in life is deducible to a game. Hasbro, the toy company behind The Game of Life, certainly would.
Artists hanging their work at Del Ray Artisans’ newest exhibit, Love, Politics, and Scrabble: The Games We Play, tackle the theme literally and metaphorically. A photograph of the McDonald’s Monopoly game hangs alongside a framed drawing of pills representing the solution to puzzling mind games, like attention deficit disorder and insomnia.
“It’s not about the games that pills play with your mind, it’s about beating the games in your head,” said artist Bonnie Ferguson Butler about “Head Games,” her pastel entry.
The meanings of each piece vary by artist — and viewer — said Linda Elliff, co-curator at Del Ray Artisans. And the subject matters vary even more. Elliff and co-curator Barbara Boehm wanted to have an interpretive exhibit that challenged artists but was also entertaining, and few things are inherently more fun than games.
“The artists are telling us they’ve had such fun with this,” Elliff said. “It’s challenged them, whether it’s about love, politics, tennis or ‘Angry Birds.’”
Alexandria photographer David Kosar took the political route with one of his entries and went literal with the other. His “A New Hope?” layers a color photo of President Barack Obama at his inauguration over another from former President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. It’s a comment on the Washington players Obama inherited from the Clinton administration and proof that little was actually “new” about Obama’s presidency, he said.
“Politics is one of the biggest games of all,” said Kosar, a lobbyist and yoga instructor who still wants Hillary Clinton as president.
Kosar’s other entry is artistically abstract but literal in its symbolism.
“It’s just trash on the street of Miami,” he said.
But it’s not “just trash.” “Consumerism” is a crumpled and weathered McDonald’s bag pasted naturally to the street with fire-red ketchup packets and advertisements for the fast food chain’s Monopoly contest. It’s strangely attractive on the asphalt next to a paint-splattered curb in Miami’s arts district.
“It’s really whatever you want it to be,” Kosak said. “We live in a disposable, wasteful society, but we also love our games.”
Love, Politics, and Scrabble: The Games People Play opens Friday at Del Ray Artisans, 2704 Mount Vernon Ave. It runs through February 24. Opening reception is Friday at 7 p.m. | <urn:uuid:9ce34114-7af8-42b7-be34-1166eedfec33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://alextimes.com/2012/02/its-all-fun-and-games-and-art-at-del-ray-artisans/?pagenum=41&sort=id&dir=DESC | 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 | 0.951513 | 647 | 1.796875 | 2 |
A group of Republican lawmakers wants to put the question of parental notification on the election ballot this November. The House Judiciary Committee will look at the issue on Tuesday..-
Lawmakers say they want to strengthen parents' rights over the health of their children, which could include notification if an underage girl seeks an abortion.
Currently under Florida's Constitution, minors have the same privacy rights as adults.
Two previous parental notification laws were struck down in 1988 and 1999. | <urn:uuid:29f920e1-1fff-4d96-8844-52b67f8f9067> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/parental_notification_law_may_be_put_on_election_ballot/ | 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 | 0.965318 | 93 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Controllers, Airlines Question Effectiveness Of
Stating it is the
federal government's job to make holiday airline travel "as
comfortable an experience as possible," on Tuesday President George
W. Bush announced that for a second year military airspace along
the East Coast will be opened to civilian flights... and, that the
program will also expand nationwide.
As ANN reported, the military first opened
airspace along the East Coast to civilian flights during the
Thanksgiving holiday season last year -- "and it worked," Bush
(right) said. For 2008, the military will open so-called
"Thanksgiving Express Lanes" to areas of the Midwest, the
Southwest, and the West Coast, including the skies over Phoenix and
"In other words, we innovated last year to ease the travel; it
worked, and now we're expanding that innovation this year," Bush
said. "We're also working with the FAA, the TSA, and the airlines
to make more staff available to speed check-in and boarding, and to
help passengers affected by cancellations and delays."
The move to increase available airspace for commercial airline
flights follows numerous reports noting a likely drop in holiday
travel by air, due to sky-high fares fueled by soaring fuel
prices... which, ah, have since plummeted. Airlines have also
slashed capacity, meaning there will be fewer planes in the air to
enjoy the expanded airspace.
And then there's the question of just how much the opening of
military airspace last year actually helped reduce congestion.
David Castelveter, spokesman for the Air Transport Association,
told The Associated Press the move had "marginal impact" in 2007.
"The main reason for the good performance we saw over both holidays
last year was good weather," he added.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association -- locked in a
bitter fight with the FAA over a new contract -- openly criticized
the move. Spokesman Doug Church said opening up military airspace
"is all for show and, frankly, this show is getting quite tiresome
to the American traveling public that has gotten fed up with
mounting delays and FAA mismanagement that has degraded the system
during the current administration."
Bush then addressed
other measures intended to reduce congestion... including the DOT's
controversial plan to implement slot auctions at New York-area
That plan has been derided by commercial
airlines, local airport authorities, and lawmakers... and even deemed illegal by the Government
Then again, such criticism hasn't necessarily stopped
this President before.
"[I]n January, the FAA will start auctioning takeoff and landing
slots at New York airports. This will increase competition for
access to these airports, and we strongly believe increased
competition will help lower fares to consumers," Bush said.
"Airlines need incentives. They need incentives to boost
efficiency. And this incentive that we put out will encourage them
to use larger planes out of the New York area. We believe these
actions will ease our traffic jams in New York, which will help
reduce flight delays all across the country."
The ATA has said it plans to file legal action against the DOT
to stop the slot auction plan.
Bush also said new regulations governing airlines were on the
horizon. "We have just completed new regulations that provide
increased protection for consumers. These include measures that
will require airlines to provide greater compensation for lost
bags, as well as tougher penalties when airlines fail to notify
travelers of hidden fees," Bush said. "I think that's a responsible
role for government. I think it makes sense for us to, through this
department, put regulation in place that stands side by side with
consumers in a reasonable way."
You'll notice Bush fell short of stating the government would
take any steps towards requiring airlines to comply with any
guidelines regarding passenger strandings, and extended delays on
As ANN reported last week, the so-called
"Tarmac Task Force" -- called to action by the Department of
Transportation last December to address how airlines treat their
passengers during such delays -- issued its report on ways airlines
could help make a bad situation better.
Alas, the group -- dominated by airline interests -- voted 34-1
in favor of a disjointed set of measures aimed at better treatment
of passengers during extended flight delays... but it could not
even agree what constituted a "lengthy delay."
Bush said the new rules should take effect next month, in time
for Christmas and New Year's.
"These efforts represent our commitment to making this year's
holiday travel season as smooth as possible," Bush said. "And,
frankly, they are part of this administration's strong record on
improving air travel for American consumers." | <urn:uuid:20698610-01cd-4ba4-85a0-00798a1c1ec5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aero-news.net/subscribe.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=a296dfca-7c77-4ec0-aba9-eda89e6c9baa | 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 | 0.949404 | 1,015 | 1.789063 | 2 |
BENTONVILLE, Ark., — A Wal-Mart executive insists the company paid off several Supreme Court Justices.
The whistle-blowing comes mere hours after the nation’s highest court threw out a massive discrimination suit against Wal-Mart Stores. The suit was the largest employment discrimination in U.S. history with claims from 1.5 million women that they had been discriminated against in both pay and promotions.
In a series of secret hotel room interviews, the fifty-four year-old turncoat, wearing a wig and moustache, detailed the specifics of cash-drops and hand-offs in several posh Washington apartment buildings.
Using a microphone and voice-distortion software, he explained. “I don’t want to call it protection money because Wal-Mart is not in the business of killing people or hurting people, unless, of course, you count all the processed food we sell. Five Justices received cautionary letters, and followed by a delivery of cash. It was clear. It was understood. As long as the Justices throw out the suit, they don’t have to worry.”
When pressed to list the names of Justices who received money from Wal-Mart, the informer would only reveal the project acronym: SKRAT.
“The Wal-Mart people are no joke. During one late-night session about the case, someone even put up one of our old signs and crossed out ‘Prices.’ It said ‘Beware of Falling Justices.’ I was scared for my life,” he continued.
Much to his chagrin, the tipster is still employed by Wal-Mart. He promises to divulge the full story and publish his notes and journal as soon as his kids are out of college. “I’ve got two kids in college, my hands are tied. I have to keep working for these Wal-Mart pigs. Not to mention, I can’t afford to shop anywhere else. I just wanted to do the right thing. I had to tell someone.”
Supporters of women’s rights have been protesting Wal-Mart stores for months. Jessica Spearhead, an organizer for AllianceforJustice.org, spoke for the growing crowd outside of the Supreme Court, “We knew Wal-Mart was this sleazy, but we didn’t realize the Supreme Court was just as shady.”
Agents for film director Kathryn Bigelow have been reaching out to the informant to secure movie rights for his story. | <urn:uuid:d0afc83d-7e45-4bab-b425-29cfdd22c4a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/34720/wal-mart-insider-we-paid-off-supreme-court | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977054 | 534 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Two more local governments in Texas have passed laws designed to deter "serial requestors" of public records.
Corsicana and Kemah city councils earlier this month each passed ordinances that allow public officials to bill citizens for staff time that meets or exceeds 36 hours responding to public information requests during a 12-month period.
Those decisions revive a debate about the 2007 state law that enabled local government agencies to pass on such costs: Is the effect one of government efficiency or reduced government transparency?
Corsicana and Kemah city officials contend the new policies are necessary to prevent government employees from wasting valuable time rummaging for files when they should be attending to city business. But open government advocates argue that providing citizens with public information is central to a government agency’s business.
Kemah City Attorney Dick Gregg Jr. said the law passed on June 7 by the city council will thwart the two or three “serial requestors” of open records from requesting “giant volumes of things that ties up city hall in a small city.”
Those people’s actions are “costing us dough,” Gregg said. “It’s a tremendous burden. A large portion of the staff becomes responsible for finding documents instead of taking care of running the city. So taxpayers end up paying for that work rather than the cost of city governance.”
That’s a misguided concept of democracy, said Paul Watler, a partner at the Dallas law firm Jackson Walker.
“Keeping the public informed about the business of government isn’t just ancillary to public agencies,” said Watler, past president and current member of the board at the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
“Open record requests shouldn’t be looked at as something that distracts from the real work of government employees,” Watler said. “Transparency is the essence of public institutions in a democracy.”
That may be so, but the fact of the matter is that many broad requests do take a lot of time during the workday of Corsicana city employees, said Mayor Chuck McClanahan. Corsicana city council members passed its ordinance on June 5.
“Some of the information requests were really starting to slow down the process here,” said McClanahan, who said he believes in transparency and pointed to awards the city has won for financial transparency from the state Comptroller. “We want to be more efficient. We’re trying to be responsible with taxpayers’ money.”
Connie Standridge, the Corsicana city manager, said six people across three departments -- finance, engineering and parks -- typically handle public records requests. The city has 279 full-time employees, according to its website.
Corsicana employees spent an estimated 113 hours handling requests last year, the first year the city tracked that statistic, Standridge said. Staff has spent an estimate of 60 hours for the year to date, she said.
Local government agencies would be less burdened by requests if they would adopt technology such as document management and retrieval software, Watler said.
The new laws worry some residents, who fear they’ll be targeted as the so-called “serial requestors.”
“Now, as soon as we file requests, they’re just going to use multiple employees to use up as much time as they can” to reach the 36-hour threshold, said Blu Shields, 59, a commercial and residential builder from Texas City who does a lot work in Kemah. “Now, they can pick and choose who they charge and who they don’t.”
The ordinance enables city officials to “impede us even before we ask for records,” said Donna Holcomb, 47, a stay-at-home mom of Bacliff who used to live in Kemah. Holcomb recently asked for eight years’ worth of email records for 16 city officials and was told she could have them, but it would cost $412,000.
She said the new law gives even more power to officials such as Gregg to “give us a ludicrous estimate for the amount of time and money our record requests will cost.”
“This law is going to close up government for the people of Kemah,” she said.
That chilling effect is an unintended consequence of the 2007 law, said Watler, the Dallas lawyer and FOI Foundation board member who specializes in First Amendment and media law.
“It deters legitimate requestors from seeking public records,” Watler said.
The 2007 law was authored by Texas state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, who put forward the proposal after parents flooded the Austin-based Lake Travis Independent School District and the Eanes Independent School District with thousands of open records requests, according to stories in the Austin American-Statesman and the Houston Chronicle.
Neither Wentworth nor officials with the two districts responded to multiple requests for comment.
Several local governments since have enacted policies based on the law, including Comal County in 2008 and Fort Bend County in 2010.
Comal County Judge Sherman Krause said he hasn’t heard anyone talk about the county’s toughened policy, “so I’m not sure how we would quantify” whether the law has made county governance more efficient.
But in Fort Bend County, the 36-hour-limit has not been triggered since the law was passed two years ago, Michelle Rangel, an assistant county attorney, said.
The Texas Legislature in passing the law exempted public officials and journalists, as well as tax-exempt legal services organizations. The exemption does not cover activists like Tom "Smitty" Smith, state director of Public Citizen, the national consumer advocacy organization founded by activist Ralph Nader.
Smith said the 2007 law “hinders people from finding out what’s really going in government,” because unraveling scandals often takes many public records requests over a long period of time.
“On a number of occasions we, or our allies, have been told that data we are seeking would be prohibitively expensive,” Smith said. “And we would have to trim back our data request or abandon it because we couldn’t afford to go forward.”
Contact Mike Cronin at firstname.lastname@example.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.
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Monday, 06/18/2012 - 11:08AM
if governments created and supported open and transparent systems in the first place, they wouldn't have to process so many records requests. While the new regulations are backwards and discriminatory, they're a symptom of a closed system that prevents citizens from having ready access to government information without requiring a government agent to grant that access on an individual basis. | <urn:uuid:520c06b2-9e37-4ab6-9c8a-9ec0ff36b716> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.texaswatchdog.org/2012/06/texas-city-officials-say-serial-requestors-must-be-deterred-public-records/1339798986.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945725 | 1,621 | 1.75 | 2 |
First published in Islamabad Dateline.
People of Swat faced the most brutal atrocities known in modern times. From slitting throats to public flogging and burning girl’s schools, from handwritten notices condemning shaving beards to banning women from visiting markets, almost every local narrates horrible stories of terror, horror and of the infamous Khoni Chowk.‘We had invited them for talks in our local mosque with our elders. We lived up to our promise and brought no weapons but they broke their promise and butchered everyone’, narrated Fazal from suburbs of Swat.
‘Whenever I saw them (Taliban) moving in streets, my legs started shaking’, a youth activist Yasin recalling the time of duress.
In May, 2009 Pakistan launched a second, but this time a full fledged military operation to cleanse radical elements from Swat. 2.3 Million people were displaced and hundreds of soldiers and civilians lost their lives.
Two years later, Pakistan Army organized ‘National De-radicalization Seminar’ here in Mingora, Swat from 4th-6th July, 2011.
Governor Khyber Pakhtunkhua Masood Kausar in his inaugural speech stressed upon the need to re-integrate former militants into the society. Major General Asif Javed, the GOC Swat gave insight into the military offensive whilst Lieutenant General (R) Mustafa Khan gave an overview of Pakistan’s contribution in war against terrorism quoting figures which revealed Swat was largest counter-insurgency operation involving 03 districts and also largest airborne operation In South Asian history. He told the audience that 150000 troops are deployed in WoT operations with 80 % aviation resources focused to battling terrorist elements. He said the world must acknowledge the sacrifices Pakistan made as only military casualties surpass 3000 men, and 9000 injured, greater than any country’s contribution in global war against terrorism.
Renowned experts like Khalid Aziz, Rasul Bakhsh Rais and Dr. Farrukh Saleem gave insight into the roots and causes of radicalism in Pakistan. Professor Miraj ul Islam presented an Islamic perspective of de-radicalisation.
Dr Savage. MS Malkhanti, Prof. Tahir Abbas, Dr. Maria Sultan, Dr. Zebloun Tainter and Babar Sattar talked about the UK, Saudi Arabia and Srilanka’s de-radicalisation models and also discussed legal hurdles in convicting terrorists.
Politicians like Ameer Muqam, Mushahid Hussein and Iftikhar Hussein also addressed the attendees. Members of civil society of Swat, Mussarat AhmedZeb and Zia-uddin Yousuf Zai gave a local perspective of happenings in Swat in the last two years.
Ziauddin articulated that Swati people were very tolerant and the local tappa translating as ‘I’m Muslim, my friend a Hindu; for my friend, I sweep the temple’ underlines the culture of inter-faith harmony in Swati folklore.
DIG Malakand division, Qazi Jamil gave a revealing presentation of the current situation of jails in his domain, asking for the much needed help. Most of the thousands of arrested radicals, he said are in our jails and if we don’t initiate de-radicalization programs for prisoners they will end up radicalizing their fellow prisoners.
The attendees and media were also made to visit de-radicalisation rehabilitation centers run by Pakistan Army called Saboun, for juveniles and Mishal for adult former extremists with militant ties. The aim of these facilities was to provide mental, theological and educational help to former extremists and also present a counter-narrative to radical ideology. These facilities also impart vocational training which helps them earn livelihood.
Dr Fareha Peracha, Director of Saboun said that in total around 100 graduates have already been successfully re-integrated as useful members of society. Currently 13-17 years old students enrolled students in Saboun number at 129.
Most of the kids, when inquired as to why they were brought here bowed their heads in regret, which clearly showed they were repelled to what they used to do before.
Nawab, a 15 year old Swati was a member of a right-wing religious-political party before joining Taliban as a cleaner. He said he wanted to become a civil engineer.
Another 14 year old said he had no choice but to join extremist elements as they had threatened to kill his family if he did not oblige. He wanted to become a solider and when asked why, he said ‘because I want to be able to protect my family’.
A bright young fellow Arshad had a similar story as I disturbed him during computer class. He said he loves Pakistan to the core and will not take part in any anti-state activity in future.
The seminar concluded with speeches from COAS, General Kiyani and the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yousuf Raza Gillani.
Swat might serve as a perfect model for counter-insurgency, return of over 2.3 Million IDP’s within months of military offensive being launched might reiterate the resilience and resolve of Pakistanis but will Swat post military operation be able to serve as a potent force against religious extremism? Only time will tell.
The absence of honest and upright leadership gives space to anyone with a strong agenda to take over the minds and consequently the streets of our neighborhoods. FazlUllah used FM radio to spread his venomous agenda; many other mediums are also available and used by radical elements without any checks from state institutions.
The blood soaked streets of Pakistan with nearly 40,000 deaths convey a silent protest: Why have we still not been able to enact a national level counter and de-radicalization policy? How many more Swats will it take to realize that the need for de-radicalization might not arise if we instigate grass roots counter-radicalization programs?
Swat was reclaimed; let’s hope we as a society don’t have to grow through the ordeal anywhere, again. | <urn:uuid:e06e403e-0060-40db-b27e-eee0deba9afc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://plastictearz.wordpress.com/tag/de-radicalization/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967482 | 1,270 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Weeks after Hurricane Sandy, thousands of New Yorkers are still without power. It may be months before electricity is restored. Sun Giant Energy, a new social enterprise focused on electrifying Liberia with off-grid solar, is using its solar connections to share light with affected residents in New York City. Join the Giant, donate a Sun King lantern, and give the gift of light to a family Red Hook, Coney Island, the Rockaways, or Staten Island.
Want to join in? Save this to your To-dos or mark as Done. | <urn:uuid:be6539a9-3aeb-4310-a796-f6f1343192f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.good.is/posts/give-solar-lights-hurricane-relief-in-ny | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930712 | 111 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Overview of Qualifications and Compliance Review
- As a national credentialing agency, NBCOT is responsible for upholding its certification standards with the ultimate goal of serving the public interest. The seven principles set forth in the Code of Conduct that an examination candidate or certificant agrees to uphold are specific to the practice of occupational therapy.
- NBCOT periodically conducts extensive and in-depth reviews of its Qualifications and Compliance Review program. These in-depth review processes are initiated to assess the effectiveness of NBCOT's current policy and procedures in supporting the organization's mission of serving the public interest.
- NBCOT's Qualifications and Compliance Review program serves the public interest by helping to ensure that an OTR® or COTA® practitioner, certification examination candidate, or individual who has applied for the occupational therapy eligibility determination review (OTED) to determine eligibility to take the OTR certification examination abide by the Principles identified in the Candidate/Certificant Code of Conduct. The program is not intended to be punitive; it is also rehabilitative, providing incentive to present and future certificants to adhere to the behaviors outlined in the Candidate/Certificant Code of Conduct.
- NBCOT® exercises its responsibility to protect the public from an OTR or COTA practitioner, or an examination candidate who is in violation of the Candidate/Certificant Code of Conduct. The vast majority of OTR and COTA practitioners are ethical and competent. The Qualifications and Compliance Review Program makes it possible to identify, discipline, and require improvements from the few practitioners who are not. The Procedures for Enforcement are intended to enable NBCOT, through its Qualifications and Compliance Review Committee (QCRC), to act fairly in the performance of its responsibilities to the public as a certifying agency, and to ensure that the rights of candidates and certificants are protected.
- NBCOT's actions are independent of those taken by state regulatory agencies or the American Occupational Therapy Association's Ethics Commission. However, when NBCOT receives a complaint against an individual in a regulated state, it notifies that state about the complaint and any final decisions rendered in the case. In addition, when a state regulatory entity is actively considering a complaint, NBCOT's Qualifications and Compliance Review Committee will stay or hold off taking any action until the state entity acts on the case. | <urn:uuid:ca6b91bd-b6a5-4f18-b37e-f96fc5ac9901> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcot.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=127%3Aoverview-of-qualifications-and-compliance-review&catid=2&Itemid=162 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932991 | 466 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Gardening book worms ... Five titles for the holiday gift list
From the book "Great Gardens of Brittain," a swirling landscape in the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in southern Scotland, which is open to the public just one day a year Purchase photo reprints »
From the book "American Grown," Michelle Obama shows off a sweet potato to students from the Bancroft School in Washington, D.C., who have been working on the White House garden. Purchase photo reprints »
From the book "Williamsburg Vegetables," seedling melons are protected in a hoop house. Purchase photo reprints »
From the book "Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens," the waterfall in the Giles Rhodedendron Garden Purchase photo reprints »
From the book "Coastal Maine "Botanical Gardens," children sniff the herbs in the Lerner Garden of the Five Senses. Purchase photo reprints »
From the book "The Unexpected House Plant," sempervivums (succulents) grow in a stone planter. Purchase photo reprints »
A book about gardening is a fabulous holiday gift for any serious or novice gardener.
Over the years I have amassed a huge library of garden books, some of them review copies, some self-indulgent purchases, but most of them gifts from family and friends. Last year I started to divest part of my library and this year I vowed I wouldn’t purchase any new books.
Somehow, however, I managed to add to my overflowing bookshelves. And I love finding new books at the Jones Library, its Munson branch, or via the wonderful invention of interlibrary loan. Here are five I recommend as holiday gifts.
∎ “American Grown: A Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America” (National Park Service, Crown Publishers) by first lady Michelle Obama isn’t a “how to garden” book. It’s a “why to garden” book. Obama became enthusiastic about vegetable gardening when her pediatrician warned her she needed to improve her children’s diet. When they moved into the White House in 2009, the first lady was determined to start a kitchen garden, not only to feed her family but also to act as an inspiration for families across the country. Chicago-born Obama was hardly an expert on growing vegetables but she was able to call upon true experts to help design and construct a large vegetable garden.
From the beginning she involved local schoolchildren, many of whom had no idea where tomatoes, collards or broccoli originated except at the grocery store.
Obama learned alongside the children. This beautiful book should be an inspiration to all families to grow a pot of tomatoes on the balcony, dig up the backyard for a full-scale vegetable garden, rent a community-garden plot or help establish a food garden at their children’s school.
The book includes stories from community and school gardens around the country as well as a thumbnail history of other gardens at the White House. There is plenty of practical information and a dozen inviting recipes at the back as well as a good resource list and bibliography.
Michelle Obama deserves credit for raising the visibility of vegetable gardens and the importance of good, fresh food and exercise for children and adults of all ages.
∎ Perhaps a more practical guide to vegetable gardening, however, is “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way: 18th-Century Methods for Today’s Organic Gardeners” (Rodale) by Wesley Greene.
When Williamsburg was founded, the settlers had to grow their own vegetables and fruits — or starve. They generally used European methods and European seeds but they also learned from Native Americans how to grow “new” vegetables like squash, beans, corn and tomatoes. Long-ago methods such as tomato tables and using wax and lime to deter squash borer are fascinating examples of Williamsburg gardening. Each chapter includes a list of 18th-century varieties along with modern organic seeds.
The section called “The Williamsburg Gardener’s Assistant” outlines how to grow specific vegetables. If your menus have been limited to tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas and lettuce you will learn about formerly popular vegetables like skirret and salsify. This attractive and informative book should inspire you to try something new as well as something old.
∎ Come January all gardeners will be pining for a touch of green. Traditional houseplants include ever-blooming African violets and cast-iron Boston ferns.
Tovah Martin prefers more unconventional specimens. She got her start at Logee’s Greenhouse, the famous tropical houseplant nursery in Connecticut, and has gone on to a fantastic career as a garden writer and lecturer. Her new book, “The Unexpected Houseplant: 220 Extraordinary Choices for Every Spot in Your Home” (Timber Press), provides an incredible array of unusual plants for growing indoors. Take conifers, for instance. When Martin failed to find time to get an end-of-season bargain ‘Blue Ice’ Arizona cypress into the ground, she simply brought it inside for the winter. She wrote, “It changed my world.
That started a whole spate of experimentation with conifers.” Since they need good light indoors, she raises their large pots to windowsill level on stools or other unconventional risers and keeps them inside until spring in an east window.
Not only does Martin use unusual plants indoors, she scrounges up unique containers, each one absolutely perfect for the plant. Terra cotta pots with flared rims, eared handles or wine-glass stems mix with colorful crackleglaze ceramics and tin French florist vases.
In an innovative chapter titled “Garden Preview,” she explains how to grow spring-blooming plants like columbine, drumstick primrose (not the supermarket type), bleeding heart and tiarella indoors in late winter to jump-start the season. Martin’s book makes one look very differently at the whole houseplant phenomenon. It isn’t so much a practical guide about potting soils, fertilizer and careful watering as a challenge to think outside the box when trying to bring the outside inside for the dreary winter months.
∎ Another way to escape winter is to travel. You can simply drive a short distance to one of the local academic greenhouses or you can plan a spring, summer or fall getaway to Maine or England.
As readers of this column will recall I fell in love with the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay this past summer. Its new guidebook, “Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens: A People’s Garden,” by William Cullina, Dorothy Freeman and Barbara Hill Freeman (Down East), wasn’t yet available in late June but I knew I wanted it. A friend who was visiting the botanical garden later in the summer kindly picked up a copy for me. I’ve been lending it to friends ever since.
The photography is gorgeous and the writing is excellent. Unless you live near Boothbay or are willing to drive 10 hours round-trip once a month you will never see the gardens in all seasons as they are shown in this wonderful guide. The book is available by mail from the garden or the publisher and at selected bookstores. If you are planning a pilgrimage there I highly recommend getting the guidebook ahead of time so you can plan your visit wisely. Even in four hours in June I only saw half of the gardens and had no time to stroll on the woodland trails. This is a true garden gem with a guidebook worthy of its beauty.
∎ English gardens have always been a mecca for me and I own far too many books about them. So I vowed only to borrow such books from the library. “Great Gardens of Britain” (Frances Lincoln Ltd.) by Helena Attlee made me break my vow.
After borrowing it twice from the Jones Library, I made it my souvenir from a trip to the New York Botanical Gardens this fall. The book includes the “usual suspects”: Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, Stourhead and Hidcote. But it introduced me to some intriguing new places. Most prominent is the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in southern Scotland where Charles Jencks and the late Maggie Keswick carved an incredible landscape using heavy-duty earth-moving equipment. The whole garden is a fantastic sculpture dotted with stunning statuary, stonework and graceful lakes.
Among the metal sculptures is a double helix. This garden isn’t about flowers. It’s about shapes and scientific ideas. Attlee writes, “... this is one of the most exciting, intellectually demanding and aesthetically challenging gardens of our time.”
Other beckoning gardens described in the book include Beth Chatto’s nursery and display gardens in Essex and the Alnwick Garden, designed for the Duchess of Northumberland by a Belgian team, which is now the third most-visited garden in England, after Kew and Wisley. It is more of a holiday place appealing to children who are allowed to run through the fountains and picnic on the lawns. On a massive scale, it may take years to mature completely (it was started in 1996), but it is a prime attraction in northern England — and it has flowers. The photographs in this book are stunning and the author makes you want to jump on a plane (perhaps not in December) and visit every one of the 20 marvelous gardens she describes from Cornwall to Ireland to Scotland.
Years ago a friend who was an excellent gardener scoffed at the idea of purchasing new books on gardening. She felt everything had been written that needed to be written. I’m sorry; she was wrong. Every year there are dozens of excellent garden books available to appeal to every kind of gardener. Browse at your local bookstore and something will jump off the shelves as the perfect gift.
Cheryl B. Wilson can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:114c22c8-9580-405f-9d46-448d062cf217> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gazettenet.com/home/3045876-95/garden-gardens-book-cosmic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941165 | 2,112 | 1.625 | 2 |
This past year, I was overcome with happiness about two enormous issues that will, hopefully, eventually affect millions.
First: The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, decided to make it against the law to sell many sweetened drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces. The second: McDonald’s finally decided to list the calorie content on all the items on their menu.
I don’t know if these things mean anything to a lot of people, but, to me, they mean everything in the exhausting fight against obesity.
Let’s tackle NYC’s “soda ban,” which will go into effect in March of 2013. I know some of you love soda; however, I call soda the Devil’s urine! That’s right; I said it, the Devil’s urine! It doesn’t offer anybody anything in any way to make them healthier. For goodness sake, you can pour soda on a car battery to dissolve the acid on the connectors! Why you would want to put that in your body? What do you think it does to your esophagus, God forbid you have gastroesophageal reflux?!
Let’s not just crucify soda – let’s also talk about high-sugar juices. We mistakenly drink a lot of juice because we think it’s so good for us. But when you add up the amount of sugar that’s in these processed juice drinks, it could definitely top the sugar content of soda. Am I the only one that remembers when you went to a restaurant a long time ago, when you ordered juice, it would come out in a tiny glass? That’s because that was the juice of one or two oranges! No one ever needs the juice of 6 oranges for breakfast. If you want that much juice, then eat 6 oranges! At least you get some fiber. So, kudos to the city of New York, and I hope that my beautiful city of New Orleans, as overweight as it is, can follow suit.
Now, let’s tackle the second issue. I think McDonald’s has done a monumental thing by letting people know exactly how many calories are in their offerings. It’ll make the amount of calories we consume when we go to these kinds of places very real. A lot of people hate McDonald’s. I don’t hate McDonald’s because McDonald’s has its place – it’s supposed to be a treat. The problem is people started using McDonald’s as their sole source of food intake and that, my friends, is a huge problem. So, thank you, McDonald’s, for letting us know exactly how many calories are in each one of your cheeseburgers. And thank you to Mayor Bloomberg for allowing me to have faith in the common sense judgment of civil servants once again! | <urn:uuid:d7cef5b8-f5a5-43fc-b641-aa6fe74a698d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.doctoroz.com/oz-experts/the-weightiest-issues-of-2012 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953775 | 605 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Katikati, the gateway from the north to the Bay of Plenty.
From the earliest recorded settlements the area has been recognized as a lifestyle destination. The population may have changed but the reasons for coming to Katikati are still the same
Orchards - Kiwifruit, Avocado, Olives and Citrus
Mural Town of New Zealand - Katikati is famous for its murals depicting scenes of the regions rich history.
Open Air Art
Avocado Food & Wine Festival and much more.
Katikati town which services the area from the Kaimai Ranges through rolling lush grass land to the Tauranga harbour has thrived and its population has grown three times faster than the national average since 1950. Its commercial and industrial sector hosts some of New Zealand’s leading manufacturers as well as a number of small, unique businesses. Only two hours from Auckland and Hamilton and under half an hour from Mount Maunganui and Tauranga which boasts the largest shipping port in New Zealand.
Katikati has an award winning winery, luxury lodges and a choice of boutique accommodation options, great cafes and restaurants and a fascinating heritage museum, to name just a few.
Stretching from the Kaimai Ranges to the sea, Katikati offers countless options for those interested in tramping, fishing, swimming,and recreational boating. This friendly, cheerful New Zealand town is rapidly gaining popularity with its relaxed atmosphere and lifestyle opportunities. | <urn:uuid:6fb92321-9321-4375-bf4a-07f56721d1cf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bethlehemrealty.co.nz/index.cfm?pageCall=content&contentID=78338MenuItemID=79495 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94391 | 303 | 1.820313 | 2 |
I don't like Moon-days
Take it away, guest poster Owl Meat:
An article in The Guardian reports that the English have lost their minds regarding wine and are nuttier than Donovan riding a lovecoaster powered by unicorn tears:
The idea that the taste of wine changes with the lunar calendar is gaining credibility among the UK's major retailers, who believe the day, and even hour, on which wine is drunk alters its taste. Tesco and its rival Marks & Spencer, which sell about a third of all wine drunk in Britain, now invite critics to taste their ranges only at times when the biodynamic calendar suggests they will show at their best.
Many scientists have little time for biodynamic wine, pointing out that the movement's guru, Rudolf Steiner, claimed to have conceived the concept after consulting telepathically with spirits beyond the realm of the material world. Among his other works are claims that the human race is as old as the Earth and descended from creatures with jelly-like bodies, and a belief that men's passions seep into the Earth's interior, where they trigger earthquakes and volcanoes.
Well pour me a Pinot Noir, smack my butt and call me Krakatoa. I can understand that there is a certain lunatic fringe who will buy into anything, but the idea that major retailers are encouraging people to not drink wine ever is bonkers ...
Perhaps there are better or worse days to plant things. Who knows? The moon does have a serious effect upon the tides, human biology and possibly human behavior. Plus werewolves.
The matter of how wine already in the bottle can be influenced by the moon seems ridiculous. Does a waxing moon change the chemistry of a Spanish Rioja? How would that work?
Moon gravity changing flavor electron orbitals? Perhaps the moon changes the chemistry in my brain so that those leathery undertones on Monday taste like vinyl car seat on Thursday. If this was true, wouldn't food taste vary by some astrological calendar too?
Here's my astro-œnological forecast for the coming week: This is a good time for people to buy wine for Sagittarians. Their sparkling personalities and awesome guest blogging skills will reflect back upon you and make you more attractive to them the more glasses of wine you buy them ... ladies. And no merlot. | <urn:uuid:d62fa8cf-4cb9-411b-9971-81763cf4ddd4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/midnight_sun/blog/2009/05/i_dont_like_moondays.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961466 | 479 | 1.5 | 2 |
And when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, at the mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples,
saying to them, Go into the village over against you, and immediately ye will find an ass tied, and a colt with it; loose [them] and lead [them] to me.
And if any one say anything to you, ye shall say, The Lord has need of them, and straightway he will send them.
But all this came to pass, that that might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying,
Say to the daughter of Zion, Behold thy King cometh to thee, meek, and mounted upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.
But the disciples, having gone and done as Jesus had ordered them,
brought the ass and the colt and put their garments upon them, and he sat on them.
But a very great crowd strewed their own garments on the way, and others kept cutting down branches from the trees and strewing them on the way.
And the crowds who went before him and who followed cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed [be] he who comes in the name of [the] Lord; hosanna in the highest.
And as he entered into Jerusalem, the whole city was moved, saying, Who is this?
And the crowds said, This is Jesus the prophet who is from Nazareth of Galilee.
And Jesus entered into the temple [of God], and cast out all that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those that sold the doves.
And he says to them, It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of robbers.
And blind and lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.
And when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonders which he wrought, and the children crying in the temple and saying, Hosanna to the Son of David, they were indignant,
and said to him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus says to them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?
And leaving them he went forth out of the city to Bethany, and there he passed the night.
But early in the morning, as he came back into the city, he hungered.
And seeing one fig-tree in the way, he came to it and found on it nothing but leaves only. And he says to it, Let there be never more fruit of thee for ever. And the fig-tree was immediately dried up.
And when the disciples saw [it], they wondered, saying, How immediately is the fig-tree dried up!
And Jesus answering said to them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and do not doubt, not only shall ye do what [is done] to the fig-tree, but even if ye should say to this mountain, Be thou taken away and be thou cast into the sea, it shall come to pass.
And all things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.
And when he came into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him [as he was] teaching, saying, By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority?
And Jesus answering said to them, I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I also will tell you by what authority I do these things:
The baptism of John, whence was it? of heaven or of men? And they reasoned among themselves, saying, If we should say, Of heaven, he will say to us, Why then have ye not believed him?
but if we should say, Of men, we fear the crowd, for all hold John for a prophet.
And answering Jesus they said, We do not know. He also said to them, Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.
But what think ye? A man had two children, and coming to the first he said, Child, go to-day, work in [my] vineyard.
And he answering said, I will not; but afterwards repenting himself he went.
And coming to the second he said likewise; and he answering said, I [go], sir, and went not.
Which of the two did the will of the father? They say [to him], The first. Jesus says to them, Verily I say unto you that the tax-gatherers and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.
For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not; but the tax-gatherers and the harlots believed him; but ye when ye saw [it] repented not yourselves afterwards to believe him.
Hear another parable: There was a householder who planted a vineyard, and made a fence round it, and dug a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and left the country.
But when the time of fruit drew near, he sent his bondmen to the husbandmen to receive his fruits.
And the husbandmen took his bondmen, and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.
Again he sent other bondmen more than the first, and they did to them in like manner.
And at last he sent to them his son, saying, They will have respect for my son.
But the husbandmen, seeing the son, said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him and possess his inheritance.
And they took him, and cast him forth out of the vineyard, and killed him.
When therefore the lord of the vineyard comes, what shall he do to those husbandmen?
They say to him, He will miserably destroy those evil [men], and let out the vineyard to other husbandmen, who shall render him the fruits in their seasons.
Jesus says to them, Have ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which they that builded rejected, this has become the corner-stone: this is of [the] Lord, and it is wonderful in our eyes?
Therefore I say to you, that the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and shall be given to a nation producing the fruits of it.
And he that falls on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.
And the chief priests and the Pharisees, having heard his parables, knew that he spoke about them.
And seeking to lay hold of him, they were afraid of the crowds, because they held him for a prophet. | <urn:uuid:e1630762-781c-4555-a490-5ae076c8a420> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hebrewoldtestament.com/darby/B40C021.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977413 | 1,452 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Vanity Fair has published a great study of Mitt Romney's financial record. While there's not a whole lot of new information there, it does put a lot of the information into clearer context by painting a portrait of a man who loves dumping his money offshore and avoiding taxes. The piece opens with Romney encouraging a young Bain employee to use illegal methods to uncover information about Bain's competitors. And then it gets into what happens to the money once Romney "earns" it:
Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984...The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.
A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities. “What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.”
Romney...takes his payments from Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum 15 percent, instead of the 35 percent he would pay on “ordinary” income, such as salaries and wages.
I suggest you read the whole thing and then make sure people you know read the whole thing.
And if barely legal tax evasion and a startling lack of confidence in American investments isn't enough to convince you that someone shouldn't be president of the United States, maybe there's this Facebook post from Dogs Against Romney, which points out that Bain Capital owns Burlington Coat Factory, which has sold Chinese coats made from dog fur. That, of course, brings this to mind:
Get the best of the Mercury each week in your inbox! | <urn:uuid:3d795f62-b37e-447b-9e46-e9507c7995ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2012/07/03/more-evidence-of-mitt-romneys-evilness-hits-the-internet | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97503 | 402 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Relatives of those killed in an April uprising in Kyrgyzstan clashed with police and called for revenge at the start of a trial for former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev and 27 of his top allies.
The ousted president and his allies are charged with using deadly violence in an attempt to put down protests that ultimately toppled his government, forcing him to flee the country. More than 80 people were killed during the uprising.
Mr. Bakiyev is being tried in absentia, but relatives of the victims broke through police lines Wednesday, trying to reach the 22 defendants who were present.
The trial is being held at a Bishkek sports palace to accommodate the interest in the trial.
The head of the Citizens Against Corruption human rights center, Tolekan Ismailova, criticized the proceedings, calling the trial nothing more than a political show.
Kyrgyzstan has been plagued by instability since the deadly rebellion.
The new government in Kyrgyzstan has said Mr. Bakiyev and his allies ordered security forces to shoot at the demonstrators during the April protests. Meanwhile, the country's newly-elected parliament convened for its first session just this week.
Nationalist party Ata-Zhurt, or Fatherland, emerged as the lead vote-getter in last month's elections, and is now leading talks to form a coalition government.
The United States, which operates a military air base in Kyrgyzstan to support the war in Afghanistan, has embraced the Kyrgyz effort to create the region's first parliamentary democracy.
Russia, which also has an air base in Kyrgyzstan, opposes the parliamentary model.
Riots broke out in June between ethnic Kyrgyz and minority Uzbeks in the country's south, killing hundreds of people and displacing some 400,000 others.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters. | <urn:uuid:4631770e-b1e1-4da6-bcd6-1f459b69e288> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.voanews.com/content/kyrgyzstan-opens-trial-against-ousted-president-108652714/166647.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 | 0.979144 | 394 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Graduate Students Forum:
The Convincing Cover Letter
The job candidate should consider the cover letter as the most important part of the packet of materials created to win the enthusiastic attention of a search committee. When committee members open the small pile of papers into which a candidate condenses years of academic life, the cover letter lies on top, providing the candidate with the opportunity to create a context, a mood, a lens through which the rest of the documents will be read. Of those materials, the cover letter is the most direct communication between candidate and committee, since the accompanying vita, recommendations, and transcript are not addressed to anyone in particular. At the time of application, their content is no longer within the control of the candidate, making the letter the best clue about the candidate's personality, attitudes, and judgments. The cover letter thus becomes a personal connection between the candidate and those who make decisions about jobs, signified by the handwritten signature at the bottom. These practical and symbolic attributes of the cover letter mean that its composition is much more significant than most job candidates realize.
I say that after reading hundreds of such letters written by aspiring historians in all fields of study. The occasional foolish errors can lead to good stories around the committee table, such as the letter correctly addressed to my small college in Maine, in which the candidate neglected to edit the sentence directed to a similar committee in southern California, where "the weather adds to the attractiveness of your position." The fundamental mistake here cannot be fixed by replacing these words with a reference to the joys of snowshoeing. The problem is in the deeper assumption that one letter is sufficient for applying to many jobs.
Every job is different. Each search committee seeks a candidate who will fit into a particular kind of institution, a uniquely constituted history department, a special slot within a curriculum. As I sift through dozens of dossiers, the few letters which are really addressed to me and my department stand out among the vast majority in which "Bates College" is merely pasted into the proper locations. Candidates who use the opportunity of the cover letter to make that personal connection to Bates stand out from the crowd.
The simplest fix to the universal letter is perhaps the most crucial. Candidates must pay attention to the difference between research universities and liberal arts colleges. In the crudest terms (and from my perspective at a small college), we are looking for excellent teachers who will also do fine research, while research universities seek excellent and prolific researchers who will also teach well. Does the cover letter reveal that the candidate understands the mission of Bates College and thus the nature of the job for which she or he is applying? A letter beginning with several paragraphs about the dissertation and further research goals, and ending with a paragraph about how much the candidate loves to teach, will not demonstrate an understanding of our emphasis on small classes, interactive discussion, one-on-one senior thesis work, and the overall goal of getting to know students personally. Candidates should show in their letters that their research and teaching experiences and goals are appropriate to the kind of institution to which they are applying.
A more difficult but ultimately more successful strategy is to tailor each letter to the specific job. The ideal letter should be an interaction between what the candidate wants to say about himself and what the position calls for. Figuring that out requires applying the skills that the young historian claims to have developedclose reading, research, and analysisto the task at hand.
The most useful source is the job advertisement itself. While ads typically include much standardized language, each ad contains clues about the particularity of the job. Some clues refer to areas of crucial importance to the hiring department. For example, Bates advertised recently for an American historian who would also play a role in our interdisciplinary program in American Cultural Studies, which emphasizes the categories of race and gender. Candidates whose letters made no reference to this key feature of the job inevitably appeared less interested in Bates than those who discussed their experience with or attitudes toward such interdisciplinary programs.
A second set of clues lies in the composition of the department. How many European and American historians are there? What other continents are taught or not taught? Will the candidate's proclaimed ability to teach world history be welcomed or seen as evidence that he or she had not done any homework about this department's curriculum?
Finally institutional and departmental web sites offer a wealth of information about allied programs, departmental practices, and sometimes, controversial issues. The candidate whose cover letter demonstrated some knowledge of our peculiar calendar (short intensive spring term) and our stress on the senior thesis was also indicating an interest in our job.
I am not suggesting that candidates refashion themselves to fit into every position they can find. A need to remake oneself to appear attractive to a particular search committee might be an indication that this job is not a good match. I do urge candidates to use the historical skills developed over years of study to think about the job market. Craft a cover letter that presents yourself as a candidate for the particular job being offered. Should that letter, and the rest of the dossier, have the desired effect, continue to seek ways to make the personal connection between your own notion of what it means to be an historian and the kind of historian a committee is seeking. One does not need to know everything about a department; just asking a probing question about what a phrase in the job ad means can show both alertness and interest.
A good cover letter will not cover weaknesses elsewhere. But it can elevate a good candidate into the ranks of those invited for a closer look. Then all the paper in the application packet recedes into the background and the skills behind the letter come into the open.
Steve Hochstadt teaches modern European history at Bates College, and just completed eight years as chair of the history department.
Copyright © American Historical AssociationLast Updated: February 6, 2008 4:07 PM | <urn:uuid:2454fe01-3817-4c6e-ba0d-119b441ab3ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2003/0309/0309for1.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958365 | 1,201 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Republicans intensified their criticism of President Barack Obama's foreign policy on Monday, noting questions about his administration's accounting of last month's deadly attack on an American diplomatic post in Libya and the U.S. response to Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Obama's campaign recast a theme it has hit repeatedly, announcing an ad to run in battleground states on Republican nominee Mitt Romney's business past.
Both Romney and Obama spent Monday preparing for Wednesday night's first presidential debate in Denver with polls showing a tight race overall.
Romney said in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the United States could be brought into another fight if the turmoil in the Middle East is not calmed.
"We're not moving them in a direction that protects our people or our allies. And that's dangerous," Romney wrote, referring to current policy on Iran that he says puts Israel at risk.
"If the Middle East descends into chaos, if Iran moves toward nuclear breakout, or if Israel's security is compromised, America could be pulled into the maelstrom," Romney wrote.
His running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, separately criticized the Obama administration's response to the September 11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
He noted the revised account of what occurred at the consulate - first described as an attack that U.S. officials thought grew out of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim film. The intelligence community said on Friday it now believes the attack was "a deliberate and organized terrorist assault carried out by extremists" affiliated or sympathetic with al Qaeda.
"We've seen a confused, slow, inconsistent response to what is now very clearly known as a terrorist act," Ryan said in a radio interview with Laura Ingraham on Monday.
Romney will continue to focus on foreign policy and the economy heading into the debate, according to a campaign memo obtained by CNN and campaign advisers who spoke Monday on a conference call.
"Governor Romney will, over the next few weeks, crystallize the choice for voters on the issue of foreign policy and national security," said senior adviser Kevin Madden, adding that Romney would "lay out a stronger vision for American foreign policy based on the strong leadership that we need to shape world events and protect American interests and ideals."
Obama spent Monday in Nevada preparing for the debate, while Romney began his day in Boston and then flew to Colorado.
The Obama campaign recast the narrative of Romney's business past as part of its heavy emphasis on portraying him as an out-of-touch executive who led a company that sent jobs overseas or cut employment at home.
The campaign announced a new ad linking Romney's former private equity firm, Bain Capital, to a Chinese appliance company that the Obama campaign said relied on American outsourcing for its success. The campaign would target battleground states but did not say when the ad would air.
First on CNN: Romney campaign to unleash 'robust' spending
The Romney campaign is planning to unleash "robust" spending in the final five weeks of the election campaign, a memo provided to CNN by a Republican source said.
"We will spend as much in paid advertising, direct mail, and field operations in the next five weeks as we have spent since becoming the presumptive nominee," according to the memo by Spencer Zwick, the campaign's National Finance chairman, and Mason Fink, the campaign's National Finance director.
Poll: horse race for presidency neck and neck
A CNN/ORC poll released on Monday showed Obama and Romney in a close race.
Asked who they would vote for today, 50% of likely voters said they would cast a ballot for the president while 47% chose Romney. The difference of 3% is within the margin of error.
Neither candidate had an edge on the economy, which remains the top issue for Americans and is a focus of the first debate.
Obama, who has been pressured by Romney over his handling of an economy that has experienced slow growth and high unemployment for much of his White House term, got some good news on Monday.
A leading survey of purchasing managers for September reflected the first expansion of the U.S. manufacturing sector in four months. But all eyes will be on the labor market with figures about private sector job growth and Friday's monthly jobs report from the Labor Department still on tap.
A majority of voters aren't expecting Romney to be victorious in the first debate.
According to an ABC News/Washington Post national poll released Monday, 55% of likely voters say they think the president will win the debate with 31% saying that Romney will come out on top. | <urn:uuid:06d40dba-bdff-4f91-ac0b-8b3b429004b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news4jax.com/politics/Romney-hits-foreign-policy-Obama-ad-on-Bain/-/1875986/16804122/-/a6mlemz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969493 | 938 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Yes, Virginia, Obamacare is Raising the Cost of Your Health Insurance
First as a candidate and then as president, Barack Obama repeatedly promised his administration would “have a health care plan that would save the average family $2,500 on their premiums.”
Yet since the president passed his health care law, with exclusively Democratic support in Congress, health premiums have continued to rise – and every datapoint we have indicates a significant portion of that premium increase is due to Obama’s law and its impending regulations and costly mandates on what coverage must be provided.
A recent study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation illustrates the problem. The average employer health insurance premium rose by 9 percent in 2011, three times the increase of 2010, and family premiums exceeded $15,000 a year for the first time. In some states, premiums rose by even more – they have now risen by $2,213 since Obama took office according to Kaiser's numbers.
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, is having none of this. He says an ad that references the Kaiser survey is an overuse of a “single data point” to suggest premiums are increasing because of Obama’s law. He writes:
“Six in 10 Americans are seeing their [health insurance] premiums rise. The average cost of a family policy is up $1,300. Another part of President Obama’s health care takeover will cost $111 billion more than promised.” --Voiceover in a Republican National Committee TV ad about the Obama health care law
Be wary of the single data point, exploited either by Democrats or Republicans.
This new RNC ad slams the Obama health care law for already causing a boost in health care premiums, even though much of the law has not been implemented. (The ad frames this as breaking President Obama’s already dubious promise that the health care overhaul will result in average family premiums declining by $2,500.) ...
As we said, be wary of a single data point.
Now, the RNC makes the same mistake in focusing on the increase in health care premiums. The Kaiser survey does not suggest that the premium increase has much to do with the health care law; indeed, it notes that “many of the most significant provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) will take effect in 2014.”
The provisions that have taken effect, such as providing coverage for adult children up to age 26, thus far appear to have had modest impact on premiums. Kaiser says it will monitor the impact on employers but it generally places the year-to-year increase as part of an overall trend of sharply rising costs. “Since 2001, average premiums for family coverage have increased 113 percent,” the report notes.
Indeed, when Kaiser looked at just the increase in the portion of the premium that workers contribute, the report said that neither the amounts for families nor individuals represented “a statistically significant increase over the 2010 values.”
Kessler’s work, particularly in the health care space, routinely displays an obtuse naiveté for how policy applies in the real world. Last year, he assigned Four Pinocchios (his suitably ludicrous measuring standard) to the claim that Medicaid gets ripped off by rich people, because after he looked into the matter, he found rich people don’t qualify for Medicaid. Yes, really. (And of course, he was wrong about that BMW thing.)
Kessler makes a number of assumptions in this piece, but let’s drill down to a pretty basic one: He assumes for Republicans to claim premiums are increasing means they are assigning the entirety of those premium increases to the effects of Obama’s law, when in fact the ad makes no such claim. It merely claims premiums are going up, not down, as Obama promised.
This is simply a fact, one established not by “single data point” claims but by the overwhelming evidence we have on hand. I’m unsure what Kessler even means by that repeated "single data point" line. Does he mean to suggest the Kaiser survey is inconsistent with the balance of research or reports in the field? Even the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office before the passage of the law indicated premiums would increase by a significant amount because of its requirements:
Average premiums per policy in the nongroup market in 2016 would be roughly $5,800 for single policies and $15,200 for family policies under the proposal, compared with roughly $5,500 for single policies and $13,100 for family policies under current law. The weighted average of the differences in those amounts equals the change of 10 percent to 13 percent in the average premium per person.
And this is consistent with the continued projections we’re seeing from across the country. These have since been supplemented by reports at the state level about expectations of premium increases relative to what would have happened if Obamacare didn’t exist, such as in Indiana , where “The estimated ACA-driven premium rate change for the Indiana individual insured market beginning in 2014 is 75% to 95%.” And also Ohio , where premium rates in the individual market are expected to rise between 55% and 85% thanks to the law.
We also have the estimates of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, who sees increases in premiums (as opposed to the decreases he anticipated just a few years ago). In Wisconsin , he anticipates a premium increases of 30 percent by 2016 in the individual markes; in Minnesota , he claims the individual market will see increases in premiums by 29 percent. And in Colorado , he expects premiums will rise by 19 percent relative to what they would’ve been without Obamacare.
And this isn’t just about mandates on insurers – it’s also about the acceleration of health care spending. When you subsidize something, you’re going to get more of it. According to Health Affairs’ comprehensive look at national health spending projections through 2020 , we’re due to see a 10.7 percent increase in prescription drug spending in 2014, an 8.9 percent increase in physician and clinical services in 2014, and a 7.2 percent increase in hospital spending in 2014 – all higher than the spending anticipated without Obama’s law. And guess who’s paying for this new spending? The insurers. What do you expect to happen to premiums, exactly?
This recent AON Hewitt survey on what is driving these premium increases finds the individual market is feeling disproportionate impact from Obama’s law. There's even a handy breakdown of the portion of the increase that insurance carriers believe is due to the handful of PPACA's elements which have already gone into effect. Note the range of impact on individual policies in this chart, which shows how the expenses of just the few provisions that have taken hold already. As the report notes:
[I]t is important to consider the additional factors that contribute to overall premium increases – including changes in the covered population, deductible leveraging, and benefit changes driven by PPACA. These items are usually smaller than core trend, but can still have a significant impact on premium increases. On average, reported impacts for covered population changes and deductible leveraging show that these items increased estimated 2010 health care costs by an additional 1.8% to 5.2% over core health care trend, depending on line of business. Many PPACA impacts will first be largely reflected in 2011, with average projected impacts by line of business ranging from 0.8% to 4.7%.
Now, this is just the word of insurance carriers themselves - but what do they know about costs versus a well-trained fact checker? And of course, how much of these increases on an individual policy level are due solely to Obamacare is a matter of debate. But as I pointed out at the beginning: the ad Kessler's attacking didn’t claim prices were increasing solely due to Obamacare. And there is no debate about these simple facts: that every measure and datapoint we have indicates Obamacare is making premiums more expensive, not less; that they are exceeding expectations in terms of cost increases, not slowing their rate of growth relative to estimates; and that the impending mandates and regulations will continue to increase those premiums and do nothing to stop their rise. That will be up to price controls and bureaucratic regulators to do, after all.
One last point: Kessler needs to update his fact sheet on the operability of Obama’s claims. He writes:
We offer no defense of Obama’s claim that his health care law will reduce premiums by $2,500. (There was an asterisk to that claim – he was talking about what premiums would have been in 2016 absent the law, not an actual dollar decline from current rates.) He will have to answer to Americans if his law fails to live up to that pledge, or if people feel misled by his careful wording.
Kessler needs to re-check that asterisk he's imagining. The White House long ago backed off that $2,500 savings figure (at one point it was actually $3,000) and extended the timeline for its applicability from 2016 to 2019. Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy DeParle, one of the president’s leading health care policy advisors, told ABC News last year that families won’t see those savings for another eight years, until 2019 – well after Obama’s second term would conclude. She also scaled the figure back to “around $2,000” in savings.
In other words, it would be well after the point where Obama would “have to answer to Americans” as Kessler claims. And that’s a fact. | <urn:uuid:64177300-0dcf-4ed0-accf-655c919ac820> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Yes-Virginia-Obamacare-is-Raising-the-Cost-of-Your-Health-Insurance/(comment)/337168 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964262 | 1,996 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Refiners grind the fiber material for the pulp preparation process.
Pretreated wood chips or a thickened fiber suspension are fed between the refiner disks that are equipped with blades.
Extremely high speeds in combination with high loads have to be accommodated.
The shaft is guided axially by a sliding bearing and radially by two special cylindrical roller bearings. Oil circulation lubrication with oil injected directly to the bearings is the standard. | <urn:uuid:b1b7cd0f-2b35-4d07-8286-92c8e416fb2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ina.de/content.ina.de/en/branches/industry/pulp_and_paper/applications_1/pulp_preparation/refiner/refiner.jsp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931475 | 91 | 1.726563 | 2 |
On Thursday, Boston will light its city Christmas tree, after an uproar over an attempt to rename it the "holiday tree." It's just one of many battles across the country over what some Christians see as attempts to sap Christmas of its religious meaning.
Christian conservatives have launched online petition drives and recruited a record 1,550 attorneys to pursue any attempts to substitute "Christmas" with "holiday," or any other inclusive or nonsectarian terms. It's all aimed at -- to use their phrase -- "putting the Christ back in Christmas." And in some places, it's working.
Target stores became the focus of a Christian conservative boycott, after banning Salvation Army kettles.
Christian conservatives say retailers should proudly play up Christmas even if some non-Christian customers are alienated.
"Tough luck," said Donald Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association. "This is an overwhelmingly Christian country."
Some retailers are reacting to the pressure.
After using the more inclusive "Happy Holidays" in its ads and in-store promotions last year, Macy's is now embracing "Merry Christmas." And, after hundreds of phone calls, Lowe's stopped selling "holiday trees" and switched to "Christmas trees."
Speaking of trees, Christian conservatives applauded the speaker of the house when he had the tree on Capitol Hill switched from a "holiday tree" to a "Christmas tree." And, after Christians threatened to sue, Boston changed its mind about changing the name of its Christmas tree.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell says he and his allies are taking back Christmas from "Grinches" such as the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The fact is," Falwell said, "we've gone on the offense now. We've put them on the defense. We're kicking their butts and they're unhappy."
Critics say putting together an armada of Christian attorneys is likely a publicity stunt. If they sued Boston over the name of its tree, they'd likely lose because governments can call their trees whatever they want.
"Jerry Falwell has found that this war on Christmas is a very good, healthy, fundraising mechanism," said the Rev. Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "And that's just about all this is. This is a war without any generals." | <urn:uuid:ce8b2c66-30c3-4b2e-b967-96d9ca0d880a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1358020 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96183 | 471 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Online Scheduler: Access our scheduler to make an appointment.
What to Expect: Here you can learn what to expect during a Writing Center session.
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The College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University's Writing Centers exist to help students write better papers and become better writers. We offer an informational atmosphere where students can bring questions to their peers. Our one-on-one sessions allow both the tutor and the student to work through procedures and strategies in order to help improve the student's writing abilities. We are resources in all stages of the writing process, from brain-storming to perfecting a final draft. We do not proofread papers; rather, we believe in the value of teaching students how to brainstorm, how to organize their thoughts, how to clarify their assertions, how to recognize and fix their grammar mistakes, and so on. We believe in teaching students skills they can use in all their writing. Each session is intended to reach beyond a specific assignment. | <urn:uuid:a3ba42b5-c90d-4613-9d31-59ce55e86d0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://csbsju.edu/Writing-Center.htm?mobile=true | 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 | 0.930335 | 285 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Shap, are you telling me the carriers were away from Pearl because we knew Pearl was going to be attacked?!
Every book I've read on the subject states it was sheer luck they were out at the time of the attack.
Besides, we had no idea as to the value of aircraft carriers until they were blooded in the war. They were thought of more as defense support for the real fighting ships, the battleships, not the centerpiece of an offensive strike force.
There is a fundamental difference between the end of WWII and what's going on now: In WWII, the countries involved formally surrendered to us. Such has not been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iraq people keep dying in increasing numbers.
Just because our founding fathers were noble, and I admire that about them tremendously, doesn't mean they were confident of beating the British. As a matter of fact, wasn't our change in fighting style more a product of necessity and desperation than of superior strategic thinking?
As for me, I don't know if I have what it would have taken to lead then, but I certainly would have joined.
PS. Selma, as usual, is right on the money.
<small>[ 06-03-2005, 01:58 PM: Message edited by: OperaTenor ]</small> | <urn:uuid:2956dc0d-1e58-4f81-a54d-fd3ab413d4c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beethoven.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=67556 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.99147 | 270 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Samsung is denying rumours that it had raised the prices of the application processors that Apple uses in its products by 20%.
That rumour appeared in Korean newspaper Chosun Ilboon on Monday. That report claimed a person familiar with the negotiations between rivals Samsung and Apple had said: “Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in application process. Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the [20 per cent increase]”.
A Samsung source has now denied this rumour, telling Seuul-based newspaper The Hankyoreh that prices are set at the beginning of the year and aren’t changed easily.
On news of the rumoured price hike Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster speculated that the increase would hit Apple's gross margins by 1-2%, he suggested that Apple would “shift production to another vendor”, notes The Street.
It is thought that Apple is already looking to TSMC and other suppliers to supply the chips it uses in the iPad and iPhone. Analysts believe that TSMC will take on Samsung's workload over the next couple of years, with production commencing in the fourth quarter of 2013.
When the iPhone 5 launched it emerged that Apple is now designing the chips itself with Samsung merely building them. A Samsung official confirmed: "Samsung’s agreement with Apple is limited to manufacturing the A6 processors. Apple did all the design and we are just producing the chips on a foundry basis."
The custom-designed chips found on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple TV are built by Samsung at its chip fabrication plant in Austin, Texus, writes Apple Insider. | <urn:uuid:400b786b-4864-4bbf-a955-74fb6206cf7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.macworld.co.uk/apple-business/news/?newsid=3411215 | 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 | 0.952128 | 345 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask/Using Your Time Wisely
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For extra time, play the Song of Time backwards. This causes events and time to move half-as-quickly, making it easier to complete temples that would otherwise give you trouble. However, enemies are just as dangerous since the reversed song only affects the events within the world. In addition, you can skip time by playing each note in the Song of Time twice, if you are trying to complete a single task.
The Bunny Hood is very useful for trying to move around Termina faster. If this doesn't seem to help your game play, pre-read the walk-through and understand what you need to do. In particular, you may want to study when certain events will occur and plan your movements accordingly. | <urn:uuid:d17d9908-20b5-4423-ab66-274bab635fec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Majora's_Mask/Using_Your_Time_Wisely | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964064 | 178 | 1.75 | 2 |
Alex Wong/Getty Images
A bugler plays taps during an Aug. 9 funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. After reports revealed mishandling of remains at the cemetery, military officials are now working to reconcile the burial records of the 330,000 people laid to rest there.
For years, Arlington National Cemetery has been defined by honor. Presidents are buried there. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger. And thousands of men and women who served in the military.
But Barbara Tye doesn't have the same sense of honor she once had. After her family had her little brother, Army Staff Sgt. Michael Somers, disinterred she found out he had been buried in the wrong place.
After reports last year revealed mishandling of remains at the cemetery, military officials are now working to reconcile the burial records of the 330,000 people laid to rest there. The cemetery faces a joint criminal probe by the Army and the FBI. Congress has also ordered an accounting by the end of the year.
Cemetery officials recently unveiled changes they have made so far — ones they hope will help regain some of the trust they lost. But two families who questioned the burial of their loved ones say they aren't sure that's possible.
Somers' family hadn't spoken out until now, so as not to disgrace the Army he loved.
"They dug one grave to the left of him and that was an empty gravesite," says Tye, his sister. "Because when they dug up his gravesite, it was the wife of a colonel. So then they dug one grave to the right of him and discovered his casket and the body of another wife of an unknown service member."
The sun rises over Section 15 at Arlington National Cemetery as soldiers from the Army Old Guard photograph headstones on Aug. 24. Their work is part of a task force to photograph and catalog nearly 220,000 grave markers and the columbarium niches of more than 43,000 sets of cremated remains at Arlington.
The sun rises over Section 15 at Arlington National Cemetery as soldiers from the Army Old Guard photograph headstones on Aug. 24. Their work is part of a task force to photograph and catalog nearly 220,000 grave markers and the columbarium niches of more than 43,000 sets of cremated remains at Arlington. Cliff Owen/AP
Tye says she'll never look at the graves at Arlington the same way.
The cemetery's staff is working hard to restore the trust of the families — and the nation.
An accountability task force is locating graves, documenting the information on the grave markers, then matching it with digitized paper records and computer databases to get an accurate accounting.
"There's almost 220,000 markers and another 43,000-some columbarium niches we had to go out and physically count," says Army Col. John Schrader, co-chairman of the task force.
Army troops armed with iPhones have been out taking pictures of the graves.
Army Lt. Col. Jamie Wilmeth explains that the pictures are then fed into a system that helps check if the information on the headstones is correct.
"We're going to take all of these that have the mistakes on them and we're going to go through the files — whether they're hard files here at the cemetery ... different databases, VA databases, personnel databases — and we will determine what the truth is," he says.
Kathryn Condon, executive director of the Army National Cemeteries Program, took over at Arlington after the previous administrators were forced out in the wake of the 2010 Army inspector general report.
"If we find a discrepancy, we will immediately work with the next of kin," she says.
Condon and her staff dealt with Somers' case, but she says errors like this are rare because most of the time families are present when their loved ones are buried. Inclement weather prevented that for the Somers family.
"Hopefully ... we don't have many of those discrepancies left, but you have my promise that if we do we will do everything to bring the veteran and their loved ones to closure," she says.
NPR asked repeatedly how the cemetery can be sure the original paperwork isn't wrong. Condon says if all the records check out — and match the headstone — the cemetery presumes the right person is under that headstone.
Courtesy of Scott Warner
Marine Pvt. Heath Warner was 19 when he was killed in Iraq in 2006. Warner's father had his body disinterred to confirm that he was buried in the right place.
But Tye, Somers' sister, says that presumption is a slap in the face. "They told us my brother's paperwork was in order [and] he was where he was supposed to be," she says. "But he wasn't."
Condon says the cemetery won't know how many discrepancies there are until the task force finishes its work.
But Scott Warner says he doesn't think Arlington can ever restore his trust. Warner had his son, Marine Pvt. Heath Warner, disinterred to confirm that he was buried in the right place. He was.
"I don't think ... there's anything they'll ever be able to do for us to take that pain and that suffering that we went through going through this process," he says.
Condon says the cemetery will be ready to make its mandated report to Congress — accounting for every single person buried there — in December. | <urn:uuid:98c8a821-23bf-48d9-88c5-3ecffeb7ce18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.npr.org/2011/08/29/140037988/families-skeptical-as-arlington-tries-to-repair-trust | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977393 | 1,124 | 1.796875 | 2 |
South Africa: Relief as Lonmin strike ends – miners accept deal
The strike highlighted poor wages and living and working conditions for most South African workers, the widening gap between rich and poor that makes the country the most unequal nation on Earth, and raised questions about President Jacob Zuma’s leadership just as he prepares for a crucial governing party congress in December that will decide whether he gets another term as leader of Africa’s richest economy.
Zuma said Monday that strikes have cost the country more than US$500 million this year.
The Lonmin workers were the first to strike and in recent weeks seven other mines had work stoppages, including six platinum mines, one gold and one chrome mine.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
Pages: 1 2 | <urn:uuid:7e41708c-3a1f-4f77-a968-223ecc66ae84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thehabarinetwork.com/south-africa-relief-as-lonmin-strike-ends-miners-accept-deal/2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958658 | 156 | 1.75 | 2 |
Heritage Auctions is branching out into the luxury accessories category with their first auction in Heritage's Luxury Accessories category as part of the December 13 Fine Jewelry and Handbags auction. We've been seeing more and more action in this category from auction houses lately as older bags have commanded high prices. This auction includes a pair of rare Hermes Birkin bags--two Hermes Porosus Crocodile Birkin handbags, one in Shiny Fuschia, the other in Matte Black are each estimated to bring in over $40,000. Those two Birkins are the most expensive in a selection of more than 30 Hermes Birkins and Kelly handbags in the auction, all of which are greatly coveted by collectors.
But perhaps even more interesting to students of fashion is the brown crocodile suitcase belonging to legendary Vogue editor and style icon Diana Vreeland. The English brown crocodile suitcase, shown above, is from the 1930s and replete with her initials. It is estimated at $5,000.
Collectors of Judith Leiber's beaded minaudieres will also want to check this auction out. It includes a variety of highly collectible versions of her small purses which are often in the shapes of animals and plans. The collection also includes some her earliest metal bags from the 1960s, which are rarely available on the market.
The auction not only marks the first appearance of Luxury Accessories at Heritage, it is also the first auction for the company conducted by Matt Rubinger, Director of Luxury Accessories at Heritage and a widely-known and highly-respected voice in the world of high-end handbags. With the auction taking place just two weeks before Christmas, Rubinger has a feeling that "more than a few of these will end up under a tree somewhere."
Lots from the Luxury Accessories Auction will also be available for lot viewing in New York, at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion (Ukrainian Institute), at 2 East 79th Street (at 5th Ave.) on December 2-5. | <urn:uuid:58773ac2-5d0b-4eea-8710-6b7677e5840b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.luxist.com/tag/birkin+bags/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962235 | 416 | 1.578125 | 2 |
It is important to establish the road to success by providing a planning document and communicating an expected level of performance for all employees. It is recommended that the planning stage of the evaluation be completed and communicated to employees within the first four weeks of employment. Employees need to understand and realize early in their employment the success criteria by which they will be evaluated.
A supervisor should provide periodic feedback during the evaluation period prior to the annual review. A documented midpoint assessment with the employee during the evaluation year is strongly encouraged not only to pinpoint performance concerns but also to provide positive feedback as well.
Problems associated with unacceptable job performance should be communicated as soon as possible to the employee. This will give an opportunity to overcome any deficiency prior to the annual review. If a counseling session is needed, a supervisor should define what area of a specific job duty is deficient, provide suggested ways to overcome the deficiencies, provide a time period for the expected improvements and the resulting consequences in the event no improvements are made.
If improvements are not made, a supervisor may issue a Warning Notice of Substandard Performance. This is done if performance becomes substandard in one or more essential job function(s) or objective(s) that significantly impact overall performance. Supervisors must be sure that a planning stage document is in place prior to issuing the warning notice.
A workshop for supervisors of classified employees is available for individuals who would like to learn more about evaluating employee performance using the Employee Performance Management System. EPMS for Supervisors is a performance appraisal workshop designed for supervisors to learn methods and techniques in using the EPMS as a communication tool when evaluating employees and setting performance objectives. The workshop also provides clarification when dealing with substandard job performance issues as well as ensuring understanding of the importance of preparing the EPMS planning document.
New supervisors are encouraged to attend and will receive guidance and information in completing the EPMS document, hands-on experience with writing success criteria, and exploring case exercises that illustrate various scenarios in which supervisors must consider the ideas presented in the class and identify what decisions or actions they would undertake. Experienced supervisors also can take advantage of this workshop to refresh or update their skills in conducting the evaluation review.
For detailed information, refer to HR 1.36, Performance Evaluation for Classified and Unclassified Non-Academic Staff. | <urn:uuid:7a7cd169-1f68-460e-b8dd-1e0d60b1b31f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uscupstate.edu/offices/humanresources/ereo/Default.aspx?id=13468 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938022 | 466 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Thu January 19, 2012
'Coriolanus': A People's Hero Turns On His Own
Ralph Fiennes showed up for a frenzied cameo near the end of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, and her hand-held, adrenaline-charged approach clearly inspired his film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, which he both acts and directs the bloody hell out of.
He plays the Roman commander Caius Martius, awarded the name "Coriolanus" after vanquishing Rome's enemies the Volscians at their capital, Corioli, in 494 B.C. In the film, however, he does it with tanks and rifles in a war-torn city-state called "Rome" that evokes nowhere in particular, but 20th-century Northern Ireland and Bosnia generally.
I admit I have a prejudice against Shakespeare on screen in modern settings, but it's one I'll happily discard when the adaptors know what they're doing. My old friend Michael Almereyda made a wonderful Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, set in the Big Apple, and this Coriolanus is in the same league. Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan have the pulse of the story, its mixture of firm martial beats and messy political clatter. As cinema, it's thrilling.
I've been lucky to see two tremendous productions of Coriolanus onstage, one in London starring Alan Howard, the other in New York with Christopher Walken. Of the three, Fiennes' hero is by design the least likable. His Coriolanus is a hardened soldier, a glassy-eyed killing machine rendered unfit by his battle experiences for peacetime life.
In our modern parlance, he either has post-traumatic stress disorder or — as The Hurt Locker framed its hero — an addiction to the rush of war. The source of the tragedy is that his formidable mother, Volumnia, played by Vanessa Redgrave, has mapped out a career for Coriolanus in politics. She wants him to lead the republic, which means he has to slap the backs of senators and flatter the public. Even his soliloquy, his private resolution to become a politician, suggests he's the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fiennes' Coriolanus is so viscerally ill at ease that the notion of putting him up for public office seems demented. He's aggressively unpleasant. But thanks to the medium of cinema, we at least understand where he's coming from. Most of the carnage in Shakespeare is offstage, but Fiennes can show his hero in grueling hand-to-hand combat, once being drenched with arterial spray. Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd puts his camera in the warriors' faces, chief among them Fiennes', a scowling mask with a map of ugly scars.
Those scars have dramatic weight. His mother says to use them to win the peoples' hearts, but Coriolanus tells the Senate, "I had rather have my wounds to heal again / Than hear say how I got them."
Fiennes and Logan don't go in for political nuance. There's a good case to be made that a man with such atrocious people skills and a possible penchant for martial law would make a lousy leader, but Coriolanus' political rivals are portrayed as more self-serving than principled.
All the sympathy here goes to the warrior class. Coriolanus is much more at home in the presence of his bitterest Volscian enemy, played with surprising tenderness by Gerard Butler, than with anyone else, including his wife, the phenomenally versatile Jessica Chastain.
Redgrave is not one of the world's greatest verse speakers, but being one of its greatest actresses compensates for much. What comes through in her Volumnia, even on the eve of Redgrave's 75th birthday, is a kind of girlish, shining-eyed certainty that would impel many a dubious man to do her bidding. Brian Cox is superb as her most dogged supporter, an urgent yet gentle man who proves that not all politicians are, as Coriolanus maintains, founts of phoniness.
There isn't a bum note in the whole movie — but there are oddities. The Romans who debate the election are seen on TV screens. They're TV pundits who talk in iambic pentameter!
But after sitting through months of Sunday talk-show election blather, I wasn't thinking, "How unrealistic." I was thinking, "If only they sounded like this!" | <urn:uuid:b736c39f-0383-4fd3-b12c-293f140bccbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wqcs.org/post/coriolanus-peoples-hero-turns-his-own | 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 | 0.970752 | 945 | 1.507813 | 2 |
New York judge overturns ‘large sugary drinks’ ban
NEW YORKERS were still free to gulp from huge sugary drinks today, after a judge struck down the city’s pioneering ban on supersized sodas just hours before it was supposed to take effect, handing a defeat to health-conscious Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The big drinks ban - the first of its kind in the U.S. - sparked reaction from city streets to late-night TV talk shows, celebrated by some as a bold attempt to improve people’s health and derided by others as another “nanny state” law from Bloomberg during his 11 years in office.
State Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling’s Monday ruling was seen as a victory for the beverage industry, restaurants and other business groups that called the rule unfair and wrong-headed.
Tingling said that the 16-ounce (half-litre) limit on sodas and other sweet drinks arbitrarily applies to only some sugary beverages and some places that sell them. Tingling issued a 36-page ruling that examined the appropriate scope of power for an administrative board for regulations. The judge also said the Bloomberg-appointed Board of Health intruded on the City Council’s authority when it imposed the rule.
The drinks limit follows other efforts by the Bloomberg has made to improve New Yorkers’ eating habits, from compelling chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus to barring artificial trans fats in restaurant food to prodding food manufacturers to use less salt. The city has successfully defended some of those initiatives in court.
The city has also won fights over outlawing smoking in bars and offices, and has promoted breast-feeding over infant formula. Last week, the Bloomberg administration announced a campaign to warn young people they risk hearing loss from cranked-up earphones.
Bloomberg, who has championed the ban as a novel measure for fighting obesity, vowed to appeal the decision.
“We believe the judge is totally in error in how he interpreted the law, and we are confident we will win on appeal,” Bloomberg said. He added: “One of the cases we will make is that people are dying every day. This is not a joke. Five thousand people die of obesity every day in America.”
For now, though, the ruling it means the ax won’t fall Tuesday on extra-large sodas, sweetened teas and other high-sugar beverages in restaurants, movie theatres, corner delis and sports arenas.
Because of the limits of city authority and exemptions made for other reasons, the ban on big beverages wouldn’t cover alcoholic drinks or many lattes and other milk-based concoctions, and it doesn’t apply at supermarkets or many convenience stores.
In defending the rule, city officials point to the city’s rising obesity rate - about 24 percent of adults, up from 18 percent in 2002 - and to studies tying sugary drinks to weight gain. Care for obesity-related illnesses costs government health programs about $2.8 billion a year in New York City alone, according to city Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley.
The judge acknowledged the impact of obesity on the city’s residents, and noted that those bringing suit likewise didn’t dispute obesity is a significant health issue, but questioned how much sugary drinks can be blamed for it. Ultimately the judge said whether the issue of obesity is an epidemic is not the key issue here, but whether the board of health has the jurisdiction to decide that obesity is such an issue that it could issue a cap on consumption of sugary drinks.
Critics said the measure is too limited to have a meaningful effect on New Yorkers’ waistlines. And they said it would take a bite out of business for the establishments that had to comply, while other places would still be free to sell sugary drinks in 2-litre bottles and supersized cups.
“The court ruling provides a sigh of relief to New Yorkers and thousands of small businesses in New York City that would have been harmed by this arbitrary and unpopular ban,” the American Beverage Association and other opponents said, adding that the organization is open to other “solutions that will have a meaningful and lasting impact.”
Beverage makers had expected to spend about $600,000 changing bottles and labels, movie theatre owners feared losing soda sales that account for 10 percent of their profits, and delis and restaurants would have had to change inventory, reprint menus and make other adjustments, according to court papers.
The city had said that while restaurant inspectors would start enforcing the soda size rule in March, they wouldn’t seek fines - $200 for a violation - until June.
In striking down the rule, Tingling further said that the Board of Health went beyond its authority when it approved the size limit in September. The rule strayed into territory that should belong to the elected City Council, not the board appointed by Bloomberg, Tingling wrote.
Some restaurants had already ordered and started using smaller glasses for full-sugar soda, while others began experimenting with freshly squeezed juices as alternatives to soda for children’s parties. Dunkin’ Donuts shops have been telling customers they will have to sweeten and flavour their own coffee. Coca-Cola has printed posters explaining the rules.
Bloomberg urged businesses to comply despite the court ruling, and not just because the city may yet prevail.
“If you know what you’re doing is harmful to people’s health, common sense says if you care, you might want to stop doing that,” he said.
But an opponent of the measure said the court’s ruling “serves as a major blow to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s incessant finger-wagging.”
J. Justin Wilson at the Center for Consumer Freedom, created by restaurants and food companies, said, “The court confirmed what most New Yorkers already know: They don’t need a government regulator to dictate their diet choices. New Yorkers should celebrate this victory by taking a big gulp of freedom.”
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 27 May 2013
Temperature: 8 C to 12 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: South
Temperature: 7 C to 14 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: East | <urn:uuid:107b829d-0739-4b62-9b3b-868108e58a30> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scotsman.com/news/health/new-york-judge-overturns-large-sugary-drinks-ban-1-2831875 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962741 | 1,333 | 1.5 | 2 |
Lego spokesman Michael McNally said that it was important for the company to address the presumption that construction play is more appealing to boys.
"By inspiring more girls to build, we are able to build a new audience ...with whom we can foster skills such as patience, perseverance, confidence, self-esteem and pride of accomplishment," he said.
So far, the move is paying off. Lego's McNally said that the number of girls playing with Legos tripled in 2012 after the new line was introduced.
Mattel's Cooper also said the company has seen a lot of interest in the Barbie set since it debuted in December.
To be sure, the new toys continue to play into some stereotypes. A Barbie construction set lets children build a fashion boutique, Lego Friends sells a pet salon, and the Nerf Rebelle comes in shades of hot pink and purple.
"We're in the transitional phase, so it makes sense that companies are still trying to capitalize on people's natural 'boy' and 'girl' inclinations to get them into it," said O'Brien, the development psychologist. "Once parents realize their kids like the toys, the toys will likely get more gender neutral."
Analysts believe the trend will pick up steam as companies experiment with more ways to go across the aisle.
"It's driven by a simple fact," said Sean McGowan, a toy analyst with Needham Co. "If you can get a product targeted to one gender to be appealing to the other, you can significantly increase sales." | <urn:uuid:0062fce0-5708-4bc0-b846-65585713325c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wapt.com/news/money/Barbie-Nerf-redefine-girl-toys/-/9156750/18526610/-/item/1/-/el6wn2z/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967758 | 314 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Given that people live for a longer period of time it is becoming important that we plan our retirement well. It is really important that you plan your retirement well if you want to sustain your current standard of living all the way to your old age. Whether you work in a sector such as customer relation or have your business it is important that you have a proper pension plan. This is especially important for small internet entrepreneurs that will need to ensure some long-term income. For instance if you operate a site dealing with moyen age or developpement personnel it will be interesting that you invest a part of your income in a retirement plan if you want to have money in the future. I have attached an article on retirement in order to provide you more information on this topic. In a lot of locations from the world, which includes the United states of america, we frequently watch senior citizens as getting limits. Even though wellness issues may possibly plague some senior citizens, most individuals are wholesome and pleased. In fact, numerous contemplate their senior years to become the prime of their reside. If you're one of these people, you can expertise enjoyable and enjoyment aboard a cruise ship.1 of probably the most widespread issues aboard a cruise is security. Several senior citizens and their household members are concerned with the wellness risks of taking a cruise. If you or your family members has fears associated with extended cruises, you could desire to look for advice from your family physician. With a simple go to, your physician could easily have the ability to decide whether or not you are up for that voyage.If and if you obtain the alright from your physician, you can start to more analyze vacationing aboard a cruise ship. When examining cruise ships, you are encouraged to look at a number of cruise lines and each and every from the ships that they have available. To get started in your research, it truly is advised which you look at Royal Caribbean Cruises, Superstar Cruises, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Princess Cruises. The foresaid cruise lines are only several in the many that service travelers; even so, they are frequently considered probably the most well-liked.When examining a particular cruise ship, you are encouraged to search for actions and services that you are attracted to. These services are important because they are typically the one way for seniors to discover the perfect cruise ship. In the current time, there is certainly not a significant, well-known cruise ship company that provides cruises particularly for senior citizens. That will not imply which you shouldn?t take a cruise. It does; nevertheless, imply that you simply might should invest a lot more time investigating your obtainable alternatives.You are able to and really should lookup for cruise ship activities according to your personal preferences. A lot of seniors favor cruise ships that offer sophisticated dinning amenities and actions geared in direction of mature crowds. If security is really a issue, you might want to trip aboard a family members enjoyable cruise. These cruises are geared in direction of people and families of all ages. Many times, a family fun cruise includes a a lot more proper environment. Seniors, such as your self, could uncover this atmosphere heat and welcoming.Once you have produced the decision to get a cruise ship getaway, you might be energized to e-book your reservations. Senior citizens are urged to refrain from purchasing tickets and generating journey lodging on a whim. This is due to the fact numerous seniors qualify for cruise ship as well as other journey discounts. A lot of of these special discounts are supplied by AARP, Triple A, along with other membership clubs. Even if you could not qualify for journey deals and discounts, you need to nonetheless see when they exist. Till you look, you by no means know should you can ebook a cruise at a discounted price.Cruise ship travel is really a enjoyable, exciting, and fulfilling experience, regardless of what your age. All most all cruise ships are secure enough that you may even trip on your own. In case you are worried together with your safety while traveling alone, you might desire to invite together family or your senior friends. With a significant quantity of savings, it really is quite doable that you simply can all enjoy a holiday aboard a cruise ship, with no getting to go broke. | <urn:uuid:103f1342-f1f5-48fd-8bd9-e58a3f4d7882> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.confidentielles.com/lifetype/index_blog.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=167768&blogId=9253 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972029 | 865 | 1.554688 | 2 |
I have lots of clear memories of my childhood, but some of my most vivid memories are of washing wooden stairs with a sponge, cooking spaghetti on Wednesdays, and picking up sticks with my trusty wheelbarrow. Those were my chores, and I don’t remember them so well because I hated them or because they were hard. I remember them because they made me feel proud of myself. (Ok, so I hated doing the spaghetti dishes, but I got over it…)
Now, I’m trying to figure out how to help my son feel that same sense of pride. At three years old, he’s just getting to the point where he can really understand what it means to help Mom and Dad. Right now, he helps alongside me when I clean, recycles with Daddy, and picks up his toys. Sometimes he’s willing, but sometimes it’s a bit of a battle, so my challenge lately has been getting him excited while helping him build a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility.
So, I found this online service called MyJobChart.com. My Job Chart is the free, easy to use, online chore chart and reward system for teaching, organizing and motivating your kids to Save, Share and Spend responsibly.
Kids simply log in…
do chores and earn points
then save, share or spend!
Kids can even access their own personal store where they can redeem their points.
Here’s how it works:
How MyJobChart.com Works! from MyJobChart.com on Vimeo.
My Job Chart gives parents the satisfaction of seeing their kids gain the foundation skills of a strong work ethic and financial understanding. It facilitates fun, engaging, hands-on answers to your questions about chore chart , kids and allowance , and kids and responsibility. My Job Chart even gets a thumbs up from financial expert Suze Ormon, who calls it a “revolutionary family resource”!
Currently there are 351,755 members using MJC and hundreds more joining each day. We’ll have to work pretty closely with our boy since he’s only three, but I’m going to give My Job Chart a try. Maybe I’ll even start a chart for myself! | <urn:uuid:22abf52b-c915-4b76-bc83-e4267acbb8c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcsandgardenpeas.com/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960061 | 469 | 1.578125 | 2 |
JOHN WILLIAMS, left, and Steven Spielberg, on "AFI?s Master Class,"… (Adam Rose / TCM )
The quietest room in Hollywood may be the office where John Williams composes. In a bungalow on the Universal Studios lot, steps from the production company of his most frequent collaborator, director Steven Spielberg, Williams works alone at a 90-year-old Steinway grand piano, with fistfuls of pencils and stacks of composition paper nearby, and worn books of poetry by Robert Frost and William Wordsworth piled on the coffee table.
"My relationship with Steven is the result of a lot of very compatible dissimilarities," Williams said in a late December interview during a week that saw the U.S. releases of both of the duo's latest joint efforts, the comic-book adaptation "The Adventures of Tintin" and the World War I epic "War Horse." "Steven works with huge groups of people and is an international businessman.... This is the environment that I need. I don't use a lot of — as my younger colleagues do — synthesizers and computers. When I started, that didn't exist.... It is a labor-intensive, solitary business."
Williams, who turns 80 Feb. 8, has penned the scores to 25 of the 26 feature films Spielberg has directed, a musically polyglot list that includes "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan." (Producer Quincy Jones wrote Spielberg's "The Color Purple" score.) The remarkably enduring partnership — between men who straddle two generations of Hollywood filmmaking and who met over a blind lunch date in 1972 — has yielded 13 Oscar nominations for original score, and some of the most widely recognized music in cinema.
At the time of this interview, Williams was polishing a quartet for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which will celebrate his birthday this year with performances of his music by artists including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and opera singer Jessye Norman; he had just finished updating themes for the "Today" show and "Meet the Press"; in a few months, he'll begin composing for Spielberg's next film, "Lincoln."
Unlike the giants of Hollywood movie music who preceded him — composers like Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin who are identified with a distinctive sound — Williams has no discernible tells as a songwriter, beyond an emphasis on accessible melodies. That stylistic versatility has been the foundation of their partnership, according to Spielberg.
"John is much more of a chameleon as a composer," Spielberg said by phone from the Virginia set of "Lincoln." "He reinvents himself with every picture. The score to 'Tintin' could not be more dissimilar to his score to 'War Horse.' They fit the characterizations of the different movies. The 'Tintin' music is a rollicking adventure, an exhilarating ride downhill. He's chasing the audience with his score. In 'War Horse,' he wrote music for the land … the period, evocative of the early 20th century."
Born in New York, the son of a jazz percussionist, Williams moved to Los Angeles in 1948 when his father began playing in the Columbia Pictures orchestra. As a child, he took up the piano. "The only adults I knew were musicians, his friends, so I thought that's what you did when you grew up," he said. "It seemed to be an inevitable life path for me."
He would go on to attend UCLA and the Juilliard School, and work as a studio pianist on scores by Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini — it is Williams, credited as "Johnny Williams," playing the indelible jazz riff on Mancini's 1958 "Peter Gunn Theme."
By the time Spielberg and Williams met in 1972, the composer had nearly 20 years of film and TV scoring behind him; he had collected an Oscar for adapting "Fiddler on the Roof" to the screen and had just scored a giant commercial hit, "The Poseidon Adventure." Spielberg was a 25-year-old television director about to shoot his first theatrical feature. The young filmmaker had listened to a record of an Americana-style score Williams composed for "The Reivers" so many times that he had worn it out, and he wanted a similar sound for his feature debut, "The Sugarland Express." At Spielberg's request, a Universal executive arranged a meeting.
"Steven took me to a very fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills for lunch, in the days of these martini lunches," said Williams. "It was like going with a teenager who had never ordered wine before and didn't quite know what to do with the silver. He was so young, a little older than my children but not a whole lot. And seemed to know more about my music than I did. He would sing third themes from some remote western."
Impressed by the script and charmed by the boyish enthusiasm of its director, Williams agreed to work on the movie, and arguably the most successful film music partnership in Hollywood history was born. | <urn:uuid:a6232d5b-cabf-4741-bbf1-19ccc0695fa7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/08/entertainment/la-ca-john-williams-20120108 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97624 | 1,073 | 1.601563 | 2 |
There's no question about what the ultimate accessory was this week at TED 2013 in Long Beach:
In conference hotels, parties and at the conference itself, random people could be spotted wearing the ultimate must-have-but-incredibly-scarce gadget.
On Wednesday, Google's Sergey Brin took to the stage at TED 2013 wearing his pair to discuss his, ahem, vision for Google Glass. His appearance came on the day when applications were due in a contest to win the right to buy one of the $1,500 devices.
TED released official photos from the session. According to the TED blog, Brin said:
"When we started Google 15 years ago, my vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn't have to search query at all."
But, he argued, the smartphone is antisocial, because you look away from people. From the TED blog: "Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people? It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?"
Naturally, TEDsters shared their awe on Twitter:
“It’s a little freaky at first, but you get used to it” - Sergey Brin on wearing Google Glass augmented reality glasses #TED2013— June Cohen (@junecohen) February 27, 2013
Sergey Brin: When we started Google, we didn't want search queries; we wanted information to come directly to you. This does that. #TED2013— Chip Cutter(@ChipCutter) February 27, 2013 | <urn:uuid:6258c35f-1b97-4093-8131-585363723a5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/technology/blog/la-fi-tn-ted-2013-sergey-brin-google-glass-20130227,0,1480185.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970547 | 329 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Chow Kum Hor, who was taking stock of the progress of the University after some 4 years after enrolling is first set of students.
Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Utar), the MCA-run university, is now coming to terms with trying to realise an ambitious project in the cutthroat sector of private education. It is now operating from campuses in Petaling Jaya, Setapak and Bandar Sungai Long pending the completion of its main campus in Kampar, Perak.It appears that UTAR is facing quite a few difficult challenges – some of which are related to earlier criticisms which I've made.
From its modest beginnings with only eight Bachelor’s programmes and an initial intake of just over 400 students, it now boasts an enrolment of over 12,000 with more than 30 courses.
But just how sustainable is Utar in the face of increasingly stiff competition?
1. The Politics of Raising Funds
Apparently, many donors who were probably more interested in hobnobbing with the MCA politicians, after handing over "giant mock cheques in front of flashing Press camera bulbs, are taking their time to come up with the cash". Since the University is privately funded with the exception of an initial RM50 million grant from the Government, income from fees and donations are critical in ensuring continued viability of the university.
2. The Politics of Attracting Academics
It appears that being a “political university” creates discomfort among some academics, and correspondingly attracts academics of a certain profile.
Kampar-born historian Prof Datuk Dr Khoo Kay Kim says "some good scholars may also be put off by the idea of working for an institution linked to a political party."
The first two principals of TAR College, he says, were distinguished physics professors from Universiti Malaya. But their stints did not last long after falling out with their political masters.3. Competition
With the New Era College and the Tunku Abdul Rahman College (TARC) competing for almost the same pool of students and public funds, plus the fact that the latter is 50% subsidised by the Government, UTAR faces the challenge of keeping its fees low and yet pay the bills.
At the same time, students today are almost spoilt for choice in pursuing private tertiary education in Malaysia. With the liberalisation of private tertiary education in the late 1980s and 1990s in the country, many students who were previously unable to pursue expensive tertiary education overseas after being denied places at the local public universities have countless options today.
My Humble Thoughts
Without the benefit of hindsight, the future of UTAR is obviously going to be difficult to predict. When I spoke to some lecturers of UTAR some time back, I detected a sense of pride and achievement from them, particularly in their believe that UTAR is setting new standards and that they are ensuring real quality in the recruitment of both academics and students.
However, with the exponential growth which UTAR has experienced from 400 to 12,000 students (and more in the near future) all within a short period of 4 years, my fear is that something has to give, and that's the qualitative aspects of the university. This is not surprising given the experiences of other private educational institutions in the country.
For comparative purposes, there was a time whereby, UTAR's sister college, TARC produced graduates who were in high demand and were highly regarded by employers. However, with the liberalisation and commercialisation of the tertiary education sector as well as possible politicisation of the college, student enrollment was increased exponentially with the opening of quite a few branch campuses around the country in the late 1990s. Today, given all things equal, I'll hire a computer science graduate from Universiti Malaya over TARC with the same CGPA of say, 3.3 any time. As mentioned in some of my earlier posts, barring exceptions (and there are exceptions), I'll rarely shortlist TARC candidates for interviews.
I've not received sufficient quantity of resumes from UTAR graduates to be able to give a more informed judgement on their quality and standards, especially since their pioneering batch of students have only graduated last year. However, from the few (less than 10) which I have received, I have not been particularly impressed, especially in terms of the entry criteria into the university.
All top universities anywhere in the world is defined by strict and high entry criteria for students based on their secondary education or pre-university academic achievements. The levels at which some of the students were accepted into UTAR indicates to me that standards have been set a tad too low, possibly due to commercial and political pressures to accept a greater number of students.
I think it might have been a better strategy for UTAR to have focus on being first and foremost, a top quality institution and a strict recruitment criteria for both academics and students, instead of attempting to meet MCA's political needs in growing into a sizeable institution within such a short period of time. Let TARC, its sister college bear the brunt of providing degree education for the masses (since it's subsidized by the Government) and UTAR focus on the top quality students - why should they compete in the same space? UTAR seems to have fallen into the perpetual trap faced by Malaysian institutions and politicians who have no patience plucking fruits only after they have properly ripen. | <urn:uuid:fe52ae3b-dbff-424c-9d2c-85ce878097f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://educationmalaysia.blogspot.com/2006/05/utar-too-fast-too-soon.html?showComment=1215914040000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974515 | 1,109 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Context for Braun contract
Ryan Braun’s new contract puts him in a very small group of players. Here are some examples:
–The $21 million average annual value of the extension is second-highest ever for an outfielder, after Manny Ramirez’s two-year deal with Dodgers.
– Braun is now guaranteed $145.5 million from this season through the end of the extension, which makes Braun and Colorado’s Troy Tulowitzki the only Major League players signed through 2020. In fact, the only other players signed through 2018 are Joe Mauer of the Twins and Adrian Gonzalez of the Red Sox.
– Braun signed his current eight-year, $45 million contract on May 15, 2008. It was, and remains, a record contract for a player with less than one year of Major League service.
– The new deal marks the first time first time a player with five years left on his current contract agreed to an extension (Tulowitzki had three years plus an option remaining when he re-upped with the Rockies). It is also believed to be only the sixth time a player has signed a contract that guaranteed him 10 or more years of future salary (Dave Winfield, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Todd Helton and Tulowitzki are the others).
– Only seven players are signed through age 36 and have spent their entire career with their original professional organization: Braun, Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Ryan Howard, Chipper Jones and Todd Helton.
– It is one of nine contracts ever for a position player with a total value of at least $100 million and an average annual value of at least $20 million (Rodriguez twice, Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Mauer, Ramirez, Mark Teixeira and Howard).
– Braun is 27, and only two other players 27 or younger signed a contract with an AAV of $20 million or more: Rodriguez in 2001 and Mauer in 2011.
– It’s the largest deal in Brewers history by total and AAV (Prince Fielder signed a $15.5 deal for 2011).
– Braun’s agency has done well for itself in the past year and a half. In the last 16-plus months, seven players have signed a deal with an AAV of $20 million or more and three of those were negotiated by CAA Sports (also Howard and Roy Halladay).
Follow Brew Beat on Twitter. | <urn:uuid:0a8d6b07-2310-46bc-9951-eab6a6e20a57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://brewersbeat.mlblogs.com/2011/04/21/context-for-braun-contract/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=c1ce40f6e1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965968 | 507 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The 300 degree club is possibly the most exclusive club on Earth, certainly
it is one of the stupidest. Entry requirements are challenging. First you need to
be at the South Pole in winter. Then you need to wait for the temperature to drop
to -1000F. This only occurs a few times each year. When it happens the
sauna (yes we have a sauna at the South Pole) is cranked up to plus 2000F
and all potential members climb in and get really sweaty for 20 minutes. When you can
bear the heat no longer you strip off all your clothes (some form of footwear and
a face mask are permitted) and run all the way to the South Pole! The temperature
drop of 300 degrees gives the club its name. You don't actually have to reach the pole,
most people just run to the top of the snow drift outside the dome. A few more
make it to the Ceremonial Pole and one or two even make it as far as the Geographic
In 1996 it was not until the 17th of July that we got temperatures below
-1000F. Fortunately it was a clear crisp day with almost no wind,
perfect conditions for the 300 degree club. It took a couple of hours to get
the sauna up to +2000F and then 19 of us (a record I think?) crammed
into the sauna for a good sweat. 2000F becomes very unpleasant in
a short space of time and with the large crowd we had there was not much air to
breath. Most people were a bit nervous waiting to go outside and so we were
egging each other on and trying to get psyched up for the challenge ahead.
The tradition is to do the 300 degree club naked but footwear is allowed. A
face mask is also advised since running at such low temperatures forces the
lungs to take deep breaths of very cold air. After 15 minutes of sweating we
could bear the heat no longer and cheering we ran from the sauna dropping our
towels to the floor. Instantly we hit the cool outside air the sweat on our bodies
turned to steam filling the entrance archway of the dome as we raced through the
Luckily the sauna had raised my core temperature high enough that I didn't feel
the cold initially but once outside and on route to the Pole the sweat began to freeze.
Its a steep climb up the snow drift outside the dome and then a straight 100 yard dash
to the Pole. Unfortunately I had forgotten my face mask and my lungs were screaming
with the pain of the cold air by the time I was halfway there. I slowed to a walk
and saw others returning from the Pole racing back to the warmth.
I walked up to the Ceremonial Pole marker, touched it and turned to home and then I realised just how far I had to walk back, naked cold and with frostbitten lungs. I tried jogging slowly as I was starting to feel the cold. I could feel the flesh on my shoulders, now frozen solid, crack as I moved. My fingers were getting the tell-tale numbness of frostbite. I knew the next 100 yards was going to hurt. Just then Dan Potter came jogging along his usual smiling and joking self. He had been all the way to the Geographic Pole and along with me was the last one outside.
Dan could tell I was hurting and stayed with me as we jogged the rest of the way back.
Just as I reached the top of the snow drift I looked around. What a perfect sight. The
stars were out, the skies were clear and dark and floating gently over the station was
the arc of a bright green aurora. For a second I forgot the pain and just marvelled
at the view, remembering just were I was. Then the cold reminded me that it was
-1000F and I was naked. With a last burst of speed Dan and I returned to
Back in the sauna, the air was filled with the sounds of cheering and coughing. Most people, even those wearing facemasks, had frosted their lungs. For the next half hour as we warmed ourselves in the sauna I broke into convulsive body-shaking fits of coughing. It was very unpleasant but between coughing fits we were patting each other on the back, giving high fives, comparing our experiences, and vowing , never again.
Thanks to Chris Bero for the photographs. | <urn:uuid:6648ee99-b3ac-4c7d-a157-26d690054a7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ast.leeds.ac.uk/haverah/spaseman/club300.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980135 | 923 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Who do you know who...
Then please! Tell them about computerized electro dermal screening! We want to help!
"Our first recommendation is to do the Asyra scan so we can find out where the deep toxicities are located. (To find out more go to Asyra.com.)" - Dr. Steve Nelson, page 228, Breakthrough, by Suzanne Sommers, 2008
Dr Mercola has talked about his experience with CEDS on his website.
The purpose of this site is to introduce the public to computerized electrodermal screening (CEDS) which may provide the answers to why you don't feel well. This technology has been in use for decades. Practitioners and technicians can be found in nearly every country. In my opinion, this equipment could drastically reduce the cost of medicine by improving the physician's ability to more quickly arrive at a proper diagnosis and prescribe medications with the greatest benefits and fewest side effects. It is highly versatile and can be used for many health-related purposes including allergy/sensitivity screening, mental health screening, drug screening, energy screening, and more.
The equipment has been slow to be accepted by mainstream medicine. In spite of double blind studies that have shown this equipment to be as reliable as many medical tests, it is used in very few M.D. and D.O. medical practices. The equipment is mostly found in chiropractic and independent technician offices. As good as the equipment is, however, it cannot work as a substitute for a physician. A thorough screening using CEDS provides information, a great deal of information, and it takes someone trained in the medical field to be able to use that information to come up with a proper treatment for your health problems. A technician can use the equipment to work to balance your energy fields using homeopathic remedies. In many instances, this is enough to aid your body in healing itself.
The problem with the equipment is that it does not work by normal scientific means. Quantum physics is uncovering the reasons why this equipment works. At this time, scientific explanations of why the equipment works are inadequate but I have provided you with the best explanation I have found at this time. The equipment also screens thousands of items. There will never be enough double blind studies to cover all the items that can be screened.
What matters most is that the equipment works and works extremely well. The new equipment is becoming faster and its accuracy is being proven as more and more studies are being done.
I have assembled references to published articles from books and from the Internet. I have even included the negative site owned by Quackwatch which has many good links to CEDS sites and I have answered their attack to the best of my ability.
This site is not about promoting any particular CEDS practice. If you are interested in being screened, please visit the technician page. There are also many fine technicians about whom I have no information. If you don't find a technician listed here in your area, ask at your local health food store to find a technician located near you. Be aware that the equipment and the practices differ tremendously. If you have a serious medical problem, I recommend that you find a technician who is also a medical doctor or take all the CEDS findings directly to your physician for further evaluation.
Welcome to my site. Please proceed by visiting my introduction page.
Barbara Feick Gregory
The information contained herein is intended for educational purposes only.
BE AWARE: The electrodermal testing devices have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") for assessment of nutritional deficiencies, food allergies, the presence of toxins, Candida, Epstein Barr virus, or the weakness of organs and glands. Use of the device for these purposes is inconsistent with FDA approval. The galvanic skin response device is a Class II device that may be used for lie detection and for biofeedback.
There are no generally accepted completed clinical studies which demonstrate that the electrodermal testing devices are effective when used to assess for nutritional deficiencies, the presence of toxins, food allergies, Candida, Epstein Barr virus, and the strength or weakness of organs and glands.
Your child's exposure to lead or heavy metals cannot be determined solely through electrodermal testing.
You should not make decisions about your or your child's health and nutritional needs from information obtained solely through electrodermal testing.
You are to discuss all CEDS recommendations with your health care provider before implementing any of them.
There are medical tests for many, if not all of the issues that respondents use electrodermal testing to assess, and you are strongly encouraged to confirm the exposures identified through standard medical testing if you or your family physician feel that it is necessary.
Laws regarding this equipment vary from country to country. | <urn:uuid:6847a3c1-e083-4470-9d79-ea4b29b28cc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://barbfeick.com/ceds/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961478 | 985 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Beijing: China's influential microblogs, which
over the last few years have emerged as a challenge to the
monopoly of the state media, have fallen silent for the first
time after being penalised over the spread of coup rumours.
Two major Chinese microblogging sites, weibo.com and
t.qq.com, known as Chinese Twitters with about 300 million
microblogger subscribers have suspended comment functions
after they were punished for allowing rumours to spread, state
run Shanghai Daily reported.
They put up online announcement yesterday suspending the
comment function from March 31 to April 3 to clean up rumours
and other illegal information spread through microblogging
networks, following a crackdown for carrying postings,
including pictures of battle tanks rolling down streets in
Beijing, that sparked speculation of a coup.
The speculation went viral with rumours of infighting in
the Communist Party leadership following the sacking of a
party leader Bo Xilai.
Chinese authorities have closed 16 websites and detained
six people responsible for "fabricating or disseminating
Beijing police also arrested 1,065 suspects and deleted
more than 208,000 "harmful" online messages as part of an
intensive nationwide crackdown on Internet-related crimes
conducted since mid-February, according to the state run
Xinhua news agency.
This is perhaps for the first time the Chinese government
which was apprehensive about the emergence of the alternate
media, cracked down on them, though a series of measures to
regulate them were announced in the recent months.
Opposition claims Myanmar's Suu Kyi wins
Pak supports peaceful use of N-energy by Iran: Gilani
Beijing: Pakistan supports "peaceful use" of
nuclear technology by Iran, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani
has said, as he backed enhanced energy and trade ties with
Tehran, which is facing international sanctions.
Gilani said Pakistan is desirous of enhancing its
bilateral relations with Iran, especially in energy and trade.
He said realisation of Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project
will open new vistas of cooperation.
Gilani said "Pakistan wants to enhance trade relations
with Iran," and stressed for increasing it up to five billion
dollars, the APP reported. He said Pakistan supports peaceful
use of nuclear technology by Iran.
Gilani expressed these views while talking to Iranian
Vice President, Mohammad Javad Mohammadizadeh, as the two
leaders met in Boao's seaside resort city on the sidelines of
Boao Forum for Asia, to be held tomorrow.
He said Pakistan attaches great importance to its
relations with Iran that is deep-rooted in the realms of
history, culture and brotherhood.
"Pakistan is currently facing energy shortage," Gilani
said, noting that the 1,000 MW electricity being supplied from
Iran to Pakistan's Balochistan province, would prove helpful
in overcoming the energy shortage. He called for joint
Pak-Iran efforts to ensure a peaceful and prosperous region.
He suggested that the opening of Pakistan's consulate in
Bandar Abbas would not only facilitate the people but would
also reduce the road distance by 1,000 kilometres.
He said Pakistan wants to maintain good ties with its
neighbours including Iran, Afghanistan, China and India and
called for joint efforts for the stability in Afghanistan.
He said Iran had completed its work on Iran-Pakistan gas
pipeline and urged Pakistan to expedite from its side.
First Published: Sunday, April 01, 2012, 20:02 | <urn:uuid:cdc9c9fe-b4da-4949-b945-36cbbde1a422> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/china-s-microblog-media-falls-silent_767671.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944989 | 751 | 1.546875 | 2 |
By Cynthia Figge
A week ago I attended the Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics Conference. This event was brimming with over 200 CEOs, entrepreneurs, industry experts and policymakers, discussing profitability, innovation, and smarter uses of energy. The focus was on the opportunities and risks that are quickly emerging and changing across sectors within the intersection of business and environment. While the event left me with many thought provoking questions and ideas, I wanted to share some of what caught my attention the most here:
1. We have a chance of reaching 50% renewable energy use in the 2060 timeframe, but it will take at least one of five miracles to come true, and about 200 crazy people working really hard at all five.
Bill Gates, Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Chairman, Microsoft
3. We must change our source of food – raising cattle the way we do it doesn’t work.
J. Craig Venter, Chairman and President, J. Craig Venter Institute
4. The present and future role of natural gas is contested, but it could be the best bridge fuel as we move away from petroleum altogether. We could cut our consumption of OPEC oil by 60%.
T. Boone Pickens, Chairman, BP Capital Management and Edward G. Rendell, Former Governor, State of Pennsylvania
5. Most people believe that there is environmental damage involved in fracking, but it’s needed for the future of energy in the US. In the words of California Governor Jerry Brown, fracking is not as bad as environmentalists say, or as good as the companies say. How do we make the best out of a bad situation? (For more on this issue, watch for the upcoming CSRHub blog on fracking as a new special issue).
Aubrey K. McClendon, Chairman and CEO, Chesapeake Energy
6. By improving ESG (environment, social, and governance) principles, sustainability can mean more cash flow and making more money. This is crucial for incenting and supporting companies with sustainability missions.
David M. Rubenstein, Managing Director, The Carlyle Group
7. Our consumption and daily habits add up, but can add up for good. For example, Robert McDonald says 4.4 billion people on the planet use a P&G product every day. Today 40% of laundry is washed in cold water – P&G has a goal of 70% in cold water. This alone would have an impact on several percentage points of the world’s GHG emissions.
Robert A. McDonald, Chairman, President and CEO, The Procter & Gamble Company
8. Selling green is about being honest. Marketers have less control over the message, and are instead are expected to be transparent and authentic.
Dara O’Rourke, Chief Sustainability Officer, GoodGuide
9. We have the technology to reduce waste and increase recycling, reaching a waste diversion rate close to 100%. But this is an area where we need very effective subsidies and incentives, and a change in culture and behavior.
David P. Steiner, President and CEO, Waste Management
10. The best companies are embedding sustainability into their innovation pipeline. It’s in everything they do and it’s part of their image and brand.
Betty Noonan, Senior Vice President, Panasonic Consumer Marketing Company of North America
11. China had more patent applications than the US for the first time in history last year. This marks a change in innovation, transparency, and the rule of law. This will go a long way to sparking change for sustainability in China’s economy and workforce.
C. S. Kiang, Chairman, Sustainable Development Technology Foundation
These are just some of the great comments, discussion points, and reflections I heard while in Santa Barbara. There was a clear focus on natural gas at this conference, and how the abundance of a cheaper, cleaner alternative to petroleum has changed the energy market in the US. While natural gas was once thought to be a bridge fuel to a low (or no) carbon economy, that bridge appears to be getting longer.
It is always interesting to see how a change in a key issue around energy, or any topic under the sustainability umbrella, can change how we perceive the challenges and the solutions. This is one of the reasons why in our sustainability reporting and aggregation of data, CSRHub allows users the ability to filter the data they see. A key issue, like natural gas, is the type of specific wedge point that may shift our understanding of sustainability and CSR.
Cynthia Figge, Cofounder and COO of CSRHub is a forerunner and thought leader in the corporate sustainability movement. In 1996 she co-founded EKOS International, one of the first consultancies integrating sustainability and corporate strategy. Cynthia has worked with major organizations including BNSF, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Dow Jones, Noranda and REI to help craft sustainability strategy integrated with business. She was an Officer of LIN Broadcasting/McCaw Cellular leading new services development, and started a new “Greenfield” mill with Weyerhaeuser. She serves as Advisor to media and technology companies, and served as President of the Board of Sustainable Seattle. Cynthia has an MBA from Harvard Business School. Cynthia is based in the Seattle area. | <urn:uuid:3ca8eba0-1d50-45ad-b4a8-830316be4d3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csrhub.com/blog/2012/04/my-top-eleven-takeaways-from-wsjs-conference-on-business-and-sustainability.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946797 | 1,098 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Halozyme Therapeutics Inc. shares jumped Friday after the biopharmaceutical company said it received a positive opinion from a European panel for one of its treatments.
THE SPARK: Halozyme and Baxter International Inc. said Friday the European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use granted a positive opinion for the use of HyQvia as a replacement therapy for adult patients with primary and secondary immunodeficiencies.
THE BIG PICTURE: The immune system normally protects the body from bacteria, viruses, fungi and other pathogenic microorganisms that can cause infectious diseases. If someone suffers from immunodeficiency, part of the body's immune system is missing or does not function properly, making them more likely to suffer infections and it may take longer to recover from infections.
When a defect in the immune system is inherited, it is called primary, or inherited, immune deficiency. Secondary immunodeficiencies develop as a result of a variety of conditions, such as some forms of leukemia, metabolic disease or malnutrition. Burns or severe infection can also cause defective immune function and poor antibody response
THE ANALYSIS: While investors drove up the stock Friday, Wedbush analysts Gregory Wade, David Nierengarten and Christopher Marai reiterated a "Neutral" rating on the company's shares.
The analysts said in a research note that HyQvia does not represent a significant opportunity to Halozyme and it represents only part of Baxter's $1.4 billion in annual antibody therapy sales worldwide. They noted that Halozyme's royalty on the drug's sale is only 5 percent. As a result, they said they don't see much more than $1 per share in value to this product for the company.
SHARE ACTION: Shares of Halozyme jumped more than 31 percent to $6.89 in late trading. Its stock remains in the middle of its 52-week trading range of $3.86 to $13.50. Baxter's shares rose 74 cents, or 1 percent, to $70.80. | <urn:uuid:e8eefd6b-a055-4a44-88fd-1c1104deadbc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news.net/article/208005/Business/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932229 | 417 | 1.695313 | 2 |
It’s not bad enough that they bring their 7th century superstitions and behaviors to local UK neighborhoods but now they want to overturn hundreds of years of medical knowledge to please their so-called prophet.
The Islamic Medical Association – no AMA by a long shot – has injected itself into the heat debate in Britain. It seems that medical hygiene in room must give way to dogma. Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.
Muslim women working at U.K. medical facilities are increasingly refusing to comply with the basic hygiene standard of rolling up their sleeves when their washing hands, it was reported.
According to the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, female workers are ignoring Britain’s Department of Health rules requiring medics to be “bare below the elbow” because they consider showing any skin — outside the hands and face — immodest.
The guidelines were put into place to stave off the spread of infectious killer bugs like MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients, according to the paper.
Hygiene experts said the standard should hold for all workers— even if it goes against their religion.
Duh!! You think?
The Islamic Medical Association, for one, has issued a statement that “no practicing Muslim woman — doctor, medical student, nurse or patient — should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” according to paper.
Some comments from medical professionals in the field.
Dr Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said:
To wash your hands properly, and reduce the risks of MRSA and C.difficile, you have to be able to wash the whole area around the wrist. I don’t think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally.
Dr Charles Tannock, a Conservative MEP and former hospital consultant, added:
These students are being trained using taxpayers’ money and they have a duty of care to their patients not to put their health at risk. Perhaps these women should not be choosing medicine as a career if they feel unable to abide by the guidelines that everyone else has to follow.
So what’s next? Refusing to handle surgery instruments because they were sterilized in alcohol?
But this comment was the best.
What are the chances of the team of doctors having sex because they saw each others arms while scrubbing?
Get a FREE TRIAL COPY of the The Gathering Storm eBook which includes the Forward by Walid Shoebat, Introduction, and first 50 pages of The Gathering Storm eBook. And sign up for my free WEEKLY STORM REPORT and receive a synopsis of the most important weekly news revealing the intimidation, infiltration and disinformation tactics used to soften-up the non-Muslim world for domination. | <urn:uuid:91c0e267-3ef8-436b-9937-08d087b7ecee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bloggernews.net/113656 | 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 | 0.958901 | 650 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Brussels opens ears on cloud computing
Steely Neelie wants to hear from the cloudbase
The European Commission has opened a consultation on cloud computing ahead of the creation of a Europe-wide strategy.
Neelie Kroes, Digital Agenda Commissioner, said she wanted to hear from cloud developers as well as users.
Of particular interest is feedback on cross-border data protection and liability, standards and interoperability, uptake of cloud services – especially by smaller companies – and ways to promote research and innovation.
The Commission is already looking at data protection rules more generally, including how they can be adapted to cloud computing.
The consultation will run until 31 August and the Commission's strategy on cloud computing will be released next year.
Here is a link to the Commission's public online consultation on clouds. ® | <urn:uuid:c302c84c-b4e1-4069-81ca-c463afb8817c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/16/cloud_feedback/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939441 | 167 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Lebanese Tourism Ministry begins food safety courses
Tourism officials led a seminar on food safety for restaurants in the southern suburbs of Beirut Wednesday, as the ministry kicks off a series of courses to alleviate some of country’s food handling problems ahead of the tourism season.
Chefs and restaurant owners from across the southern suburbs filled the Tourism Ministry’s glass hall to learn about food storage and how to purchase quality meat. The session involved basic sanitary information, with advice such as “store raw materials off the floor in closed boxes or containers or bags,” but it is a baseline of food knowledge that the ministry hopes to spread across the country.
“We are going to do the same information sessions for more groups,” said Nada Sardouk, the director general of the Tourism Ministry. “To have the same knowledge for all people working in restaurants.” Sardouk said that before the summer tourism season starts, she plans on leading instruction seminars for restaurant owners from all parts of the country, and expects to reach about 500 people in total.
“We need them to know that we are not only a ministry to exercise oversight and issue penalties – we need them to know we are in a partnership, and we want to improve our services together,” Sardouk said. “It will be a good start and it’s going to continue.”
The food industry has been shaken by a number of quality scandals in the past weeks, most alarmingly when tons of bad meat were discovered marinating in wine to be resold to the public. The increased scrutiny of the food industry has turned up other infractions across the country involving medicine.
Government ministers have played down the extent of the spoiled food problems, but food and health officials have recently stepped up efforts to better control food quality. Many people remain unconvinced, and a number of cities have seen a decrease in meat purchases, while the prices of vegetarian staples such as grain have risen.
Wednesday’s session discussed basic food preparation practices for items such as shawarma and grilled meats, and ministry officials distributed basic food sanitary checklists for employees and managers to run through. The emphasis was on simplicity.
“We try to have a common language,” Sardouk said. “We are trying to make it easy.” Tourism officials reached a wide range of people at the Beirut session. One experienced chef asked for photos of the food advice to include in his kitchen for his workers.
The information was entirely new for 17-year-old Hani Fares, who works at a sandwich shop in Haret Hreik. “Everything was helpful,” Fares said. “I learned a lot.” | <urn:uuid:4ca9e68b-ab94-41e1-b4e2-944661c6d59f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albawaba.com/business/lebanese-tourism-safety-420715 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970734 | 567 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Thai authorities were staging a fighting retreat Wednesday against flood waters that threaten Bangkok, after the country's oldest factory park was completely inundated and a nearby one faced imminent threat.
Hundreds of soldiers and volunteers had taken part in the effort to save the Nava Nakorn industrial estate after its defenses were first breached over the weekend, but surrender came Tuesday with an evacuation of all workers. By nightfall, the entire property - which is home to hundreds of factories and tens of thousands of workers - was covered by water more than a yard (meter) deep in places.
It was the fifth major industrial estate to be devastated, together putting as many as 200,000 workers at least temporarily out of a job. Many of the factories are producers of specialized components, such as parts for automobiles and computer hard drives, producing a knock-on effect for manufacturers in other areas unaffected by flooding that are now unable to source needed parts.
Defenders were making a new stand Wednesday morning at the nearby Bang Kradee industrial estate, also in Pathum Thani province, just north of Bangkok. The state broadcaster MCOT reported that local authorities in the neighborhood had shot flares to warn residents - who don't benefit from the defenses set up for the industrial estate - to evacuate the area.
In another marker of the deteriorating situation, there were concerns that at least one center to which people from points farther north were being evacuated about a week ago - Thammasat University's suburban campus - might itself have to be abandoned.
Another flash point is Bangkok's Sai Mai district, in the northern city limits, where civilian volunteers have joined soldiers in desperate dike-building efforts after Bangkok's governor delivered a dramatic late-night TV warning that the city had until late Wednesday to lay down 1.2 million sandbags to protect an especially vulnerable 3.7-mile (6-kilometer) stretch.
"When the governor said we had 48 hours left, I thought we could not just wait until the water arrived, so I took a day off and volunteered," said Suriya Termchoksap, 39, who took Tuesday off from his job at IBM to help build a dike along a key canal.
The deluge began with heavy rains that started in August, with flooding sweeping slowly downstream from the north. The death toll is 317, mostly from drowning, with nearly 9 million people affected and 27 of the countries 77 provinces still inundated.
In addition to the damage to stores and factories, hundreds of thousands of acres (hectares) of farmland have been damaged. Initial estimates of the economic costs were $3 billion, but have since been rising.
On Tuesday, the Royal Irrigation Department advised residents in districts east of Bangkok near Suvarnabhumi Airport, the country's main international gateway, to secure their homes with sandbags and move valuables to upper floors because water levels there were rapidly rising.
A department spokesman stressed that the airport itself was not threatened because it was well-protected.
Bangkok's other airport at Don Muang, north of Bangkok, is in another area where floods threaten but is also believed to be safe for now. However, the Thai air force, which maintains a base there, said it has moved about 20 planes to other bases as a precaution.
About 10 aircraft have stayed to carry out flood relief missions, but they also may need to be moved if the situation worsens, Air Force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchukorn said. | <urn:uuid:a785e6ad-fc17-402a-ab85-f99ecdc4aba4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/oct/18/no-letup-as-thai-authorities-battle-against-flood/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980326 | 711 | 1.679688 | 2 |
By Jeff Widener, The Honolulu Advertiser
The most famous photo of the Tiananmen Square protests, that of an unidentified man facing down Chinese tanks, was taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press. Widener, now with The Honolulu Advertiser, recalls how he got the picture:
IMAGE GALLERY: Tiananmen Square anniversary
To this day, it's the only photograph hanging on my wall.
I still see it as the shot I almost blew. I had miscalculated the shutter speed. Of the three images I took, only one came out — it was kind of blurry, but apparently clear enough to be used in more than 6,000 publications around the world the next day.
The story of how I got the photo centers on two people whose names I never knew.
The Chinese government's crackdown on Tiananmen Square had been going on for several days, and the government was trying to prevent any more Western media from documenting all the street battles and deaths.
I wanted to get into the Beijing Hotel, which offered a high vantage point from which I could take photos. That wasn't going to be easy. The Chinese had put security guys in white suits there to guard against journalists. The rumor was they were using cattle prods to repel unwanted visitors.
So I hid my camera inside my Levi's jacket, and stuffed my film in my underwear. Then I walked through the hotel's front door, and the guards approached me. I saw this long-haired college kid who was registered at the hotel, and I exclaimed, "Hi, Joe! I've been looking for you!" Then I whispered, "I'm from the AP. Can you show me up to your room?"
The kid picked it up immediately. We went up to his room, and then to the roof.
Several hours passed. My head was still aching from a concussion I'd sustained a few days before, when a rock thrown by a protester hit me in the face. When I saw the guy standing in front of the tanks — the subject of the now-famous picture — I thought: They're going to shoot this guy. Why are they waiting?
After I was done, I asked the kid to smuggle the film to the AP office at the diplomatic compound. He did. I think his name was Kurt, but I'm sorry to say I don't know for sure. It would be great to find him and thank him.
I was back in China recently. Frankly, I was shocked the Chinese government let me in. There are so many new office buildings, and seemingly a Starbucks on every corner. But it was hard not to see everything through the prism of what happened 20 years ago, the China of 1989 I captured in that picture.
The other name I don't know, of course, is the guy in the picture. Nobody knows who he was, or what happened to him, but I think in some ways it's better that way. I still think of him as the unknown soldier — the faceless guy who represents all of us.
Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more. | <urn:uuid:0982f7d0-b844-44f4-b6b6-e467b47ba796> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-06-03-chinaphoto_N.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985232 | 683 | 1.640625 | 2 |
By Jared A. Favole
First Lady Michelle Obama urged business leaders from some of the world’s largest companies to hire veterans, saying as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are ending more than one million soldiers will be hanging up their uniforms and transitioning back to civilian life.
Mrs. Obama says soldiers and their spouses have “seen it all,” and return from war with the values “you simply can’t teach anywhere else -a relentless commitment to excellence, the ability to juggle multiple priorities, the wherewithal to meet deadlines under every circumstance imaginable.”
The first lady was speaking to members of the Business Roundtable, a business group whose members include executives from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. American Express Co. and FedEx Corp. She called out Wal-Mart and a few other companies by name for their commitments to hiring veterans. Wal-Mart has committed to hiring 100,000 veterans in the next five years.
Mrs. Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden‘s wife, Jill, have led the administration’s efforts to help veterans transition back to civilian life. Their efforts include encouraging companies to hire veterans, setting up workforce training programs and steps to prevent financial firms from preying on soldiers and their families.
While the unemployment rate for all veterans is slightly lower than the national unemployment rate it’s hire than the national average among those who fought in wars following the 9/11 attacks. Mrs. Obama said these veterans hold a special place in the country’s history. “These are the Americans who stepped up and volunteered to serve during wartime knowing full well they would be sent into harm’s way,” she said.
She said many of them have information technology and logistics skills, and have overseen millions of dollars in military assets. She said hiring them would provide service to the U.S.
“Think outside the box. Take real risks. And work together to make big, bold commitments to hire our veterans and military spouses,” she said. | <urn:uuid:ee2425df-7fd5-43b0-80fa-1c52b4929428> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/03/13/first-lady-urges-big-companies-to-hire-veterans/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963237 | 418 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Soon the couple relocated to Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota, McConnell to take a job at its library and Baker to study law. He joined a campus group called FREE (Fight Repression of Erotic Expression), an early gay-rights group.
"The fear then wasn't that you'd be discriminated against, that was a given," said Jean Tretter, a member of FREE who went on to decades of gay activism in Minnesota. "You were a lot more afraid that someone might come after you with a shotgun."
Baker and McConnell — educated, clean-cut and handsome — contrasted with the typically scruffy counterculture activists of the era. But the Hennepin County attorney blocked their bid for a marriage license, a decision upheld by a district judge and affirmed by the state Supreme Court with reasoning that echoes in today's arguments against gay marriage: "The institution of marriage as a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the Book of Genesis."
Asked via email why they pursued the case, Baker wrote, "The love of my life insisted on it."
It was a stormy time for the couple. Soon after McConnell relocated to Minnesota, the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents yanked his job offer because he was openly gay; the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his separate lawsuit to get it back. In April 1971, amid both legal dramas, Baker was elected and then a year later re-elected as president of the university's student government.
Two decades after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Baker v. Nelson, the Hawaii Supreme Court in 1993 ruled that homosexuals had a constitutional right to marry. It started the ball rolling on a movement that has seen many victories and setbacks since.
"Jack was the politician — outgoing and effective, manipulating the material world," said Roger Lynn, a retired Methodist pastor who performed a marriage ceremony for the men in 1971, and who remains in touch with them occasionally. "Michael was the librarian, detail-oriented, more introverted. They were a good match, and they're still making it work."
In a strange twist to their story, Baker wrote via email that he and McConnell would be personally unaffected if Minnesota legalizes gay marriage. In 1971, about 18 months after Hennepin County rejected their application, the couple traveled to southern Minnesota's Blue Earth County, where they obtained a marriage license on which Baker was listed with an altered, gender-neutral name.
That license was later challenged in court but was never explicitly invalidated by a judge. While Baker recently predicted on his blog that gay marriage would be legalized in Minnesota soon, he emailed that he and McConnell don't see a need to make it official in Hennepin County.
"We are legally married," Baker wrote.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:3f9f9a63-94c9-4db3-8169-acd0c5f83a18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2012/12/10/minn-gay-couple-in-71-marriage-case-still-joined?s_cid=related-links:TOP&page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981577 | 608 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Meet Sarah Palin
Ethics and the woman who would be V.P.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
The defining moment of Sarah Palin’s political career– at least up until Friday, Aug. 29– took place while she didn’t even hold elected office and occupied a place largely outside the public eye.
In 2004, two years after leaving the office of mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (a town of fewer than 10,000 souls), Palin had returned to the life of a hockey mom. Through her connections to the state GOP establishment, she had landed a spot on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a state agency with oversight responsibility for some aspects of oil and gas development. One of the job’s requirements was that she sign a statement each month reporting that there were no ethical violations occurring on the commission.
At that point in 2004, Palin decided she couldn’t sign that statement. As a result, she knew there was a good chance she’d never hold public office again– after all, the man she was about to accuse of conflicts of interest, Randy Ruedrich, was chairman of the state’s Republican Party. The Republicans dominated politics in Alaska, and they were likely to be unhappy about Palin turning on a member of her own party.
But Palin chose to become a whistleblower anyway– and far from destroying her political career, that action relaunched it. Ruedrich resigned from the commission and paid an Alaska record $12,000 fine for his misdeeds.
Meanwhile, news was beginning to trickle out about the FBI’s sweeping investigation into corruption among many of Alaska’s leaders. To date, four state representatives have been charged with accepting bribes from Bill Allen, the CEO of VECO (an oilfield services company), who, along with their customers– major Alaska producers like Exxon, BP and ConocoPhillips– stood to benefit from a lower petroleum-profits tax that was being enacted. Then-Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski’s chief of staff pleaded guilty as well, and several lobbyists and businessmen have also been caught up in this probe– including, most recently and publicly, U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, who is slated to go on trial this fall.
THE FIRST SCANDAL OF PALIN’S SHORT CAREER AS GOVERNOR IS ONE REGARDING A POTENTIAL ETHICS VIOLATION.
In this environment, Palin suddenly stood out as the rare politician who wasn’t tainted, and who stood up to corruption. By 2006, incumbent Gov. Murkowski’s approval ratings had tanked. In addition to pushing for the same industry-friendly petroleum-profits tax (which makes up the bulk of Alaska’s revenue) that the indicted state legislators had backed, Murkowski had held closed-door negotiations with the major oil producers about a natural-gas pipeline to markets in Canada and the Lower 48.
When Palin challenged him in the Republican gubernatorial primary, she beat him handily, taking 51 percent of the vote to his 19. (Another challenger pulled 30 percent.)
In the governor’s office for less than two years, Palin’s main achievement has been getting a gasoline act– different from the proposal pushed by Murkowski– passed and a proposal (from Calgary-based TransCanada) approved under its provisions. The act is less favorable to the major producers than Murkowski’s, as is a new petroleum-profits tax she supported. And her administration has taken on Exxon over dormant leases, threatening to cancel them if the oil giant doesn’t develop them.
So it’s shocking that the first scandal of Palin’s short career as governor is one regarding a potential ethics violation. Earlier this summer, Palin dismissed Walt Monegan, her public safety commissioner. Then word leaked out that Palin’s staff, and possibly her husband, Todd, had long (and unsuccessfully) pressured Monegan to fire a particular state trooper, Mike Wooten. Wooten has a handful of serious blots on his record as a cop– but it seems the main black mark against him from the Palin administration’s standpoint was that he was divorced from Palin’s sister Molly and locked in a custody battle with her; Wooten also allegedly threatened to kill their father, Chuck Heath.
Thus far, the administration maintains that the members within it who contacted Monegan about Wooten did so on their own, without Palin’s knowledge or consent. The state Legislature has appointed an independent investigator. The results of that investigation are due out at the end of October– on the eve of the elections that will determine whether Sarah Palin makes history as the first woman to ever be elected vice president. | <urn:uuid:eb33c097-1653-486c-954c-2fe0789af7dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/2008/sep/04/meet-sarah-palin/?templates=desktop | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970987 | 988 | 1.765625 | 2 |
When the ethanol industry launched its newest promotional group, Growth Energy, back in December 2008, it challenged the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) to either lower food prices for Americans during tough economic times or “to admit to the fundamentally flawed argument they’ve been making about biofuels.”
Growth Energy even set up a countdown clock
to track the hours and days elapsed since the group called on Big Food to lower prices for consumers at the grocery store. You can check out the clock at www.GrowthEnergy.org
. At this posting, it’s at about 126 days, 5 hours, 25 minutes and 16 seconds.
Now that corn prices are down, why won’t Big Food drop grocery prices?
“The GMA is claiming that there is lag time before food prices reflect the lower costs of oil and corn, but there was no lag time when the GMA raised food prices. Consumers took the hit right away," says Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, LLC and Board Member of Growth Energy. Hawkeye Energy h nation’s third-largest
"Raising food prices on struggling Americans is not a popular thing to do, so it's easy to see why they might claim a 'lag' or try to predict future price hikes so they can keep their costs high now. Once again, they are trying to lay the blame for their price hikes at the feet of America's ethanol producers and corn farmers."
Note: Rastetter, who runs the nation's third-largest ethanol-producing company is contemplating a run for Iowa governor in 2010. It will be fun to watch him go up against Big Food while juggling political interests. | <urn:uuid:55f6ae73-66f2-407c-a21d-8e498cabc5bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agweb.com/livestock/dairy/blog/Top_of_Mind_213/?Year=2009&Month=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948311 | 353 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Israeli settlers in Hebron
His articles, to which he devotes all his energies and time, by love for his country that Israel has turned into a nightmare, reflect daily the torture, the arrests, the abductions, the humiliations, the massacres that the Israeli army imposes constantly to his destitute people, abandoned by the world. He calls a spade a spade when he documents the racist remarks of Jewish religious and political leaders advocating the mass murder of Palestinians. He compares the Israeli military to the Nazis when they behave as such. He describes the Israeli anti-Muslim racism, which resembles in many respects the “anti-Jewish propaganda of Nazi Germany in the 1930s”. He challenges the colonization presented as a "return to their original homeland”. He responds here to the questions of Silvia Cattori.
Silvia Cattori: You have written countless articles explaining in detail what is happening in Palestine. When you see that your articles - which are translated in many languages, and well reported in the Arab medias and in the new medias - remain largely ignored in the western medias, aren’t you sometimes discouraged?
Khalid Amayreh: No, not at all, the evilness of the Israeli regime instils in us a greater determination to keep up the struggle. With every murderous crime committed by the Zionists, whom I often call the “Nazis of our time”, we acquire new evidence that the evil regime’s end is inevitable. Evil can’t be sustained for ever. Eventually it will destroy itself along with the evil doers. This often happens due to purely internal factors, but it could be also as a result of a combination of internal and external factors. The fact that Israel is trying to censor the messages and punish the messengers (e.g. international observers and human rights activists operating in occupied Palestine) shows that Israel has much to hide from the eyes of the world. Nonetheless, Israel is fighting a losing battle as many Israelis are finding out that Zionist criminality can’t be sustained for ever. In a world where everything can be denied, there are forces undeniable. And on earth, where nothing is sure, we have our certainties. As an oppressed people our certainty is to be free. True, our freedom is not around the corner, but, nonetheless it is a certainty.
Silvia Cattori: Ambiguity is everywhere. While large international solidarity associations with the Palestinian cause readily publish all the writings of Israeli militants and journalists like Michel Warshavsky, Uri Avnery, Amira Hass, or Gideon Levy, few of your articles pass the censorship. This shows well that the discourse in the solidarity movement is biased, truncated at will; of course they condemn the occupation but they do not question the legitimacy of the Zionist State, the dispossession and the occupation of Palestine since 1948, etc. They consider that the occupation actually started with the 1967 war. Is it better to be an Israeli Jew to report on Israel Palestine?
Khalid Amayreh: Your observations are unfortunately correct. However, it is always better to view the half-full part of the proverbial glass. That these people don’t publish my articles is unfortunate, however, the fact that they have brought themselves to realizing that Israel is committing crimes and violating the basic human rights of the Palestinian people is a laudable act in itself.
What is more important is that a revolutionary act can’t occur outside its natural historical and political milieu. We just can’t expect people who were breast-fed with the holocaust religion all their life to suddenly convert to anti-Zionism. In France, as in the United States and much of the West, turning one’s back completely to Israel and Zionism means losing a certain part of one’s identity. Hence, many people are just not ready to undergo the desired transformation. My personal impression is that the final transformation will ultimately occur as the universal resistance to Zionism becomes deeper and irreversible as the futility of the so-called peace process become clearer, which is happening now.
Silvia Cattori: The murder of a Hamas military executive, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, has been largely commented. Never has been Israel’s image so degraded. But should we not see that no Western State condemns the Israeli policy of targeted killings of Palestinians fighters? Doesn’t this demonstrate that Western politicians do not want to see the ugly and brutal policy of the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman ?
Khalid Amayreh: You see, international politics is very much like a house of ill-repute. Principles, including so-called moral principles, mean nothing as opposed to statecraft. In western countries, leaders and politicians would go to a great extent asserting the ideals of freedom, human rights and democracy. However, when these principles collide with expediency or pass through a real test (e.g. Hamas’s election victory in 2006), they are let down in the name of realism and pragmatism.
The same thing applies to Israeli behaviour. Israel has always been a criminal entity. And the West went along with that. Hence, it would be naïve to expect the West to undergo a sudden awakening of its conscience just because Israel has murdered a Palestinian leader. Israel has always committed such crimes, and the West has always lived with this. So there is absolutely nothing extraordinary here.
Silvia Cattori: When Benjamin Netanyahu reiterates that Israel will never withdraw from East Jerusalem, nor return to 1967 borders, nor allow Palestinian refugees to return to what is now Israel, which means do you have to voice your anger?
Khalid Amayreh: I tend to believe him, which really convinces me of the futility of seeking peace with Israel. Unfortunately, it is too late for peace with Israel. Now it is either open-ended conflict, or a single democratic state in all of mandatory Palestine from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean where all inhabitants are viewed as citizens, irrespective of religion and ethnicity. Needless to say, the later concept is anathema for Israel, since it would lead to the loss of Israel’s Jewish identity.
Silvia Cattori: After calling to dismember Iraq, after destroying Lebanon and Palestine, Israeli regime wants now to attack Iran and encourage his allies to enter in his war propaganda. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government is openly the most eager to support Israel against Iran. But is it really Iran that threatens the Middle East?
Khalid Amayreh: No, Iran in no way represents a threat to the Middle East. Iran is still very much a Third World country that lacks the ability (and the inclination) to pose such a threat. Besides, Iran, unlike Israel, has not waged wars of aggression in modern times.
In my opinion, the driving motive behind the Israeli-western hysteria against Iran is to ensure that Israel remains the sole, undisputed, and unchallenged superpower in the Middle East as it is now. Hence, the largely phobic talk about the possible destruction of Israel by Iran is more than rubbish. It really insults people’s intelligence and should never be entertained by serious peoples.
Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear heads and bombs, along with their delivery systems, which means that it would be utterly foolish to threaten Israel. Some would claim that the Iranian leadership can be “foolish” but this is nonsense. A country that has been able to navigate itself through the treacherous terrains of international politics can’t really be foolish.
In the final analysis, we are talking about a potential challenge to Israeli supremacy in the region, not existence, a condition that has persisted since the aftermath of the Second World War. This is what irks Israel and the West.
As to Sarkozy, he obviously lacks the rectitude of an honest leader. He is very much a European copy of George Bush, but lacking the enormity of means that were at the latter’s disposal.
Silvia Cattori: How France - totally aligned with Israel as it is from 2007 – could it help the Palestinians people to regain their rights? Did it not already lose all its credit and influence in the region? As for the strategy of Obama for the Middle East has it not already failed?
Khalid Amayreh: No, France is not really qualified to carry out a truly constructive role in helping the Palestinians regain their rights. France, especially under the present government, is too reluctant, too inconsistent, too unprincipled and too much seduced by Zionist romanticism.
Indeed, France has repeatedly demonstrated that its heart and mind belong to Israel, not to Justice. Moreover, the scandalous French stand on the genocidal Israeli onslaught against the people of the Gaza Strip a year ago was really a classical example of political whoredom. What else can be said of a major international power that once taught the world the meaning of liberty that stood idle, passively watching Nazi-Israel rain death on the heads of Gaza’s helpless children and women while mendaciously claiming to be doing this in self-defence?
Silvia Cattori: Have you not been shocked by the call to recognize a “Palestinian State without borders”, made by Bernard Kouchner on the day (21 February) of the arrival of the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in Paris? If France wants to recognise a Palestinian State, why should it be without defining its borders?
Khalid Amayreh: Yes, I have. And I think many other Palestinians have the same feeling. The reason for that is very clear. The French proposal for recognizing a Palestinian state without borders should be viewed as a mere euphemism for the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.
Besides, any temporary arrangements would have be more or less vague arrangements in order to be accepted by both sides. And from our experience with the Oslo Accords, vague arrangements are always interpreted by the powerful side, in this case Israel, in a way that serves the Israeli designs, while the other party, the Palestinians, is left indulging in day-dreaming.
Didn’t Shimon Peres, the hero of the Qana massacre , say “I can’t post a guard at Arafat’s lips,” when the late Palestinian leader said that the Oslo Accords gave Palestinians an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital?
Besides, who would or could guarantee that Israel wouldn’t treat the “temporary borders” as “permanent borders”? The United States? France? The United Kindom? Germany (we probably shouldn’t even mention Germany, given her pornographic embrace of Israeli Nazism!)? Well, these powers can’t even get Israel to stop demolishing an Arab home in East Jerusalem, let alone force Israel to withdraw from Palestinian land.
Silvia Cattori: In an article co-authored with Miguel Angel Moratinos , Bernard Kouchner spoke of a new plan that sets the agenda for negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian State. Here, again, do you think that this is a credible solution? Is not Bernard Kouchner’s plan an Israeli plan? A plan “for the establishment of institutions and the creation of a viable Palestinian State” that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad had endorsed in summer 2009, that would build a state "in facts and on the ground" for 2011, through an increase of economic projects? What does that inspire you?
Khalid Amayreh: I think this plan is no plan at all. It is rather a process of deception very much like the defunct Oslo process. Besides, it is always ludicrous and vacuous to claim that a viable Palestinian state can be built while the Palestinian people are still languishing under a cruel foreign military occupation that controls every aspect of their lives.
I sincerely believe that Mr. Fayyad is acting very much like Alice in Wonderland. He is a man who was parachuted from North America to Palestine thanks to a decision by President Bush. I dare say he is not really acquainted with the Nazi-like nature of the Israeli regime. Moreover, he naively thinks that the building of institutions, probably along with international recognition, could create a certain mechanism, or a momentum, that would eventually make the proverbial viable Palestinian state an achievable task.
To this, we Palestinians, who have been through it all, from creation to destruction, say a big « No ». We have learned, the hard way, that the creation of a state before liberation is a dangerous and stupid act of gambling. This has been proven in a clarion way through the Oslo process, which gave us annexation instead of liberation and apartheid instead of statehood.
Besides, who would guarantee that Israel wouldn’t move its tanks to crush all the institutions Mr. Fayyad would like to build in cooperation with people like Kouchner, especially if Palestinians continued to be affronted with the durability of the “temporary borders” being proposed now?
Silvia Cattori: Salam Fayyad is a politician that Sarkozy and Kouchner would like to seat in power definitely. Luisa Morgantini, the leader of the solidarity movement in Italy, considers Salam Fayyad as a militant, fighting side by side with his people. Who is Fayyad really for the Palestinians? What did he to improve the daily life of his people? Have you seen less check points, less jobless under his regime? Is it true that the economic situation improved in the West Bank, and what does it mean for the Palestinians on the ground? Do you believe that Fayyad could be the right person to solve the Palestinian cause?
Khalid Amayreh: In my opinion, Fayyad is a man who is effectively striving to carry out the Netanyahu concept of “economic peace” whereby Palestinians, or a majority of them, would accept trading off their national aspirations for jobs and money. In other words, he wants to us to settle for a deformed “state”, one without dignity, without freedom, without authority, without anything, for a little-whore of a state that would be perpetually subject and subservient to Israel. As to Jerusalem, the right of the refugees, the numerous Jewish colonies that continue to expand throughout our land, this is none of his concerns. His ultimate concerns is to achieve “economic prosperity” but at the expense of our legitimate and inalienable rights, including the right to freedom from Israeli Nazism.
If Fayyad’s vision were to succeed, God forbid, we would be condemned to many decades of serfdom and subjugation by Jewish colonialism, all in the name of peace.
Silvia Cattori: The Palestinian people and their cause can only suffer from the split between Fatah and Hamas. In 2008 you said that “it is imperative that member-States of the European Union (EU) either collectively or individually should initiate a meaningful dialogue with Hamas as soon as possible. Needless to say, such a dialogue would be expedient to all parties involved as well as to the cause of peace and stability in the Middle East." . In October 2009, when Fatah and Hamas were close to signing a pact of national unity, there was a big hope. Yet the division remains? How can we imagine that Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad can be loyal in a future coalition with Hamas after all the betrayals that are known?
Khalid Amayreh: I am not really optimistic about true reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. The reason for that is that Fatah, indeed the entire Palestinian Authority, lacks the will to act independently, given the fact that they both are almost completely dependent for their financial survival on western and pro-western Arab donors.
Indeed, the “raison d’être” of the Palestinian Authority (PA) now, at least from the American and Israeli view point, is to combat Hamas or at least inhibit its growth.
This is not a matter of a transient political strategy. It is much more than that. Israel, which continues to control the overall American policy in the Middle East, believes that the inclusion of Hamas into the main body of Palestinian politics would more or less raise the ceiling of Palestinian aspirations and expectations. This, not the issue of terror, is the main reason of Israel’s vehement hostility to Hamas.
Moreover, Israel hopes that a strong Hamas would ensure that Fatah wouldn’t make serious concessions to Israel with regard to cardinal final-status issues such Jerusalem and the refugees.
This is why it is likely that the dichotomy between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas will continue for sometime unless the Palestinian Authority delivers itself from the shackles of subservience to the United States and European Union, which considers Hamas a terrorist organization.
Silvia Cattori: An intelligence officer of the Palestinian Authority, Fahmi Shabana al-Tamimi , has condemned the misuse of public funds within the Palestinian Authority; has he been heard? Where are the billions paid by the European Union?
Khalid Amayreh: No, he hasn’t been heard and is unlikely to be heard. The reason is clear. For the Palestinian Authority to truly and sincerely fight corruption, it would have to demolish the entire Palestinian Authority apparatus because corruption, in its various forms, is the other side of the Palestinian Authority regime. In fact, there is an umbilical relationship between the Palestinian Authority and corruption. This might sound as an exaggeration to many, especially in the west. But this is taken for granted here. In short, corruption infests every aspect of the Palestinian Authority so much so that only a thorough and complete overhaul of the Palestinian Authority would stem the plague of corruption.
Silvia Cattori: When Mahmoud Abbas asks Hamas legitimate authorities (in Gaza) to recognize Israel as a precondition to forming a government of national unity, does it sound normal?
Khalid Amayreh: No, it doesn’t. And he hasn’t the courage to say so openly before a Palestinian audience. Besides, he and his Palestinian Authority had recognized Israel a long time ago, and look what they have got in return?
Silvia Cattori: The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) recognized Israeli State. But is it its honour? What is the usefulness of the PLO? Has it still reason to be? Do you consider its representatives abroad as legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people? Mahmoud Abbas does he not use the PLO to divide the Palestinians?
Khalid Amayreh: The PLO used to be a true representative of the Palestinian people. But this was when the PLO still retained it national chastity. Now, in my opinion, the PLO lost much if not all of its national honour, if only by indulging in manifestly treasonous acts such as the so-called security coordination with Israel. Some Palestinians are already calling the PA, the daughter of the PLO, a Palestinian “judenrat”.
Silvia Cattori: Your representatives outside do not seem to be concerned with the abuses of the Palestinian Authorities. Leila Shahid, Palestinian representative in Brussels continues to refer to Oslo, to negotiations, and other nonsense. By the way, this PLO representative is considered, for instance in France, the legitimate Palestinians’ voice by activists like Dominique Vidal and Michel Warshavsky, with whom Leila Shahid held conference for years in France. Did Palestinians expect them to resign in 2006 when Abbas and his Fatah movement had lost the power?
Khalid Amayreh: This is really tragic, because these people are supposed to defend the honour of the Palestinian people, not blindly support and defend policies that corrode this honour in the service of Israel.
My impression is that these people are following the old adage “when money appears, heads bow.” I am sorry that some of our people have reached this level of depravity.
Silvia Cattori: When the Palestinian representative in UNESCO Elias Sambar, or members of the Palestinian Authority, stigmatize Iran - one of the few countries in the region which denounces Israel without concessions - or blame the Palestinian Muslim resistance to be “Shiia” , do they express the opinion of the majority of your people?
Khalid Amayreh: I don’t think so. My impression is that they indulge in this stupid ranting in order to receive a certificate of good conduct from the U.S. and Israel. Otherwise, one might ask what interest do Palestinians have in alienating millions of Shiite Muslims around the world by calling Hamas “Shia’a”?
Besides, didn’t Fatah and the PLO repeatedly beg Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to include Fatah prisoners in any prisoner-exchange deal with Israel; hence the hypocrisy on their part.
Silvia Cattori: Another grim reality: the Fatah collaboration with the enemy. Under these conditions when the Palestinians hear Abbas or Fayyad talk about the “liberation of Palestine”, can they believe them?
Khalid Amayreh: Yes, I know that too well. This is really beyond chutzpah [insolence]; it is pornographic hypocrisy bordering on mental sickness.
Silvia Cattori: You wrote that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “is functioning very much like a hanger-on vis-à-vis the American backed Palestinian Authority “ . But is it not sad to see that outside, solidarity associations and leftist groups consider the PFLP as a leftist party and, therefore, collect and send to its leader large sums of money? Is this a good way to help the Palestinian in general?
Khalid Amayreh: The PFLP is not what it used to be. Its effective alliance with an American-backed Fatah has more or less undermined its erstwhile reputation. For example, the PFLP has not adopted an uncompromising stance vis-à-vis the issue of security coordination with Israel. I remember that two years ago, one PLO security commander declared that “the Palestinian Authority and Israel have one common enemy, that is Hamas,” and the PFLP kept silent in the face of this national apostasy.
Moreover, the PFLP was virtually silent and made no reactions to the serious attacks by the Palestinian Authority on freedom of speech, human rights and civil liberties in the West Bank. To many Palestinian, this stand was unforgivable. More to the point, there is a widespread impression in occupied Palestine that the PFLP leadership has on many occasions allowed the Palestinian Authority leadership to utilize the PLO, of which PFLP is a founding member, in the showdown with Hamas.
None the less, most Palestinians, including this writer, still view with respect and admiration Ahmed Sadat, the imprisoned chief of the PFLP. We hope that he will be free from Zionist jails soon.
Silvia Cattori: The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a place forbidden to many Palestinians. New restrictions are forbidding Muslims to go on the site of Haram Al-Sharif. After all the punishments they suffered from the Israeli occupiers, is it not the cruellest humiliation for the Palestinian?
Khalid Amayreh: Yes, it also shows that Israel denies non-Jews freedom of religion. How else can one relate to these draconian measures when people from Paris to Los Angeles can access the Aqsa Mosque while Palestinian Muslims and Christian who live only a few hundreds meters away are denied the right to visit and pray at their respective holy places? Even the most fascist states in history didn’t embark on such measures.
Silvia Cattori: Gaza remains under siege despite protests from many Muslims and non Muslims in the world. Can the Palestinians of Gaza continue to survive without outside help?
Khalid Amayreh: The Palestinians have no choice but to survive. The Palestinians have survived in spite of history because they constantly and feverishly clung to that choice, if you can call it a choice. The other alternative was ultimate demise and national obliteration.
None the less, there is no doubt that the enduring Gaza nightmare represents a stigma of shame at the forefront of the international community as well as upon humanity’s conscience as a whole.
It is more than lamentable that while an entire people is being raped, humiliated, starved, and tormented, the nations of the world are just looking on passively as if this slow-motion holocaust were taking place on a different planet or in a different galaxy. I really can’t find the right word to describe the gigantic crime of apathy toward Gaza. Now, I understand why many people were silent when the Nazis were doing what they were doing Europe in the course of the Second World War.
Silvia Cattori: Thank you very much.
Benjamin Netanyahu, born in 1949, is the current prime minister and head of the extreme right-wing Likud party. He was the first to ever be voted prime minister via direct elections in 1996, and later served as foreign minister and finance minister under Ariel Sharon.
Avigdor Lieberman, born on 1958 in Kishinev, Moldavia, is the current foreign minister and leader of the extreme right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, which after the 2009 general elections has become Israel’s third largest party. Lieberman immigrated to Israel in 1978. Shortly after arriving in the country, he enlisted in the Israel Defence Forces and served in the Artillery Corps.
Qana is a village in Southern Lebanon where many Lebanese civilians, who had taken refuge in a UN compound to escape the fighting, were killed by the Israeli artillery on April 18, 1996.
An article in the daily Le Monde on February 23, 2010, “À quand l’État palestinien ?”, by Bernard Kouchner French Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Miguel Angel Moratinos, Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation.
See: “The Shi’a Threat in Palestine: between phobias and propaganda”, by Jean-François Legrain, 1st October 2009. | <urn:uuid:a9fe5b68-655d-494a-a8d5-e93ec7181a32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://silviacattori.net/article1139.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955936 | 5,469 | 1.609375 | 2 |
The Second Circuit ruled this past week that Greece, through its opening prayers at board meetings, is associating itself with Christianity.
A little bit of history here: In 1999, Greece Town Supervisor John Auberger replaced a moment of silence at board meetings with a prayer.
He called the prayer-giver “Chaplain of the month.”
For eight straight years only Christian leaders were invited to give this prayer.
This is not to say other religions weren’t welcome, it’s just that leaders of other religions were not asked to participate.
During a vast majority of the prayers, the Christian leader would invoke the name of Jesus Christ or Your Son or the Holy Spirit making the prayer overtly Christian in nature.
After a complaint in 2007, the town brought in a rabbi and even a Wiccan priestess to give the prayer, but because it was town policy to invite clergy almost exclusively from within Greece, most prayers continued to be given by Christians.
Two Greece residents filed a federal lawsuit.
They lost their case at the district level, but the Second Circuit reversed that decision and declared the town’s policy unconstitutional.
What’s interesting is the court appears to condone – though it may frown upon – each aspect of the town’s policy, but it took issue with the policy in its totality. | <urn:uuid:ba9de9de-5630-45db-9dec-089a606929bc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.13wham.com/content/blogs/story/greece-prayer-ruling/fTLEf6BPY0ehZGl87COSdA.cspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962817 | 279 | 1.601563 | 2 |
"France's reluctance to allow a precedent of NATO taking military action without direct Security Council authorization may even outweigh its concerns over Kosovo," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. Taking action through the U.N. could take a lot longer, despite the fact that Russia's traditional heel-dragging in defense of the Serbs will be undercut by its dire need for Western economic assistance. Serbia is certainly betting that Western action isn't imminent; its troops continued their offensive against Albanian separatists today, NATO be damned.
NATO is gathering its forces for an air strike against Serb targets in Kosovo, but the West can't agree over who gives the order to attack. Washington believes that Wednesday's U.N. Security Council resolution calling for Serbia to end its crackdown on Kosovo empowers NATO to order a strike. But France -- a NATO member -- disagrees, insisting that the Security Council is the only body competent to authorize military intervention in what remains, legally, a Yugoslavian domestic conflict. | <urn:uuid:b2d65945-be56-4def-953b-e4d00c5d1cb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,14894,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95496 | 202 | 1.71875 | 2 |
About the project: Introduction
Forward by Ross Hall
This project was conceived with the aim of tackling a critical issue facing governments across the world today; namely, how well the employment and training needs of employers, individuals and governments are being met by education and training systems. This balance between the supply and demand sides of education is becoming more and more intense as countries across the world contend with difficulties arising out of the current economic downturn. It makes what we call 'effective education foremployment' an even more fundamental issue.
Our initial research began in 2007 and finished in 2008. During this time economic conditions in many countries worsened and even now, many commentators are forecasting difficult conditions persisting in varying degrees into 2010/11 and possibly beyond. These conditions make the need for effective education for employment even greater. If employers don't get the skilled workforce they need, if individuals don't get the training they need and if governments don't get the education and training levels they need then economic competitiveness and social cohesion suffer.
Yet getting a good 'fit' between supply and demand in education and training is not straightforward. Needs vary, priorities change and resources can become stretched. It is a challenge that many countries are tackling in different ways.
Our research ranged over 25 countries and heard from over 2,000 stakeholders. To each and every one, we extend our thanks for their support and contributions to what we hope will be an extremely useful piece of work on how best to develop effective education for employment.
Director of International, Edexcel
Effective Education for Employment is a collaborative project driven by organisations and individuals passionate about the need for educational reform.
Edexcel International, part of Pearson Education, sponsor this Project. Edexcel International currently operates in over 85 countries and is one of the world's leading providers of professional education, primarily through the provision of BTEC qualifications.
White Loop is the lead delivery partner. White Loop designed and delivered the international provocation series and provided strategic input to every other part of the project. White Loop is a London-based consultancy specialising in stakeholder engagement, strategic communications and the provision of digital media services.
Insight Research Group conducted all primary research activity. Insight is an international market research company based in London and New York. | <urn:uuid:5889fb44-b377-4586-844c-d0378882d30b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eee-edexcel.com/About_the_project | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948244 | 457 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Local Organizations Unite to Help Disabled Homeowners |
Title (Max 100 Characters)
Learning Disabilities Association of Western New York and Heart of The City Neighborhoods, Inc. Announce the Creation of Stable Homes Program
Homeowners with developmental disabilities living in the city of Buffalo now have an opportunity for home renovations through the Stable Homes project. Created by Heart of the City Neighborhoods, Inc. (HOCN) and Learning Disabilities Association of Western New York (LDA of WNY). The Stable Homes program provides individuals with developmental disabilities, a population that is most vulnerable to health issues associated with older homes, a sustainable home.
This past spring HOCN and LDA of WNY teamed up to bring sustainability to low-income homeowners. This is just the beginning of the Stable Homes program, which had been funded by the NYS Department of Homes & Community Renewal (DHCR) and the NYS Affordable Housing Corporation through HOCN’s Green and Healthy Homes Initiative.
“LDA of WNY and HOCN are doing tremendous work looking out for the most vulnerable citizens of our community, and they should be commended for their tireless commitment to the Stable Homes project,” said NYS Assembly Member Sean Ryan. “I will be working with my colleagues to ensure that DHCR continues to have the resources to fund this worthwhile program."
Three homes have been completed through the Stable Homes project, with enough left over from the grant to complete 7 more homes owned by those with developmental disabilities. Homeowner and I-Voice Buffalo Advocate Marie Malinowski was a recipient of the Stable Homes pilot project.
“I am just so appreciative to have had it done. The process was thorough, with a proper inspection,” said Malinowski. “They knew what needed to be fixed and they did it right”.
LDA of WNY and HOCN know that the age of a home can lead to high maintenance demands such as exposures to lead, safety hazards and mental health stressors.
“The Stable Homes collaboration is an important piece to LDA’s initiative to create stable, affordable safe housing for the persons we serve in the communities in which they wish to live,” said Marc Hennig, deputy director of programs for LDA of WNY.
Stephanie Simeon, executive director, HOCN, has seen her fair share of old homes taking a toll on those who live within them.
“We know how difficult it can be to make costly but necessary repairs on Buffalo’s old housing stock, but we also know how important these repairs can be not only for the health of the home, but for the health of the families that reside within these homes,” said Simeon.
The collaboration of HOCN and LDA of WNY now allows HOCN to improve homes outside of their designated service area in Buffalo, “Heart of the City is excited to be able to extend our home repair services to others in Buffalo, outside of the Lower West Side,” said Simeon.
To apply for a home renovation through the Stable Homes program please contact Jennifer Stemier of Learning Disabilities Association of WNY at (716) 874-7200 ext. 159.
About Learning Disabilities of Western New York
The Learning Disabilities of Western New York is a non-profit that specializes in the servicing of persons with learning disabilities, neurological impairments, developmental disabilities and disabilities with similar multiple service needs. The organization strives to create and provide an environment in which all individuals they serve experience independence, respect, dignity, and full participation in the community so that they can reach their potential. For more information on LDA of WNY, please visit www.ldaofwny.org or visit the agency’s Facebook page at Facebook.com/LDAOFWNY.
About Heart of the City Neighborhoods, Inc.
Heart of the City Neighborhoods, Inc. (HOCN) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit Community Development Corporation that exists to create, facilitate and support housing and neighborhood development in the Lower West Side of Buffalo. For more information on HOCN, please visit http://www.hocn.org.
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- Permanent Food Vendors to Replace Winter Market at Horsefeathers | <urn:uuid:6d6b3589-8f87-4cc1-9341-5e5c29b9fe42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://downtown.wgrz.com/news/70942-local-organizations-unite-help-disabled-homeowners | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946178 | 982 | 1.796875 | 2 |
We tend to spend all day popping in and out of our web browsers, often to do very repetitive tasks, like searching for something on Google. While we can’t escape those tasks, there are ways to speed up or automate those things that we have to do over and over again. A common one is to create bookmarklets and shortcuts for those web sites you have to visit routinely. That approach can lead to an overwhelming number of shortcuts, however. Quix is a surprisingly simple way to speed up little tasks, while minimizing the shortcuts you have to have.
Setting Quix up is a matter of dragging a link on to your tool bar. It works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and even Safari for the iPhone (instructions for individual browsers are available on the web site). Whenever you need to handle a particular task, such as searching Amazon or look at all nofollow links on a given page, you click the Quix button and type the appropriate shortcut.
You can easily take several actions on the page you’re currently visiting, as well as starting searches or other tasks on other sites. Typing “bitly,” for instance, will shorten the URL of the page you’re currently visiting. Other URL shorteners work with Quix, as well. You can also do things like check out the analytics of the current page or tweet the link. Quix eliminates intermediate steps, speeding up and simplifying such tasks.
It can be tough to memorize a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts, but the ones used by Quix’s developer are fairly intuitive: for example “g” starts a Google search, while “gbs” is for Google Blog Search. If you are having a hard time remembering the exact shortcut you need, typing “help” will get you a list of the different options immediately.
The list of tasks you can handle with Quix is impressive, covering al sorts of things from basic tasks like Flickr search and translating web pages, all the way through to SEO and webmaster tasks.
No matter what kind of project you’re working on, there’s likely a Quix command to help you. Furthermore, you can extend Quix if you so choose, by creating your own commands. The syntax for creating new Quix commands is available online and, while it does take a little technical know-how, the process is remarkably quick.
While it’s quite powerful out of the box, there are a few additional commands that could be useful. Off the bat, I see the opportunity to add several more social networking commands: the basics are there, but a few more can’t hurt.
One of the benefits that I’ve seen after just a few days of using Quix is that I’ve been able to get rid of several Firefox plugins and bookmarkelets, speeding up my workflow, as well as making Firefox run a little better. Quix is definitely a nice little hack that can make a big difference to your productivity.
Have you tried Quix? Let us know what you think of it below. | <urn:uuid:397f9591-aee1-4228-a8ad-ad85b47d03b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gigaom.com/2010/01/19/quix-make-your-browser-more-productive/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933206 | 650 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Perhaps understandably, many eyes glaze over when the subject of the Department of Defense's financial management failures are discussed. Some minds might perk up when it is explained that without fixing the Pentagon's financial records any meaningful reform of the - very likely - worst managed agency in the federal government is impossible. It is a problem that three decades of reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon's Inspector General document to a fare-thee-well, but which no one from either political party in Congress, the Pentagon, or the White House has even begun to address in any serious manner. In a remarkable article in Conde Nast magazine, journalist Scot Paltrow explains the seriousness and dimension of this opaque problem and the utter absence of meaningful progress to address it.
This article can be found at http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/04/14/Pentagons-Accounting-Mess/?refer=email, and it is reproduced below.
May 2, 2008 Issue
The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem
The defense department has spent billions to fix its antiquated financial systems. So why does the Pentagon still have no idea where its money goes?
by Scot Paltrow
On a winter afternoon in Indianapolis, Jessica Hilligoss, a young Defense Department worker, types long strings of numbers and letters into a computer, helping the United States armed forces transfer the billions of dollars it draws each week from the Federal Reserve to contractors, vendors, and military and civilian personnel.
Her job is to review invoices for everything from construction projects to lawnmowing, and to approve payment. Within a few days, another computer system—behind locked doors in the building's basement—deposits the money in the recipients' bank accounts.
The size of nearly 28 football fields, with a facade of alternating red stucco and white cement tiles, the three-story operations center is the federal government's third-largest office building, after the Pentagon and the Ronald Reagan Building, and the place where a big chunk of the Iraq war's soaring price is paid. The center doles out more than $104 billion annually, making it Defense's largest disburser.
Theoretically, when Hilligoss authorizes a payment, the department should be able to instantly track where the money goes and which program it was spent on, in order to make sure the right amounts are paid to the right recipients at the right times. But it doesn't work that way.
Since 2004, the Pentagon has spent roughly $16 billion annually to maintain and modernize the military's business systems, but most are as unreliable as ever—even as the surge in defense spending is creating more room for error. The basic defense budget for 2007 was $439.3 billion, up 48 percent from 2001, excluding the vast additional sums appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to federal regulators and current and former Pentagon officials, the accounting process is so obsolete and error prone that it's virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up. While the department's brass has made a few patchwork improvements, billions are still unaccounted for. The problem is so deeply rooted that, 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited, the Pentagon still can't be. (Read a chronology of efforts to modernize the military's financial systems.)
For the first three quarters of 2007, $1.1 trillion in Army accounting entries hadn't been properly reviewed and substantiated, according to the Department of Defense's inspector general. In 2006, $258.2 billion of recorded withdrawals and payments from the Army's main account were unsupported. It's as if the Army had submitted multibillion-dollar expense reports without any receipts.
Preoccupied with protecting their turf, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines continue to maintain separate, increasingly outdated systems that can't talk to each other, trace disbursements, or detect overbilling by contractors. At the Indianapolis facility, as at the Defense Department's four other main U.S. centers for financial operations, accounting programs under the same roof can't share information without extensive jury-rigging, as though contracts, payments, and accounting had nothing to do with one another.
"In the Defense Department, what you have now are material weaknesses that are in every single area, in every part of the department, so deep and so wide you do not really have any way of figuring out where money is being spent," says Linda Bilmes, a federal budget expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Every year, the Pentagon tries to justify its budget request to Congress by submitting three years of financial data: "actual" performance for the past fiscal year plus projections for the current year and the next. But because of the lack of reliable accounting, these totals are largely fictional. That, in turn, raises major questions about whether the government will be able to meet skyrocketing commitments for future spending on ships, planes, and high-tech ground weapons, especially given the expected growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the impact of tax cuts.
According to David Walker, who recently left his post as head of the Government Accountability Office, the failure of the Pentagon's outdated and incompatible systems to keep tabs on expenditures—even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan eat up an ever-bigger chunk of the federal budget—puts several Defense Department agencies high on the G.A.O.'s list of federal programs that are mismanaged and prone to fraud, waste, and abuse.
John Evans, a retired Pentagon official who oversaw more than half of the defense budget, says that all this just encourages the military branches to conceal spending. "If you want to know how much one of the services is paying, you have to ask them," he says. "They say, 'Why do you want to know?'" When Evans did a formal review to see if spending was on track, he says "it was like a C.S.I. crime drama to find out where the services spent money and where they squirreled it away."
To enter the Indianapolis center is to pass through a time warp, to a place where the most critical software programs date from the dawn of the computer age. They run on old-style I.B.M. mainframes and rely on Cobol, the ancient Sumerian of computer languages. "This was a bunch of systems patched together," says Greg Bitz, a former director of the center. "I never went home at night without worrying about one of them crashing." Bitz predicts a crisis as older programmers retire. "Try to find somebody today who knows Cobol," he says.
Hilligoss and other clerks sit in long rows of identical cubicles and enter endless sequences of numbers and letters by hand. The strings signify contract terms, identifying information, due dates, and accounting and appropriations codes. Even if the workers input all the information accurately, they can't prevent mistakes and miscommunications down the line. Indeed, the moment they authorize payment, triggering the transfer of money, any ability to reliably trace it disappears.
Since the scandal in 1985, which revealed that the Navy paid Lockheed $640 each for airplane toilet seats, Congress, military leaders, and regulators have agreed that the Defense Department's internal accounting system is in shambles. What's startling is the scope of the problem and the government's seeming inability to fix it. Over the past two decades, the Pentagon has repeatedly tried to design new computer systems to replace the antiquated ones. Even today, new incompatible financial systems continue to proliferate within the services, contrary to directives from the secretary of Defense's office.
In a September 10, 2001, speech, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pressed for a top-to-bottom overhaul of Pentagon financial systems, which he later estimated would save the department as much as $25 billion a year. "It is not, in the end, about business practices, nor is the goal to improve figures on the bottom line. It's really about the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld said, arguing that waste, mismanagement, and overspending on bureaucracy were taking resources away from weapons and troops.
The next day's terrorist attacks diverted his attention. Although the Pentagon took some initiative, including paying I.B.M. $250 million to help streamline business processes, it wasn't until 2005 that the Defense Department launched another major financial reform, and that one was just as problematic as its predecessors. Since 9/11, weaknesses in Pentagon financial systems have become more glaring as defense spending has climbed to record highs, with a request for $481.4 billion pending for 2008. In addition, the White House pushed through emergency defense appropriations—supplemental funds that don't undergo the usual congressional review—totaling $287.2 billion in 2006 and 2007.
The Indianapolis center and other back offices are supposed to comply with a congressional mandate to track how much of each year's emergency appropriations are spent on the Bush administration's declared global war on terrorism. But a former senior official from the Indianapolis center, who requested anonymity, says that its outmoded systems can't be tweaked to produce such data. Instead, it's done offline by workers combing through computer data and pulling out what they think should be attributed to the war on terrorism. Their guesswork, the source says, is probably way off.
The dysfunction stems in part from the traditional independence of the military branches. Over several decades, they have cobbled together separate processes for identical functions, resulting in the uncontrolled growth of more than 4,000 accounting, financial, and inventory systems. Their names form an acronym soup: CAPS, Stanfins, IAPS, Somards, Samms, Mocas, HQARS, Stars. The department's primary system for handling weapons contracts and payments dates from 1958; a costly attempt to replace it was abandoned in 2002 as a failure. The Army's notoriously inaccurate main accounting system was created in 1966.
In 1990, Congress enacted legislation requiring all federal agencies to pass independent audits. Every year, the Defense inspector general dispatched dozens of auditors to the military's financial and accounting centers. Every year, they reported back that the job couldn't be done. Defense Department records were in such disarray and were so lacking in documentation that any attempt would be futile. In 2000, the inspector general told Congress that his auditors stopped counting after finding $2.3 trillion in unsupported entries made to force financial data to agree.
In 2002, Congress relented. Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that "material amounts" in its financial reports can't be substantiated.
That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."
The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn't envisioned until 2016.
Without an audit, anecdotal evidence suggests, contractor fraud is likely to go undetected for years. Two South Carolina sisters who supplied small parts to the military bilked it of more than $20 million by charging wildly inflated shipping costs for low-priced items, like $998,798 for shipping two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas. The scheme lasted six years before they were caught in 2006.
Since 2005, the Pentagon has been carrying out what it says is the most comprehensive reform ever. Undersecretary of Defense Tina Jonas, who is now the comptroller and chief financial officer, is heading up an elaborate effort—once again—to develop compatible systems to share information seamlessly. A 2007 department report foresees the Pentagon becoming "as nimble, adaptive, flexible, and accountable as any organization in the world."
Unfortunately, flawed planning and internal resistance have hampered the current reform effort. Far from being nimble, the bureaucracy set up by Jonas and her staff seems nearly as convoluted as the financial systems that it's supposed to streamline. Beginning at the top, there is the Defense Business Systems Management Committee, which oversees a committee of principal staff assistants, and under that, the Business Transformation Agency, which is made up of eight separate directorates.
Early initiatives have done little to inspire confidence. For example, the Army is introducing an overall accounting system for its general fund that is expected to be fully operational in 2011. "By all the measures one can usually rely on to predict success, this one is doing fine," the Army's acting undersecretary, Nelson Ford, said in a November interview. Just weeks later, though, the Defense inspector general found that the new system was "at high risk for incurring schedule delays, exceeding planned costs, and not meeting program objectives."
Overburdened by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the individual services remain reluctant to commit staff members and money to Jonas' financial-reform effort. The Navy stymied Jonas' plan to create a single Defense Department system for military pay. While the Army is already converting to this common pay process, Navy Secretary Donald Winter says the new system doesn't meet his service's particular needs. The Navy will eventually adopt it, he says, but only after it has been thoroughly tested and debugged. At the same time, the Army and the Defense Logistics Agency—a separate branch of the Pentagon—are each going ahead with costly new systems for tracking billions of dollars' worth of supplies and replacement parts from purchase to their ultimate delivery to military units, even though government auditors say neither one yields reliable data. Together, the two systems cost about $2 billion.
Jonas says that her approach is working and that eight small Pentagon branches, like the Army Corps of Engineers, have now passed audits. "I think we're making good progress," she says.
Nevertheless, the four military services still can't be audited, and Jonas declines to predict when the entire Defense Department will finally pass an audit. "We don't know what we don't know," she says. | <urn:uuid:7480525f-d901-4901-9427-b1408d44e6fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://snuffysmithsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/pentagons-1-trillion-problem-with.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963161 | 2,958 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Last year’s holiday lights walk was such a hit we knew we’d be continuing the tradition again this year. We added a twist by creating our own holiday neighborhood scavenger hunt. (To be truthful, The Big Explorer created most of the list himself.)
It isn’t often that we take a walk after the sun goes down, so both kids were pretty excited. They’d seen many of the decorations in our neighborhood during the day, but all lit up at night was something completely different.
Although much of the decorations in our neighborhood involve unnatural elements, we made sure to include natural items on our list, too. So while we were counting penguins and reindeer, we also kept an eye out for wreaths and poinsettias.
We discovered that the lights made a beautiful backdrop to many already special items, like roses and fall leaves.
Of course, all the Santas, candy canes, reindeer and sparkly lights were a huge hit, too.
You’ve got to appreciate the simplicity of the neighborhood walk. Ours involved just a few blocks and took us about 40 minutes. But The Explorers were completely enthralled.
Sometimes it’s the simplest activities that bring the most pleasure, so make time for them this season.
- Dress the part. The key to a fun holiday nighttime scavenger hunt is keeping the kids warm. Bundle up with jackets, hats, gloves, warm socks and comfy shoes.
- Carry a flashlight. Since not every house has a lights’ display, some spots along your route may be dark. Bring along a flashlight or headlamp to keep your path visible.
- Give out awards. No trophies here, just honorable mention for things like your favorite display, best Santa or best use of natural objects. | <urn:uuid:e53392f0-accd-4eb1-9346-b7a61ef81343> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.goexplorenature.com/2011/12/holiday-neighborhood-scavenger-hunt.html | 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 | 0.964618 | 379 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The great Red Barber, when his hair was still red, working at his typewriter, with a volume of Roget’s Thesaurus close by.
Many of us knew Red chiefly through his weekly chats with Bob Edwards at NPR’s Morning Edition. The biographies say Red died in 1992. That was 19 years ago — it seems more recent than that. (Edwards left Morning Edition in 2004.)
It may be ironic to show Barber at his typewriter. He would be more accurately portrayed, perhaps, behind a microphone at a baseball park.
From 1939 through 1953 Barber served as the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was working for the New York Yankees when he retired in 1966. Barber had the distinction of broadcasting baseball’s first night game on May 24, 1935 in Cincinnati and the sport’s first televised contest on August 26, 1939 in Brooklyn.
During his 33-year career Barber became the recognized master of baseball play-by-play, impressing listeners as a down-to-earth man who not only informed but also entertained with folksy colloquialisms such as “in the catbird seat,” “pea patch,” and “rhubarb” which gave his broadcasts a distinctive flavor. (Radio Hall of Fame)
- Red Barber’s biography at the Radio Hall of Fame
- Bob Edwards on his NPR conversations with Barber
- Listing at “Baseball Voices,” featuring audio of some of his famous broadcasts
- Typewriter of the moment: An old one, manual or electric (yours?) (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
- Vin Scully Speaks With ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ (losangeles.cbslocal.com) | <urn:uuid:198f84e6-da45-482d-840f-86e2e6e0668d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/typewriter-of-the-moment-sports-broadcaster-red-barber/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977427 | 369 | 1.75 | 2 |
Ordinary Heroes, Waukesha North students show support for Sandy Hook victims
Locals start letter-writing movement in wake of shooting
It was a city they did not know existed.
It was a school they did not know of.
And they were students and teachers they never met.
But as soon as Zach Dunton, Kelsie Wendelberger and Crystal Herrington heard about the recent Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 first-graders and six staff members, they didn't think twice.
"I knew we had to do something," said Dunton, a 2011 Waukesha North High School graduate and a current sophomore at UW-Oshkosh. "We immediately swung into action."
That has been his response often this year.
It was the case after the movie theater massacre in July when a gunman opened fire in Aurora, Colo., at the midnight showing of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises."
And it was the case when it happened near their hometown of Waukesha when the Sikh Temple shooting took place a couple weeks later in Oak Creek.
Dunton, with Wendelberger, created the Ordinary Heroes campaign that calls upon ordinary people to become extraordinary in times of need. In downtown Waukesha, they raised more than $3,000 for the Aurora Victim Relief Fund and the Milwaukee Sikh Victim Relief Fund.
After sending out that money this summer, the two said their effort isn't finished. They will return when needed.
Unfortunately, that moment came sooner than anyone would have liked.
Dunton was about to head home for the semester while Wendelberger was getting ready for her final exams the following week at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., when they heard the news. They contacted each other almost immediately to think of how Ordinary Heroes could help the victims' families.
As they chatted over the phone, they realized money was not going to cut it this time.
"Every tragedy is terrible, but this one was so delicate and seemed to affect everyone with it being at an elementary school," Wendelberger said. "We knowpeople were emotional, so we thought putting these emotions on paper would be best."
Through social media, they encouraged their schools and others across the country and area to begin writing personal letters to those impacted by the shooting.
Dunton, who said he and Wendelberger plan on writing personal letters to each family who lost a loved one in the shooting, added: "There's no way to understand what they're experiencing in Connecticut, but we wanted to show them that people from all across the country can come together and be united."
Herrington, a senior at Waukesha North High School, had the same idea.
And just as Dunton and Wendelberger, both 20 years old, were leading their effort through Ordinary Heroes, Herrington began a school-wide effort called "Northstars for Newtown" the Monday after the shooting. She encouraged students to write letters and make donations.
"I just wanted to give everyone a chance to make a difference," Herrington said. "I wanted these letters to be a wave of hope. I felt so sorrowful and almost felt their pain as I wrote mine."
About 200 personal letters are being sent to Sandy Hook and $90 was raised that will allow the children to receive psychological help.
"After watching the news, I decided it was necessary to do something about these tragedies," Herrington said. "I was sick of sitting around and helplessly watching this happen."
She made a poster and a box with a slot on the top and brought it to school and got the approval from Principal Jody Landish.
Wendelberger, who visited her alma mater during this effort, said their contributions are "a perfect example of what Ordinary Heroes is about."
"It's so great what North is doing and that's what we've wanted Ordinary Heroes to be all along," Dunton added. "That's been our vision where others branch off and start their movements and take the initiative."
This was evident as Dunton and Wendelberger said they have heard from people all across the country saying they have been inspired by their movement and are following their lead.
It happened at both of their colleges and other nearby schools.
Before Christmas, Wendelberger said she compiled and boxed up more than 5,000 letters from Wheaton College and thousands of letters from other individuals and groups across the nation.
The two have been getting recognized for their efforts as they have been profiled on all the local TV stations.
Dunton and Wendelberger, however, don't want to take all the credit.
"We might have been the catalysts for it but it really took off when we encouraged others and they got on board," Dunton said before adding, "it's not about us, it's about others being ordinary heroes."
At a glance
Ordinary Heroes and "Northstars for Newtown" encourages others to send a letter to those impacted by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting:
Sandy Hook Elementary School
12 Dickenson Drive
Sandy Hook, CT 06482
And according to the Sandy Hook Elementary School website, a Sandy Hook Support Fund has been started.
Checks can be mailed to: Sandy Hook School Support Fund
c/o Newtown Savings Bank
39 Main St
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- Town of Waukesha wants in water service area, sends letter to city
- Fight with ump may have cost coach his job
- Blood drive to take place Tuesday at Town of Waukesha Hall
- Lifeway Foods CEO looking forward to future in Waukesha
- Neighbors unite beautifying turf
- Waukesha GuitarTown project shaping up
- Waukesha Memorial Day parade is Monday
- Waukesha STEM Academy names new principal
- More than 342 acres of town land could be annexed into the city
- Police Report: May 23 | <urn:uuid:6a36083b-8f0a-4bd8-afb3-1ce97b614f8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.waukeshanow.com/news/185319991.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979349 | 1,281 | 1.78125 | 2 |
AUGUSTA, Maine — State government employed 610 fewer workers during the first half of this year than it did in 2010, the year before Gov. Paul LePage took office after a campaign that made reducing the size of state government its centerpiece.
As with his efforts to cut Maine’s public assistance rolls, LePage has found it more difficult as a governor than as a candidate to convert his advocacy for limited government into action. The reduction in state jobs represents a 2.5 percent decline in the state workforce since the first half of 2010, the last year of Democrat John Baldacci’s governorship.
The total number of state employees dropped from 24,113 for the first half of 2010 to 23,503, according to Glenn Mills, chief economist for the Maine Department of Labor’s Center for Workforce Research. The state workforce not affiliated with the university or community college system has decreased by 978 employees since 2010, Mills wrote in an email. The number of jobs within the state’s higher education network grew by 368 — rising from 37 percent to 39 percent of the overall state workforce.
Increased enrollments spurred hiring at the state’s community colleges and universities, according to Mills. State employment rolls fluctuate each summer to reflect the hiring of seasonal park staff, interns and transportation project workers, he said.
A Governing By the Numbers analysis of public versus private sector job changes during the recession — between January 2008 and April 2012 — shows that Maine’s state workforce cuts were deeper than in neighboring New Hampshire, but not as severe as in Vermont and Rhode Island. Twenty-eight states cut their workforces during that time period, the report shows.
Maine’s overall staffing reduction corresponds with a $38.9 million decrease from the first half of 2010 to the first half of 2012 in total wages paid by the state. “A decline of $44.1 million in non-education was partially offset by an increase of $5.3 million in education,” Mills wrote. “On an annual basis, total wages declined $80 million for the 12 months through June 2012 compared to calendar year 2010.”
Average wages, which the Department of Labor measures quarterly, also declined from 2010 to 2012, he said.
The 12-month payroll decrease from $1.03 billion to $950 million reflects wages exclusively. Potential savings from retirement contributions, health insurance and other benefits do not factor into the $80 million decrease, Mills said.
Julie Rabinowitz, communications director for the Maine Department of Labor, wrote Thursday in an email that the state achieved savings in each of those areas, but she did not provide a total amount, noting that the savings would be reflected in budgets for each of the fiscal years since the first half of 2010. Factors such as conditions of employment, a 2010 curtailment order issued by Baldacci and benefit changes make an aggregate figure difficult to pin down, she said.
LePage took office Jan. 5, 2011, after campaigning, in large part, on a call to cut the size of state government and make it more accountable. “The taxpayers tired of footing the bill for a bloated establishment in Augusta,” he said during his inaugural address.
The governor’s initial two-year budget proposal, released in February 2011, included a plan to eliminate 80 mostly vacant state jobs. Government reforms, including changes to the state pension system passed as part of the biennial budget in June 2011, triggered other job reductions, according to Rabinowitz.
“Some jobs were not eliminated, but the staff person in that job took the retirement offered as a result, and that, accompanied by the hiring freeze, resulted in a loss of workers,” she said.
Ginette Rivard, president of the Maine State Employees Association, the union that represents state workers, agreed that state pension system changes and related incentives motivated many state employees to retire in 2011.
“That creates a shortage in the workplace and is a drain on experience and institutional memory,” she said.
The merger of the state’s agriculture and conservation departments this year prompted the elimination of some duplicative positions, Rabinowitz said.
A comprehensive list of the jobs eliminated since 2010 is “not readily available and the data would be incomplete,” Rabinowitz said.
Neither Rabinowitz or Rivard could provide hard numbers that link state job cuts and contracted services. Rivard, the state employees union president, cited intensive case management services for the Department of Health and Human Services as one example of work formerly done by state workers that’s now contracted to an outside entity. She said the Maine Department of Transportation is considering privatizing vehicle maintenance “because they can’t keep enough mechanics to service the vehicles, particularly in the winter months.”
“There is no particular tracking in the accounting system of contracted ‘workers.’ Our reports only generate expenditures for service contracts by various categories of service but there would be no relationship to the number of workers that is supporting,” Rabinowitz wrote.
A conservative group that chastised LePage in February 2011 for not including deeper state workforce cuts in his first budget proposal praised the downsizing, but said it didn’t go far enough.
“While no one wants to lose their job in these tough economic times, the decline in the number of state government workers is a necessary step in order to right-size the workforce,” Scott Moody, president of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, wrote in an email Wednesday.
In February 2011, the conservative MHPC released a report titled “Right-sizing Maine State Government’s Workforce,” which advocated for reducing state government’s workforce from 5.51 to the national average of 4.78 state workers for every 100 people employed in the private sector. An overview of the report, written by Moody, asserted that Maine could save almost $186 million annually by eliminating 3,880 state government jobs to get to the national average.
“The decline in the state workforce of 610 people since 2010 is a good down payment toward right-sizing the state workforce,” Moody wrote. “However, more needs to be done especially as the average Mainer struggles to put food on the table or heating oil in the tank.”
Rivard said the reduced state workforce negatively affects the delivery of state services. “When you have that many fewer people doing the work, it results in increased workloads,” she said.
Upheaval within the state workforce also poses recruitment and retention problems, according to Rivard. “People come in and get trained, then leave for better paying jobs in the private sector,” she said. “In essence, state government is subsidizing training for the private sector. A person who has done the job can complete a task much faster than someone who’s learning. There’s a cost to taxpayers in terms of efficiency.”
The workforce reductions reflect LePage’s commitment “to shrinking the size of government, but doing so in a thoughtful manner that protects Maine’s most vulnerable and our essential services,” Rabinowitz said. | <urn:uuid:034cc778-6dce-4a7e-a5b0-37ea0da0041d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bangordailynews.com/2012/12/07/news/lepage-pledge-to-end-bloated-state-government-remains-unmet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96554 | 1,498 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Ripple Effect – Hey mom, getting and remaining in shape is vital available for you – however your workouts might be more vital to your children. The key reason why; your babies are inexorably fascinated by follow your fitness example – for great or bad. The method that you manage your very own fitness and nutrition carries a ripple effect that spreads across all your family.
Your “personal ripple effect” could be the most powerful forces shaping your children’s physical and mental development. Take into account the following:
I am products individuals environment. We gravitate toward might know about are repeatedly subjected to. It’s actually a straightforward case of repetition. Greater there are, hear, use, eat something the harder it might be ingrained inside our psyche. The truth is, social scientists believe environmental repetition could have an impact on gene expression which enable it to literally alter your biochemistry.
The strength of suggestion is strong. The strength of repeated suggestion is practically unstoppable. Therefore you are making poor fitness and nutrition choices for your age, it’s likely your sons or daughters is going to be making identical choices once they reach that stage of their lives.
“When Junior sees Dad parked as you’re watching tube and digging in a bag of chips, it is difficult to resist exactly the same lifestyle. And chunky Mom plus chunky Dad often equals chunky kids”, said Dr. Lynette Martinan Owensboro, pediatrician.
Evidence is compelling. Your example, your behavior, your routine is being absorbed through your children at warp speed. The trick is turning it into a blessing rather than curse.
It’s rarely ahead of time or past too far to start out. Within our StrollerFit classes we have seen the impact of consistently exposing infants for their parents’ exercise examples. Since they grow, they embrace exercise being a natural, fun section of their lives. Our first generation of infant StrollerFit participants is currently 8 years. Their parents still credit the StrollerFit exercise knowledge about building the walls with their children’s active, healthy lifestyle – and his or her.
There is a chance to influence the medical and fitness of one’s children for lifelong. The fitness habits you assist them to build could keep serving them following you’re gone. I will think about no better gift to depart your household.
What exactly is undertake it? It’s actually a day-to-day process along with a combination of repeated small steps that total awesome health habits. Each time you select the apple within the chips, a stroll spanning a ride and a dynamic game over T.V. you’ve just made another donation in your baby’s lifetime health fund. | <urn:uuid:0ae8d697-dbad-4604-807d-509b10d4aeb2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tipshealth.org/your-current-private-fitness-ripple-effect/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94749 | 561 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The Fed’s other shoe dropped over the holiday weekend. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Bloomberg news dropped the Fed’s other shoe, with a reverberating thump.
It was back in August that Bloomberg revealed that the Fed gave $1.2 trillion in secret loans to the very banks that caused the financial crisis – roughly the same amount that homeowners owed to the very same banks. Sunday, Bloomberg dropped the rest of the story: that banksters made about $13 billion in profits off the Fed’s under-the-table, below-market-rate loans.
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
The “Big Six” – the banks that borrowed the most from the Fed – reads like a roll call Wall Street’s worst offenders. As Jeffrey Sachs writes, “Virtually every marquee firm on Wall Street, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, committed financial fraud.”
The Treasury Department relied on the recommendations of the Fed to decide which banks were healthy enough to get TARP money and how much, the former officials say. The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, measured by peak daily debt calculated by Bloomberg using data obtained from the central bank. Paulson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The six — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley — accounted for 63 percent of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment- services firms, the data show. By comparison, they had about half of the industry’s assets before the bailout, which lasted from August 2007 through April 2010. The daily debt figure excludes cash that banks passed along to money-market funds.
One of the biggest was Bank of America – the same bank that earned $3.1 billion last year, whose CEO (after pulling down $10 million last year) declared a “right to make a profit” by fleecing its customers a $5-out-of-a-month fee for the privilege of using their own money, and was incensed when bank customers had the nerve to complain about it.
This is the same Bank of America that:
- Made $4.5 billion from its customers by processing debit card transactions to maximize over draft charges, and only had to pay back $410 million.
- Engaged in robo-signing that resulted in fraudulent foreclosures
- “Significantly hindered” a federal investigation into its robo-signing practices.
Now we know that BOA also made some of its profits by using taxpayer loaned to it by the FDIC, under-the-table and with no strings attached.
Citigroup, another “Bix Six” borrower bank, just had its $285 million settlement with the SEC for defrauding investors thrown out by a judge, because it effectively lets Citigroup off the hook.
And then there’s Goldman Sachs. Where does one begin?
The SEC charged Goldman with fraud, and they settled the suit by admitting their marketing materials contained lies – which they called “mistakes.” They were fined by Great Britain for illegally concealing US fraud investigations. Goldman has its own gender discrimination lawsuit, too, and theirs comes complete with strippers and racist emails.
Goldman’s being sued for deceiving its clients over an offering its own employee privately (and thanks to Sen. Levin, famously) bragged was “a shitty deal.” Goldman separately paid $60 million in Massachusetts to settle charges of predatory loan practices.
After mismanagement drove Goldman into impending doom, the firm was saved by TARP funds and Federal Reserve’s Emergency Liquidity Programs. Total taxpayer aid to Goldman exceeded three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Goldman also received $13 billion in backdoor payouts through the AIG liquidation (under Tim Geithner’s supervision).
Rap Sheet: Fraudulent misrepresentation; predatory loan practices; illegal concealment of an investigation. And who know what else. They’re Goldman, man!
Shameless Quotes: “We’re very important … We do God’s work.” (Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein) “If I whet My glittering sword, and Mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to Mine enemies.” (God)
Think about it for a minute, and if you’re blood doesn’t star to boil consider that – as Leo Gerard points out – the whole point of the recently failed “supercommitte” was to find about $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.
The committee was searching for $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The Bush tax cuts, which disproportionately benefitted the rich, cost $2.8 trillion over the past decade. But the 1 percent obstructed a return to the pre-Bush-balanced-budget-era tax rates and would sneer at the mere suggestion that they pay the much higher marginal rates the wealthy accepted after World War II to settle those government debts. In fact, Republicans on the Super Committee actually proposed additional tax cuts for the rich.
More breaks for the wealthy would require slashing social safety net programs for the 99 percent — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, child nutrition. It would mean no funds to create jobs and boost the economy. The result would be less money to build highways, refurbish bridges and renovate schools.
That’s okay with the 1 percent because they feel no obligation for those social responsibilities.
So, the Fed gave banks – and gave them unconditionally – roughly the same amount of money that the supercommittee wanted to apply to the deficit by slashing programs for the 99 percent, rather than raise taxes on the one percent. And in case you’re wondering, Wall Streeters pretty much are the one percent.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters have focused attention on rising income inequality in the United States, and they are right to do so.
…Why have incomes of those in the top 1 percent soared? Their occupations provide some clues. From 1979 to 2005, nonfinancial executives, managers and supervisors accounted for 31 percent of the top 1 percent, medical professionals for 16 percent, financial professionals for 14 percent and lawyers for 8 percent.
Together, executives, managers, supervisors and financial professionals accounted for 60 percent of the increase in the top 1 percent’s income, with a widening compensation differential between those in the financial sector and those in other sectors of the economy after 1990.
Superstar athletes, actors and musicians, often portrayed among the super-rich, accounted for about 3 percent of the top 1 percent from 1979 to 2005, far less than the less glamorous people (mostly men) who lead and advise America’s businesses.
Mind you, these guys already get about $30 million a year in government welfare. Yes, welfare – on top of the $1.2 trillion in taxpayer-funded loans.
Class warfare is a politically charged term these days, from the Wall Street protests to the Capitol Hill negotiations over curtailing the nation’s debt. But a new congressional analysis, obtained by Newsweek, may fuel populist outrage by showing the extent of government subsidies that go to the wealthiest people in America.
From unemployment payments to subsidies and tax breaks on luxury items like vacation homes and yachts, Americans earning more than $1 million collect more than $30 billion in government largesse each year, according to the report assembled by Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who is so often at odds with members of both parties that colleagues call him “Dr. No.” The Internal Revenue Service provided the data showing how much money was going to the much-referenced top 1 percent.
In all, millionaires receive hefty help from Uncle Sam. The $30 billion in handouts, to put it in perspective, amounts to twice as much as the government spends on NASA, and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. On the other hand, it would only cover the cost of fighting about three months in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, eliminating them would help make a small dent in the $1.5 trillion congressional leaders are trying to find by Thanksgiving.
Given all of the above, it’s no wonder Occupy Wall Street resonated with so many people.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
Not only have the banks “made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act,” 10,000 feet above “a vat of razor blades you can never climb out of,” but with the help of our government they’ve made sure those ordinary people paid for the tightrope and the razor blades, while the banks profited from it – all with the help of what’s supposed to be our government. | <urn:uuid:0e7cdd14-80bb-4e50-a517-901bfec11453> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.ourfuture.org/20111130/The_Feds_Other_Shoe_Drops?q=blog-entry/2011114829/feds-other-shoe-drops | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961927 | 2,598 | 1.65625 | 2 |
NORTH NAPLES — A controversial dredging project cleared another hurdle this week, but Collier County officials said a plan to dredge Wiggins Pass is far from a done deal.
Instead, officials said the special treatment permit is the first of many steps the county staff needs to take before work on the project can begin.
Collier County commissioners on Tuesday unanimously approved a special treatment development permit to dredge and fill near Wiggins Pass. The pass is one of the county's main access points to the Gulf of Mexico, and without dredging, real estate values and recreation in North Naples could suffer.
The county staff wants to straighten the channel and fill in the remaining portions of the existing S-curve. County consultants have said the approach will reduce erosion and keep water moving quickly, helping to keep the pass open longer between dredging.
County leaders shot down a request to pursue a state Department of Environmental Protection permit in March, but later decided to continue attempts to get a permit.
Gary McAlpin, the county's coastal projects manager, said county government needed to issue itself the special treatment permit to show it "really considered the environment" as part of the project. With that permit in hand, the county can now show the state DEP that the project is consistent with the county's growth management plan and land development code.
McAlpin said the DEP has indicated the permit will be completed once county officials can show it is consistent with the development codes.
The county staff needs permits from both the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before it can proceed. Once the county staff has those permits, the project will undergo a peer review and will be put out to bid.
Commissioner Georgia Hiller also asked that during the review process, county officials look at how the tributaries will be affected and how staff can lower costs.
The county estimates the project will cost $1.7 million, which will be paid for using money from the tourism development tax, collected from room rentals.
This project has been years in the making. A citizens committee began meeting in 2008 to oversee the county's work toward a solution at Wiggins Pass and eventually settled on this approach.
There were no objections to the project during Tuesday's meeting, and Hiller said it is time for county officials to take the next step.
"There has been a strong, collected interest to move forward," she said. | <urn:uuid:8f2aafde-451f-4c8e-8926-c4c0ed45b435> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.swflmoms.com/news/2012/oct/10/collier-commission-wiggins-pass-straighten-dredge/?citizen=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959169 | 497 | 1.601563 | 2 |
KC Home Design
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|KCMag.com: ARTISTIC EXPRESSION|
After casually picking up a sketchbook at a softball game and penciling a portrait of the batter, Rose was swamped with requests from parents asking for drawings of their athlete kids. Pencils turned to charcoal, and charcoal evolved into large-scale oil paintings that “capture emotion and the power of the subject matter,” Rose says.
For many of his pieces, he takes somber-faced models, who are often close friends, down to the stockyards or to brick-and-mortar buildings, and the juxtaposition between a beautiful woman and the rough exteriors creates a stirring conflict on canvas or paper.
Rose has completed large-scale commissions, sold his work to prominent art collectors such as Chicagoan Howard Tullman and landed his sketches on the cover of American Artist magazine. Just when Rose felt he accomplished it all, Hollywood called.
Director Lawrence Roeck was collaborating with Clint Eastwood on a film depicting a teenager who gets into the lucrative business of art forgery, and Roeck needed an artist to create the artwork. Three months, 50 charcoal drawings and one ceiling painting later, Rose had created all the drawings and paintings used in the film “Carmel-by-the-Sea,” which is expected to debut in June.
Now, Rose paints many of his masterpieces at ARTichokes (10557 Mission Road, Leawood), where he enjoys engaging with other artists coming into their own. “I love having people watch me work because we get to dialogue and interact with the art,” he says. “I end up selling paintings that are only half done due to conversations that start because of them.”
As a former photography major at the University of Northern Iowa, Nybeck couldn’t get into a required photography class and decided to try her luck in a sculpture course. Working with wood, stone and metal got the young artist thinking in 3-D concepts, leading Nybeck to put down the camera and pick up a welder and sander.
As her college graduation neared, a professor drew her attention to the Arts Incubator program in the Crossroads Arts District. Nybeck moved to Kansas City the day after graduation and set up shop at MachineHead, a Crossroads studio owned by Dick Jobe. Her transition from one city to another spawned her first local project, “Break Away,” in Lawrence, which is symbolic of the difficulties of ungluing oneself from “the pack” and following a dream full-force, even if it means saying goodbye to the familiar and hello to the unknown.
Another source of inspiration for her work is the Chaos Theory, which manifested itself in “Constrained Chaos” in Concourse Park. The mass of metal tubing welcomes climbers and observers alike to engage with the notion that the world is a delicate balance of organization and dishevelment.
Nybeck’s career really took flight when investors for John Wayne International Airport in Orange County, California, chose her from hundreds of applicants to create a piece for the new airport. After working for more than a year, she evolved the project into a 100-foot sculpture that suspends 21 aluminum birds from the airport ceiling. The birds’ wings are translucent aviation maps similar to those still used by pilots of smaller planes. Nybeck’s inspiration for “The Flight of Ideas” was man’s first attempt to mimic the birds and the courage it took to pursue dreams of being airborne.
Although she’s often found hauling a flatbed across the country with her newest sculpture in tow, Nybeck still returns to the roots she’s developed in the Crossroads. “I feel so blessed to have the mentors and teachers here,” she says. “There’s a group of artists here that are actively seeking, doing and engaging, and this place has such a rich artistic culture.”
His work in the semi-abstract, figurative realm doesn’t struggle for a definition. “I don’t really want to define my work as an –ism,” Wright says. “Expressionism, impressionism, realism—I like to just do my work and see what happens.” His paintings are composed with muted colors, and each subject creates ambiguity between itself and the background. “I like things to pop out at the viewer, but I always try to leave it loose and unrefined so it leaves room for viewers to read into,” Wright says.
From his attic studio in his Midtown home, Wright begins most of his work with a charcoal drawing he’s fashioned from a session with a live model. As he transitions to a painting medium, he relishes the challenge of recreating the piece in a different light or posture, creating a quasi form of the muse.
As the son of a father who championed the do-it-yourself way of life, Wright grew up learning how to tinker with gadgets and cars. After his dad passed away 10 years ago, Wright went back to the rusted cars they worked on together for projects he sees as a tribute to him. With a cutting torch, Auto-Body Bondo, spray paint and a grinder, Wright produced several pieces on steel hoods of the clunkers they used to fix up. “There’s something about working with your hands and cars that came from him, and I wanted to take what I knew because of my father and apply it to my work,” Wright says.
Staunch followers and new fans of Wright’s work regularly head to the Crossroads First Friday events or the Westport and Prairie Village art shows. He also has pieces for sale at Kansas City Artists Venue in Crown Center, and though the philanthropic angle of the shop has waned, Wright still loves to donate his time and work to other local organizations, such as the Medical Missions annual art auction last month.
Click here for more photos. | <urn:uuid:659f5c58-fdf7-400f-b9f0-67e9fbe23405> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kcmag.com/home-design/kcm-home-design/6329-kcmagcom-pent-up-party | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965478 | 1,287 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Working Conditions / Sweatshops
Articles and Resources
Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at: Aug 14, 2012 Factory owners: Federal prisoners stealing our business
QUOTE: Unicor is a government-run enterprise that employs over 13,000 inmates -- at wages as low as 23 cents an hour -- to make goods for the Pentagon and other federal agencies....If Unicor wants a contract, it gets it.
CNN/Money Magazine Mar 18, 2012 Apple and the Daisey affair
QUOTE: The show, which cast a harsh light on the working conditions in the Chinese factories....We now know, thanks to follow-up reporting by Rob Schmitz at American Public Media's Marketplace, that Daisey's monologue -- as he reluctantly admits -- was a piece of theater, not a factual report.
CNN (Cable News Network) Jan 25, 2012 In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
QUOTE: workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems....More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law.
New York Times Oct 07, 2011 What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs
QUOTE: In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.
Gawker Oct 04, 2011 Tracking factory slaves across Asia
QUOTE: We traveled to Cambodia planning to tell the story of an escape from modern-day slave labor but what we found were tales of more women trapped in debt-bondage in Malaysia. In Cambodia, we found the women who had escaped, but we also learned about dozens of other workers stuck in similar circumstances, unable to get home unless they paid off their "debt" to a recruitment agency.
CNN (Cable News Network) Aug 24, 2011 America’s Sweatshop Diplomacy (Op-Ed)
QUOTE: the J-1 visa Summer Work Study program, which allows foreign students to work in the United States for a few months, is meant to promote “lasting and meaningful relationships” between the students and Americans....Hershey’s business strategy is a microcosm of the downsizing and subcontracting that so many American companies have pursued during the past few decades in search of ever cheaper labor.
New York Times Jun 29, 2011 Mine Owners Misled Inspectors, Investigators Say
QUOTE: Federal investigators said Wednesday that Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion last year, misled government inspectors by keeping accounts of hazardous conditions out of official record books where inspectors would see them.
New York Times Jun 23, 2011 Why SEO Disgusts Me
QUOTE: I recently had a discussion with the CEO of a leading Midwest search firm who described their common practice of creating fake accounts to pump client links into the comment section of blog posts and forums....I’m concerned when it gets difficult to compete in the industry without engaging in fraudulent behavior.
WebProNews Apr 18, 2011 Victims break chains of slavery
QUOTE: A vast network of workers who are lured from Bolivia to Argentina on empty promises… Most endure long and brutal journeys before being sent to work in clandestine clothing factories under oppressive conditions…
CNN (Cable News Network) Jun 18, 2010 Supreme Court rules on employer monitoring of cellphone, computer conversations
QUOTE: A hesitant Supreme Court waded cautiously into a question that arises daily in workplaces and offices across the country: whether employers have the right to look over the shoulders of workers who use company computers and cellphones for personal communication. In the first ruling of its kind, the justices said they do, as long as there is a "legitimate work-related purpose" to monitor them.
Washington Post May 27, 2010 Safety Rules Can’t Keep Up With Biotech Industry
QUOTE: the estimated 232,000 employees in the nation’s most sophisticated biotechnology labs work amid imponderable hazards. And some critics say the modern biolab often has fewer federal safety regulations than a typical blue-collar factory.
New York Times May 26, 2010 Electronics Maker Promises Review After Suicides
QUOTE: “Foxconn’s production line system is designed so well that no worker will rest even one second during work; they make sure you’re always busy for every second,” says Li Qiang, executive director of the China Labor Watch, a New York-based labor rights group. “Foxconn only values the enterprise benefits but totally ignores the social benefits.” Those claims have been bolstered in recent weeks by some of China’s state-run newspapers, which have published a series of sensational reports about the suicides, alongside exposés detailing what they claim are the harsh conditions inside Foxconn factories.
New York Times May 08, 2010 For BP, a History of Spills and Safety Lapses
QUOTE: After BP’s Texas City, Tex., refinery blew up in 2005...The next year, when a badly maintained oil pipeline ruptured and spilled 200,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska’s North Slope...Despite those repeated promises to reform, BP continues to lag other oil companies when it comes to safety...
New York Times Apr 19, 2010 Justices Get Personal Over Privacy of Messages
QUOTE: The question in a case argued Monday in the Supreme Court sounded both irresistible and important: Did a California police department violate the Constitution by reading sexually explicit text messages sent by an officer on a department-issued pager?
New York Times Apr 10, 2010 Mines avoid crackdowns by challenging safety citations
QUOTE: By contesting the citations, the 32 mines were able to avoid falling into a "potential pattern of violation" category, which would have brought closer scrutiny and moved regulators a step closer to the ability to restrict or shut down operations.
Washington Post Mar 24, 2010 New software lets businesses track employees' Facebook, Twitter activity
QUOTE: Facebook and Twitter users should probably just assume that what they post publicly is being monitored by their employer. If your privacy settings don't limit content to friends only, anyone can search Google or the social networking sites themselves to see what you're writing. Granted, that can be a tedious process that an employer may not want to bother with -- but now it's becoming easier for businesses to monitor social networking activity.
InfoWorld Dec 03, 2009 An Indian Village Sees the Downside of Carbon Trading Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1945243,00.html#ixzz0Ykz1f6GX
QUOTE: The controversy in Toranagallu [India} raises questions about the effectiveness of CDM [Clean Development Mechanism] projects and the wisdom of relying on the carbon market to combat climate change.
Time Magazine Nov 22, 2009 In Ethiopia, farmland is hot property
QUOTE: The scale and pace of the land scramble has alarmed policy makers and others concerned about its implications for food security in countries such as Ethiopia...
Washington Post Nov 16, 2009 Work-Related Injuries Underreported
QUOTE: Employers and workers routinely underreport work-related injuries and illnesses, calling into question the accuracy of nationwide data that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration compiles each year, the Government Accountability Office said Monday.
New York Times Oct 19, 2009 Which Side Is Government On? Millions of contract workers whose salaries are ultimately paid by government live in poverty. Uncle Sam should demand high standards, not pay as little as possible.
QUOTE: In 2007 the Labor Department found in 80 percent of its SCA [Service Contract Act]investigations that employers [contracted by the federal government] underpaid wages or benefits or both. And wages are so low in many service jobs, especially where few workers belong to unions, that prevailing wages are often only sub-poverty wages.
American Prospect Oct 08, 2009 Letterman didn't violate his company's harassment policy: The scandal points to a gray area in office policies. Many businesses have yet to clarify guidelines for workplace relationships.
QUOTE: Americans generally say it's inappropriate for someone to enter sexual relationships with office subordinates... But such actions aren't necessarily grounds for discipline, although they can cause deep concern within organizations.
Christian Science Monitor Oct 02, 2009 Dark and Bitter: Food workers increasingly exist in a legal limbo with no protections for wages, benefits, job security, or life and limb. Why are employers like Hershey off the hook?
QUOTE: In this new world, workers are paid only when needed. There are no more messy layoffs -- merely the end of an assignment. All the risks are shifted to workers. Staffing agencies often tout their services as giving employees flexibility and variety, but [Nik] Theodore's research shows they are worse off by many measures.
American Prospect Oct 01, 2009 America's High-Tech Sweatshops: U.S. companies may be contributing unwittingly to the exploitation of workers imported from India and elsewhere by tech-services outfits
QUOTE: While many [tech-service] outfits operate legally and provide high-quality talent, there is growing evidence that others violate U.S. laws and mistreat their recruits.
BusinessWeek Sep 27, 2009 Truckers Insist on Keeping Computers in the Cab: Driven to Distraction
QUOTE: The issues raised by truckers [on in-cab computers] show the challenges facing advocates for tougher distracted-driving laws, given that so many Americans have grown accustomed to talking and texting behind the wheel.
New York Times Sep 26, 2009 Mandatory Flu Shots Hit Resistance: Many Health-Care Workers Required to Get Vaccines
QUOTE: With the H1N1 pandemic spreading rapidly, hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, orderlies and other U.S. health-care workers for the first time are being required to get flu shots, drawing praise from many public-health authorities but condemnation from some employees, unions and other critics who object to mandatory vaccination.
Washington Post Sep 10, 2009 Big Brother bosses: Employers spying on staff
QUOTE: Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.
Economist Sep 04, 2009 Working Without Laws
QUOTE: For the past thirty years, the gospel of lean and mean has reordered the world of work, setting off a race to the bottom in which employers circumvent and evade standards that once seemed inviolate. That race has now taken us to a logical low point: many employers are ignoring workplace laws altogether.
Nation Aug 25, 2009 Unchain the Office Computers! Why corporate IT should let us browse any way we want.
QUOTE: So why not lock down workplace computers? Here's why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively.
Slate Aug 24, 2009 Wyoming split over worker safety: It's the second time lawmakers are weighing measures to decrease the state's high rate of job fatalities, especially in the oil fields.
QUOTE: For the last several years, Wyoming has outpaced the rest of the country in occupational fatalities.
Los Angeles Times Aug 21, 2009 The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life (Fatal Flights A Perilous Rush to Profit
QUOTE: Yet as crashes and deaths have mounted [in medical helicopter accidents], top executives at the Federal Aviation Administration and its parent agency, the U.S. Transportation Department, have acted as partners with the industry, issuing reams of voluntary safety advisories with little follow-up. The FAA has sent poorly trained inspectors to monitor operators and used fines and penalties as only a last resort.
Washington Post Aug 18, 2009 Nanoparticle safety in doubt: Lung damage in Chinese factory workers sparks health fears.
QUOTE: Claims that seven Chinese factory workers developed severe lung damage from inhaling nanoparticles are stoking the debate over the environmental-health effects of nanotechnology.
Nature Aug 17, 2009 Scientists analyze blood to test for toxic airplane air exposure
QUOTE: Results of [Clement] Furlong's research could expand recognition of what a select group of researchers believes is a largely unrecognized risk of flying: the chance that poisonous fumes enter the cabin.
CNN (Cable News Network) Aug 10, 2009 Off the clock? Hyperconnected workers sue employers
QUOTE: he line between work and play is growing increasingly muddy thanks to technology, and new lawsuits are popping up to push back on employers to shell out for the free labor.
Ars Technica Aug 09, 2009 French workers pull few punches in fight to keep jobs
QUOTE: As jobs are lost, and factories close because of the global financial crisis, French workers have resorted to threatening management with violence; forcefully holding their bosses on company grounds; blocking and burning property in factories; and, in one instance, ransacking police headquarters.
Los Angeles Times Aug 08, 2009 Fatal Sunshine: The Plight of California's Farm Workers
QUOTE: Last week, the ACLU and the blue-chip law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson sued California's occupational-health and safety agency... According to the lawsuit "large numbers of agricultural employers fail utterly to provide basic access to water and shade for their employees" and, as a result, hundreds suffer heat-related illnesses and hospitalizations — or worse — each year .
Time Magazine Aug 07, 2009 UPS Employees Say They Were Forced to Lobby Against FedEx
QUOTE: In an increasingly bitter Washington battle between the nation's two largest shipping companies, some unionized UPS workers say they are being forced to write letters to their lawmakers in support of more stringent labor rules for arch rival FedEx.
Washington Post Aug 05, 2009 L.A. lawyer accused of fraud in pesticide litigation (Column One)
QUOTE: Here[Nicaragua], [the chemical] DBCP is more than a pesticide. It is a political movement. The forces of poverty and corruption cloud the most basic facts surrounding the claims. The truth that can be established is one that [Judge Victoria] Chaney alluded to in her ruling: If Nicaraguans truly were injured by DBCP a generation ago, what has happened since makes identifying the victims nearly impossible.
Los Angeles Times Aug 04, 2009 More than half of ER nurses have been assaulted on job
QUOTE: More than half of nurses who work in emergency departments report they've been physically assaulted on the job...
USA TODAY Jul 15, 2009 Labor issues in China continue to plague Apple and others
QUOTE: A new investigation into Chinese labor law disputes reveals that Apple still isn't immune to associations with manufacturing partners that aren't in compliance with laws designed to improve labor conditions for Chinese workers.
Ars Technica Jul 06, 2009 How to Stop Fraud: The Madoff and Stanford cases may grab the headlines, but the temptation of fraud appears at every corporate level
QUOTE: It doesn't take a high-profile, multibillion-dollar scandal to rock an enterprise.
Jun 24, 2009 In the Andes, a Toxic Site Also Provides a Livelihood
QUOTE: But Mr. [Ira] Rennert’s privately held industrial empire includes the smelter with a towering smokestack that overlooks Ms. [Claudia] Albino’s home, so the health and economic fate of her and thousands of others here rest on the corporate maneuvers he is carrying out.
New York Times Jun 16, 2009 Economic downturn fuels human trafficking: Twelve more countries are on the US watch list this year for failing to combat trafficking, as the recession makes workers vulnerable to exploitation.
QUOTE: The economic downturn is adding a new dimension to the global problem of human trafficking... as workers desperate for income accept increasingly onerous conditions or fall prey to international cheap-labor rings.
Christian Science Monitor Apr 24, 2009 Nigeria: The Hidden Cost of Corruption: Who are the biggest victims of widespread bribery?
QUOTE: the Berlin-based group Transparency International has consistently ranked Nigeria among the world's most corrupt countries.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Feb 10, 2009 The price of saying 'no' at work
QUOTE: Indeed, a decade or two out, halfway up the career ladder or higher, a yes-yes-yes woman will discover that she wants to start saying no sometimes. But can she? Can any woman in a fast-paced, high-powered career ever stop saying yes -- without self-destructing?
CNN (Cable News Network) Jan 09, 2009 Government fights slave labor in Brazil
QUOTE: A recruiter known as a "gato," or cat, plumbs the slums and other poor areas of the vast country and gets people to agree to jobs in distant places. Once separated from home and family, workers are vulnerable to all sorts of abuses, such as being told they owe money for transportation, food, housing and other services. "This is known as debt bondage, which also fits official definitions of slavery,"...
CNN (Cable News Network) Dec 29, 2008 Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction
QUOTE: Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.
Washington Post Dec 26, 2008 Bits: Naughtiest and Nicest C.E.O.’s
QUOTE: Glassdoor.com, a site that lets employees anonymously review their employers and share salary information, is out with a list of the naughtiest and nicest chief executives of 2008, based on those reviews.
New York Times Dec 09, 2008 Accountability? Check. Authority? Not so much.
QUOTE: I have complete accountability for the company's network infrastructure and its data, but no authority over any of these...The employees treat their work computers as their own personal computers.
InfoWorld Sep 16, 2008 Code Aims to Aid Nurses: Group Says Foreign Hires Need Protection
QUOTE: A coalition of health-care groups this month unveiled a code of ethics it hopes will protect nurses from other countries from abusive employment practices when they take jobs in the United States.
Washington Post Aug 03, 2008 Work at Home? Your Employer May Be Watching (WORK & FAMILY)
QUOTE: In a budding trend some employment experts say is invasive, companies are stepping up electronic monitoring and oversight of tens of thousands of home-based independent contractors. They're taking photos of workers' computer screens at random, counting keystrokes and mouse clicks and snapping photos of them at their computers. They're plying sophisticated technology to instantaneously detect anger, raised voices or children crying in the background on workers' home-office calls. Others are using Darwinian routing systems that keep calls coming so fast workers have no time to go to the bathroom.
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Tuesday’s revelation that W. Mark Felt, the former number two man at the FBI, was the anonymous source known as Deep Throat, who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unravel the Watergate scandal in the pages of the Washington Post 30 years ago should be seen as an important reminder that even the leader of the free world can be devious, corrupt and dishonest.
Some things never change.
The parallels between the Bush and Nixon administrations are eerily familiar. Both bullied the press, were/are highly secretive, obsessed over leaks, engage(d) in massive cover-ups and quickly branded aides as disloyal if they dared to raise questions about the President’s policies.
The Washington Post, the very paper that is credited with forcing Nixon’s resignation, summed it up perfectly in a Nov. 25, 2003 story on the similarities between the two administrations.
“Bush… structures his White House much as Nixon did. Nixon governed largely with four other men: Henry A. Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. This is not unlike the "iron triangle" of aides who led Bush's campaign and the handful of underlings now -- Cheney, chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and communications director Dan Bartlett -- who are in on most top decisions. Nixon essentially ended the tradition of powerful Cabinets in favor of a few powerful White House aides -- a model Bush has followed.”
“The most striking similarity is in the area of secrecy and what Nixon staffers called "managing the news." Nixon created the White House Office of Communications, the office that has become the center of Bush's vaunted "message discipline."
Unfortunately, neither the Washington Post nor any other mainstream newspaper or magazine in this country will ever be credited with exposing another Watergate. For one, mainstream reporters just don’t have the balls to put their careers on the line to sniff around, ask tough questions, and, perhaps, find sources like W. Mark Felt. Not even Woodward has the muckraking qualities of what Woodward used to have. Worse, editors’ at large papers don’t encourage reporters to practice that kind of reporting anymore because they don’t want to rock the boat or risk losing their jobs or be seen as liberal and therefore become the ire of the blogoshpere.
The sad reality these days, however, is that it takes a scandal such as a president receiving oral sex in the Oval Office by an intern to qualify for above the fold headlines and impeachment. Leading the country into a war under false pretenses? Sorry, not juicy enough.
The Downing Street memo that was unearthed by the Times of London last month should have been the smoking gun that finally resulted in Bush being brought up on High Crimes and Misdemeanor charges under the United States Constitution’s impeachment clause. The memo was written a full eight months before the U.S. led invasion in Iraq by Matthew Rycroft, a British national security official, based on notes he took during a July 2002 meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisers, including Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service who had recently visited the White House to meet with Bush administration officials.
Among other things, the memo said:
· Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route.... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. ...
· It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.
These are some of the public statements about Iraq that President Bush made after Rycroft revealed in the July 2002 memo that Bush wanted to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein and that he would say that Iraq had a massive weapons arsenal, was a threat to the U.S. and its neighbors in the Middle East in order to build public support for a case for war:
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
(Radio Address, October 5, 2002)
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." (Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, October 7, 2002).
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." (State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003).
Despite the fact that the memo was splashed across the front pages of dozens of international newspapers, it was relegated to the back pages—or not covered at all—in U.S. papers.
The memo's authenticity has never been called into question by either the Bush administration or Tony Blair's office.
"But the potentially explosive revelation has proven to be something of a dud in the United States," the Chicago Tribune said in a May 17 story.
“The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war,” the Tribune said. “All of this has contributed to something less than a robust discussion of a memo that would seem to bolster the strongest assertions of the war's critics.”
How sad for the more than 1,400 soldiers and the tens of thousands of innocent civilians who died in the Iraq war and the thousands more who will no doubt perish as this bogus and unjust war rages on. How much more evidence do we need to pile on in order for those gutless Democrats and those fanatical Republicans in Congress and the Senate to hold this president accountable for either war crimes or defrauding the United States?
One of the key figures during Watergate made a compelling case a couple of years ago for impeachment if President Bush intentionally misled Congress and the public into backing a war against Iraq.
"To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," wrote John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s former counsel, in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com. "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution’s impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."
Dean said that statements made by presidents that pertain to national security issues are supposed to be held to a higher standard of truthfulness.
"A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson’s distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon’s false statements about Watergate forced his resignation."
Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in early 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold’s website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.
© 2005 Jason Leopold | <urn:uuid:b6bffe71-fc3a-4dbd-96bd-d86f672c074f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0601-29.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964704 | 1,652 | 1.773438 | 2 |
2.6-6 Multiple Defendants
Revised to December 1, 2007
There are <insert number of defendants> defendants on trial here. Although the defendants are being tried together, you must consider the case against each separately. That is, your findings in one case do not in themselves establish a basis for similar findings in the other case[s]. Each defendant is to be considered as if (he/she) were on trial alone for the offense or offenses for which (he/she) stands charged. You will be required, therefore, to render a verdict upon each defendant separately. The charges against each defendant are contained in different counts. Each count charges a separate crime joined for the convenience of the trial in one information. You must consider each count separately and decide whether or not the state has proved each of the elements of that crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
I remind you that during the course of the trial certain evidence of <describe evidence> was admitted for you to consider in the case of <insert name of defendant>, but you were instructed not to consider this particular evidence in connection with the charges against the other defendant[s]. Your verdict for each defendant must be based solely on the evidence that was admitted for your consideration with respect to that particular defendant. Where evidence was admitted with respect to one defendant and not the other[s], you must consider it only with regard to the appropriate defendant and disregard it as to the other[s]. Remember that you will be required to return a separate verdict for each count.
See generally State v. Booth, 250 Conn. 611, 632-33 (1999), cert. denied, 529 U.S. 106, 120 S. Ct. 156, 146 L. Ed. 2d 47 (2000) (trial court instructed the jury to "decide the case against each of these three defendants separately").
If there are more than two
defendants, a longer instruction may be necessary. See State v. Henry,
72 Conn. App. 640, cert. denied, 262 Conn. 917 (2002). | <urn:uuid:13a64114-b0ff-4226-a336-55ccc877d005> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jud.ct.gov/JI/criminal/part2/2.6-6.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94419 | 422 | 1.84375 | 2 |
How do writers get the creative juices flowing? I once went on a cable television programme on the occasion of the publication of a new book and, following the recording, the enthusiastic director came over to me and suggested that for my next book he'd like to come to my home and film me in the process of writing. I quickly pointed out this would be very boring indeed, aside from the fact that much of my inspiration in front of a blank screen normally came from swigging at a two-litre bottle of coke, munching chocolate, picking my nose and/or scratching my scalp or other parts. Not exactly a must-see.
Many macho American authors in the Hemingway, Mailer or James Crumley mould, as well as my good friend Michael Moorcock in his younger heyday as a pulp hack, would of course fuel the engine with generous sips of whisky which would put my prodigious consumption of cola to shame.
But a recent article in The 3rd Degree, the newsletter of the Mystery Writers of America, offers a whole new perspective on the creative process and its artificial stimulants. No, drugs don't come into it: exercise is apparently the new absinthe. Scientists at Rhode Island College conducted a study on 60 subjects and concluded that aerobic exercise had a positive effect on creativity, both immediately afterwards and again several hours later (immediate and residual effects, they called it). Which reminded me of the fact that Dickens was known to wander through London at night, plotting stories in his head and that Stephen King has stated in On Writing that he finds much necessary stimulation from long, lonely walks on country roads (which of course also occasioned the famous accident that incapacitated him for several years and from which he has never fully recovered).
Crime writer Michael Koryta whose main character, like him, works out in a gym, checked out the theory on other authors he came across. Recent Edgar-winner Theresa Schwegel confessed to be a regular runner and that she absolutely saw a tangible effect of exercise on her writing. Other award winners like Steve Hamilton and Laura Lippman said likewise. According to Lippman, "I haven't gone more than 72 hours without some kind of exercise since 1986, when I severed my toe and had to be on crutches for a week ... I guess I should admit up front that I don't know a lot about brain chemistry, so I can't say with certainty that there is a connection. But I do think that writing requires stamina and that training helps to do that. It takes a certain mental toughness to persevere through a hard workout or a bad day of writing. The experience of the former informs the latter."
Lippman claims a sharper mind in the mornings, which is when she does most of her writing. "I exercise in mid-afternoon, when my brain is at its lowest ebb." Koryta, however, claims the opposite works best for him: "The routine I find myself happiest with is when I exercise before writing", whereas Schwegel says "I always write better after a workout. Getting more blood to the head, maybe."
The Rhode Island researchers concluded their study thus: "Instances of aerobic exercise significantly impacted the creative process of the participants and these effects were shown to endure over a two-hour period, This not only supports the proposition that aerobic exercise may positively impact creative potential and adds to the literature in doing so, but introduces a new element in the discussion of exercise and creativity, that of residual effects."
Koryta summarises differently: "Maybe there is really some science behind it, maybe there is a body-in-motion=brain-in-motion tie. Or maybe we simply love to be on our feet because that keeps us from having our asses in the chair at the desk where they belong".
Should I switch from drinking cola to exercising? I suppose it would do my waistline no harm, but would I write better or more? | <urn:uuid:9905a15e-3cd4-465f-9a30-962e2b6d90aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/nov/26/averyliteralkindofcreativ | 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 | 0.97471 | 815 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The ‘Features & Analysis’ section of the Middle East page of the BBC News website included an item by the BBC Jerusalem Bureau’s Wyre Davies on May 12th entitled “Israel prepares for the worst as tensions over Syria grow“.
In that piece, readers once again see the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hizballah described in cartoonish terms as Israel’s “arch-enemy in southern Lebanon” and once again the writer manages to produce an entire article based around the subject of Israeli responses to weapons transfers to Hizballah via Syria without explaining the all-important underlying UN Security Council resolution 1701.
Davies’ main theme in this feature is that Israel is preparing itself for another round of conflict with Hizballah – an assertion which will not be news to anyone with even a basic familiarity with the Middle East.
“It is obvious as well, that not just the municipality of Haifa but the Israeli government and the higher echelons of the army are getting ready for the possibility if not the probability of another conflict in the north.”
“Driving out of Haifa, newly installed batteries of the much vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile defence system are visible in fields to the north of the city.
After the system was successfully used in last year’s Gaza conflict, it should provide added security for Haifa and other northern towns in the event of another conflict, even though there is still a debate about how effective the system – developed in Israel and financed by the United States – actually is.”
Later on in the article comes this rather curious statement:
“Although all of the intelligence and military assessments concur that the greatest immediate threat to Israel still comes from the north and Hezbollah, in recent weeks and months there has also been a great deal of concern and attention focused on the eastern frontier.”
That analysis suggests that Davies has not entirely grasped the fact that whilst Hizballah’s traditional stomping ground is indeed southern Lebanon (to the north of Israel), its record of activity abroad and its involvement in the Syrian civil war indicate that it is by no means confined to that geographical location. The Lebanese website Naharnet reported earlier in the week that Hizballah has been involved in the recent fierce fighting in the Dara’a area in southern Syria – close to the borders with both Jordan and Israel – and other reports suggest that the terror organisation’s presence in that region has, with Iranian prompting, received Bashar Assad’s blessing.
Meanwhile, on the morning of May 15th, mortars from Syria landed in the area of Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights, with the fire later being claimed by an Islamist group operating in Syria. On the same day a New Zealander serving with UNTSO was abducted from an observation post in the Golan, apparently together with two others, but released after a few hours. In southern Lebanon a UNIFIL post was overrun with three soldiers also briefly kidnapped and equipment and ammunition stolen. None of the above incidents has so far been reported by the BBC. (Also unreported was missile fire on the same day on Israel’s southern area of Eshkol.)
The repeated incidents of abductions of UN personnel in the Golan Heights have already had a detrimental effect upon peace-keeping activities along that border (one imagines much to the delight – if not intent – of the assorted Islamist groups located in the area) and an alleged recent EU statement suggests that the same could apply to the Lebanese – Israeli frontier. Ironically, during a visit to Lebanon on May 13th, the UN Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping saw fit to whitewash the long-standing failure of his organisation to implement UN SC 1701 which has led to the current situation in which Hizballah is able to threaten regional stability on several fronts.
“In his remarks, Mr. Ladsous commended Israel and Lebanon for their continued commitment to the cessation of hostilities and the implementation of Security Council resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hizbollah, and calls for respect for the Blue Line, the disarming of all militias in Lebanon, and an end to arms smuggling in the area.”
Towards the end of Davies’ article we find another bizarre statement:
“Israel’s response to the fighting and upheaval on the Syrian side of the plateau has been spectacular if controversial.
A massive new 3m (10ft) high fence has been built in almost no time along the entire length of the de-facto border and Israel’s military presence has been visibly stepped up in the region.”
What exactly Davies thinks is “spectacular” or “controversial” about replacing a forty year-old rusty fence with a new one in light of the appearance of armed Al Qaeda-affiliated groups on its other side is – to this writer at least – something of a mystery.
And for as long as the BBC continues with its practice of selective reporting of events on Israel’s northern and eastern borders – as well as those on its southern one with the Gaza Strip – BBC audiences will also remain mystified with regard to the dynamics at work in cooking up the next round of conflict – from whichever direction it may come. | <urn:uuid:587214a2-357e-4549-bbee-c1b6bd26829a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bbcwatch.org/tag/hizballah/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962913 | 1,111 | 1.726563 | 2 |
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Costa Rica's Peaceful Reputation At Risk From Cartels
Costa Rica is Central America's most stable democracy, a peaceful country that abolished its army in 1948 and now draws nearly a million U.S. tourists a year to its national parks and beaches. But it's also right in the middle of the world's most lucrative cocaine trafficking corridor.
As Mexican drug cartels push deeper into Central America, they've cast a dark shadow over Costa Rica's idyllic green image.
Jim Damalas runs a tourist resort that taps into the green reputation. One of 60,000 or so U.S. expatriates living in Costa Rica, Damalas left a career in the Los Angeles advertising business to build an award-winning hotel outside the tiny town of Quepos, with sweeping views of the Pacific and its own rainforest preserve.
The resort, called Si Como No, has every sort of green certification you can imagine, even tree bridges for the local monkeys to swing safely across the road. All of this — and Costa Rica's entire tourism-dependent economy — has been possible largely because of its reputation as a safe place that isn't like the rest of Central America.
"People say in Costa Rica God's always watching over us. We don't have a lot of hurricanes, we don't have devastating earthquakes, we don't have devastating poverty; instead of having tanks and military we have teachers and schools," Damalas says.
But because there isn't a military and the police force has never had to be militarized, he says, "we are very vulnerable."
An Unprecedented 'Menace'
Recent polls show that crime and security are the leading public concern now in this country of 4.6 million people. The same laid-back attitude and openness to outsiders that draws tourists has also attracted Mexican cartels and their Colombia cocaine suppliers, who warehouse drug loads here and move them up the coastlines or overland toward the U.S.
Local contacts are increasingly paid in raw product for their logistical help, so drug use has jumped, especially for crack cocaine, and Costa Rica's homicide rate has nearly doubled since 2004.
"I do not remember in our whole history a menace [like] this menace with organized crime," says Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica's first female president.
Chinchilla says that Costa Rica's view of itself as a peaceful, law-abiding country in a poor, violent region is now being put to the test by a threat far greater than even the conflicts of the Cold War era.
"During the 80s, you had forces fighting in the region, but they have a structure, they have an ideology, they were fighting for different ways of conducting the society — the problem was a political problem," Chinchilla says. "This has to do with the survival of the institutions. It doesn't matter if it is from the left or the right, it doesn't matter what kind of ideology your government has."
Authorities here say recent arrests of police officers on corruption charges show the institutions are standing up to the power of the cartels, but Chinchilla and others acknowledge the fight is only beginning.
For the United States there is also a great deal at stake here, as Washington's counter-drug role in the region expands. Costa Rica is still nowhere near as violent as Honduras or El Salvador, where the murder rate is more than six times higher, but there is a sense that the cartels' criminal expansion has to be checked somewhere.
Costa Rican Coast Guard Lieutenant Rodolfo Murillo unfurls a map of the country and its long, jagged Pacific coast. The walls are still bare at the agency's brand-new Pacific headquarters at Puerto Caldera, built with $3 million in U.S. funding.
With the decline of local fisheries and new catch restrictions, Murillo says the fisherman have turned to running million-dollar coke packages for the cartels. They pay well, he says, explaining how locals bring drug loads to shore or deliver gasoline out to sea for traffickers zooming north from Colombia in high-powered speed boats.
The new docks here creaking in the waves have two berths for U.S.-donated interceptor boats designed to chase down the smugglers. The Coast Guard hasn't had any on the Pacific until now.
But already officials say the smugglers are changing tactics to stay two steps ahead of authorities. They're hiding cocaine deep in the wells of fishing trawlers and building sophisticated semi-submersibles that cruise undetected far out at sea, well beyond the range of the new boats.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. | <urn:uuid:e77d753d-7155-421f-b689-75e609608ff2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kcur.org/post/costa-ricas-peaceful-reputation-risk-cartels | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953989 | 1,043 | 1.835938 | 2 |
- Special Sections
The school shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, the second deadliest shooting at a school and the most ever at an elementary school, prompted areas school officials and students to reflect on safety here.
Area school officials and students were unanimous in their sadness over the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, but they remarked they believe things are safe at their respective schools.
“I just can’t imagine someone doing that,” Wapakoneta High School junior Logan Martin said. “It is hard to imagine.”
However, Martin said he believes as much as possible is done to keep students safe at his school.
“I don’t feel like there is any danger here,” Martin said. “I feel safe here.”
Junior Wyatt Harrison echoed that response, which seemed to be the consensus.
“We had an incident here my freshman year, when someone had a weapon,” Harrison said. “We were immediately on lockdown and the problem was handled. I trust the teachers here and I trust the school system. I am confident that we are safe here.”
Harrison, who returned from a field trip midday through school, said that was when he first learned of the shooting.
“It makes you feel so helpless,” Harrison said. “You want to help and it is so far away. The fact that it was a elementary school just breaks my heart.”
Wapakoneta Schools Superintendent Keith Horner said seeing the event that unfolded Friday is a school administrator’s worst nightmare.
“It’s very horrible,” Horner said. “My heart goes out to those folks.”
Most school buildings constructed more recently have stricter safety guidelines and it is harder to get in the school. Visitors typically have to pass through a locked entry to be buzzed in to the office.
Visitors must then be identified to get a pass into the rest of the school. Both Wapakoneta and Waynesfield-Goshen have that practice for entries into their schools.
“We do our best to try and monitor everyone that comes in the building,” Horner said. “We try to be alert all of the time.”
Even with the school locked down, there are brief periods when security can be at a weaker point, mainly during the morning when kids are coming to school or in the afternoon when they are leaving. Horner said school employees are placed at strategic points during these times to monitor the situation.
“Teachers are assigned to various locations,” Horner said. “It isn’t 100 percent foolproof. You have to get 2,000 kids in and out of the school, but we take safety very seriously.”
Horner said safety meetings are held routinely every other week to discuss all safety concerns, from salting sidewalks to finding areas where it is possible to come in unmonitored.
“Its always on our mind,” Horner said.
Waynesfield-Goshen Local Schools Superintendent Chris Pfister said modern design goes a long way in helping kids remain safe.
“The design of newer buildings is very helpful,” Pfister said. “Students can only go in one door and out one door.”
The doors open at the school promptly at 7:50 a.m. During release, faculty and other employees are in the hall monitoring students as they leave the school.
Pfister said employees also have a sole entry in the back of the school, and must have a pass key to get in.
Both schools also have crisis management plans that are put in place immediately shall an incident take place.
“You have to wonder what is wrong with some people,” Pfister said. “It is unfortunate, very sad.”
Botkins Local Schools currently is housed in an older building, but designs for the new school set for groundbreaking in April of next year has more stringent safety precautions designed into the building. Visitors at that school will also have to get clearance through the office before gaining access to the building. In the meantime, the school showed the ability to react fast as the school was locked down earlier this year and all students were contained quickly to their rooms. The village police chief was quickly able to resolve the matter.
Acting Ohio Board of Education Superintendent Michael Sawyers released a statement offering sympathy and prayers to Sandy Hook.
“Our hearts ache for you,” Sawyers said in the release. “Ohio, too, has known the horror of a recent school shooting and the senseless tragedy reminds us that we must all work together as a nation to make schools the safe places they should be.”
In light of the incident, Sawyers reminded local boards of education that a school safety plan must be adopted for each building in the school district as mandated by Ohio law. Copies of the plans must be filed with local law enforcement, the fire department, and the Attorney General’s office.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine offered the following words in regards of the incident.
“First and foremost, Fran and I are praying for the families affected by the horrible and unspeakable tragedy which occurred today in Connecticut,” DeWine said. “After the shooting that occurred earlier this year in Chardon, and several times since, I urged schools around Ohio who had not yet filed school safety plans to do so.
“These plans are critical for first responders to respond to incidents at school facilities,” he said. “I am pleased to report that in response to our most recent call for updated plans, over 1,000 Ohio schools filed plans with our office. However, there are still 145 schools that have never filed plans with our office. Our Crime Victim Services section has contacted the Connecticut Crime Victims Compensation program to provide any assistance they need at this time.” | <urn:uuid:4eb60b6f-0bde-40c0-b4c4-6b023194676d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wapakdailynews.com/content/sad-about-connecticut-shooting-glad-about-local-safety-measures | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979607 | 1,247 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The room in your home that sees all the dirty laundry doesn't have to be a waste of time and energy. Today's energy efficient washers and dryers and amenities are smart, flexible and built to save money over the long haul. Welcome to the laundry revolution.
Smart machines. Family members have no excuse for avoiding laundry chores when faced with the easy-to-operate high efficiency washers and dryers now on the market. Clear and helpful displays, quiet operation, and a range of cycles to perfectly clean and protect clothes are the new norms. Now, all you need to do is have the chat about separating fabrics and colors and not overloading the laundry machines, and your crew will be good to go.
Alt=energy efficient washer dryer The latest energy efficient appliances are smarter than you, and that's good news for both your life outside of the laundry room and the life of your clothes. Consider GE's Profile Harmony Clothes Care System , which has a washer and dryer that actually talk to each other in two languages. In either English or Spanish, users simply select a wash cycle based on how their laundry is sorted, press Start, and at the end of that cycle, the washer communicates information about the wash load electronically to the dryer.
The dryer responds by pre-setting dry cycles for better clothing care, increased time savings, and greater convenience. Also smart are the washer's Stain Inspector™ stain removal system which treats more than 80 stains through optimized wash cycles, and the dryer's DuoDry™ system that senses just the right temperature and amount of drying time, adding an adaptive, wrinkle reducing cool-down phase at cycle's end.
Ergonomic, flexible styling. Not only are today's high efficiency laundry machines more gentle with clothes, they're more gentle with you. A wide variety of appliance heights, sizes and configurations allow everyone to find the best fit for them and their laundry space. The increasingly popular front loaders offer easy access and a height that is better for your back, and also make for fast, tangle-free retrieval of laundry. Larger baskets in both washers and dryers help to trim down the number of wash loads, and when you add manufacturer-provided pedestals under units and comfortably placed, ample counter space, your days of laundry strain are over.
Water and energy savings. ENERGY STAR labeling is the thing to look for when shopping for new energy efficient washers and dryers. Laundry appliances bearing the ENERGY STAR logo meet energy and water-savings guidelines set by the EPA and U.S. Department of Energy, and will add up to money in your pocket over the long haul. Front loading machines are among the biggest money savers, thanks in particular to the reduced amount of water required by their configuration.
To give you an idea of how positive these savings can be, here are a few of the stats for Maytag's Epic™ Front Load Washers and Dryers . The high efficiency washer uses as little as 10 gallons of water for a load, compared to 40 gallons for a conventional machine. The Epic™ washer also meets the ENERGY STAR standard, while reducing energy consumption by a whopping 46%.
Alt=Hig Efficiency Washers and DryersEpic™ dryer stats are equally impressive. Conventional dryers can take up to twice as long to dry clothes as it does to wash them, especially with items such as bath towels and blue jeans. However, because the spin cycle in the technologically advanced Epic™ dryer is more efficient, more water is extracted from the clothes before they hit the dryer. As a result, the wash and dry times for Epic™ are about equal, which is half as long as a conventional dryer. Shortened dry time also means reduced heat and tumbling and far less wear and tear on your clothes.
But will the savings and higher cost of buying high efficiency machines that conserve water and energy pay for themselves over the life of the appliance? While there are variables, the short answer is - yes!
As a rule of thumb, an average family will save $150-$185 per year by using an energy efficient washer/dryer. High efficiency washers and dryers cost about twice as much as conventional machines. The price difference is made up in the first 6 years or the full price of the machine can be recouped in about 12 years. Since appliances like Maytag's are designed to last 20 years, the appliance should more than pay for itself over it's working life.
Accessorize to organize. Many manufacturers offer accessories that can turn an already great pair of machines into a slick full fledged laundry center. Options include appliance-top work surfaces with spill guards, supply trays and back splashes. Laundry storage towers that nestle between or to the side of units for organized, easy access to detergents and supplies, and washer and dryer pedestals with built-in storage drawers are also available.
Customizing your high efficiency laundry space with other items like handy hampers (rolling industrial style or tilt-out numbers with cabinet fronts), fold-away ironing boards and drying racks not only adds to its efficiency, but also defines the laundry zone if it shares a space with other activities. Add a utility sink to the mix, and you'll surely wash away all the hassles you used to associate with laundry day! | <urn:uuid:eaf0c8f9-aa6d-414e-bd98-0f431aafe2fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moneypit.com/print/397?quicktabs_1=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945975 | 1,116 | 1.5 | 2 |
On February 7, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared California’s infamous Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Six days later, Washington became the seventh state to enshrine marriage equality into law. These are causes for celebration, but neither fight is over.
The Court of Appeals decision is merely the latest chapter in a story that began in 2008. The next chapter will likely be the written in Washington, once the organization ProtectMarriage.com files a Supreme Court Appeal. The group, which describes itself as a “broad-based coalition of California families, community leaders, religious leaders, pro-family organizations and individuals from all walks of life who have joined together to defend and restore the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman,” also has the option of an en banc appeal to an expanded judicial panel in the Ninth Circuit.
California marriage rights advocates will have to hope that court action(s) go their way; there seem to be no alternative approaches at this point. Love Honor Cherish, who have fought Prop 8 every step of the way, announced this week that they’ve abandoned their quest for a November ballot measure for formal repeal, following in the footsteps of LGBT advocacy group Equality California, which announced last fall:
In 2009, we anticipated that 2012 would provide our best opportunity in the near term to overturn Proposition 8 at the ballot. However, based on our analysis of public opinion and the significant challenges of the current political and economic climate, we concluded in fall 2011 that more work must be done and announced that we will not lead an effort to return to the ballot in 2012.
Following the enactment of Washington’s new law, marriage inequality zealots immediately began to close ranks:
A group called Preserve Marriage Washington filed Referendum 73 Monday afternoon. If they collect the more than 120,577 valid voter signatures needed by June 6, the law will be put on hold pending the outcome of a November vote. Separately, an initiative was filed at the beginning of the legislative session that opponents of gay marriage say could also lead to the new law being overturned…
The Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, which was involved in ballot measures that overturned same-sex marriage in California and Maine, has promised to work with Preserve Marriage Washington to qualify the referendum to overturn the new law.
Given the time allowed and the low signature threshold, a November ballot measure seems inevitable. To find out how you can help defend hard-won equal rights under the law, go to the Washington United for Marriage website.
TWO: Justice Under Siege
While chilling at his vacation home on the Caribbean island of Nevis last Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, along with his wife and two guests, was robbed at machete-point by an intruder. The robber’s take was roughly $1,200. Happily, no one was hurt.
Since the story was fairly short on details, a number of media outlets supplemented it with crimes involving other justices:
Known crimes against the current justices are rare. In 2004, a group of young men assaulted now-retired Justice David Souter as he was jogging near his apartment in Southwest Washington.
And in 1996, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the victim of a purse-snatching as she and her husband and daughter were walking near the Kennedy Center.
Conspicuously unmentioned in such reports were Justices Scalia and Thomas, but I suppose that’s because they’re much more apt to be perpetrators than victims when it comes to criminal behavior.
THREE: Motor City Madman
General Motors, which you might recall is one of the two giant auto companies Barack Obama saved from extinction, had some good news to share today:
G.M. said it earned a quarterly profit of $472 million, or 28 cents a share, down from $510 million, or 31 cents a share, a year ago. It was the eighth consecutive quarterly profit for the carmaker…
For all of 2011, G.M. earned $7.6 billion, nearly all of it from North America. That was 62 percent higher than the $4.7 billion it earned a year ago and nominally more than G.M.’s previous record of $6.7 billion in 1997 (in today’s dollars, the 1997 profit would be about $9.4 billion).
This comes two days after someone named Mitt Romney (apparently the leader of a group of people who believe Mitt Romney should be President) contributed an op-ed to the Detroit News, in which he vacillates – sometimes within the same paragraph – between decrying President Obama’s handling of the auto bailout and trying to take credit himself for its success:
The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business… The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better… Instead of a bailout, I favored “managed bankruptcy” as the way forward… Shorn of… excess costs, and shorn of the bungling management that had driven them into a deep rut, they could re-emerge as vibrant and competitive companies. Ultimately, that is what happened. The course I recommended was eventually followed…
Now, I’m no diagnostician, but I’m guessing Romney’s confusion could be a result of the weird medical condition he mentions in the same piece:
Cars got in my bones early. And not just any cars, American cars.
Ouch! That might also explain Romney’s apparent preference for driving imports:
[Romney has] released an ad showing him driving around in a fancy Chrysler while he talks about how much he loves Michigan, and all…
And here’s the problem: that Chrysler that he’s driving is a 300 model, and the 300 is made in Canada.
In fairness, Romney does seem to have been driving American back in the days when he, his family, and his Irish setter Seamus made their annual vacation trip to, uh, Canada.
Romney is unambiguous in advising the White House what to do next:
The Obama administration needs to act now to divest itself of its ownership position in GM.
The shares need to be sold in a responsible fashion and the proceeds turned over to the nation’s taxpayers.
As always, President Obama is taking a smarter, more patient approach:
Shares of G.M. are worth about one-quarter less than the price set in an initial public offering in November 2010, when the federal government sold most of the 60 percent stake it received in G.M. after shepherding the company through bankruptcy.
The government still owns 26 percent of G.M., but the Obama administration has delayed plans to sell those shares in the hopes of recovering a larger percentage of its investment as the share price increases.
Oh, and Mitt? One more noteworthy item from today’s report:
The results mean G.M.’s hourly workers in the United States will receive profit-sharing checks next month of up to $7,000, a record…
Sounds like crony capitalism at its finest. Continue reading Take Five (There Oughta Be a Law edition) | <urn:uuid:7379dae7-4d9e-4420-9c97-51e63f085e8a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.democratsforprogress.com/tag/westminster-kennel-club/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968666 | 1,510 | 1.75 | 2 |
Today, Heather Kleb, Director of Regulatory Affairs here at the CNA, is speaking at the Licence hearings for Cameco Corporation’s Port Hope Conversion Facility, Fuel Manufacturing Facility and Blind River Refinery, on behalf of the people who work in Canada’s nuclear industry. Here’s why we think the facility licences should be renewed.
The Canadian Nuclear Association has some 100 member companies, representing 70,000 people employed in the production and advancement of nuclear medicine, uranium mining and exploration, and fuel processing and electricity generation. This includes the 590 people who operate Cameco’s Port Hope Conversion Facility and Fuel Manufacturing Facility, and the 160 people who operate the Blind River Refinery.
Understandably, we have a strong interest in matters pertaining to the health and safety of our Members and to potential effects on the environment where they live and work. We have therefore reviewed, with interest, Cameco’s applications to renew the Class IB Nuclear Fuel Facility Operating Licenses for the Conversion Facility, Fuel Manufacturing Facility and Refinery, which comprise Cameco’s Fuel Services Division.
In our presentation we would like to make three main points:
- Canada’s nuclear industry needs to maintain its base of highly skilled professionals.
- Our industry is committed to environmental stewardship, both in the communities where we live and work, and globally; and
- We have a proven track record of being among the safest in the world.
We would like to start by discussing the community where the Fuel Services Division’s head office, and much of its operations, are based – the town of Port Hope.
Port Hope is a town with a long, rich history. It is home to more than 270 heritage buildings and sites, including former 19th and early 20th century houses, shops and schools. Also included among the heritage buildings and sites are a number of mills, distilleries and factories. Port Hope grew up around these and other industrial facilities, which supported not only its growth, but its economic development.
It is not the focus of the current licence renewals, but we feel it is important to acknowledge these past industrial activities and the legacy that they have left behind. As a result of these activities, Port Hope is also home to low-level radioactive and other industrial wastes, which predate Cameco’s operations there. The wastes are considered to be in a safe and stable condition, but there is an acknowledged need for a solution for their long-term management.
Cameco and a number of our other Members are involved in the development of the required solution. Our industry’s knowledge, experience and technology are being used to clean up the radioactive and other industrial wastes that originated from Eldorado’s facility’s, the Crane Sanitary Company, the coal gasification plant and other past industrial activities.
So, as I indicated in point I., we need to maintain our base of highly skilled professionals – including the Cameco staff that are undertaking this important work.
With respect to environmental stewardship, the knowledge and skills of Cameco staff were recently tested when, in 2007, subsurface contamination was discovered beneath the UF6 plant. They immediately investigated the extent of the soil and groundwater contamination and completed a site-wide risk assessment. Then, following confirmation that there were no unreasonable risks to employees, the public, or the environment, they installed new liquid management infrastructure and groundwater collection and control systems.
We are confident that Cameco staff will apply this same level of diligence to the resolution of any operational challenge that they face. The commitment to continual improvement is embedded in the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System framework that they work to conform to. ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems involve a plan-do-check-act cycle of continuous improvement.
As I indicated in point II, we, as an industry are committed to environmental stewardship: protecting the land, air and water, both in the communities in which we live and work, and globally.
We also believe that past performance provides the best indication of future performance when it comes to human health and safety. We are committed to safety and are proud of our safety track record. That being said, we are never complacent. Cameco staff continually work to learn from the experiences of others within the corporation and outside of the organization.
A timely example is the review of lessons learned from the events in Japan. In spite of the operational differences, the Fuel Services Division has carefully evaluated the lessons that can be learned from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and developed and submitted an action plan to the CNSC, which outlines further improvements to their operations.
So, not only are Cameco staff committed to the safe, clean and reliable operation of the Fuel Services Division, they are also committed to continually striving to improve the safety performance and processes of the Division. Even though the facilities have been in operation for decades, and the licence renewals will not result in fundamental changes to their operations, Cameco staff are committed to continuous improvement.
As I indicated in point III., Canada has an exemplary nuclear track record with over 50 years of occupational and public health and safety and is a leader in the industry worldwide, but we are never complacent.
- Cameco has a highly skilled workforce, which should be maintained;
- Cameco has reaffirmed its commitment to take all reasonable precautions to protect the environment; and
- Cameco has expressed a strong commitment to the safe operation of its facilities. Cameco also intends to continually improve the health, safety and environmental performance and processes of its facilities and to ensure the safety of its employees, the community and the environment where they live and work.
In light of these points, the Canadian Nuclear Association is of the opinion that the Class IB Nuclear Fuel Facility Operating Licenses for the Port Hope Conversion Facility, Fuel Manufacturing Facility, and the Blind River Refinery, should be renewed. | <urn:uuid:a2c11b03-5dd3-4c99-9114-d12f00ce3cb2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://talknuclear.ca/index.php/tag/hearings/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957453 | 1,212 | 1.75 | 2 |
A friend showed me this drill that two people could do using one doubles
lane. This will work on your stroke placement and force you to move fast
on your feet to line up the shot. Also you will learn to bring your body
around quickly to change from backhand to forehand and back again.
Both players start at the baseline on one side of the tennis court
centered on the "doubles lane." Quite simply, start a rally to your
partner but keep them in the "doubles lane". This might sound easy,
but try it. You will be tempted to stay with either your backhand
or forehand, and in order for you to change to the other side you
must do some quick footwork to come about the ball. Set a total
score of 11 points and see who can "win" this game by two points.
I use this to work on my weak side until I start losing and then
I switch to my stronger side. Remember, hitting the line is ok,
but not outside your opponents doubles lane. Take turns starting
the rally, or allow the "losing" player to start all the rallies.
His "serve" must be a clean hit deep to his partner to start the
play. You may have the players each hit twice before "play" to get
a fair start. You may lob, approach, and use spin to defeat your
partner, but remember to watch the lines when he overheads or sends
you a drop shot and don't volley a ball that is going out.
This drill will cause you to focus on hitting on an exact spot on the
court. It is a very small target frame, but will greatly increase your
Because two players are using one side of the tennis court in one lane,
it is possible have another pair of drillees on the other side doing the
same thing. Let both "matches" play out 11 points and then switch partners,
winners against winners and losers together. See who becomes the "Doubles
Work hard and play hard,
---Dan L. Salinas | <urn:uuid:c55ff748-b11b-46a6-9938-97de8272da1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tennis4you.com/workshop/groundstrokes/groundstroke-drill-017.htm | 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 | 0.946145 | 441 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Welcome to Pack 88's Blue and Gold planning
page. With the Blue and Gold being an annual event
we've started this page to help share the information that
we've learned over the years. With the help of past
Cubmasters, Den Leaders, and Pack volunteers we captured
the files and steps needed to successfully plan and execute
the Blue and Gold Banquet. While the majority of information
is specific to Pack 88, other Cub Scout Packs will benefit
from the experiences that we have gained in planning many
banquets. The information below is not only form Pack
88 but a collection of information from Packs from around
the US on how they have made the B&G successful. A
special thanks to Bill Smith's Unofficial Cub Scout Roundtable.
An excellent resource on the web.
What is a Blue
and Gold Banquet?
A blue and gold banquet is a birthday dinner for the Cub
Scouting program, held during February. The anniversary
month of the Boy Scouts of America, which was organized
in February 1910. The Cub Scouts was organized 20
years later in 1930.
Some packs have a dinner, this can be a potluck affair,
with each family brining food, or many packs prefer buying
the food, having it prepared by a mother's committee, and
still other packs prefer to have it catered. The plan
of feeding is not important, it is the Cub Scouting that
takes place during the preparation and dinner that really
counts. Dens should sit together. Guests may
be invited and seated either at a head table or seated with
Decorations may be as elaborate or as simple as you wish.
Attractive menu cards or dinner programs can be made, place
cards, centerpieces, place mats, nut cups and favors are
all suggestions of things which might be used. Cubs
can take part in making decorations.
The dinner program
should include entertainment from within the pack, but outside
entertainment is okay. Also don't forget the importance
of recognizing advancement of the boys and leaders of the
Remember that the B&G is supposed to be fun for all the
Scouts from Tigers to Webelos. The entertainment portion
of the event will be from 60 to 90 minutes in length.
In years past Pack 88 has had multiple magicians, ventriloquists,
combinations of the two and the very popular
Science people perform. Others options such as
trained animal shows have been researched but the cost has
always been prohibitive. Discuss the options with the Committee
and make a decision based on cost and availability of the
Arrow of Light
The Arrow of Light Ceremony is the most important
portion of the B&G but it does not have to be the most complex
or lengthy portion of the event. Their are multiple
Scouting website dedicated to just the B&G and Arrow of
Light Ceremony. A simple Google search will yield
hundreds. The information here is just a sampling of what
Pack 88 has used in the past. Using the files from
our Arrow of Light page is an excellent starting point
for the ceremony. Putting a unique touch on the event is
always a way to make it all the more memorial for the boys.
Be sure that the boys, leaders, and parents know that the
banquet is Cub Scouting's birthday celebration.
Begin planning at least three months ahead.
KISMIF - Keep it Simple, Make it Fun
Involve leaders and parents. Sharing responsibilities
makes it easier and fun for everyone.
Let the boys help plan
and make the decorations, but keep the cutting and pasting
to a minimum. Do let them help make each item.
(Then watch their eyes glow with pride the night of the
Programs and etc.
The following files can be downloaded and edited to fit
your need for the
invite (.pub), and
reserved seating cards (.pub). The files are
in Microsoft Word and Publisher formats. Again,
all the files can be modified to fit your needs and
tailored to fit the theme of your Blue and Gold. | <urn:uuid:0acfb19e-3e5f-48ed-a87e-0384db6bb747> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cubpack88.org/blueandgoldplanning.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931781 | 866 | 1.75 | 2 |
"When life is difficult, do something to help someone else, and your problems will diminish. There is always someone much worse off than you," said Jane Seymour while discussing one of the lessons learned from her mother.
There was much more to the story but I didn't take notes or record her discussion at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore. Jane spoke of caring for others, her children, going through devastating times, her art, and the loss of her mother. She touch our hearts as she has done so many times in the past.
We were there for the signing of her latest book Among Angels. It is a beautiful work filled with heartfelt quotes and artwork straight from this wonderful woman's own heart.
I was amazed when people in the audience talked about watching "Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman" and gaining strength from Jane through her character. I hadn't really thought about it that way. Jane played the part of a strong determined woman on our western frontier. More than that, she played herself and I think that is why so many people were drawn to that show that lasted 6 or 7 seasons when most didn't think it would last a few episodes.
She found art during a desperate part of her life and it helped save her just as I've read so many times in magazines and in BlogLand. Art Saves. Art Heals. But, going back to Jane's comment about her mother...by sharing your art and yourself you spread healing throughout the world.
Thank you, Jane, for a beautiful message when I needed it most. Thank you fellow artists for sharing of your selves. | <urn:uuid:34a8da70-383a-4d83-ac76-2b5812a3b911> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tatteredpast.blogspot.com/2010/11/art-heals.html?showComment=1290257144265 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987545 | 325 | 1.625 | 2 |
Wondering what in the world a, IRS (Internal Revenue Service) W9 Form is? First off it is one of the many forms provided by the Internal Revenue Service, AKA The IRS. This W9 Form is used by companies to request the important information they need from freelancers they have used in the tax year. Those freelancers will receive the W9 Form fill it in and send it back to the company that was requesting it. Please also note that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) W9 Form does not get filed with the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), that is what the 1099 Form is used for. | <urn:uuid:d65a532d-7e70-436a-8fbf-9df262c1a0cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://betterplacerescue.org/tag/form-w9/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960487 | 128 | 1.53125 | 2 |
OverviewIn Kansas, flatness is a way of life, in Iowa, it's an art.
Hawkeye Point is the highpoint of Iowa. Although the Mississippi River areas offer some hills and rocks in Eastern Iowa, Western Iowa is flatter than can be. However, one of those flat points rises above the rest, and although it does not tower over the landscape in any way, there is a value in reaching its farmland summit. Hawkeye Point gradually rises 20 feet above the surrounding farmland offering excellent panoramic views of the Iowa landscape. While the site is privately owned, the owners have championed the site as a tourist destination and has worked with the County to make sure it remains accessible. While the landowners are friendly and happy to have visitors, please make sure respect the land, visit at a reasonable hour, and do not leave any trash behind.
Getting ThereFrom I-90. Go to Worthington, Minnesota and take Exit 45, which is rt. 59 South. While still in Minnesota, look for signs to route 60 South. Once you hit the Iowa border, it is about 3 miles to the turn. Make a left on to 130th street. Their is a sign marking the turn for Hawkeye Point on route 60.
Once in the driveway, drive up about a tenth of a mile, and look for the silo to the right. Behind it is the highpoint marker and the highpoint of Iowa. There is a summit register.
UPDATE - Oct 2011
Presently, Highways 59 and 60 south of I-90 are both having construction completed near Worthington. Note this will slow you down, but there are detours. In Worthington, follow the 59 detour signs, and eventually, you'll get to a portion of 60 you can use. Alternatively, if traveling with a GPS, just set your destination as Sibley, IA - it'll also get you to the MN/IA state line (but you don't travel all the way to Sibley.)
For more information see the Minnesota Department of Transportation website
HighpointingSome may ask why anyone would want to travel to this remote midwestern farmland area. Hawkeye Point certainly does not provide the best Iowa has to offer, but highpointing takes you places you would never think of going. Like a unique tour of America that few get to experience. The site was recently remodeled and celebrates highpointing.
Hawkeye Point is one of the few flatland highpoints, and it is accessible from I-90, a highway that goes from Boston to Seattle, and is used by many to drive cross-country. For more information on highpointing, check out the Highpointers Club.
Red TapeEntry is free. The high point is now owned by Osceola County (more details are below). Please show respect for the area and don't leave any trash. The Sterler family owned this land for many years and were always welcoming to the public. Let that tradition continue with the new owners.
To make certain this State Highpoint always remains free and accessible for anyone wanting to come, the Sterler family offered to donate 1.6 acres around the highpoint to Osceola County. Osceola County then took that idea a step further, signing an agreement with the family in 2007 to purchase 5 acres around the highpoint. The highpoint is still always open to the public, but the county plans to eventually have a Visitor's Center, campground, restrooms, historical display areas, and an observation tower. These are long-range plans, because funding is by donation. The site has already been remodeled and looks much better. For more information about future plans for this highpoint, or to contribute a donation, please contact the "Hawkeye Point Committee" at (712)754-2523.
When To ClimbAny time of year.
Yellow River State Forest - The hills in IowaYellow River State Forest is located in Allamakee County in northeast Iowa (far away from Hawkeye Point), yet it is one of the hilliest areas in the entire state, with rises in the vicinity of 300'. There are even some nice rock outcroppings to visit that overlook the Mississippi River. The elevations in this area are above 1,000', but none approaching the height above sea level at Hawkeye Point.
Check out this page for information on hiking in the forest.
Check out this page for photos of the hills.
Miscellaneous InfoHiking, camping, and several lakes are available at Gull Point State Park about 25 miles away. Check out Gull Point
Check out this site for some rock climbing areas in Iowa.
Some of the included parks are:
Backbone State Park in the Northeast in Delaware County.
Palisades-Kepler near Cedar Rapids in the East
Wapsipinicon State Park near Cedar Rapids in the East
For a list of more Iowa State Parks and Recreation Areas see this site.
Weather in Sibley, Iowa
Additions and Corrections[ Post an Addition or Correction ] | <urn:uuid:e773ae4e-f964-4102-9cf5-6b0200c5e1c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.summitpost.org/hawkeye-point/152530 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955534 | 1,044 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Todd said she believes the challenge has nothing to do with the fact she is gay, but is about the fact that she is white and won in a majority black district.
"Of course if I was black I don't think they would have contested the election," Todd said. She blamed the contest on Joe Reed, longtime chairman of the black Democratic caucus, who wrote a letter before the election urging black leaders to support Hendricks because of her race and stressing the need for keeping the seat in black hands.
It is particularly disturbing that all five Democratic Committee members who voted to disqualify Todd are African-American. The district which Todd won is predominantly African-American. These party officials are upset that a white lesbian took a seat in the legislature away from their African-American candidate. Her opponent's mother-in-law filed a complaint against her for filing her campaign financial statement with the secretary of state's office late, claiming that Todd deliberately did so to hide the financial support she was receiving from a national gay rights group, which contributed $25,000 to her campaign. With Todd and her opponent out of the way, the party leaders can handpick their own choice, which obviously won't be a white lesbian.
Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend, who is an African-American lesbian, is angered by the Alabama's Democratic Party's action. Spaulding writes incitefully of the recent developments:
The mess and self-destruction of Alabama's Democratic party in its decision to disqualify white (and out lesbian) Patricia Todd, who legitimately won the House 54 seat, and black challenger Gaynelle Hendricks) is now complete.
The people's vote doesn't matter. It's about party kingmakers, sore losers and race, with the added spice of gay demonization. At the core of this issue is district 54, central Birmingham, is being gentrified. When Kate and I drove through the district on a recent visit, it was plainly apparent that Crestwood, in particular, is an area that is undergoing demographic change. This is no different than what many in-town neighborhoods are experiencing, as property is being bought by gay (and mostly white) urban homesteaders who remodel delapidated housing, attract new businesses and breathe life into those neighborhoods. What it also brings, with the rise in housing costs is displacement of the urban poor, change in voting patterns -- and the power and influence of kingmakers like party vice chairman Joe
It's the loss of Reed's political control that was driving this insanity. It's not as if Patricia Todd didn't have black support -- she had to have a good amount in order to win -- those who supported her have had to deal with taunts and charges of "Uncle Tom" and "sellout." Reed and company are tossing a political temper tantrum and illegitimately tossing out the race card, hoping that noise and rage will overpower actual voting results. And yes, that still works in Southern politics, particularly in this case.The anti-gay spin has been downplayed in coverage, but the fact of the matter is, as the NYT article notes, anonymous fliers were posted calling Patricia Todd a "confessed lesbian." No one needs to ignore this and let it slip below the radar. The black homophobia should not be swept under the rug.
And so, with the disqualification over an arcane rule that no Dem in a certified race has followed, this is a statement that "if we can't have the black winner we want, we'll sacrifice both of them to get the white lesbian out of the picture.
"Gentrification and its impact on a district's representation is a worthy topic to discuss; using party machinery and backroom bigotry to toss out the legitimate results of an election is a travesty and embarassment. It's as if Reed and company have a short memory -- that they are reveling in the chance to take away the vote of the people now that blacks have gained political power is a sad state of affairs. It wasn't that long ago that party machinery was used against blacks; table-turning on an ally like Todd is self-defeating and racist in turn.
Spaulding is right to emphasize the role anti-gay bigotry in the Alabama's African-American community is playing in the Democratic Party's actions, and that this issue is being downplayed in the media coverage. You can bet that if a group of white Republicans had taken similar action against an African-American candidate, the news media would have played up the race issue big time.
The question now is whether Alabama's state Democratic Party, with encouragement from the DNC, will step in and overrule the local party leader's actions. If they don't, then our U.S. Justice Department should do its job in enforcing the Voting Rights Act and overrule the local party's actions. Somebody needs to act quickly; otherewise, we're simply allowing a bunch of bigoted sore losers to make a mockery of the very laws which were created to ensure fair elections for minorities. | <urn:uuid:7ff3995e-bd32-43f4-8dde-0b192b73e9d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2006/08/alabama-dems-deny-election-win-to.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978646 | 1,033 | 1.546875 | 2 |
You can often find the answer to why something is available in Debian, and not in LMDE, by having a look at PTS. For LMMS the story is here: http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/lmms.html
. Basically, LMMS was removed from Debian testing mid last year, and only two months back was it migrated from unstable back to testing. Inbetween it has not been available in testing. Since LMDE is currently at UP#4, which was released before LMMS was accepted back into testing, this explains why when using LMDE latest with UP#4 you can not find LMMS. Currently UP#5 is being working on, expected to be available on LMDE latest by end of August. LMMS will then be available on LMDE again.
As for Oracle Java (formerly Sun Java), Oracle has revoked the license for operating systems to distribute Oracle Java. See Oracle retires licence for distributing its Java with Linux
. You'll have to install it manually from the Oracle website if you can't make do with OpenJDK. | <urn:uuid:caee4ac0-75d5-4136-8594-88e15c072a9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=190&t=109607&p=615817 | 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 | 0.973329 | 223 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Ms Rotterdam in the Norwegian fjords.
Breathtaking national treasures on your doorstep
Do we take our national treasures for granted? We were fairly shocked to discover over 70,000 of England's monuments, listed buildings and churches have been damaged by vandals, as was revealed in a survey earlier this week. As an homage to these fallen beauties, we asked the National Trust to handpick 20 of their favourite places in Britain. The journey is quite spectacular...
related stories on msn
Laura, as a native of NI I believe Northern Ireland IS part of Britain because the full and proper title always was 'Great Britain and Northern Ireland' - which was also our proper Olympic name before the spin, money making marketing prats came up with 'Team GB'.
Secondly, all you Scots should know about your own country! If you did, you would know as John rightly pointed out, Scotland has its own National Trust. And wouldn't you all have hit the roof if the National Trust put up pictures of 'your' properties; claiming they would have no right to do so - you cannot have it both ways!
Thirdly, what a shame that so many beautiful pictures and the reason for which we are seeing them (highlighting the mindless vandalism to which they are subject) should be overshadowed by these mindless issues.
Finally, could some of you please consult a book called an 'atlas'? It might teach you not a little about basic geography in your own region of the world.
In school they taught me Scotland was part of Britain.
Sean Ryder - do you need a map of Britain ??
Cragside/Penrhyn are in Wales
Castleward is in N Ireland
I work at St Michaels Mount which is an absolute honour and priviledge
Heather as a native myself I believe you are incorrect. You are missing a part of that statement which is the "the united kingdom of great britian and northern Ireland". At the end of the day this isnt a political statement and i do not want this type of conversion.
However, I do agree that there are missed gems in each country and that more tourism in each should be encouraged. Sometimes the best sites are at home. | <urn:uuid:f8a06752-0644-4a60-b5be-a0eb25df62ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://travel.uk.msn.com/short-breaks/20-of-britains-beautiful-historic-gems | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975743 | 456 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Towers to shine a light unto darkness over Manuka
The newly-installed light towers at Manuka Oval. Photo: Katherine Griffiths
The Canberra sky will burst to life tonight when the Manuka Oval lights are turned on for the first time.
After months of construction and testing, officials will flick the switch for the six light towers which signal the start of a new sporting era in the capital.
The lights transform Manuka Oval from a boutique venue to one capable of hosting international cricket fixtures and night-time AFL matches.
The lights have received mixed reviews. Photo: Melissa Adams
The lights have received mixed reviews since the the 47-metre high towers were put in place earlier this month.
While Ian Warden recently hailed them the "jewellery of a grown-up city", conjuring images of dandelions and lingerie, letter writers in to The Canberra Times have not been so kind, describing them as fly swatters, War of the World-sque props, and a "monstrous blight" on the city's streetscape.
Public opinion aside, the lights will be turned on at 5.30pm this evening to give them time to warm up before they illuminate the ground when the sun goes down.
Organisers are finalising preparations for the Prime Minister's XI clash against the West Indies on Tuesday - the first day-night match in Canberra's history.
Installing lights was also the key to luring the Australian cricket team to Canberra for the first time on February 6 to celebrate the capital's centenary.
The $5.347 million project was jointly funded by the ACT government ($2.847 million) and the federal government ($2.5 million).
The lights have been periodically tested over the past two weeks, but officials had to wait for a maintenance part and for ActewAGL to sign off on paperwork before turning all six towers on at the same time.
Each tower contains four different types of light - wide, medium, narrow and extra-narrow - which are fanned out to ensure an equal coverage on the playing surface.
Design criteria was set by the National Capital Authority to ensure the lights blended into the inner-south suburb.
Black louvres are installed on each light to prevent spill outside the ground, reducing the impact on residents nearby.
The AFL will also play nights games in Canberra for the first time this year, with the GWS Giants to take on St Kilda in a twilight fixture on April 13.
What do you think of the new Manuka Oval lights? Leave your comment below.
Poll: What do you think of the lights at Manuka Oval?
- I think they are great. They are sleek and stylish and mean we can have day-night games.
- We need lights at the oval, but not these ones. They look terrible.
- Everything was fine as it was. We don't need lights. They have ruined the skyline.
- I don't care either way.
Total votes: 1225.
You will need Cookies enabled to use our Voting Feature.
Poll closed 26 Jan, 2013
These polls are not scientific and reflect the opinion only of visitors who have chosen to participate. | <urn:uuid:2ff22f06-9c69-4f12-afd5-de0c021df195> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/act-news/towers-to-shine-a-light-unto-darkness-over-manuka-20130123-2d6ex.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949104 | 659 | 1.5 | 2 |
UCLA law students locate compound of Congolese militia leader wanted by the ICC
Bosco Ntaganda unexpectedly spotted in the town of Goma
"If our group from UCLA Law could stumble upon Ntaganda and locate his compound, then the Congolese government and the intelligence services of Western countries have surely located him as well."
By Lauri Gavel for UCLA Newsroom
A UCLA law professor and six of his students have located Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on war crimes charges, and obtained video of his compound.
Ntaganda, also known as "the Terminator," is alleged to have led a militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that massacred civilians and forcibly conscripted child soldiers. In 2008, the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest, charging Ntaganda with war crimes for conscription of child soldiers. He remains at large and is alleged to violently control much of the conflict minerals trade in Eastern Congo. Ntaganda was a close associate of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, who was found guilty by the ICC today of recruiting and deploying child soldiers during a five-year conflict until 2003. An estimated 60,000 people were killed in the violence, part of much wider bloodshed in central Africa.
The group from UCLA School of Law, supported by the Sanela Diana Jenkins Rights Project, unexpectedly spotted Ntaganda in the Eastern Congolese town of Goma. Ntaganda was traveling on one of the town’s main roads in a convoy of three heavily armed jeeps, one with a mounted heavy caliber machine gun and the other two with soldiers carrying automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
After investigating, the group located what several reliable sources identified as Ntaganda’s compound on Avenue des Tulipiés, about 100 yards from the Rwandan border. The sources said that Ntaganda lives in the compound, which also serves as his operational headquarters, and speculated that the location was chosen by Ntaganda to facilitate escape into Rwanda if an arrest attempt were made. One source said that six houses between the Ntaganda compound and the border were controlled by him, facilitating his smuggling conflict minerals into Rwanda. A clandestine video taken from the street shows the compound and some of Ntaganda’s soldiers on guard duty.
UCLA Law Professor Richard Steinberg, a member of the faculty advisory board for the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project, led the group of students to the Eastern Congo for human rights field research unrelated to Ntaganda. "If our group from UCLA Law could stumble upon Ntaganda and locate his compound, then the Congolese government and the intelligence services of Western countries have surely located him as well," Steinberg said. "This shows that Ntaganda lives with impunity, and he does so while enriching himself through conflict minerals trade, injustices that continue to destabilize the Eastern Congo."
"It is our hope," Steinberg said, "that the United States government will press the Congolese government to arrest Ntaganda and send him to The Hague for trial."
Published: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 | <urn:uuid:617beb3d-513f-4dc7-9c29-92733043a307> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.international.ucla.edu/asia/article.asp?parentid=125017 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979742 | 660 | 1.664063 | 2 |
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