Recag/C4_10 · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 12 62.3k
There are definitely some drawbacks to a pocket full of radiation detection. That’s to be expected for any piece of physics equipment that a dummy like me literally just asked a physicist if I could borrow. It runs pretty hot. You shouldn’t run it in the sun (why did I do that) because it will pick up the more energetic light and almost every pixel will record a hit. And if you’re testing it with a banana, make sure you put a piece of Saran wrap over the detector since it’s incredibly sensitive (CERN: I did not get any banana on your chip). You’ll also need some sort of analysis package to analyze your data in a meaningful way. And it costs four thousand bucks.
People actually use this chip for things other than screwing around, by the way. NASA uses the MiniPix to monitor radiation on board the International Space Station. And the team developing the chip offers a wide array of these kinds of radiation cameras for experiments. Some of the experiments at CERN will soon use TimePix chips to look at the particle decays, or the background radiation that they need to understand to better see the things that they’re looking for.
CERN physicist Michael Campbell who lent me the chip told me there were even more potential uses I didn’t try out: Punch a few pinholes through a sheet of foil in front of the chip and you’ve got a camera obscura, which you can use to capture the image all of the gamma radiation in a room, say, after a nuclear meltdown.
As useful as this might seem, it’s unlikely you’ll need it unless you live near a superfund site, are a physicist, or are trying to escape from Chernobyl. It’s the best (only) pocket-sized particle detector I’ve ever used. It’s cool to carry something like it with you, knowing that some people way smarter than you are are doing more important things than putting a banana onto it and stumbling around a neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.
Video produced by Eleanor Fye and shot by Carmen Hilbert.
Arcade Fire long ago attained the sort of critical mass where anyone who breaks ranks from received wisdom and dares to have a pop at them is rounded up by the taste police and pushed down a very tall flight of stairs indeed. Which is why you probably haven’t read anywhere that — whisper it — “Neon Bible” isn’t in the same league as its predecessor “Funeral” and, by the same token, “No Cars Go” isn”t a patch on the likes of “Wake Up” and “Rebellion (Lies)”. Oops — there, we’ve said it. If you never see our name in print again then please tell our mother that we love her.
Rob Burns from Ramblers Scotland at Royal Cornhill Hospital.
NHS Grampian is backing a new walking initiative in a bid to boost fitness across the region.
The health board is supporting the Medal Routes campaign – which features more than 30 locations across the North-east.
Covering Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Moray, each location has a start and finishing hub, and a gold, silver and bronze route representing 15, 30 and 60-minute walks.
New routes near NHS Grampian sites have now been unveiled to give staff, patients and visitors to hospital sites a convenient exercise option nearby. The initiative is open to all and NHS staff can also refer anyone, at any time, to join Medal Routes.
Last year NHS Grampian revealed 30% of the North-east population is obese, with 78% not eating enough fruit and vegetables, and 20% smoking.
Concerns were raised about the pressure this would put on health services in the future – caused by a population increase combined with more long-term health conditions like diabetes.
A spokesman for The Ramblers, which helped create the Medal Routes, said the initiative is a good way to incorporate exercise into your day.
He said: “Adults are encouraged to take part in 30 minutes of physical activity, five days a week, children 60 minutes.
“Most people think physical activity means taking part in a sport, but there are lots of other ways to be physically active.
“One simple, affordable way of getting fitter is to go for a walk.
An app to accompany the campaign tracks your location during each walk and gives feedback on calories burned and distance travelled. It also lets you create and share your own short walks with others and encourages you to set personal goals.
The municipal government has a head start on its ambitious carbon reduction goals.
The city of Fort Collins is beating its timeline for reducing the carbon footprint of its internal operations.
It recently completed a municipal carbon inventory that showed it hit its 2020 milestone for greenhouse gas reductions three years early, in 2017. It lowered its emissions by 21 percent from the 2005 baseline.
To reach the goal, the city retrofitted its downtown parking garage, replaced streetlights with LEDs and installed solar panels on municipal buildings. It also is transitioning its fleet to low-emission and electric vehicles.
That goal is in addition to an effort to reduce community-wide greenhouse gas emissions, which dropped by 17 percent in that same time period.
The next carbon reduction goal from the city's Climate Action Plan is an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. It also has a goal of achieving 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030.
How to be happy at work: Friends. Lunch. Hope.
Annie McKee, author of “How to be Happy at Work,” with her labradoodle, Keik.
Given her job titles, it would be easy to dismiss Penn professor Annie McKee's book "How to Be Happy at Work" as a pie-in-the-sky prescription for the whining privileged who enjoy the luxury of worrying about being fulfilled at work.
After all, McKee, 62, a Ph.D., runs an executive doctoral program for chief learning officers through the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She's the author of four books and a counselor to chief executives, having been one herself.
But she was also once on welfare, cleaning houses and counting on food stamps to feed her children.
On her knees scrubbing floors, McKee came to understand the true basis for happiness at work.
"Cleaning houses — it's hard to find something to be really proud of," she said, sitting in the kitchen of her well-appointed — and very clean — house in Elkins Park. "So I recognized that I had to do something to make my job better. What helped me was [thinking] what about that job made me feel better.
"I discovered," she said, "I liked to make things better," which happened with each swipe of her dust rag.
“How to Be Happy at Work” by Annie McKee, director of an executive doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania.
McKee began to converse with her employer, and soon that woman became a mentor, encouraging McKee to return to school and pointing her to a brighter future.
As the years passed, McKee and academic colleagues — including Daniel Goleman at Princeton — conducted hundreds of interviews, globally, with all levels of employees to learn about organizations and leadership, interviews that formed the basis for her book, published by Harvard Business Review Press.
For happiness, three things matter: a sense of purpose and an opportunity to contribute to a larger cause; a personal vision of a good life, embracing work and home and a reason for hope; and resonant and friendly relationships, including at work.
"I learned you need to take care of your emotional life, just as you do your physical health," she said.
"It's tempting to blame other people — that toxic boss, that horrible manager — when you aren't happy," she said.
Sometimes, the best solution is a burn-no-bridges exit. But "running away isn't always possible."
Go out to lunch — or at least don't eat at your desk. Have coffee with a colleague. Learn a new skill — because you want to, not because the company says so. Those are baby steps toward happiness, because each asserts the employee's power.
"I think we have a lot more control than we think we do," McKee said. "We box ourselves in."
Sometimes, she said, people may not even see themselves as unhappy, just settled into an unsettling discontent.
"If you are normally a glass-full kind of person, and you find yourself pessimistic and cynical; if relationships that were enjoyable are now strained; if you worry all the time; if you see physical signs, like not sleeping, or eating or drinking too much; if you don't feel like you're on the top of your game and somehow it doesn't seem worth it anyway," those are all signs to begin a happiness makeover, she said.
Sometimes, overheated ambition is the culprit, where getting ahead obscures the happiness of doing it right. Sometimes, it's a bigger paycheck. But mostly, it is endless "shoulds," enslavement to happiness-sapping tasks or workplace customs, McKee said.
"Then comes the really hard part: using emotional self-control to hold steady as you make changes, because you are going to get scared," she said. Going out for lunch while others are desk-dining, for example, may require chutzpah.
That's why it's important to have work friends who support your efforts and tell the truth about your impact on the job. McKee rejects the old caveat about keeping work and personal friendships separate.
"Like all myths, there is a kernel of truth to it," she said. "But I think we are more likely to have clouded judgments because we don't know people than if we do know them."
The former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has described media leaks of his report into the police force in Northern Ireland as total fabrications.
Mr Patten is due to publish recommendations for reforming the RUC next week.
Speaking in Brussels the head of the Independent Commission on policing said some of the assertions were a "total fabrication" and were designed to create a very difficult political atmosphere.
Referring to speculation that the RUC would be split into a number of regional forces, he said: "There has been a whole debate about whether we are going to Balkanise the police service. That is a straight forward fabrication.
Chris Patten: "I cannot deal with every smear"
"And why is it happening? I think there is an effort to distract attention from the real substance of our report next week and to muddy the water before we report.
"I can't deal with every fabrication and every smear, or every piece of educated guesswork, because I would get involved in a political striptease, showing you a week ahead what's in the report or what isn't."
Mr Patten also said reports of filling the police force with paramilitaries were also a "complete and total fabrication".
Mr Patten has recommended that his report, which contains over 200 proposals, should not be cherry-picked.
It will include a recommendation, vehemently opposed by unionists, that the RUC will be called the Northern Ireland Police Service.
But Mr Patten said that the RUC will not be broken up into a number of regional forces.
His comments came after a former chief constable of the RUC spoke out about some of the changes suggested in media reports.
Sir John Hermon, who was chief constable of the force between 1980 and 1989, said: "I did support the Patten committee and did, and still do, the assembly, because I think they're both essential.
"What concerns me about the Patten commission at the moment is the unprecedented number of leaks of what the Patten commission report is going to concern.
''This has caused a lot of deep concern not only within the Royal Ulster Constabulary but I would also say the considerable majority of this community."
London 2012 Olympics organisers have released more than 120,000 hotel room nights back onto the open market, they announced Sunday.
They confirmed that some 20 percent of the room nights they had reserved in London would be returned to hotels to offer up to other customers.
The spaces had been reserved to provide accommodation for media, global sport federations, the International Olympic Committee, Games workers and sponsors.
The rooms at more than 200 hotels, range from five-star to budget accommodation.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to flock to London for the July 27 to August 12 Games, whether ticket holders or not.
As part of the bid to stage the 2012 Olympics, agreements had been struck with hotels to provide more than 40,000 rooms, representing more than 600,000 room nights during the period.
But part of the deal was that the organisers promised to return any unwanted rooms to the hotels so they could sell them in time for the Games.
"The hotel industry in London got behind the bid to stage the Games in the most extraordinary way and that support helped us across the line," London Olympics chief executive Paul Deighton said.
"We always promised that we would not hold on to hotel rooms we didn't need but return them to the individual hotels at the beginning of 2012.
"We are now doing this and I hope that this enables the hotels to continue with their planning for this summer as we all work together to stage a spectacular Games."
Sandie Dawe, the chief executive of the VisitBritain national tourism agency, said: "The fact that such a wide spread of rooms in London will now be made available to the public is great news for overseas visitors wishing to come to the UK to experience the Olympics and all the other wonderful festivities that are taking place."
However, some in the tourism industry warned that prices had risen too fast before the new rooms were offered and many potential visitors have been put off staying in London.
Neil Wootton, managing director of sightseeing operator Premium Tours, told The Independent newspaper: "Prices have been so high that tourists are moving elsewhere."
Freshman Reading Round-Up is a summer reading program offered to first-year students. The annual event allows participants to read a book selected by a UT professor and meet in groups with that professor to discuss the book before classes start.
The 16th annual Reading Round-Up was filled to capacity within three days of the initial email inviting incoming freshmen to participate, which has never happened before, academic program coordinator Laura Weingarten said.
Weingarten said they reach out to a variety of professors every year to fill the 58 group slots.
While some professors chose to share their own books, Reading Roundup founder James Vick said he chooses a different book every year for his group to read.
Journalism freshman Will LeHardy said he signed up for Reading Round-Up as a way to introduce himself to the University before the start of classes.
Weingarten said the interest for Reading Round-Up has grown beyond first-year students.
Texas may become the third state in the country to raise the legal smoking age above 19-years-old.
Representative John Zerwas, a Fort Bend County Republican, is backing the bill authored by State Senator Carlos Uresti, a Democrat from San Antonio. Senate Bill 183 would raise the age to legally smoke or possess tobacco products from 18 to 21.
Both California and Hawaii have passed similar measures.
Similar legislation has been proposed multiple times in the past but has failed due to concerns over an infringement of civil liberties, loss of state sales tax and the potential to harm small businesses. Despite those failures, lawmakers say that new data has helped make their argument stronger than ever.
In December 2016, the Department of State Health Services released an analysis of the potential impact of raising the smoking age to 21. The analysis determined that raising the smoking age could reduce pre-term births by 4.3 percent over the first five years and 11.6 percent over the next 20 years. The report also states that the measure could reduce low birth-weight births by 4.1 percent over the first five years and 10.7 percent over the following 20 years.
According to the report, the state could save over $406 million in health care costs over the next five years and over $5.6 million over the next 25 years.
The report also stated that raising the smoking age would "result in a delayed use of such products, which in turn will decrease the prevalence of users. From a health perspective, the impacts of decreased prevalence would be short- and long-term. Reductions in tobacco-related diseases will take decades to realize, but there would be an immediate reduction in adverse physiological effects and poor infant health outcomes."
If the smoking age is raised, Texas would lose an estimated $97,147,000 in tax revenue over five years.
"It's kind of ironic that we're relying on 18,19, 20-year-olds to smoke so we can bring in $18 million, yet it's costing the state of Texas in the hundreds of millions of dollars for smoking-related illnesses," Sen. Uresti said.
Cory McCullough, who manages the Wizard Hut Smoke Shop, said his store will comply with whatever the law requires, but doesn't think it will deter anyone from smoking.
"If kids want to smoke, they're going to smoke," McCullough said. "If anybody wants to do anything, they're going to do it."
If the law is passed, the penalty for selling tobacco to anyone under the age of 21 would be a Class C Misdemeanor.
The new U.S. Attorney for West Tennessee said an anti-gun task force has been given new energy in Memphis and Shelby County to stem the widespread use of firearms in criminal acts.
Guns are used in more than a third of robberies and aggravated assaults, but the effort to press back against gun-toting criminals eased in recent years across Tennessee, leading many criminals to flaunt weapons.
Now a move is afoot to press back in Memphis.
Violent crime has eased in Memphis since the heavy crime streak nearly three decades ago, but the city’s national reputation as a crime zone persists. A recent comparison of America’s big cities by Forbes, a business magazine read worldwide, ranked Memphis No. 4 in the nation with 1,583 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. This works out to almost 10,300 such crimes each year.
Dunavant, the former district attorney general for the state's 25th Judicial District, was nominated by President Donald Trump to the larger office of U.S. Attorney and was sworn in last September.
More: Waters: How long will we live and die by the gun?
Since then, law enforcement agencies have committed 14 investigators and attorneys to the anti-gun initiative in Memphis and Shelby County called Project Safe Neighborhoods, up from a maximum of about 11 several years ago, Dunavant said.

There are definitely some drawbacks to a pocket full of radiation detection. That’s to be expected for any piece of physics equipment that a dummy like me literally just asked a physicist if I could borrow. It runs pretty hot. You shouldn’t run it in the sun (why did I do that) because it will pick up the more energetic light and almost every pixel will record a hit. And if you’re testing it with a banana, make sure you put a piece of Saran wrap over the detector since it’s incredibly sensitive (CERN: I did not get any banana on your chip). You’ll also need some sort of analysis package to analyze your data in a meaningful way. And it costs four thousand bucks.

People actually use this chip for things other than screwing around, by the way. NASA uses the MiniPix to monitor radiation on board the International Space Station. And the team developing the chip offers a wide array of these kinds of radiation cameras for experiments. Some of the experiments at CERN will soon use TimePix chips to look at the particle decays, or the background radiation that they need to understand to better see the things that they’re looking for.

CERN physicist Michael Campbell who lent me the chip told me there were even more potential uses I didn’t try out: Punch a few pinholes through a sheet of foil in front of the chip and you’ve got a camera obscura, which you can use to capture the image all of the gamma radiation in a room, say, after a nuclear meltdown.

As useful as this might seem, it’s unlikely you’ll need it unless you live near a superfund site, are a physicist, or are trying to escape from Chernobyl. It’s the best (only) pocket-sized particle detector I’ve ever used. It’s cool to carry something like it with you, knowing that some people way smarter than you are are doing more important things than putting a banana onto it and stumbling around a neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.

Video produced by Eleanor Fye and shot by Carmen Hilbert.

Arcade Fire long ago attained the sort of critical mass where anyone who breaks ranks from received wisdom and dares to have a pop at them is rounded up by the taste police and pushed down a very tall flight of stairs indeed. Which is why you probably haven’t read anywhere that — whisper it — “Neon Bible” isn’t in the same league as its predecessor “Funeral” and, by the same token, “No Cars Go” isn”t a patch on the likes of “Wake Up” and “Rebellion (Lies)”. Oops — there, we’ve said it. If you never see our name in print again then please tell our mother that we love her.

Rob Burns from Ramblers Scotland at Royal Cornhill Hospital.

NHS Grampian is backing a new walking initiative in a bid to boost fitness across the region.

The health board is supporting the Medal Routes campaign – which features more than 30 locations across the North-east.

Covering Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Moray, each location has a start and finishing hub, and a gold, silver and bronze route representing 15, 30 and 60-minute walks.

New routes near NHS Grampian sites have now been unveiled to give staff, patients and visitors to hospital sites a convenient exercise option nearby. The initiative is open to all and NHS staff can also refer anyone, at any time, to join Medal Routes.

Last year NHS Grampian revealed 30% of the North-east population is obese, with 78% not eating enough fruit and vegetables, and 20% smoking.

Concerns were raised about the pressure this would put on health services in the future – caused by a population increase combined with more long-term health conditions like diabetes.

A spokesman for The Ramblers, which helped create the Medal Routes, said the initiative is a good way to incorporate exercise into your day.

He said: “Adults are encouraged to take part in 30 minutes of physical activity, five days a week, children 60 minutes.

“Most people think physical activity means taking part in a sport, but there are lots of other ways to be physically active.

“One simple, affordable way of getting fitter is to go for a walk.

An app to accompany the campaign tracks your location during each walk and gives feedback on calories burned and distance travelled. It also lets you create and share your own short walks with others and encourages you to set personal goals.

The municipal government has a head start on its ambitious carbon reduction goals.

The city of Fort Collins is beating its timeline for reducing the carbon footprint of its internal operations.

It recently completed a municipal carbon inventory that showed it hit its 2020 milestone for greenhouse gas reductions three years early, in 2017. It lowered its emissions by 21 percent from the 2005 baseline.

To reach the goal, the city retrofitted its downtown parking garage, replaced streetlights with LEDs and installed solar panels on municipal buildings. It also is transitioning its fleet to low-emission and electric vehicles.

That goal is in addition to an effort to reduce community-wide greenhouse gas emissions, which dropped by 17 percent in that same time period.

The next carbon reduction goal from the city's Climate Action Plan is an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. It also has a goal of achieving 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030.

How to be happy at work: Friends. Lunch. Hope.

Annie McKee, author of “How to be Happy at Work,” with her labradoodle, Keik.

Given her job titles, it would be easy to dismiss Penn professor Annie McKee's book "How to Be Happy at Work" as a pie-in-the-sky prescription for the whining privileged who enjoy the luxury of worrying about being fulfilled at work.

After all, McKee, 62, a Ph.D., runs an executive doctoral program for chief learning officers through the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She's the author of four books and a counselor to chief executives, having been one herself.

But she was also once on welfare, cleaning houses and counting on food stamps to feed her children.

On her knees scrubbing floors, McKee came to understand the true basis for happiness at work.

"Cleaning houses — it's hard to find something to be really proud of," she said, sitting in the kitchen of her well-appointed — and very clean — house in Elkins Park. "So I recognized that I had to do something to make my job better. What helped me was [thinking] what about that job made me feel better.

"I discovered," she said, "I liked to make things better," which happened with each swipe of her dust rag.

“How to Be Happy at Work” by Annie McKee, director of an executive doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania.

McKee began to converse with her employer, and soon that woman became a mentor, encouraging McKee to return to school and pointing her to a brighter future.

As the years passed, McKee and academic colleagues — including Daniel Goleman at Princeton — conducted hundreds of interviews, globally, with all levels of employees to learn about organizations and leadership, interviews that formed the basis for her book, published by Harvard Business Review Press.

For happiness, three things matter: a sense of purpose and an opportunity to contribute to a larger cause; a personal vision of a good life, embracing work and home and a reason for hope; and resonant and friendly relationships, including at work.

"I learned you need to take care of your emotional life, just as you do your physical health," she said.

"It's tempting to blame other people — that toxic boss, that horrible manager — when you aren't happy," she said.

Sometimes, the best solution is a burn-no-bridges exit. But "running away isn't always possible."

Go out to lunch — or at least don't eat at your desk. Have coffee with a colleague. Learn a new skill — because you want to, not because the company says so. Those are baby steps toward happiness, because each asserts the employee's power.

"I think we have a lot more control than we think we do," McKee said. "We box ourselves in."

Sometimes, she said, people may not even see themselves as unhappy, just settled into an unsettling discontent.

"If you are normally a glass-full kind of person, and you find yourself pessimistic and cynical; if relationships that were enjoyable are now strained; if you worry all the time; if you see physical signs, like not sleeping, or eating or drinking too much; if you don't feel like you're on the top of your game and somehow it doesn't seem worth it anyway," those are all signs to begin a happiness makeover, she said.

Sometimes, overheated ambition is the culprit, where getting ahead obscures the happiness of doing it right. Sometimes, it's a bigger paycheck. But mostly, it is endless "shoulds," enslavement to happiness-sapping tasks or workplace customs, McKee said.

"Then comes the really hard part: using emotional self-control to hold steady as you make changes, because you are going to get scared," she said. Going out for lunch while others are desk-dining, for example, may require chutzpah.

That's why it's important to have work friends who support your efforts and tell the truth about your impact on the job. McKee rejects the old caveat about keeping work and personal friendships separate.

"Like all myths, there is a kernel of truth to it," she said. "But I think we are more likely to have clouded judgments because we don't know people than if we do know them."

The former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has described media leaks of his report into the police force in Northern Ireland as total fabrications.

Mr Patten is due to publish recommendations for reforming the RUC next week.

Speaking in Brussels the head of the Independent Commission on policing said some of the assertions were a "total fabrication" and were designed to create a very difficult political atmosphere.

Referring to speculation that the RUC would be split into a number of regional forces, he said: "There has been a whole debate about whether we are going to Balkanise the police service. That is a straight forward fabrication.

Chris Patten: "I cannot deal with every smear"

"And why is it happening? I think there is an effort to distract attention from the real substance of our report next week and to muddy the water before we report.

"I can't deal with every fabrication and every smear, or every piece of educated guesswork, because I would get involved in a political striptease, showing you a week ahead what's in the report or what isn't."

Mr Patten also said reports of filling the police force with paramilitaries were also a "complete and total fabrication".

Mr Patten has recommended that his report, which contains over 200 proposals, should not be cherry-picked.

It will include a recommendation, vehemently opposed by unionists, that the RUC will be called the Northern Ireland Police Service.

But Mr Patten said that the RUC will not be broken up into a number of regional forces.

His comments came after a former chief constable of the RUC spoke out about some of the changes suggested in media reports.

Sir John Hermon, who was chief constable of the force between 1980 and 1989, said: "I did support the Patten committee and did, and still do, the assembly, because I think they're both essential.

"What concerns me about the Patten commission at the moment is the unprecedented number of leaks of what the Patten commission report is going to concern.

''This has caused a lot of deep concern not only within the Royal Ulster Constabulary but I would also say the considerable majority of this community."

London 2012 Olympics organisers have released more than 120,000 hotel room nights back onto the open market, they announced Sunday.

They confirmed that some 20 percent of the room nights they had reserved in London would be returned to hotels to offer up to other customers.

The spaces had been reserved to provide accommodation for media, global sport federations, the International Olympic Committee, Games workers and sponsors.

The rooms at more than 200 hotels, range from five-star to budget accommodation.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to flock to London for the July 27 to August 12 Games, whether ticket holders or not.

As part of the bid to stage the 2012 Olympics, agreements had been struck with hotels to provide more than 40,000 rooms, representing more than 600,000 room nights during the period.

But part of the deal was that the organisers promised to return any unwanted rooms to the hotels so they could sell them in time for the Games.

"The hotel industry in London got behind the bid to stage the Games in the most extraordinary way and that support helped us across the line," London Olympics chief executive Paul Deighton said.

"We always promised that we would not hold on to hotel rooms we didn't need but return them to the individual hotels at the beginning of 2012.

"We are now doing this and I hope that this enables the hotels to continue with their planning for this summer as we all work together to stage a spectacular Games."

Sandie Dawe, the chief executive of the VisitBritain national tourism agency, said: "The fact that such a wide spread of rooms in London will now be made available to the public is great news for overseas visitors wishing to come to the UK to experience the Olympics and all the other wonderful festivities that are taking place."

However, some in the tourism industry warned that prices had risen too fast before the new rooms were offered and many potential visitors have been put off staying in London.

Neil Wootton, managing director of sightseeing operator Premium Tours, told The Independent newspaper: "Prices have been so high that tourists are moving elsewhere."

Freshman Reading Round-Up is a summer reading program offered to first-year students. The annual event allows participants to read a book selected by a UT professor and meet in groups with that professor to discuss the book before classes start.

The 16th annual Reading Round-Up was filled to capacity within three days of the initial email inviting incoming freshmen to participate, which has never happened before, academic program coordinator Laura Weingarten said.

Weingarten said they reach out to a variety of professors every year to fill the 58 group slots.

While some professors chose to share their own books, Reading Roundup founder James Vick said he chooses a different book every year for his group to read.

Journalism freshman Will LeHardy said he signed up for Reading Round-Up as a way to introduce himself to the University before the start of classes.

Weingarten said the interest for Reading Round-Up has grown beyond first-year students.

Texas may become the third state in the country to raise the legal smoking age above 19-years-old.

Representative John Zerwas, a Fort Bend County Republican, is backing the bill authored by State Senator Carlos Uresti, a Democrat from San Antonio. Senate Bill 183 would raise the age to legally smoke or possess tobacco products from 18 to 21.

Both California and Hawaii have passed similar measures.

Similar legislation has been proposed multiple times in the past but has failed due to concerns over an infringement of civil liberties, loss of state sales tax and the potential to harm small businesses. Despite those failures, lawmakers say that new data has helped make their argument stronger than ever.

In December 2016, the Department of State Health Services released an analysis of the potential impact of raising the smoking age to 21. The analysis determined that raising the smoking age could reduce pre-term births by 4.3 percent over the first five years and 11.6 percent over the next 20 years. The report also states that the measure could reduce low birth-weight births by 4.1 percent over the first five years and 10.7 percent over the following 20 years.

According to the report, the state could save over $406 million in health care costs over the next five years and over $5.6 million over the next 25 years.

The report also stated that raising the smoking age would "result in a delayed use of such products, which in turn will decrease the prevalence of users. From a health perspective, the impacts of decreased prevalence would be short- and long-term. Reductions in tobacco-related diseases will take decades to realize, but there would be an immediate reduction in adverse physiological effects and poor infant health outcomes."

If the smoking age is raised, Texas would lose an estimated $97,147,000 in tax revenue over five years.

"It's kind of ironic that we're relying on 18,19, 20-year-olds to smoke so we can bring in $18 million, yet it's costing the state of Texas in the hundreds of millions of dollars for smoking-related illnesses," Sen. Uresti said.

Cory McCullough, who manages the Wizard Hut Smoke Shop, said his store will comply with whatever the law requires, but doesn't think it will deter anyone from smoking.

"If kids want to smoke, they're going to smoke," McCullough said. "If anybody wants to do anything, they're going to do it."

If the law is passed, the penalty for selling tobacco to anyone under the age of 21 would be a Class C Misdemeanor.

The new U.S. Attorney for West Tennessee said an anti-gun task force has been given new energy in Memphis and Shelby County to stem the widespread use of firearms in criminal acts.

Guns are used in more than a third of robberies and aggravated assaults, but the effort to press back against gun-toting criminals eased in recent years across Tennessee, leading many criminals to flaunt weapons.

Now a move is afoot to press back in Memphis.

Violent crime has eased in Memphis since the heavy crime streak nearly three decades ago, but the city’s national reputation as a crime zone persists. A recent comparison of America’s big cities by Forbes, a business magazine read worldwide, ranked Memphis No. 4 in the nation with 1,583 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. This works out to almost 10,300 such crimes each year.

Dunavant, the former district attorney general for the state's 25th Judicial District, was nominated by President Donald Trump to the larger office of U.S. Attorney and was sworn in last September.

More: Waters: How long will we live and die by the gun?

Since then, law enforcement agencies have committed 14 investigators and attorneys to the anti-gun initiative in Memphis and Shelby County called Project Safe Neighborhoods, up from a maximum of about 11 several years ago, Dunavant said.