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Bentley’s finance director agreed that mergers won’t result in a sudden drop in state government workers.
“Many of these individuals are protected by the merit system. You can’t just walk in and start laying off people,” Davis said.
But just because mergers are being planned now, it doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
Bennett recalled that Alabama’s new governor in 1939, Bibb Graves, merged the Department of Labor into the Department of Industrial Relations. Then four years later, the next governor, Chauncey Sparks, split them apart, he said.
If you decide to move your site from blogs.wm.edu to an installation of WordPress somewhere else, WordPress allows you to easily export your site. Before you start this process, you will need to have set up WordPress to manage your new site.
On the left navigation menu, go to Tools>>Import. Select “WordPress” from the list of possible sites from which you can import content.
You will then see a screen that will allow you to assign the authors of the previous posts to users on your new site. You can either create new user accounts for your old authors, or assign the posts to an existing user on your site.
Check the box to download file attachments to make sure you get all the content from your old site.
WordPress will then import your old data. While the images on your posts and pages should be imported, we recommend that you double check to make sure they made the move.
It isn't just bottles and microbeads that should worry you.
March 16, 2017, 1 p.m.
Much of the plastic we use ends up in the oceans and landfills as pollution, but there's a much less obvious form of pollution heading to the seas.
Those comfy, often-controversial yoga pants and other stretchy athletic wear and comfort clothes also are contributing to marine pollution. Clothes made out of synthetic fabrics can contain microplastic fibers — tiny shreds of plastic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Debris Pro...
"This suggests that a large proportion of microplastic fibers found in the marine environment may be derived from sewage as a consequence of washing of clothes," the researchers wrote. "As the human population grows and people use more synthetic textiles, contamination of habitats and animals by microplastic is likely ...
For the NOAA-funded Florida Microplastic Awareness Project (FMAP), citizen scientists collect coastal water samples, filter them and analyze them to check for microplastics. In the first year, 89 percent of the samples collected contained at least one piece of plastic, and 82 percent of the plastics found were microfib...
University of Florida researcher Maia McGuire runs the project. She told the Associated Press that when she first started to study the types of plastic in Florida's water, she thought she would discover primarily microbeads, the tiny plastic specks found in personal care products like toothpaste and body wash that were...
Studies have shown the fibers can end up in the stomachs of marine animals, including some that wind up as seafood. The research has prompted some environmentalists to consider targeting microfibers (and washing machine manufacturers) as the new microbeads in an effort to lower the amount of plastic pollution in the oc...
"It would be really great if the washing machine companies would get on board and come up with a filter to trap these microfibers," Caitlin Wessel, regional coordinator for NOAA's Marine Debris Program, told the AP. "I think there's a big push right now — nobody really disagrees that marine debris is an issue that need...
In the meantime, what can you do? Check your tags. Where possible, buy clothes with all-natural, non-synthetic materials. After all, cotton yoga pants can be comfy, too.
We know plastic products pollution the ocean, but washing yoga pants, athletic wear and other clothes is a rising cause of concern.
Black Stars coach, Kwesi Appiah, has never properly offered an explanation for the constant exclusion of the Ayew brothers from the Black Stars team. Jordan in particular, arguably the country’s best player abroad last season, was consistently overlooked by the gaffer in national team selections.
The explanations haven’t been offered, not because questions haven’t been asked; but because Appiah has been dodgy with his answers. After all, Kwesi Appiah himself has remarked that call ups to the national team will purely be based on merit.
What better merit is there than consistently churning out top notch performances for a club in the best league in the world; emerging top scorer of that team; and eventually being named player of the season by your club?
Such has been the story of Jordan Ayew; king at Swansea City, an outcast in the Black Stars.
But Jordan’s exclusion is a question that will never go away, and Appiah, after several months of evading the question, has finally offered an insight into why he has consistently overlooked the Ayews.
“If a player says he’s not well or he is injured, it is my job to make sure there is another player available to fill the void. Nobody is bigger than Ghana and I’m looking for players who are committed and ready to kill themselves for the nation,” Appiah said.
Jordan and Andre have not received call ups to the Black Stars since they opted out of Ghana’s world cup qualifier against Congo last year. Jordan said he had a stomach upset while Andre said he was injured. Appiah’s side subsequently won the return encounter 5-1.
Word is that Appiah felt the brothers faked the illness and the injury. It is also understood he was not happy with Jordan’s conduct in the first leg encounter days earlier in Kumasi. If this is what sums up a lack of commitment to Appiah, well that’s within his right to judge.
The problem is that Appiah has presided over similar, if not worse cases of seemingly indifferent attitude from players his players, yet none, has faced an immediate axe as exhibited in the case of the Ayew brothers.
In 2008, Asamoah Gyan and his brother Baffour, packed up their bags and threatened to abandon the Ghana camp midway through AFCON 2008 because of intense criticism of Asamoah’s performances. They were persuaded by then President J.A. Kuffour to stay. Kwesi Appiah was assistant coach to Claude Le Roy at the time.
In 2012, Gyan, without another head of state to persuade him to stay, abandoned the national team, returned in 2013 and was rewarded with the captain’s armband for that year’s AFCON. Kwesi Appiah was head coach of the team.
But same year, Appiah left out Jordan Ayew in the AFCON squad but named his brother Andre. But after Andre turned up to the team’s training camp late (till date Andre insists he gave justifiable reason for his late show), Appiah axed him from the team.
A month later, he and his brother announced temporary retirement from the national team. Few months later however, the duo were invited back to the team, and helped Ghana qualify for the 2014 world cup in Brazil.
In 2010, Muntari was nearly sacked from the world cup in South Africa after incessantly complaining over a lack of starting berth. He had earlier been excluded from the 2010 AFCON squad over disciplinary issues. Kwesi Appiah was assistant coach of the team and witnessed all of this behavior, but when he became head coa...
In 2011, Kevin Prince Boateng retired from the national team after using it to build a profile so high, he eventually ended up making a move to Italian giants AC Milan. His performances for the Rossoneri were superb and the Black Stars were desperately in need of his qualities for two AFCON tournaments but he turned hi...
Kwesi Appiah was assistant coach to Goran Stevanovic for AFCON 2012 and head coach for AFCON 2013.
He then invited him back to the team for the final world cup qualifier return leg against Egypt.
He was no longer at AC Milan and performing wonders. He was at Schalke 04 and playing sporadically. He needed the national team more than the team needed him. Appiah took him along to the world cup.
In 2012, Michael Essien quit the national team before making himself available just before the 2014 world cup, and made the team for the tournament.
The way some people interpret is that Kwadwo chose Juventus over the Black Stars at crucial moments. Yet, Appiah is elated to invite him back to the team.
Why was Kwesi Appiah ready to wait for Kwadwo Asamoah for FOUR years to be fit and regain his position at his club, before returning to the team but finds it hard to accord both Ayews the same courtesy? How can you believe that one player is genuinely staying away from the national team for 4 years but cannot believe t...
Of the players actively playing for the Black Stars, only Asamoah Gyan (106) and Harrison Afful (76) have made more appearances for the national team than Andre Ayew (75). In fact, Andre has more appearances in Black Stars jersey than the legendary Stephen Appiah (67) himself.
A player does not reach these numbers by being uncommitted.
Since making his debut in 2010, Jordan Ayew (46) has made more appearances for the team than any other player who made his debut in and around that same period.
Appiah can have a thousand reasons for excluding the duo from his team, but to brand them uncommitted will be inconsistent with how Appiah has treated or labelled players who have behaved similarly to the Ayews in the past.
If their exclusion is to make way for newer and younger players, why is he still inviting players such as John Boye and Harrison Afful when their best football is clearly behind them? That would be inconsistent, woudn’t it?
If there is more to their exclusion (misconduct or otherwise), it is important for Kwesi Appiah to offer a proper explanation but to axe them from the team based on that one incident will be a miscarriage of justice in Kwesi Appiah’s court of fair treatment.
This is why I believe a press conference should always be organized to announce the Black Stars squad, so that Appiah can properly address questions around his choice of call ups. And there are question marks in his call ups; wherever you look.
Jorge Perez, a developer and art collector who built tens of thousands of condos in Miami during the go-go years, lives in a hacienda-style house stuffed to the gills with art on land that once belonged to Howard Hughes, in Miami's Coconut Grove. Robbie Whelan has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Alexia Fodere for The Wa...
Exploring a time warp of haunting beauty, Olivia Cole discovers the tiny precipice-top towns of Basilicata are alive with entrepreneurial bustle and cinematic enchantment.
It’s a magical hour on the drive up to the vertiginous mountain village of Oliveto Lucano in the foothills of the Apennines, but it’s hard to imagine an hour that wouldn’t have a kind of magic here. There are pine forests and olive groves, fruit trees and pocket-sized wheat fields. At the roadside, long grasses, wild f...
The region of Basilicata is a revelation even to people who think they know Italy well. But unspoilt is also a synonym for the poverty which has preserved its wildness. It doesn’t look too different today to how it was described in the 1950s by the region’s chronicler, the left-wing polemicist Carlo Levi: “Like all the...
This Friday night, though, is not about solitude. All of Oliveto Lucano’s residents are out in the piazza. There is traditional music. Teenage girls are dancing a tarantella. The boys watch on. The older residents are on the balconies with their geraniums. Despite all the crowds here tonight, like so many of its neighb...
Just for a moment, it is possible to fall for the illusion of a world outside history. A few details break the spell: there are Converse flashing underneath the girls’ traditional skirts; grandmothers take photos on their phones of their freshly baked focaccia; T-shirt logos are sequinned with “LA” or “‘Frisco”, reiter...
The Night of the Ovens is a genuine attempt to counter the drain, which continues today. In the nearby hilltop medieval village of Aliano, houses seem to be slowly disappearing into the landscape. Another, Craco, is a ghost town: untouched for more than 50 years except by looters and film crews. Its own festa still tak...
But despite this recurrent motif of departure in modern-day Basilicata, there is a story of return, too, and the emotional and imaginative pull this region can exert. The most prominent example is filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who opened his Palazzo Margherita half a dozen years ago in the sleepy town of Bernalda. As...
Coppola first visited more than 50 years ago, aged 23. After finishing a shoot in Dubrovnik, he travelled to southern Italy to find his roots—and the hometown of his paternal grandfather Agostino Coppola, who left in 1904. From the piazza to the church to the castle, he was astonished to find a place he could still rec...
Whilst Agostino was born in a small house in the backstreets, his grandson’s hotel is one of Bernalda’s grandest 19th-century palazzos, with high ceilings, frescos and marble floors. There is an opulent drawing room with a retractable cinema screen; a jewel box of a bar under a Murano chandelier; and rooms named after ...
Return is also, today, strong in nearby Matera, an extraordinary example of a troglodyte settlement. Carved out of the soft porous rock, it’s a complex of houses, churches, monasteries and hermitages built into the natural cave system. The town seems to rise out of a gorge like two wings of a bird; the constructions lo...
Yet in recent history, the hauntingly beautiful town, and the region at large, had a reputation as the shame of Italy. That stemmed in part from the writings of Levi, who described the scattered villages here as “cut off from History and the State”, its people living “for better or for worse, like angels or demons, in ...
But a few decades later, in 1986, there was a government initiative to inspire investment in the south. Artists arrived, seduced by the astonishing architecture and the 50 per cent subsidies available for restorative work. The caves were converted into ateliers, shops and galleries. Vehicles are banned and, at dusk, th...
For anyone who grew up here, this new hipster-driven identity can seem surreal. Nicola Rizzi, a retired teacher, is a founder of the city’s La Casa di Ortega, a gallery dedicated to the Spanish painter José Ortega, who made Matera his muse. Rizzi tells me he would like to see “people living normally” here, perhaps a fa...
Continuing my walk around town, I pass the duomo. An arrow daubed on a wall points the way to a neatly scribed CINEMA. As someone who finds Italy’s everyday life profoundly cinematic, daydreaming about what it must have been like to discover Italy earlier in the century, that sign stays with me. There is, of course, a ...
For more than three decades, Joan Cusack has been making audiences howl with laughter, whether it’s on Saturday Night Live, as Jessie the Yodelling Cowgirl in the Toy Story films or as Cyn, an Aqua Net-addicted secretary in Working Girl.
Unlike the traditional voice-over procedure used in the Toy Story films, Mars Needs Moms employed a motion-capture process producer Robert Zemekis used before with The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol. Cusack compares the Avatar-esque process of motion-capture to “going back to childhood. [You’re] just playing, and ...
The information contained herein is strictly embargoed from all press, online and social media use, non-commercial publication, or syndication until Monday 30 March 2015.
Whenever disaster strikes, International Rescue answers the call! From their hidden island base in the south Pacific, the five Tracy Brothers pilot remarkable, cutting-edge Thunderbird vehicles from the depths of the oceans to the highest reaches of space – all for one purpose: to help others in need.
International Rescue’s identities may not be widely known, but their heroism is legendary. Even the devious schemes of mysterious international criminal ‘The Hood’ can’t weaken their resolve, or stop them from battling the dangers of the year 2060.
Supported by mechanical genius Brains, stealthy operative Kayo, their jet-setting London agent Lady Penelope and her loyal driver Parker, Scott, Gordon, Virgil, John and Alan Tracy live for these three words: Thunderbirds Are Go!
Fifty years on from its first television debut, ITV Studios and New Zealand based Pukeko Pictures have re-invented the classic Thunderbirds series in collaboration with world-famous Weta Workshop (Avatar, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings). The 26 x 30’ major new children’s series will debut on ITV and CITV this Spring.
This re-invention of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's iconic series has been produced using a unique mix of CGI animation and live-action model sets. Showcasing Pukeko Pictures’ and Weta Workshop’s ground-breaking creative and technical excellence, it will deliver a whole new level of action-adventure animation for today's ...
Featuring the world's most famous family of heroes, the series stars Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl, Pride and Prejudice) as Lady Penelope, original cast member David Graham who reprises his role as Parker, Kayvan Novak (Fonejacker, Facejacker) as inventor Brains and Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Game of Thrones, Love Actually) vo...
“BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts” by Serious Eats pastry wizard Stella Parks. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
While the cookies have garnered the most attention, she also covers classic cakes and breakfast treats (think homemade Pop-Tarts and McDonald’s-style baked apple turnover) as well as candies and ice cream. High achieving do-it-yourselfers can even learn to make their own sprinkles.
Parks examines the history behind some of the most popular mass-market treats to hit supermarket shelves, often revealing the clever marketing ploys that made them insanely popular. She debunks the myth of Ruth Wakefield creating the first chocolate chip cookies in 1938 – Nestlé featured the legendary Toll House recipe...
“BraveTart” author and Serious Eats pastry wizard Stella Parks. Sarah Jane Sanders Reprinted with permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
She likewise invests three full pages (and 25 footnote references) on the fascinating twist and turns of how Oreo dethroned Hydrox as America’s most beloved creme-filled sandwich cookie, concluding with recipes for the chocolate wafers and vanilla filling. Her secret to making the cookies inky black? Top quality Dutch ...
With “BraveTart,” you can master your own Nutter Butter and Pecan Sandies, and you won’t need a Girl Scout to indulge in superior Thin Mints and Trefoils.
This book makes me wish I could turn back time and make even-better Fig Newtons for my dad, who loved to dunk them in coffee. As with many of the recipes, Park includes several variations, allowing you to tweak the filling with such enticing combinations as apricot-strawberry, blueberry-lime and “Pig” Newtons crammed w...
Jill Warren Lucas is a freelance writer from Raleigh. She can be reached at 3lucases@gmail.com or via Twitter at @jwlucasnc.
Made from equal parts butter and peanut butter, these shortbread wafers are ultra-crunchy and salty-sweet – perfect for sandwiching with whipped peanut butter creme. They’re best made with commercial peanut butter, which makes the dough and filling easy to handle.
Prepare the dough: Sift flour (if using a cup measure, spoon into the cup and level with a knife before sifting).
Homemade Nutter Butter Cookies from “BraveTart.” Stella Parks Reprinted with permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees and adjust oven rack to middle position.
Combine butter, peanut butter, sugar, baking soda and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low to moisten, then increase to medium and cream until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes.
Beat the egg whites with a fork until foamy and thin, then add to the butter and sugar in four additions, letting each incorporate before adding the next. Scrape the bowl and beater with a flexible spatula, then resume mixing on low.
Sprinkle in the flour, and mix to form a soft dough.
Knead dough against sides of the bowl to form a smooth ball. Divide in half and flatten into two discs.
On a flour-dusted work surface, roll the dough until 1/2-inch thick. Sprinkle with flour, flip, sprinkle again, and roll just shy of 1/8 inch.
Cut into peanuts with a 3-inch bikini cutter or simple 2 1/4-inch rounds. Gently lift with an offset spatula and arrange cutouts on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Gently score the cutouts in a criss-cross pattern. Gather scraps, re-roll and cut as before. Bake wafers until firm and dry, about 13-15 minutes. Cool compl...
Make the creme: Combine butter, peanut butter, honey, vanilla and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low speed to moisten, then sprinkle in the powdered sugar a little at a time. Once incorporated, increase to medium and beat until the creme is soft and light, about 5 minutes.
Transfer to a pastry bag fitted with a 1/2-inch plain tip.
Assemble the cookies: Pipe two teaspoons creme onto half of the cookies, filling each lobe of the peanut shape. Sandwich with remaining wafers.
Transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate until the filling is set, about 15 minutes. Store up to one week at room temperature or a month in the fridge. Serve at room temperature.
Recipe and photographs from “BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts” by Stella Parks. Copyright 2017 by Stella Parks. Reprinted with permission of W.W. Norton & Company Inc. All rights reserved.
Forget molasses, this golden brittle gets its color (and complex flavor) from caramelized sugar. It’s so easy to make you don’t even need a thermometer – just let the syrup simmer until it develops a tawny hue, indicating that all the water has been driven out. Note: Honey, molasses and maple syrup cannot be used in th...
Caramel Vanilla Peanut Brittle from “BraveTart.” Stella Parks Reprinted with permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Split the vanilla bean lengthwise with a paring knife and scrape the seeds from each half; reserve the pod for another project.
Combine the water, corn syrup, sugar, butter and vanilla seeds in a 3-quart stainless steel saucier set over medium-low heat and gently stir with a fork until the clear syrup is bubbling hard around the edges, about 5 minutes. Increase heat to medium-high, clip on a digital thermometer if you like, and cook, without st...
Meanwhile, lightly grease an aluminum baking sheet. Measure baking soda and salt into a ramekin or small dish.

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