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Embassy Row on Tuesday failed to give the proper credit to the source of an interview with Saudi Ambassador Adel al Jubier.
The interview was published in the fall issue of U.S.-Arab Tradeline, a publication of the U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce.
By , KATHMANDU, April 14 – Successful on the battlefield, Nepal’s Maoists appear to have confounded predictions they would fail at the ballot box — taking a stunning early lead in the count from last week’s elections.
Behind the numbers emerging from the Election Commission in Kathmandu is what observers and ordinary voters say is a resounding demand for sweeping change in the Himalayan nation and one of the world’s poorest places.
Last Thursday’s polls — the first major elections in nearly a decade — are set to change the history of the country by electing a body whose first job is to rewrite the constitution and most likely abolish a discredited monarchy.
Of the 601 seats up for grabs in a new Constituent Assembly, nearly one third have been decided or were close to being allocated — with the former rebels taking or poised to win the lion’s share.
Local media said the Maoists, who fought a decade-long insurgency to oust the monarchy, had already won 59 seats and were far ahead in scores of others currently being tallied — about three times as many as their nearest rivals.
"The Maoists had an election slogan: ‘We have seen everyone else time and time again, lets see the Maoists’ this time’," recounted 56-year-old Ganey Darai, a voter who gave the ex-rebels his backing.
"People have decided to take them up on their word, and see what they can do," said Darai, who earns less than a dollar a day hiring out weighing scales outside a hospital in Kathmandu.
Nepal’s established parties and the monarchy, he said, had had their chance — and were now suffering as the results rolled in.
"I would rather take a chance with the Maoists than the other political parties who have done nothing for poor people like me," Darai said.
The Maoist surge also appears to highlight the depth of the unpopularity of King Gyanendra, who ascended the throne after the tragic and bizarre palace massacre of 2001 — in which the former king and nearly all the rest of the family were shot dead by a lovelorn, drunk, drugged and suicidal prince.
Gyanendra’s status sank in 2005, when he fired the government and seized absolute power to fight the Maoists — only to push mainstream parties into the arms of the rebels and enter a peace deal that led to Thursday’s elections.
First-time voter Laxmi Shrestha, 22, said only the Maoists could be trusted to finally oust the unpopular monarchy and deliver the kind of shake-up Nepal and its feudal-style heirarchy needed.
"I am a staunch republican. When it comes to getting rid of the monarchy, I cannot trust the other parties," the student said.
The Maoists fought for ten years to oust the monarchy, a war that left at least 13,000 dead and was marked by brutality on all sides.
"I am sad that many Nepalese had to die, but people will soon forget the war. We are hoping for a better future," Shrestha said.
Rhoderick Chalmers, country director for the Brussels-based think-tank the International Crisis Group, said the Maoists also fought the best campaign.
"They were very professional and very dedicated," he said, predicting the Maoists will win between 30 to 40 per cent — shy of an absolute majority — of the seats in the 601-member assembly.
"There would have to be a serious upset now for them not to be the biggest party and the biggest by some significant margin," said Chalmers.
Author and political commentator Khagendra Sangroula, said the preliminary results suggested that "Nepali people have woken up."
"There has been a great stir amongst the Nepali people. They wanted new ideas, alternatives, new faces and possibilities," he said.
"The straight message of this election is a Nepali message: political party leaders are not landlords and this country is not their land."
He wants to retain maximum maneuverability in all areas.
On November 19, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made his final decision to leave the Likud. Just as before the major military battles he fought, he wanted to know that very evening all the final details regarding the forces he would be facing on the political battlefield. Kalman Gayer, Sharon's own pollster since 2000, pre...
Shypmate, which is part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, is a quick, low-cost international shipping solution that relies on everyday people to transport items from the U.S. to Ghana and Nigeria.
Why Ghana and Nigeria? Well, the founding team (pictured above) has members from both Ghana and Nigeria — two African markets they’re familiar with and have a need for this kind of service, Shypmate co-founder Perry Ogwuche told TechCrunch. On average, it takes shoppers Nigeria about five weeks to receive packages from...
In Shypmate’s test with DHL shipping a $50 pair of shoes to Ghana, it took about a week and cost $250, Ogwuche said. With Shypmate, the cost of shipping is just $25. Shypmate guarantees deliveries within 5-10 days after receiving the item from the retailer, but has been averaging deliveries of just three to five days. ...
For shoppers in Ghana and Nigeria, all they need to do is send Shypmate a link to whatever it is that they want to purchase. Shypmate then takes care of the entire process, from purchase to delivery. Some initial fears that might come to mind for travelers could be, “but what if I end up carrying something illegal?” Sh...
Here’s how it works for people in the U.S.: Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Ghana or Nigeria, and you have some extra space in your luggage. You would go to Shypmate and sign up as a traveler, share your flight information, and provide the best address for you to receive the item. Before you’re approved, Shypmate c...
In the last two months, Shypmate has facilitated over 150 transactions with a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, and is growing 10 percent every week. So far, people have been using Shypmate for shoes, weaves, iPhones, laptops, jewelry and other products. For the shoppers, Shypmate’s fees are based on the weight, size...
Down the road, post-Y Combinator, Shypmate will likely relocate to New York, where there are more direct flights to Ghana and Nigeria than from the San Francisco Bay Area. Shypmate also wants to expand its offering to other countries.
For now, if you’re based in the U.S. and planning a trip to either Ghana or Nigeria, you may want to consider signing up to become a Shypmate traveler to help offset the costs of your trip.
And, look for Pet Connection volunteers selling totes and other items to benefit the shelter from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. October 9 at the Clarence Hollow Farmers Market, 10717 Main St., Clarence.
Volunteer orientations will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. October 4 and from 10 a.m. to noon October 23 at the shelter. Adoption hours are held from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Pet Connection is located at 12935 Williston Road, Marilla. For more information, please call 652-0192 or visit www.petconnectionprogramsinc.com.
If you enjoy a sharply-worded insult, read on. This slideshow’s for you.
Linus Torvalds is considered one of the greatest living programmers, and for good reason, having written some of the most widely used software, such as the Linux kernel and the Git revision control system. He’s also known for not being shy about sharing his opinions on things that he doesn’t like through colorful and s...
BTW, just because Torvalds is now 45, don’t expect middle age to slow him down (much).
History: ARM-based system-on-chips (SoC), which integrate control all of a device’s components and peripherals onto a single chip, are widely used today in mobile devices and on systems like Raspberry Pis. Due to a lack of standards, however, beyond the basic instruction processor set (the ARM part), each SoC is custom...
History: C++ was created by Bjarne Stroustrup, who wanted to create a systems programming language that had the speed and efficiency of C, but with some of the program organization features of Simula. While C++ was created partly with idea of being used for operating system kernels, Linus Torvalds found it to be, well,...
History: The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), has been around since 1987, having been first created as a C compiler for the GNU operating system. It’s since been expanded to include front ends for compiling code for a number of other languages (C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go) on a wide variety of platforms....
History: GNOME is an open source desktop environment available on many Linux distributions, providing a graphical user interface and numerous applications. Linus Torvalds has had a long, on-again, off-again relationship with GNOME, often switching between using it and dropping it in favor of other environments such as ...
History: Emacs has long been one of the most popular text editors used on Unix and Unix-like systems, including Linux. GNU Emacs, the most widely used Emacs implementation, was created by Richard Stallman and released in 1985 as the first piece of software to come out of Stallman’s GNU project. Despite its popularity, ...
History: Hurd is a microkernel created as part of the GNU project with the intention of replacing the Unix kernel, based on CMU’s Mach kernel. Though Hurd has been a long time in development, with work having begun in 1990, it’s still not ready for production use. Ironically and instead, it’s the Linux kernel that beca...
History: HFS+ is a file system developed by Apple, also known as the Mac OS Extended Volume Hard Drive Format. HFS+ is used by the Mac OS X operating system, although it was first implemented in Mac OS 8.1. Over the years, Linus Torvalds has repeatedly shared his disdain for HFS+. One of his big issues with it is its c...
History: Java, first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995 as proprietary software, is one of the most popular programming languages in use today. Early on, Linus Torvalds had high hopes for Java and its “write once, run anywhere” feature, feeling that it could be a big boost for Linux. However, Torvalds felt that Sun b...
History: Mach is a microkernel, originally developed at CMU as a replacement for Unix’s BSD kernel in the late 1980’s. It later was used as the basis for other kernels (not all of which were microkernels), such as GNU Hurd and Apple’s Mac OS X. Given Linus Torvalds’ dislike for microkernels, it’s no surprise that he ha...
History: MINIX is a Unix-like operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, first released as proprietary software in 1987 and later open-sourced. Linus Torvalds has cited Tanenbaum as an influence and one of the reasons he became interested in Unix in the first place. In...
History: Solaris was created as a proprietary operating system by Sun Microsystems based on Unix System V and first released in 1991. Right around the time that Sun decided to open-source the Solaris code through the OpenSolaris project in 2005, Linus Torvalds had a few choice public words about Linux’s new competition...
History: XML is a markup language for encoding documents, developed by the W3C as a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and first published in 1998. While it was meant to be easily readable by both machines and people, not everyone finds that to be the case. Linus Torvalds is one of those people, ...
A couple pages for Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island went live early, giving up the game's price and list of achievements and trophies.
Tipsters who spotted the price page before it was removed said the game will cost $12.99 (€12.99 in Europe, £9.99 UK) on PlayStation Network and list for 1000 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live. Couldn't confirm that this morning, but it sounds reasonable.
TUCSON, AZ (KOLD) - Colonia Verde is a beautifully quiet little community tucked away on Tucson's east side. Though this weekend, the controversy surrounding Colonia Verde is anything but beautiful and quiet.
A memorial service for a long-time employee is planned Sunday afternoon at the Colonia Verde Clubhouse. That in itself isn't the problem. What is...is that the man for whom the service is being held--shot and killed his wife before killing himself.
For 17 years, Jeffrey Jester was a man many people knew and loved in the Colonia Verde community. Affectionately known as JJ, he was a working property manager who knew just about everybody in the community on a first-name basis.
"He never knew what it meant to say no to a homeowner. He just never did," says long-time Colonia Verde resident Phyllis Seltzer. "He was the biggest help to every homeowner."
But on June 15th this year, inside the east side home JJ shared with his wife Renie, Jester murdered wife before turning the gun on himself.
In the month since, we've learned Jester was experiencing great deal of anxiety.
"So the opposite of who he was, so the opposite," says Seltzer.
We're told his wife had cancer and JJ himself was battling clinical depression.
"I kept saying, 'JJ...are you getting help for the anxiety?' Seltzer says, recalling one of her last conversations with Jester.
'Well they're giving me something, but whatever they're giving me--it's making me worse'--Seltzer said, characterizing JJ's respond. "And he was telling this to a lot of people."
Then, early one Wednesday in June, Jester called the police saying that shots had been fired inside his home.
And he would be too in just a matter of moments.
"This tragedy is being overlooked and we're not doing any good or attempting to do any good."
That's Kent Driesbock, a Colonia Verde property owner who knew Jester for many years.
Like most people, Driesbock says Jester was incredibly helpful and beloved by many.
But he takes issue with the memorial being held Sunday in Jester's memory.
"They're honoring his service to the community which I can understand," Driesbock says. "But I think they're not really looking at the big issue that this was a murder suicide and something can be done better."
Something like calling attention to Jester's deteriorating condition.
Even his biggest supporters say he needed help.
"I really really feel like we all could do more, myself included," Seltzer says, tears welling in her eyes.
"I hope people realize that if we intervene we might make a difference," Driesbock says. "We always can't, but hopefully we can if we decide to intervene at some point."
All controversy aside, the memorial will in fact take place this weekend, Sunday afternoon starting at 3 PM. It's open to all Colonia Verde residents who'd like to attend.
Copyright 2011 KOLD. All rights reserved.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt testifies on the EPA’s budget request during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee Thursday, April 26. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
I realize it’s a perfectly reasonable request, to try to separate the personal from the policy in politics. This is how his desperately defensive fans ask for, shudder, President Trump to be treated at this late stage in his time in office.
And I get it. I mean, trying to separate out Trump’s lies and Gatsby-like carelessness about the fate of our nation and the Earth is like trying to separate higher literacy rates under Castro from his jailing all dissenters.
So Trump is a careless person, and so are his people. Take EPA chief Scott Pruitt, please. But let us stipulate that in the end, the problem is not his spending $43,000, money that came from you and me, on a cone-of-silence phone booth in his office. It’s not that a person who is not exactly the leader of the free worl...
Though it’s all unsavory enough that he was called on the carpet by a congressional committee last week, as an analyst told KCRW’s Madeline Brand on Thursday, Pruitt “is playing for an audience of one.” And the careless president doesn’t care about profligate spending and pesky ethics.
No, what Californians should care about re Scott Pruitt is his ongoing attempts to undo our state’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allows us to set tailpipe standards higher than federal rules. You know — those standards that have allowed us to clear our air from the godawful smog that choked the Southern Californ...
He’s against that. He wants to foul our air again. And that’s not a personal quirk. That’s an assault on our well-being.
The reason we get the waiver is that we were already in the vanguard of fighting smog from well before the federal Clean Air Act of 1970. The emissions standards for Nebraska don’t make sense here. So we got the waiver, and a dozen other states have followed us.
Yes, trade groups representing some automakers have been among those cheering this deregulation. But even that is by no means unanimous. The top brass at both Ford and American Honda have come out in favor of maintaining California’s waiver.
First, they are realists, and so realize the country will wake up from this little dark age sooner rather than later, and then they would just have to retool.
But they also know consumers like the industry’s government-prodded progress on not only emissions but also on fuel-economy standards, which Pruitt also wants to roll back. (He has the gall to claim that this is to make cars safer, i.e. more tank-like. By this logic, we should all drive Mack trucks.) For those who aren...
The 13 clean-car states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) and the District of Columbia are home to 113 million Americans. We’re like the 13 original colonies: We’ll fight for our rights.
The event Wednesday on an airport tarmac in Cincinnati was just the latest opportunity for the White House to disparage and undercut a law it officially must carry out.
One saw her choice of doctors shrink while her premiums and out-of-pocket costs rose, he said. The other has curtailed new investments in his company to maintain employees’ health benefits.
Both the gathering and Trump’s remarks represent officials’ strategy to convince Americans that the collapse of the Affordable Care Act is inevitable and to bolster public and congressional support for a GOP overhaul. Since the day he was inaugurated, Trump has taken steps to erode the law, including instructing his de...
But behind the scenes, the increasing fragility of the law’s insurance marketplaces has created an increasingly difficult predicament for the president’s top advisers.
The issue is whether to take steps to allay the concerns of skittish insurers, some of which are either increasing rates or pulling out altogether, or let things deteriorate further — even at the risk of being blamed. The advisers are split, according to several people briefed on the deliberations: Vice President Pence...
For the moment, the administration has defaulted to a position of doing little to try to soothe the health insurance industry, even as many insurers warn that federal action — or inaction — could aggravate the situation. Some suggest that the White House’s relentless naysaying is not reflecting marketplace problems as ...
“We’re in this very strange situation where the agency in charge of stewarding the law is very openly working to undermine that law,” said Caitlin Morris, director of affordability initiatives at Families USA, a pro-ACA consumer group.
“Sabotage is the operative word,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said last month.
The biggest source of industry anxiety right now is whether the administration and Congress will continue to fund cost-sharing subsidies that help 7 million Americans with ACA plans afford deductibles and copays. House Republicans challenged the legality of the $7 billion in subsidies when Barack Obama was president, a...
“Absent that funding, I don’t know if we’re going to have much participation in the exchange market in 2018,” said Tennessee insurance commissioner Julie Mix McPeak, a Republican who also serves as president-elect of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
The uncertainty is one of the top reasons insurers have cited when explaining why they are posting higher rates for the next year or withdrawing from markets outright. Two weeks ago, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina filed a rate increase of 22.9 percent that it said would have been 8.8 percent if the administra...
And on Tuesday, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it was pulling out of the federal exchange in Ohio, meaning that at least 20 of the state’s 88 counties will lack an insurer.

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