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In contrast to the cases of Mr. Clean and the Rice Krispies elves, the licensing agreement between Burger King and Hasbro involves an undisclosed amount of money. The Burger King ads have Mr. Potato Head starring with Claymation characters created by Nick Park (of ''Wallace and Gromit'' fame). But graphics on packaging, billboards, the touring Burger King ''Fry Mobile'' and promotional toys feature the talented tuber solo.
In the hall of mirrors that is pop culture, cross-referencing is all about recognition and surprise: the sitcom character from one show that drops in on a character on another show. For those who wish for a Mr. Clean/Mr. Potato Head joint appearance, however, don't hold your breath. ''Mr. Clean doesn't appear with anyone else,'' said Paul Sellers of Honda.
A report in the Public Eye column in the House and Home section on Jan. 29 about new advertising campaigns that use old advertising icons misstated the first name of the executive director of the California Milk Processing Board (which is using the Snap, Crackle and Pop elves in a milk commercial). He is Jeff Manning, not Jim.
We have tried to watch as much of the Olympic games as possible, and root for the USA.
We have stayed up late and tried to be as patriotic as we could.
Recently, we watched the ice dancers that won gold. Then we waited for the medal awards, but they cut off the Olympics for the local news. That was OK We watched the new "Tonight Show," hoping that when it was over they would pick up with the medal ceremony. They did not. Why?
We were excited to see (Meryl) Davis and (Charlie) White win gold, and wanted to watch when they were awarded their gold medals to the national anthem, but it was never shown.
We were very disappointed, and were wanting to know why.
Come along on a bed tour, where this Starry Night Sleep Technology Bed by Leggett & Platt can run as high as $50,000, depending on how you configure it. Plug in your iPod (it's not quite ready for the iPhone, even though it will fit), trick it out with 2K watts of subwoofer/fanny-rattling power, or team it up with electronic trickery that even senses when you're snoring too much or trigger the lights and raises the blinds when you rise in the morning.
Also on this video montage of robotic beddom, don't miss the LCD screen that slides out from under the bed. This one you see here is $18K, perfect for that upwardly mobile bachelor who seems to get laid all the time. We want that mounted under our Starry Night crib, racking up a $68,000 bed. Or we could just get a big honkin' Hummer and sleep in that every night.
Why you should care about air.
Bill Gates has said the world needs an energy miracle. We may already have found multiple miracles.
Environmentally-aware Australians now have a green energy option.
'Dirty bombs for a dirty nation."
The slogan appeared on a jihadist Web site in December 2004, its author lamenting that the planes that struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, did not also carry weapons of mass destruction. He pressed for a WMD attack against the United States, and proposed that deadly new dirty-bomb catchphrase to rally his followers.
No al-Qaeda figure, not even Osama bin Laden, has dedicated more effort to thinking through how to destroy the United States than the author of that Web posting, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the veteran Syrian jihadi whom Pakistani police arrested last fall. He is arguably al-Qaeda's most influential strategist since 9/11, and has been at the center of al-Qaeda's efforts to develop WMD capabilities since the late 1990s.
Setmariam's little-noticed capture, along with the much more heralded killing last week of Iraq insurgency leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, represents one of the most significant U.S. victories against terrorism in the past few years. But this is a rapidly changing war in which the arrest or death of any one leader may not matter. The new al-Qaeda promoted by Setmariam and Zarqawi is an al-Qaeda that lives on the Internet and in the swelling ranks of jihadists worldwide.
Indeed, Setmariam's exhortations and ideas, posted over the years on jihadist Web sites, offer a public dossier on al-Qaeda's strategies for global jihad and its internal debates on WMD. Our examination of thousands of pages of Setmariam's writings and videos of his speeches reveals just how influential the 47-year-old Syrian has been in redirecting al-Qaeda toward a more decentralized and hard-line jihad -- one that will be that much harder to defeat because it is now so diffuse.
Setmariam's vision centered on a few key ideas: Al-Qaeda needed to remake itself to become looser, meaner and more resilient. And to defeat the United States, jihad should be waged globally and with many more recruits.
This vision has become reality. After the London bombings of July 2005, which were undertaken by a local, autonomous cell and resembled attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul and Madrid, Setmariam gloated on a jihadist Web site: "I swear to God that I have in me a joy stronger than the joy of the farmer who sees the harvest of his fruits after a long planting."
Setmariam developed his strategy at the al-Ghuraba camp in Afghanistan from 1998 to 2001, where he instructed the best and brightest of al-Qaeda -- those who could recruit and plan operations.
His Afghanistan lectures were filmed and distributed across the Muslim world and in Europe; his videotapes turned up in Naples in 2000, when police raided the homes of members of a militant Islamist group. His lectures were later incorporated into a 1,600-page publication, "The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance," which was disseminated widely on the Internet beginning in December 2004.
We obtained more than 20 hours of video of Setmariam's lectures, in which he addresses his students, clad in white Islamic garb, with the obligatory Kalashnikov propped against a wall. Even then, Setmariam was urging future operatives toward the new structure and strategy al-Qaeda would adopt after 9/11.
Setmariam argued that "individual terrorism" should replace the group's hierarchically orchestrated attacks. He believed al-Qaeda should move away from centrally coordinated actions led by teams from Afghanistan -- the model for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and later the 9/11 attacks -- and should instead rely on local groups launching spontaneous attacks. He offered a harsh critique of al-Qaeda's rigid hierarchy, even drawing a diagram to show how easy it was to round up a cell and then trace its members back to a leader.
Setmariam's courses also offered tips on how to encourage more Muslims to become jihadis. "This should be done," he said, by "highlighting Jewish-Crusader oppression of Muslims" and emphasizing the "degeneracy of the Western world." He claimed his teaching was informed by years of living in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, where he blended in because of his fluent Spanish and French and his red hair and fair complexion. "I am one of the few jihadis who understand the Western culture and mentality," he said later.
Many of the students Setmariam trained in Afghanistan now recruit jihadis worldwide. His protégé Amer Azizi is wanted by Spanish authorities in connection with the 9/11 plot, the Madrid bombings of March 2004 and the buildup of al-Qaeda's presence in Spain. Before Zarqawi's death, Azizi was thought to be one of his key aides in Iraq.
But clearly it is through the online postings of his writings that Setmariam exerted the greatest impact, both because he cogently expressed jihadist strategies and because the medium spreads his ideas across the world instantly. Setmariam's online writings may well have influenced the manner of recruitment and even targets for the perpetrators of the attacks in London and Madrid.
He "has had a big influence," said Jordanian journalist Fuad Hussein, author of a Zarqawi biography. "I monitor the Islamist Web sites every day, and every day there are new postings of Setmariam's research, writings, chapters of his books and tapes. He has big credibility because [the jihadis] know his history. People read this in Iraq, the Arab world, in Europe and all over the world."
The power of the Internet to foment jihad was reaffirmed earlier this month with the arrests of suspected bombing plotters outside Toronto. The suspects reportedly became radicalized through militant Web sites and received online advice from Younis Tsouli, the Britain-based webmaster for Islamic extremist sites who called himself "Terrorist 007," before he was arrested late last year.
Setmariam's large Internet following has been of particular concern to U.S. authorities because of his repeated exhortations since 9/11 for al-Qaeda to strike the United States with WMD. That was probably why the U.S. government offered a $5 million reward in November 2004 for his capture or killing. In the 2004 book "Arab Afghans," serialized by the London Arabic daily Asharq al Awsat, bin Laden confidant Abu Walid al-Misri states that before 9/11, there was a sharp debate within al-Qaeda regarding how far to go in developing WMD capabilities, with even bin Laden leaning toward a more cautious approach.
But, according to U.S. authorities, Setmariam helped al-Qaeda's WMD chief, Abu Khabab al-Masri, instruct recruits on the use of such weapons at the Derunta training camp in Afghanistan before 9/11. Setmariam and Masri were particularly determined to develop the ability to explode radioactive material over a large area by inserting it into a conventional bomb. In a letter written before 9/11 and discovered in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, Masri instructed al-Qaeda operatives to work with contacts in Pakistan to learn how to use "the charges from a traditional nuclear reactor for military ends."
"I feel sorry that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the planes that attacked New York and Washington on 9/11," Setmariam said in his December 2004 Web posting. He argued that the attacks were not destructive enough to justify the loss of al-Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan following the U.S. backlash. Bin Laden had not fully thought through how to destroy the United States, which is "a life and death issue for all Muslims," Setmariam wrote.
In Iraq today, Setmariam's hopes for "thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Muslims participating in jihad" are becoming reality. Iraq is evolving into what Setmariam refers to in his 2004 book as "an open front" -- a necessary area to build "individual terrorism" because it offers a "haven" and a rich recruiting environment.
But even with the Iraqi insurgency and an increasingly globalized jihad, Setmariam realized that defeating the United States through conventional means would take "many years and enormous sacrifices," as he wrote in the December 2004 online posting. Therefore, "an attack on the United States with WMD has become necessary . . . by means of decisive strategic operations with weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."
In his 2004 book, Setmariam said that "Strategic Operations Brigades" should be established and given "very high-level financial capabilities" to acquire an "operational knowledge and potential to use WMD." Then Americans, he argued, could be subjected to a "back-breaking policy of collective massacres."
Despite his capture, Setmariam's strategic advice will remain influential. His final, chilling proposal, made before his arrest and posted online in December 2005 by unknown followers, argues that with Washington and its allies bogged down in Iraq, the time is ripe for al-Qaeda to strike again: "I reiterate my call for mujahideen who are spread in Europe and in our enemies' countries or those able to go there, to move fast to hit countries that have a military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Arab peninsula or to hit their interests in our countries and all over the world."
Paul Cruickshank is a visiting fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security. Mohanad Hage Ali covers terrorism for the London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat.
Back in the day, we lived in small clans or tribes of loosely related people, usually ruled over by whoever had the strongest leadership skills, or the strongest arm. Everybody else grew, gathered or hunted food. About the only specialization in existence was perhaps the healer/spiritual leader. Other than the chief, most people were roughly equal in status.
Then along came the ability to grow and store grain, and thus settle in one spot more or less permanently. We were civilized. That meant we had to have a few more rules for getting along, and it meant we could specialize a little more. Not everybody needed to work full time obtaining and storing food. With more people freed up from food duty, some would become soldiers. Or poets. Or the idle rich.
We’ve done nothing since then but become increasingly dependent on our ever-more-complex society. Most of us would starve if suddenly we could no longer walk into the grocery store and buy food.
We would also freeze to death, since most of us are utterly dependant upon the utility company. I live close enough to the Illinois River that I suppose I could bring a couple of buckets of nice, muddy green water to my house each day, but I doubt we’d survive long drinking that.
We are specialized to an astonishing degree. Many people do jobs that could not have been imagined a generation ago.
Time was, even the guy who made barrels still had a good understanding of the job of the guy who raised pigs. The guy who raised pigs had a decent idea of how the blacksmith made horseshoes.
Imagine asking a computer programmer, a modern farmer with a GPS-enabled tractor, an electrician, a web designer and a welder to step into each other’s jobs.
I have no earthly idea how a laptop computer is made or programmed, even though I am on one for 12 hours a day. We’re surrounded by more mysteries than ever.
And more rules. And more taxes.
Those rules and taxes may seem like a loss of freedom, but some of them are necessary, ultimately, to everyone else’s freedom.
This level of civilization we’ve decided to build up requires law enforcement to keep the order. If you want to compare the level of taxes people pay now with the tiny amount paid generations ago, you might want to reflect how many more government services we have now, many of them necessary only because of the increasing level of complexity in our society, and thus the increasing need to oversee all the things that hold the system together, from roads to meat inspection to public safety to the sort of safety net welfare programs that weren’t necessary earlier in history.
When folks could build a shelter in any likely spot out of the natural materials around them and live off the land, society didn’t need a welfare bureaucracy. But we’ve built a society that requires all the trappings of civilization now, whether people can afford to pay for them or not.
I’ve often thought some poor souls were just born in the wrong time. The guy who can’t keep a job today might have had status as a mighty hunter if he lived in ancient times. Meanwhile, the computer nerd who today enjoys every luxury his job skills can buy might not have fared too well if he had to depend on brute strength to bring down a bison.
I’m hopeful we can keep this whole civilization thing going, because while I do have more subsistence skills than many, I’m not eager to trade in editing a newspaper for plucking chickens and weaving cloth.
The firm founded by the creators of the Spark in-memory data-processing framework has improved its hosted platform to cut time spent developing and managing complex workloads.
Apache Spark company Databricks has updated its cloud platform with a feature designed to let firms manage production pipelines to run Spark workloads without human intervention.
The company, started in 2013 by the creators of Spark's various components, says the new Jobs feature supports the creation of production pipelines using Databricks Cloud notebooks as well as standalone applications that use the Spark in-memory data-processing framework.
Because of that ability to move from exploration to production workloads, Databricks reckons the Jobs feature will cut the time spent developing, scheduling, and managing complex Spark workloads.
Databricks head of engineering Ali Ghodsi said the company had been working on the Jobs feature for some time because of the difficulties of making interactive exploration, collaboration and production to work well together.
"You can take your notebook and say, 'OK, I want this notebook that I've just developed interactively now to run over any new data that comes in every two hours. I want you to launch a cluster for me of this particular size, get enough machines for this cluster, configure it for me, run this job or notebook every two hours and dump the results somewhere else, " he said.
Once the workload is running in production, users may receive email notifications flagging up issues.
"If you get an email, you can go back into the UI again at any given time and see the output of each of these runs of the job. You can click on it to see its output and the nice thing is that again you get this notebook back," Ghodsi said.
"If you're confused about the output of some job or something looks strange or you just want to dig deeper, you can use that notebook just as you could to do interactive exploration to debug: 'Why is this output here looking like this or what if I change the query a little bit here?'. It provides you with a very nice way of mixing this interactive mode with the production mode."
Spark began in 2009 as a UC Berkeley research project to create a clustering computing framework addressing target workloads poorly served by Hadoop. It went open source in 2010 and its September 1.1 release counted more than 170 contributors.
"Spark is an engine that is much faster than Hadoop. It has a very simple API that lets programmers use it, writing very few lines of code compared with Hadoop and finally - this is one of its main strengths - it unifies many different models, which you would otherwise have to use many different systems for," Ghodsi said.
"So if you want to do real time screening or SQL queries or machine-learning or just basic raw data-crunching you would, before Spark, use different systems. But Spark lets you do this very naturally in one framework."
Ghodsi said the creators of Spark created Databricks Cloud, which was unveiled last June, because getting started with any of these frameworks, even Spark, requires users to go through a lot of hoops.
"You have to set up clusters - that could take you six months. You have to configure them. You have to work with operations to get that up. Once you've installed Spark, Spark is just the engine. You still need a way to explore the data interactively. You need some kind of interactive operation tool where you can just sit there and write these things," he said.
Ghodsi said the fear of lock-in lies behind the relative failure of platform as a service compared with infrastructure as service, which has been immensely successful.
The Databricks Cloud Jobs feature was launched this week at the inaugural Spark Summit East in New York City.
The number of robberies in Northumberland has increased by more than 50%, according to the latest police recorded crime statistics.
Office for National Statistics data shows there were 89 reported robberies in the 12 months to September 2018.
That figure is up 51% on 2016-17, when 59 incidents were recorded.
Overall, police recorded crime in Northumberland increased in the 12 months to September 2018.
Over the period, 26,075 crimes were recorded, up by 17% on 2016-17.
That means there was a rate of 82 crimes per 1,000 residents during 2017-18, slightly below the England and Wales average of 85.
Gun and knife possession offences in Northumberland rose by 24 to 155 incidents.
There have been no homicides, which are murders or manslaughters. There were three cases of death or injury by dangerous driving.
In Northumberland, theft, one of the most high volume crimes, increased by 7%. Drugs related offences rose by 22%.
Northumbria Police’s Superintendent Andy Huddleston said: “Numbers don’t ever tell the whole story and I would ask that the public don’t just look at the overall increase in recorded crime.
“Recorded crime has been rising for a number of years now but that does not mean that our region is less safe than it has been in the past.
“What these figures do show is that residents in our Force area are the least likely in the entire country to be victims of household crime, including burglary.
“These figures also highlight the continued confidence the public have in contacting police to report crimes.
“There have also been reductions in violent incidents and the figures show we rank highly in public confidence.
Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman said: "These statistics show that your chance of being a victim of crime remains low, but we recognise that certain crimes - particularly violent crime - have increased, and we are taking action to address this."
Criminal damage in Northumberland, which includes arson and vandalising cars and houses, has gone up, from 4,071 incidents in 2016-17, to 4,190 in the latest figures.
In Northumberland, there were 897 incidents recorded between October 2017 and September 2018, a 40% rise on the previous year, when 642 crimes were reported.
There were also 2,637 cases of stalking and harassment reported over the same period.
WASHINGTON — Bulls point guard Rajon Rondo said he was told by a member of the Chicago coaching staff that coach Fred Hoiberg was “saving me from myself” by benching the four-time All-Star for the past five games.
Before returning to action in a game Tuesday night, Rondo said Hoiberg had not provided a reason for his benching.
Rondo said he was surprised by the comment and said he did not understand it.
Rondo came off the bench in the first quarter against the Washington Wizards on Tuesday. He hadn’t played since posting a plus-minus rating of minus-20 during 11 first-half minutes in Chicago’s 111-101 loss at Indiana on Dec. 30.
Rondo, an eight-year star with the Celtics, said his diminished role with the Bulls wasn’t what he was expecting when he signed a $28 million, two-year contract in July.
Rondo’s debut season in Chicago started spiraling downward when he was suspended one game by the team for verbally arguing with assistant coach Jim Boylen during a Dec. 3 loss to the Mavericks. The controversy escalated when he was caught on camera throwing a towel at Boylen during a timeout.
A day after the initial benching, Rondo again didn’t see the court during the Bulls’ Dec. 31 loss to the Bucks and told reporters he would propose a trade if he continued to sit, according to ESPN. The 30-year-old point guard met with general manager Gar Forman and executive vice president John Paxson after the game, a talk he dismissed as having no “clear-cut” message, but said Tuesday he has not spoken with them since.
Hoiberg spoke to the media before Rondo made his comments and said the veteran would be the first man off the bench Tuesday for the short-handed Bulls. Chicago was without leading scorers Jimmy Butler (ill) and Dwyane Wade (resting), and forward Nikola Mirotic was also out with an illness.
He averaged 7.2 points, 7.1 assists and 6.5 rebounds over 29 games before falling out of favor.
This is your opportunity to fix my cartoon below. Post your caption on the comments link to the left. Your deadline is Wednesday at noon.
Remember brevity is the soul of wit so keep it short and keep it clean. The winning captions will be posted Thursday.
Drivers have been have warned of the dangers of standing water as severe weather and flood warnings are in place across the UK.
It comes following crashes which have seen cars written off after they aquaplaned on roads affected by recent heavy rains.
Road Policing Scotland tweeted a picture of two cars which were involved in a crash near Livingston, West Lothian in Scotland.
They wrote, “[Police] attended a 2 car RTC at the weekend which highlights risks caused by standing water. Everyone ok, but both written off and lucky escapes for all.

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