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While The Miniaturist on Masterpiece Theatre is based on a work of fiction, the novel, The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton, is actually based on a woman who lived in the 17th century named Petronella Oortman. Her cabinet house, a dollhouse which was a replica of her home with all of its luxury furnishings, was given to her by her husband as a wedding gift.
The miniseries now on PBS is the story of a young woman named Petronella (Nella) Oortman, who is the young wife of a wealthy Dutch merchant named Johannes Brandt. Brandt gives Nella the cabinet house as a wedding gift and gives her a budget with which to decorate it to her liking. She starts getting gifts from a miniaturist who seems to be all-knowing, slowly revealing the secrets of the family.
Town & Country says that the story is fiction from Burton’s imagination, but the author got her inspiration when she saw the real Petronella Oortman’s cabinet house in a museum in Amsterdam. Burton was on vacation in 2009 when she visited the Rijksmuseum and saw the dollhouse, which belonged to Oortman, who was married to a man named Brandt.
The detail that went into the dollhouse stayed with Burton.
She says she couldn’t help wondering what kind of woman would have owned such a large piece of art.
Burton says that the story, which is actually quite dark, has little to do with the real Petronella Oortman beyond the family name and the particulars of the dollhouse.
But the author did want to know more about the cabinet house and its furnishings and what would have gone into having the pieces made to match the actual Brandt home. A historian told Burton that Nella would have spent the equivalent of 2 million euro on the house.
Data is, supposedly, the currency of the internet age, with companies increasingly allowing people to pay for their digital services with information rather than money. But how much is your personal data actually worth?
According to a new survey of 5,000 consumers by digital storage company Western Digital, the average consumer values their personal data at £3,241.
Men tend to value their personal data more highly than women, with the average male consumer placing a value of £4,174 on his data, compared to £3,109 for women.
However, women are less willing to "sell" their personal data, with 31pc claiming their data is "priceless", compared with 23pc of men.
Older people are also less likely to sell their data than younger ones – with 32pc of those 45 years and above describing their data as priceless, compared to 24pc of those aged 16 to 24.
Those between the ages of 25 and 34 consider themselves the "richest" demographic in terms of valuable personal data, with £4,174 cited as the average personal value in this age group.
The research also claims that many consumers in the UK still prefer to own content outright, rather than rent or stream it.
Thirty per cent of UK respondents claim to download a music album to their PC at least once a month, while 25pc download at least one film and 21pc download a TV show.
Meanwhile, just 2pc of those surveyed are using a paid cloud storage solution, and less than a fifth (16pc) are taking advantage of a free cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.
According to a Financial Times report in 2013, advertisers are willing to pay a mere $0.0005 per person for general information such as their age, gender and location, or $0.50 per 1,000 people.
A person who is shopping for a car, a financial product or a holiday is more valuable to companies eager to pitch those goods. Car buyers, for instance, are worth about $0.0021 a pop, or $2.11 per 1,000 people.
The more intimate the information, the more valuable it is. Knowing that a woman is expecting a baby and is in her second trimester of pregnancy sends the price tag to $0.11, for example, while those with specific health conditions or taking certain prescriptions are worth $0.26.
However, even adding those details up, the sum total for most individuals often is less than a dollar.
Even cyber criminals are not willing to pay as much for stolen financial data as you might think. A recent report by Intel Security Group’s McAfee Labs revealed that the average estimated price for stolen credit and debit cards is $20 to $35 in the UK.
Bank login credentials for a $2,200 balance bank account are worth about $190 on the "dark web", while login credentials for online premium content services such as Netflix are worth as little as $0.55.
The OPCW said it received information about the medical conditions of the Skripals and Det Sgt Nick Bailey, it collected their blood samples, and it gathered samples from the site in Salisbury.
The group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, released a report saying that its laboratory analysis of "environmental and biomedical samples" that its experts had collected "confirm the findings of United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical".
However a "combination of credible open-source reporting and intelligence" showed that in the 1980s the Soviet Union developed a "fourth generation" class of nerve agents known as Novichoks. "It is now up to Russian Federation to finally play a constructive role and answer the open questions", he said.
He said the watchdog's findings were based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world, all of which returned the same "conclusive" results.
Russian Federation strongly denies involvement in the attack, which has sparked an worldwide row resulting in the expulsions of diplomats from all sides.
The U.K. has called a meeting of the OPCW's executive council for April 18 to discuss next steps, Johnson said.
A British police officer was also taken ill after attending the scene.British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson hailed the chemical watchdog's findings.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Friday (Thursday local time) the findings show "there can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russian Federation has the means, motive and record". "The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended", he said. She also said she would give interviews to the media in time, but asked the press to have patience while she recovers.
"While we feel rightly outraged at this act, I have seen no sense that the city wishes anything but friendship with the Russian people and better relations between our governments".
Doctors treating the two victims of last month's poisoning attack in Salisbury England, have confirmed that one of the victims Yulia Skripal has been released from hospital. In a diplomatic row that followed a number of Western countries "in a gesture of solidarity" with Britain expelled Russian diplomats.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Zakharova said: "Even if it's Novichok, about 20 countries produced it".
Police who launched an investigation into the attempted murders of Mr Skripal and his daughter, who was visiting him from Russian Federation, believe that the pair first came into contact with the novichok nerve agent at his home in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
"We can not be sure that Yulia's refusal to see us is genuine".
Trump also blamed Moscow for being partners with "a gas killing animal", referring to Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Until the end, we will fight against both these mistakes.
On Monday, January 28, a special celebration and public forum will be held in Toronto to reflect on the 25th annivesary of the Morgentaler Supreme Court decision. Carolyn Egan, who will be one of the speakers at the forum, reflects on the lessons of the struggle that led up to the 1988 legal victory.
A major victory was won when the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the federal abortion law in January of 1988. The campaign was situated in the broader context of reproductive freedom. Abortion rights were seen as one of a number of demands that the women's movement was struggling for in the fight for reproductive rights for all.
Before the law was struck down, there was access to abortion, but it was a very privileged access. In 1969, legislation had been passed which allowed abortions to be performed if they took place in an approved or accredited hospital with the consent of a therapeutic abortion committee. There was uneven interpretation of the law across the country and many hospitals did not establish committees. The law was unjust and denied women the right to make decisions over their reproductive health.
The Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics (OCAC) was formed in 1982. The group thought long and hard about how best to change an increasingly desperate situation for so many women. We looked at the circumstances in the province of Quebec where CLSCs (community health centres) and the Centre de santé des femmes (women's health centre) were providing abortions to women in their own communities. A lesson was learned from our sisters in Quebec and we modelled our campaign after theirs. The strategy was the combination of a doctor willing to challenge the law and a broad and representative movement willing to fight for the necessary changes.
OCAC has always been a grassroots, activist organization. The immediate objectives were to overturn the federal law and to legalize freestanding clinics providing medically insured abortions. We were fully aware of the limits of the notion of “choice.” Full access to free abortion, as significant an advance as that would be, does not guarantee that all women have choices over their lives or over having or raising children. The definition of “choice” was broadened in our organizing.
OCAC stated that for all women to have real choices in our society they require safe and effective birth control services in their own languages and their own communities, decent jobs, paid parental leave, childcare, the right to live freely and openly regardless of their sexuality, employment equity, an end to forced or coerced sterilization, and, of course, full access to free abortion. All were required if women were to have reproductive freedom.
OCAC tried to ensure that the demand for abortion access was never seen in isolation, but as one of a number of interdependent struggles. We tried to make this concrete by challenging the coerced sterilization that Aboriginal women, women with disabilities and Black women were facing. We held joint forums on the issues with women speaking about the injustices that they were experiencing. Healthcare workers told us that therapeutic abortion committees sometimes refused abortions unless a woman agreed to be sterilized. We fought for childcare as a woman’s right and campaigned against extra billing by doctors.
OCAC worked with Dr. Henry Morgentaler and in 1983 he opened a clinic challenging the federal criminal code. The clinic became a symbol of women’s resistance to an unjust law. A long campaign against two levels of government and an organized anti-choice movement began.
It did not take long before the police raided the facility, seized the medical equipment, and arrested Drs. Morgentaler, Scott and Smoling. This was not unexpected and OCAC had been building broad support. We knew we were going to be in a long, drawn-out campaign. We had to change the balance of power in the country, and while the issue had to be in the courts because of the arrests, the critical task was mobilizing the strong support that we knew existed for women’s reproductive rights.
OCAC took a mass action approach. We did not leave the campaign to the lawyers or to the lobbying of politicians. We believed that tens of thousands of women and men would come into the streets across the country to fight for women’s reproductive freedom. Groups took up the cause in every province and the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL) fought side by side with us.
In linking struggles, OCAC was able to build a wide campaign through demonstrations, marches and rallies -- in which thousands participated. Through our organizing, we were able to broaden the participation of trade unionists, students, AIDS activists, people of colour and immigrant women’s organizations in the campaign. We understood that, without the active participation and the support of thousands, no change would occur. The goal was to build a visible, mass movement that fought together for women’s reproductive freedom.
When the Supreme Court finally overturned the existing abortion law, it was through the strength of a broad and representative movement. It was a collective victory in which tens of thousands played an active role. The fact that OCAC understood that the state was not neutral -- and was not acting in the interests of women -- was critical to the success of our campaign. We believed that only a mass movement could change the balance of forces in the interest of all women.
There was a spontaneous demonstration of thousands of supporters outside the Morgentaler Clinic when the decision of the Supreme Court was announced. Women and men were dancing in the street! Similar rallies erupted across the country. Freestanding clinics were legalized in Ontario, fully covered by the healthcare system, and clinics began to open in other parts of the country as well.
It did not take long before the Conservative government in Ottawa began the process of introducing new legislation recriminalizing abortion. Because of the strong roots that had been developed, a major campaign against a new law was launched. There was wide support from groups such as the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women, the Canadian Labour Congress, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Federation des Femmes du Quebec, the United Church of Canada, the Canadian Medical Association, AIDS Action Now!, and a large range of provincial and local organizations across the country. There were national days of action and large numbers came out into the streets. Tragically, during this period, a young woman in Toronto died of a self-induced abortion because she believed a legal procedure was not available.
During the campaign against the new law and for increased access, anti-choice forces began another assault. “Operation Rescue,” as they called it, started in Toronto in the fall of 1988 and attempted to blockade the entrance to the Morgentaler Clinic. They physically and verbally harassed women seeking abortions.
OCAC organized defence of the clinics, rejecting the argument that it should be left to the police to protect the facilities. We would link arms, chanting, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay: born-again bigots, go away” and “Campaign Life: your name’s a lie. You don’t care if women die!” These chants reflected the politics of the campaign. The broad support created the political pressure to defeat the legislation in the Senate in 1991, after it narrowly passed in the House of Commons.
There are now over 30 freestanding clinics providing funded abortions across the country. Access is much wider than when the campaign began in the early 1980s and sexual health services are more widely available, but the fight for reproductive justice is far from over. Prince Edward Island is still forcing women to go to the mainland to access abortions, and New Brunswick refuses to fund clinic procedures. Hospital amalgamations and healthcare cuts are reducing reproductive services in many areas. Women are still being harassed as they enter clinics.
The Conservative government initially refused to fund International Planned Parenthood and now gives money on the condition that it be allocated only in countries where abortion is illegal. There is no national childcare program, equal pay for work of equal value is still a dream for many, employment equity has not been implemented, systemic discrimination still exists and many of the other services necessary for women to have real choices in their lives are not in place. Private members’ bills are regularly being introduced in the House of Commons to create barriers for women. To date, all have been defeated.
Support for reproductive justice is still very strong across the country. While the overall strategic situation has changed and will always change, the lessons of the campaign that was waged still remain relevant. The principles and tactics that were used created a broad-based movement for reproductive rights, which overturned the federal abortion law and created a network of clinics making abortion much more accessible for women who were previously denied.
Carolyn Egan is a long-time labour and women's rights activist.
This article is excerpted from “Reproductive Rights and the Campaign to Overturn the Federal Abortion Law”, which will be published in a forthcoming anthology edited by Shannon Stettner. It was originally published in Socialist Worker and is reprinted with permission.
1975: The year Dr. Henry Morgentaler began serving an 18-month jail term for performing abortions. He was acquitted of the original charge in 1976 and waded into a long-term legal battle to secure women's legal right to safe abortions.
25 years since the Morgentaler decision: A celebration!
A celebration of the struggle that repealed Canada's abortion law, and the struggle for reproductive justice today.
The mob that hounded [memo author James] Damore was like the mobs we've seen on a lot of college campuses. We all have our theories about why these moral crazes are suddenly so common. I'd say that radical uncertainty about morality, meaning and life in general is producing intense anxiety. Some people embrace moral absolutism in a desperate effort to find solid ground. They feel a rare and comforting sense of moral certainty when they are purging an evil person who has violated one of their sacred taboos.
Flashback: Axios Tech Editor Kim Hart on the broader trend of P.C./intolerance in the Valley, "Tech's tolerance problem."
Recode's Kara Swisher: "Google CEO Sundar Pichai canceled an all-hands meeting about gender controversy due to employee worries of online harassment ... Doxxing of search company staffers had already started."
Outreach is probably a word you hear a lot. In different contexts, it can mean different things.
Here at CAPS, Outreach is an integral part of the activities performed by our staff. In general, outreach is a treatment philosophy based on a social and community mental health model of care that advocates for a comprehensive range of mental health services to increase access to as many members of the community as possible.
More specifically, outreach is our way of extending the caring wisdom and expertise of the traditional counseling session into the broader Stanford Community. With outreach we are able to reach larger amounts of students in shorter amount of time. We embrace that students come from diverse backgrounds and have unique concerns. CAPS is strongly dedicated to social justice and reaching out to all students especially those from underrepresented identities, and marginalized communities who may not utilize traditional counseling. Our center offers a variety of services with the goal of creating and maintaining a healthy, empowered, student population and campus climate aimed toward academic and social success.
Workshops, trainings, roundtable discussions, panels, groups, and lectures that focus on student’s social, personal and academic effectiveness.
If you wish to collaborate with a clinician to have an event for your student group, classroom, or organization, you can now request an outreach service by competing this Outreach Request Form.
Our staff believe that it is important to offer programs where students, faculty and staff work and live. We want to actively engage with you all and create a healthy campus environment by preventing and treating mental health problems.
You can check out upcoming CAPS outreach events on our calendar so you don’t have to miss out!
The study was funded by the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund and the authors call for cultural change, starting in medical school, to allow doctors to recognise their own vulnerabilities and cope better with ill health, both their own and their colleagues’.
Dr Max Henderson, Senior Lecturer in Epidemiological & Occupational Psychiatry from King’s Institute of Psychiatry and lead author of the paper published in BMJ Open, says: ‘The doctors we interviewed were brutally honest about how they managed their difficulties, and the problems they faced. There is a huge discrepancy in the way doctors address their own health problems, compared to those of their patients.
The authors carried out semi-structured interviews with 19 doctors, all of whom had been away from work for six months or more within the past year. Their ages ranged from 27 to 67, with the average age 46. All but one doctor had a mental health or addiction problem, which included depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and alcohol dependence. Seven also had physical health problems. Fourteen of the doctors had come to the attention of the doctors’ professional regulator, the General Medical Council.
The main themes to emerge during the interviews, which lasted between 1 and 3 hours were professional identity; relationships with family, friends, and work colleagues; and the way in which the individual doctors perceived themselves.
Several doctors described good levels of support from friends and family, but many reported the opposite, and felt they had become “a nuisance,” or “an outsider in my own family,” or that they were no longer highly thought of.
Some said they deliberately hid their illness (and its treatment) from their families because they feared that coming clean would have a detrimental impact on their personal relationships.
Interviewees said that they felt “judged” perceived as “weak” and that others considered they were no longer fit to be a doctor because they had become ill.
The sick doctors frequently described feelings of emptiness, guilt, shame and failure, and blamed themselves. When they experienced difficulties after returning to work, their confidence plummeted, which further worsened their self esteem and made work even harder to cope with.
The funding for the study was provided by the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund, with the support of the General Medical Council and the Practitioner Health Programme.
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A Massachusetts man charged with killing two engaged doctors in their luxury Boston condominium entered the building through the garage with a backpack containing two replica guns, a knife and duct tape, a prosecutor said Monday.
Bampumim Teixeira was held without bail after pleading not guilty in Suffolk Superior Court to charges including two counts of murder.
Teixeira, 30, of Chelsea, bound and stabbed 38-year-old Dr. Lina Bolanos and 49-year-old Dr. Richard Field in their home on May 5, prosecutor John Pappas said in summarizing details of the case.
Teixeira was spotted hanging around outside the building, where he had briefly worked as a concierge, several hours before the doctors were found dead, Pappas said. The building has a stairwell that leads from the garage to the penthouse floor.
The suspect had no known personal relationship with the victims, he said.
Police responding to a 911 call from one of Field's friends found keys to the unit in the hall outside the 11th-floor condo. Police, after knocking first, used the keys to enter the unit, where they made a "grisly discovery," both doctors already dead from "massive trauma," Pappas said.
Police recovered a carving knife in the apartment as well as a second bag containing Bolanos' jewelry. The bag with the fake guns, knife and duct tape was found elsewhere in the building.
Teixeira was shot twice during a confrontation with police and his district court arraignment was held in his hospital room.
But he had recovered enough to walk into court under his own power on Monday, even saying "Good morning, what's up?" to the assistant clerk magistrate.
His lawyer, Steven Sack, did not address the charges in court, and did not challenge bail conditions, but did reserve the right to request bail at a future date. Sack refused comment outside court.
Teixeira is due back in court on Sept. 12.
The X-Files star Gillian Anderson, who plays Dana Scully, revealed why season 11 will be her last and she won’t return for a season 12. As The X-Files season 11 was getting ready to make its big debut, one bit of information overshadowed the excitement of the occasion. Anderson announced this would be her final run as agent Dana Scully and she would not be returning to the role again once season 11 had concluded. Naturally, fans were shocked and wanted to know why. Anderson wasn’t immediately forthcoming with the answer, so fans were left feeling a bit melancholy heading into season 11.
Obviously, Anderson’s role as Scully has been the most well-known performance of her career, with the character stretching across nearly 25 years. But she has by no means been limited to that iconic role. Anderson has found success in movies and TV alike, with some of her more recent notable roles including characters on the Hannibal TV series as well as the adaption of American Gods. So clearly Anderson is not just getting sick of acting.
There’s lots of things I want to do in my life and in my career. It’s been an extraordinary character, but there’s lots of things to do and I don’t want to be tied down doing one thing.
That answer certainly makes sense when seeing how she has continued to take on new roles over the years. It’s not as if Anderson has just been sitting around twiddling her thumbs with nothing to do when The X-Files wasn’t on TV. So apparently she was fine coming back to give the show a more ceremonious send off than it originally had and letting Scully have one last hurrah, but she’s ready to move on from that part of her life now. And for those who think she’s just playing up her other acting options in the hopes of FOX maybe offering more money, Anderson makes it clear she’s adamant about this.
“It wasn’t suggested that now is a new series, but I’m serious,” said Anderson. “I’m finished.” Apparently Scully’s sendoff has already been filmed, so depending on how that was handled, there may be no turning back at this point. And for her part, Anderson seems conflicted over how to feel about this chapter closing, finding the question difficult to answer when asked about her thoughts on this being the end.
So it sounds like fans better enjoy The X-Files season 11 while it lasts, because this may be the last of the series we see. Though given how many shows of the past have been revived in recent years, this is one case that may not be able to be put to rest for good for some fans.
The X-Files season 11 is currently airing on FOX on Wednesdays at 8 Eastern time.
The actor tells Ritujaay Ghosh that it was not easy for her to play Ashima Gangully in Meera Nair's The Namesake.
Even as Tabu awaits the release of Mira Nair’s The Namesake — which will have a global release in March, first in the US and then in India — and Cheeni Kum, where she is paired with Amitabh Bachchan, the actor says that when it comes to regional cinema it is the Telugu and Bengali film industry that appeal to her.

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