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Martin said he doesn’t believe his deputies would make the same decisions now.
Martin said that sheriff’s deputies can call on interpreters when dealing with people who don’t speak English.
Kimberlee Tellez and Mia Yamamoto were married in 2015.
PACOIMA — “Living and Loving Out Loud: Our LGBT Stories” will be presented on Sunday, Aug. 28, at 2 p.m. at the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Community Center,12953 Branford St. in Pacoima.
• Mia Yamamoto and Kimberlee Tellez, who were married on Sept. 2, 2015. Yamamoto was the first openly transgender attorney in Los Angeles County and is the recipient of numerous awards in the legal and humanitarian fields. Tellez is lead designer and CEO of Pele Design Studios.
• Jason Takagi, a member of San Luis Obispo United Methodist Church. He came out to his church while a lay leader to personalize the need to be reaffirming of LGBT people. Takagi is the convener of the California-Pacific Reconciling Ministries Network and provisional chair of the California-Pacific Annual Conference LGBT Task Force.
• Marsha Aizumi (facilitator), an author, national speaker and educational consultant. She serves on the PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) National Board of Directors and is co-founder and president of the PFLAG San Gabriel Valley Asian Pacific Islander, the first and only API of PFLAG. Aizumi and her transgender son Aiden had the honor of meeting President Obama at the White House in 2012. A member of the San Fernando Valley JACL, she received the National JACL’s Japanese American of the Biennium award in 2014.
This free panel, sponsored by the SFV JACL, is presented in part to inform the community of Okaeri 2016: A Nikkei LGBTQ Gathering, which will be held on Oct. 14 and 15 at the Japanese American National Museum.
An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect address for SFVJACC. Our apologies.
Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
Sharing is a good thing, we learned in kindergarten, but that wisdom was soon called into question by the grown-up world of getting and spending. Now, New Age capitalism has spun out a wonderful invention: the “sharing economy,” which holds out the promise of using technology to connect disparate individuals in mutually profitable enterprise, or at least in warm feelings.
The most prominent examples of the sharing economy are a taxi-hailing service called Uber and a real-estate-subletting service called Airbnb. As with most enterprises emerging from Silicon Valley, they come with a very ambitious vocabulary. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, uses words like “revolution” and “movement” to describe his company, which is now valued at $13 billion—a bit less than the price at which the stock market values Starwood, a company that operates 1,200 properties in 100 countries, under names like W, Westin and Sheraton—making Airbnb the best-capitalized revolutionary movement in history. The term “sharing economy” has been making the rounds for about a decade, but the phenomenon has roots in the 1990s: all of its trademark enthusiasms—the flattening of stodgy old hierarchies, the rise of peer-to-peer networks, the decentering of everything—were concepts imported into middlebrow culture by the likes of Thomas Friedman. Then as now, the structure of the Internet was taken as a model for society: a network of peers rather than a gray-suited hierarchy. But in its last iteration, during the dot-com boom, techno-utopianism was more about the production side of the economy—transforming the world of work into a flexible, hip space for creativity and collaboration.
The updated version is more about the consumption side; in fact, another name for it is “collaborative consumption.” In a 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review, Rachel Botsman, formerly of the Clinton Foundation, and venture capitalist Roo Rogers applied the term to Zipcar and Netflix, though it seems like a grand appellation for gussied-up rental operations. “Collaborative consumption,” they wrote, “gives people the benefits of ownership with reduced personal burden and cost and also lower environmental impact—and it’s proving to be a compelling alternative to traditional forms of buying and ownership.” Less famous names in the “space,” as business professors like to say, included Zilok.com, a peer-to-peer rental scheme for tools and appliances (which offered me a jackhammer for $18.75 a day); UsedCardboardBoxes.com, for the “rescue” and resale of used cardboard boxes (which brags that it’s saved over 900,000 trees); and the then-new Airbnb.
Airbnb, which seems universally loved by both hosts and renters, has since become the most appealing example of this profitably collective ethos. I spoke with hosts (who universally crave anonymity) who pick up anywhere from $15,000 to $75,000 a year by renting out parts of their houses. It’s not quite free money; one host in Los Angeles, whose annual earnings are at the high end of that range, estimates that it takes from one to three hours a day to maintain the space (which would work out to $125 an hour or more). And guests love the service, too—it’s much cheaper than a hotel.
But the model isn’t blemish-free: there’s a real, if hard-to-measure, impact on housing availability and affordability in desirable cities. In October, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a report tracing the rapid growth of Airbnb in New York City. It found many of the rentals illegal, which wouldn’t necessarily be something to worry about if they didn’t stretch an already-taut housing market. Schneiderman also found that many of the units are rented out not by individuals, but by large commercial operations that do nothing but let out units via Airbnb, taking them off the regular rental market. Airbnb’s response is that the company has put an end to the commercial operators, and that its footprint is too small in any event—25,000 hosts in a rental market of 2.2 million units—to make much of a difference.
That may sound reasonable, but it’s not fully convincing. Yes, 25,000 hosts is tiny next to a 2.2 million rental inventory—but there were only 68,000 vacancies as of the city’s most recent survey. And more subtle displacements go on as well: one graduate student I spoke with took a two-bedroom apartment in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood that he otherwise couldn’t afford, knowing that he could rent out the empty room and cover his rent. He feels guilty, but what’s an impecunious grad student to do? He added that he had a friend who rented a four-bedroom apartment, also in a gentrifying neighborhood, and Airbnb’d three of the rooms. Such practices take units off the rental market and grease the wheels of gentrification by making rapidly rising rents “affordable.” My Los Angeles source said similar things about her neighborhood. And she dismissed Airbnb’s claim about getting commercial operators out of the business; she’s recognized houses previously run by professionals who have simply recast themselves as private individuals.
Writing three years after Botsman and Rogers’s “collaborative consumption” article in the Harvard Business Review, and with Airbnb firmly established as a leading “sharing” company, Arun Sundararajan announced in the same journal that collaborative-consumption models had surpassed Zipcar in the ride-sharing sphere. Zipcar was still burdened with a dedicated fleet, while outfits like RelayRides and GetAround allowed car owners to rent out vehicles they weren’t using. Sundararajan said that while collaborative consumption was “more reminiscent of flower power than of Gordon Gekko,” big business was going to have to adapt to its challenge. We’re not there yet: last year, RelayRides reported on Monday of Thanksgiving week that I could rent a Camry for $80 a day, or an Escalade for $300 over the holiday weekend, in New York. Avis’s Brooklyn location was out of cars.
But in ride sharing, there’s really only one victor: Uber, a company with a knack for breaking laws, because the march of disruption can’t be bothered with legalities. Uber is the headline-grabber of the moment because, at a dinner party in New York last November, a company VP suggested to BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith that it might be a good idea to spend $1 million hiring opposition researchers to dig up dirt on the lives of journalists who had been writing critically about them—especially Pando’s Sarah Lacy.
According to legend, Kalanick founded Uber in 2009 one snowy evening in Paris after a brainstorming session with co-founder Garrett Camp. It launched in San Francisco—a city where it’s notoriously difficult to get a cab because of strict limits on their numbers—in 2010. It was far from Kalanick’s first venture. A youthful coder, he founded Scour.com, a Napsterish file-sharing site, in 1999, while still a student at UCLA; it was quickly sued out of business by the entertainment industry for copyright violations. (Apparently, he has a thing for sharing other people’s stuff.) A second venture, Red Swoosh, moved media files around legally for pay; it was sold in 2007 and made Kalanick a small-time millionaire. He’s a big-time billionaire now.
After its San Francisco launch, Uber was immediately slapped with a cease-and-desist order by city authorities for running an unlicensed cab service. Kalanick found this opposition energizing: the company quickly expanded to other cities, sometimes with official blessings and sometimes without. At first, Uber featured high-end cars for a little taste of luxury, booked via a smartphone app. As Kalanick told an early Uber gathering, the experience was: “I pushed a button, and a car showed up, and now I’m a pimp.” Uber soon faced competition at the low end from the now-second-banana ride-sharing service Lyft, however, and began recruiting regular people with regular cars as drivers. Its growth has been explosive: it now has hundreds of thousands of drivers in over 200 cities.
But there’s a lot of discontent among drivers, both those who work for Uber and those who work for what are derisively called “incumbent” companies. Traditional drivers have staged protests against Uber and its rivals in Los Angeles, Washington and across Europe, although none have gone to the same lengths as Parisian cabbies, who have attacked the cars, smashing windows and slashing tires. And while Kalanick et al. have a point about the restricted taxi availability in major cities, it’s the fleet owners who are profiting, not the drivers facing a low-cost rival.
Uber drivers often complain about the low (and declining) pay and miserable conditions. S., a driver in Chicago (who, like everyone I spoke with, wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals), says that full-timers put in sixty hours a week for an hourly rate that comes to $12 or $13 after expenses. He says the company is constantly scheming to cut pay. A., a driver in Los Angeles (and one of the few women in the trade), says she gets $11 to $12 an hour after expenses (daily expenses like gas, not depreciation of the car), which is around the twenty-fifth percentile of the city’s hourly earnings, though about in line with typical taxi-driver pay. That’s a sharp contrast with the $35-an-hour rate that was dangled in front of her when she signed up. A. describes Uber as “a port in the storm,” a way to pick up some cash while, Angeleno that she is, she works on some movie and web projects. Uber’s a different story in New York, where all drivers have to be certified by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the cars are all regular cabs or car-service vehicles. Every Uber-hailed driver I’ve spoken with in New York likes the service, because it delivers more paying riders than they’d otherwise have.
Drivers are rated by their passengers, and if your rating isn’t high enough, the company will “deactivate” you—which is how they say “fire,” since you’re just another node in the app to them. J., another LA driver whose name was passed along to me by an organizer with the California App-Based Drivers Association (a project of the Teamsters Union), says passengers love to wield this power over drivers: one insisted that he run a red light or lose his five-star rating. And J. says there’s no appeal process for a bad rating or deactivation.
You need a newish car to drive for Uber; if your car gets too old, that’s grounds for deactivation. But the company is ready to help: it’s entered into a partnership with Santander, a Spanish bank, to offer car loans to drivers, with the payments conveniently deducted from their paycheck. According to the terms posted on Uberpeople.net, a chat board for drivers, the payments work out to an interest rate of around 21 percent. They get you coming and going.
Earlier this year, Uber hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to handle its PR, strategy and lobbying. Kalanick describes a politico like Plouffe as a perfect fit with Uber, because there are daily “primaries going on with folks in the ride-sharing space.” Well-capitalized revolutions need such high-end strategists.
For Barbrook and Cameron, the techno-utopia promised in the mid-1990s was very much a product of the baby boom, with roots in a 1970s artisanal hippie/New Leftish capitalism, subsequently leavened with the rising libertarian ideology of the New Right in the 1980s. Individualism and techno-utopianism were merged into a single, seductive package. The latest update of the Californian Ideology is the product of a different cohort, one more comfortable with Ayn Rand than Charles Reich. Its enterprises are less associated with garages than with venture capitalists. It traffics in one of Silicon Valley’s favorite words, “disruption,” but it’s a bit short on the intense utopian promises of the New Economy era of the late ’90s. Then, technology was going to make work meaningful, end recessions and promote human understanding. Now, technology is making it easier for you to hail a taxi—in a way that’s taking down the already low incomes of “incumbent” cabbies. It may make you feel hip, if that’s something you’re longing for, but it’s going to make only a few people rich.
Of course, “sharing” entrepreneurs aren’t entirely lacking a utopian line, as Chesky’s exuberant language demonstrates. But despite the appeal to a green communitarianism, it just doesn’t have the verve of its dot-com ancestor. That may be because in the 1990s bubble, jobs were easy to come by and real wages were rising across the board, so optimism was easily transmissible. Now, despite over five years of official recovery, the sharing economy offers some people, like cab drivers, the prospect of real wage cuts, and others, like people with a spare bedroom, a way to supplement stagnant incomes. The sharing economy is a nice way for rapacious capitalists to monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous, and to evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies this growing desperation like the smaller, production-oriented side of the sharing economy. Here, the labor of people is shared in an arrangement that looks increasingly feudal. There’s the venerable TaskRabbit, founded in 2008, which was described by Wired as an “eBay for real-world labor.” It matches “Taskers” with “Clients”—firms or people with errands to run. Financially, TaskRabbit is a pipsqueak next to the giants of the sharing space; according to CrunchBase, it’s received just $38 million in financing.
CrunchBase’s bio for TaskRabbit hits all the right notes: “It was a cold night in Boston in February of 2008 when Leah Busque realized she was out of dog food for her 100-lb yellow lab, Kobe. Leah thought to herself, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place online I could go to connect with my neighbors—maybe one who was already at the store at that very moment—who could help me out?’” Thanks to the magic of this “curated” website, lugging a bag of dog food on a cold winter night gets recast as an act of neighborly generosity, even though money will change hands and the “neighbor” is unlikely to be seen again. Many Taskers are people who had good jobs until the recession hit; as of last year, 70 percent had a bachelor’s degree, and 5 percent a PhD. Now they’re running around town fetching stuff. Comparable services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allow workers to bid for the privilege of doing piecework online—filling out spreadsheets, doing graphic design, checking code for errors—at low rates with no accountability from companies, which can reject their work (and their invoice) if they deem it insufficient for any reason.
The sharing economy looks like a classically neoliberal response to neoliberalism: individualized and market-driven, it sees us all as micro-entrepreneurs fending for ourselves in a hostile world. Its publicists seek to transform the instability of the post–Great Recession economy into opportunity. Waiting for your script to sell? Drive an Uber on the weekend. Can’t afford a place to live while attending grad school? Take a two-bedroom apartment and rent one room out. You may lack health insurance, sick days and a pension plan, but you’re in control.
As Airbnb’s Chesky said in a McKinsey & Company interview, today’s generation sees ownership as “a burden.” People aren’t proud of their homes or cars; they’re proud of their Instagram feed. As Chesky predicts, “in the future, people will own whatever they want responsibility for. And I think what they’re going to want responsibility for the most is their reputation, their friendships, their relationships, and the experiences they’ve had.” Affect triumphs over material lack. You may not have a job, Chesky adds, citing Thomas Friedman, but you’ll have an ever more complex “income stream”—which in most cases is more likely to be a trickle than a torrent.
This Jan. 10, 2018, file photo shows Fiona, a baby Nile Hippopotamus, walk through her enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden in Cincinnati. Fiona was born six weeks prematurely at 29 pounds, well below the common 50-100 pound range, and required nonstop critical care by zookeepers to ensure her survival, but has become an international celebrity.
The Cincinnati Zoo is celebrating another milestone for its famous premature baby hippo.
The zoo said Wednesday that Fiona has hit 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms).
The zoo acknowledges reaching that weight mark is more of a sentimental milestone since full-grown female hippos weigh about three times that. Senior keeper Jenna Wingate tells WVXU radio that it's "a big deal" because the zoo didn't know whether she would survive at birth.
Born nearly two months early in January 2017, she was 29 pounds (13 kilograms). That's about a third the size of a typical full-term Nile hippo. She also was unable to stand or nurse.
A zoo staffer hand-milked her mother Bibi, and Smithsonian's National Zoo helped develop a special formula. Nurses from Cincinnati Children's Hospital put in a hippo IV.
Following on from the writings of three named poets, the reader might feel a bit at sea in confronting a poem about whose author we know nothing - or do we? The speaker claims to be in prison as he writes, a man whose good name has been sullied (lines 64-70). In spite of the many friends he once had (lines 71-79), he is now entirely without friends; all have abandoned him (line 85). All this sounds much like George Ashby's complaints, and they may well be literally true, but we have no way of knowing whether we can trust these "biographical details" or whether a clever poet has created an air of verisimilitude to drive home his point that Fortune is fickle.
Still, because readers always have a strong preference for works attached to authors' names, scholars have suggested a variety of names for possible authors of this work: John Lydgate, Thomas Usk, George Ashby, Sir Richard Roos, or William de la Pole, the duke of Suffolk. None of their arguments has been considered conclusive enough to be generally accepted, so the work remains anonymous. We can learn a bit about the author's mind, however, by attending carefully to the poem. The author was educated enough to know some Latin (lines 35 and 42), something about the classical gods (Saturn and Mars, line 24), and the three Fates, Antropos, Cloto, and Lachesis (lines 47-58). He knew the ideas of the Boethian tradition, and he had probably read Chaucer. This all points to a literate and fairly well educated person. He was devout, concluding his arguments with a final plea to Mary, the mother of Jesus.
This poem may be divided into several parts. The first portion of the poem (lines 1-28) initiates a dialogue between Fortune and the prisoner, the prisoner complaining against Fortune and her three sisters, the Fates (or Parcae). Fortune answers his complaints in lines 29-42. Although the speaker opens with the address to Fortune, it is not until line 29 that we realize that this is something more than a metaphorical way of speaking. The writer creates the scenario of Boethian-style dialogue, but in a way without any real dialogue taking place. Fortune does not pick up the prisoner's appeal to the ill will of Saturn or Mars (clearly a fictional solution to the speaker's problems, since they were not "real" gods); instead, she appeals immediately to God, equating misfortune with punishment for sin (an idea that never arises in Boethius' discussion with Philosophy). Having given the prisoner this bracing (almost cruel) lesson, she now leaves it to him to work out his own solution to the Boethian problem. In the second portion (lines 43-118), the prisoner abandons his complaint, turns away from Fortune and the Fates, and accepts his unjust punishment as an affliction from God, which he must suffer in order to pay for his sins and buy himself a shortened stay in Purgatory. The poet ends with a prayer to God and the Church to aid all who are unjustly punished and who repent of their sins (lines 119-40).
Despite first creating and then abandoning the dialogue, this anonymous poet comes the closest of all those represented in this volume to presenting the proper Boethian attitude toward Fortune, as taught by Lady Philosophy: "Farewele, Fortune, and do right as thee list [whatever you please]!" (line 43), he says, commending his soul to the protection of "God and Seynt Marie" (line 61). Admittedly, he follows this with a complaint about his loss of good name and friends, and his despair at being left entirely alone except for the echo of his own voice is heart-wrenching. He even indulges is a short vindictive fantasy (lines 92-99), but his rehearsal of his woes brings him back to his main point: "Fy on this world; it is but fantasie!" (line 99), which leads him into the same solution as that adopted by George Ashby: it is best to "suffre al adversité" (line 107), putting faith and fate in the hands of God.
Though not a great poem, this is certainly a good one. The poet had a better sense of meter than many of his fellow poets and makes good use of the couplet that closes each stanza of rhyme royal. (It is worth comparing these conclusions to his stanzas to the couplets that close English sonnets in the following century.) There are interesting comparisons of theme and expression to be made between this complaint and Chaucer's ending to his Troilus and Criseyde, a work the poet surely knew.
The "Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune" (IMEV 860) survives in a number of manuscripts derived from John Shirley, a London scribe of the middle of the fifteenth century who is responsible for preserving unique copies of minor works of Chaucer and his contemporaries and followers. Two of these manuscripts were written by the so-called Hammond Scribe who worked in London in the reign of Edward IV (1461-83) and had access to John Shirley's manuscripts after Shirley's death: British Library MSS Additional 34360 (fols. 19r-21v) and Harley 2251 (fols. 271r-273r); and the third is derived from another manuscript by Shirley: British Library MS Harley 7333 (fols. 30va-31ra). This poem was previously attributed to Chaucer as an extension to his short "Complaint to his Purse" (IMEV 3787) because it so appears in both of the manuscripts copied by the Hammond Scribe; that is, the "Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune" follows the end of "Complaint to his Purse" without a break, heading, or any indication of separation except "Amen" added to the end of the last line of the earlier poem.
Connolly, Margaret. John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998. Pp. 173-75.
Green, Richard Firth. "The Authorship of the Lament of a Prisoner against Fortune." Mediaevalia 2 (1976), 101-09.
Hammond, Eleanor Prescott. "Two British Museum Manuscripts (Harley 2251 and Adds. 34360): A Contribution to the Bibliography of John Lydgate." Anglia 28 (1905), 1-28.
---. "A Scribe of Chaucer." Modern Philology 27 (1929), 26-33.
It seems Orange, formerly Wanadoo, is still having problems with its local loop unbundling. The Register has learned that a number of Orange's Broadband customers have at best patchy access to their services, with some being cut off for literally weeks at a time.
In the most extreme case, one customer who upgraded her system from dial-up to broadband 11 weeks ago has not even had her account activated, despite numerous calls to technical support. She is, we note, still being charged her monthly subscription.
"I had the 'Anytime' dial-up," she told us. "Then I moved up to the broadband service. Orange closed the 'Anytime' account and started billing me for Broadband, but I've never had the service. I've complained, of course, and spend ages on hold, but they [customer services] won't even call you back."
Orange is providing her with a free dial up service while it tries to sort out the problem, she says, but that is hardly a long-term solution.
Kevin Ellis, an Orange customer who started the OrangeProblems.co.uk site when he was cut off from his service during unbundling earlier this year, says this is a common occurrence. He has been without broadband for the last three weeks - the second time his service has vanished this year.
"What happens is, you ring technical support and they take you through the basic checks. Then they do line tests and you have to ring them back. Inevitably, the line test couldn't be completed, or they can't conclude anything from it. It feels like they are just stalling," Ellis told us.
His site is jammed with similar tales.
One punter explains: "I've been having problems with my broadband since May 18. [It} will only display some web pages, can't send any emails out, but CAN receive emails. If I’m downloading or uploading anything, it is faster to do so on my dial-up connection.
"I’ve contacted tech support countless times, but they have been unable to solve the matter. The landline bill for all the calls since then have mounted to about 22 pounds, 8 hours spent on the line for nothing. The last time I called them was to get a MAC code. And that was 3 weeks ago."
Another details a similarly long fight with the company, after an unsolicited upgrade to the 8Mb service went wrong. Yet another is even having trouble cancelling the service after being unable to get online since mid-July.
The problems Orange, then Wanadoo, was having with its broadband migration were first highlighted back in February. At the time, the company said it was working with its suppliers to sort the problems out, but it now seems that they've been unable to do so.
As we noted at the time, somewhere between two and three million lines will be unbundled this year. Only a very small proportion of those need to fail for there to be a whole lot of stranded websurfers.
"We apologise for the downtime (Name Witheld) is experiencing with regard to her broadband connection. We take our commitment to customer service extremely seriously and so are working with her to get her line back up and running as quickly as we can.
"We have already successfully migrated tens of thousands of customers to the new Orange Broadband network and only a very small number of customers have experienced any problems.
Noble Energy to provide nearly 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as energy dependence on Israel from Jordan heightens.
Israel is to supply Jordan with natural gas from its vast Leviathan offshore gas field over a period of 15 years, US giant Noble Energy announced Wednesday.
A source close to the deal said it was worth $15 billion (11.4 billion euros) - a significant chunk of some $60 billion which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said will come from Israel's offshore gas exports.
Noble announced in a statement the "execution of a non-binding letter of intent to supply natural gas from the Leviathan field, offshore Israel, to the National Electric Power Company Ltd (NEPCO) of Jordan."
"Noble Energy and the Leviathan partners will supply a base gross quantity of 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the Leviathan field over a 15-year term," it said.
Leviathan is majority-owned by three Israeli companies, with 40 percent owned by Noble.
geopolitically to establish our relationship with Jordan and other Arab countries."
This is not the first time Israel and Jordan have discussed a natural gas deal. Just six months ago, the Arab Potash Company (APC) signed a similar deal to increase Jordan's reliance on Israeli energy, after Egyptian pipelines became unreliable after countless attacks from terrorists in the Sinai.
In February, Jordanian officials said the disruptions in gas supplies cost Amman at least $1 million per day. According to the Egyptian Cabinet Information Centre (IDSC), Egypt’s natural gas production shrank in December 2013 to 3.3 million tons - down 11.8 percent from December 2012.
"We are aware of the situation in Egypt and they [Egyptians] are aware of our situation in Jordan,” Jordan Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour during a meeting with an Egyptian delegation in Amman, according to Al-Ahram. “Egypt is to begin gas mega-projects and Jordan has already commenced implementing a natural gas terminal that is expected to be completed by the end of this year to import and store liquefied gas. Egypt then can export its surplus gas from Jordan."
The announcement also surfaces despite heightened tensions between Amman and Jerusalem. Earlier Wednesday, the Jordanian government and royal family reportedly succeeded in cowing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into stopping a building project near the Temple Mount due to regional and political pressures.
Export plans for the eastern Mediterranean have been taking shape over the past five years since Noble discovered the Leviathan field in Israeli waters.
condensate, and has been hailed as the largest gas deposit found in the world in a decade.
Several months ago, the Israeli government approved a new plan allowing up to 40% of what it extracts from Leviathan and another field, Tamar, off its Mediterranean coast to be exported.
Netanyahu has said exports would bring in some $60 billion to state coffers over the next 20 years; Israel's natural gas finds are expected to sharply reduce its dependence on imports.
Mumbai: Mira Nair’s, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a unanimous choice of the Jury members, was awarded with the first Centenary Award and presented with a Silver Peacock, a certificate and a cash prize of Rs 10 lakh at this year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI).
Mira Nair’s, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was also the closing film that brought down the curtains at the 43rd International Film Festival of India, Goa.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a touching and engaging story of a young man chasing corporate success on Wall Street. Post September 2011 tragedy in America, he finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family’s homeland.
It is based on the bestselling novel by Mohsin Hamid. The film was shot in Lahore, Istanbul, New York, Atlanta, Delhi and stars Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schrieber, Riz Ahmed, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is slated for an April 2013 release in India.
Milton Keynes re-opening its art gallery, Simon Amstell's film Benjamin, Northern Ballet's Victoria, Sadie Jones's The Snakes, and Memes and Selfies on BBC Four.
Simon Amstell directs his first cinema release - Benjamin. The title character is a thinly-disguised version of himself with nervous lack of self esteem who is directing a film about himself. It's all very meta but is it marvellous?
The bicentenary of Queen Victoria's birth has seen lots of artistic projects to mark the moment. Norther Ballet has commissioned a work by choreographer Cathy Marston which looks at the Queen's life through her relationship with her youngest daughter.
Sadie Jones won the Costa First Novel award for her book The Outcast and her latest The Snakes is set in contemporary London and Burgundy.
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4) Texas A&M 52, Duke 48 -- Great game because of A&M's furious comeback and Johnny Manziel ending his career reminding everyone why he's arguably the most exciting and entertaining college football player ever. Duke's early dominance in the Chick-Fil-A Bowl bordered on boring. Except this was Duke hammering an SEC team. Instead, that merely set the stage for one last Johnny Football miracle.
3) Ohio State 42, Michigan 41 -- Perhaps the greatest finish ever in one of the greatest rivalries in sports. Michigan coach Brady Hoke's gutsy call to go for two points and the win rather than kick a game-tying PAT and play for overtime. The win preserved the Buckeyes' perfect record. Hours later, they found themselves in the driver's seat for the national championship game after Auburn stunned Alabama.
2) Florida State 34, Auburn 31 -- This would have made the list regardless of the stakes with FSU outscoring Auburn 21-10 in the fourth quarter, with three lead changes in the final 4:31 and the game-winning touchdown coming with 13 seconds left. The fact that it was the national championship game made it even more epic. So what could top the perhaps the greatest national championship game ever?
1) Auburn 34, Alabama 28 -- Only the greatest college football game ever. The stage. The participants. The drama. The improbable finish. The shock value. The 2013 Iron Bowl had it all.
5) A&M-Duke -- Again, a great game. But the lack of national championship ramifications is the separating factor for me.
4) Ohio State-Michigan -- Although Ohio State was undefeated, nearly losing to a mediocre Michigan team exposed the Buckeyes as merely a pretty good team buoyed by a soft schedule.
3) Georgia-Auburn -- Finally somewhat healthy again, the Bulldogs showed how good they could have been if not for all of their injuries. But the Tigers proved they had something special going on.
2) Florida State-Auburn -- This belongs in the conversation for the top 25 games of all time.
1) Alabama-Auburn -- My regional bias notwithstanding, it was the greatest college football game of all time.
You probably noticed that four of the five games involved SEC teams. In fact, 10 of the 25 games involved SEC teams: Alabama-Texas A&M, Georgia-LSU, Auburn-Texas A&M, South Carolina-Missouri, Ole Miss-Vanderbilt and Georgia-Tennessee were the others. That didn't include some worthy honorable mentions -- Tennessee's upset of South Carolina, Georgia's comeback against Georgia Tech, A&M's thriller over Ole Miss.
Just 65 days before new drama is created.
The University of Florida is being criticized after an usher manhandled several black students during a graduation ceremony on Saturday. The white usher pushed and grabbed students attempting to stroll—a dance significant to black fraternities—dance, and celebrate while crossing the stage.
In videos of the ceremony posted to social media, the man can be seen grabbing and yanking at students after they recieve their diploma.
University of Florida president W. Kent Fuchs apologized for the incident. “I personally apologize, and am reaching out to the students involved,” he tweeted.