Split (1)

train · 2.59M rows

text stringlengths 12 69.1k
Prices are currently trading sharply under the weekly pivot point and right near the S1 support level at time of writing. The EURUSD has been on an overall bearish trend this week after opening the trading week below the weekly pivot.
Here are the Pivot Points Levels with Support (S) and Resistance (R) for the GBPUSD currency pair today. Price action is currently trading at the 1.67560 price level and under the daily pivot point, according to data at 6:30 AM ET. The GBPUSD high for the day has been 1.67763 while the low of day has fallen to 1.67305. The pair earlier today opened the Asian trading session below the daily pivot and has continued to trend lower to the 1.6750 area.
Prices are currently trading under the weekly pivot point and below the S1 support level at time of writing. The GBPUSD has been on an overall strong bearish trend this week after opening the trading week below the weekly pivot.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Nadja West and high school sophomore Ahmad Perez on the surface might not appear to have much in common, but an interest in medicine brought them together in an unlikely way May 2.
West is the U.S. Army's surgeon general and commander of U.S. Army Medical Command in the Washington D.C. area.
Perez, a sophomore at Brentwood High School in New York, is interested in the medical career field. He's also a member of the school's Air Force Junior ROTC program.
Opportunity would present itself for them to meet, thanks to Perez' initiative.
Perez was required as part of his JROTC's college program to research the career he wanted to enter. His interest in medicine led him to the U.S. Army's Surgeon General's office -- Lt. Gen. Nadja West's office.
He sent her an email to ask her about the medical career field and to talk about his aspirations.
"I was delighted to get his email," West said. "I was shocked he was only in tenth grade. He sounded like one of my seasoned Soldiers."
The conversation didn't end electronically however.
"I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to meet this really amazing young man," said West, who has been a doctor for nearly 30 years.
So, they met at Brentwood High School on Long Island for an interview at the school auditorium.
The venue was filled with several hundred teenagers with smiles on their faces, eager to ask questions and meet the career Army officer who is the first African American female to make the rank of Lieutenant General in the Army and the first African American Army surgeon general.
"It was really a great opportunity for the kids to meet someone who is such a trailblazer and role model," said John Callan, principal of the Sonderling Center of Brentwood High School. "She gave them the message that you can really achieve your dreams if you put your mind to it."
West spent nearly an hour talking about leadership, preparation for success and belief in oneself. Students lined up to meet her, ask questions and take selfies. The inspiration behind her visit, Perez, interviewed her on stage about her life and journey to the top echelons of the Army ranks.
Perez said he was really excited when he found out she was coming, and he felt honored to interview her on stage.
During their exchange, West challenged the students--more than 80 percent minority--to reach for their dreams.
On one occasion, she asked the students to raise their hands if they wanted to go into the medical career field.
She asked who among them thought they weren't good enough to go into medicine.
Most of the hands stayed up.
"That was me," West said, referring to the group with the raised hands.
The general said she thought she wasn't good enough to be a doctor when she was young, until a mentor told her to just try. "What would it hurt to try?" she recalled.
The mentor said that if she never even applied to get into medical school, then the answer to her being a doctor would categorically be "no."
"It starts with belief in oneself," West said. "Have confidence to do it. If it is your dream, go for it."
Following a question and answer session, West presented awards to select JROTC students -- to include presenting one to the young cadet who was the catalyst for the event, Ahmad Perez.
West admitted that visiting high schools is one of the highlights of what she does when she travels, but usually other events are also on the agenda. In this case, the day prior, New York City's Soldiers', Sailors', Marines', Coast Guard and Airmen's club honored her with the Spirit of America Award.
Her New York visit also included a meeting with the Business Executives for National Security, where she outlined the current and future state of Army medicine.
As for Brentwood High School, Principal Callan said he hopes she comes back.
"It was a thrilling visit," he said. "For our students to see someone who represents them so well… it was just such a great opportunity."
Army surgeon general visits Long Island HS and motivation ensues!
On Sunday, Sept. 5 at 5:30 a.m., as the first rays of morning sun backlit the gray rain clouds and cast a dull illumination upon the blue rain-chopped Caribbean sea below, a Nicaraguan Navy mariner aboard a go-fast patrol boat trained his binoculars steadily on the dark image of a rapidly approaching vessel.
Less than 24 hours earlier, a similar navy patrol had exchanged machine-gun fire with a northbound Colombian drug boat loaded with 380 kilos of cocaine. The navy patrol quickly captured the Colombian vessel after one of the alleged drug traffickers was shot and the others threw their weapons overboard and surrendered.
On Sunday, however, the mysterious vessel spotted by the navy patrol was heading south, against the traditional flow of most drug traffic that passes through Nicaraguan waters. But the mariners aboard the navy patrol had enough experience to realize they weren’t dealing with ordinary weekend boaters out for a pre-dawn cruise.
The navy go-fast engaged the approaching vessel and ordered it to stop. The only answer they got was a hail of machine-gun fire, as the hostile craft veered west and sped full-throttle towards the shore.
The navy patrolmen gave chase, returning fire and killing one of the suspected drug traffickers – one of eight men aboard the drug boat. However, the foreign vessel made it to the nearby cove, where the suspected drug traffickers beached the craft at full speed and fled into the jungle north of Sandy Bay, in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region.
The navy mariners managed to capture one of the men on the beach, but the other six – including at least one Costa Rican and one Honduran, according to the testimony of the captured suspect – disappeared into the nearby village. The navy intelligence thinks local contacts probably helped hide the alleged smugglers from authorities.
Back at the abandoned boat, the navy sailors found 586 kilograms of marijuana, which they think was probably headed to Costa Rica from Jamaica or one of the other Caribbean producer islands.
After a busy weekend patrolling the Caribbean Sea, the Nicaraguan Navy’s scorecard read like that of the winning team: 1.06 tons of captured drugs, two captured go-fast boats (one in working order); one captured AR-15 assault rifle; one drug trafficker killed, one injured, three in custody and six missing somewhere in the jungle.
For more on this story, see the Sept. 17 print or digital edition of The Nica Times.
Amol Palekar has expressed his “hurt” at the silence of the artists at a National Gallery of Modern Art event in Mumbai where he was interrupted on Friday for criticising the culture ministry’s policies and had to cut his speech short.
“I was badly hurt that none of the senior artists who were in the audience interfered and raised a voice telling the organisers to let me complete the speech,” the actor-director told a news conference in Pune on Sunday.
“If there was any impropriety at the event, it was (the act of) interrupting my speech after inviting me as a guest,” he added, answering some NGMA officials’ reported allegation that some of his comments on Friday had been improper.
Speaking at an exhibition of the works of his friend, the late painter Prabhakar Barwe, Palekar had criticised the Centre’s “agenda of either moral policing or proliferation of certain art commensurate with an ideological incline”.
The gallery director, exhibition curator (Jesal Thacker) and a former head of an artists’ advisory committee (Suhas Bahulkar) repeatedly interrupted Palekar and told him told to stick to Barwe’s work, prompting him to ask how a guest could be subjected to “censorship”.
Palekar mentioned how writer Nayantara Sahgal was recently invited to speak at a Marathi literary event only to have her invitation withdrawn because what she was going to say would have been “slightly critical of the situation around us”. He then walked off the podium.
“When I wrote the speech, I was hoping that the artists on the dais and in the audience would applaud me for raising their issues,” Palekar said on Sunday.
Palekar, the chief guest at the event, had described as “disastrous” the culture ministry’s decision to abolish the advisory committee of local artists at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and Bangalore.
On Sunday he said he was only trying to seek the reasons behind the cancellation of retrospectives of two senior artists.
He said he had learnt that the artists’ advisory committee had approved retrospectives of three artists, of whom Barwe’s work was exhibited.
“But I came to know that without any communication to the committee, the next two retrospectives had been cancelled by the Mumbai NGMA’s new director, Anita Rupavataram. I wanted to raise these issues. How and when these decisions were taken, we wanted to know,” he said.
Palekar stressed that he was talking about the NGMA and could therefore not be accused of saying anything inappropriate.
“I was not given any brief what could be said and what was off limits. So to say that it was improper for me to raise the issue at the event is not true. I spoke about Prabhakar Barwe and then spoke about these important issues,” he said.
After he had walked off the podium, Rupavataram had reminded the actor that the NGMA was a government gallery.
Prithviraj Chavan, former Congress chief minister of Maharashtra, said it was “shocking that a national icon like Amol Palekar was gagged”.
Because of a member’s unprofessional behavior and activities, the International Society for Mental Health Online (ISMHO) recently took the unprecedented action of terminating that person’s membership in the Society. In its 8-year history, I’m not aware of the organization ever having done this before.
I’m saddened by this because I pity the professional. I hope he finds help for his issues soon, and eventually finds closure. His actions and rants toward multiple organizations and other professionals speak for themselves.
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration decreed sanctions against Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami on Monday, accusing him of playing a major role in international drug trafficking.
The announcement, made on the Treasury Department's website late in the day, is bound to ratchet up tensions between the U.S. and its harshest critic in Latin America. El Aissami is the most senior Venezuelan official to ever be targeted by the U.S.
The U.S. government is also sanctioning Samark Lopez, a wealthy Venezuelan businessman believed to be El Aissami's main front man. As part of the action, 13 companies owned or controlled by Lopez, including five in Florida, will be blocked and both men will be barred from entering the United States.
There was no immediate reaction from El Aissami, but he has long denied any criminal ties.
The move comes a week after a bipartisan group of 34 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to Trump urging him to step up pressure on Venezuela's socialist government by immediately sanctioning top officials responsible for corruption and human rights abuses as well as El Aissami for his purported ties to Hezbollah.
In the wake of President Nicolas Maduro's crackdown on dissent following anti-government protests in 2014, the U.S. Congress passed legislation authorizing the U.S. president to freeze the assets and ban visas for anyone accused of carrying out acts of violence or violating the human rights of those opposing Venezuela's government. Monday's sanctions were imposed under rules passed during the Clinton administration allowing the U.S. to go after the assets of anyone designated a drug kingpin.
El Aissami, 42, has been the target of U.S. law enforcement investigation for years, stemming from his days as interior minister when dozens of fraudulent Venezuelan passports ended up in the hands of people from the Middle East, including alleged members of Hezbollah.
Venezuela's top convicted drug trafficker, Walid Makled, before being sent back from Colombia in 2011, said he paid bribes through El Aissami's brother to officials so they could turn a blind eye to cocaine shipments that have proliferated in Venezuela during the past two decades of socialist rule.
El Aissami was named vice president last month as Maduro struggles to hold together a loose coalition of civilian leftist and military supporters whose loyalty to the revolution started by the late Hugo Chavez has frayed amid triple-digit inflation and severe food shortages. Recent polls say more than 80 percent of Venezuelans want Maduro gone.
El Aissami is feared by many in the opposition for his association with Venezuela's intelligence services from his long run as interior minister under Chavez. Since El Aissami became vice president, Maduro has handed him control of an "anti-coup commando unit" to go after officials and opponents suspected of treason.
A former Obama administration official said the decision to sanction El Aissami was months in the making and involved several U.S. federal agencies. But it was held up last year, at the insistence of the State Department, for fear it could interfere in a Vatican-backed attempt at dialogue between the government and opposition as well as efforts to win the release of a U.S. citizen, Joshua Holt, jailed for months on what are seen as trumped-up weapons charges.
"This was an overdue step to ratchet up pressure on the Venezuelan regime and signal that top officials will suffer consequences if they continue to engage in massive corruption, abuse human rights and dismantle democracy," said Mark Feierstein, who served as Obama's top national security adviser on Latin America.
The talks between the opposition and Venezuela have since collapsed. The opposition blames Maduro's administration, saying it didn't follow through on a pledge to release dozens of activists that government opponents consider political prisoners. The opposition also says Maduro didn't set a date for regional elections that his opponents are favored to sweep after the government suspended a recall referendum against the president in October.
"The sanctions in and of themselves will not bring about a democratic transition," Feierstein said. "That will require the Venezuelan opposition to remobilize its followers and U.S. diplomatic efforts to marshal governments in the region to isolate Maduro."
Tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela have been on the rise for years. The countries haven't exchanged ambassadors since 2010.
But Trump mentioned the country only briefly during the campaign, and amid uncertainty on whether he would break from the Obama administration's policy of relative restraint, Maduro had adopted a softer tack. After blasting Trump as a "bandit" and "mental patient" during the campaign, Maduro has remained quiet since.
"He won't be worse than Obama, that's the only thing I dare to say," Maduro said last month in an appeal to supporters to withhold judgment on Trump.
In the wake of a travel ban against top Venezuelan officials in 2014, Maduro ordered the U.S. to slash staffing at its embassy in Caracas, accusing diplomats of conspiring to overthrow his government.
Douglas G. Swift was named by Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. to head the new Canalside Design Committee.
Swift, president and director of design for CityView Properties, will be joined by Hiro Hata, associate professor of architecture in urban design at the University at Buffalo; architects Max Willig and Rishawn Sonubi; and Amelida Ortiz Weinmann, active in the Hispanic community.
"The committee is being put in place as an extra measure to bring professionals from the community into the mix to help our board of directors to ensure design is upheld to the highest standards, and to create an environment we are all going to be proud of," said Thomas P. Dee, the harbor agency's president.
The historic Buffalo River Tour will be offered at 12:30 p.m. on Labor Day, Sept. 5. The tour is led by the Industrial Heritage Committee. Boarding is at the Miss Buffalo Dock at Erie Basin Marina. Cost for the two-hour trip is $15, $10 for kids 6 to 12.
The Hispanic Women's League is accepting applications for scholarships from female college students who live in Erie County and show a commitment to the Hispanic community.
Applicants must have completed 24 hours of degree credit courses and have at least a 2.75 grade point average. Special awards will be given to those pursuing a career in nursing or mental health. Community Foundation and Bryant & Stratton scholarships also will be awarded. Applications are available at www.hispanicwomensleague.org. or by calling Alicia Granto-Estenoz at 885-HELP or Eleanor Paterson at 851-1049. Deadline for applications is Sept. 23.
Loretta Zazynski-Loffredo turns 101 today.
Born in Brooklyn on Aug. 28, 1910, she has lived most of her life in Western New York and currently resides at Harris Hill Skilled Nursing Facility in Lancaster. A retired elevator operator from the old L.L. Berger clothing store in downtown Buffalo, she has two children, six grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
The owners of the Westin and Wildwood are continuing improvements on the hotels, adding a new restaurant and completing work on an outdoor plaza adjacent to the slopes.
Starwood Capital Group, headquartered in Greenwich, Conn., and Wasserman Real Estate, based in Providence, R.I., partnered to buy the two properties in 2011 and poured $55 million into renovating them last year. Now they are completing construction of the plaza below the Westin lobby, making it more accessible from the slopes, in time for the start of ski season. They also plan to add a ramen restaurant in the space where the Village Steakhouse was in the Wildwood, set to open the weekend of the Winter X Games, which are Jan. 23 through 26.
“We look at these hotels as works in progress,” said David Wasserman, principal of the ownership group.
The ramen restaurant will be affordable and family-friendly, Wasserman said, something the owners always had in mind for the hotel. Remaining open in the same space is the Arcave, which houses games, a pool table and hula hoops.
Serving ramen and other “fun bites,” the menu is meant to appeal to everyone, skiing or not, Wasserman said.
The three-tiered outdoor terrace was built below the Westin lobby on the mall level in 2012. Work began last week on grading the area surrounding the terrace, which will make it more accessible to skiers and snowboarders on Fanny Hill. Several fire pits also are being installed, including one near the pool, which is above the mall, and a path connecting it to the deck of the Snowmass Kitchen.
Wasserman said the construction provides “true ski-in/ski-out access to Snowmass Kitchen” and a “more comfortable seating area” adjacent to the Ranger Station and Starbucks. Visitors can order food from Ranger Station, Snowmass Kitchen or the Vue Lobby Lounge in that seating area, according to a statement.
The Westin also holds a concert series there in the summer and winter. Some Thursday-night concert attendees also might want to view the stage on Fanny Hill from the Westin Plaza.
This is part of a six-week sermon series “Resistance: Justice Heroes From the Bible and the Big Screen.” The preaching text is 1 Corinthians 12:12-31.
Remember a few weeks ago, we talked about “bad words” and “good words?” Well, there is a new “d-word” that is off-limits in some circles. It’s “diversity.” All of a sudden that has become a trigger word, indicating some extreme leftist agenda. Media personality Tucker Carlson went on a tirade about it just this week. Responding to other public figures—who were celebrating diversity—he argued that people get along better, are “more cohesive”as he put it, the more they have in common. And he went on about how much better life is when we live among the people who are like us. It was one of those subtle maneuvers in which he didn’t exactly, directly say anything racist … but the implication was clear: Like Laura Ingram before him, who went on a similar rant about “shifting demographics that have been forced by us.” The message behind this increasingly common nationalist rhetoric is that popular culture is forcing us to interact with people who don’t look like us, and wouldn’t it be great if life were simple again and everyone stayed segregated in their own homogenous communities and schools and maybe even had separate water fountains?
It’s not just TV hosts. The Governor of Maine said not too long ago, while holding up mugshots of immigrants and African Americans, “The enemy right now … are people of color or people of Hispanic origin” He said that, y’all. Just right out loud. The governor. Of. Maine. And he’s not alone. In this current climate, politicians are winning races on … well, race. And the preservation of a “good old days” mentality, calling out a nostalgia vote around this idea that everything was better and nicer and happier when people were not forced to interact across cultural and racial divides.
Clearly, folks in these small and scared little circles missed the memo of Star Trek, which is to “boldly go” where none have gone before; to blaze new trails, and more importantly, to promote cooperation and friendship across all kinds of barriers—cross-cultural and interstellar boundaries if needed.
How do you capture the essence of a story that has spanned five decades—amounting to 14 movies, six different TV series, and more than 700 episodes? Maybe you can’t. Like scripture itself, which also spans many generations and mines a complex field of character and geography, maybe you can’t capture it in a single 20-minute message, so we work in broader themes.
The narrative world of Star Trek may be complex. But we can’t really do a sermon series about resistance in movie themes without boldly going there, at least in part.
The heroes of Star Trek, in any generation, stand apart from other movies in our “resistance” series because Kirk, Spock and all the rest of the leaders of the Starship Enterprise are not really out to defeat evil. Yes, they sometimes get into conflict situations … but that’s because their primary mission is to travel the galaxy and promote relationships across all kinds of barriers. That work of subverting norms and crossing social boundaries inevitably leads to discomfort. But they demonstrate that most of the time, the “other” is not pure villain, but one who has been misunderstood. Basic lack of understanding is what most often leads to conflict; and so they are working for a better world through diplomacy. They lead a resistance, not against some villainous “other,” but against bigotry and prejudice of all kinds. And they get to fly cool spacecraft while they’re at it!
From the earliest days of the original series, the crew was ahead of its time. The show featured women in power, interracial and even inner-planetary relationships (including the first kiss between a black and a white person ever shown on screen), with alien races who were once enemies sometimes showing up as allies in later shows. There’s even a countercultural vision of economic equality present in this fictional world, because the federation has no currency.
The storylines evolved over time, but the newer movie franchise has stayed faithful to this theme. Even the most recent movie (which I realize the true fans deemed the worst episode ever) reinforces that underlying message of equality and diversity. Near the beginning, we hear voiceover narration of Captain Kirk, reading an entry from his Captain’s log: “We continue to search for new lifeforms in order to establish firm diplomatic ties.” This has always been the spirit of the Star Trek narrative, from the earliest series to the recent films. There is “strength in unity,” as Lt. Uhura tells Krall at one point. The takeaway from the latest film is that the Federation—despite its imperfections—is still ultimately good and promotes peace in a critical way. Like the original series, the more recent movies reinforce the message that strong alliances across the universe are our best bet at survival. We are stronger together than apart.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.