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In a rare act of coordinated defiance, more than a dozen newspapers across the country jointly published an editorial last year calling on the government to take on the nettlesome process of reform. “We believe in people born to be free and people possessing the right to migrate freely,” the editorial declared. Within hours, however, the editorial was pulled from the papers’ Web sites and several editors were punished.
Since then, some Chinese scholars have been reluctant to speak out on the issue — indeed, a half-dozen experts on the subject each declined to comment for this article. Others, who were willing to discuss the matter, warned that the status quo was producing the very situation China’s leaders want to avoid.
Although education bureaucrats insist that the closings of the migrant schools in Beijing are a matter of safety, many parents raised questions about the timing and the lack of alternatives. Some parents, especially those whose children have been displaced more than once, admitted defeat and said they would either return to their hometowns or send their children back to be raised by relatives.
More of the families, however, vowed to stick it out in Beijing. Two weeks ago, as devastated parents and their children gathered at the rubble of their former schools, local newspapers eagerly captured their despair. Compounding popular ire were news media reports about a government-affiliated charity that is spending more than $300 million to construct 1,000 schools in Africa.
The public backlash was immediate, prompting education officials in several districts to relax restrictions that bar nonresident students from enrolling in Beijing’s public schools. Still, many parents complained that the remedies were inadequate or elusive, and said that similar promises after a spate of school demolitions in 2006 proved to be hollow.
Li Haixin, 32, a math teacher at Red Star who sent her 6-year-old son to the school, said the boy was still shaken from seeing the desks, chairs and student art projects buried under a mound of broken masonry. Although she is now unemployed, Ms. Li said she would try to send him to a more expensive but legally registered private school, borrowing the money to pay the fees, rather than enroll him in a slapdash building that the authorities said would open as a replacement school for some of the students.
An acorn-eating island scrub jay. Another population of the species specializes in attacking pine cones, and accordingly has a differently shaped bill.
The scrub jays of California's Santa Cruz Island really love a good peanut. "It's like crack to them," says Katie Langin, a biologist at Colorado State University who probably knows these birds better than anyone else. Working with Scott Morrison of the Nature Conservancy, Langin started visiting the peaks and valleys of this wild island in 2007, baiting jays with nuts to trap and tag them for her dissertation. Before she came along, what researchers knew about the island scrub jay came from observations in just a handful of places. Much of this rock is inaccessible, but Langin had a helicopter.
As she gathered more and more data on different populations of the birds around the island, Langin had a revelation: The birds, members of one single species, had split into two varieties in different habitats. Island scrub jays living in oak forests have shorter bills, good for cracking acorns. Their counterparts in pine forests have longer bills, which seem better adapted to prying open pine cones. That may not appear to be something you'd consider a "revelation," but it really is—if you believe in evolution. Ever since Darwin and his famous finches, biologists have thought that in order for a species to diverge into two new species, the two populations had to be physically isolated. Those finches, for instance, each live on a different Galapagos island, where their special circumstances have resulted in specialized bill shapes. Yet the two varieties of island scrub jay (they haven't technically speciated—yet) live on the same tiny island. If they wanted to meet each other for a brunch of acorns and/or pine nuts and perhaps later some mating, they could just fly right over.
This is very, very weird. It's an affront to a sacred tenet of evolution you probably learned in school: Isolation drives speciation. Well, speciation can also come about in a broadly distributed population, with individuals at one end evolving differently than individuals at the other, but nothing kicks evolution into overdrive quite like separation. Without it, two varieties should regularly breed and homogenize, canceling out something like different bill shapes (though rarely the two types of island scrub jay will in fact interbreed). And the island scrub jay isn't alone in its evolutionary bizarreness. In the past decade, scientists have found more and more species that have diverged without isolation. Langin's discovery with island scrub jays, published last week in the journal Evolution, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this yet.
It's probably a good idea to take a moment and talk about what exactly a species is. The problem is, it's hard to say. A species is supposed to be a group of organisms that look similar and can exchange genes by breeding (a handful, though, reproduce asexually). Yet some species can mate with each other and produce offspring, hybrids, and while most of the time they're sterile, two different species can also come together to produce fertile offspring that can form a new species. So...it's complicated. Nature doesn't give a damn about our penchant for classification.
What is clear is that speciation has produced the incredible diversity of life on Earth, and the engine of speciation is reproductive isolation. You can have an island that gets separated from the mainland by rising sea levels, stranding its wildlife to uniquely evolve. Or a volcano can erupt into an island and creatures can float or fly there, as is the case with Hawaii. On the mainland, a new mountain chain can sprout or a river can emerge, splitting a population in two. Thus isolated, the two populations may split into two distinct species adapting to their environment, and those two species may split into two more species, and so on, growing Earth's enormous tree of life.
An oak variety of island scrub jay.
Now, the island scrub jay has apparently said "screw all that isolation." This is particularly weird because birds have, you know, wings. It’d be easy to see how something less mobile like a snail could split and stay isolated, but the jays are more than capable of flying between populations and mating. Yet they only very rarely do. Why that is, Langin isn’t yet sure, but she has a few hypotheses. A simple explanation would be that each variety is only attracted to birds with beaks like its own. But then how did the split happen in the first place? Perhaps a population of jays long ago settled in a certain kind of forest, evolved either an acorn- or pine cone-specialized beak, and henceforth found only that trait to be wildly attractive (sexual selection is, after all, a matter of determining the fitness of your mate, and few things are more fit than being able to eat the food in your environment). “Another alternate hypothesis going into this would be maybe individuals that are hatched in pine habitat just prefer to settle in pine habitat,” Langin says. “There's actually a lot of evidence that experiences birds have immediately after they hatch come into play when they're selecting a place where they want to breed.” She cautions, though, that her study didn’t collect the data needed to support this, and that more research is in order here.
It makes sense because this kind of divergence has been observed in other species. Fitzpatrick says scientists have been talking about speciation without isolation since the 1970s, but for a while there biologists struggled to find many examples out there in nature. Now that seems to be changing. “Within the last decade an increasing number of studies, not just with birds but in fact more so with insects and other invertebrates, show that under certain fairly stringent conditions, this genetic separation can happen even without physical isolation,” Fitzpatrick says.
Take, for example, the apple maggot fly in the Northeast US. It feeds on the hawthorn tree, but when Europeans showed up with apple trees, some of the flies switched to feeding on those. Two different populations then emerged, each focusing on a different kind of tree, even though they all live in the same neighborhood. And they could well be on their way to becoming separate species.
The pine-loving variety of island scrub jay.
Those with peanut allergies need not apply.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Seven Democrats are vying in the Sept. 4 primary for the 1st Franklin District House seat being vacated by 25-year incumbent Rep. Stephen Kulik, D-Worthington. There is no Republican candidate. This is one in a series of profiles on those candidates.
Kate Albright-Hanna describes herself as “a muckraking journalist” who’s reported for CNN, Vice and MSNBC and also worked on the 2008 Obama presidential campaign and a 2016 campaign to convince Elizabeth Warren to run for president.
A former New Yorker with a foreign-service bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, she moved to Huntington with her husband and two sons in 2016. Albright-Hanna, 42, says her combination of journalistic skills and experience as a political organizer make her a natural fit for the legislator’s post.
Albright-Hanna, who won Emmys for two post-9/11 CNN documentaries, became director of video and new media for Obama for America and the Obama-Biden transition team, and also had a stint at the Department of Health and Human Services. She became deputy campaign manager for Ready For Warren, a campaign to encourage Warren to run for president in 2016.
Albright-Hanna serves on the Huntington Planning Board.
One of the hallmarks of any social network is how it pushes people to share their experiences with others, but increasingly we’ve seen a lot of moves by social platforms to give people the option to remain very private, if they choose.
One of the latest moves on this front comes from LinkedIn, the social network for the working world with some 450 million members and currently getting acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion: today the company is turning on a new feature for its users who may be interested in quietly looking for a new job, while still employed somewhere else.
Open Candidates, as the new feature is called, will let those users essentially create a signal that will be viewable only to recruiters who use LinkedIn’s premium (paid) tier of service (prices begin at $8,000 and vary depending on the number of licenses). In turn, those recruiters who are looking for candidates like that person will get a signal that a particular candidate is looking to change jobs and is open to getting contacted about new career opportunities. It will be initially available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia and will get rolled out to more markets throughout this year, LinkedIn tells me.
Open Candidates is being turned on as part of a larger revamp of LinkedIn’s recruitment products, which also include new and more dynamic Career Pages — customised pages that companies that are recruiting employees use to advertise themselves — and a new way for recruiters to connect at the backend with their clients who are hiring to provide more seamless integration. Both of these are getting rolled out globally from today.
All three are being unveiled formally today at the company’s annual Talent Connect event.
Open Candidates and the other two updates are much-needed (and perhaps overdue) features for LinkedIn. Talent Solutions — the company’s recruiting operations — accounts for the lion’s share of the company’s revenues (last quarter bringing in $558 million of its $861 million in sales), but at the same time it’s facing a lot of heat from old behemoths like Indeed and Monster, as well as newer and more nimble approaches from the likes of Glassdoor, all of whom are also vying for the same online job advertising market. LinkedIn’s recruiting business, which today lists some 6 million jobs, needs updating and innovating all the time to stay competitive.
Of the three, Open Candidates is perhaps the most interesting update getting announced today.
In terms of social networks, LinkedIn holds a unique place in the market for how it has approached the idea of watching and being watched.
The company regularly tracks and updates users on who is viewing their profiles and other stats about their presence on the platform, essentially applying some of the mechanics of things like ad tech to its platform to highlight relationships and build connections. You can opt out of being tracked this way, and also from seeing these stats, but even if you don’t want to look or be seen, that information is still being tracked.
Features like this have been a blessing (some people love these things) and a curse (some find it creepy). But to me, Open Candidates is possibly one of the most practical and helpful applications of some of LinkedIn’s technology. The company is embracing one of the main ways that its platform is used today — to look for jobs, or to find people to fill jobs — and it is making it easier for people to do this now in a more discreet way.
And for some it might make LinkedIn a more friendly platform to use for other things. I’ve seen countless people note on their LinkedIn profiles that they do not, under any circumstances, want to get contacted by recruiters on there. The fact that people have had to put this on their profile pages is a sign of how annoying LinkedIn can be for some. If the Open Candidates feature gets used as it should, some of that spammy element could start to subside.
There are some interesting and very useful details for how it works. Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s Careers product lead, told me that if you turn on Open Candidates, the “looking for new work” signal will only be beamed out to recruiters who are not in any way connected to the place where you currently work. That means that even if you are looking, you won’t jeapordize your current job in the process. You can then share your profile with that recruiter privately, too.
And LinkedIn, like other social networks, is always looking for ways of getting people to share more of their details and keep them up to date. This applies here, too. Once you turn on the feature that will privately let recruiters know you are looking for work, the company will give you an opportunity to revisit and update your own profile.
While less impactful for the wider population on LinkedIn, the Career Pages update helps to lay the groundwork for how LinkedIn wants to continue growing its recruitment business.
The new pages will now add significantly more conversational testimonials and other social features to company’s recruitment sites, making them more about trying to convey a company’s culture rather than simply the jobs that are on offer at the moment.
This is an interesting turn and to me really shows the influence of sites like Glassdoor on the recruiting market today. It may not feel like this to everyone in the world (some will take any work they can get), but a lucky proportion of the population has a choice about where she or he can take a job.
Still, it is a decidedly positive spin. No candid reviews from disgruntled employees, the updated Career Pages will bring in posts from existing employees that are getting published on LinkedIn, as well as a selection of profiles of other people from the company, alongside job listings.
As with the new Open Candidates feature, the new Career Pages will be made available to paying companies — with a more pared-down version still available to use for free.
Amazon Web Services is launching a suite of products geared specifically to over-the-top video providers, hoping to expand its foothold in the OTT video space.
The company launched five products in the AWS Elemental Media Services suite, each targeting a different piece of the OTT puzzle.
AWS Elemental MediaLive is specifically for live video, with an emphasis on TVs and connected devices, where much live viewing takes place.
AWS Elemental MediaConvert is for formatting and compressing on-demand video, while AWS Elemental MediaTailor is designed too allow for the insertion of targeted advertising into videos.
Two other products support live and on-demand video as well.
By outsourcing their video technology to AWS, companies don’t need to worry about replenishing equipment as it goes out of date, or upgrading servers to keep up with unexpected demand.
Streaming services with an emphasis on live sports made up a large chunk of the companies participating in the private beta. Streaming sports is complex, not only because of the live nature of the games, but the issue of inserting advertising at unpredictable times.
AWS is already a big player in cloud computing, but streaming video takes up significantly more bandwidth and computing power than most internet traffic. Amazon is betting that by assuming oversight of streaming video's complex issues, it can establish itself as a leader in this format in much the same way it established itself in other cloud computing fields.
Those who live in the desert borderlands of southern New Mexico face plenty of serious struggles. Water is limited, living wages are scarce, and many live in unincorporated communities called colonias, which often lack basic infrastructure like roads and gas lines. Things are so tough there, in fact, that one might understandably presume that the only food issue on residents’ minds is whether or not they’ll have enough. Not so, argues Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard, director of the Farm Fresh program for La Semilla Food Center in Las Cruces, the largest city south of Albuquerque. In 2010, Wiggins and two colleagues founded Semilla (“Seed” in Spanish), with plans to start a youth food policy council, a youth farm, and multiple produce stands. After their inaugural year, which included the council’s launch and the gift of 15 acres to start the farm, Wiggins’ work won her an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) fellowship — and a visit from cookbook author, New York Times columnist, and food maven Mark Bittman. I spoke with Wiggins by phone to hear about her surprising path to food work, her plan to grow 500 foods in a desert, and what it’s like to promote local food in the country’s fifth-poorest state.
Q. You didn’t start out as a food person. How did you end up doing work that lured Mark Bittman to the desert?
A. [Before La Semilla] I was a grad student in political science, and I have a history of being involved in human rights movements on the border. I was working at Colonias Development Center, and I came in after a USDA Community food projects grant was [going] to start community gardens, and I realized I had a passion for working with youth and growing food. [Before that], if you’d asked me about food, I probably would have said, What’s the big deal, you go to the grocery store and you buy it. Once I saw that [only some] eaters have access to food and income to buy healthy food, how that’s a human rights issue, it was a natural fit for me. It was, How did I miss this?
The youth of La Semilla Food Center.
Q. Colonias are known for lacking things like roads and water lines. What does that mean for food?
A. There are very small grocery stores and little corner stores, but they don’t always have the healthiest or the freshest food available and that’s really part of our work — to pilot market stands in the community to increase access to that fresh food. There’s no organic food, there’s very little choice. Most of these colonias are in very rural areas, and you have to have a car or know someone who can give you a ride. We did a [community food] survey with our youth in 2009, and everyone said they go to Las Cruces or El Paso [to buy groceries]; it’s 20-30 miles, and there’s no public transportation. People prefer to have healthier choices and more options, so they’ll drive elsewhere.
Q. A small town in Maine just passed a food sovereignty law, and there are a number of U.S. organizations beginning to talk about that idea, which is the belief that having access to healthy food and retaining control of its production is an essential human right. How does food sovereignty factor in to your work?
A. I have a lot of experience with communities in Chiapas, Mexico, where I worked with a weaving cooperative. The reason they have to sell their products is they are no longer able to farm their land for subsistence. We should be able to grow enough food for our own subsistence if we choose to, and use our land the way we want without having powerful corporations make choices for us. I think food sovereignty is also tied to being able to save seeds that are GMO- and chemical-free, and having more choices that aren’t determined by corporations.
I think our work is entirely in line with [food sovereignty]. We will be growing desert foods and things you can’t find in the grocery store [at the youth farm], like amaranth. Right now, much of what’s grown in New Mexico is shipped out, and we can really grow our local economy if we sell our food here instead of selling to an outside company.
Cooking with prickly pears at La Semilla.
Q. Desert farming? Could you really feed a modern community on that?
A. In southern New Mexico, we have a year-round growing season. It’s pecan, cotton, alfalfa for most of it, [and] you can grow so much here with modest season extension techniques; there are 550 varieties of fruits and vegetables that can grow here. The problem in the desert is water [and] our farm is also meant to show that we can use dry land farming techniques.
Q. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country. How can farmers markets make sense for a population where the median household income is 16 percent below the national average?
A. I think farmers market prices here are quite affordable and many of the vendors take WIC [Women, Infants and Children support service] checks. Some of the colonia communities have really high redemption rates for WIC checks there, and it’s a great way to access fresh food. They are also usually getting food grown without pesticides and people want those choices. One thing in our area that we are lacking is the use of EBT (food stamp cards). There’s only one market in our region that accepts EBT and part of my work is trying to increase access to EBT at markets.
A group of young participants at La Semilla Food Center.
Q. What’s been the biggest barrier to seeing your students change their eating behaviors?
Fort Collins developer Les Kaplan has been holding on to the Chuck E. Cheese's building at Prospect Road and College Avenue for nearly a decade.
The lease for Chuck E. Cheese's — a popular place for children's birthday parties — expires in November 2019 and Kaplan's thoughts have turned to redevelopment.
He is teaming up with Fort Collins development consultant Stu MacMillan and Saunders Commercial Development, which would develop and own a six-story, 149-room hotel that would replace Chuck E. Cheese's and Fort Collins Furniture and Mattress.
MacMillan, formerly of Bohemian Cos., and Trae Rigby, who previously ran McWhinney's development arm, were involved in developing The Elizabeth Hotel in Old Town. Bohemian, McWhinney and Sage Hospitality partnered on The Elizabeth, the city's only 5-star hotel.
MacMillan subsequently left Bohemian and Rigby left McWhinney for Saunders. MacMillan brought the idea of a hotel to both Kaplan and Saunders. Rigby and his team got to know the site and Kaplan, "and decided a hotel was the highest and best use for such a prominent corner and with such great proximity to CSU and the stadium," Rigby said.
MacMillan added: "It's a great opportunity to be right beside CSU at its gateway."
No hotel flag has been chosen yet, Rigby said, but the group is looking at new concepts "that have a clean, minimalistic style and approach. We are looking at a few flags that have a focus on design."
Since Kaplan purchased the building in 2007, the area has seen a construction boon with CSU's new football stadium and health center, a rebuilt intersection at College and Prospect and Prospect Station I and II apartments just west of the site.
Schrader's convenience store and gas station sits at the corner. "I'd like to include the gas station (in the hotel development plan), but they're not interested in being included," he said.
But they are interested in making the property architecturally compatible with the hotel when they're ready to renovate the store, Kaplan said. "It seems like now is the time to reposition that key intersection to respond to the opportunity and need."
The hotel will back up to a small strip center with offices and several retailers, including Black Bottle Brewery, Music City Hot Chicken, Bawarchi Biryani Point Indian restaurant, Taqueria Los Comales and Edward's Cigar Shop.
Chuck E. Cheese's and the furniture store have until their leases expire next year to find new locations.
"What I like about the location is it is less dependent on the business economy than any of the hotels that have been built or are contemplated," Kaplan said.
Convenient to CSU's football stadium, adjacent to the MAX bus line and on the edge of campus, it could be a base camp for families coming to Fort Collins to look at CSU, attend football games or CSU events, he said.
"It will be a much needed complement to the university in addition to all the other potential patrons of the hotel who want to be near downtown and the government center. It has easy access from Prospect and I-25, it's near restaurants and it's on the Spring Creek Trail and MAX," Kaplan said.
"It's a great opportunity to be right beside CSU at the gateway, MacMillan said.
If the hotel comes to fruition, it will be the sixth hotel to open recently or be in the city's development pipeline. MacMillan and Rigby are scheduled to meet with city planners next week to discuss preliminary plans.
If approved, construction would likely begin as soon as the leases expire and the building is razed. Construction would take about 15 months and likely open in early to mid-2021.
ITV has released a trailer for the sixth and final season of Downton Abbey. The network has also confirmed that the drama will air in the U.K. on Sep. 20 at 9 p.m., Deadline reports.
The trailer, which you can watch above, offers a brief glimpse into the farewell season. There aren’t too many details yet, but we do know the show will pick up in 1925, about six months after it left off.
CELTIC have been linked with a swoop for Brighton youngster Aaron Connolly - but it’s been claimed talk of a move north of the border is ‘nonsense’.
Connolly has been in blistering form for the club’s Under-23 side this term.
He’s fired in 17 goals for the Albion, and earned the Premier League 2 player of the month award in November.
Despite that impressive haul, Connolly, 18, hasn’t barely a sniff of first-team action under Chris Hughton with Glenn Murray, Florin Andone and Jurgen Locadia are all above the Republic of Ireland youth international in the pecking order.
The Scottish Sun report Brighton want to tie him to a new contract and then loan him out in January.
They add Celtic are also keen on landing him in the New Year.
But talk of a switch to the Glasgow giants has been brushed off by The Argus journalist Andy Naylor, who covers Brighton.
The Sun report claims Manchester United are also keeping an eye on the young striker.
He was signed for Brighton by scout Mark Anderson, who has since moved north to join the Old Trafford club.
Manchester City, Leeds and Hoffenheim are other teams who have been linked with the Irishman.
Connolly has made his senior debut for Brighton last season in an EFL Cup clash against Barnet.
He made his second first-team apperance in the same competition this term in a 1-0 defeat at home to Southampton.
Brighton will be without goalkeeper Mat Ryan for the Premier League visit of Everton tomorrow.
The Australian has joined his country's squad ahead of the Asian Cup, which runs from January 5 to February 1, with David Button and Jason Steele competing to replace him.
Defender Lewis Dunk returns from a one-match ban, but Alireza Jahanbakhsh, who is also away on international duty with Iran at the Asian Cup, following a hamstring problem, remains unavailable, along with fellow winger Jose Izquierdo (knee).

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