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and respecting everyone's heritage, even if it is not the same as our own."
have never voted for a Democrat in my entire life and don't intend to do so."
me to the city manager as a socialist. "I'm no supporter of Black History Month,"
he reminds me. Robert E. Lee is one of his heroes -- and so on.
home.' And that should have been the end of it."
innocent youth. "Now let's get on with it."
"romantic stories of Jeb Stuart," among other tales, to local schoolchildren.
group is doing. They are bullish on the future -- which is to say the past.
Having won themselves a month in Suffolk, they are aiming for the year.
KEEP IT CLEAN: Litter is a huge problem in East Sussex and you only have to look along the verges of the A27, A26, A22, roads like that, to realise how bad it is. It is interesting to discover that much of the trash comes from falling off lorries when they are actually taking it to the waste disposal units rather than ...
SILVER SCREEN: Doors will be open tonight (Friday) from 7pm at Piddinghoe Village Hall when a substantial audience is expected for the the Queen movie, Bohemian Rhapsody. Film Night doesn’t always pack them in here but this time several tickets have been booked in advance already and prime seating positions may be at a...
CHURCH SERVICES: Every fourth Sunday at St John’s (9.30am) including hymns and The Eucharist. Then every second Sunday in the month a shorter, half-hour service led by Rev Mary Sitwell. Plans are well advanced for Easter (April 21, Easter Sunday) and the fund-raising effort to attack the £25,000 needed to restore our w...
PIDDINGHOE PLAYERS: Piddinghoe Players present Le Hoe de Pidding (satire and song) in the Village Hall Saturday March 30 (7p.m.) £10 including a drink. Tickets from Old School, Village Green.
FILM NIGHT: Tonight (Friday) in village hall Bohemian Rhapsody, PG at 7.30pm. (Doors open 7pm) £3.
PILATES: Tomorrow (Saturday) with Rebecca in the village hall. Three separate sessions from 8.15am to 11.15am.
INDOOR GAMES: Every Wednesday night from 7.30pm equipment freely available in village hall for tables tennis, darts etc. Just turn up.
ART AND KNITTING: Jill is taking a break this week but others may bring their brushes and needles and find the kettles and tea pot in the usual places at village hall. Thursdays from 2pm.
YOGA: Tim Blair’s class ever Thursday from 6.30pm, £8 in village hall.
What: Penn Virginia's stock dropped by more than 12% after the company issued its outlook for 2015. The oil driller is really dialing back its spending, which will slow down its oil production growth. That, along with lower oil prices today, sent shares tumbling.
So what: Penn Virginia is dramatically cutting its capex plan to $295 million-$345 million in 2015. That's up to 63% lower than the company spent last year, but it will still push its production up 10%-20% higher in 2015. The company is cutting back on spending because it wants to ensure that it maintains a health...
While this is a prudent move in light of the downturn in the price of oil investors see this as a sign of weakness. That's because its cutting spending by more than the 50% average we've seen by most other small oil drillers. Further, Penn Virginia had been rapidly growing its oil production as it used its pr...
Now what: While investors might not like Penn Virginia's decision to pull back spending, it's really the right thing to do. The world is oversupplied with oil right now so there's no reason for Penn Virginia to add to that glut by continuing to rapidly grow its oil production. The oil under its acreage i...
The article Heres Why Penn Virginia Corporations Stock Is Down 12% Today originally appeared on Fool.com.
AIRPORT DISTRICT — Bob Hope Airport officials Monday unanimously approved a $96-million budget that will pay for several major infrastructure projects, such as runway improvements and work on a new regional transit center.
The 2010-11 budget for the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority comes amid a drop in passenger traffic, fluctuating fuel costs and overall uncertainty regarding the national economic recovery. Despite ballooning more than $20 million over the last year, the budget does not increase charges to airlines or rely on...
The 555-acre airport, which serves about 5 million passengers annually and houses some 45 private jets, also maintained investments in programs to enhance environmental sustainability.
"Because of the uncertainty that we believe we continue to face, the budget has been developed with a cautious eye on the economic situation heading into the next fiscal year," said Kathy David, the airport's director of administrative services. "The second area that we also see uncertainty is regarding what our air ca...
The budget forecasts a loss of $825,000 from investments and a $307,000 dip in landing fees due to the indecisive scheduling. Southwest Airlines recently announced plans to phase out 12% of its weekly flights by September, although other carriers have added flights.
Included in the budget is $4.5 million for a passenger processing system, $11 million to rehabilitate two ramps and a runway shoulder, and $18 million on a regional transportation center.
The proposed $120-million center, which is working its way through the approval process, would link the airport with passenger trains, shuttles, buses, taxicabs and rental cars.
Airport commissioner Frank Logan, a member of the finance committee, reviewed the budget in five sessions before recommending it to the full commission. The group's guiding principle, he said, was "don't spend the money if we don't have it."
"All in all, I think that it's fair to say that members of the finance committee are satisfied with the results," Logan said.
Operation and maintenance costs rose by roughly 4% over last year, to $35.9 million, according to the authority.
Although parking revenue showed significant improvements in April and May, passenger traffic for the year has been slower to recover. Total passenger traffic in April was down 8% from the previous year, bringing the year-to-date figure down to 3.7%, airport records show.
In 2000, Reed Hastings, the founder of a fledgling company called Netflix, flew to Dallas to propose a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and his team. The idea was that Netflix would run Blockbuster’s brand online and Antioco’s firm would promote Netflix in its stores. Hastings got laughed out of the room.
We all know what happened next. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 and Netflix is now a $28 billion dollar company, about ten times what Blockbuster was worth. Today, Hastings is widely hailed as a genius and Antioco is considered a fool. Yet that is far too facile an explanation.
Antioco was, in fact, a very competent executive—many considered him a retail genius—with a long history of success. Yet for all his operational acumen, he failed to see that networks of unseen connections would bring about his downfall. Over the past 15 years, scientists have learned much about how these networks func...
When Hastings flew to Dallas and proposed his deal in 2000, Blockbuster sat atop the video rental industry. With thousands of retail locations, millions of customers, massive marketing budgets and efficient operations, it dominated the competition. So it’s not surprising that Antioco and his team balked at simply handi...
Yet Blockbuster’s model had a weakness that wasn’t clear at the time. It earned an enormous amount of money by charging its customers late fees, which had become an important part of Blockbuster’s revenue model. The ugly truth—and the company’s achilles heel—was that the company’s profits were highly dependent on penal...
At the same time, Netflix had certain advantages. By eschewing retail locations, it lowered costs and could afford to offer its customers far greater variety. Instead of charging to rent videos, it offered subscriptions, which made annoying late fees unnecessary. Customers could watch a video for as long as they wanted...
Netflix proved to be a very disruptive innovation, because Blockbuster would have to alter its business model—and damage its profitability—in order to compete with the startup. Despite being a small, niche service at the time, it had the potential to upend Blockbuster’s well oiled machine.
While Netflix’s model clearly had some compelling aspects, it also had some obvious disadvantages. Without retail locations, it was hard for people to find it. Moreover, because its customers received their videos by mail, the service was somewhat slow and cumbersome. People couldn’t just pick up a movie for the night ...
Still, customers loved the service and told their friends. Some were reluctant at first, they actually liked being able to browse movies at the store and pick one up at a moments notice, but others jumped right in. And as more of their friends raved about Netflix, the laggards tried it too, fell in love with it and con...
Network scientists call this the threshold model of collective behavior. For any given idea, there are going to be people with varying levels of resistance. As those who are more willing begin to adopt the new concept, the more resistant ones become more likely to join in. Under the right conditions, a viral cascade ca...
The best way to understand thresholds is to look at the diffusion of ideas model formulated by Everett Rogers in the 1960’s.
While ideas usually take hold in small niches of innovators, they can often spread to early adopters, who are only slightly more resistant to join in. Once they’re on board, those in the early majority begin to feel comfortable giving it a try. As each threshold is past, the next group becomes more likely to adopt the ...
Unfortunately, this effect is devilishly hard to quantify. Duncan Watts, a pioneer in network theory, is quick to point out that social dynamics tend to be idiosyncratic and it’s not always clear exactly where thresholds exist. Still, you can use conventional marketing analysis to evaluate whether an idea is spreading ...
It is not clear whether Antioco’s team did such an analysis or not, but by 2004—six years before the company went bankrupt—he sensed that Netflix had become a significant threat and sought to change his firm’s policies. Yet how he went about doing that sealed his, and ultimately Blockbuster’s, fate.
Once John Antioco became convinced that Netflix, and to a lesser extent Redbox, was a threat, he used his authority as CEO—as well as the credibility he had earned by nearly doubling Blockbuster’s revenues during his tenure—to discontinue the late fees that annoyed customers and invest heavily into a digital platform t...
Antioco’s article in Harvard Business Review describes what happened next. While he convinced the board to back his plan, one of his lieutenants, Jim Keyes, led a rear guard action. He pointed out that the costs of Antioco’s changes — about $200 million to drop late fees and another $200 million to launch Blockbuster O...
Eventually, an activist investor, Carl Icahn, began to question Antioco’s leadership. Antioco lost the board’s confidence and was fired over a compensation dispute in 2005. Keyes was named CEO and immediately reversed Antioco’s changes in order to increase profitability. Blockbuster went bankrupt five years later.
Keyes felt the company couldn’t afford to keep losing so much money, so we pulled the plug. To this day I don’t know what would have happened if we’d avoided the big blowup over Antioco’s bonus and he’d continued growing Total Access. Things might have turned out differently.
So the inability to understand the networks that would determine his fate struck John Antioco twice. First, he failed to realize how quickly a niche idea could snowball into a viral cascade. Second, he failed to construct a network that could carry his ideas of change throughout his own organization.
For all the excitement surrounding online social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, we really haven’t scratched the surface on the networks we encounter in real life: The networks of consumers that make up our brands and industries as well as the organizational networks that determine how things get done—or don’t ...
And it’s imperative that we start thinking about them more seriously. We need to stop acting as if there is a recipe for business—like a cake or a casserole—and start thinking in terms of how factors are connected. The structure of those unseen connections, their context and how they relate to our objectives increasing...
Watts points to recent research done at Facebook as an example how a well designed study can reveal much about how influence spreads through networks. He also notes that that digital trails left by emails and electronic calendars can be very useful for mapping organizational networks. Fortunately, we have far more tool...
The irony is that Blockbuster failed because its leadership had built a well-oiled operational machine. It was a very tight network that could execute with extreme efficiency, but poorly suited to let in new information. Antioco’s fatal flaw wasn’t one of intelligence or capability, but a failure to understand the netw...
We’re downloading more audiobooks than ever. What do they bring to our relationship with stories, and can they really replace the pleasure of reading?
Books blog Is it time for a Handmaid's Tale sequel, to reckon with the Trump era?
Is it time for a Handmaid's Tale sequel, to reckon with the Trump era?
Ask Jack What’s the best way to listen to ebooks?
Peter’s wife loved reading, but a stroke has limited her to consuming TV and radio. Would an Amazon Kindle or another device enable her to listen to books instead?
What’s the best way to listen to ebooks?
If you haven’t seen Google’s new “Dear Sophie” video, I highly recommend you check it out. It’s brilliant.
At various points in the video, the Chrome browser in use reveals an unreleased product: a Google +1 extension. For the best view of it, skip to the 0:51 mark. There it is, front and center, next to the Picasa button being clicked on.
The funniest part of this is that Google is actually airing this video on national television as part of their new Chrome marketing push. So Google just leaked their own new feature to millions of people. Well, those watching very closely, at least.
So what does the extension do? Hard to say since they never actually click on it in the video. But one can assume that it’s a simple way to +1 any site you’re visiting. Google formally unveiled +1 about a month ago as a way to socially share Google Search results with friends — and to help Google rank those results wit...
I’m also wondering if the extension doesn’t have more social functionality — such as a way to share a link on Twitter and other networks alongside +1’ing it. You may recall that as they were developing +1, we kept getting leaks about it. One of those was a +1 toolbar that was apparently a way to share with other social...
Google has also said that a +1 button is coming for publisher websites. But we haven’t heard any more on that since the original announcement.
Anyway, a +1 Chrome extension is clearly on the way. And Google let us know about it either by way of a brilliant subliminal marketing move, or a big mistake in front of the entire American public.
Either way, great ad. +1, really.
The DUP and SDLP are pressing the Sinn Fein Lord Mayor of Belfast to talk to the PSNI about her recollections of events in a Belfast pub before the murder of Robert McCartney in 2005.
Sinn Fein councillor Deirdre Hargey, was one of 70 people in Magennis’ bar near the Markets area, when a fracas erupted that ended with the brutal murder of the 33-year-old father of two outside.
Mr McCartney’s death was widely blamed on IRA members and came at a fragile time politically – before the IRA had decommissioned or Sinn Fein had signed up to policing.
Despite the large number of people in the bar when the row began, no-one reported seeing anything.
Speaking ahead of her inauguration in June, Ms Hargey said the murder was “wrong and should not have happened”. She added: “If the PSNI or anyone else needs me in terms of helping in that investigation then I will do so”.
DUP council group leader Lee Reynolds said that after Ms Hargey’s installation, Robert’s murder was raised in the media and he responded that the most important issue was for the McCartney family to be heard.
“So the family then approached us and the SDLP and we agreed to work with them in their campaign for justice,” he said.
The McCartneys’ key desire, he said, was for the 13 witnesses who gave statements to the Police Ombudsman — one of whom was believed to be Ms Hargey — to talk to the PSNI face to face.
Robert’s sister, Catherine McCartney, said: “Now that she is in a position of leadership, we are calling on Deidre Hargey to go to the police.
“There were quite a few Sinn Fein members in the bar that night who have not yet done so. At the time Sinn Fein had not yet signed up to policing and some party members gave statements to the Police Ombudsman instead.
She added that there was no suggestion that the Mayor was involved in any way in the death of her brother.
April 9 (Reuters) - The Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) is close to finalising governance and sharia standards for Islamic endowments, known as awqaf, the Bahrain-based body said on Sunday.
AAOIFI, one of the main standard-setting bodies in Islamic finance, started work last year on developing guidance for awqaf - which receives donations from Muslims to operate social projects, such as mosques, schools and welfare schemes.
Development of an accounting standard for awqaf is also underway, Deputy Secretary General Omar Mustafa Ansari said during AAOIFI’s annual sharia conference being held in Manama this week.
AAOIFI standards typically address the financial products offered by Islamic banks and insurers, but extending its reach to awqaf could help unlock large pools of otherwise idle assets.
A governance standard for awqaf, for instance, would provide guidance on internal controls, policies and procedures, transparency and disclosures.
According to a Dubai government estimate, awqaf may hold around $1 trillion in assets around the globe.
Management of those assets has struggled to keep up with their expansion, many being poorly managed and earning low returns, sometimes requiring further donations to keep them running.
Can you believe our newest House representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? What a girl! She just got elected and has already defied Amazon, seemingly alone, turning away their presence in her hometown of New York City. No thousands of new jobs there! And she has caused Sen. Dianne Feinstein to go on a toot and talk sha...
Even Hillary Clinton has come out of her cave to denounce her, but very softly. The T-shirt industry is busy printing T-shirts glorifying her. I've ordered three with her wittiest remarks. I hear a comic book group is planning to make her an "action hero" in one of their series. What a strong personality!
On March 5, even The New York Times, the leader of the Democratic Party's new left-wing, had to back down and admit that “Medicare for all” is "the impossible dream” — too expensive to ever happen. Ocasio-Cortez will take care of that. She's straightening up the party, too, making a list of House Democratic members who...
Where do we go from here? I suggest the Democrats put her in charge of all those committees studying President Trump. Bob Mueller and others have been at it for more than two years. Bet it won't take AOC that long.
You go, girl! I can't wait to see.
One in five high school students is vaping? Breathing in nicotine, affecting others nearby. Nicotine is responsible for how many ailments? It affects fetuses growing in a “host body,” as new Florida House Speaker Jose Oliva called a pregnant woman.
Of Florida children lucky enough to have made it out of the womb, 325,000 have no health insurance. Almost 1 million Florida adults also. But these are “pro-life” Republicans who refuse to expand Medicaid.
That’s dead in the water? That seems to describe a lot of Florida these days.
But the new speaker is worried about letting us old people smoke marijuana. The kids might get hold of it. Ever-younger children seem to be able to get ever-more-dangerous drugs every year. Opioids are a product of these private businesses that seem “entitled” to do whatever they want.
Competition is the answer to lower health care costs? Marijuana might compete with cigar, cigarette and vaping sales? The new speaker is from a cigar-making family that grew tobacco in Cuba, then big-time in Nicaragua. Even the leaves growing in the field are dangerous to workers tending them, aren’t they?
Whereas marijuana seems to be a real help to children with epilepsy. Lots of sick people have no appetite, or have difficulty swallowing, and can’t handle edible marijuana.

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