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Here lives Madeleine (Fanny Ardant), a secretive musician, who might be the key to unlocking the dark secrets of his childhood.
Eventually he locates the house in question, blagging his way in as an architecture graduate student looking to survey the house for a project.
Hugh, who is hoping for a cinema release for the film this autumn, co-wrote it with Charles Garrad who directed it. Both hope to attend the Chichester screening.
“He had some ideas and I had some ideas, and we got together. I was interested really in the idea of secrets and how they can be difficult and damaging and hold people back.
“It was this idea of a father whose secrets hold back his son who can’t move forward in his own life because of the secrets his father has hidden.
“I was also interested in the idea of traumas so intense that people can’t get past them.
“I was also interested in the military life and things that affect people’s normal life afterwards.
“The film is about this son who has to undertake this journey that takes him out of his comfort zone and normal life into a different place. He needs taking away from that comfort zone.
“He is working in a dead-end job and he is not happy in his life. His conscious reason for going is that he is curious about what his father has hidden, but unconsciously he is looking for something that will move him forwards in his life.
“His father was in the British army in Aden and it was one of those counter-insurgency situations that are very bad.
Hugh is delighted that the film has now come to fruition: “It has taken a while. It usually takes a few years trying to set up a feature film. It is so hard. You are waiting for people to make decisions. Someone might be interested in talking to you but then they are not because something else has come up, and then you all go round again, but then we found some private investors who were interested in it.
“This is my tenth film, and what you usually find is that you reach a point where it is all happening very quickly.
“Once you have got the funding, you are able to talk to the actors and ask them when they are available.
“And then you are moving forward.
HOLGUÍN, Cuba, Jun 28 2016 (IPS) - Five gargantuan modern irrigation machines water the state farm of La Yuraguana covering 138 hectares in the northeastern province of Holguín, the third largest province in Cuba. However, “sometimes they cannot even be switched on, due to the low water level,” said farm manager Edilberto Pupo.
“The last three years have been very stressful due to lack of rainfall. We take our irrigation water from a reservoir that has practically run dry,” Pupo told IPS. In 2008 La Yuraguana received new irrigation equipment financed by international aid.
Central pivot machines are a form of overhead water sprinkler that imitates the action of rain. The machinery is assembled in Cuba using European parts.
Since late 2014 Cuba has endured the worst drought of the past 115 years.
The extremely dry weather has sounded an alarm call drawing attention to the urgent need to modernise and change water management practices in response to climate challenges, and to other problems such as water wastage from leaky supply networks, inefficient water storage and conservation policies and absence of water metering at the point of use.
National reforms begun in 2008 have not yet achieved the hoped-for lift-off in agricultural production. Farming, however, is the main consumer of water in this Caribbean country, responsible for using 65 percent of the island’s total fresh water supply for irrigation, fish farming and livestock.
Future difficulties loom on the horizon, because droughts are becoming more seasonal in nature in the Caribbean region due to climate change, according to a new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published June 21.
The Caribbean region accounts for seven of the world’s top 36 water-stressed countries, FAO said.
The eastern part of Cuba suffers most from droughts, and its population, alongside small farmers in Holguín province, has its own methods of addressing the problem of lack of rainfall. They say that in extreme droughts, irrigation equipment is of little use.
“At the most critical time we had to plant resistant crops like yucca (cassava) and plantains (starchy bananas that require cooking) that can survive until it rains,” Pupo said, speaking about the cooperative farm which sells vegetables, grains, fruit and root crops to the city of Holguín’s 287,800 people.
La Yuraguana employs 93 workers, 14 of whom are women. Its 2016 production target is 840 tonnes of food, for direct sale to markets in the city of Holguín, in the adjacent municipality.
“We hope Saint Peter will come to our aid, that the rains will come and fill the reservoir, so that we can water our crops and keep on producing,” said Pérez. Devout rural folk call on Saint Peter, whose feast day is June 29, to intercede on their behalf because they believe the saint is able to bring rain.
Cuba’s total agricultural land area is about 6.24 million hectares out of its total surface of nearly 11 million hectares. Only 460,000 hectares of arable land is under irrigation, mostly with outdated equipment and technology, according to the government report titled “Panorama uso de la tierra. Cuba 2015” (Overview of land use: Cuba 2015).
At present only about 11 percent of the land used to raise crops is irrigated, but FAO forecasts that by 2020 the area equipped for irrigation will nearly double, to some 875,600 hectares, through a programme launched in 2011 to modernise machinery and reorganise farm irrigation and drainage.
Use of irrigation increases average crop yields by up to 30 percent, experts say.
Cuban authorities want to boost local production in order to reduce expenditure on purchasing imported food to meet demand from the island’s 11.2 million people, and from the influx of tourists – there were three million visitors to Cuba in 2015. The bill for imported food is two billion dollars a year.
Cuba is not blessed with any large lakes or rivers, and so is reliant on rainfall, captured in 242 dammed reservoirs and dozens of artificial minilakes.
Local experts agree with FAO’s Friedrich that over-exploitation of underground water reserves should be discouraged because of the risk of causing salinisation and losing fresh water sources.
The present drought in Cuba was triggered by the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon, which has had devastating effects in Latin America this year. Shortage of water has affected 75 percent of Cuban territory, according to official sources, with the worst effects being felt in Santiago de Cuba, a province adjacent to Holguín.
In spite of steps taken to put the water consumption needs of people before agricultural and industrial uses, one million people experienced some limitation on their access to water in May, said the state National Institute of Water Resources.
On June 20 the European Union announced an additional grant of 100,000 euros (113,000 dollars) to Cuba via the Red Cross, as disaster relief for 10,000 drought victims in Santiago de Cuba. The funds are intended to improve access to safe drinking water and to deliver transport equipment, reservoirs and materials for water treatment and quality control.
However, many of those responsible for the agriculture and small farming sectors still see irrigation as the key to boosting production.
“Yields under irrigation when necessary are much higher than when one just waits for nature to take its course,” said Abdul González, deputy mayor in charge of agriculture for the municipal government of Holguín. Unfortunately “80 percent of our land under crops lacks irrigation,” he told IPS.
“Small farmers from all forms of agricultural production (state, private and cooperative) are demanding irrigation systems. Some of them resort to home made tanks and ditches to mitigate the negative impacts of the drought,” he said.
At the Eduardo R. Chibás Credit and Service Cooperative, not far from La Yuraguana, Virgilio Díaz, one of the cooperative’s beneficial owners who grows garlic, maize, sweet potato, papaya and sorghum on his 22-acre plot, ascribed much of his success to the irrigation system bought in 2010 by the 140-member cooperative.
“Income went up by over 70 percent: we raised salaries; I was able to request a lease on more land and I built a new house,” Díaz said. He and five other workers between them produce 200 tonnes of food a year, when the climate is favourable.
The NEC MultiSync P212 is a pricey 21 inch professional-grade monitor engineered for continuous use. It offers very accurate colors, superb grayscale performance, and a robust feature set.
Very accurate colors. Excellent gray-scale and viewing-angle performance. 14-bit Look-Up Table (LUT). Many features and settings.
Expensive. Only one side-accessible USB ports.
The NEC MultiSync P212 ($899) is a 21-inch professional-grade UXGA (1,600-by-1,200) monitor featuring a high-performance In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel engineered for continuous use, making it ideal for use in control rooms, medical institutions, digital-image-acquisition applications, and office applications that require precise color and gray-scale accuracy. It delivered outstanding performance in our tests, and offers a wealth of settings and features, but the panel offers a 4:3 aspect ratio model, so if you require a widescreen display, the NEC MultiSync EA244UHD, our Editors' Choice for midsize Ultra High-Definition (UHD) monitors, might be a better bet.
The P212's IPS panel differs from most other IPS displays in that it benefits from a special manufacturing process that reduces the amount of contaminants in the LCD elements that may result in image retention. This allows the P212 to run 24/7 without incurring permanent damage to the panel. The 1,600-by-1,200-resolution screen has a non-reflective, anti-glare coating, a peak brightness of 440 cd/m2, a 1,500:1 native contrast ratio, and a 4:3 aspect ratio. It also offers a 14-bit Look-Up Table (LUT), which allows for internal calibration using a hardware/software solution such as NEC's SpectraView II Color Calibration Solution, which is available for an additional $250 as a bundle (P212-SV).
The 10.6-pound cabinet is available in white or black and comes with a matching stand that offers plenty of ergonomic adjustments, including height, tilt, swivel, and pivot maneuverability. Connectivity ports are numerous and include an HDMI port, a DVI port, a DisplayPort, and a VGA port, as well as three USB 3.0 ports (one upstream and two downstream), an audio input, and a headphone jack. There's only one side-mounted USB port on this monitor, and the two 1-watt speakers aren't very loud.
On the right side of the lower bezel are an ambient light sensor, an LED indicator, a Power switch, an input select button, a menu button, and a left-and-right arrow rocker for navigating the menus. There's an up-and-down rocker on the right bezel, along with a button that doubles as a reset switch and an ECO mode selector. As with the NEC MultiSync PA322UHD and the NEC EA244UHD, the P212 offers a boatload of settings. In addition to the usual Brightness, Contrast, Color Temperature, and Sharpness settings, there are six picture mode settings, including sRGB, REC-Bt709, High Bright, Native, DICOM (for medical imaging), and Programmable. Advanced settings include 6-Axis Hue, Offset, Saturation, and White Balance color adjustments, Uniformity, Metamerism (improves white point color matching), Print Emulation, and Black Level. There are three ECO power saving modes (Off, Mode 1, and Mode 2), an Auto-Dimming setting that uses the ambient light sensor to adjust brightness, and the same carbon footprint meter found on previous MultiSync models.
The P212 is covered by a four-year warranty on parts, labor, and backlight and comes with HDMI, DVI, VGA, and USB cables. It also comes with a resource CD containing drivers and a User Manual.
The P212 provided excellent color accuracy right out of the box. As shown on the chromaticity chart below, red, green, and blue colors (represented by the colored dots) are perfectly aligned with their ideal CIE coordinates (represented by the boxes). Colors appeared rich and uniform in my test images and while viewing Captain America: The Winter Soldier on Blu-ray.
New Jersey Temperature are in the nineties today and tomorrow.
I will take the ice cold weather, any day of the week.
Growing up in Phoenix and working construction during summer months (during the university years) you had to figure it out or you wouldn't make it, literally. We didn't have a day or two, we had four months (30 years later, it's up to five months) of 100-115 degree temps every day. My routine was to eat a big dinner of pasta or the like and drink water mixed 50/50 with an electrolyte sports drink low in sugar. Breakfast of bananas and eggs. Lunch was typically bananas, peanut butter and a can of tuna. No extra sweets, cereal, or junk food, or you would feel like crap very quickly. Drink lots of water mixed with low-sugar sports drink, and drink before you feel thirsty. Wear long sleeves to keep the sun off your skin. Some of our crew took salt tablets with the water, but everyone's chemistry is different. I advise against drinking the real sweet sports drinks like Gatorade unless you mix extra water with it.
The all time best suggestion I can give you is DON'T GET OLD! Up until a very few years ago, I could shrug off the high heat and humidity, but it suddenly caught up with me. Now if I stay out in the heat a little too long, I can't get my breath and I start seeing spots. A few minutes more out in the heat and I start snapping at the spots like a dog snapping at flies---then it's no BS time to find some AC and cold water.
I remember in high school playing football in the August heat to make the cut.
Sometimes there were double or triple sessions. I drank an entire litter bottle of Mountain Dew soda.
That was the worst time for being thirsty in my life. It was horrible wearing all that football gear in August.
Heat exhaustion is a condition that can be eased by getting out of the heat. Continued exposure to high heat can lead to Heat Stroke, which is a life saving condition and needs immediate attention. Your body gets so hot you go into a downward cascade of increasing severe situation. Electrolytes go wild and your blood pH can begin to change. Normal pH range is 7.35 to 7.45, go outside that range by over the .10 and you might not pull through. Sodium, Potassium, Chloride and CO2 control the body pH. In the Hospital we put people right in a tub of ice cubes to get the temp down.
On the flight line the temp could reach 115 or higher and the men had to be very careful in working there. If you are the guy that has to crawl inside a wing when it is 115, he can tell you all about heat. They watched each other for early signs of trouble and were able to prevent heat strokes.
Call me back when the temp hits 113° and you have to put down a built up roof!
THEN...I'll talk to you about working in the heat!
Roofers start at first light in the early morning and quit early in the afternoon during the extreme heat..
Buckshot, If its early morning before work, I pack up three cold plastic 12oz bottle waters in my small cooler bag, with a couple ice packs. I take two cloth hand towels for the sweaty face and I also kept a roll of paper towels in my work truck.
I'll stack hay in the field all day over stacking 100 bales inside a barn! LOL!
Inside a metal barn in summer heat is a killer!
When your contract calls for completion by a specific date and time, you work until you're done, heat be damned.
Yep. Wasn't too bad when the mow was just getting started, but up near the top, it was pretty bad. That was when you'd start getting dive-bombed by the wasps, too. We earned our four bucks an hour, that's for sure!
After forty years working heavy hi-way construction, you learn a few things about how to beat the summer heat. You Don,t. Learning how to tolerate it though is actually a change in how you live to prepare for it.My diet would change , no meat, or very little, no beer no matter how cold, actually just try to limit your intake. Lunches eat light, with lots of foods that contain pulp , apples, oranges, tomatoes, melons, they seem to help you retain the water your drinking I never your system. Dress with light colored shirts and pants, wearing hard hats I kept a wet sponge cooled under my hat. I, d roll my pant legs up high, and unzip my zipper some to allow air to vent up my legs. Sunglasses not only protect your eyes but keep dry air from blowing into your sockets. Limit caffeine, and fill up early before you start work and never pass an opportunity to drink if your thirsty or not. Don,t think about it, it only makes it seem worse, when guys would complain about the heat I,d always remark that it was indeed a little warm ,but somewhere someone was doing a hot job. Lemon water is good for you, no sugar though, Gator aid and electrical lite drinks are good late in the day but easily over done .
Back in the mid 60's when the square bale was the norm and the minimum wage was $1.25/hr, a three man crew (driver, loader, stacker) could earn pretty fair wages at .03/bale.
As Christian Legacy Week launches today (19 October), churches are being urged to talk more about legacy giving.
A survey by Christian Research found that only 45% of Christians plan to leave a gift to a church or charity in their will.
Legacy gifts are an important way that Christians can positively impact the world when they are no longer here. The research shows that Christians are concerned about the future of our society, with the majority (61%) feeling that the condition of British society will decline over the next 25 years. In light of this, they identified the need to share the gospel, and to tackle poverty and social injustice as their highest priorities.
Despite this, just 5% of Christians saw legacy giving as an important way they could do this and help impact future generations.
Over half (55%) of Christians do not plan to leave a gift to a church or charity or are undecided.
Paul Chenery, from Christian charity TLG, and part of the Christian Legacy consortium, said: “Legacy gifts play such an important role in ensuring the fantastic work of charities and churches continues. However many Christians have never considered leaving a gift in their will.
Christian Legacy are providing resources to help Church leaders and small groups to talk about legacy gifts. You can access the resources here.
Students and parents are learning their college fates this week and then having to address whether schools are actually affordable. They have their work cut out for them as college fees, often well-disguised, continue to explode.
At the University of California Santa Cruz, where tuition runs to nearly $35,000 for non-residents, students every year pay more than 30 additional fees — including a small charge for what's billed as "free" HIV testing. Students at Oklahoma State University pay a handsome sum to attend one of the state's flagship schools, but they are also responsible for covering 18 different fees, including a "life safety and security fee."
The $100 "globalization fee" at Howard University is listed — without explanation — in the school's tuition and fees brochure. A school spokeswoman said the fee "supports internationalization initiatives" such as study abroad. Students pay the fee even if they have no intention of studying abroad themselves.
Worcester State University in Massachusetts, however, might have one of the most arresting fees. Students fortunate enough to be admitted face the challenge of paying the required tuition. But before they step foot on campus, they also will be hit with a fee to, well, step foot on campus. A portion of the school's "parking/pedestrian fee" goes to the upkeep of the sidewalks on campus.
Student fees have been something of a known irritant for years, often criticized as a kind of stealth, second tuition imposed on unsuspecting families. But such fees are still on the rise on many campuses. And though their names can border on the comical — i.e., the "student success fee" — there's nothing funny about how they can add up.
"It's a way for colleges to increase the cost that may not be as apparent to as many students," said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert and the founder of finaid.org and fastweb.org. "You focus in on tuition and when you get the bursar's bill, there are lots of little lines for all these fees, but because each is a relatively small amount, you may not notice it as much. You focus in on the big figure but not on these little figures that collectively add up to a lot."
This week, anxious high school seniors will be opening letters and emails of acceptance or rejection. For them, there will be a mix of joy and disappointment. But for those students and their parents, there will also be an initial reckoning with the expensive, often opaque issue of college fees.
Lauren Vaughn, a senior at UMass Amherst, is also an organizer for the UMass Students Against Debt coalition. She said appreciating the collective cost of additional school fees is often critical to determining whether any particular school is, in fact, affordable.
"It does seem as though we are not informed about these fees often until it is too late," Vaughn said, noting that such fees "can be the thing that puts some students who are financially strained over the edge."
The federal government has made efforts in recent years to make true college costs more transparent. U.S. Department of Education data shows that in more than half the states across the country, degree-granting institutions reported that fees comprised a greater portion of combined tuition and fees in the 2010-2011 school year than they had in 2008-2009.
But fees for specific programs and courses typically get left out of that data. The same goes for fees that apply to specific pockets of students, such as honors students or international students.
Many school officials say they do their best to make sure the necessary information about tuition and fees is clear to students and their parents. But there's no one definition that schools stick to when deciding what's covered by tuition and what falls under fees, and the very structuring of tuition and fees can vary wildly between different schools.
"It's all smoke and mirrors in some ways, the issue of tuition and fees," said Terry Meyers, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary. "It seems to be one area of the academic world where no one is looking and no one wants to look too closely."
To best appreciate how confusing — even upside-down — the world of college costs can get, consider this: At state schools in Massachusetts, where the state board of higher education has held tuition flat for more than a decade, "mandatory fees" wind up far outstripping the price of tuition. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship of the UMass system, mandatory fees are more than six times the cost of in-state tuition.
And that isn't the end of it: Students are then hit with still more charges — the $300 "freshman counseling fee," the $185 "undergraduate entering" fee, and several hundred dollars more if your parents or siblings attend freshman orientation. Honors college and engineering students face still more fees.
A number of forces are driving fees upward. For public institutions, declining state support has left many schools scrambling to find other types of revenue. As well, since the notion of straightforward tuition hikes is often politically toxic, there is considerable appeal to using fees to make up shortfalls.
But it has all required ever-greater attempts at creativity. In the last few years, a number of public colleges across the country have added fees with vaguely pleasant names — "academic excellence and success fees," or "student enhancement fees," for instance.
Some school officials admit openly that these fees aren't all that different from tuition.
Since 2009, students at Georgia's public colleges have been paying hundreds of dollars a year in what are called "special institutional fees," separate from tuition. The fees vary, depending on the campus; at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which charges the most, they now top $1,000 a year. All of it goes straight into schools' general funds.
"The special institutional fee goes to the exact same things your tuition goes to," said John Millsaps, spokesman for the state Board of Regents.
The charges are simply called "fees" instead of "tuition," he said, because at a time when the state slashed funding, several classes of entering students had already been promised that their tuition would be locked in at the same rate as part of a "guaranteed tuition plan." Calling any increase "tuition" would break that promise. The intent was also that the fee would be temporary, Millsaps said. Instead, the fees have grown on every campus.
College administrators also acknowledge that sometimes a "fee" is easier for students to stomach than a "tuition" increase — even if the difference is more about semantics than substance.
"Unfortunately, the word tuition is a little bit of a lightning rod these days," said Colette Sheehy, vice president for management and budget at the University of Virginia. "And not just here, but in other places as well."
This year, the university began imposing two new charges on students taking engineering courses or enrolled in the nursing school in order to better reflect the higher costs of running those programs. But rather than take the step of raising tuition on certain students, the school opted to implement the new charges as fees, as many other schools have already done. For an engineering major, the new fee typically adds up to an extra $750 per year, Sheehy said.
Within the 23-campus California State University system, six schools have adopted some form of what's called a "student success fee" since the beginning of 2011. The annual fees, which different campuses have been using to cover a broad array of things from technology to mentoring programs to athletics, range from as little as $162 to as much as $430 a year depending on the school.

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