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Birmingham have gone into freefall since their dramatic Carling Cup fi nal win over Arsenal at Wembley in February.
But England keeper Ben Foster insists relegation is not on the menu at St Andrew’s.
He said: “We are not looking at relegation or anything like that.
“We have got three games left and with the goal difference, it’s like five points. If we do end up going down being fi ve points off the relegation zone with three games left, then we would only have ourselves to blame.
Former Manchester United ace Foster believes victory instead of the 1-1 home draw with Wolves on Sunday would have been enough to safeguard the club’s Premier League future.
But he said: “I don’t think we can get caught up in how many points we might need.
In the Okanagan, BC211.ca is made available through a partnership with United Way so that everyone can access it. BC211 is a free, up-to-date, reliable gateway to community, social, non-clinical health and government services. Free, confidential help is available 24/7, 365 days a year. The service was launched across BC in June 2017 and can be accessed locally online at BC211.ca.
BC211 is launching a new mobile site to make it easier and faster for people to find information on their mobile devices. With the new mobile site, users land directly on search topics with drop-down menus to help narrow the search. Currently across the province, Over 35% of users access the site using a mobile device and this is growing as more youth seeking help with social issues.
Since the online searching was introduced in the Okanagan 18 months ago, more than 5,500 people in our region have been helped by BC211. The top searches continue to be housing and homelessness, mental health, health, income and financial assistance, and substance use.
BC211 provides online users with icons for easy access to popular search topics or an open search field.
In the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island, residents can dial 2-1-1 for non-emergency services helps reduce congestion on 911 dispatch lines. The 211 network now reaches more than 26 million Canadians. 211 operates in partnership with United Way across Canada. Canadians should always call 9-1-1 for emergencies.
COLUMBIA, Mo. — Kentucky takes on Missouri at Memorial on Saturday afternoon.
Line: Missouri is a consensus 7-point favorite.
Modesto’s Fire Department provides no ambulance service. That is done by a private company, American Medical Response, which can bill Medicare, Medicaid or MediCal as well as private insurers. But none of those government insurers pays first-responder fees, nor can the individuals be billed for them, a representative of Whitman Enterprises told me. That company handles the billing for the Sacramento Metropolitan, Cosumnes and other fire agencies that charge fees.
Already, the fee concept is drawing opposition. Dave Thomas, a longtime government watchdog and member of Mayor Ted Brandvold’s budget review committee, is against it. Some of his concerns mirrored those of readers who commented on reporter Kevin Valine’s story posted on The Modesto Bee’s Facebook page.
Though some people are now insured through Covered California, their plans have high deductibles – some as high as $6,000, Thomas said – and if the insurer won’t pay, it won’t matter.
During the Valley’s 2006 heat wave, some heat sufferers said they were on fixed incomes and didn’t think they could afford to pay the increased costs of running their air conditioning units. Thomas said the same would happen if the Fire Department begins charging for the first-responder duties.
That hasn’t been the case thus far in the Cosumnes Community Services District, which covers Elk Grove and Galt, since it instituted a fee of $147 per response a couple of years ago.
“That has not been communicated to me, that we’ve had people who were afraid of (calling 911 due to the fee),” said Tracey Hansen, the district’s fire chief.
That agency also faced initial blowback from residents who opposed the fee. But it overcame the opposition because the agency was able to show the public through a series of meetings the need to overcome the adverse effects of the recession.
The district involved folks from senior agencies, since seniors often require first-responder services. They included school officials. They also promised to keep the fee in place only until the economy restored the tax revenues that put the department back on solid footing again. When that happens, the fee will stop, she said.
The fees, Hansen said, will have generated $450,000 during the fiscal year ending June 30.
Modesto hasn’t determined what it would charge.
Or at least there soon could be for insurers, at least.
Former Venezuela Presidential Chief of Staff Beatrice Rangel analyzes the deaths of 2 intellectual giants.
The past week oversaw the departure of two great minds. In the U.S., Zbigniew Brzezinski; and in Argentina, Manuel Mora y Araujo.
The first, a distinguished geopolitical thinker and anti-soviet crusader.
Mora y Araujo a quiet brilliant political scientist who revolutionized polling in Argentina while fighting ceaselessly to consolidate democracy.
Both knew how disastrous a power engulfing regime can be for development, democracy and peace.
Born in Poland in 1928, Mr Brzezinski saw Europe emerge from a horrendous war only to fall into another equally ominous cold war, where for the first time, governments adopted mutual annihilation as a policy.
After the war, Mr. Brzezinski's home was taken over by the Soviet Union. His father, a former diplomat, chose freedom and moved with his family to Canada.
Mr Mora y Araujo lived through the military dictatorship in Argentina seeking refuge in academia.
He then began developing polling services than soon became very successful and attracted the attention of the military regime that would rather have public opinion suppressed and not measured.
Mr. Mora y Araujo had to put his polling services in hibernation, concentrating only on marketing studies. Pedagogy and writing became the focus of his work. He sought deep into the history of his beloved Argentina for the limits to development and ended becoming an authority in Peronism.
Both men marked an epoch of brilliance in political thought that today is in demise in a world where people are more interested in learning about events than about their causes, prefer images to texts, and regard information due diligence as a nuisance.
If one had to choose a work by these two extraordinary men, my choice would be Out of Control for Mr Brzezinski and Liberalismo y Democracia for Mr Mora y Araujo.
Out of Control, written on the eve of the 21st century warns us about the perils of self-deception after the fall of the Soviet Union led many to believe that there would not be any more conflicts in the world or serious threats to peace.
In his piercing prose Mr Brzezinski brings down the myth of a conflict free century marching under the Pax Americana paradigm. With his superb intellectual command of geopolitics, he unveils one by one the time activated grenades that would explode in the new century lest the West and particularly the U.S. take preventive action. He found the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations truly feeble in terms of vision and effective operational aptitudes and feared the consequences for peace and stability going forward. He, of course, was right.
Mr Moray Araujo, on his part, dissected the Latin American political ethos to conclude that statism was in the heart of all politicians. Accordingly, they would promote state intervention over individual initiative.
And as state intervention called the shots, the region would always be crippled by dualism. Dualism encircles in one country two societies: one poor and backwards and the other modern and continuously developing. The second would never absorb the first into a development wave because its economic blood is rent extraction.
In order to bring a society together, you need to create wealth. The United States is facing this harsh reality after the Clinton Administration opened the field to rent extraction by financial services by repealing the Glass-Steagall.
Both thinkers will be alive and well for the better part of this century as we read headlines that seem to demand the creation of a new balance of power and a focus on wealth creation.
MONTEREY COUNTY — A pair of local school districts are receiving some extra funding for their visual and performing arts programs starting next year.
The Monterey Peninsula Unified and the North Monterey County Unified school districts announced last week they had received a Student Support and Academic Enrichment competitive grant.
MPUSD is getting $859,147, while NMCUSD will receive $701,481. The districts were among 51 potential school districts and county offices of education statewide to get a total of $44 million.
Jaqui Hope, visual and performing arts coordinator at MPUSD said she was a little shocked that MPUSD received nearly $1 million because there were plenty of other worthy school districts or offices of education asking for funding, too.
“A lot times when you are hoping for a grant you know that there’s a good chance that they won’t give you the full amount that you requested and this was surprising in that they gave us the full amount,” Hope said.
The grant was provided by the California Department of Education to support activities in three areas, including well-rounded educational opportunities, safe and healthy students or effective use of technology.
This specific grant prioritized awards to applications that enhanced visual and performing arts education or implemented a comprehensive strategy to expand access to physical and mental health care.
North Monterey County Unified, in partnership with the Sunset Cultural Center and the Kennedy Performing Arts Center, is implementing a district-wide Arts Integration model to increase student engagement and promote academic achievement.
“We’re excited to have been awarded funding to expand and intensify our district wide arts integration program and that the amount award matched our request,” said Kari Yeater, superintendent at North Monterey County Unified School District.
Yeater said the district worked hard to write the grant application, which outlines a budget proposal for training over 250 teachers and administrators. The district will also provide demonstration lessons in the classroom that will both occur from January through September 2019.
At Monterey Peninsula Unified, the district will build on initial arts integration work at two of its Turnaround Arts schools – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: School of the Arts and Marina Vista Elementary Arts Academy – to develop a Multi-Tiered Support and Engagement through the Arts (MTSEA) initiative at nine schools.
According to MPUSD, the district intends to strengthen access and opportunities for a well-rounded education for all students by enhancing visual and performing arts education.
Priority was given to districts or county offices with the greatest need based on the number or percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced breakfast or lunch. Hope said the grant will cover plenty of arts education supplies from drums to paint.
“They’ll also be receiving instructions by teaching artist who will come into the classroom,” Hope said.
Hope said a focus on the grant is expanding the classroom teachers’ ability to incorporate the arts into whatever subject they teach. She said there’s a lot of teacher training that’ll be done by the professional teaching artist.
“Who are generally people that are professionals in their arena. Like, they might be directors or actors and they teach theater to these teachers,” Hope said.
Over the course of the grant, professional artist instructors will train and coach transitional kindergarten through eighth grade teachers in arts instruction and in integrating arts into core subjects, including language arts, math, science, and social studies.
The teachers will also receive 10 hours of intensive arts education integration and lesson planning from CSU Monterey Bay specialists and participate in 20 hours of arts curriculum planning workshops with artist instructors during a four-day Summer Institute.
Your favorite idea for improving home energy efficiency. Plus, the four other great ideas I will try at my home.
In February, with your help, I embarked upon an effort to see whether I could reduce my home energy use by 10 percent. Over the past two months, Slate readers offered more than 1,000 suggestions, comments, and nuggets of advice. Thank you for all the e-mails and debate in the comments thread. Readers and a panel of experts also chose and voted on the most useful ideas for living a more energy efficient life. After two rounds of voting, the most popular idea of the more than 500 submitted is the proposal by “jgrass” for an X-prize to create a low-cost solar shingle, followed by tax incentives for people to install it. Congratulations, jgrass! A close runner-up in the voting was the exhortation from “Icemilkcoffee” that Americans get rid of their lawns and replace them with plants that require less water and fertilizer. Not to sound too cheesy, but this has been a voyage of discovery for me. What I discovered, aside from my own ignorance, was a great deal about how energy is used in the home, about the opportunities for efficiency and conservation, and about the substantial barriers that remain. So, can someone like me reduce home energy use by 10 percent without spending a large amount of money or substantially altering my life? Yes, I can.
But here’s what else I learned. Going into this project, I assumed that technology would be the salvation. But I was wrong. Behavior matters much more. Programmable thermostats don’t program themselves. The low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency is in consciousness raising. Simply going through the audits and becoming more aware of how energy is used in the house pushed me to be more efficient—without making any investments. I’m making a point of not heating, cooling, or illuminating spaces that don’t need to be heated, cooled, or illuminated when nobody is in them, and generally turning switches off. That may sound obvious, but it’s not, even to pros. One of the building performance experts who visited my house confessed that in his house computers are left on 24/7, which is tantamount to burning money. Now that I understand how much energy my computer and its peripheral devices use even when the PC is turned off, I unplug it when I go out of town for a few days.
In my house, behavior matters more than software, but hardware matters more than both. That’s what I learned from the sobering blower test and the visit from the insulation guys. The construction of houses—the way homes and the stuff in them are designed, built, updated, and maintained—is a much larger liability than I expected. The gains you reap from installing a smart meter and turning down the heat can be more than offset by poor insulation. Policy matters, too. As I mentioned, Connecticut has a policy through which electricity customers kick in to a fund that subsidizes home energy assessments. I paid only $75 for the services of Val and Vitaly Siretsanou. But the work they did—installing compact fluorescents, putting weather strips on doors, generally tightening the thermal envelope of my house—could be worth thousands of dollars over time.
I’m committing to a series of actions and investments based on what I’ve learned. My criteria: to maintain the maximum household comfort and productivity while investing a relatively small sum of money. Given that, some of the most popular proposals from Slate readers don’t make much sense for me. Line-drying, which got a lot of votes, doesn’t really work in the winters in Connecticut, and I don’t think the loss of productivity would compensate for the saved energy. Nor am I going to follow another popular idea and move into a city to save energy: The financial and emotional costs associated with such a move would surely outweigh the energy savings.
But I will take four of the most popular ideas very seriously. I’m definitely going to add and/or replace insulation, a no-brainer considering the generous rebates and tax credits associated with it. I’ll commit to looking into a waste-water heat exchanger, a water heater timer, and a whole-house fan for cooling. And I’ll also continue to experiment with many of the practices and products readers have suggested, such as the TrickleStar strips that power down PCs and television. As the grid gets smarter and as the energy-efficiency industry grows and gains scale, there will be many more apps, software programs, and devices that aim to boost home energy efficiency.
Thanks for your patience and help. Simply going through this exercise has already yielded significant gains. In March-April 2010, my daily electricity consumption is down 8.8 percent from the comparable period a year ago. It’s more difficult to draw conclusions on heating oil, but it appears I’m on track to use less heating oil this season than last. I’ve cut my energy use so far with help from readers and professionals—and without making big investments. My out-of-pocket costs have been only about $400. As I move into the next phase of making some more substantial investments in efficiency, I’m increasing my goal: I will try to reduce my home energy use by 15 percent from its 2009 level, with a stretch goal of 20 percent. Watch this space for updates.
Photo provided my Oregon Lottery.
SALEM, OR (KPTV) – A Linn County man and his wife won $150,000 after accidentally upgrading his Powerball purchase at a convenience store in Medford.
Michael Faught and his wife, who live in Lebanon, were on a road trip with their travel trailer when they stopped to pick up Powerball tickets at a Food for Less, the Oregon Lottery says.
Faught ended up matching four numbers and the Powerball for the March 23 drawing.
The Oregon Lottery says since he purchased the Power Play multiplier option, and the multiplier drawn for that drawing was three, Faught tripled his prize money.
Faught says he and his wife are talking with a financial advisor. They plan to put new wood floors in their home and Faught says he might do some minor upgrades to his motorcycle.
The family had already planned a trip to Disneyland, and Faught said they used some of the prize to “enhance” the trip.
Foundations Keep Detroit Art Off The Auction Block In Detroit, a group of local and national foundations has pledged more than $330 million to keep the city from auctioning off assets from the Detroit Institute of Art. The purpose of the deal is twofold: to preserve the collection and to raise money for the city's underfunded pension plans.
In Detroit, a group of local and national foundations has pledged more than $330 million to keep the city from auctioning off assets from the Detroit Institute of Art. The purpose of the deal is twofold: to preserve the collection and to raise money for the city's underfunded pension plans.
A federal bankruptcy judge in Detroit has mediated a deal that could potentially solve two of the city's biggest problems. The plan would raise money for retirees' pension funds and keep masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Art from being auctioned off. NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: As part of bankruptcy, all assets are on the table. And the Detroit Institute of Art holds what many consider to be the city's most valuable assets, paintings by Rembrandt, Monet, Van Gogh and Matisse, among others. Christie's valued select works in the museum between about 400 and $800 million. City officials suggested those paintings be sold to pay off creditors. That led to an outcry throughout the city and the arts world in general.
Judge Gerald Rosen has been mediating the complicated and sometimes tense bankruptcy proceedings. He came up with a plan that he presented to a number of private donors and foundations, including the Knight Foundation, where Alberto Ibarguen is president.
ALBERTO IBARGUEN: The suggestion was, well, what if we had an additional pool of money that could buy the art, put it in trust, so that it stays as a cultural asset of Detroit and the state of Michigan?
BLAIR: And money from that trust would also be used for retirees' underfunded pensions. How? There are still a lot of details to work out but today, nine local and national foundations agreed to the concept and pledged more than $330 million. They include Ford, Kresge and Knight. Foundations don't usually come together like this to help solve municipal problems, not to mention buy art for a museum. John Gallagher, a business reporter for the Detroit Free Press, says today's announcement is good news for the city but it doesn't settle the bankruptcy case.
JOHN GALLAGHER: The bankruptcy case is still alive. Creditors are still trying to get every penny they can. It helps. I mean, suddenly we have an extra $330 million in the pot that wasn't there yesterday.
BLAIR: The Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan set up a fund to support these twin goals. It's called the Fund to Support Detroit's Retirees, Cultural Heritage, and Revitalization. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
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GROVELAND, Calif. - At Ike Bunney's dude ranch near the Sierra community of Tuolumne City, all creatures have been evacuated as firefighters brace for an intense battle to keep a wildfire raging north of Yosemite National Park out of mountain communities.
"We've already evacuated the horses," said Bunney, who was keeping an eye on his Slide Mountain Guest Ranch on Sunday. "I think they're worried about the fire sparking over these hills."
As fire leapfrogs across the vast, picturesque Sierra forests, moving from one treetop to the next, residents in the fire's path are moving animals and children to safety.
The fire has moved northeast away from Groveland, where smoke gave away to blue skies Sunday. But at Tuolumne City's Black Oak Casino in Tuolumne City, the slot machines were quiet as emergency workers took over nearly all of the resort's 148 hotel rooms.
"The casino is empty," said casino employee Jessie Dean, who left her four children at relatives' homes in the Central Valley. "Technically, the casino is open, but there's nobody there."
Hundreds of firefighters were deployed Sunday to protect Tuolumne City and other communities in the path of the Rim Fire. Eight fire trucks and four bulldozers were deployed near Bunney's ranch on the west side of Mount Baldy, where two years of drought have created tinder-dry conditions.
"Winds are increasing, so it's going to be very challenging," said Bjorn Frederickson, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service.
"It's slowing down a bit, but it's still growing," Frederickson said.
Fire lines near Ponderosa Hills and Twain Hart are being cut miles ahead of the blaze in locations where fire officials hope they will help protect the communities should the fire jump containment lines.
"There is a huge focus in those areas in terms of air support and crews on the ground building fire lines to protect those communities. We're facing difficult conditions and extremely challenging weather," Frederickson said.

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