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__label__wiki	0.514237	0.514237	Home Sports Football Multiple Golden Eagles selected in NFL Draft Multiple Golden Eagles selected in NFL Draft For the first time since 2004, three Golden Eagles were picked in the NFL Draft, which is the most by any of the Conference USA schools. Defensive back Tarvarius Moore led the Golden Eagles draft class after being picked in the third round (No. 95 overall) by the San Francisco 49ers. The pick used to select Moore was acquired last Friday in the trade that sent offensive tack Trent Brown to the New England Patriots. Although Moore was not projected to be drafted in most mock drafts, it is safe to say he left an impression at his Pro Day workout where he posted a 4.32 40-yard dash and had a vertical jump of 39 1/2 inches. Moore played safety but will most likely move to cornerback based on the 49ers defensive scheme. Moore will be able to sit behind Richard Sherman and is projected to work his way into seeing playing time as a rookie. Running back Ito Smith followed in the fourth round (No. 126 overall) and is the first Southern Miss running back to be drafted since 1998. Smith is the all-time leader in all-purpose yards at 6,462 and is the 10th player in FBS history to have 4,000 yards rushing and 1,000 yards receiving. Smith will most likely serve as a return specialist and play a role in being a thirdstring running back when needed. It is worth noting that second-string Tevin Coleman is in his final contract year and has also had several injuries in his early career. Smith is also a viable option for a running back that can be involved in the passing game. Surprisingly, defensive back Cornell Armstrong was drafted by the Miami Dolphins in the sixth round (No. 209 overall). Armstrong was the second defensive back selected by the Dolphins with their first pick being Alabama defensive back Minkah Fitzpatrick. Armstrong will probably start out with special teams due to his speed, but he could see playing time in the future based on how unsteady the Dolphins defense will be. Wide receiver Korey Robertson’s expectations fell short after being projected to go in as high as the third round in multiple mock drafts and being invited to the NFL combine. Robertson signed as an undrafted free agent to the Minnesota Vikings despite not being drafted. Robertson will join former Golden Eagles Dylan Bradley and Rashod Hill. Other Golden Eagles will also get the opportunity to extend their careers. Tight end Julian Allen, offensive lineman Devin Farrior, defensive lineman Draper Riley and defensive Curtis Mikell have been invited to try out at rookie minicamps. Previous articleNo.11 Southern Miss wins nine games in a row Next articleFlint, Michigan, still doesn’t have clean water	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2194
__label__cc	0.704375	0.295625	India, whose rulers claim it to be the ‘largest democracy’ has celebrated its ‘festival’ of elections for almost two months long. Now the new incumbent, Modi led BJP government has once again occupied the office to rule the country for five more years. During its previous tenure, the Modi-government had promised to double the income of the peasants by 2022, announced increase in the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for procuring the produce from them and talked of having protected them by way of a crop insurance (Fasal Bima) in case of any crop loss because of natural calamities etc. Obviously, one would like to review how far the announced measures had benefitted the peasant community, pauperized and marginalized with every passing hour, and then proceed to see what this second term of the BJP government is going to offer the millions of suffering peasants of our country. Was this government serious about addressing the question of farmers’ distress that caught national attention just before the elections? In fact, the crisis in agricultural sector has become so acute that in the recent past, entire country had witnessed surge of quite a number of militant peasant agitations. So initially, all the parliamentary parties of different hues who are engaged in vote-based politics had posed themselves as champions of farmers’ cause till the announcement of election schedule. But once drum-beatings of election campaign started, all burning problems of the people including the issue of farmers’ distress were relegated to the back. All non-issues had become the issues of election. A conspiracy had been hatched to focus mainly on personal mudslinging and muscle flexing against each other, instigating divisive feelings, competing in enchasing religious sentiments, stroking national jingoism with warnings of war-like attacks at borders etc. Thanks to the pliant media and bourgeoisie propaganda machinery that the attention of the people were craftily diverted from the real issues and made to veer around the spruced up topics. But the hard realities of life cannot be hushed up for long. People cannot but come forward to ventilate their suppressed grievances again and again. The distressed farmers are no exception to it. They will have to hit streets again with much more strength and stamina. So what is needed is a clear conception about farmers’ distress, its root cause and ever-lasting solution. Spectacle of doom and disaster It is a fact that over the years, the crisis in farm sector has intensified and hit hard by the onset of capitalist globalization. Farmers’ suicides have become order of the day. All the successive governments irrespective of hues did nothing to rescue the hapless farmers who were forced to end their life finding no way to come out of the debt trap or appalling poverty. In the two decades between 1995 and 2015, as many as 3,10,000 farmers had committed suicides. During the period between 2001 to 2011, farmers suicides had increased at an alarming rate. On an average, one farmer committed suicide every 30 minutes. Reasons for untold misery of farmers are several. The costs of all agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilizers and pesticides have been spiralling day by day because, consequent to implementation of the prescripts of globalization, the governments have cut down the input subsidies drastically and the production as well as distribution of such inputs were handed over to the giant MNCs and other private operators on a silver platter while government-owned production houses like the Hindustan Fertilizer were made sick by design and closed down. In fact, the private companies, owned by both domestic and foreign monopoly capitals, have established their monopoly over the market of agricultural inputs. According to an estimate, prices of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides have increased by 800%, 300% and500% respectively. Even some of the MNCs have virtually been allowed to corner production and distribution of particular inputs. Added to all these miseries, the supply of spurious seeds, fertilizers and pesticides is rampant. The governments never bothered about farmers in arranging proper supply of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides at reduced rates. Another foremost problem of the small and marginal farmers is about indebtedness. As the institutional credit advanced by national banks has become the privilege of a few influential rich peasants, small and marginal farmers are falling into the clutches of private money lenders whose interest rate is exorbitantly high enough. Money lending by the micro finance institutions is creating havoc in life of rural populace with its illegal terms and conditions in case of non-payment of loans. So for the ordinary farmers, even the payment of interest itself is something impossible let alone the clearing of principal loan. Mounting debts are also driving marginalized and landless peasants into agricultural labourers. Moreover, the governments had lifted all the quantitative restrictions over the imports including agricultural products. So, Indian market is flooded with foreign products. This has led to drastic squeeze of the market for the domestic farmer’s produce. Unable to get remunerative price for many of agricultural products because the procurement machinery is controlled by an unholy nexus of dishonest administration-village touts-middlemen-ruling party leaders-planted agents of the MNC sharks with the government remaining as an indulgent onlooker, farmers are finding it hard to continue eking out a livelihood from farming any more. Even the local unscrupulous traders and the influential rural rich who lend money to small and marginal farmers to meet input costs and other farming expenses at the time of sowing or harvesting, often force the peasants to sell the crops to them at a price much below the market price. This deception or deprivation by the various groups of vested interest is a common phenomenon in rural economy. While the procurement price of agricultural products is drastically reduced at the time of harvesting, the retail price of the same produce shoots up several times in the local markets because of a slew of market manipulations by the agents of establishment and moneyed class. It is also a common feature that sometimes farmers just throw away the produce to waste since they even do not get transport or other miscellaneous expenses when they sell. So it is clear that apart from irregular rain fall, drought and other natural calamities which are causing crop failures, problems like rising input cost, indebtedness and lack of remunerative price are pushing farmers to give up farming itself. A survey conducted by the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) noted that 76% of the 5000 farm households across 18 states preferred to take up some other work than framing. This is in nutshell the root of crisis in agricultural sector in the capitalist economy of India. Plethora of promises, pompous claims When the entire farming population is faced with such an unprecedented disaster, any government worth the name should address the farmers’ distress in a holistic manner with a comprehensive plan of resolving the deep rooted crisis. Instead, all the anti-people governments be it Congress-led UPA or BJP-led NDA adopted some populist schemes and left the farmers at the mercy of the corrupt market forces. The BJP’s Manifesto of 2019 elections under title of so-called Sankalp Patra, dished out pompous claims such as doubling the income of farmers, 25 lakh crore investment in Agri-rural sector, interest-free Kisan Credit loans and so on and so forth. Not only now, even during the last 2014 elections, Mr. Narendra Modi led BJP made plethora of promises to address the agricultural crisis in the country. After riding over to power in 2014, Modi government launched with much fanfare the Prime Minister Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as an ambitious scheme to help farmers cope with erratic monsoons or weather uncertainties. In a country where over half of the un-irrigated crop area is dependent on the vagaries of the four-month-long south-west monsoon, PMFBY promised increased cover for a variety of risks at a premium of just 2% (of sum assured) for kharif and 1.5% for winter or rabi crops. It was declared that the centre and states would equally share the cost of actuarial premium payable to the insurance companies. This scheme is being described as the flagship programme of government. But its implementation has been marked by many flaws at all stages. Right from enrolment of farmers under the scheme, collection of premiums, assessment of crop loss and finally to settlement of claims, farmers are facing many hurdles. Initially, when this scheme came into operation in 2016-17, there was a spurt in number of enrolment because of the fact that availing of bank loans was linked with the payment of premiums under this particular scheme. For farmers availing crop loans from the scheduled banks, the premium amount was deducted at source from the loan amount without even issuing a receipt for such deductions. But later on, this scheme failed to attract farmers anymore and enrolment fell drastically. The reality is that in the event of any crop damage, farmers are at a loss as to whom to reach out to since most of the insurance companies have not set up field offices to attend to customer complaints. There are many instances where assessment of crop losses is made, but payments are either delayed by months or not disbursed at all because the lending banks do not process data or states do not release their share of subsidy in time. This is catastrophic for the farmers who have suffered losses and desperately needed the money to start preparation for cultivation for the next season immediately. Any delay forces them into the clutching arms of money-lenders, who charge exorbitant rates. This has precisely been the reason behind the dire need for speedy compensation after crop losses. Yet, three years of implementing experience shows that this problem has not been resolved. Because of all these factors, there is a steep decline in the number of farmers opting to join this scheme. Data from the agriculture ministry itself shows that enrolment (during the rain-fed kharif season) rose from 30.9 million farmers in 2015 to 40.3 million in 2016, an impressive 30% jump. But delayed assessment of crop loss and settlement of claims which took six to nine months led to farmers losing interest in the scheme. So, enrolment fell to 34.8 million in 2017 and further plunged to 33.3 million during kharif cultivation in 2018. According to the study made by the Delhi-based Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in February 2018, “the litmus test of any crop insurance programme is quick assessment of crop damages and payment of claims into farmers’ accounts directly, and from that point of view, the first year of implementation of PMFBY (2016-17) has not been very successful.” Distress became source of minting profits What Modi government did was to turn this scheme into a profit making enterprise for the insurance companies. As per media reports, there are 18 insurance companies that are involved in this crop insurance scheme. Of these, five are government owned and all the rest are private. According to the provisions of the PMFBY scheme, whoever would bid the lowest, would get the contract. So it is not mandatory to choose a government company if a private company makes a lower bid. So the private companies in connivance with the government administration secure major chunk of premium collections. It is known to all that farmers pay a part of amount to the insurance companies as premium. The rest is paid equally by the Central government and the various state governments. The total premium thus collected goes into the coffers of the insurance companies. In case a farmer suffers crop loss due to natural calamities, the company settles the claim from the gross premium that it had collected. It came out from the data collected by some RTI activists that for kharif 2016, rabi 2016-17 and kharif 2017, the total premium collected by all 18 insurance companies was a staggering Rs 42,114 crore. This amount includes both contribution of farmers (amounting to Rs. 7,255 crore or just over 17%) and government’s share (Rs. 34,859 crore or nearly 83%). The governments’ share is made up of equal contributions by the Central and state governments. Of this total amount, how much the insurance companies paid by way of compensation in all seasons? One would be astonished to know that the insurance companies paid out only Rs.32,912 crore as compensation. That means they were left with about Rs.8,713 crore as surplus. These companies have pocketed nearly 21% of the total amount. (Reply of the government in a starred question in parliament referred to in Newsclick 27-12-18) Another media report says that “despite the fall in the number of farmers insured and coverage area, the total premium collected by insurance companies has not fallen. It has actually increased. In 2016-17, the total premium collected was Rs 22,362 crore. This went up to Rs 25,046 crore in 2017-18.In the two years that PMFBY has been in place, total claims paid to farmers have increased only marginally, despite the total premium having increased by more than 4.5 times.For the two years after PMFBY, the data provided by the ministry shows that total claims paid have only increased by 10% to Rs 31,613 crore as of October 10, 2018. Thus, the surplus for insurance companies till that date is Rs 15,795 crore, almost a third of the premiums collected. (The Wire-12-1-18) It is the same money that suffering farmers had paid out as premium or the government’s money which is in fact collected from the people by way of over taxation. Big corporates like Reliance, Essar have amassed huge sums in states like Maharashtra where the farmers’ distress is in centre of focus. In Maharashtra, around 2.80 lakh farmers sowed soya in their farms. In a district, the farmers paid a premium of Rs 19.2 crore, the state government and the central governments paid Rs 77 crore each, amounting to a total of Rs 173 crore, which was paid to Reliance insurance. The entire crop failed and the insurance company paid out the claims. Reliance paid Rs 30 crore in that district, giving it a total net profit of Rs 143 crore without investing a single rupee. So making profits running into hundreds of crores of rupees out of farmers’ distress is the hall mark of the PMFBY scheme. Modi led BJP government had facilitated this loot as a faithful and subservient political manager of big corporates. In fact, reaching out riches to the corporates through the conduit of the insurance companies owned by them has been a very convenient policy for the bourgeois governments. Through boastful announcement of insurance covers either in agriculture or health or any other sector, the government seeks to impress as if necessary security has been guaranteed to the marginalized section of the toiling masses. But, then in absence of proper infrastructure as well as preponderance of a surfeit of loopholes, flawed operative machinery, rampant corruption, nepotism make such announcements a mockery. Fasal Bima is a glaring testimony of that. If one takes to go deep into the terms of the insurance, it would be evident that exclusions and non-claimable items are perhaps more than what are admissible as claims. Moreover, the entire mechanism acts in such a away that most of the benefits reach out only to a handful of rich peasants and their lackeys while the large number of real needy are conveniently left out. Farmers’ struggle needs to be oriented on working class approach The above facts make it clear once again that every policy or a programme adopted by all successive governments intended not to protect the interests of common toiling masses but to fetch fabulous profits to their masters i.e. the ruling capitalists. The PMFBY is a classic example of the same. Really, the first term of Modi government did wonderful job of serving them in a most faithful manner and creating social and economic inequalities in an unimaginable dimensions. It is known to all that 73% of country’s wealth has been concentrated in the hands of those 1% super rich. If this is the meaning of ‘development’ or ‘prosperity’ of the country, what can be expected more in the coming five years? So the suffering farming community must be mobilized through out the length and breadth of country on correct working class approach to force the reluctant governments to adopt a pro-peasant policy of resolving farm sector crisis by reducing prices of agricultural inputs, providing irrigation and institutional credit facilities, ensuring remunerative prices, curbing corrupt middlemen in the crop procurement market etc. Along with it there is a need to frame comprehensive and robust government run compensation scheme that has quick and simple method of assessing crop damage and free from corruption and hassles in claim settlement instead of allowing corporate companies which are out to suck the farmers blood and plunder public exchequer. Previous Previous post: Notwithstanding vandalism of his statue, Vidyasagar remains the unblemished name of an unforgettable character with an amazing personality in Indian history Next Next post: SUDAN IS IMPLODING AGAIN Achievements in two years : BJP rhetoric on development closely interspersed with RSS hate campaign for fratricidal bloodbath From behind the façade of democracy : Footfalls of fascization to the rescue of capitalists, being echoed in acts and voices of RSS-BJP Proletarian Era : 50 years of committed purposive journey Dialectical Materialism is the only philosophy of struggle against all sorts of injustice and privilege calling for sacrifice and self-dedication as it alone is capable of stemming the rot and raising the moral standard of the people. ~SHIBDAS GHOSHSource: Scientific Approach to Our Educational-Cultural Problems, p.10	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2196
__label__wiki	0.804118	0.804118	Goldcorp announces $90 million investment for winze construction at Musselwhite Mine New winze will improve ore handling Goldcorp Inc. has approved a $90 million capital project to improve ore handling at its Musselwhite Mine in northwestern Ontario. The project will see the construction of a raisebored winze, which will dramatically reduce truck haulage to the mine’s underground crusher. Currently, mining is at a depth of 1,000 metres under Lake Opapimiskan and 17 haul trucks are used to transport ore a distance of 7.5 kilometres to the crusher at the 400-metre level. The current system is taxing the ventilation system and forced the mine to plan for a more economical and practical material handling solution. The project will enable hoisting of ore through the winze and associated infrastructure, reducing reliance on high-cost truck haulage. The new material handling solution will improve energy efficiency, reduce ventilation requirements, lower costs and extend the life of the mine. The winz is scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2019 and is expected to generate incremental production of 20 per cent, as well as cost savings of approximately 10 per cent for the life of the operation. In other news, Goldcorp announced second quarter gold production of 613,400 ounces at all-in sustaining costs (AISC) of $1,067 and a net loss of $78 million, compared with net earnings of $392 million for the same period last year. For the six months ending June 30th, the company reported gold production of 1,397,100 ounces, net earnings of $2 million and AISC of $936 per ounce. Goldcorp has three operations in Northern Ontario – Red Lake, Musselwhite and Porcupine. It also owns the Borden development project 200 kilometres east of its Timmins’ Porcupine operation. Second quarter gold production at Red Lake totaled 73,000 ounces at an AISC of $958 per ounce. The Porcupine operating unit also reported second quarter gold production of 73,000 ounces, but at a lower AISC of $844 per ounce, while Musselwhite produced 59,000 ounces at an AISC of $721 per ounce. At its Porcupine unit in Timmins, Goldcorp completed its Hoyle Deep project, allowing for more efficient movement of personnel and equipment to the lower levels of the mine and reducing travel time by two hours per shift. During the quarter, a decision was also made to continue underground operations at Dome Mine. Originally, Goldcorp planned to cease underground mining at Dome by mid-year, but higher gold prices and operating cost savings persuaded management to look at options for extending the life of the mine. In Red Lake, Goldcorp plans to complete “a concept study” on the HG Young deposit, a high-grade discovery near its existing operations. A pre-feasibility study is expected to commence in the first half of 2017 with a decline from surface to allow for further drilling and the extraction of a bulk sample. At its Cochenour development project, drilling, sampling and test mining is expected to the completed by the end of this year. The company announced several cost saving measures in its second quarter report, including the adoption of a new decentralized organization that will give individual operations greater “accountability for growing the net asset value of their individual businesses.” One-third of the company’s employees at corporate and regional offices have been terminated for annual administrative savings of $55 million. The restructuring has also resulted in new management at its Northern Ontario operations with Bill Gascon taking over the reins in Red Lake, Marc Lauzier, returning as mine general manager at Porcupine and Peter Gula, assuming responsibility at Musselwhite. Goldcorp has also announced plans to complete a pre-feasibility study on its Borden project by the first quarter of 2017 and to begin construction of a ramp to extract a 30,000-tonne bulk sample early next year Tagged Bill Gascon, gold mining, Goldcorp Inc., Marc Lauzier, Musselwhite Mine, Peter Gula, Porcupine Gula, Red Lake Acoustic Zoom applies novel imaging technology Taking teleremote to a new level Exploration research bonanza Commerce students invited to go for gold Telstar takes pride in hydraulics expertise In the 1967 movie, The Graduate, a young college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman runs into an older gentleman at...	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2197
__label__wiki	0.718988	0.718988	A great way of understanding this shot is by observing different professional tennis players who are good at different things. I find that you can learn tennis pretty fast by visualization. For example, Novak Djokovic, currently ranked as the number one tennis player in the world is famous for his flat forehand and backhand. Caroline Wozniacki, currently ranked as the best female tennis player is admired worldwide for her two-handed backhand. Observe such players and practice as much as you can so that you can play tennis to the best of your abilities! So to answer the question – there are many balls because motor learning (learning how to hit and move) takes many repetitions and the coach is ready for that. He also knows that you will probably miss many times before you get the right feel. It's not a life or death question, it's just learning to move in a new way. Are you ready to start with tennis for beginners and do you have realistic expectations? Any court surface may be used indoors. Hard courts[8] are most common indoors, as they are made with the most versatile materials and surface finishes. Clay courts are installed indoors with underground watering systems, and used mostly for Davis Cup matches. The conclusion of the Wimbledon Championships, in 2012, was played on the lawn of Centre Court under the closed roof and artificial lights. The Halle Open has also seen a number of matches played on its grass court in the Gerry Weber Stadion with the roof closed. Carpet surfaces have been used both on the ATP World Tour and World Championship Tennis circuit, though no events currently use them. Historically, other surfaces have been used indoors such as hardwood at the defunct World Covered Court Championships and London Indoor Professional Championships. Currently, the ATP World Tour Finals event is the most important indoor tennis tournament. From a poor defensive position on the baseline, the lob can be used as either an offensive or defensive weapon, hitting the ball high and deep into the opponent's court to either enable the lobber to get into better defensive position or to win the point outright by hitting it over the opponent's head. If the lob is not hit deeply enough into the other court, however, an opponent near the net may then hit an overhead smash, a hard, serve-like shot, to try to end the point. A break point occurs if the receiver, not the server, has a chance to win the game with the next point. Break points are of particular importance because serving is generally considered advantageous, with servers being expected to win games in which they are serving. A receiver who has one (score of 30–40 or advantage), two (score of 15–40) or three (score of love-40) consecutive chances to win the game has break point, double break point or triple break point, respectively. If the receiver does, in fact, win their break point, the game is awarded to the receiver, and the receiver is said to have converted their break point. If the receiver fails to win their break point it is called a failure to convert. Winning break points, and thus the game, is also referred to as breaking serve, as the receiver has disrupted, or broken the natural advantage of the server. If in the following game the previous server also wins a break point it is referred to as breaking back. Except where tie-breaks apply, at least one break of serve is required to win a set. We also slide the non-dominant hand from the throat down to the handle while we’re changing the grip. This somewhat complex move has to be practiced for a while so that it becomes quick and eventually completely subconscious. From there, we again let the racquet drop and fall behind us. Then we pull it through the familiar contact point and follow-through stages that we already mastered. The players (or teams) start on opposite sides of the net. One player is designated the server, and the opposing player is the receiver. The choice to be server or receiver in the first game and the choice of ends is decided by a coin toss before the warm-up starts. Service alternates game by game between the two players (or teams). For each point, the server starts behind the baseline, between the center mark and the sideline. The receiver may start anywhere on their side of the net. When the receiver is ready, the server will serve, although the receiver must play to the pace of the server. The set is won by the first player (or team) to have won at least six games and at least two games more than his or her opponent. Traditionally, sets would be played until both these criteria had been met, with no maximum number of games. To shorten matches, James Van Alen created a tie-breaker system, which was widely introduced in the early 1970s. If the score reaches 6–5 (or 5–6), one further game is played. If the leading player wins this game, the set is won 7–5 (or 5–7). If the trailing player wins the game, the score is tied at 6–6 and a special tiebreaker game is played. The winner of the tiebreak wins the set by a score of 7–6 (or 6–7). When both sides have won the same number of points then: when each side has won one, or two, points, the score is described as "15-all" and "30-all" (or "15-up" and "30-up"), respectively. However, if each player has won three points, the score is called as "deuce", not "40–all". From that point on in the game, whenever the score is tied, it is described as "deuce", regardless of how many points have been played. ^ Lorde (2013). Lyrical Influences (VEVO LIFT): Brought to You By McDonald's (video). VEVO/YouTube. Event occurs at 2:25. Retrieved 22 November 2013. When I wrote "Tennis Court", I was looking at a lot of photography by this guy called Gregory Crewdson who, um, makes these huge, super intricate, really beautiful photographs. They kind of just, like, depict human life, and there is this an emptiness to them and there is a suburbia to them which I find really compelling. And so I was definitely thinking of that visually. In most professional play and some amateur competition, there is an officiating head judge or chair umpire (usually referred to as the umpire), who sits in a raised chair to one side of the court. The umpire has absolute authority to make factual determinations. The umpire may be assisted by line judges, who determine whether the ball has landed within the required part of the court and who also call foot faults. There also may be a net judge who determines whether the ball has touched the net during service. The umpire has the right to overrule a line judge or a net judge if the umpire is sure that a clear mistake has been made.[59] Position yourself in a baseline corner. The game starts with both players on the baseline. The server chooses a corner of the baseline to serve from, and the other player positions themselves on the opposite back corner. So if you serve from the right corner of your side of the court, your opponent will stand in the far left corner from your point of view.[12] Historians believe that the game's ancient origin lay in 12th century northern France, where a ball was struck with the palm of the hand.[2] Louis X of France was a keen player of jeu de paume ("game of the palm"), which evolved into real tennis, and became notable as the first person to construct indoor tennis courts in the modern style. Louis was unhappy with playing tennis outdoors and accordingly had indoor, enclosed courts made in Paris "around the end of the 13th century".[3] In due course this design spread across royal palaces all over Europe.[3] In June 1316 at Vincennes, Val-de-Marne and following a particularly exhausting game, Louis drank a large quantity of cooled wine and subsequently died of either pneumonia or pleurisy, although there was also suspicion of poisoning.[4] Because of the contemporary accounts of his death, Louis X is history's first tennis player known by name.[4] Another of the early enthusiasts of the game was King Charles V of France, who had a court set up at the Louvre Palace.[5] Contact us at webmaster@www.superbabyproject.com \| Sitemap xml \| Sitemap txt \| Sitemap	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2199
__label__wiki	0.878053	0.878053	Philosophy and our goals National Energy Emissions Audit Climate & Energy Program Accountability Project Funding sport fairly: an income-contingent loans scheme for elite sports training The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) spent $97 million of taxpayer’s money from 2001-2002 on scholarships for athletes. With each scholarship averaging $23,000 per year, per student, there should be a HECS style sporting scheme. This would entail athletes earning more than $100,000 per annum having to repay the AIS. Download Publication: WP43_8.pdf Richard Denniss >> Share this Page The Australia Institute is the country’s most influential progressive think tank. We conduct research on a broad range of economic, social and environmental issues in order to inform public debate and bring greater accountability to the democratic process. Centre for Future Work The Australia Institute Tasmania No New Coal Mines Go Home On Time Day Nordic Policy Centre The Australia Institute acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as First Australians and recognise their culture, history, diversity and their deep connection to the land. The team at The Australia Institute acknowledges that the Australian Capital Territory is Ngunnawal Country and pay our respects to Elders past and present. Copyright The Australia Institute \|	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2200
__label__wiki	0.875348	0.875348	Zeid refers to Lanka probe in UN report 23rd October 2014 Karu LATEST UPDATES, SRI LANKA NEWS, Uncategorized, WORLD NEWS 0 UN High Commissioners for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has made a reference to Sri Lanka in his report submitted to the UN General Assembly’s main body dealing with social, humanitarian, and cultural issues (Third Committee). The High Commissioner presented a report and made a statement yesterday on the work of his Office (OHCHR) between August 2013 and July 2014, under his predecessor, Navi Pillay. He said that during the reporting period OHCHR was assisting or conducting three Commissions of Inquiry or mandated investigations – on the Syrian Arab Republic, Central African Republic and Sri Lanka – with three more soon to become operational, on Eritrea, the occupied Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem, and Iraq. “When I took up my mandate as High Commissioner for Human Rights last month, I was startled to discover that all the extensive work of this Office is achieved despite funding shortfalls that burden the Office with significant capacity deficits,” said the High-Commissioner. One of the UN pillars, human rights only receives only a fraction of the Organization’s resources. For the 2014-2015 biennium, $173.5 million was allocated to OHCHR – 87% less than the allocation to the peace and security pillar, and 84 per cent less than the allocation to development. “This is not sustainable,” Mr. Zeid said. “When human rights go wrong – when violations and abuses generate explosive crises and conflicts – the cost in bloodshed, in wrecked economies and humanitarian aid is titanic,” he added, urging the world to enable his Office not only with the capacity to detect and alert to violations, but to ensure that the “alarm bells” are followed by swift action. (Colombo Gazette) Sri Lanka president prepares budget with eye on election Delisting Tigers: UK still studying EU court ruling	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2206
__label__wiki	0.822027	0.822027	Boxing Great Emile Griffith passes away at 75 Ultimate Sports Talk July 25, 2013 Comments Off on Boxing Great Emile Griffith passes away at 75 Former boxing great Emile Griffith passed away in his sleep on July 23 at the age of 75. Sadly, Griffith was known for beating Bennie Paret back in 1962 and his opponent died from injuries suffered during the fight. However, he also made history as the first pro boxer born in the U.S. Virgin Islands to win a world championship. Griffith was suffering himself later in life with pugilistic dementia and he needed fulltime care. He was deservedly inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. Griffith headlined at Madison Square Garden in New York a remarkable 23 times and often showed up later in life around the city to take in boxing matches. The fatal bout with Paret took place at Madison Square Garden in March of 1962 and was broadcast live across America on television. Griffith knocked Paret out in the 12th round and regained his welterweight title with the win. However, Paret fell into a coma and died 10 days later from his injuries. This weighed heavily on Griffith’s mind and he retired from boxing for a period. In addition, Griffith was also known for his sexual orientation as he admitted he was bisexual. This wasn’t a good mix back in the 1960s and many people blamed him for Paret’s death. The NBC network was shocked at the result of Paret’s injuries and pulled the plug for awhile on live boxing events. Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York at the time, even went as far as to launch a commission to look into the bout as well as the sport of boxing. While Griffith eventually returned to the ring, Ruby Goldstein, who was in charge of the bout against Paret, never entered the ring again. The bout became the subject of a documentary movie in 2005 called “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story. When he returned to the ring following the Paret bout, Griffith admitted that he was never the same and just fought hard enough to win. He said he would have retired for good as he never wanted to hurt anybody in boxing, but he didn’t have any other skills. However, as the years went by the public realized Paret’s death wasn’t Griffith’s fault and he became one of the most beloved and respected boxers in history. He was known for his slick skills and hand speed and learned his craft from trainer Gil Clancy, also a hall of famer. The young boxer won the Golden Gloves title in New York and then turned pro in 1958. He received his first shot at a world title against Paret in the welterweight division in 1961. Griffith stopped the champion in the 13th round in New York, but lost the title back to him in a rematch just five months later. He regained the title in the tragic bout with Paret and then moved up in weight to the middleweight division. Griffith beat middleweight champion Dick Tiger by a close unanimous decision in 1966 and would go on to lose a pair of fights to both Nino Benvenuti and middleweight champion Carlos Monzon. When he retired at the age of 39 in 1977 after three straight losses, Griffith had a career record of 85-24-2 along with 23 Kos. Sixteen of his losses came after he reached the age of 30. In total, he won five world championships He went on to become a boxing trainer and worked with several world champions such as Juan Laporte and Wilfredo Benitez of Puerto Rico. POSTED IN » BOXING, COMBAT About the author: Ultimate Sports Talk View all posts by Ultimate Sports Talk Ultimate Sports Talk was founded by Greg Mitchell, a former college athlete and college football coach. He founded Ultimate Sports Talk in April 2011. In 2012, he founded the Ultimate Sports Talk Radio Network. THE WWE HALL OF FAME CLASS OF 2014 THE THIRD INDUCTEE INTO THE WWE HALL OF FAME CLASS OF 2014 IS… THE SECOND INDUCTEE INTO THE WWE HALL OF FAME CLASS OF 2014 IS… Hashtag Sports – 15 Finalists for the 2014 NFL Hall of Fame – 1-15-14	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2207
__label__cc	0.635779	0.364221	GIVEAWAY & GUEST POST: The Summer of Broken Things by Margaret Peterson Haddix! A quick note: joining us today is Margaret Peterson Haddix, one of the few (there were a grand total of 2) authors my non-reading sister has ever enthusiastically read and pushed on me. In addition to this guest post and giveaway, Margaret will be hosting a Twitter Takeover on @YoungEntMag on April 23rd, from 7-9pm ET. Margaret will be discussing some of her “firsts” and answering reader questions about her books, so make sure to stop by and check it out! Welcome to Day #2 of The Summer of Broken Things Blog Tour! To celebrate the release of The Summer of Broken Things on April 10th, blogs across the web are featuring exclusive content from Margaret Peterson Haddix and 10 chances to win a copy of the book! Atocha Memorial My daughter and I were lost. We were holding a map of Madrid in our hands, and we knew both the name of the street we were on and the nearest intersection. So our problem wasn’t exactly that we were geographically lost, but that the landmark we expected to see before us—a memorial to the victims of train bombings in 2004—was nowhere in sight. So maybe the problem was that the memorial was lost? It was the hottest day of our August 2015 trip to Spain for me to do research for my book, THE SUMMER OF BROKEN THINGS. The two of us were already sweaty and thirsty and exhausted from hours of walking around looking at other sites I intended to use in the book. “Maybe the map’s just a little off, and it’s actually in the next block,” I suggested. “If we ever find this place and then your editor makes you cut that scene from your book, I’m going to be so mad,” my daughter groused. And… that made me give up. Because I didn’t know for sure if I was going to mention the Atocha train station memorial (also known as the 11-M Memorial) in my book. I wasn’t entirely certain which of the sites we’d visited would find their way into the first draft of the book, let alone stay around for the final version. That’s the nature of research trips, at least the way I do them—I never entirely know what’s going to be important, so I try to see and do as much as I can. But that afternoon I decided it was time to be kind to my daughter and go get something cold to drink instead of continuing our search. She was along as my combination tour guide and translator, since her Spanish skills are far superior to mine and she’d actually spent a semester studying in Spain only a year and a half before. And amazingly--given the pace of our trip and our jet lag and all the other things that can go wrong during travel--we really only had that one moment of grouchiness with each other. That evening back in our (air-conditioned) Airbnb apartment, I doubled down on my internet research, and re-convinced myself that the Atocha memorial could end up playing a vital role in my book. And the next morning, better rested and less grumpy, we walked right to it. The secret was that it was mostly underground, which I saw as a perfect metaphor for both grief and the underlying problems my main characters, Avery and Kayla, have in THE SUMMER OF BROKEN THINGS. The only way to get into the memorial is to first walk through the train station. And I really do not blame the people who run the train station for not having a lot of signs directing visitors to the memorial—I took several trains in and out of Atocha station myself that week, and I didn’t want to be reminded every time that it had been the site of a terrorist bombing killing 191 people not that long ago. But I found myself in awe of the memorial itself. In one sense, it is only a dark, empty room, sealed off from the rest of the train station by thick, mostly soundproof glass that makes the ordinary scene outside seem surreal. Isolated in that room, I wondered if that’s what it might feel like to be a ghost, to hover near the living but not be able to reach or speak to them. The main light in that memorial comes from above, from a funnel of words on translucent plastic. The words are the expressions of grief in multiple languages that flowed into Madrid after the bombing. They make a twisting spiral of sorrow and condolences, woe and comfort. The morning we were there, my daughter and I had the memorial to ourselves; nobody else visited. I wondered if that was a sign that, after more than a decade, the grieving survivors of those who died in the 11-M bombing have less of a need for the memorial. But the room’s stillness and condolences might still serve as a beacon for others who are lost or in pain. And s of course I ended up placing the Atocha memorial in my book. It becomes an important place for Kayla at a time when she’s also lost and struggling and in need of comfort. And then eventually Avery finds solace there, too. Some lost places are worth searching for. Blog Tour Schedule: April 16th — BookhoundsYA April 17th — The Book Rat April 18th — Book Briefs April 19th — Parajunkee April 20th — A Dream Within a Dream April 23rd — Crossroad Reviews April 24th — I Am a Reader April 25th — Page Turners April 26th — Once Upon a Twilight April 27th — Tales of the Ravenous Reader Buy: Amazon \| Indiebound Add on Goodreads Follow Margaret: Website \| Twitter \| Facebook \| Instagram From New York Times bestselling author Margaret Peterson Haddix comes a haunting novel about friendship and what it really means to be a family in the face of lies and betrayal. Fourteen-year-old Avery Armisted is athletic, rich, and pretty. Sixteen-year-old Kayla Butts is known as “butt-girl” at school. The two girls were friends as little kids, but that’s ancient history now. So it’s a huge surprise when Avery’s father offers to bring Kayla along on a summer trip to Spain. Avery is horrified that her father thinks he can choose her friends—and make her miss soccer camp. Kayla struggles just to imagine leaving the confines of her small town. But in Spain, the two uncover a secret their families had hidden from both of them their entire lives. Maybe the girls can put aside their differences and work through it together. Or maybe the lies and betrayal will only push them—and their families—farther apart. Margaret Peterson Haddix weaves together two completely separate lives in this engaging novel that explores what it really means to be a family—and what to do when it’s all falling apart. About the Author: Margaret Peterson Haddix is the author of many critically and popularly acclaimed YA and middle grade novels, including the Children of Exile series, The Missing series, the Under Their Skin series, and the Shadow Children series. A graduate of Miami University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for The Indianapolis News. She also taught at the Danville (Illinois) Area Community College. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. One (1) winner will receive a finished copy of The Summer of Broken Things Fill out the Rafflecopter to enter Please do not leave any sensitive info (addresses, emails, etc) in the comments! Ends April 24 at 11:59 EST Labels: contemporary, giveaway, guest post, Margaret Peterson Haddix, The Summer of Broken Things Danielle H. April 17, 2018 at 2:43 PM I didn't even know this memorial existed. I keep saying, Wow, over and over. How soon I forgot this tragedy in Spain, maybe because new ones happen every day in the world to steal my focus. I love the research this author did for the book. John Smith April 17, 2018 at 4:07 PM It sounds like a very unique and memorable memorial! Rachael April 18, 2018 at 5:40 PM I own a book by this author, but haven't read it yet. I think this new novel sounds super good.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2210
__label__wiki	0.877984	0.877984	Complaint against CPM leader’s son stirs Hornet’s Nest Previous Article Rahul Gandhi to launch poll campaign in Meghalaya Next Article Shiv Sena to go solo in 2019 elections KOCHI: The allegation against Binoy Vinodhini Balakrishnan, son of Communist Party of India (Marxist) Kerala state secretary and politburo member Kodiyeri Balakrishnan that he cheated a Dubai-based company of Rs.13 crores could be shrouded in intrigues but it raises serious questions about the increasing quest of party leaders and their family members for wealth. Binoy claimed there is no case pending against him in Dubai, but he doesn’t deny his financial dealings with Jaas Tourism LLC, which has approached the authorities for his arrest and extradition to Dubai. Benoy claimed that he had settled the case and some vested interests were raking it up now with ulterior motives. A reading of the case shows that the deal was shady. A Times of India report has raised doubt about the financial capacity of Jaas Tourism to extend such a huge loan to Binoy based on the research it conducted into the credentials of the firm. The firm that operates from a tiny office situated on the ground floor of a small building at Deira Dubai already has a case in Kerala against Chavara CPM MLA Vijayan Pillai’s son Sreejith for allegedly swindling Rs.10 crores. The dealings were made through Rahul Krishnan, who is the Indian partner of the firm owned by UAE national Hasan Ismaeel Abdulla Al Marzooqi, is a persona non-grata in United Arab Emirates. His wife Ragi Rahul manages the affairs of the company at Dubai. The charge against Biony was made by Mazooqi in a letter he sent to the CPM politburo seeking its intervention for his arrest and extradition. The letter alleged that Binoy had absconded from Dubai after borrowing 7 million Dirham, equivalent to Rs.13 crores, in two instalments for buying an Audi car and for launching a business in Saudi Arabia, UAE, India and Nepal. The UAE national also alleged that Binoy has taken money from many banks and individuals in UAE. There are over five criminal cases registered against him by Dubai police and public prosecution so far, he alleged. The case shows complex web of connections the CPM leaders and their family members maintain with business houses owned by Malayalis in the Middle East. Krishnan is the nephew of Jayantha Kumar, who used to supply manpower to RP Group, owned by Kollam-based Ravi Pillai. Binoy’s younger brother Bineesh Kodiyeri had once worked with the group as its India vice-president. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s daughter T Veena had also worked as CEO of an IT firm owned by Ravi Pillai at Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram. Ravi Pillai has reasons to oblige top political leaders since some of his businesses in the state have flourished with political patronage. The opposition parties have described the government’s decision to hand over the archeologically valuable Kovalam Palace to Pillai’s hotel group as a gift from the LDF. Environmentalists also see red in burying a case against his group for setting up a hotel at Kollam in violation of the coastal zone regulations. The successive governments in the state have been sitting on a direction of the Kerala Coastal Zone Management Authority (KCZMA) for demolishing parts of the hotel complex that were constructed illegally since 2015. The allegation against Benoy may open floodgates of shady deals involving top leaders and their kin. The CPM has sought to distance itself from the allegation saying that Binoy is not a member of the party and it has nothing to do with his deals. However, political observers feel that the party cannot wish it away since the financial deals involving the party leaders and their kin are against the communist values that the party seeks to impart on the cadres, majority of them are poor labourers, who built the party with their sweat. One such party member was Palora Matha, who donated her only calf to the party when CPM patriarch EMS Namboodiripad was raising funds for the party mouthpiece in the 1950s. When Namboodiripad asked her how she would survive, she said wanted the party to survive even if she died. “Many like Palora have helped the party immensely to gain strong root in the state. They gave everything to the party as the leaders then were committed to the people. Majority of the present-day leaders are interested in accumulating wealth for the party as well as themselves,” says Rajesh, an autorickshaw driver in Kochi. The CPM today has turned out to be a business empire in Kerala with a total turnover of Rs.25, 000 crores, 10,000 pieces of real estate and over 1 lakh employees, according to a report in the Hindustan Times. The CPM turnover is roughly 16 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which was put in the dock by both LDF and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) over the alleged disproportionate growth of a company owned by party chief Amith Shah’s son Jay Shah, has demanded an investigation into the allegations against Benoy and the wealth of CPM and its leaders. Former party state president V Muraleedharan alleged that the party had accumulated the wealth by misusing the power they wielded in the state. He said that he had approached the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) to conduct an investigation into the wealth of the party and its leaders two years ago. “The VACB turned down my petition citing lack of evidence to proceed with the case. It did so without even conducting a preliminary investigation into my complaint. I hope it will take cognizance of my complaint in the light of the current allegation against the CPM secretary’s son,” Muraleedharan said. Political observers feel that the CPM attempt to brush the issue under the carpet on technical grounds may cause lot of embarrassment to the party leadership when they face the party delegates at the state conference at Thrissur in the last week of February and party congress at Hyderabad in April. A section of the CPM leadership feels that the allegation against Benoy could have been raked up in the wake of the defeat of party general secretary Sitaram Yechury’s draft political resolution seeking an understanding with Congress at the Kolkata central committee meeting last week with an eye on the impending party meets. The Kerala unit of the party had backed the alternate resolution moved by former party chief Prakash Karat ruling out any truck with Congress. Many had described this as a pro-Modi move aimed at getting some top leaders extricated from various cases pending against them, including the SNC Lavalin scandal. Whatever the truth, political observers believe that the party may have to do a lot of explaining to retain the trust of the people, who have voted it to power on an anti-corruption plank.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2213
__label__wiki	0.929245	0.929245	Samuel López Samuel Lopez was born in El Salvador. He left with his family during the civil war of the 1980s and settled in Montreal. Samuel is a trilingual certified translator and an HIV+ AIDS activist. HIV has been a theme of interest in his work and in his life as a community activist long before he tested positive. In 1993, Samuel made his directorial debut with the documentary Samuel & Samantha. Samuel & Samantha is an autobiographical documentary about his life as a Latino drag queen. In 1996, while at the University of Toronto, Samuel wrote the screenplay “L’Histoire d’Henri” (“Henry’s Story”). In 2008, Samuel directed and produced the short documentary “Our Faces, Our Stories” for the group Latinos Positivos (HIV+ Latinos). He has directed several short documentary videos for Latinos Positivos Toronto and the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange. He recently completed the feature documentary “The Sugarcane” (2013) that will premiere at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in La Habana, Cuba in December 2013. El Cañaveral (The Sugarcane) 2013, 58:08 minutes, Colour / B&W, Spanish and English with English and Spanish subtitles Nuestras Caras, Nuestras Historias (Our Faces, Our Stories) 2009, 16:45 minutes, colour, Spanish with English Subtitles Samuel & Samantha 1993, 23:00 minutes, colour, English	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2217
__label__cc	0.717366	0.282634	The Harvard University Herbaria is made up of six separate herbarium dating back to the early/mid 1800s: the Gray Herbarium, the Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum, the Economic Herbarium of Oakes Ames, the Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium, the Farlow Herbarium and the New England Botanical Club Herbarium. Until the early 1950’s these herbaria were housed separately throughout Cambridge and Boston. In the years between the 1950’s and the 1970’s all six herbaria were brought together into one facility on Divinity Avenue on the Harvard campus. The existing facility is a complex of three structures; the original Farlow Herbarium building constructed in 1886, the main herbaria building constructed in 1954 and an addition to the main building constructed in 1979. Today the size of the herbaria collections far exceeds the capacity of the existing facility. WeatherstonBruer were retained to undertake two projects: 1) Collection Facility Master Plan 2) Design & Construction of New Third Floor Facility	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2222
__label__wiki	0.566669	0.566669	From WikiCU Foobar (Talk \| contribs) m (Reverted edits by 74.76.227.8 (Talk); changed back to last version by Pacman) Latest revision as of 10:54, 14 January 2017 (view source) (Obama's term is ending) [[Image:Obamany.jpg\|thumb\|right\|Obama the Columbia undergrad, visiting [[Central Park]] ]] '''Barack Obama''' [[Columbia College\|CC]] '[[1983\|83]], is the 44th and current President of the United States. A former US Senator from [[w:Illinois\|Illinois]], he is the first African-American and the first Columbia graduate to hold the nation's highest office. '''Barack Obama''' [[Columbia College\|CC]] '[[1983\|83]] was the 44th President of the United States. A former US Senator from [[w:Illinois\|Illinois]], he is the first African-American to hold the nation's highest office. Obama is the first attendee of [[Columbia College]] and the first graduate of any Columbia school<ref>[[Theodore Roosevelt]] and [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt]] both attended [[Columbia Law School]], but neither graduated, as you only needed to pass the bar after 2 years of school to practice law. One Roosevelt dropped out after passing the bar, the other after being elected to the NY State Assembly. [[Dwight Eisenhower]] never attended Columbia, but rather served as a somewhat absentee President of the University while biding his time to run for the Presidency.</ref>, to occupy the Oval Office. Obama was also the first Columbia College alumnus to be nominated by a major modern party ticket, and the first CC alum to be a major party nominee since the Federalists nominated [[DeWitt Clinton]] in [[1812]]. Obama is the first attendee of [[Columbia College]] to occupy the Oval Office. Obama was also the first Columbia College alumnus to be nominated by a major modern party ticket, and the first CC alum to be a major party nominee since the Federalists nominated [[DeWitt Clinton]] in [[1812]]. He is the second Columbia alumnus to win a [[Nobel Prize\|Nobel Peace Prize]], after [[Nicholas Murray Butler]] in [[1931]]. [[Theodore Roosevelt]] also won a Peace Prize, but is not formally an alumnus. He is the second Columbia alumnus to win a [[Nobel Prize\|Nobel Peace Prize]], after [[Nicholas Murray Butler]] in [[1931]]. [[Theodore Roosevelt]] also won a Peace Prize. Obama maintains a somewhat distant relationship to Columbia today. While he has turned down invitations to official Columbia events and appeared to deemphasize his Columbia years in the course of his campaign, Obama has sent personal notes to alumni of his class and is a donor to the university. ==Columbia years== [[Image:Obama-columbia.png\|thumb\|right\|Obama wearing Columbia t-shirt]] [[Image:Obamasiddiqi.jpg\|thumb\|right\|Obama with his Pakistani friend Sohale Siddiqi in Obama's 109th St. apartment, 1981]] [[Image:Obamaboerner.jpg\|thumb\|right\|Photo by Obama of his friend Phil Boerner in their apartment on 109th St., Fall 1981.]] [[Image:Obama tenement.jpg\|thumb\|right\|The East Harlem tenement where Obama lived during most of his time at Columbia]] [[Image:Obama tenement.jpg\|thumb\|right\|A more recent image of the Yorkville apartment on East 94th where Obama lived during most of his time at Columbia]] [[Image:Obamastudent.jpg\|thumb\|right\|Obama in the winter of 1981]] [[Image:Obamastudent.jpg\|thumb\|right\|Obama not looking very happy in the winter of 1981]] [[Image:Obama grandparents.jpg\|thumb\|right\|Obama gets a visit from his grandparents during his Columbia years]] Obama [[transfer student\|transferred]] to CC from [[w:Occidental College\|Occidental College]] which (poor place) is even more rarely mentioned by the President. At Occidental, Obama wrote, he had been into partying and drugs. He hoped the move to New York, and Columbia, would put him on a more serious track. Obama [[transfer student\|transferred]] to CC from [[w:Occidental College\|Occidental College]], which is even more rarely mentioned by the President, in the fall of [[1981]]. At Occidental, Obama wrote, he had been into partying and drugs. He hoped the move to New York, where the cold weather would force him to stay inside and read,<ref>http://bwog.net/2010/04/06/a-new-look-at-obamas-columbia-years</ref> would put him on a more serious track. ===Accommodations=== Columbia at that time barred transfer students from its limited supply of campus housing, so Obama lived off campus. He claims to have spent his first night sleeping in an alley near the corner of 109th and [[Amsterdam Avenue]] and washing with the homeless next to an open fire hydrant, as he had arrived too late to be let in to the apartment he had found, #3E, 142 W. 109th St., between Amsterdam and Columbus. Columbia at that time barred transfer students from its limited supply of campus housing, so Obama lived off campus. He claims to have spent his first night sleeping in an alley near the corner of 109th and [[Amsterdam Avenue]] and washing with the homeless next to an open fire hydrant, as he had arrived too late to be let in to the apartment he had found, #3E, 142 W. 109th St., between Amsterdam and Columbus. The rent was $360. The next day he moved into the apartment with fellow Occidental College transfer [[Phil Boerner]] in the fall of [[1981]]. Boerner, who remained Obama's friend throughout his college years, describes the apartment as a third story walkup with a railroad layout and a missing doorbell. It had a walkthrough layout, and Boerner had to walk through Obama's room to get to his own. The heating frequently failed, one of the reasons Obama wound up spending so much time in [[Butler Library]]. At other times, the two roommates read their books under blankets. Their hot water was also irregular, and they often made use of the Columbia gym showers. They frequently hosted guests from their Occidental days, and Obama was reportedly a gracious host, doing grocery shopping and making chicken curry (which he'd learned to cook from Pakistani friend Sohale Siddiqi).<ref>http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/jan_feb09/alumni_corner</ref><ref>http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/recollections-of-obamas-ex-roommate/</ref> The next day he moved into the apartment with fellow Occidental College transfer [[Phil Boerner]]. Boerner, who remained Obama's friend throughout his college years, describes the apartment as a third story walkup with a railroad layout and a missing doorbell. It had a walkthrough layout, and Boerner had to walk through Obama's room to get to his own. The heating frequently failed, one of the reasons Obama wound up spending so much time in [[Butler Library]]. At other times, the two roommates read their books under blankets. Their hot water was also irregular, and they often made use of the Columbia gym showers. They frequently hosted guests from their Occidental days, and Obama was reportedly a gracious host, doing grocery shopping and making chicken curry (which he'd learned to cook from Pakistani friend Sohale Siddiqi).<ref>http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/jan_feb09/alumni_corner</ref><ref>http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/recollections-of-obamas-ex-roommate/</ref> After their first semester, Obama tried to find a better apartment for himself and his friend, but was only able to locate a studio. He eventually moved into a walkup at #6A, 339 E. 94th St., in [[Yorkville]], where he would "chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about...the sound of gunfire at night".<ref>http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/where-obama-lived-in-1980s-new-york/</ref> ===Academics=== When he was on campus, he concentrated on academic work, spending most of his time in [[Butler Library]] "like a monk", and made few friends. He also took up jogging (around [[Central Park]]) and "stopped getting high". Still, he had time for the occasional beer, and enjoyed watching sports. When he was on campus, Obama concentrated on academic work, spending most of his time in [[Butler Library]] "like a monk", and made few friends. He also took up jogging (around [[Central Park]]) and "stopped getting high". Still, he had time for the occasional beer, and enjoyed watching sports. He majored in [[Political Science Department\|PoliSci]], and concentrated in "International Relations," (now [[International Politics]] - this is a subfield of the PoliSci major and should not be confused with a "[[concentration]]," the Columbia term that substitutes for what most schools term a "minor"). Obama's professors and classmates, including former international politics professor Michael Baron and current MTV president Michael Wolf, confirm that he was a brilliant, standout student and that he was an active participant in seminars. Baron said he was one of the top one or two students in his class. Despite this, Obama continually declines requests to release his Columbia transcript. He majored in [[Political Science Department\|PoliSci]], and concentrated in "International Relations," (now [[International Politics]] - this is a subfield of the PoliSci major and should not be confused with a "[[concentration]]," the Columbia term that substitutes for what most schools term a "minor"). He also took classes in other disciplines, including a class with famed literary theorist [[Edward Said]]. Boehner confirmed that Obama found Said's focus on theory tedious and that both would have preferred to be reading Shakespeare. Obama apparently called Said "a flake". <ref>http://bwog.net/2010/04/06/a-new-look-at-obamas-columbia-years</ref> Obama's professors and classmates, including former international politics professor Michael Baron and current MTV president Michael Wolf, confirm that he was a brilliant, standout student and that he was an active participant in seminars. Baron said he was one of the top one or two students in his class. Despite this, Obama continually declines requests to release his Columbia transcript. Sources first differed on whether he wrote his senior thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament<ref>http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/28631</ref> or the North-South debate on trade and the "new international economic order"<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04obama-t.html</ref>. Later, it emerged that he had not really written an official thesis at all: students were not required to do so at the time, and what was considered his "thesis" was really a long seminar paper. Obama wrote his for Prof. Baron's American Foreign Policy class. A search has been launched<ref>http://www.bwog.net/articles/obama_s_schoolwork_verily_a_mystery</ref> for a copy of the paper, which was confirmed to have been on the topic of Soviet disarmament. Baron, Obama's de facto "thesis" advisor, is now retired to Florida, and claims to have lost his copy of the paper in a move some time ago. ===Extracurriculars=== In spring 1983, Obama wrote at least one article for the now defunct campus publication ''[[Sundial (magazine)\|Sundial]]'', a discussion of the aims and methods of campus anti-war groups.<ref>http://www.politico.com/static/PPM116_obamaessay.html </ref> His friend Phil Boerner explains that during this period, Obama wanted to be writer rather than a politician. In spring 1983, Obama wrote at least one article for the now defunct campus publication ''[[Sundial (magazine)\|Sundial]]'', a discussion of the aims and methods of campus anti-war groups.<ref>http://www.politico.com/static/PPM116_obamaessay.html </ref> His friend Phil Boerner explains that during this period, Obama wanted to be a writer rather than a politician. Obama also claims to have participated to some extent in anti-apartheid activities with the [[Black Students Organization]]. ===Free time=== On off days, Obama would reportedly browse bookstores like the [[Strand]] and a Barnes & Noble that apparently once operated across from Columbia. He also went to museums, such as the [[Met]] and the [[Guggenheim]]. On off days, Obama would reportedly browse bookstores like the [[Strand]] and a Barnes & Noble that apparently once operated across from Columbia. He also went to museums, such as the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art\|Met]] and the [[Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum\|Guggenheim]]. Boerner remembers their discussions of John Rawls's <i>A Theory of Justice</i> in particular. They also listened to reggae. Boerner remembers their discussions of John Rawls's ''A Theory of Justice'' in particular. They also listened to reggae. Like many Columbia students, Obama partook of breakfast at [[Tom's Diner]] and beers at [[The West End]]. Like many Columbia students, Obama partook of breakfast at [[Tom's Restaurant]] and beers at [[The West End]]. ===Formation of views=== The racist and anti-Semitic graffiti he sometimes encountered on bathroom walls on campus (how times never change!) helped Obama form his ideas about race and class. He wrote of "the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well".<ref>''Dreams from My Father''</ref> The racist and anti-Semitic graffiti he sometimes encountered on bathroom walls on campus helped Obama form his ideas about race and class. He wrote of "the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well".<ref>''Dreams from My Father''</ref> According to Phil Boerner, Obama "could get pretty emotional about sports, food and injustice" at the time. ==Recent relationship with Columbia== Many Columbia students [[w:The Audacity of Hope\|audaciously hoped]] he would win the Democratic primary and the national election. Obama, however, appeared to tend to forget or ignore his Columbia affiliation, preferring to mention that he attended [[Harvard\|Harvard Law School]]. He has repeatedly turned down requests to be the [[Class Day]] speaker in recent years, as well as general requests to appear from the [[College Democrats]]. Many Columbia students [[w:The Audacity of Hope\|audaciously hoped]] he would win the Democratic primary and the national election. He did, however, note that Columbia was his alma mater while visiting during the [[ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum]], and sent a letter to the attendees of the Class of 1983's 25th reunion gathering. Obama's 2009 tax filings revealed what may be stirrings of latent loyalty to the institution: Obama donated $1,000 to Columbia that fiscal year, giving nothing to Harvard. He has repeatedly turned down requests to be the [[Class Day]] speaker in recent years, as well as general requests to appear from the [[College Democrats]]. Recently, CC Class of 2011 President [[Sean Udell]] spearheaded the "POTUS Project" to get the president to speak at [[University Commencement]], an honor traditionally reserved for the [[University President]] alone. President [[Lee Bollinger]], however, cosigned the initiative<ref>http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/10/14/ccsc-launches-potus-project-0</ref>, to little avail. Obama did, however, note that Columbia was his alma mater while visiting during the [[ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum]], and sent a letter to the attendees of the Class of 1983's 25th reunion gathering. Obama's 2009 tax filings revealed what may be stirrings of latent loyalty to the institution: Obama donated $1,000 to Columbia that fiscal year, giving nothing to Harvard. In [[2012]], Obama spoke at the [[Class Day]] of [[Barnard College]]. This caused considerable consternation in the Columbia College community (see "[[Obamanard]]"), especially among those who had been organizing to bring him to campus as a Class Day speaker for CC. The ''[[New York Times]]'' speculated that the reasoning was tied to the political issues surrounding women's health at the time.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/politics/obama-will-speak-at-barnard-graduation.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1330794112-IRvF63PYWJu3Y6zj7xYWSA</ref> ==Other Columbia coincidences== In his primary fight to become the Democratic nominee, Obama faced, among others, [[GS]] alum [[Mike Gravel]]. His Republican opponent was [[John McCain]], a former [[Class Day]] speaker whose daughter, [[Meghan McCain]], was CC'07. In the general election, he also faced tickets with [[Wayne Allen Root]], also CC'83, the Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee, and independent vice presidential candidate [[Matt Gonzalez]] CC'87. Following his victory, Obama nominated [[Eric Holder]] CC'73 for Attorney General and [[Julius Genachowski]] CC'85 chairman of the FCC. [[Judd Gregg]] CC'69 was later nominated as Commerce Secretary. Following his victory, Obama nominated [[Eric Holder]] CC'73 for Attorney General and [[Julius Genachowski]] CC'85 chairman of the FCC. [[Judd Gregg]] CC'69 was later nominated as Commerce Secretary, but later removed himself from consideration, citing irreconcilable differences with the administration. ==Revisionism and Obama's Columbia Years== As with the 'birther' movement's obsession with the veracity of Obama's birth records, occasional hoaxes and misinformation are promulgated surrounding his time at Columbia or a fictitious "thesis" written while a student.<ref>http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/10/25/2009-10-25_limbaugh_falls_for_obama_thesis_hoax__but_is_in_no_rush_to_apologize.html</ref> [[Category:U.S. Presidents\|Obama, Barack]] [[Category:Nobel Prize winners\|Obama, Barack]] [[Category:Transfer students\|Obama, Barack]] Latest revision as of 10:54, 14 January 2017 See also Wikipedia's article about "Barack Obama". Obama the Columbia undergrad, visiting Central Park Barack Obama CC '83 was the 44th President of the United States. A former US Senator from Illinois, he is the first African-American to hold the nation's highest office. Obama is the first attendee of Columbia College to occupy the Oval Office. Obama was also the first Columbia College alumnus to be nominated by a major modern party ticket, and the first CC alum to be a major party nominee since the Federalists nominated DeWitt Clinton in 1812. He is the second Columbia alumnus to win a Nobel Peace Prize, after Nicholas Murray Butler in 1931. Theodore Roosevelt also won a Peace Prize. 1 Columbia years 1.1 Accommodations 1.2 Academics 1.3 Extracurriculars 1.4 Free time 1.5 Formation of views 2 Recent relationship with Columbia 3 Other Columbia coincidences 4 Revisionism and Obama's Columbia Years Columbia years Obama wearing Columbia t-shirt Obama with his Pakistani friend Sohale Siddiqi in Obama's 109th St. apartment, 1981 The apartment building on 109th St. where Obama lived with Phil Boerner in 1981 Photo by Obama of his friend Phil Boerner in their apartment on 109th St., Fall 1981. A more recent image of the Yorkville apartment on East 94th where Obama lived during most of his time at Columbia Obama not looking very happy in the winter of 1981 Obama gets a visit from his grandparents during his Columbia years Obama transferred to CC from Occidental College, which is even more rarely mentioned by the President, in the fall of 1981. At Occidental, Obama wrote, he had been into partying and drugs. He hoped the move to New York, where the cold weather would force him to stay inside and read,[1] would put him on a more serious track. Columbia at that time barred transfer students from its limited supply of campus housing, so Obama lived off campus. He claims to have spent his first night sleeping in an alley near the corner of 109th and Amsterdam Avenue and washing with the homeless next to an open fire hydrant, as he had arrived too late to be let in to the apartment he had found, #3E, 142 W. 109th St., between Amsterdam and Columbus. The rent was $360. The next day he moved into the apartment with fellow Occidental College transfer Phil Boerner. Boerner, who remained Obama's friend throughout his college years, describes the apartment as a third story walkup with a railroad layout and a missing doorbell. It had a walkthrough layout, and Boerner had to walk through Obama's room to get to his own. The heating frequently failed, one of the reasons Obama wound up spending so much time in Butler Library. At other times, the two roommates read their books under blankets. Their hot water was also irregular, and they often made use of the Columbia gym showers. They frequently hosted guests from their Occidental days, and Obama was reportedly a gracious host, doing grocery shopping and making chicken curry (which he'd learned to cook from Pakistani friend Sohale Siddiqi).[2][3] After their first semester, Obama tried to find a better apartment for himself and his friend, but was only able to locate a studio. He eventually moved into a walkup at #6A, 339 E. 94th St., in Yorkville, where he would "chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about...the sound of gunfire at night".[4] When he was on campus, Obama concentrated on academic work, spending most of his time in Butler Library "like a monk", and made few friends. He also took up jogging (around Central Park) and "stopped getting high". Still, he had time for the occasional beer, and enjoyed watching sports. He majored in PoliSci, and concentrated in "International Relations," (now International Politics - this is a subfield of the PoliSci major and should not be confused with a "concentration," the Columbia term that substitutes for what most schools term a "minor"). He also took classes in other disciplines, including a class with famed literary theorist Edward Said. Boehner confirmed that Obama found Said's focus on theory tedious and that both would have preferred to be reading Shakespeare. Obama apparently called Said "a flake". [5] Sources first differed on whether he wrote his senior thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament[6] or the North-South debate on trade and the "new international economic order"[7]. Later, it emerged that he had not really written an official thesis at all: students were not required to do so at the time, and what was considered his "thesis" was really a long seminar paper. Obama wrote his for Prof. Baron's American Foreign Policy class. A search has been launched[8] for a copy of the paper, which was confirmed to have been on the topic of Soviet disarmament. Baron, Obama's de facto "thesis" advisor, is now retired to Florida, and claims to have lost his copy of the paper in a move some time ago. It has been reported that Obama graduated without honors[9], but if the policies then were the same as they are today, he would not have been eligible for Latin honors, because he spent only two years in the college. After graduation, Obama hoped to become a community organizer, but could not find work as one, and joined a consulting firm instead. In spring 1983, Obama wrote at least one article for the now defunct campus publication Sundial, a discussion of the aims and methods of campus anti-war groups.[10] His friend Phil Boerner explains that during this period, Obama wanted to be a writer rather than a politician. Obama also claims to have participated to some extent in anti-apartheid activities with the Black Students Organization. At one point he worked selling subscriptions to The New York Times to pay Columbia's tuition costs.[11] On off days, Obama would reportedly browse bookstores like the Strand and a Barnes & Noble that apparently once operated across from Columbia. He also went to museums, such as the Met and the Guggenheim. Boerner remembers their discussions of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in particular. They also listened to reggae. Like many Columbia students, Obama partook of breakfast at Tom's Restaurant and beers at The West End. Formation of views The racist and anti-Semitic graffiti he sometimes encountered on bathroom walls on campus helped Obama form his ideas about race and class. He wrote of "the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well".[12] Recent relationship with Columbia Many Columbia students audaciously hoped he would win the Democratic primary and the national election. He has repeatedly turned down requests to be the Class Day speaker in recent years, as well as general requests to appear from the College Democrats. Recently, CC Class of 2011 President Sean Udell spearheaded the "POTUS Project" to get the president to speak at University Commencement, an honor traditionally reserved for the University President alone. President Lee Bollinger, however, cosigned the initiative[13], to little avail. Obama did, however, note that Columbia was his alma mater while visiting during the ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum, and sent a letter to the attendees of the Class of 1983's 25th reunion gathering. Obama's 2009 tax filings revealed what may be stirrings of latent loyalty to the institution: Obama donated $1,000 to Columbia that fiscal year, giving nothing to Harvard. In 2012, Obama spoke at the Class Day of Barnard College. This caused considerable consternation in the Columbia College community (see "Obamanard"), especially among those who had been organizing to bring him to campus as a Class Day speaker for CC. The New York Times speculated that the reasoning was tied to the political issues surrounding women's health at the time.[14] Other Columbia coincidences In his primary fight to become the Democratic nominee, Obama faced, among others, GS alum Mike Gravel. His Republican opponent was John McCain, a former Class Day speaker whose daughter, Meghan McCain, was CC'07. In the general election, he also faced tickets with Wayne Allen Root, also CC'83, the Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee, and independent vice presidential candidate Matt Gonzalez CC'87. Following his victory, Obama nominated Eric Holder CC'73 for Attorney General and Julius Genachowski CC'85 chairman of the FCC. Judd Gregg CC'69 was later nominated as Commerce Secretary, but later removed himself from consideration, citing irreconcilable differences with the administration. Revisionism and Obama's Columbia Years As with the 'birther' movement's obsession with the veracity of Obama's birth records, occasional hoaxes and misinformation are promulgated surrounding his time at Columbia or a fictitious "thesis" written while a student.[15] ↑ http://bwog.net/2010/04/06/a-new-look-at-obamas-columbia-years ↑ http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/jan_feb09/alumni_corner ↑ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/recollections-of-obamas-ex-roommate/ ↑ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/where-obama-lived-in-1980s-new-york/ ↑ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/28631 ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04obama-t.html ↑ http://www.bwog.net/articles/obama_s_schoolwork_verily_a_mystery ↑ http://www.nysun.com/new-york/obamas-years-at-columbia-are-a-mystery/85015/ ↑ http://www.politico.com/static/PPM116_obamaessay.html ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10dowd.html ↑ Dreams from My Father ↑ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/10/14/ccsc-launches-potus-project-0 ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/us/politics/obama-will-speak-at-barnard-graduation.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1330794112-IRvF63PYWJu3Y6zj7xYWSA ↑ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/10/25/2009-10-25_limbaugh_falls_for_obama_thesis_hoax__but_is_in_no_rush_to_apologize.html Columbia College Today profile of Obama NYT article on Obama's years at Columbia and subsequent time in New York Retrieved from "http://www.wikicu.com/index.php5?title=Barack_Obama&oldid=54742" Articles with counterpart on Wikipedia Columbia College alumni Political science majors Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2223
__label__wiki	0.911627	0.911627	There has been much talk lately about the future of computer role-playing games. Some say that they are in the middle of a popularity resurgence, while others cry that CRPG’s in the “classic” sense are dead. Yet the argument is not necessarily a binary thing–there are some people who feel the classic CRPG has simply been scattered finely throughout computer gaming and that it has evolved away from its roots. I think proponents of the latter opinion have a good point. You could make the argument that the RPG has been one of the most influential forces on computer games of all types, having permeated every other genre to such a degree that it is no longer even noticeable. Think about all the adventure games and action games that have RPG-like inventory systems. Think about the origin of the fictional settings for games like Master of Magic, Myth or Warcraft. Think about all the terminology that has crept into other non-RPG games. Even “character” itself is used in a fashion that has more in common with paper RPG’s than with fiction in the context of computer games. It’s not “a” character, it’s “your” character. And just as the effects of RPG’s have been scattered throughout the culture, the very term RPG has come to have a widely spread meaning. The term itself is no longer focused enough to be as meaningful as it once was. Regardless of which side they’re on, people tend to have pretty strong opinions about the issues. Much more so than outsiders to the gaming subculture would think. Why is that? Why do gamers get so worked up about things like, “The future of CRPG’s?” When I’m in an optimistic mood, I believe it’s because people are extremely passionate about the experiences they have while playing great games. They have come to value the intrigue they feel when exploring some new virtual place or the adrenaline that comes upon them as they close upon a helpless foe in a shooter. They get attached to the characters in the games they play, whether they are real people, in the case of online games like FireTeam, or AI-driven, as in the case of games like Fallout. Gamers are passionate. When I’m in a pessimistic mood I think it’s because some gamers are fascists who immediately get defensive if anyone ever tries to offer them anything new or challenging. Part of the problem in deciding whether CRPG’s are currently in good shape or bad is that people define the term RPG differently. So what is an RPG? Is it a game in which you create a party of adventurers, use them to freely interact with that world, meet and converse with secondary characters (NPC’s), fight monsters, collect treasure and gain “levels?” What if you take away the party and make the player manipulate a single character? Does it cease to be an RPG? Some purists have screamed loudly about this for years, bashing games that do away with the concept of the “party of followers.” What if there is a party, but the player does not get to create the characters;their identities are pre-scripted? Does it cease to be an RPG then, even if it has all of the other elements? Again, some have said that a game without these elements is not an RPG. These definitions are restrictive, which is bad from a creativity standpoint, and if all game developers did stick to them then the genre would never grow; most RPG’s would feel the same. So–since so many great games have emerged over the last few years that bent a few of the rules or otherwise departed from tradition–the definition of RPG must be somewhat more flexible. The term seems to be in a state of flux. Is an RPG simply a game in which you “play a role” while exploring a fictional world? Is an RPG defined by the fact that the point of the game is to escape the real world, to immerse yourself in a fictional setting and participate in an unfolding plot beyond the scope of your normal life; to shape that plot by your actions? The camp more concerned with the immersive elements of the experience than with numeric systems would say that a game that combines a few components of the classic RPG with this sort of exploration and immersion is a role-playing game in its modern incarnation. That the genre has evolved. Those on this side of the argument say that stopping to manipulate stats pulls the player out of an otherwise immersive experience by moving the emphasis away from interacting with and reacting to the game environment. This group would say that stats are thus counter to what an immersive reality sim tries to do–pull you into the experience. Advocates of such games claim that heavy reliance on stats is a throw-back to the days before we had more sophisticated means of conveying feedback information to the player, and that if a developer is making a game with the focus on immersing the player in a living, breathing world and if he can find a way to convey advancement, successes, failures and effects to the player in some subtler way, he should. (For instance: instead of my ‘exhaustion stat’ dropping from 50 to 20 when my character is tired, my character literally begins to make a panting sounds when he is tired and moves a bit slower.) The immersive adventure sim is emerging as a new, participatory techno-artform and it is leaving stats behind because they do not serve it. (When silent movies became “talkies,” the text at the bottom of the screen was dropped.) The other side of the debate says that stats are great fun and highly useful for tracking progress and game character powers. People love to track stats. (Look at the heuristic insanity of the sports world.) Stats are a simple, classic way to tell people how a given unit (or player) compares to others, to that unit’s previous performance and its advancement. Games that are not as concerned with ‘world immersion’ (i.e., their primary goal is something else) can be tons of fun because the stats let you track your progress finely, chart your moves with precision and micromanage the game systems. Stats are also useful in firming up the concept behind a given character. When rolling up a character for a Rifts (paper) game recently, I allocated his highest attribute to his Physical Endurance because I had already decided, in concept, that this character was first and foremost a survivor, someone who could take a lot of pain and keep on moving. I’d say that both camps are right in ways and that the terminology itself is what has failed us. Now that both halves of the world are flaming me for being on the Wrong Side ™, let me explain this opinion by first bringing up a parallel from the paper RPG world. The way I see it, there are two key types of RPG enthusiasts–those in love with the game systems, character statistics and mechanics, and those in love with the places, characters and stories. When I first started playing paper RPG’s (20 years ago, on the night of my 11th birthday), I played with a mixed group of people. In those early days, it was nothing but chaos and fun. However, as we continued to play together over the years, certain critical differences began to assert themselves. It seemed that some people in the group wanted to spend more and more time interacting with interesting NPC’s (through the voice of the referee, of course) and slowly piecing together the exotic nature of the campaign world. These same players began to create characters with more quirks, deeper histories and more crisply defined personas. Other players in the group found this type of role-playing tedious. Eventually, our gaming group split up–the role-playing purist played with people who wanted to focus on verbal interaction, character portrayal, world exploration and complicated plot turns. The other group, made up of people who loved the game systems themselves, played games that focused on exploiting the mechanics to gain power in the game. (Most of the latter group eventually switched to combat/tactical games like Warhammer 40K.) I see a version of this division in computer RPG fans today. The parallel seems strong to me. If you personally had to decide on one of the following preferences, would you say that you enjoy games more that allow you to master a tactical system, manipulating the game-world and its pieces through distinct unit qualities and lots of tweak-able mechanics? Or do you prefer games that allow you to visit an unusual place, explore forgotten, alien or haunted worlds? Which of these two aspects of the RPG is more important to you? (Though both of these games shared both aspects in some proportions, Wizardry VII was mostly an example of the former and System Shock was mostly an example of the latter.) How you answer these questions probably says something about your opinion on the current state of the CRPG. Looking over the games coming soon, it seems to me that many future CRPG’s will cater to either one crowd or the other. Others will attempt to function as a hybrid, satisfying both groups. Again, I think it is the terminology that has failed us, not the games; I think that the term RPG means too much, to too many people. Perhaps some new terminology would better serve to categorize the experiential specifics of a given game, depending on whether it is technically a stats-based CRPG or an immersive adventure sim. This division is not a bad thing–the split is only there, as it always has been, because of differences in the tastes of gamers who love RPG’s. Players should keep this in mind when they finally get their hands on Ultima Ascension, Thief: the Dark Project, Baldur’s Gate and Swords & Sorcery. For developers, understanding where their games sit along this spectrum is even more critical. Deus Ex, the game I am currently working on (with Warren Spector and a really talented team of people at ION Storm Austin), is a hybrid. We are going to try to please both camps by creating an immersive RPG, filled with dynamic characters and an interesting story line. But we’re also allowing for skill-based character generation and advancement, a party of allies, lots of non-plot-related areas to explore, a conversation system and multiple (non-violent) solutions to problems based on your character’s skills and inventory. It’s an ambitious effort, trying to make a game that people from both sides will like. In the end, regardless of philosophical quibbles (that may cause Warren to hit me repeatedly over the head with a giant rubber ‘Toon mallet), we’ll do our best to make Deus Ex fun above all else.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2226
__label__cc	0.731393	0.268607	Tag Archives: D’Angelo In 1979, President Jimmy Carter declared June Black Music Month. In 2016, President Barack Obama, who recognized the month as African-American Music Appreciation Month, said the music of African-American artists helped the country “to dance, to express our faith through song, to march against injustice, and to defend our country’s enduring promise of freedom and opportunity for all.” Today’s Tunes du Jour playlist embodies that sentiment. (The Spotify embed function is not working.) Tagged as 2Pac, Aretha Franklin, Arrested Development, Beyoncé, Bill Withers, Billie Holiday, Blood Orange, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Chi-Lites, Childish Gambino, Chuck Berry, Common, D'Angelo, Donny Hathaway, Edwin Starr, En Vogue, Gil Scott-Heron, Grandmaster Flash, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Ice-T, James Brown, Janet Jackson, Jimmy Cliff, John Legend, Jungle Brothers, Kendrick Lamar, Killer Mike, Marvin Gaye, Melle Mel, Miguel, N.W.A., Nas, Nina Simone, Oscar Brown Jr., Prince, Public Enemy, Ramparts, Roberta Flack, Run-D.M.C., Sam Cooke, Sampha, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings, Sly & the Family Stone, Solange, Stevie Wonder, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy, The Impressions, The Isley Brothers, The O'Jays, The Staple Singers, The Temptations, Tracy Chapman, War Nineties R&B Today is Janet’s birthday! The most popular r&b group of the nineties was probably Boyz II Mej3y64t.,huy Sorry. My head hit the keyboard. Just typing that group’s name puts me to sleep. I find their music devoid of personality, emphasizing vocal histrionics over soul-felt passion. They should call themselves Boyz II Meh! Am I right, people? Tip your waitstaff. Much of nineties r&b suffers from the same. Technique over feeling. Not all, though. I’m not damning a whole genre with a wide paintbrush, or whatever that expression is. Today’s playlist showcases twenty of the best r&b hits from last millennium’s last decade, the decade being 1990 to 1999, for the purposes of this post. Nothing obscure this time. All of these songs received a fair amount of airplay back in the day. If I missed any of your favorites, let me know in the comments section, unless it’s a song by Boyz II Mebg;hev. Click here to follow Tunes du Jour on Facebook. Follow Tunes du Jour on Twitter. Tagged as Bell Biv DeVoe, BLACKstreet, Brandy, D'Angelo, Destiny's Child, Dr. Dre, En Vogue, Erykah Badu, Fugees, Janet Jackson, Joni Mitchell, Lisa Stansfield, Mary J. Blige, Maxwell, Michael Jackson, Monica, Montell Jordan, Next, Prince, Q-Tip, Queen Pen, Sisqo, TLC, Tracy Chapman, Whitney Houston Cool New Music (3-20-19) Here are twenty new(ish) songs that float my boat. Tagged as 21 Savage, Amine, Ariana Grande, Beck, Billie Eilish, Cardi B, Charly Bliss, City Girls, D'Angelo, Jenny Lewis, Kacey Musgraves, Kehlani, Lizzo, Sharon Van Etten, Solange, Teyana Taylor, The Black Keys, The Killers, Toro y Moi, Ty Dolla $ign, Vampire Weekend, Weyes Blood My Top 99 Songs Of 2015 Herewith, my 99 favorite tracks of this year: 1. Can’t Feel My Face – The Weeknd 2. Sugah Daddy – D’Angelo & the Vanguard 3. Peanut Butter Jelly – Galantis 4. Downtown – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis featuring Eric Nally, Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee & Grandmaster Kaz 5. Fuck It All – Elle Varner 6. Therapy – Mary J. Blige 7. Coffee (Fucking) – Miguel 8. What Do You Mean? – Justin Bieber 9. Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck) – Run the Jewels featuring Zack De La Rocha 10. Hello – Adele 11. Only One – Kanye West featuring Paul McCartney 12. Depreston – Courtney Barnett 13. On the Regular – Shamir 14. Lampshades on Fire – Modest Mouse 15. Shine – Years & Years 16. Hotline Bling – Drake 17. Truffle Butter – Nicki Minaj featuring Drake and Lil Wayne 18. The Blacker the Berry – Kendrick Lamar 19. Dead Fox – Courtney Barnett 20. The Ground Walks, with Time in a Box – Modest Mouse 21. Uptown Funk – Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars 22. FourFiveSeconds – Rihanna featuring Kanye West and Paul McCartney 23. Teenage Talk – St. Vincent 24. Alright – Kendrick Lamar 25. Who U? – Dynas featuring Slick Rick 26. Friday I’m in Love – Yo La Tengo 27. Queen – Perfume Genius 28. King Kunta – Kendrick Lamar 29. Yoga – Janelle Monae featuring Jidenna 30. Dreams – Beck 31. Return to the Moon (Political Song for Didi Bloome to Sing, with Crescendo) – EL VY 32. The Love Within – Bloc Party 33. The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt. – Father John Misty 34. Huarache Lights – Hot Chip 35. Dancing in the Dark – Hot Chip 36. B.O.B. – Macy Gray 37. Break the Rules – Charli XCX 38. Ex’s & Oh’s – Elle King 39. Stay Gold – First Aid Kit 40. Cool for the Summer – Demi Lovato 41. Girl Crush – Little Big Town 42. Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party – Courtney Barnett 43. Little Red Wagon – Miranda Lambert 44. Cedar Lane – First Aid Kit 45. Jonathan – Christine and the Queens featuring Perfume Genius 46. Boxing Day Blues (Revisited) – Courtney Barnett 47. In for the Kill – Shamir 48. Biscuits – Kacey Musgraves 49. Can’t Get Enough of Myself – Santigold featuring BC 50. You’re So Beautiful – Empire Cast featuring Jussie Smollett 51. Ugly Cherries – PWR BTTM 52. Earned It (Fifty Shades of Grey) – The Weeknd 53. Leave a Trace – CHVRCHES 54. Freedom – Pharrell Williams 55. Betray My Heart – D’Angelo & the Vanguard 56. Snakeskin – Deerhunter 57. Really Love – D’Angelo & the Vanguard 58. I Can’t Lose – Mark Ronson featuring Keyone Starr 59. Outta My Mind – the Arcs 60. Happy Idiot – TV on the Radio 61. Bad Blood – Ryan Adams 62. Nobody’s Empire – Belle & Sebastian 63. Come – Jain 64. Stonemilker – Björk 65. Holding On – Julio Bashmore featuring Sam Dew 66. Go Out – Blur 67. Weight in Gold – Gallant 68. Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins) – Father John Misty 69. Coming Home – Leon Bridges 70. All Day – Kanye West featuring Theophilus London, Allan Kingdom and Paul McCartney 71. Glory – Common and John Legend 72. Need You Now – Hot Chip 73. Sausage – Lil Mama 74. Déjà Vu – Giorgio Moroder featuring Sia 75. Alone on Christmas Day – Phoenix featuring Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzmann, Buster Poindexter and Paul Shaffer 76. Smokin’ & Drinkin’ – Miranda Lambert featuring Little Big Town 77. She’s Not Me – Jenny Lewis 78. Omen – Disclosure featuring Sam Smith 79. For Sale – Kendrick Lamar 80. NWA – Miguel featuring Kurupt 81. Times Square – Destroyer 82. I Put a Spell on You – Annie Lennox 83. 4 Degrees – ANOHNI 84. Go – The Chemical Brothers featuring Q-Tip 85. Sometimes – Heems 86. Bitch Better Have My Money – Rihanna 87. Runnin’ (Lose It All) – Naughty Boy featuring Beyoncé and Arrow Benjamin 88. Smooth Sailin’ – Leon Bridges 89. Hell – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart 90. Simple Things – Miguel 91. Shivers – Courtney Barnett 92. Tom’s Diner – Giorgio Moroder featuring Britney Spears 93. Trap Queen – Fetty Wap 94. Tell Your Friends – The Weeknd 95. L$D – A$AP Rocky 96. These Walls – Kendrick Lamar featuring Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat 97. Love is Free – Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique 98. Country Down – Beck 99. Better in the Morning – Little Boots Click here to like Tunes du Jour of Facebook! Tagged as A$AP Rocky, Adele, Allan Kingdom, Anna Wise, Annie Lennox, Antony & the Johnsons, Arrow Benjamin, BC, Beck, Belle & Sebastian, Beyoncé, Bilal, Björk, Bloc Party, Blur, Britney Spears, Bruno Mars, Buster Poindexter, Charli XCX, Christine and the Queens, Chvrches, Common, Courtney Barnett, D'Angelo, Deerhunter, Demi Lovato, Destroyer, Disclosure, Drake, Dynas, EL VY, Elle King, Elle Varner, Eric Nally, Father John Misty, Fetty Wap, First Aid Kit, Galantis, Gallant, Giorgio Moroder, Glenn's Ten, Grandmaster Kaz, Heems, Hot Chip, Jain, Janelle Monae, Jenny Lewis, Jidenna, John Legend, Julio Bashmore, Jussie Smollett, Justin Bieber, Kacey Musgraves, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Keyone Starr, Kool Moe Dee, Kurupt, La Bagatelle Magique, Leon Bridges, Lil Mama, Lil Wayne, Little Big Town, Little Boots, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Macy Gray, Mark Ronson, Mary J. Blige, Melle Mel, Miguel, Miranda Lambert, Modest Mouse, Naughty Boy, Nicki Minaj, Paul McCartney, Paul Shaffer, Perfume Genius, Pharrell Williams, Phoenix, PWR BTTM, Q-Tip, Rihanna, Robyn, Run the Jewels, Ryan Adams, Sam Dew, Sam Smith, Santigold, Shamir, Sia, Slick Rick, St. Vincent, The Arcs, The Chemical Brothers, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, The Weeknd, Theophilus London, Thundercat, TV on the Radio, Years & Years, Yo La Tengo, Zack De La Rocha This week’s Throwback Thursday playlist spotlights the hits of 1995, starting with TLC’s “Waterfalls,” a song that features backing vocals by Cee Lo Green. Tagged as 20 Fingers, Alanis Morissette, Annie Lennox, Cee Lo Green, Coolio, D'Angelo, Des'ree, Edwyn Collins, Foo Fighters, Janet Jackson, L.V., Luniz, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Method Man, Rednex, Seal, Shaggy, Skee-Lo, Take That, the Presidents of the United States of America, Throwback Thursday, TLC, Tom Petty New Music! Today I present to you twenty current songs I’m listening to. Feel free to let me know what good ones I am missing. Tagged as Beck, Chvrches, Courtney Barnett, D'Angelo, Demi Lovato, Elle King, Galantis, Gallant, Janelle Monae, Jidenna, Julio Bashmore, Kendrick Lamar, Leon Bridges, Little Big Town, Miguel, Miranda Lambert, Pharrell Williams, PWR BTTM, Sam Dew, The Weeknd, Wale, Wilco, Years & Years, Yo La Tengo U Should Know D’Angelo You should know D’Angelo’s music. His debut album, Brown Sugar, turns twenty this summer. It’s a landmark in neo soul that sounds as fresh today as it did in 1995. D’Angelo’s second album, Voodoo, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary a couple of weeks ago. It builds on and surpasses his debut, with D’Angelo’s singing, writing and production stretching beyond what his contemporaries were doing. He surprise released his third album, Black Messiah, this past December. The Village Voice annual music critics poll placed it at #1 for 2014 album releases. Today D’Angelo turns 41. Here is an introductory playlist. You should know D’Angelo’s music. Tagged as D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Method Man, Redman February 5, 2015 · 9:30 AM The Song Retains The Name Today is Bobby Brown’s 46th birthday. A former member of New Edition, Brown had his first solo hit in 1988 with “Don’t Be Cruel,” which reached #8 on the Hot 100. Though it shares its title with an Elvis Presley #1 hit from 1956, Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel” is not a remake. That brings us to today’s playlist, which I call The Song Retains the Name. It consists of different songs with the same title. I initially planned to include twenty such songs, but more kept springing to mind. Before I knew it, I passed 100 entries. There are plenty more, so I decided to open this up to my reader(s). If you have songs that share titles you’d like to add, feel free to do so. (NOTES: I included The Jacksons’ “This Place Hotel” because when it was released in 1980 its title was “Heartbreak Hotel.” Thought he didn’t have to, Michael Jackson, the song’s writer, later changed its name to “This Place Hotel” to avoid confusion with the Elvis Presley song “Heartbreak Hotel.” Whitney Houston didn’t feel the need to make the same Hotel accommodation. Also, though it is listed on Spotify as “The Best of My Love,” the Eagles track does not have a “The” on the 45 or the band’s On the Border album.) Click here to follow Tunes du Jour on Facebook! Tagged as 50 Cent, Abba, ABC, Adele, Andrea McArdle, Annie, Antony & the Johnsons, Archie Bell and the Drells, Aretha Franklin, Avril Lavigne, B*witched, Bad Company, Barbra Streisand, Beck, Bee Gees, Billy Joel, Billy Stewart, Blondie, Bobby Brown, Bon Iver, Brenda Lee, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Bruno Mars, Bryan Russell, Buddy Holly, Cam'Ron, Carly Simon, Carol Lawrence, Carole King, Carpenters, Cee Lo Green, Chaka Khan, Charlie Wilson, Cheap Trick, Chic, Christina Aguilera, Christopher Cross, Climax Blues Band, Commodores, Connie Francis, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Crystal Gayle, D'Angelo, D:Ream, Daryl Hall John Oates, David Bowie, David Crosby, Deborah Harry, Del Shannon, Deniece Williams, Diana Ross, Dick Van Dyke, Dido, Dina Rae, Dion, Dionne Warwick, Dire Straits, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Don Johnson, Donna Summer, Donnie Iris, Donny Hathaway, Dragonette, Duke Bootee, Dusty Springfield, Eagles, Earth Wind & Fire, Eddie Rabbitt, Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris, Eve, Faces, Fairground Attraction, Faith Evans, Faith Hill, First Aid Kit, Fleetwood Mac, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Franz Ferdinand, Fred Schneider, Gabrielle, Garbage, Gnarls Barkley, Graham Nash, Grand Funk, Grandmaster Flash, Gwen Stefani, Heart, Hercules & Love Affair, Hole, Howard Jones, Inner City, Irene Cara, Jackson 5, James Brown, Janet Jackson, Jay-Z, Jefferson Starship, John Denver, John Stewart, Juelz Santana, Kanye West, Karen O, Kelly Price, Kenny Loggins, Kenny Rogers, Kim Weston, Kool & the Gang, Kylie Minogue, Lady Gaga, Larry Kert, Led Zeppelin, Lesley Gore, Lily Allen, Lionel Richie, Little River Band, Lorraine Ellison, Love and Rockets, Lupe Fiasco, Macy Gray, Madness, Madonna, Martin Solveig, Marvin Gaye, Mary J. Blige, Mary Lambert, Matthew Santos, Matthew Sweet, Maureen Stapleton, Mel B, Melle Mel, Meredith Brooks, MeShell NdegéOcello, Metallica, MGMT, Michael Jackson, Midge Ure, Miley Cyrus, Miranda Lambert, Missy Elliott, Moby, Modest Mouse, Morrissey, Mötley Crüe, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Neil Young, New Edition, Nicki Minaj, Nine Inch Nails, NSYNC, Ohio Players, Olivia Newton-John, Orleans, Patsy Cline, Paul Lynde, Paul McCartney, Paula Abdul, Pebbles, Peter Brown, Petula Clark, Pharrell, Pharrell Williams, Pilot, Pointer Sisters, Pretenders, Prince, Prodigy, Public Enemy, Pusha T, Queen Pen, R.E.M., Radiohead, Rick Ross, Rihanna, Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock, Robbie Nevil, Robbie Williams, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart, Ryan Adams, Salt -N-Pepa, Sam Cooke, Sam Smith, Santigold, Seal, Simon & Garfunkel, Sixpence None the Richer, Skee-Lo, Skyy, Sly & the Family Stone, Smashing Pumpkins, Snoop Dogg, Spandau Ballet, Stephen Duffy, Steve Miller Band, Stevie Wonder, Styx, T-Pain, Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, The Association, The Black Eyed Peas, The Black Keys, The Cars, The Chantels, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, The Doobie Brothers, The Drifters, The Duprees, The Emotions, The Floaters, The Go-Go's, The Human League, The Isley Brothers, The Jacksons, The Killers, The Kingsmen, The Manhattans, The Marcels, The O'Jays, The Primitives, The Rapture, The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, The Trammps, The Who, Timi Yuro, Tina Turner, TLC, U2, Whitney Houston, XTC, Yarbrough & Peoples Glenn’s Ten – January 28, 2015 It’s been awhile since I posted Glenn’s Ten, the ranking of my ten favorite songs of the week, so let me rectify that. At number one is Elle Varner with “Fuck It All,” which will be my wedding song. Elle is the only act in Glenn’s Ten this week who is there for the first time. Long-missing D’Angelo surprise released an album in December, from which two tracks are in this week’s tally. Kanye West surprise-released a single on New Year’s Eve. That song, “Only One” was last week’s #1. On it he is helped by Sir Paul McCartney, who makes his first Glenn’s Ten appearance since “No More Lonely Nights” in 1984. Mary J. Blige has also been absent from Glenn’s Ten for a number of years, but she is there now with “Therapy,” a former #1. Glenn’s Ten for this week is: 1 – “Fuck It All” – Elle Varner 2 – “Sugah Daddy” – D’Angelo 3 – “Only One” – Kanye West featuring Paul McCartney 4 – “Therapy” – Mary J. Blige 5 – “Break the Rules” – Charli XCX 6 – “Little Red Wagon” – Miranda Lambert 7 – “Really Love” – D’Angelo 8 – “Earned It” – The Weeknd 9 – “Stay Gold” – First Aid Kit 10 – “She’s Not Me” – Jenny Lewis Today’s playlist consists of those ten songs, followed by ten songs that were #1 on Glenn’s Ten on this date in past years. Tagged as Charli XCX, D'Angelo, Elle Varner, First Aid Kit, Glenn's Ten, Jenny Lewis, Kanye West, Mary J. Blige, Miranda Lambert, Paul McCartney, The Weeknd	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2229
__label__cc	0.553985	0.446015	“Govt. cannot deny Federalism to Tamil people” -Gajan Ponnambalam 27th July 2018 Karu LATEST UPDATES, SPECIAL NEWS, SRI LANKA NEWS, Uncategorized 0 All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) leader Gajan Ponnambalam, in an interview with the Daily Mirror, shares his views on the political developments of the north. Mr Ponnambalam, whose party made significant gains at the local government elections, speaks about Federalism. The following is what he shared: Tamil people are not going to ask for an armed struggle If there is going to be an armed struggle, it is the Sinhalese who are pushing them to it UNHRC has been used as a political tool UNHRC resolutions not aimed at addressing accountability issues here They are aimed at regime change in Sri Lanka only TNA is part of the government Law and Order was good in LTTE controlled areas There is nothing controversial about Vijeyakala’s statement Q As the leader of All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), how do you assess the current political situation? When you consider the last elections in 2015, we see the way the people voted and the expectations they had in the rejection of Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa to usher in a new political culture in the south. Later, people voted for the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) on the basis that they would have a good relationship with the party in the south and deliver on Tamil expectations. As far as the benchmark for the 2015 elections is concerned, there is total disillusionment certainly in the north and east, and also in the south. There is a very clear shift away from the TNA in all the districts in the north and east. In the case of the south, there is a resurgence of Mahinda Rajapaksa. The voting terms may be different. In a real political sense, there is a total resurgence of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s party. Q You mentioned that there is a resurgence of Mahinda Rajapaksa. How do you view that phenomenon from your party’s point of view? Even from 2010 onwards, Mahinda Rajapaksa’s political position in regard to the solution to the ethnic problem is fundamentally problematic to the Tamil people. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We reject that position. We see him pandering to the Sinhala nationalist sentiments. I personally do not have a problem with Sinhala nationalism. I do not reject nationalism. I am also a Tamil nationalist. There is nothing wrong in being a nationalist. Various forms of nationalism must be prepared to co-exist. Unfortunately, Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa has an ultra-nationalist position where he rejects any other form of nationalism. That ultra-nationalism is nothing but racism. The question is whether the alternative to it is any different. That is the key question. If the coalition government had taken a different line and said, “Mistakes have happened. The LTTE might have been defeated. But, the Tamil people are different. We have to deliver on their rights. If we do not deliver, the country will find it difficult to move forward. The international community did not like Mahinda because he did not deliver on the Tamil question in terms of war crimes, accountability and political solution. Therefore, they came down hard.” If they (the new government) had said that, I think there could have been a genuine change. They went on a totally opposite narrative. Their position is that it was they who protected Mahinda Rajapaksa. It is they who had safeguarded the military from any form of prosecution. They are trying to outbid Mahinda. In our view, it is not a regime. It is really the change in personalities. For us, it is unfortunate. Tamils are the vast majority living in the north and the east. If you look at upcountry Tamils, they are living in the south in fairly large numbers. You have a significant number of Sinhalese in the north and the east. No one is asking them to be chased away. Our accusation is that their settlements are State-aided colonization. Q Yet, the present government has undertaken certain projects such as the Constitution-making process. The TNA is part and parcel of that process. How do you respond? Kelum, I left the TNA because they said soon after the war was over that they were going to accept the 13th Amendment to the Constitution as the basis for a solution. The 13th Amendment is well within the Unitary State. You cannot be within a Unitary State and talk of devolution or Federalism. No one is talking about separation. Clearly, we are not talking about separation. Certainly, to exercise the right to self-determination in the north and east, you cannot be within a unitary state and do it. Yet, the TNA accepted it. So, we left the TNA. I cannot understand why Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa or any Sinhalese reject these political proposals backed by the TNA. These are proposals Tamil people have to reject. They are within the Unitary State. The TNA is lying to the Tamil people by calling it Federalism. But, it is not. After we told the truth to the Tamil people, they began to realize that they had been cheated. I don’t understand what the Sinhalese are worried about. Q What are the parameters of devolution you expect? In any Federal constitution, except for foreign affairs, currency and national defence to protect the country from foreign invasion, everything is devolved. Then, for convenience sake, there are subjects like national highways cutting across Federal units. In such matters coordination is needed. That has to be vested with the centre. There has to be self-rule to the region. Q You talk about self-rule to Tamils in the north and the east. But, a vast majority of Tamils live outside the north and the east. What about them? Kelum, Tamils are the vast majority living in the north and the east. If you take upcountry Tamils living in the south, there is a significant number of Tamils in the south. You have a significant number of Sinhalese in the north and the east. No one is asking them to be chased away. Our accusation is that their settlements are State-aided colonization. Yet, we are not asking the Sinhalese to run away. We are not saying that Tamils in the south must come to the north and the east. We have to make sure that the Sinhalese in the north and the east are comfortable and safe. When we say self-rule, it is not to disenfranchise the Sinhalese people living in the north and the east. They will be protected and given equal rights. But, the north and east, as a region, is Tamil speaking. That identity must be protected. Within that identity, non-Tamils can live. The same sort of arrangement will be there for Tamils in the south. Q How realistic is a Federal solution without cooperation from politics in the south? That is something the Sinhalese people have to think about. If they want this country to solve its problems without external interference, they must find a way to solve the ethnic problem. We are not talking about separation. Federalism is not separation. I do understand the Sinhalese people having a problem with a Separate State. But, you cannot deny Federalism. We are prepared to give all the guarantees you want, provided, that Tamil people can exercise their right to self-determination within a united Sri Lanka. We will ensure the Sinhalese people that we will not seek separation. Q Support for a Federal constitution is unlikely in the south as things stand at the moment. Then, how are you going to pursue your goals? Tamil people must have their rights. Q How are you going to achieve such rights in the absence of support from the south? That is something we will have to see. During the time of the LTTE, the international community told us that the Sinhalese people were willing to grant Federalism. It was the LTTE that was not ready to accept a Federal solution. The LTTE was only interested in separation. There is no LTTE today. Merely because the LTTE is not there, you cannot deny Federalism. The justification for the war was that the LTTE was for separatism. Q How are you going to get Federalism without cooperation from the south? Our view is that we must get Federalism. We will struggle to achieve it. Q Through democratic means… Q Some people express fear that there is the possible resurgence of the LTTE to fight for it. What do you think of it? Tamil people have been subjected to genocide in our view. If they have been subjected to genocide, they are recovering from it. Tamil people are not going to want an armed struggle. They want their right to make sure that they won’t suffer again. If there is going to be an armed struggle, it is the Sinhalese people who are going to push them to it. Q Today, the United States has pulled out from the UNHRC. That India is having a different attitude was said by some Tamil leaders. India is bent on resisting the Chinese rise in the region. In that context, how favourable is the international situation for you to fight for your rights? If you take the US and India, China is their fundamental concern. The US accusation is that the UNHRC is a political tool. Our accusation is that the UNHRC has been used as a political tool. The resolutions, passed in the UNHRC, were primarily aimed at regime change in Sri Lanka. That was also a political tool. It is ironic that the US makes the same allegation against the other countries. For the Tamil people, it is not a major loss that the US pulled out. The ultimate goals are not in Tamil people’s interests. The UNHRC resolution is not aimed at addressing accountability issues. It is aimed at regime change in Sri Lanka. The UNHRC resolution, as it stands, falls well short of accountability for the victims. Q The Northern Provincial Council will stand dissolved by October. How are you planning to contest the elections then? We will contest. I think there have been calls that current Chief Minister C. V. Wigneswaran has to get together with us. We have said that we are willing to work with him. We are willing to come to a coalition. Of course, it all depends on whom he is trying to accommodate. We are prepared to work with him if he creates a party. We are also prepared to work with civil society organizations and unions within the Tamil People’s Council. Q What about various parties in the TNA if they defected to join hands with you? Why are they defecting? We want a political culture in which Tamil politicians are held accountable to people. We left the TNA because their policies were wrong. We believe that they are cheating on the Tamil people. During election times, they said they were for Federalism. But, after the elections, they agreed to a unitary constitution. These parties never had a problem with the TNA policies. They had various other problems with the TNA. There were problems regarding the leadership. There are ego problems. Some parties were not given equal status. None of it had to do with policies. Our view is that any coalition should be based on policies. Yes, of course. You ask any woman in the north and east whether she felt safe now or then during the LTTE time. The answer will be unanimous. Even those who were opposed to the LTTE will tell you that they felt safe at that time. Q The TNA is the main opposition in Parliament. You also represented the TNA in Parliament at one point in the past. What do you think of their role? What have they done? They are part of the government. Only after they got a trouncing at the local government elections, have they started criticizing the government. They do it because they cannot come here otherwise. They won elections after the war on frauds. They lied to the Tamil people. They gave assurances to the Tamil people. Q What is the reason for criminal activities to rise in the north? We are talking about a situation. There is so much intelligence gathering in the north and the east. You could not have won the war without having such good intelligence. If there are these gangs, they cannot function without the knowledge of the military and the Police. That is a fact. It is impossible for anything to happen without their knowledge. Q UNP MP Vijayakala Maheswaran recently called for the resurgence of the LTTE. She said there were no criminal activities at that time. It became a controversial statement. What is your position? That is not controversial. In the LTTE controlled areas, the law and order situation was so good that women could walk at midnight alone on any road. That was how safe it was. That is a fact, Kelum. Today, when you have the military ratio of ten to one, criminal activities take place at this rate. You have to ask the military what they are doing. Q It means you also stand for the same viewpoint? Q But, there were so many political killings. Your father was also assassinated. How do you say the situation was good then? My father was assassinated by the Chandrika Kumaratunga Government. There were a lot of assassinations in the south. During the war-time, you cannot compare even. The Government did white van assassinations. That is a different thing. Those are matters associated politically. We are talking about law and order in the normal sense. Q What is your view on the next Presidential Election? Our view is that we will take a decision at that time. It will depend on what the candidates offer to our people. As far as how people voted at the previous elections, they did it by trusting the TNA. Today, people have lost their trust in the TNA. Don’t expect the people to behave as they did at the previous time at the dictates of the TNA! It will not happen. Mahinda and Vijayakala will never be arrested – Gammanpila Sri Lanka Black July 1983, Remembrance day, Panel discussion by BTF in association with All Party Parliamentary group for Tamils (APPGT-UK).	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2232
__label__cc	0.514437	0.485563	Unnoticed by the liberals, but not to the deplorables, and in spite of a massive propaganda campaign by the Jew-controlled media, the Democrat attempt to attack Trump and Russia has now collapsed into vague unproven allegations that the Russians might have done some anti-Clinton trolling (!) during the election. This in a world where George Soros pays people, including in the United States (and including in Russia right now!), to commit violent acts during phony 'spontaneous' demonstrations in order to subvert elected governments. It is as if the Democrats decided to do a high school drama production of the Church Committee, this time as a comedy. In the meantime, evidence that Barry did in fact, in some way (we can't know the mechanism unless officials of the NSA and CIA are deposed under oath, but in the blackmail world of the Panopticon I don't see that happening), did surveil Trump in the Trump Tower, no doubt with the intention of aiding Hillary's coronation, or just because he could, and that's what Presidents do. "Michael Flynn Offers to Testify Before Congress in Exchange for Immunity". Another obvious Trump trick. Will the Democrats fall for it, perhaps hoping for some slip they could turn into a Hail Mary? "2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports". Heavy and Cracked have taken over from the NYT as the American 'paper of record': "Ezra Cohen-Watnick: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know". "Rick Wilson suspects Steve Bannon, Ezra-Cohen-Watnick, and Mike Flynn lInked to Nunes scandal". "Trump May Be Right: The 'Five Eyes' Allies Do Spy On One Another" (Madsen). "Podesta Hits Daily Caller With Cease-And-Desist Letter Over Alleged Financial Disclosure Violations". The serious Russian treason scandals still lie in the Clintonista crowd. "Conspiracy Theorists Welcome in Corporate Media–if They Have the Right Targets". Looking for the leaker: "Meet the Midwestern Contractor That Appears Hundreds of Times in the CIA WikiLeaks Dump". "#HoaxGate: Neo-Nazi Brain Tumor Now Being Blamed for Jewish Center Bomb Threats" (cohencidence - see above, on how Jared saved Ezra's job). Yes, the tumor that is Hitler. Obviously, the only solution is to give Khazars more money. "Waffen-SS Veterans March In Baltic States, Jews Unusually Nuanced About It". WWIII. "Aiding Saudi Arabia’s Slaughter in Yemen" (Dennis J Bernstein interviewing Gareth Porter): "DB: I want you to talk about, it’s rather troubling to see this, and entertain this notion of using food and starvation as a weapon of war. But now we see a troubling collaboration in which the Saudis are trying to break the Yemen Central Bank which is sort of standing between this, where they are now, and absolute famine. You want to talk about that policy? I know the U.S. is deeply engaged. GP: Sure. Absolutely. I mean the point here is that, as you say, the Central Bank of Yemen was, last year, the last refuge, if you will, the last thing standing between many hundreds of thousands of people and potential famine, because it was providing what little liquidity was available in that country, for the purchase of food stuffs. Very, very few food stuffs still getting into the country. But what there was, you had to have money in order to purchase it. And liquidity was very, very scarce. So the Central Bank was the only thing that was guaranteeing a minimum of liquidity in the Yemeni economy. And I’m sorry to say that now it’s too late. The Yemeni government, really the Saudis behind them, of course, manipulating the Yemeni government, decided, in their wisdom, that they were going to break the Central Bank. They were going to eliminate it as a factor, in order to basically cause the population of Yemen such suffering, such starvation, that they would, somehow, turn against the government, the authorities, the Houthis and Masala forces, who have now formed their own government in Sana’a. So that was the strategy. And they did, in fact, eliminate the Central Bank of Yemen by fiat. They supposedly, they moved it to Aden, which is controlled by the Saudis, and their puppet government, the Hadi government. But it doesn’t function, it’s simply a non-functioning Central Bank. And it promised to actually provide the pay for millions, not millions, but 1.2 million civil servants on the payroll, but who are not being paid. Who have not been paid for many months now. But it hasn’t done it. And as a result of that, of course, you then had that many more people, as of last September, which is when all this happened, it was August and September [2016] when it happened. None of those 1.2 million people now have any source of income. And so that is clearly adding to the distress, to the hunger, and the potential starvation in Yemen." "Manhattan DA’s Office probing death of reporter with possible JFK ties". Post-Haim Onion has lost a lot of its vigor, but can sometimes still bring it. Alarm clock.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2233
__label__wiki	0.962618	0.962618	0 follower follow Yukon Blonde is a Canadian indie rock band originally from Kelowna, British Columbia. The band has been based in Vancouver since 2009. Yukon Blonde's debut EP was Everything in Everyway. Their debut self-titled album, which was recorded live-to-tape, came out in 2010. For both, they worked with record producer Shawn Cole, who has previously worked with such bands as Bend Sinister and You Say Party! We Say Die!. The band has toured the US and Canada, and played at such festivals as South by Southwest. The band was named one of the "10 Canadian bands destined to break in 2010" by the CBC, and Chart called the band the best of the 2010 Canadian Music Week festival. The album Tiger Talk was released in 2012. The band was nominated for the Juno Award for Breakthrough Group of the Year in 2013. On March 17, 2015 the band released the first taste of new material with the single "Saturday Night" which premiered through Paste Magazine. In October 2015, the band collaborated with Hey Rosetta! on the non-album single "Land You Love", a protest song about the 2015 federal election. Yukon Blonde will be performing at Chingacousy Park in Brampton, Ontario, to celebrate Canada's 150th on Canada Day, July 1, 2017. find out more info about this artist Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada Dine Alone Records Bumstead Years active : 2005 (2005)–present Members : Jeff Innes Graham Jones James Younger Rebecca Gray Past members : Adam Newton John Jeffrey yukonblonde.com Yukon Blonde Critical Hit	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2237
__label__cc	0.564088	0.435912	Second Payment Received from the Singapore Economic Development Board Zecotek Receives Second Payment From the Government of Singapore Economic Development Board Vancouver, BC, October 30, 2008 – Zecotek Photonics Inc. (TSX-V: ZMS; Frankfurt: W1I) today announced that it has received a second grant payment under the previously announced Government of Singapore Economic Development Board’s (EDB) Research Incentive Scheme for Companies. The payments cover a portion of Zecotek’s operational expenses in research and development and under the terms of the agreement, grant details remain confidential. “We continue to reap the benefits from the move of our operations to Singapore and the EDB has been central to the support of our efforts to commercialize our portfolio of photonic technologies,” said Dr. A. F. Zerrouk, Chairman, President and CEO of Zecotek. “From our headquarters in Singapore we have initiated sales of the RFO vanadate crystals, completed the manufacturing process of our MAPD solid-state photo detectors and established a strategic relationship with Fujikura to manufacture our Green Fiber Laser. The commercialization of our technologies is becoming a reality and we will continue to work closely with the EDB team as we bring new laser and crystal products through development into our customer’s hands.” Zecotek has consistently met or exceeded key critical milestones required under the grant program which included: developing a production prototype of the 3D display, establishing production of RFO vanadate crystals, completion of the development of the Green Fiber Laser, the MAPD solid-state photo detector, the PET/MRI project and several new types of solid state and fiber lasers. About the Economic Development Board (EDB) The EDB is the government’s primary agency that plans and executes strategies to make Singapore a compelling global hub for business and investment across manufacturing and internationally traded services. EDB works with other agencies to develop the human, intellectual, financial and cultural capital to help multinational and Singapore-based companies upgrade to higher value-creating operations and to thrive in a vibrant, self-sustaining enterprise ecosystem, a total environment for enterprises of all sizes. For more information please visit the Economic Development Board Website at www.edb.gov.sg. Zecotek Photonics Inc. (TSX-V: ZMS; Frankfurt: W1I), is a photonics technology company developing high-performance crystals, photo detectors, lasers, optical imaging and 3D display technologies for commercial applications in the medical diagnostics and high-tech industries. Founded in 2003, the company operates three distinct divisions: imaging, lasers and 3D display, with labs located in Canada, USA, Singapore and Russia. Zecotek commercializes its novel, patented and patent-pending photonic technologies directly and through strategic alliances and joint ventures with multinational OEMs, distributors and other industry leaders. For more information, please visit Zecotek Photonics. Caliber Capital Partners The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. If you would like to receive news from Zecotek in the future please visit the corporate website at www.zecotek.com. Private Placement Increased to $3.2 Million Zecotek Imaging China Retains China-Based Law Firm to Protect Intellectual Property Chinese Institute for High Energy Physics Commits to Zecotek’s LFS Scintillation Crystal for Adoption in Advanced Scientific Equipment Zecotek Announces $2.2 Million Private Placement Zecotek to Develop 3D Head-Up Display (HUD) with European Automobile Manufacturer	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2240
__label__wiki	0.954864	0.954864	Beatles Weren’t at War During White Album Sessions, Says Producer John Pratt, Keystone, Getty Images Giles Martin, producer of the expanded version of the Beatles’ White Album, argued against the perception that the LP was made during a difficult time in the band’s history, saying instead that it was a more “cohesive” experience than generally understood. Stories surrounding the 1968 LP include Giles’ father, the late George Martin, being “frozen out” of the creative process, and drummer Ringo Starr actually quitting for 11 days before being persuaded to return. Despite that, Martin Jr. said there was evidence of all four members working closely together in the previously unreleased material that arrives today. “The revealing thing for me is you go back and listen to the tapes, and what we have on the tapes is a cohesive unit playing together and working on songs together,” Martin told Billboard. “Listen to the sessions – they were very warm. And that’s the surprising thing. I think we thought the White Album was this disparate, angry record – and it has certainly elements of that – but, in essence, the four of them made an album together they wanted to make.” Discussing his father’s lack of input, he said, “They didn’t want an architect. They wanted to build an album from the bricks up and without any real idea about what it was going to be. They indulged themselves because they knew that each member of the band would make the song better.” He added that the Beatles’ retirement from touring contributed to the wealth of material laid down during the sessions. “I think the most revealing thing for me, working on the White Album, is just how creative they were, all of the time," he said. "It’s almost like the studio couldn’t handle the level of demand that they wanted to do and the amount of songs they wanted to record.” Beatles Albums Ranked Next: Every Beatles Song Ranked Source: Beatles Weren’t at War During White Album Sessions, Says Producer Filed Under: The Beatles Categories: Articles, News, Original Features	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2242
__label__wiki	0.836418	0.836418	Kristine Stiles France Family Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley 1987 M.A., University of California at Berkeley 1976 B.A., San Jose State University 1970 Kristine Stiles (Ph.D. 1987, University of California at Berkeley) is an historian of contemporary art and artists’ writings, and specializes in interdisciplinary experimental art, from performance and conceptual art to violence, destruction, and trauma in art. Her theoretical interests include Trauma Studies, Theater Studies, German Studies, Visual & Media Studies, Feminism, Race and Gender studies, and International Comparative Studies; she is increasingly interested in animal studies with a focus on horses. Among the courses that Professor Stiles has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level are Global Art and Its Ethics Since 1945; Performance and Performativity; Art & Text: Conceptual Art; Trauma in Art, Literature and Film; Introduction to Visual Culture; Theories of Visual & Media Studies; Documentary Photography of the Nuclear Age; and Curating World Art. In recognition of her distinguished contribution to undergraduate and graduate teaching, Professor Stiles received Duke University’s Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, and the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1994. Professor Stiles is the recipient of numerous awards, among them an Honorary Doctorate of Arts at Dartington College & University of Plymouth, England; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Grant; National Endowment for the Humanities Travel Grant; a United States Department of Education, Global Course Development Grant for her course on Documentary Photography, Social Activism, and the Nuclear Age; a United States Information Agency Grant for development of “American Studies & the Romanian Transition to Democracy,” a faculty exchange between Duke University and Bucharest University, a grant co-authored with Julie Tetel (Department of English); and the J. William Fulbright, Foreign Scholar, Teaching Grant to Romania (which she declined due to professional demands in the USA). Her latest book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (University of Chicago Press, 2016). With Peter Selz, she edited the first edition of Theories & Documents of Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 1996), she revised, expanded, and edited its second edition in 2012. She edited, annotated, and wrote the survey essay for Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Duke University Press 2010). Professor Stiles is also the author of Raphael Montañez Ortiz: Years of the Warrior, Years of the Psyche, 1968-1988 (El Museo del Barrio, 1988), a publication that includes her extensive annotated bibliography on the artist. Stiles was a practicing artist, some of whose work may be found her artist’s book Questions, with essays by Lynn Hershman, Kathy O’Dell, and Richard Irwin. San Francisco: KronOscope Press, 1982. For full list (and pdfs) of Stiles’ articles, see Publications. Recent essays published by Professor Stiles include: “Ion Grigorescu’s Gift” and “Acute Civility in Dan Perjovschi’s Core Drawings,” in Gabriela Gantenbein, ed. Textures of Thought: Geta Bratescu, Ion Grigorescu, Dan Perjovschi (Vienna, Austria: Passagen Verlag, 2015), 86-111, 151-178; “The Dangerous Mind of Kathryn Andrews, Hobo,” in Kathryn Andrews: Run For President (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2015): 98-127; “Ron Rozzelle, Painting as a Trust,” in Ron Rozzelle. Greenville, NC: Greenville County Museum, 2015; “Landscape of Tremors: Toward Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Cultural and Intellectual History,” in Peter Weibel, ed., CIVIC RADAR: Lynn Hershman Leeson Retrospective (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2016); “Necessity’s Other: Charlotte Moorman and the Plasticity of Denial and Consent,” Far Out! Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde (Evanston, IL: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, 2016); “Destruction Art,” “Anti-Art,” and “Fluxus,” and (with Kathy O’Dell) “Bodies in Action,” in Gabrielle Cody and Meiling Cheng, eds., Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres (New York: Routledge Press, 2016); “Destruction in Art,” in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016); “Bruce Conner’s Eyes,” in Bruce Conner (New York and San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2016); “DIAS, Wiener Aktionismus, ZOCK,” in La révolte des anges sortis des limbes. The Revolt of the Angels from Limbo. La revuelta de los ángeles salidos del limbo (Mexico City, Mexico: Fundación Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, 2016). “Carolee Schneemann’s Correspondence,” in Ron Hanson and Kenneth White, eds., Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016); and “Peter d’Agostino Walking the World,” in Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks: Crossing Natural-Cultural-Virtual Frontiers (London: Intellect Books, 2016). As a curator, Stiles’ most recent exhibition was Rauschenberg: Collecting & Connecting (2014-15) at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2014, with an online catalog was published by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation: http://shuffle.rauschenbergfoundation.org/exhibitions/nasher/ Stiles also curated the mid-career retrospective of the Romanian artists Dan and Lia Perjovschi, and edited and wrote the survey essay for the catalog: States of Mind: Dan & Lia Perjovschi (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2007). She curated and wrote the catalog for the exhibition Jean Toche: Impressions from The Rogue Bush Imperial Presidency (John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies at Duke University, 2009). Among other curatorial work, she served as a curator and judge for the IVth Nicaraguan Biennial, Managua, Nicaragua, with Virginia Perez-Ratton and Osvaldo Sanchez, 2003. Stiles has served as a curatorial consultant to the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, the Mead Art Museum, the Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, among many other museums and galleries. Contemporary global experimental art and theory, destruction in art and trauma studies, artists’ writings, and visual studies Smith Warehouse Bay 10, A251, Durham, NC 27708 Box 90766, Durham, NC 27708 awe@duke.edu Concerning Consequences:... Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, by Kristine Stiles, France Family Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, published by... read more » Rauschenberg, Looking Long... During an interview with Robert Rauschenberg and his dealer Leo Castelli in 1977, the writer and impresario Barbaralee Diamonstein read aloud Rauschenberg’s famous 1959... read more » Correspondence Course: An... Creator of such acclaimed works as the performance Meat Joy and the film Fuses, for decades the artist Carolee Schneemann has saved the letters she has written and received.... read more » Theories and Documents of... First published in 1996, this irreplaceable resource has now been updated, revised, and expanded by Kristine Stiles to represent thirty countries and more than one hundred... read more » Stiles, Kristine. Concerning Consequences Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Stiles, K., and Peter Selz. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. University of California Press, 2012. Stiles, K. Correspondence Course, An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle. Duke University Press, 2010. Stiles, K. States of Mind: Dan & Lia Perjovschi. Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2007. Stiles, K. Chris Burden. New York: Zwirner & Wirth Gallery, 2006. Stiles, K. AmaLia Perjovschi. Soros Foundation, 1996. Stiles, K. Dan Perjovschi’s Postcards From America. Pont La Vue Press, 1995. Stiles, K. Questions. KronOscope Press, 1982. Collier, J. H. Introduction. Vol. 30, 2016, pp. 1–2. Scopus, doi:10.1080/02691728.2015.1133392. Full Text Stiles, K. “'I’m Ready.' Thinking About Artists’ Writings in a Global Context.” Not a Day without a Line: Understanding Artists’ Writings, edited by Helen De Prester, Academia Press, 2013, pp. 177–203. Stiles, K. “Performance Art.” Oxford Bibliographies in Art History, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Oxford University Press, 2013. Stiles, K. “Wangechi Mutu’s Family Tree.” Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2013. Stiles, K. “Forward.” The Reflexive Photographer, edited by Rosie Miller et al., School of Arts & Media at Salford University, 2013. Stiles, K. “The Ideal Gifts of Istvan Kantor.” PERMANENT REVOLUTION: The Art of Istvan Kantor, edited by L. Feesey, The Istvan Kantor Collective, 2013. Stiles, K. “Comments on my first interview with Gustav Metzger.” Gustav Metzger, Years without Art, 2012, pp. 39–39. Stiles, K. “Conversation with William Pope.L.” The Voice of Images, Palazzo Grassi, 2012, pp. 181–93. Stiles, K. “Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky.” Peter d’Agostino: World-Wide-Walks [Paseos a Nivel Planetario] / between Earth & Sky [Entre La Tierra y El Cielo] / 1973 – 2012, Bizkaia de la UPV/EHU, 2012, pp. 22–34. Stiles, K. “7.47 a.m. (The Traumatic Visual Vocabulary of Maurice Benayoun’s So.So.So. Somebody Somewhere Some time).” Maurice Benayoun / OPEN ART 1980-2010, CDA d’Enghien and Les Nouvelles éditions Scala), 2011, pp. 83–87. Stiles, K. “Peggy Phelan and Kristine Stiles In Conversation.” Millennium Film Journal, no. 54, 2011, pp. 30–34. Stiles, K. “INSIDE/OUTSIDE: Balancing Between a Dusthole and Eternity.” Archive, vol. 1, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, 2008. Stiles, K., and Paul Grobstein. “The Art Historian and the Neurobiologist: A Conversation about Proprioception, the 'I-function,' Body Art, and Story Telling.” Serendip, Bryn Mawr College, Oct. 2005. Stiles, K. “Remembrance, Resistance, Reconstruction, The Social Value of Lia and Dan Perjovschi’s Art.” Idea, vol. 19, Cluj, Romania, 2005. Stiles, K. “David Tudor-Alive , Free, and Without Need of Culture (in a special issue, 'Composers Inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor').” Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 14, 2002, pp. 62–63. Stiles, K. “Review of RoseLee Goldberg’s Laurie Anderson.” Make: The Magazine of Women’S Art, vol. 90, 2001, pp. 90–90. Stiles, K. “Review of Pamela M. Lee’s Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta- Clark.” Caa.Reviews, the Online Reviews Publication of the College Art Association, 2000. Stiles, K. “Comisuri: Art Actiunile ca Objecte.” Balkon: Revista De Arta Contemporana, vol. March, no. 2, Timisoara, Romania, 2000, pp. 3–4. Stiles, K. “Joshua Neustein.” Bomb, vol. 57, [New York], Oct. 1997, pp. 80–81. Stiles, K. “Debate: Empty Slogan of Self-Representation.” Siksi [Helsinki], vol. Spring, no. 12:1, 1997, pp. 87–90. Stiles, K. “Art will be…2009-2034.” Duke Alumni Magazine, Duke University, May 2009. Stiles, K. “Notes on Rudolf Schwarzkogler's Images of Healing.” White Walls: A Magazine of Writings by Artists, vol. 25, Mar. 1990, pp. 13–26. “Laudation for Dan and Lia Perjovschi, who received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award”. January 1, 2013 “Thinking About Artists’ Writings”. January 1, 2013 “‘…but a hammer with which to shape it’: Media Art and Society 1963-2013”. January 1, 2013 “Working with Artists’ Writings”. December 1, 2012 “I’m Ready.” Thinking About Artists’ Writings in a Global Context”. Royal Academy of Fine Arts/Ghent University. December 15, 2011 The State of Trauma Studies in Art History. Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. October 3, 2011 “Ever so Far at Close Shooting Range: Warhol’s Polaroid Photographs". Department of Art History at the Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.. November 1, 2010 “Whose Ethics? Principles and Standards in Age of Global Art". September 1, 2010 “Global Techniques of Performance”. August 1, 2010 “World Trends and Contemporary Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art”. May 1, 2010 Editorial Board for the journal "Art and Documentation," Lodz, Poland. 2011 - 2014 Advisory Board for chapbooks "Transmission: Annual," Sheffield Hallam University, England.. 2009 Bag Piece \| at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring. Graduate School, Duke University. 2011 Center for International Studies, grant for research on Documentary Photographs and Films of the Nuclear Age. Unknown. February 2009 College Art Association grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Millard Meiss Publication Fund. 2008 Mary Duke Biddle Foundation Grant for Publication. Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. 2008 Fellowship. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 2000 Summer Stipends Awards. National Endowment for the Humanities. 2000 Trauma in Art, Lit., Film & Vc (ARTHIST 557S.01) Smith Wrhs A266, M 11:45 AM-02:15 PM Curatorial Practices (ARTHIST 722S.01) Nasher 119, W 10:20 AM-12:50 PM Trauma in Art, Lit., Film & Vc (VMS 557S.01) Curatorial Practices (VMS 722S.01) Theories Visual/media Studies (VMS 327S.01) Performance Art History/theory (ARTHIST 344.01) Nasher 105, TuTh 10:05 AM-11:20 AM History of Conceptual Art (ARTHIST 718S.01) Performance Art History/theory (VMS 344.01) Special Topics in Arthist (ARTHIST 790S.01) Smith Wrhs A290, W 08:30 AM-11:00 AM Smith Wrhs A290, M 08:30 AM-11:00 AM Global Art Since 1945 (ARTHIST 381S.01) Introduction to Visual Culture (VMS 202D.001) Smith Wrhs A266, TuTh 08:30 AM-09:45 AM Introduction to Visual Culture (VMS 202D.01D) Smith Wrhs A266, F 10:20 AM-11:10 AM Smith Wrhs A266, F 11:45 AM-12:35 PM Smith Wrhs A266, Th 03:05 PM-05:35 PM Performance and Performativity (VMS 710S.01) Smith Wrhs A266, MW 10:05 AM-10:55 AM Global Art Since 1945 (ARTHIST 381D.01D) Carr 106, Tu 11:45 AM-01:00 PM Carr 135, Th 03:20 PM-04:10 PM East Duke 204A, M 01:25 PM-03:55 PM Global Art Since 1945 (ARTHIST 381D.001) East Duke 204A, W 03:05 PM-05:35 PM Introduction to Visual Culture (VMS 202D.01) East Duke 108, MW 10:05 AM-10:55 AM East Duke 204A, F 10:05 AM-10:55 AM East Duke 204A, F 11:45 AM-12:35 PM Experimental Art in a Global (VMS 722S.01) East Duke 204A, Tu 03:05 PM-05:35 PM Topics Modern Art (ARTHIST 590S-8.02) TBA, Tu 03:05 PM-05:35 PM Experimental Art in a Global (ARTHIST 722S.01)	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2243
__label__wiki	0.66327	0.66327	2 dead in chase, shootout in Albany Park September 16, 2011 (CHICAGO) It ended with a shootout in the 5300 block of North Kedzie. Two men are dead this morning in two related incidents. At 10:30 p.m. Thursday, tactical officers responded to shots fired around the 4900 block of North Troy Street. A 19-year-old man was found dead from gunshot wounds at the scene. He was shot in the head about 10:15 p.m. and was pronounced dead at the scene. When police showed up, they say they tried to pull over a dark-colored S.U.V. But the driver fled, and police ended up chasing the vehicle in the 5300 block of North Kedzie. A passenger jumped out, fired at police and ran, and police killed that man, authorities say. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Police believe that the initial shooting was gang related. They have not released the identities of the two men who were killed. No officers were injured in the incident, according to a news release. The Independent Police Review Authority was notified of the police-involved shooting incident but did not have any other details, spokesman Eric Muellenbach said. He confirmed a weapon was recovered at the scene. Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Pat Camden said the vehicle involved was a Chevrolet Suburban and that the shooter was a man in his 20s. A male suspect driving the SUV was taken into custody, he said. The Cook County Medical Examiner's office could not immediately be reached to confirm either fatality. Belmont Area detectives and the IPRA are investigating. The Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this report.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2244
__label__wiki	0.675767	0.675767	A capsule look at top contenders for British Open Bydoug ferguson, ap golf writer Jul 12, 2019, 10:53 AM ET FILE - These are 2018 and 2019 file photos showing some of the golfers expected to compete in the British Open golf tournament. Shown are: Rickie Fowler, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose, Xander Schauffele, Adam Scott, Jordan Spieth, Gary Woodland and Tiger Woods. (AP Photo/File) A capsule look at 10 top contenders for the British Open, to be played July 18-21 at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland (listed in predicted order of finish): Age: 30. Country: Northern Ireland. World ranking: 3. Worldwide victories: 24. Majors: U.S. Open (2011), British Open (2014), PGA Championship (2012, 2014). 2019 majors: Masters-T21, PGA Championship-T8, US Open-T9. British Open memory: Going wire-to-wire to win the claret jug at Royal Liverpool in 2014. Worth noting: He might feel more pressure at Royal Portrush playing before the home crowd than at the Masters going for the career Grand Slam. He holds the course record at Royal Portrush, a 61 he shot when he was 16. Country: United States. Worldwide victories: 9. Majors: PGA Championship (2018, 2019), U.S. Open (2017, 2018). 2019 majors: Masters-T2, PGA Championship-1, US Open-2. British Open memory: Stopping play at St. Andrews when the wind was blowing so hard that golf balls wouldn't stay put on the green. Worth noting: In his last four majors, he has won twice and was runner-up twice. The British Open is the one major where he has not contended, which might be all he needs to hear. Majors: Masters (1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2019), U.S. Open (2000, 2002, 2008), British Open (2000, 2005, 2006), PGA Championship (1999, 2000, 2006, 2007). 2019 majors: Masters-1, PGA Championship-Cut, US Open-T21. British Open memory: Completing the career Grand Slam at St. Andrews with an eight-shot victory at age 24. Worth noting: Woods has played only three times and 10 competitive rounds since he won the Masters. This will be the second time this year he has a four-week break going into a major. The other was before the PGA Championship, where he missed the cut. Majors: U.S. Open (2016). 2019 majors: Masters-T2, PGA Championship-2, US Open-T35. British Open memory: Having the 36-hole lead at St. Andrews in 2015 until a 75-75 finish. Worth noting: He now has the career Grand Slam of runner-up finishes after he was second to Brooks Koepka at the PGA Championship. Is the undisputed best player in golf with only one major. World ranking: 36. Majors: Masters (2015), U.S. Open (2015), British Open (2017). 2019 majors: Masters-T21, PGA Championship-T3, US Open-T65. British Open memory: His birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie-par finish to win at Royal Birkdale. Worth noting: The British Open marks the two-year anniversary of his last victory. Whatever progress he was making was stalled by a 73-76 finish at the U.S. Open and a missed cut the following week at the Travelers Championship. 2019 majors: Masters-T32, PGA Championship-T8, US Open-1. British Open memory: Playing the 13th at Royal St. George's in 2013 in wind that blew the rain sideways, and the amazed look on his face to see members at adjacent Prince's Golf Club playing for fun. Worth noting: He has never finished better than 12th at the British Open. It's also the only major where he's never missed the cut. Will try to become only the seventh player to win the U.S. Open and British Open in the same year. Country: England. 2019 majors: Masters-Cut, PGA Championship-T29, US Open-T3. British Open memory: Holing a chip on the final hole at Royal Birkdale in 1998 to tie for fourth as an 18-year-old amateur. Worth noting: He went from making the cut on the number to a runner-up finish at the British Open last year. He won at Torrey Pines and has a pair of third-place finishes. But he has yet to post back-to-back top 10s in stroke play this year. Majors: None. 2019 majors: Masters-T9, PGA Championship-T36, US Open-T43. British Open memory: Playing in the final group with Rory McIlroy at Royal Liverpool in 2014. Worth noting: He has made the cut in 13 consecutive majors, the longest active streak in golf. But he hasn't contended in a major since his runner-up finish at the Masters last year. He has only two top 10s in the British Open. Country: Australia. Majors: Masters (2013). British Open memory: Losing a four-shot lead with four holes to play at Royal Lytham & St. Annes in a runner-up finish to Ernie Els in 2012. Worth noting: He now has gone 71 tournaments over the last three years since his last victory. He has been runner-up twice this year, at Torrey Pines and the Memorial, and he has played some of his best golf in the majors. 2019 majors: Masters-T2, PGA Championship-T16, US Open-T3. British Open memory: Sharing the 54-hole lead at Carnoustie last year. Worth noting: His four victories in three years on the PGA Tour include a World Golf Championship (HSBC Champions) and the Tour Championship. He was among those with a share of the lead on the back nine at the Masters. He has finished in the top 10 in five of the 10 majors he has played.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2245
__label__wiki	0.845428	0.845428	Man gets death, wife given life in prison for minor rape June 18, 2014 adpanadmin 17 June 2014, China Bai Yunjiang (right) is sentenced to death by a court in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang province, on Monday for murdering a 16-year-old girl in July. Bai’s wife, who lured the girl to their home and was pregnant at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. XIAO JINBIAO / FOR CHINA DAILY A man in Heilongjiang province was sentenced to death and his wife to life in prison on Monday for murder, rape and robbery in the death of a teenager who had been lured into their home. Bai Yunjiang and his wife Tan Beibei murdered 16-year-old Hu Yixuan after Bai failed in his attempt to rape her on July 24, 2013, according to the province’s Jiamusi Intermediate People’s Court. On that day, a pregnant Tan pretended she had belly pains and asked Hu, who was walking by, to escort her home, the court said, in order to lure the girl into the couple’s home. At the couple’s home, Bai gave Hu yogurt that was poisoned with a drug to make her unconscious. But the court said he failed to rape her after she fell asleep. The couple then suffocated the girl, put her body in a suitcase and buried it. The couple was arrested on July 28 and the body was identified the next day. Before the murder of Hu, Bai had raped two other girls last year, the court said. In both of these cases, Tan lured them into the couple’s home and gave them sedatives, after which the couple robbed them of their jewelry and Bai raped them, according to the court. The convicts pled guilty and apologized to Hu’s family during a court hearing last week. In the judgment, the court said that the couple deserved such extreme punishments, as their motives were despicable, the murder was brutal and the case brought great negative influence. Because Tan was pregnant during her detention and court hearing, the court did not give her the death penalty under the current Chinese Criminal Law. The convicts were also asked to pay 374,499 yuan ($60,840) to Hu’s family. Bai said he will appeal to a higher court, while Tan accepted the punishment. Sun Hongbo, Hu’s mother, was absent when the judgment was announced. The 43-year-old mother said on Monday that she was afraid to hear the case in court and that she could not accept Tan’s life sentence. The Jiamusi government is providing Sun with basic living allowances and a job, which can bring up to 1,200 yuan monthly, because her family lost their only child. “I’m poor and old, so I don’t want to have another kid,” said Sun, who added that she will speak with her lawyer about whether the compensation is reasonable. Wu Ming’an, a criminal law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, approved the court’s verdict, saying a woman cannot be sentenced to death if she is pregnant. “So the judgment is reasonable, although the woman’s behavior was harsh,” he said. Bao Yunhe, the mother of a 2-year-old girl in Jiamusi, said she has followed the case. She said Tan did not respect life, including her unborn baby, at that time. “I’ll tell my kid to take her own safety as priority, even though helping strangers should be encouraged,” she added. The convicted couple married in 2012, but fell out of love in May 2013 when Bai found out Tan had extramarital affairs with other men. The court said Tan felt sorry for her affairs and started luring girls home to Bai, the statement added. Tan gave birth to a boy on Aug 6, 2013. No one from Tan or Bai’s families will take care of the baby, but police said they have received phone calls from across China with offers to adopt the child because “he is innocent”. News and Developments, Uncategorized China Leave a comment ← Judge delays verdict over Bangladesh new year bombings Ministry of Home Affairs turns down Surender Koli, 4 others’ mercy plea →	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2246
__label__cc	0.523683	0.476317	HOME / PEOPLE / Eugene Richardson Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine (Harvard Medical School) Associate Physician, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Eugene Richardson, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Global Heath and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received his MD from Cornell University Medical College and his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Richardson previously served as the clinical lead for Partners in Health’s Ebola response in Kono District, Sierra Leone where he conducted mixed-methods research projects related to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak. His overall focus is on biosocial approaches to epidemic disease prevention and containment in sub-Saharan Africa. He has worked as a World Bank consultant for HIV prevention in Swaziland and as research scientist at the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Filter by Role Africa Advisory Board (20) Current Fellows (6) Executive Committee (22) Faculty Affiliates (67) HSAFP (4) HSAFP Fellow (9) Leadership Council (20) Past Fellows (10) Post-doctoral Fellow (1) eeac99674354c0fc1fc49d6b9f5ca084	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2248
__label__wiki	0.920198	0.920198	3 teens shot, wounded in Grays Ferry August 29, 2016: Philadelphia police say gunfire erupted at 12 a.m. at 27th and Tasker streets in Grays Ferry. By Annie McCormick GRAYS FERRY (WPVI) -- Three teenage boys are recovering after a shootout in the Grays Ferry section of Philadelphia. It happened at 12 a.m. Monday at 27th and Tasker streets. Police arrived to find two 16-year-old boys and a 17-year-old boy who had been struck by bullets. One of the 16 year olds and the 17 year old were shot in the thighs. The other 16 year old was shot in the lower back. That boy was taken to Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania. The other two boys were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. All were said to be stable. Police were working to determine if the teens were the intended targets or if they were hit by stray gunfire. Three teenagers were shot in the Grays Ferry section of the city. Bullets also struck several cars along the block. "We know at least 12 shots were fired from a semiautomatic weapon or weapons," said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. "We found 12 spent shell casings. However, where we found the shell casings - they were in two separate groups. So it appears there was some sort of shootout between two people or two groups of people." Video from the Action Cam at the scene showed a number of vehicles that were damaged by bullets. "We also found three vehicles that were hit by gunfire," said Small, "which was another indication that the shooters were firing in opposite directions." Police are checking surveillance video from both real-time, city-owned cameras and private cameras in the area as they work to determine what led to the gunfire and who was responsible. south philadelphiaphilly newsshootingteenagersguns	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2253
__label__wiki	0.933864	0.933864	Prince Albert surveys fmr. Grace Kelly home in East Falls (PHOTOS) Prince Albert II of Monaco waves after touring a house he recently purchased in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016. EAST FALLS (WPVI) -- Prince Albert II of Monaco was in Philadelphia on Tuesday inspecting a house he recently bought: the home where his mother, Oscar-winning actress Grace Kelly, grew up and accepted a marriage proposal from his father, Prince Rainier III. Albert spent nearly an hour inside the home and walking around the property, which he bought for $754,000. He waved to a handful of fans lined up on the sidewalk across the street from the home but made no public statements. Prince Albert of Monaco now inside the east falls house where his mother grace Kelly was born..he just bought the house!! pic.twitter.com/i2crUGrisy — Vernon_Odom (@Vernon_Odom) October 25, 2016 His cousin John B. Kelly III attended the inspection with him and said afterward the prince is still considering ideas about what to do with the 2.5-story Colonial home. Kelly said it's possible the home could house the U.S. office of the prince's charitable foundation, which focuses on environmental issues. He said they were also discussing ways the space could be used to showcase interests that Princess Grace held dear, like fashion, Irish literature, drama and athletics. But opening it as a full-time museum is unlikely, adding, "If it was successful, the neighbors wouldn't like us very much." Prince Albert II of Monaco was in Philadelphia on Tuesday inspecting a house he recently bought. For now, they are focusing on getting the home back in good condition while discussing ideas for its use. Kelly said they spent the time inside the house Tuesday reminiscing about parties and "hanging out in the garage." The home was built in 1935 by Grace Kelly's father, John B. Kelly. He was a three-time Olympic gold medal-winning rower in the 1920s and later a prominent businessman active in Philadelphia politics. Grace Kelly left Philadelphia at age 20 for Hollywood but remained adored by Philadelphians through the years. The city mourned after she died in 1982 from injuries she suffered in a car crash in France that involved her teenage daughter. She was 52. Once asked about memories growing up in Philadelphia, Kelly recalled walking along the Wissahickon Creek in Fairmount Park, saying it was her "greatest treat." Her childhood home last made headlines in 2014 when its 81-year-old former owner pleaded no contest to animal cruelty charges for keeping cats and dogs in unsanitary conditions. Officials with the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals seized 15 cats from the home and found the remains of several others. The owner had lived in the large brick house since 1973. John Kelly said Prince Albert had wanted to buy the home for a few years, but it hadn't been on the market until now. "It's been his idea and he really wanted to do this to preserve his mother's house, so he's very happy right now," Kelly said. real estatephiladelphia news	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2254
__label__cc	0.685414	0.314586	Sayyid Ammar Al Hakim Discusses with Iranian Ambassador the Development of Relations between Iraq and Iran at the Political, Security and Touristic Levels Sayyid Ammar Al Hakim, head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, received in his office in Baghdad on Tuesday, November 18, 2014 the Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Danaei Far. During the meeting were discussed the bilateral relations between the two countries. His eminence considered that the increase of officials’ visits between Iraq and Iran contributes in strengthening the relations. The two sides tackled the relations at the security level in the exchange of information and experiences as well as the preparations for the visit to Imam Hussain on his Arbaeen. They also talked about the support provided by the international coalition for Iraq to fight ISIS. In this context, his eminence stressed the need to include the support in the legal frameworks and to respect the sovereignty of Iraq. He also reiterated his trust in the capacities of the security forces and the popular crowd, giving as evidence the victories achieved in Baiji, Jurf Al Sakhr and Amerli. For his part, the Iranian Ambassador praised the victories accomplished by the Iraqi army and the popular crowd, affirming Iran’s support to Iraq in fighting terrorism.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2256
__label__cc	0.639782	0.360218	Low risk for car thieves A report released by the Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that arrests are made in only 16 per cent of car theft cases. In 1998 there were 131,600 vehicles recorded stolen in Australia. In the same year approximately 21,000 offenders were charged with motor vehicle theft. Of adult offenders, one-fifth (n=3,254) were convicted of the offence and a further one-third (n=1,140) imprisoned. In other words, only one in every 90 incidents involving an adult offender resulted in a custodial sentence. The report "The Stolen Vehicle Parts Market" also looks in detail at the stolen vehicle parts market in Australia, providing a snapshot of the industry, the links between legitimate and illegitimate business and how stolen parts are distributed. Estimates for the offence of motor vehicle theft, 1998 Gant, F. and Grabosky, P. 2001, "The Stolen Vehicle Parts Market", Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, no. 215, Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra. 2002. Low risk for car thieves. Crime facts info no. 16. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. https://aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi016 Preventing car theft in Australia: "golden opportunity" for partnerships Don Weatherburn, Bronwyn Lind Preventing car theft and crime in car parks Financing of terrorism: Risks for Australia Russell Smith, Rob McCusker, Julie Walters	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2259
__label__wiki	0.533611	0.533611	«I am keen to address emerging and existing concerns that fall within the scope of the mandate, and to focus on the implementation of international norms and standards, engaging with a wide variety of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner.» Dr. Ahmed Shaheed Special Rapporteur of the United Nations on Freedom of Religion or Belief Liviu Olteanu, Secretary General of the AIDLR, talking together with worldwide religious leaders, scholars and civil society organizations on United Nations plan of action and other exchanges on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FRoB) United Nations Headquarters, New York, July 2017 The following statement was issued by the Secretary General of the AIDLR, Dr Liviu Olteanu, after the conversation he had together with religious leaders, scholars and civil cociety international NGOs at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on 14 July 2017 in the context of the Launch by the UN Secretary-General, ANTONIO GUTERRES’, Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes. Dr. Olteanu met and talked separately with the following Religious Leaders: REV. KYOICHI SUGINO, Deputy Secretary General of Religious for Peace from New York; BANI DUGAL Principal Representative of Bahá’i International Community from New York; SADHVI BHAGAWATI SARASWATI, President Parmarth Niketan Ashram from Rishikesh in India; RABBI BURTON L. VISOTZKY Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York; YAHYA SERGIO YAHE PALLAVICINI, Vice-President, ISESCO Ambassador for Dialogue among Civilizations from Rome; REV. NURUDDEEN LEMU, Director of Research and Training at the Da'wah Institute of Nigeria; ARCHIMANDRITE EMANUEL YOUKHANA, Executive Director, CAPNI Christian Aid Program Nohadra-Iraq; PETER PROVE, Director, Commission of the Churches on International Affairs at World Council of Churches, Geneva Switzerland; Dr. MOHAMED ELSANOUSI, Director in the Washington DC Office of The Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers; MONICA FELTZ, Executive Director at International Justice Project; H.Y. HANSON, President at Zaytuna College, Berkeley California; Dr. IQTIDAR KARAMAT CHEEMA FCMI, Institute for Leadership and Community Development, Birmingham UK; Dr. Liviu Olteanu and religious leaders, scholars and NGOs Representatives evaluated together the perspective of the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Incitement to Violence and the necessity to foster the defense of freedom of religion or belief internationally by vigilance, education and training. Photos: Dr. Liviu Olteanu with some of the worldwide religious leaders:	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2260
__label__wiki	0.92417	0.92417	British & Irish Directors by RAMPARTisGREAT \| created - 14 Jan 2012 \| updated - 20 Mar 2012 \| Public List Order Date Added 77 names 1. Jim Sheridan Producer \| In America Jim Sheridan is a master story-teller, and an acclaimed film director of few films, but good films nevertheless. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1949, Sheridan moved to America in 1982, meeting a man who invited him to run the Irish Arts Center. He found a place to live in Hell's Kitchen, New York City,... 2. Mike Figgis Director \| Leaving Las Vegas Mike Figgis was born on February 28, 1948 in Carlisle, Cumberland, England as Michael Figgis. He is a director and writer, known for Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Stormy Monday (1988) and Timecode (2000). 3. Thaddeus O'Sullivan Director \| December Bride Thaddeus O'Sullivan was born in 1947 in Dublin, Ireland. He is a director and cinematographer, known for December Bride (1991), Nothing Personal (1995) and Stella Days (2011). 4. John Boorman Producer \| Excalibur John Boorman attended Catholic school (Salesian Order) although his family was not, in fact, Roman Catholic. His first job was for a dry-cleaner. Later, he worked as a critic for a women's journal and for a radio station until he entered the television business, working for the BBC in Bristol. ... 5. Mike Leigh Director \| Secrets & Lies Mike Leigh was born on February 20, 1943 in Salford, Greater Manchester, England. He is a director and writer, known for Secrets & Lies (1996), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) and Another Year (2010). He was previously married to Alison Steadman. 6. Ken Loach Director \| I, Daniel Blake Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Ken Loach has never succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood, and it's virtually impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context. After studying law at St. Peter's College, Oxford, he branched out into... 7. Stephen Frears Director \| Dangerous Liaisons Stephen Frears was born on June 20, 1941 in Leicester, Leicestershire, England as Stephen Arthur Frears. He is a director and producer, known for Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Philomena (2013) and The Queen (2006). He has been married to Anne Rothenstein since 1992. They have two children. He was ... 8. Stephen Daldry Director \| The Hours In 1989, Stephen Daldry worked as a freelance reader of unsolicited manuscripts for Literary Manager Nicholas Wright in the Scripts Department at the Royal National Theatre. In July of that year, he directed a Dadaist/expressionist production of "Judgement Day," a play by Odon von Horvath, at the ... 9. Antonia Bird Director \| Priest Antonia Bird was born on May 27, 1951 in London, England. She was a director and producer, known for Priest (1994), Face (1997) and Ravenous (1999). She was married to Ian Ilett. She died on October 24, 2013 in London. 10. Peter Greenaway Director \| The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Peter Greenaway trained as a painter and began working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information in 1965. Shortly afterwards he started to make his own films. He has produced a wealth of short and feature-length films, but also paintings, novels and other books. He has held several ... 11. Neil Jordan Writer \| The Crying Game Neil Jordan was born on February 25, 1950 in Sligo, Ireland. He is a writer and producer, known for The Crying Game (1992), Breakfast on Pluto (2005) and Michael Collins (1996). He has been married to Brenda Rawn since June 30, 2004. They have two children. He was previously married to Vivienne ... 12. Michael Apted Director \| Rome Michael Apted was born on February 10, 1941 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England as Michael David Apted. He is a director and producer, known for Rome (2005), Enigma (2001) and The World Is Not Enough (1999). He has been married to Paige Simpson since January 8, 2014. He was previously married to ... 13. Adrian Lyne Director \| Flashdance Adrian Lyne (Director/Writer/Producer) is the creative force behind some of the most talked-about movies of our time, among them, "Fatal Attraction", "9 1/2 Weeks", "Flashdance", "Indecent Proposal", "Jacob's Ladder" and "Unfaithful". Born in Peterborough, England and raised in London, Lyne attended... 14. Alan Parker Director \| Evita Prior to moving into film, Alan was noted as one of London's most talented advertising copywriters. He worked for the Collet Dickinson Pearce (CDP) ad agency in the 1960's and early 1970's, and began directing his own tvc scripts in their basement. Formed a partnership with David Puttnam as his ... 15. Guy Ritchie Director \| Sherlock Holmes Guy Ritchie was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK on September 10, 1968. After watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as a child, Guy realized that what he wanted to do was make films. He never attended film school, saying that the work of film school graduates was boring and ... 16. Peter Chelsom Actor \| The Space Between Us Peter Chelsom is a member of the British Academy, the American Academy, The Directors Guild Of America, and The Writers Guild Of America. Peter was born in Blackpool in the North of England. He is a US and UK citizen. (Trivia: he is an Honorary Citizen of a small town in Tuscany, Italy, called ... 17. Alan Clarke Director \| Screen Two Liverpool native Alan Clarke got his start in the film business in Canada, where he studied acting and directing. Upon returning to England he got a job at ITV, then moved over to the BBC in 1969. He worked mostly in television, but he made a couple of feature films that got attention for their ... 18. Danny Boyle Director \| 127 Hours Danny Boyle was born on October 20, 1956 in Manchester, England as Daniel Boyle. He is a director and producer, known for 127 Hours (2010), 28 Days Later... (2002) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008). 19. Ridley Scott Producer \| The Martian Described by film producer Michael Deeley as "the very best eye in the business", director Ridley Scott was born on November 30, 1937 in South Shields, Tyne and Wear (then County Durham). His father was an officer in the Royal Engineers and the family followed him as his career posted him ... 20. Tony Scott Producer \| Domino Tony Scott was a British-born film director and producer. He was the youngest of three brothers, one of whom is fellow film director Ridley Scott. He was born in North Shields, Northumberland, England to parents Jean and Colonel Francis Percy Scott. As a result of his father's career in the British... 21. Paul W.S. Anderson Writer \| Resident Evil: Apocalypse Paul W.S. Anderson gained a fair bit of notoriety in his native England when he directed the ultra-violent Shopping (1994) (which he also wrote), starring Jude Law and Sean Pertwee in a story about thieves who steal by ramming a car into storefronts. The film was banned in some cinemas in England, ... 22. Richard Attenborough Actor \| Jurassic Park Lord Richard Attenborough was born in Cambridge, England, the son of Mary (née Clegg), a founding member of the Marriage Guidance Council, and Frederick Levi Attenborough, a scholar and academic administrator who was a don at Emmanuel College and wrote a standard text on Anglo-Saxon law. ... 23. Peter Hall Director \| Screen One Sir Peter Hall directed his first play while he was still a student. He soon achieved prominence as a stage director. He started his occasional film work in 1968 with Work Is a 4-Letter Word (1968). He was the Artistic Director of The Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon from 1960 - 1968.... 24. Ken Russell Director \| The Devils Ken Russell tried several professions before choosing to become a film director; he was a still photographer and a dancer and he even served in the Army, but film was his destiny. He began by making several short films which paved the way for his brilliant television films of the 1960s that are ... 25. Nicolas Roeg Director \| Don't Look Now When he made his directorial debut in 1970, Nicolas Roeg was already a 23-year veteran of the British film industry, starting out in 1947 as an editing apprentice and working his way up to cinematographer twelve years later. He first came to attention as part of the second unit on David Lean's ... 26. Iain Softley Director \| Backbeat Softley was educated at St Benedict's School, Ealing, London, and Queens' College, Cambridge University, where he was a member of the college's dramatic society, the BATS, and directed a number of highly-praised theatrical productions. He worked for Granada TV and the BBC before becoming a director... 27. John Madden Director \| Shakespeare in Love John Madden was born on April 8, 1949 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. He is a director and producer, known for Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and Miss Sloane (2016). 28. Martin McDonagh Writer \| In Bruges Martin McDonagh was born on March 26, 1970 in Camberwell, London, England. He is a writer and director, known for In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). 29. Anthony Minghella Writer \| The Talented Mr. Ripley Anthony Minghella was the son of immigrants from Italy, who own an ice-cream factory on the Isle of Wight, where Anthony was born on January 6, 1954. He and his two siblings, Edana Minghella and Dominic Minghella, grew up there, a popular British holiday spot. After graduating from the University of... 30. Richard Kwietniowski Director \| Love and Death on Long Island Richard Kwietniowski was born on March 17, 1957 in London, England. He is a director, known for Love and Death on Long Island (1997), Alfalfa (1988) and Flames of Passion (1989). 31. Michael Winterbottom Director \| Genova Michael Winterbottom was born on March 29, 1961 in Blackburn, Lancashire, England. He is a director and producer, known for A Summer in Genoa (2008), A Mighty Heart (2007) and The Killer Inside Me (2010). 32. Peter Howitt Actor \| Sliding Doors Peter Howitt was born on May 5, 1957 in Manchester, England. He is an actor and director, known for Sliding Doors (1998), Johnny English (2003) and Dangerous Parking (2007). He has been married to Lorraine since August 5, 2001. 33. Sally Potter Director \| Orlando Sally Potter made her first 8mm film aged fourteen. She has since written and directed seven feature films, as well as many short films (including THRILLER and PLAY) and a television series, and has directed opera (Carmen for the ENO in 2007) and other live work. Her background is in choreography, ... 34. Gerald McMorrow Director \| Franklyn 35. Pat O'Connor Director \| The Ballroom of Romance Pat O'Connor was born in 1943 in Ardmore, Ireland. He is a director and writer, known for The Ballroom of Romance (1986), Sweet November (2001) and Fools of Fortune (1990). He has been married to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio since 1990. They have two children. 36. John Irvin Director \| Raw Deal John Irvin is a British director who has made more than thirty motion pictures in his career so far. Born in England, Irvin began his career working for British Movietone News. He directed his first film "Gala Day" a documentary financed by the British Film Institute which was bought by the BBC. ... 37. Paul McGuigan Director \| Lucky Number Slevin Paul McGuigan was born on September 19, 1963 in Bellshill, Scotland. He is a director and producer, known for Lucky Number Slevin (2006), Wicker Park (2004) and Victor Frankenstein (2015). 38. Terry George Writer \| Hotel Rwanda Terry George was born on December 20, 1952 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is a writer and producer, known for Hotel Rwanda (2004), In the Name of the Father (1993) and Some Mother's Son (1996). He has been married to Margaret Higgins since 1978. They have two children. 39. Bruce Robinson Writer \| Withnail & I Such is the mythology that has sprung up around Bruce Robinson's first film, the openly autobiographical Withnail & I (1987), that it's often hard to separate fact from fiction. But the facts appear to be these: trained as an actor at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, he got off to a... 40. Roland Joffé Director \| The Mission Roland Joffé was born on November 17, 1945 in London, England. He is a producer and director, known for The Mission (1986), The Killing Fields (1984) and The Scarlet Letter (1995). He was previously married to Jane Lapotaire. 41. Nick Love Writer \| The Football Factory Nick Love was born on December 24, 1969 in London, England. He is a writer and producer, known for The Football Factory (2004), The Sweeney (2012) and Monsters (2010). He was previously married to Patsy Palmer. 42. John Schlesinger Director \| Midnight Cowboy Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger, who was born in London, on February 16, 1926, was the eldest child in a solidly middle-class Jewish family. Berbard Schlesinger, his father, was a pediatrician, and his mother, Winifred, was a musician. He served in the Army in the Far East during World War ... 43. Derek Jarman Director \| Edward II Derek Jarman was born on January 31, 1942 in London, England as Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman. He was a director and cinematographer, known for Edward II (1991), Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1993). He died on February 19, 1994 in London. 44. Franc Roddam Writer \| Moby Dick Franc Roddam was born on April 29, 1946 in Norton, Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England as Francis George Roddam. He is a writer and producer, known for Moby Dick (1998), Aria (1987) and Quadrophenia (1979). 45. Julien Temple Director \| Earth Girls Are Easy Julien Temple was born on November 26, 1953 in London, England. He is a director and writer, known for Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), Vigo: A Passion for Life (1998) and The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (2015). 46. David Lean Director \| Lawrence of Arabia An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding ... 47. Jonathan Glazer Director \| Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer was born on March 26, 1965 in London, England. He is a director and producer, known for Under the Skin (2013), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000). 48. Peter Yates Director \| Krull Having seen Robbery (1967) and Bullitt (1968), it comes as no surprise that Peter Yates started out as a professional racing car driver and team manager - albeit briefly - before turning his attention to film. The son of a military man, he was educated at Charterhouse School and trained at RADA, ... 49. Michael Radford Director \| Il postino Michael Radford was born on February 24, 1946 in New Delhi, British India. He is a director and writer, known for The Postman (Il Postino) (1994), 1984 (1984) and The Merchant of Venice (2004). He is married to Emma Tweed. They have two children. He was previously married to Iseult Teran. 50. Damian Harris Director \| Gardens of the Night Damian Harris was born on August 2, 1958 in London, England. He is a director and writer, known for Gardens of the Night (2008), The Rachel Papers (1989) and Mistress of Suspense (1990). 51. John Badham Director \| WarGames English-born "Army brat" John Badham is the son of English actress Mary Hewitt and the stepson of an American Army general. Raised in Alabama and schooled at Yale, he cut his teeth producing and directing for TV before making his feature debut with The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor ... 52. Gillies MacKinnon Director \| Small Faces Gillies MacKinnon was born on January 8, 1948 in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a director and writer, known for Small Faces (1996), Trojan Eddie (1996) and Pure (2002). 53. Henry Jaglom Writer \| New Year's Day Henry Jaglom trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York, where he acted, wrote and directed off-Broadway theater and cabaret before settling in Hollywood in the late 1960s. Under contract to Columbia Pictures, Jaglom guest-starred in such TV shows as Gidget (1965) and The Flying Nun... 54. Kevin Macdonald Director \| The Last King of Scotland Kevin Macdonald was born on October 28, 1967 in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a director and producer, known for The Last King of Scotland (2006), How I Live Now (2013) and State of Play (2009). 55. Roger Michell Director \| Notting Hill Roger Michell was born on June 5, 1956 in South Africa. He is a director and producer, known for Notting Hill (1999), Venus (2006) and Titanic Town (1998). He is married to Anna Maxwell Martin. They have two children. He was previously married to Kate Buffery. 56. Mick Jackson Director \| Volcano Mick Jackson was born on October 4, 1943 in Aveley, Essex, England. He is a director and producer, known for Volcano (1997), The Bodyguard (1992) and Temple Grandin (2010). 57. Mike Newell Director \| Four Weddings and a Funeral Attended Cambridge University. Three year training course at Granada Television, with intention of going into theatre. Graduated to directing TV plays, building strong reputation for work with David Hare, David Edgar, Hohn, John Osborne, Jack Rosenthal. 58. Nick Hamm Director \| The Hole Nick Hamm is a BAFTA award-winning British director and producer whose work extends to feature films, television and theatre. Hamm spent many years as a resident director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, focusing on both Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights; the latter including, Howard ... 59. Marek Kanievska Director \| A Different Loyalty He is well-known for his work in film and television in both the UK and the United States. His feature film directorial debut, Another Country, won awards at the 1984 Cannes and Florence Film Festivals. His next feature film was Less Than Zero, the 1987 adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis' ... 60. Beeban Kidron Director \| Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit She came to prominence with the much lauded adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical novel 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'. Since then she's directed feature films, television dramas and documentaries. In 2008, she founded the charity called Filmclub with Lindsay Mackie. It has since ... 61. Mike Hodges Director \| Flash Gordon Mike Hodges was born on July 29, 1932 in Bristol, England as Michael Tommy Hodges. He is a director and producer, known for Flash Gordon (1980), Black Rainbow (1989) and Get Carter (1971). He was previously married to Jean. 62. Richard Eyre Director \| Notes on a Scandal Richard Eyre was born on March 28, 1943 in Barnstaple, Devon, England as Richard Charles Hastings Eyre. He is a director and producer, known for Notes on a Scandal (2006), Iris (2001) and Stage Beauty (2004). He has been married to Sue Birtwistle since 1973. 63. Nick Willing Writer \| Photographing Fairies Nick Willing was born in 1961 in London, England. He is a writer and director, known for Photographing Fairies (1997), Close Your Eyes (2002) and Alice (2009). 64. Suri Krishnamma Director \| Iron Men Suri Krishnamma is a director known for A Man of No Importance (1994), A Respectable Trade (1998), New Year's Day (2000), The Cazalets (2001), Locked In (2010), Bad Karma (2012) and Dark Tourist (2012). As a writer director he has made a number of short films, including Mohammed's Daughter (1987), ... 65. Stephen Poliakoff Writer \| Close My Eyes Stephen Poliakoff was born on December 1, 1952 in Holland Park, Kensington, London, England. He is a writer and director, known for Close My Eyes (1991), Perfect Strangers (2001) and Shooting the Past (1999). He has been married to Sandy Welch since 1983. They have two children. 66. Karel Reisz Director \| Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Karel Reisz was born on July 21, 1926 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia. He was a director and producer, known for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Morgan! (1966). He was married to Betsy Blair and Julia Coppard. He died on November 25, 2002 in London, ... 67. Tony Richardson Director \| A Taste of Honey Tony Richardson was born on June 5, 1928 in Shipley, Yorkshire, England as Cecil Antonio Richardson. He was a director and producer, known for A Taste of Honey (1961), Tom Jones (1963) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). He was married to Vanessa Redgrave. He died on November 14,... 68. Angela Pope Director \| Hollow Reed Angela Pope is a director who started her career making documentaries for television and the moved into TV drama and features. Born 1945 in Weybridge Surrey, she was educated at Tiffin Girls Grammar School , and at Sussex University, followed - briefly - by post graduate work at UCLA which, she quit... 69. Steve McQueen Director \| 12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen was born on October 9, 1969 in London, England as Steve Rodney McQueen. He is a director and writer, known for 12 Years a Slave (2013), Shame (2011) and Hunger (2008). He is married to Bianca Stigter. They have two children. 70. Oliver Parker Actor \| An Ideal Husband Oliver Parker was born on September 6, 1960 in London, England. He is an actor and director, known for An Ideal Husband (1999), Dorian Gray (2009) and Hellraiser (1987). 71. Alex Cox Director \| Repo Man Throughout his years in the industry, Alex Cox, an English writer-director, has not only proven his loyalty and integrity to cult cinema, but also his love for it. This all began in 1977, when Cox dropped out of Oxford University to study Radio, Film & TV at Bristol until graduating in 1977. Seeing... 72. Marc Evans Director \| My Little Eye Marc Evans was born in 1963 in Wales. He is a director and writer, known for My Little Eye (2002), Snow Cake (2006) and House of America (1997). 73. Michael Caton-Jones Director \| Memphis Belle Michael Caton-Jones was born on October 15, 1957 in Broxburn, West Lothian, Scotland as Michael Jones. He is a director and producer, known for Memphis Belle (1990), Basic Instinct 2 (2006) and The Jackal (1997). 74. Hugh Hudson Director \| Chariots of Fire Hugh Hudson was born on August 25, 1936 in London, England. He is a director and producer, known for Chariots of Fire (1981), Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) and The Tortoise and the Hare (1966). He has been married to Maryam d'Abo since November 2003. He was previously ... 75. Joe Wright Director \| Pride & Prejudice Joe Wright is an English film director. He is best known for Pride & Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007), Anna Karenina (2012), and Darkest Hour (2017). Wright always had an interest in the arts, especially painting. He would also make films on his Super 8 camera as well as spend time in the evenings... 76. Peter Cattaneo Director \| The Full Monty Peter Cattaneo was born on July 1, 1964 in Twickenham, London, England. He is a director and writer, known for The Full Monty (1997), Opal Dream (2006) and The Rocker (2008). 77. James Marsh Director \| The Theory of Everything James Marsh was born on April 30, 1963 in Truro, Cornwall, England. He is a director and producer, known for The Theory of Everything (2014), The King (2005) and Wisconsin Death Trip (1999). Other Lists by RAMPARTisGREAT To Watch in 2019 a list of 6 titles Modern Black and White Movies Hitmen & Killers Filmmakers, who mostly direct movies together See all lists by RAMPARTisGREAT »	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2261
__label__wiki	0.932366	0.932366	Posts Tagged ‘Charsadda twin blast 13/05/2011’ To take revenge for Osama’s Death, Tehrik-e-Taliban took 80 life of Muslims. Security officials inspect the site following a suicide and bomb attack outside the Frontier Constabulary (FC) headquarter in Shabqadar town, about 30 kilometres north of Peshawar. Pakistan's Taliban on May 13 claimed their first major strike in revenge for Osama bin Laden's death as more than 80 people were killed in a suicide and bomb attack on paramilitary police. –AFP Photo Twin blasts kill more than 80 in Charsadda, Pakistan. SHABQADAR: The Tehrik-e-Taliban on Friday claimed their first major strike in revenge for Osama bin Laden’s death as more than 80 people were killed and at least 115 were wounded in a suicide and bomb attack on FC personnel. “This was the first revenge for Osama’s martyrdom. Wait for bigger attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location. It was the deadliest attack in the nuclear-armed country this year and came with Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership plunged into crisis over the killing of the al Qaeda chief by US commandos on May 2. The explosions detonated in the Shabqadar Tehsil of Charsadda, as newly trained FC cadets were getting into buses and coaches for a 10-day leave after a training course, and they were wearing civilian clothes, police said. Shabqadar is about 30 kilometres north of Peshawar, the main city in the northwest region where militants linked to the Taliban and al Qaeda have repeatedly attacked government forces. Ahmad Ali, a wounded paramilitary policeman, recalled the horror when the explosions turned a festive Friday morning into a bloodbath. “I was sitting in a van waiting for my colleagues. We were in plain clothes and we were happy we were going to see our families,” he told AFP by telephone from Shabqadar hospital. “I heard someone shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ and then I heard a huge blast. I was hit by something in my back shoulder. In the meantime I heard another blast and I jumped out of the van. I felt that I was injured and bleeding.” Police officials confirmed that more than 80 people had been killed, making it the deadliest attack in Pakistan since November 5 when a suicide bomber killed 68 people at a mosque in the northwest area of Darra Adam Khel. “The suicide bomber came on a motorcycle and blew himself up among the FC personnel. The bomb disposal squad told me the second bomb was planted,” said the police chief of the Charsadda district, Nisar Khan Marwat. He said that around 20 shops and 12 vehicles were destroyed in the intensity of the blasts and put the death toll at more than 80. “Most of those killed are FC cadets. Five dead bodies of civilians were taken to the Shabqadar hospital,” he added. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the Pakistani Taliban last week threatened to attack security forces to avenge bin Laden’s killing in a US helicopter raid in Abbottabad. There has been little public protest in support of bin Laden in a country where more people have been killed in bomb attacks in the past four years than the nearly 3,000 who died in al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks. But under growing domestic pressure to punish Washington for the bin Laden raid, Pakistan’s civilian government said Thursday it would review counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States. It was unclear if the move was intended as a threat, but it showed the extent of the task facing US Senator John Kerry as he prepares to embark on a mission to shore up badly strained ties with Washington’s fractious ally. Washington did not inform Islamabad that an elite team of Navy SEALs had helicoptered into the garrison town of Abbottabad until the commandos had cleared Pakistani airspace, carrying with them bin Laden’s corpse. The covert night-time raid has plunged Pakistani politics into turmoil with both President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani facing calls to resign. Pakistanis have been outraged at the perceived impunity of the US raid, while asking whether their military was too incompetent to know bin Laden was living close to a major forces academy, or, worse, conspired to protect him. Gilani chaired a defence committee meeting that decided “to institute an inter-agency process to clearly define the parameters of our cooperation with the US in counter-terrorism”, an official statement said. Washington is pressing Islamabad to investigate how bin Laden and several wives and children managed to live for five years under the noses of its military in Abbottabad, just 40 miles north of Islamabad. Courtesy : Dawn \| AFP. Tags:Charsadda twin blast 13/05/2011, Frontier Constabulary (FC), Revenge for Osama bin Laden, Tehrik-e-Taliban Posted in Al Jihad, Islam against Muslims, Muslims attacking Muslims, Osama bin Laden, Pak Talibans, Pak Terrorism, Pakistani Terrorism, Radical Islam against Muslims, Talibans in Pakistan, Terrorism, The Dead Hand of Islam \| Leave a Comment »	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2263
__label__wiki	0.906222	0.906222	You are here: Home / Issues / Justice Campaigning for a smarter, more humane approach to crime that saves lives and builds safer communities. Urgent National Action Required The Royal Commission into Juvenile Detention in the Northern Territory has been released. Take action now and call for an urgent response from Australia Governments to this national tragedy. Support our call for action today! The over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the criminal justice system is one of the most significant social justice issues in Australia, with the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in all stages of the criminal justice system far exceeding their representation in the community. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise 3 per cent of the Australian population and they make up 28% of the total prison population, that is an imprisonment rate 13 times higher than the non-indigenous rate. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are also 7.9 times more likely to be taken into police custody than non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and are 12 times more likely to be in community based correction programs. The rates of incarceration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are worsening. Between 2001 and 2010, the imprisonment rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women increased by 59% and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men by 35%. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women now represent the fastest growing prison population in Australia with an increase of 20 per cent in the last 12 months alone. At the same time, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – especially women and children – are experiencing increasing amounts of violence with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women 34 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence. This is devastating lives. Key drivers that contribute to offence rates include: • inadequate or inappropriate education • inadequate housing • health issues including mental health • disability • access to employment • family violence • alcohol and other drug use It's time for a new approach Tough on crime campaigns that promote increased or mandatory sentences as the way to protect the community rely on the myth that harsher sentences deter reoffending. Yet the evidence shows that prison fails to deter, rehabilitate, meet public concerns and make communities safer. We need to move beyond "tough on crime" approaches to a "smart on crime" solution-focused approach to justice. We need a dedicated focus on reducing incarceration from all levels of government, and done so in real partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives. Government should set targets through the Council of Australian Government's (COAG) framework for Closing the Gap in Indigenous disadvantage and implement a justice reinvestment approach. ANTaR is a founding member of the Change the Record Campaign launched April 2015. Change the Record is a national campaign to address the disproportionate rates of incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the high levels of violence experienced, particularly by women and children. We need to invest in early intervention, prevention and diversion strategies. These are smarter solutions that increase safety, address the root causes of violence against women, cut re-offending and imprisonment rates, and build stronger and safer communities. We can do this and reduce the cost for all of us as taxpayers. Many of the solutions are already there. Now we need to make it happen, and do so in a way that empowers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, communities and services to drive these solutions. Together, we can change the record. Together, we can build stronger and safer communities. To Change the Record, we need to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to invest in holistic early intervention, prevention and diversion strategies. These are smarter, evidence-based and more cost-effective solutions that increase safety, address the root causes of violence against women and children, cut re-offending and imprisonment rates, and build stronger communities. Find out more about what's needed to change the record. It's time for a new approach - Justice Reinvestment Don’t let the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory gather dust! For 26 years Federal, State and Territory governments have failed to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The shocking result: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are locked up at 24 times the rate of other Australian kids The rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s incarceration increased by 77% between 2000 and 2015 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women comprise 34% of women behind bars but only 2% of adult female population Just over 12 months ago, the nation was shocked out of its complacency by the horrific revelations of abuse of predominantly Aboriginal children inside the Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre in the NT. This resulted in the establishment of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. The final report, released on the 17th November, is a critical moment to pressure government to take national action to address the appalling overrepresentation and treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in prison. In the last 12 months we’ve seen and heard distressing allegations of physical and sexual abuse in Cleveland Detention centre in Queensland, Barwon prison in Victoria, Bimberi detention centre in the ACT and Reiby detention centre in NSW, and Western Australia. We need national action to address this national crisis. We need national leadership. Working as part of the Change the Record Campaign, we’re pushing for a national plan of action. We cannot let this be another report that gathers dust, with little or no government action. Stand with us and demand change so we stop another 26 years of government failure and a generation being lost behind bars. Sign the petition to implement the 8 point plan for national action. Call for a National Youth Justice Action Plan We need 3,000 signatures. Already 2,506 of 3,000 signed the petition. The Petition Dear Prime Minister Turnbull, Since your government established the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, serious findings and allegations of abuse of children in prison have emerged in every state and territory. We cannot escape that this is happening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, who are 25 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous children. National leadership is long overdue. Now is the time for the Australian Government to work with state and territory governments through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to achieve this change, building on the findings of the Royal Commission’s final report. It is critical that this report is not shelved or ignored, like past inquiries. We call on the Australian Government, in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, to develop, resource and implement a National Plan of Action that includes: 1. Supporting children, families and communities to stay strong together 2. Raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 3. Getting children who are not sentenced out of prison 4. Adequate funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled legal services and other support services 5. Ending abusive practices in prisons 6. Setting targets to end the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in prison 7. Improving collection and use of data 8. Working through COAG to reform state and territory laws that breach children's rights This plan must have the support of all sides of government, at all levels, to achieve real change. We owe it to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids who have spent their childhoods behind bars and the next generation to ensure that they are supported to thrive in their communities, not suffer behind bars. We urge you to show national leadership at this historic opportunity for change. I agree that my name can be made public. * Demand an end to incarceration for unpaid fines The dire risk to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and men from being locked up for non-payment of fines must be stopped Just over three years ago a 22 year old Yamatji woman with her whole life ahead of her - Ms Dhu, died in a Western Australian Police lock up from a fatal infection stemming from a cracked rib arising from a family violence injury. Ms Dhu had been locked up for unpaid fines for three days. She was treated inhumanely by police while in custody. This tragic death was preventable. The impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of being put behind bars unnecessarily is devastating and was recognised more than 25 years ago by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The Royal Commission recommended ‘that Aboriginal people be imprisoned as a last resort and that Governments introduce an ongoing amnesty on the execution of long outstanding warrants for unpaid fines.’ Had the recommendations of the Royal Commission been implemented, Ms Dhu would still be alive today, and over-imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people wouldn’t be devastating communities. For example, of the 7462 prisoners received into correctional centres in Western Australia for fine default: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men represented 38% of the fine default male prison population; and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women made up 64% of the female fine defaulter prison population. Following the tragic death of Ms Dhu, the WA coroner recommended that there be no imprisonment for unpaid fines and that the WA Government investigate a Custody Notification Service similar to that operating in NSW and Victoria. These recommendations have not yet been implemented by the newly elected Western Australian government. Sadly, the laws and practices that contributed to Ms Dhu’s death are reflected around Australia and contribute to more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and men being fined and locked up for minor offences. Governments across Australia must act now to remove laws that disproportionately and unfairly criminalise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Take action now by writing to State and Territory Premiers/Chief Ministers and Attorneys General to tell them to stop locking up people for unpaid fines, and introduce a custody notification service for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We cannot let the tragedy of Ms Dhu be repeated. What can we learn from justice reinvestment? Mark Riboldi, Advocacy and Communications Manager at Community Legal Centres NSW highlights the importance of community-led justice reinvestment.When people say ‘justice reinvestment’, they could be referring to or thinking of a lot of different things, depending on their perspective and experience. If you read a few different definitions, particularly on government websites, the basic idea that comes through is a ‘reinvestment’ in local communities, specifically those with high crime statistics, to tackle the factors that lead to people ending up in the criminal justice system.Despite rates... After years of strong and consistent advocacy last week I got to hear Senator Patrick Dodson and Shadow Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, announce over $100 million for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Justice.If you have been following ANTaR’s advocacy work over the last 6 or 7 years you would know that we have long called for national support for justice reinvestment, for justice targets to be included in the Closing the Gap Strategy and for much better funding for the frontline services provided by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services.ANTaR’s work through the Change the... Free to be Kids Earlier today in Canberra we stood with peak Aboriginal organisations in front of Parliament House to launch the Change the Record: Free To Be Kids Action Plan. We then took our message inside Parliament in a series of meetings with MPs. Our message: The over-imprisonment and abuse of Aboriginal children is happening all over the country and urgently requires national leadership. Thank you to 1700+ supporters who have already signed our petition after just one week to support today. Many of you have also chipped in to help get the Sea of Hands and our team to Canberra. We... NT Royal Commission Report Released The Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory Report has been released following months of inquiring into the failings of the child protection and youth detention systems in the Northern Territory. Few who saw the images could forget the trigger for the establishment of the Royal Commission on Four Corners - Aboriginal child Dylan Voller hooded and shackled to a chair in Don Dale Detention Centre in Darwin. Please sign our petition to ensure this doesn’t happen again. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous... KPMG Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project Impact Assessment Last published: 27 November 2018Author: KPMG KPMG Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project Impact Assessment. This report outlines the findings into the changes in Bourke during 2017. Free to be Kids National Plan of Action On Monday 27 November outside Parliament House in Canberra, ANTaR and the Change the Record Campaign launched the Free to be Kids Plan of Action to tackle the over-imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Youth. Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory Report Overview Read(pdf 2 MB) Submission to Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry into Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Read ANTaR's Submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry into Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Last published: 28 July 2016Author: Change the Record Call for the Royal Commission to be conducted completely independently from the Northern Territory Government and for a broader inquiry into the youth justice system. “The Things That Must Be Done…” Last published: 24 February 2016Author: Bob Debus Bob Debus highlights the incarceration crisis in the Second Frank Walker Memorial Lecture - “The Things That Must Be Done…” Some Genuine Decision-Making Power: Dealing with the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the prison system A Blueprint for Change This Blueprint is the result of more than two years of collaboration between 16 leading peak Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies, legal organisations and human rights groups. It urges a whole of government strategy, the setting of justice targets, and a commitment to work in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, their organisations and representatives to drive solutions. How do we change the record Last published: 29 April 2015Author: Change the Record To Change the Record, we need to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communi-ties to invest in holistic early intervention, prevention and diversion strategies. These are smarter, evidence-based and more cost-effective solutions that increase safety, address the root causes of violence against women and children, cut reoffending and imprisonment rates, and build stronger communities. Here is our list of what needs to be done. Justice Campaign The over representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the criminal justice system is one of the most significant social justice issues facing Australia. Read more about it. Download our fact sheet. Government must act now to meet its commitment on justice targets It’s now time government acted on its commitment to set a destination and chart the course to get us there in relation to incarceration and to do so with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Government should put this issue on the COAG agenda as a matter of urgency and work towards the development of justice targets. It must meet its commitment on setting targets to reduce incarceration. By Andrew Meehan, ANTaR National Director Read(pdf 1.3 MB) Senate Inquiry into the value of a Justice Reinvestment approach to criminal justice in Australia In this submission ANTaR discusses the unacceptable over representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our prison system and the drivers of this imprisonment rate. We raise serious questions about the economic and social cost of imprisonment in the face of what appears to be an ineffective measure to reduce crime and make safer communities. We put forward Justice Reinvestment as a positive policy solution, defining this approach and the purported economic and social benefits of reinvesting justice funds using examples in the US and the UK to support these claims. We support the recommendations put forward by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services to progress the implementation of a justice reinvestment approach in Australia. National Call to Action Last published: 15 April 2011 Read ANTaR's National Call to Action, issued on the 20th anniversary of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handing their Final Report to the Governor-General. Submission to Inquiry into the high level of involvement of Indigenous juveniles and young adults in the criminal justice system In this submission, ANTaR makes a series of recommendations designed to achieve a reduction in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in custody and build the strength and capacity of local communities, including a national justice reinvestment approach. Change the Record website Action still needed on Deaths in Custody Royal Commission recommendations Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Full Report and Recommendations Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry into the incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples website Review of the implementation of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Indigenous Death in Custody 1989-1996 Just Reinvest NSW Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory Change the Record Campaign Blueprint For Change Senate Report - Value of a justice reinvestment approach to criminal justice in Australia Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee 1 August 2013 Doing Time - Time For Doing: Indigenous Youth in the criminal justice system Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2269
__label__cc	0.55174	0.44826	← Η ελπίδα έρχεται Gary Cooper and the Sheriff of Athens → Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! Posted on January 26, 2015 by Antigone1984.com Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. Athens, 26 January 2015 “The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star. Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give.” The above are threes stanzas from a chorus in the lyric drama “Hellas” composed by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) with a view to raising money for the Greek War of Independence (1821-1827). The work was inspired by the play “Persae” by the classical Athenian dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 BC) who fought for the Greeks in their victorious battle against the Achaemenid Persians at Marathon in 490 BC. Taking a break from the ballyhoo of the hustings, we were sitting quietly last night in stillness of the mild mid-winter air on the outside roof-terrace of the Grande Bretagne Hotel in central Athens, switching our attention from the spotlit Acropolis to the right, the peach-coloured neo-Classical Parliament building (the Bouli) to the left and far below us a rapidly emptying Syntagma Square, the political centre of the Greek world, as rival party-political groupies took down their marquees, folded up their banners and made off into the night, some to celebrate likely victory, others to lament probable defeat after a long hard day in which the voters of Greece went to the polls to elect a new parliament. The exit polls had just predicted a landslide victory for the left-leaning Syriza party and a crushing defeat for its main rival, the incumbent government party New Democracy. Awakening us from our musings, the door from the restaurant to the terrace suddenly opened and a small wiry man in his late forties shot out, took a quick digital photo of the Acropolis and then went back in. But not before he had turned to us, a demented gleam in his eye, and said in an accent that showed he could only have hailed from across the pond: “I wanted to take a photo of it while it was still standing.” And then he was gone. But not for long. The door to the restaurant popped up again a few seconds later and out he shot again, his nose twitching, his eyes still a-glare. He had further intelligence to off-load. “I just got back from Ukraine,” he said. “Let these guys here find out what 50 years of socialism will do.” And with that he was gone, vanished, volatilized. Who he was, what he was doing here, why he picked on us, we shall never know. In fact, the only thing we can say for certain about this dude is that he was not best pleased with the way the Greek election was turning out. However, a little earlier in the evening we had a concrete example of why the left was on a roll that night. Come evening, journalists, TV crews, photographers, party-political cadres and assorted hangers-on were camped out outside the Syriza HQ in Koumoundhourou Square in the inner-city Psyrri district not far from the Thiseio Temple waiting for the party leader Alexis Tsipras to appear and claim victory. Meanwhile, in a darkened part of the square, only 20 metres from the entrance to the Syriza block, a sick-looking grey-haired poorly-dressed man in his mid-sixties was rummaging around in a municipal rubbish container looking desperately for something to salvage – half-empty fast food cartons, rotten half-eaten fruit, half-empty drink cans, who knows what. There are hundreds of thousands of such unfortunates barely keeping body and soul together in today’s Greece. They are the result of six years of merciless austerity (the equivalent of “fiscal waterboarding” according to Syriza) imposed on the Greek people, with the connivance of the New Democracy government, by the hated triad of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for grudgingly conceded loans to bail out – not the people of Greece – but the Greek Banks and their international creditors. Even a worm will turn. By yesterday the man and woman on the Greek omnibus had had enough – or at least enough of them had. Casting fear aside, the fear of the unknown that had kept them loyal for the past six years to the self-serving euro-lickspittles of the government party and its yes-man ally, the pseudo-socialist party PASOK, unprecedented numbers of Greek citizens voted for change. Merkel’s Junker, Jean-Claude Juncker , the big kahuna of the Brussels bunker, said he wanted the Greeks to return the “old familiar faces” to power. Much good did it do him. The Greeks voted for new blood and for hope. They took to heart Syriza’s campaign slogan: Soon you’ll be able to hope again (“Η ελπίδα έρχεται”). RESULT OF GREEK PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS ON 25 JANUARY 2015 The results of yesterday’s ballot for the Greece’s 300-seat unicameral legislature – subject only to possible minor adjustment – are as follows: Syriza (149 seats, composed of the 99 seats it actually won plus a free bonus of 50 extra seats) 36.38 % of votes cast; New Democracy (76 seats) 27.81 %; the extreme right-wing Golden Dawn party(17 seats) 6.29 %; the centrist To Potami (The River) party (17 seats) 6.04 %; the KKE Communist party (15 seats) 5.50 % ; the right-leaning ANEL (Independent Greeks) party (13 seats) 4.73%; and the nominally socialist PASOK (13 seats) 4.66 %. Other parties fell short of the three per cent threshold needed to enter parliament. The percentage of the electorate that turned out to vote was 63.9 %. While Syriza was far and away the biggest winner of the day, it should be noted that New Democracy’s vote held up reasonably well, with only a limited decline in both its share of the vote and the number of seats it won – leaving aside the 50 free votes, which now went to Syriza – by comparison with the previous election in June 2012 (see the 2012 figures below). Mirroring the rise of right-wing anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe in recent years, Golden Dawn is now the third most popular party in Greece, although its share of the vote slipped slightly and it lost one MP compared with the last election. Extraordinarily, Golden Dawn MPs in the outgoing parliament, including its leader Nikos Michaloliakis, are on remand in Korydallos Prison in Piraeus awaiting criminal charges related to the party’s activities. The johnny-come-lately policy-lite centrist party To Potami (“The River”), led by TV presenter Stavros Theodorakis, did well to gain fourth place in terms of the percentage of votes gained, having come from nowhere. Formed in February 2014, it did not stand (or perhaps we should say “flow”) in the last election. The KKE Communist Party gained 3 seats and increased its percentage of the vote. The big loser of the day was the pseudo-socialist party PASOK, led by Evangelos Venizelos of the historic Venizelos political dynasty, whose vote crumbled in terms of both percentage and seats. It was not helped by the fact that the pseudo-socialist vote was split. The scion of a rival PASOK dynasty, George Papandreou, who was Prime Minister of Greece from 2009 to 2011, left PASOK this month to form his own party, the Movement of Democratic Socialists. This fledgling party failed to breach the 3% threshold for eligibility to sit in parliament. Another big loser in terms of both percentage and seats was the right-leaning ANEL (Independent Greeks) party. Paradoxically, it is with this party that the left-leaning Syriza has opted to go into coalition. Like Syriza, ANEL is said to be opposed to further austerity. RESULT OF GREEK PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS ON 17 JUNE 2012 The following, for comparison with yesterday’s results, is an extract from our coverage of the last Greek parliamentary election on 17 June 2012 in our blog Death of Pericles: Sparta defeats Athens . The excerpt also includes an explanation of the extraordinary “50 free bonus seats” given to the party winning the highest percentage of the vote. With almost all the votes counted in the 17 June 2012 ballot for the country’s 300-seat parliament, the result is as follows: New Democracy (129 seats, composed of the 79 seats it actually won plus a free bonus of 50 extra seats) 29.66 % of votes cast; the radical socialist party Syriza (71 seats) 26.89 %; the nominally socialist party Pasok (33 seats) 12. 28 %; the right-leaning ANEL (Independent Greeks) party (20 seats) 7.51%; the extreme right-wing Golden Dawn party(18 seats) 6.92 %; the Dimar (Democratic Left) party (17 seats) 6.25 %; and the KKE (Communist) party (12 seats) 4.50 %. Other parties fell well short of the three per cent threshold needed to enter parliament. The proportion of the electorate that turned out to vote was 62.47 %. According to Greek election rules, an extra 50 seats are granted to the party winning the largest percentage of the vote. What can possibly justify this negation of democracy that makes a mockery of the ballot? The system of voting used in Greek is, on the surface, proportional representation, that is to say, parliamentary seats are allocated on the basis of the percentage of votes cast. So why give an extra 50 seats to the party with the highest percentage of the vote? According to Le Monde, the idea is to “stabilise the result of the proportional ballot”. In fact, the idea is to shut out from government the smaller parties. The aim is to give the largest party – for free – enough votes to form a parliamentary majority by itself or in coalition with the next largest party. In plain language, the object is to ensure that the two big traditional parties, New Democracy and PASOK, continue to exercise a stranglehold over the government 0f Greece. The result, moreover, is to make the ballot non-proportional. In yesterday’s election Syriza won 149 seats – just south of the 151 seats needed to gain an absolute majority of 151 seats in the 300-seat parliament. Today 26 January 2015, in order to make good this narrow shortfall, the leftist party agreed to form an anti-austerity coalition with the rightist Independent Greeks (“Ανεξάρτητοι Έλληνες”) of ANEL, led by Panos Kammenos, a disgruntled former New Democracy MP. ANEL has 13 seats in the new parliament. On the basis of this agreement, President Karolos Papoulias, the titular head of state, asked Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras to form a new government. Fun and games assured! These are still early days. It is unclear: how well the left-leaning Syriza and the right-wing ANEL will work together over time; to what extent the hard-left factions within Syriza will accept any move towards centrist ground; to what extent the European and US political and financial elites will grudgingly accept the democratic decision of the Greek people; to what extent, alternatively, the European and US political and financial elites will surreptiously do all they can to thwart the new Greek government, not least out of fear that populist contagion might spread to other European states badly hit by externally imposed austerity (such as Spain, Portugal and Ireland, Italy and France not being immune to popular unrest either). For some indications as to the problems that lie ahead, readers who have not done so might care to check out the blog we posted on the eve of yesterday’s election: Soon you’ll be able to hope again(“Η ελπίδα έρχεται”). In that blog we were concerned that Alexis Tsipras might be another Felipe González. Another comparison we might have made is with French Socialist leader François Mitterand (1916-1996), who, as President of France from 1981 to 1995, jettisoned his initial socialist commitments for the status quo of the free market. The former firebrand trade unionist Lula da Silva, who was President of Brazil from 2003 to 2011, is another example of a politician who turned moderate once in power. However, we need not have gone so far afield to find a political figure that incarnated our concerns. A Mitterand contemporary, Andreas Papandreou (1919-1996) – father of George Papandreou (he of the Movement of Democratic Socialists that went belly up in yesterday’s election) – who was Prime Minister of Greece from 1981 to 1989 and from 1993 to 1996, followed the same political trajectory from left to right. The jury is still out as far as Tsipras is concerned. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS IT APPEARED TO ENTHUSIASTS AT ITS COMMENCEMENT [A poem by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) composed in 1805 and published in 1809] “Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself A prime Enchantress—to assist the work Which then was going forward in her name! Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, The beauty wore of promise, that which sets (As at some moment might not be unfelt Among the bowers of paradise itself ) The budding rose above the rose full blown. What temper at the prospect did not wake To happiness unthought of? The inert Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, The playfellows of fancy, who had made All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength Their ministers,—who in lordly wise had stirred Among the grandest objects of the sense, And dealt with whatsoever they found there As if they had within some lurking right To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood, Had watched all gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild, And in the region of their peaceful selves;— Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty Did both find, helpers to their heart’s desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish; Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!” Bliss was it indeed – the doubts born of experience being temporarily cast aside – to be alive in Athens at dawn today on the sun-kissed morning of 26 January 2015 – the sky a cerulean blue, the Mediterranean at Piraeus a subway ride away, the temperature heading for a warm sun at noon, lemons and oranges on every branch, palm-trees here, yukkas there and now and again a prickly cactus – a mere twelve hours after the Greek people had revolted against their own Ancien Régime. As the new Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in his victory speech last night outside Athens University: “Today the Greece of the oligarchs, of the elite, of the cover-ups was defeated. Victory was for the Greece that strives, that hopes.” You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts. For instance: Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012) Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012) The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012) Capitalism in practice (4 July 2012) Ladder (21 June 2012) A tale of two cities (1) (6 June 2012) Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012) Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts. This entry was posted in Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Literature, Luxembourg, Politics and tagged Achaemenids, Aeschylus, Alexis Tsipras, Andreas Papandreou, ANEL, Evangelos Venizelos, Felipe González, George Papandreous, Jean-Claude Juncker, KKE, Lula da Silva, Marathon, Mitterand, New Democracy, Pasok, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Syntagma, Syriza, William Wordsworth. Bookmark the permalink.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2270
__label__wiki	0.952214	0.952214	Droid Razr smartphone makes its debut with a host of new services Motorola has introduced the Droid Razr, a 7.1 millimeter-thick 4G LTE … Casey Johnston - Oct 18, 2011 7:00 pm UTC Photograph by CJohnst Motorola and Verizon Wireless jointly announced a new smartphone called the Motorola Droid Razr on Tuesday at a press event in New York. The two companies bill the phone as the thinnest ever at 7.1 millimeters, with a dual core processor and Super AMOLED screen. The Droid Razr has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM behind a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display. The phone measures 7.1 millimeters thick, save the usual Droid chin on the end holding the rear 8-megapixel camera, where it measures a couple of millimeters thicker. Motorola estimates the battery life at 12.5 hours of talk time over 3G and 8.9 hours of video playback. Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said that the specs were standouts for the class, but "to create the best smartphone, we had to add one more thing". That one more thing is access to Verizon's 4G LTE network, which is expected to roll out on a large scale over the next six months. In addition to the new Droid Razr, Motorola also announced a new streaming service titled Motocast, which allows Motorola smartphones, including the Droid Razr, to seamlessly stream content from a user's computer, even when the two devices are not on the same network. The streaming service also works with another new device Motorola announced, called the Motoactv, a small and square workout-centric phone primarily designed to act as a workout monitor that uploads logs to a website and an MP3 player (but can still take phone calls). Android 2.3 Gingerbread comes pre-installed on the Droid Razr, but representatives told Ars that the phone will be able to upgrade to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which is launching later tonight. Preorders for the Droid Razr will begin October 27, with the handset launching in November priced at $299 for 32GB of storage. Stay tuned for our hands-on pictures and impressions. Casey Johnston Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter @caseyjohnston	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2275
__label__wiki	0.530223	0.530223	Aly Raisman Biography Biography by Bartley Published on 22 Dec, 2015 Updated on 28 May, 2019 Facts of Aly Raisman 1994 , May-25 Alexandra Rose Raisman "Aly" Rick Raisman Lynn Faber Ameriacn Needham, Massachusetts Gymnastics at the 2012 Summer Olympics � Women's artistic team all-around View more / View Less Facts of Aly Raisman Aly Raisman is a professional gymnast and talented sports personality. She was a member and captain of both the 2012 "Fierce Five" and 2016 "Final Five" U.S. She is two-time Olympian and won several medals in her illustrious career. Early Life And Education Of Aly Raisman Aly Raisman was born Alexandra Rose Raisman on May 25, 1994, in Needham, Massachusetts, U.S. She is an American by nationality and belongs to the white ethnic background. Her birth sign is Taurus. Raisman is a daughter of Lynn Raisman and Rick Raisman. Her mother herself was a former high school gymnast. She has also three siblings Brett Raisman, Chole Raisman, and Madison Raisman. She was raised up in Needham along with her parents. When someone eats the last cupcake without asking if you wanted some..... #BabyAly A post shared by Alexandra Raisman (@alyraisman) on Aug 9, 2017 at 9:55am PDT She began her gymnastics training from a very old age. Her mother trained her since her early age. She developed her initial love for the sport watching the finest performance of the gold-medal-winning U.S. women's team at the 1996 Summer Olympics on VHS. She took training lessons at Exxcel Gymnastics and Climbing through Level 8. Aly Raisman's Professional Career Aly Raisman was also one of the important parts of TV show Dancing with the stars where she took 4th position during her time in the show. She also has won a bronze medal for an exact and proper balancing beam within the London games representing as an American gymnast. Raisman's mother kept her classes for the gymnastics and trained Excel Gymnastics. She also learned climbing at level eight. She later joined gymnastics clubs with the help of her coaches. Later she completed her high school education in the year 2012 from Needham High School. She was very attentive during her schooling. HAPPY BIRTHDAY @simonebiles A post shared by Alexandra Raisman (@alyraisman) on Mar 14, 2018 at 7:58am PDT Raisman was so sincere and focused towards gymnastics. During her very early age, she made up a mentality that she will be working as a gymnastic player during her future. Her professional life and personal life are the two different parts of her life. Raisman played several tournaments including the Olympics from where she earns several titles and medals. Raisman has now won gold and a silver medal for the United States of America in Women's team and individual all-around; we can expect her to get more popular now. After playing for almost a decade, she retired from the gymnastics in 2018. Besides, Aly Raisman reunited with Simone Biles ahead of Dancing with the stars semi-final episode. Simone is an American Gold medalist gymnast. She also c-starred in the Maroon 5's music video, ''Girls Like You'' featuring Cardi B. Aly Raisman's Net Worth And Salary Aly Raisman has earned a decent amount of net worth from her career which as per Celebrity net worth is around $2 million. She earned an impressive amount from her career. Besides, her Needham house was on for sale for $2.5 million. She also owns a house in Massachusetts. Moreover, she owns a Ferrari worth $252,800. With such earning, she is maintaining her lavish lifestyle. Aly Raisman's Personal Life And Affairs Aly Raisman is not married yet and has not any child. Talking about relationship status, Raisman was in a relationship with her boyfriend, Jamie McGill during her high school. They had been in a relationship for several years. The couple attended their high school prom together. After that, Raisman started dating with NFL player, Colton Underwood in the year 2016. Colton Underwood, born on January 26, 1992, in Indianapolis, Indiana, is a professional football player. He plays at the tight end position for San Diego Chargers as an undrafted free agent. He earns $450,000 annually from his work and has maintained an incredible net worth of $1.1 million. The couple met for the first time in Denver and secretly dated for a few months before it came out to the public. The two were also Instagram darlings all over their relationship, posting together swoon-worthy photos of themselves. The power couple, however, parted ways in August 2017. And as of now, Raisman is reportedly dating the 23-year-old gymnast and Bruins forward Tim Schaller. I was laying with Magic when Gibson got jealous and literally sat on Magic to get some attention Luckily my sister was there to capture the moment A post shared by Alexandra Raisman (@alyraisman) on Jun 23, 2018 at 4:59pm PDT She is also an avid animal lover who has two puppies Magic and Gibson. Raisman disclosed the accounts of sexual abuse supported by 100 other women who faced harassment by the 45-year old doctor Larry Nassar. Raisman who faced the sexual abuse during Olympics days said, ''He’s gonna die in jail but any number is never enough. But I’m glad because so many people are watching and I hope that it does set an example for all the other abusers out there that their time is up and that abuse is never okay.'' Check out the video where Raisman talks about the sexual misconduct: Later, Nassar has been sentenced to 175 years of imprisonment. Age, Body Measurements and Other Facts Birth sign: Gemini Height = Aly Raisman stands an amazing height of 1.5 meters (5 feet 2 inches). Weight = She weighs 115 pounds(52kg). Body Measurement = Her body measurement is 36-26-35 inches. Eyes color: Her eyes are brown in color. Hair Color: She has a natural black color hair. For more updates stay tuned with articlebio. American Gymnast American Millionaire Celebrity	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2276
__label__wiki	0.719632	0.719632	Ronni Hawk Ronni Hawk Biography Biography by Clarence Published on 30 Jul, 2017 Updated on 25 Aug, 2018 Facts of Ronni Hawk 1999 , September-9 Veronica Faith Hawk Ronald Hawk Bambi Hawk $20k per episode Stuck in the Middle, On My Block Bak Middle School of the Arts in Palm Beach, Florida. Katy Hawk and Ashlyn Hawk Ben Hawk & Jared Hawk and two sisters, Katy Hawk and Ashlyn Hawk View more / View Less Facts of Ronni Hawk Ronni Hawk is a young and talented American actress, well known for portraying as Rachel Diaz on the US-American youth - Sitcom, Stuck in the Middle. As of 2018, she is working on the Netflix's TV Series, On My Block. Before pursuing a career in acting, she built her career as a model and appeared in several commercials. Early life, Education, And Bio Of Ronni Hawk Ronni Hawk was born as Veronica Faith Hawk on 9th September 1999 in Boca Raton, Florida under the birth sign Virgo. She belongs to white ethnicity and holds an American nationality. Hawk is born to Ronald Hawk and Bambi Hawk. She has four siblings, two brothers, Ben Hawk & Jared Hawk and two sisters, Katy Hawk and Ashlyn Hawk. I Love You, Thank You Dad #happyfathersday A post shared by Ronni Hawk (@ronnihawk) on Jun 17, 2018 at 2:44pm PDT Hawk grew up learning performing arts. At the age of five, Hawk started studying classical ballet, jazz as well as modern at the Boca Ballet Theatre. She has also participated in various performances. Moreover, She went to Bak Middle School of the Arts in Palm Beach, Florida. She also took acting classes in Florida. Ronni Hawk's Career At the young age of 5, Ronni Hawk started learning dance in a theater. Hawk began her career in modeling when she was just 10 years old. She made her appearance as a child model in commercials and advertisements when she was just twelve. In her early career, she did modeling for several commercials like Bank of America, Kohl's Bealls, AT & T and Target. She made up her mind to pursue a career as an actress after she met two acting teachers in Los Angeles. Hawk along with her family moved to Los Angeles to pursue her career in acting. She later, appeared on several stage shows and nutcrackers when she was at Bak School of the Arts. Hawk started her professional career as Leah in 2014 in an episode of Playing Hooky. Two years later, she portrayed the lead character, the oldest of seven children, Rachel Diaz in Disney CHannel's comedy TV series, Stick in the Middle. She was associated in the series from 2016 to 2018 where she shared the screen with Issak Presley, Kayla Maisonet, Cerina Vincent, and Joe Nieves. Her performance was highly appreciated by both fans and audiences. @anthonysgraphx #omb A post shared by Ronni Hawk (@ronnihawk) on Jul 11, 2018 at 7:41pm PDT As of 2018, she is working as a friend of Ruby's family, Olivia in the Netflix's coming-of-age TV series, On My Block. The series starred Jason Geano, Brett Gray, Diego Tinoco, and Sierra Capri among others. Ronni Hawk's Net worth Ronni Hawk is one of the promising actresses in Hollywood. She is still very young and yet to make a mark in the industry. Hawk has acted in a numerous television series as well as movies from which she must have earned a good salary. However, her current net worth has not disclosed yet but as per several online sources, she has an accumulated net worth of $thousand. According to some sources, Hawk earns a salary of $20k per episode form the Netflix's TV series, On My Block. Furthermore, she has many upcoming projects from which we can assume to see a rise in her net worth in the coming future Ronni Hawk's Personal life The young actress, Ronni Hawk has maintained a low profile about her relationship status. However, there was a rumor that her boyfriend is Aaron Reiser after she posted a video of herself holding hands with him. Where she wrote: ''I love getting to travel around with you.'' Reiser made it clear through his Instagram after replying to the comments of his fans and explaining that Hawk is just his best friend. The talented and young American actress, Hawk has a hand full of work. She is hardworking and ambitious which might be the reason for giving first priority to her works rather than involving in any serious relationships. As of 2018, Hawk might be possibly single. Also, she is not married as she might not be ready to tie the knot or has not found the lucky one who would be her husband or spouse. Besides, Hawk is crazy about pets and has two dogs, Chanel & Paley and also has a cat named Lila. She loves to donate her time to animal rescue shelters. Rooni Hawk's Body Measurement Height = Ronni Hawk stands at the height of 5 feet 7 inches (1.7m). Weight = Hawk weighs 55 kg. Body Measurement = The actress has a perfect body with the body measurement of 32-24-33 inches. Check out the interview with Rooni Hawk: Aaron Reiser Boca Ballet Theatre	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2277
__label__cc	0.579688	0.420312	Ashwellthorpe Village Hall is available for private bookings including Wedding Receptions Following a successful Wedding Reception in July 2010 when the bridal party were very happy with the Hall and its facilities, the Village Hall Committee have agreed to offer the Hall for similar events at a flat rate of £100 for the day (if drinks are on sale, you will have to get a Special Events Licence from South Norfolk District Council) FILM NIGHT at ASHWELLTHORPE VILLAGE HALL SATURDAY 24 MARCH 2018 The next film showing at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall-in conjunction with Village Screen and Creative Arts East – is “GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN” at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday 24 March 2018. Doors Open at 7.00 p.m. Tickets available in advance cost £4.00 from Box Office 01508 481712, on the door price is £5.00 Refreshments available. More details about the film can be seen on the Events Calendar 16 March 2018, News, News Archive, Upcoming Events CASH BINGO at ASHWELLTHORPE VILLAGE HALL DON’T FORGET – Tonight, Friday 16 March 2018 sees another Cash Bingo night with Ronnie as the Caller. Doors open at 7.00 p.m. wih EYES DON at 8.00 p.m. BINGO NIGHT at ASHWELLTHORPE VILLAGE HALL – FRIDAY 19 JANUARY 2018 The first of Ronnie’s 2018 Bingo Nights at the Village Hall in Ashwellthorpe is on Friday 19 January with Doors Opening at 7.00 p.m. and EYES DOWN at 8.00 p.m. Come along and try your luck. 8 January 2018, SPRING 2018 FILM SEASON at ASHWELLTHORPE VILLAGE HALL The films that will be showing at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall between January and April 2018 – in conjunction with Village Screen and Creative Arts East – are: Friday 26 January 2018 – “Victoria & Abdul” – starring Judi Dench and Ali Fazal. Released in October 2017, this film tells the story of the unlikely but devoted friendship between Queen Victoria and a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim, who had come to England to participate in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. The film has a PG certificate and is of 1 hour and 51 minutes’ duration. Saturday 24 February 2018 – “Hampstead” – starring Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson and James Norton. This film was released in June 2017, relating the story of the friendship which is formed between an American widow living in the Hampstead suburb of London and a man living wild on Hampstead Heath. They campaign against unscrupulous property dealers in the area who are threatening the neighbourhood and, in particular, his home and his way of life. The film has a 12A certificate and lasts for 1 hour and 42 minutes. Saturday 24 March 2018 – “Goodbye Christopher Robin” – starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Will Tilston and Alan Lawther as Christopher Robin aged 8 and 18. Released in September 2017, this film tells the story of the author AA Milne, his wife Daphne and their child Christopher Robin after their move to the English countryside. The various stuffed animal toys belonging to, and played with by, Christopher Robin inspire his father to write the stories “Winnie the Pooh” and “The House at Pooh Corner”. This film has a PG Certificate and lasts for 1 hour and 47 minutes. Friday 27 April 2018 – “Film Starts Don’t Die in Liverpool”, starring Annette Bening and Jamie Bell. also with Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham. This is a biographical romantic drama telling the story of the legendary Holywood film star Gloria Grahame and her relationship with a young ‘jobbing’ actor in the Liverpool of the late 1970s/early 1980s, through health and her fight against breast cancer. The film contains strong language and the certificate will be shown later. Its duration is 1 hour and 45 minutes. The films will start at 7.30 p.m. on each showing, and the cost will be £4.00 if ordered in advance or £5.00 on the door on the night. The TRADITIONAL QUIZ ‘N’ CHIPS IS ALMOST HERE! SATURDAY 6 JANUARY 2018 – 7.00 for 7.30 p.m. Start the New Year in the traditional way by booking your tickets NOW on 01508 489464 for our January Quiz ‘ n’ Chips evening at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall. £8.00 which includes fish or sausage or vegge burger and chips. Maximum number of 6 people each team 31 December 2017, News, News Archive, Upcoming Events, Village Hall Another popular Cash Bingo evening with Ronnie Wright as the Caller, will be held at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall on Friday 15 December 2017 at 7.00 p.m. for EYES DOWN at 8.00 p.m. Raffle and Refreshments 20 November 2017, TWELFTH NIGHT QUIZ ‘N’ CHIPS at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall The traditional January Quiz ‘n’ Chips Night at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall will be held on Twelfth Night SATURDAY 6 JANUARY 2018 Put the date in your diary – more details nearer the time 1 November 2017, Community Information, News, News Archive, Upcoming Events “WHISKY GALORE” film at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall FRIDAY 24 NOVEMBER at 7.30 p.m. (Doors Open from 7.00 p.m.) This is your chance to see the 2016 film “Whisky Galore” starring Eddie Izzard, Gregor Fisher, Naomi Battrick and James Cosmo, at our Village Hall, showing in co-operation with Village Screen and Creative Arts East. The film has a PG Certificate and lasts for 1 hour 38 minutes. TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW from Box Office 01508 489432 – Cost £4.00 in advance, £5.00 on the door on the night. 30 October 2017, CASH BINGO at ASHWELLTHORPE VILLAGE HALL – FRIDAY 27 OCTOBER 2017 CASH BINGO continues at Ashwellthorpe Village Hall on Friday 27 October 2017 – Doors Open 7.00 p.m. with a prompt start at 8.00 p.m. Bring your own Refreshments. FILM NIGHT at ASHWELLTHORPE VILLAGE HALL – SATURDAY 21 OCTOBER 2017 There are still tickets available for the next film in Ashwellthorpe Village Hall’s Autumn season this Saturday evening – 21 October 2017. In conjunction with Village Screen and Creative Arts East, the film to be shown is the 2017 “The Zookeeper’s Wife” starring Johan Heldenbergh Jessica Chastain, Daniel Bruhl and Timothy Radford and is the true story about the Keepers of Warsaw Zoo who saved hundreds of people and animals during the 2nd World War Occupation. The film has a PG 13 certificate and is of 2 hours and 7 minutes’ duration. Tickets are £4.00 in advance from Box Office 01508 481712 and £5.00 on the door on the night. Doors Open 7.00 p.m. for a 7.30 p.m. start	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2278
__label__wiki	0.900657	0.900657	East Timor combines tourism with ecological recovery Local involvement protects species diversity and promotes unique approach to eco-tourism PETER GUEST, Contributing writer June 19, 2019 14:30 JST Ernesto Da Cruz hopes to use his local knowledge to become a tour guide. (Photo by Peter Guest) COM, East Timor -- Ernesto Da Cruz loads his spear gun and lowers himself over the edge of his fishing skiff, which is bobbing at anchor on a shallow reef off the northeastern coast of East Timor. Storm clouds have begun to congeal over the sea, coloring the water deep navy on the horizon, fading through indigo into crystal blue where it breaks against the cliffs. Da Cruz ducks below the waves and swims out, his progress marked by a plastic float attached to the line of his harpoon. Moments later, he resurfaces, dragging the cord back to the boat to land a whipray, leopard-spotted and nearly a meter across, which thrashes wildly in the hull. A tall, lean man in his forties, with a mullet hairdo and a red bandanna, Da Cruz honed his skills with a spear gun hunting the turtles -- leatherbacks, loggerheads, hawksbills and olive ridleys -- that used to be abundant in these waters, close to his home village of Com. "I used to be able to fill the boat with turtles in a day. Any big ones I saw, I'd kill them," he said. On a good day, he could make $200 by selling the meat and shells. Turtle hunting was common during Indonesia's 24-year occupation of East Timor, a small, young nation on the tip of the Malay Archipelago. Blast fishing using explosives dropped from boats destroyed coral reefs, the sea grass beds that support the region's endangered dugongs were ravaged, and coastal mangroves were cut back. That exploitation left poor areas like Com, isolated and heavily dependent on fishing for livelihoods, further impoverished as fish stocks collapsed. Locals such as Da Cruz were driven by short-term necessity to hunt turtles and take whatever fish they could without a thought for the long-term impact on the ecosystem. "This is how we had to provide for our families," he said. Ernesto Da Cruz, former turtle hunter-turned conservation volunteer (Photo by Peter Guest) Things began to change after East Timor's independence in 2002. Since 2009, a concerted effort by local communities and Conservation International, a U.S.-based environmental organization, has seen the creation of Marine Protected Areas -- no-take zones that allow reef fish to breed unhindered. Much of the conservation work and day-to-day management of marine areas has been devolved to coastal communities under a traditional system of governance known as Tara Bandu, which had been outlawed under Indonesian rule. Turtles and dugongs are protected, and their numbers are rising steadily, as are fish stocks. Ernesto Da Cruz ducks below the waves and swims out. (Photo by Peter Guest) East Timor's work on conservation has been a surprising success in a region that has often failed badly in protecting its ecosystems. Now, local communities and the government want to turn this ecological recovery into an economic one by finding new ways to support livelihoods in areas that still lack employment and basic infrastructure. For many people in Com, and in other coastal communities across the country, the expectation is that this dividend will come through tourism. "This place has unique value," said Sergio Jose Cristovao, Com's Xefe Suco (village chief). People in the village have worked hard to move away from unsustainable practices and to protect their environment, he said; now they need new ways to prove the value of that work. "The natural resources we have are unique... we have to use them to attract tourists here," Cristovao said. Sergio Jose Cristovao hopes to turn Com into a tourist town for divers. (Photo by Peter Guest) "It's all connected. We can attract tourists to come here again and see the things that we've been trying to protect," said Robela Mendes, who runs the Sina Guesthouse, a four-room hostel with breathtaking sunset views over the sea, abutting a white sand beach where turtles come up to lay eggs at night. Mendes, a local conservation volunteer, also owns a small shop selling local handicrafts, and runs demonstrations of traditional dyeing and weaving techniques in her backyard. "It's not just about having them come to our guesthouse. They can see the local products that we have here; it can give incomes to the whole community." Community volunteers and Conservation International staff relocate turtle eggs found on the beach in Com. (Photo by Peter Guest) There are now half a dozen guesthouses along the beach in Com. Conservation International has brokered deals with dive operators, linking the communities that manage East Timor's marine reserves with businesses that can commercialize the resources. Divers will pay $25 or more per dive, and numbers will be restricted to limit the potential for damage -- directly linking the value of the pristine reefs and rare wildlife to financial resources. The government is backing this strategy, at least rhetorically. At the solitary gate in the tiny airport in Dili a TV plays an advertisement exhorting investors to put money into developing marine resources. And infrastructure is being improved. The road from Dili to Com, mostly a spine-jarring dirt track, is being rebuilt by a consortium of Chinese companies. When the work is complete -- possibly as soon as the end of 2019 -- travel time from the airport to Com could be cut from between six and eight hours to three. Local communities hope that Com's natural beauty will attract tourists. (Photo by Peter Guest) Tourism development is fraught with risks, however. Across Southeast Asia over-exploitation of wildlife and landscapes has sometimes had devastating impacts. Indonesia is now debating whether or not to restrict access to the island of Komodo, where giant lizards have long been a draw for visitors, to allow the ecosystem to recover. Last year, Thai authorities indefinitely closed Maya Bay on Ko Phi Phi Leh island to tourists, while Boracay in the Philippines was shut for six months because of concerns about damage to its coastline. Trudiann Dale, Conservation International's country director for East Timor, said the biggest risk is that the government's enthusiasm for pushing tourism as a driver of economic growth could outstrip communities' capacity to manage the influx. The entire budget for the tourism ministry is $1.2 million, she said, while the budget for protected areas is $150,000. Robela Mendes demonstrates traditional weaving techniques. (Photo by Peter Guest) "The protected areas will underpin the tourism here because it's going to be more about nature-based and adventure tourism; it's never going to be the commercial, Bali type tourism," Dale said. "Having the tourism dollar come in is going to be of huge benefit to communities... but we don't want to end up in a crash and burn situation. That's a risk that we're all trying to avoid." Whether Com and its neighbors succeed in finding a balance between preserving and profiting from their natural resources could have far reaching implications. In early May, a new study from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a United Nations-backed scientific body, released a landmark report declaring that nature is in an "unprecedented" and "dangerous" decline worldwide, with a million species at risk of extinction. The IPBES warned that humanity was "eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide." A fisherman's boat floats away from the beach of Com. (Photo by Peter Guest) One of the report's findings was that ecosystems being managed by indigenous groups or community mechanisms -- like East Timor's Tara Bandu -- are in general better preserved than those that are not. These communities more often than not take a "stewardship" approach to managing resources, which emphasizes long-term value over short-term gain, said Michelle Lim, a lecturer in environmental law at Adelaide University and an expert on the intersection of conservation and sustainable livelihoods. The report also highlighted the dangers of seeking to translate the value of species and ecosystems into dollars and cents, and called for a reassessment of the paradigm of global development. Its message was that "a lot of the contributions that nature makes to human well-being aren't sufficiently quantified or can't be sufficiently quantified in terms of dollar value," Lim said. Sunset over the beach outside the Sina Guest House. (Photo by Peter Guest) In Com, Da Cruz gave up turtle hunting years ago, and joined a community conservation group. Using his knowledge of where turtles and dugongs could still be found, he helped to locate and study the animals that he used to hunt. Now, he hopes to do the same for tourists. Standing on a cliff top overlooking one of Com's marine protected areas, he demonstrated how his relationship with the animals has changed. He clapped his hands and whooped loudly out across the sea. After a few minutes, a huge turtle surfaced in the water below. The animals have learned that people are no longer a threat and sometimes come when called, he said. "Look after nature [and] nature looks after you." Japan's Bandai Namco looks for life after Gundam anime Cricket world cup highlights South Asia’s fault lines Japan's Shikoku named a top Asian destination by Lonely Planet East Timor tourism remains stuck in the slow lane Varanasi cleans up despite Ganges pollution failure Dams threaten traditional way of life in Mekong Basin	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2279
__label__wiki	0.578608	0.578608	Cape Farewell, Southern Tip of Greenland, from Endeavour STS-59 April 9, 2016 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment The Endeavour STS-59 crew took this photo of Cape Farewell, lower right, the southern tip of Greenland. April 16, 1994. (NASA STS059-224-021) STS-59 launched with my crew 22 years ago today, April 9, 1994. What an introduction to spaceflight, and to our planet’s beauty. Our crew on the Space Radar Lab 1 mission took this image looking north at the southern tip of Greenland. We were only 113 nautical miles up, and about 180 miles south of Greenland when we used a 250mm lens on a Hasselblad camera to get this tight image. Steep-walled fjords lace into Greenland’s mountainous coastline. The razor-sharp peak pointing south at the center of a spider-like pattern of fjords, just right of center, is Nuk. Narsaq Kujalleq, a small town of 97, lies on the fjord to the west of that small island at bottom center. At the left center edge of the photo is the town of Nanortaliq, with 1337 people. It’s a struggle to find named landmarks in Greenland–so few people, so many mountains and fjords. I’ve seen Greenland from a B-52 cockpit and on an occasional transatlantic air trip, but never touched land there. Someday soon, I hope. #Apollo45: Moon Memories December 14, 2015 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment July 2014 marked the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first time astronauts visited and walked on another celestial body. I recorded my memories of that event, and the inspiration it brought to me, at the #Apollo45 YouTube channel. Here is my video link. What do you remember seeing–and feeling–on July 20, 1969? The Apollo 11 crew on July 20, 2009, at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Aldrin (left), Armstrong, and Collins. (NASM) Filed Under: History, Space, Uncategorized Food for Thought…Just Before Liftoff September 10, 2015 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment Launch Morning Breakfast, STS-68: Aug. 18, 1994 (NASA) In a tradition dating back to Alan Shepard’s first U.S. spaceflight in 1961, astronauts are served a favorite meal before suiting up and heading to the launch pad–and space. On STS-68, scheduled for an Aug. 18, 1994 launch, I asked the dietitians at the NASA Astronaut Crew Quarters at Kennedy Space Center (my favorite was Dotti Kunde) to prepare a mushroom and cheese omelet with bacon, toast, fresh fruit, coffee, and orange juice. My crew gathered in the dining room of crew quarters for a ceremonial photo and a wave at the TV cameras, and a formal acceptance of our “mission cake,” a giant sheet cake with our SRL-2/STS-68 patch decorating the top. After the photos, the cake immediately went into the freezer and was delivered to Houston. We’d eat the cake when–and if–we actually returned from a successful mission. Breakfast was served between five and six hours before liftoff, so there was no possibility that any of this delicious food was going to still be in my stomach when I arrived in free fall. Hence, I needn’t worry about seeing any of it if I experienced a bout of space sickness on arrival in orbit. (Besides, I took anti-nausea meds on the launch pad, eliminating any possibility of “space adaptation syndrome” that might require me to deploy my space sickness bag.) Of course, this was just the first launch morning breakfast I’d enjoy on STS-68. I came back six weeks later for another one, following our pad abort on August 18 and Endeavour’s return to the pad for our next attempt. But that’s another story…. Thank you, Dot and friends, for a delicious breakfast. It was plenty tasty enough to make one intent on returning to Earth. Read more about STS-68 in “Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir.” Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: human spaceflight program, shuttle, space history Did UFOs Visit STS-80 Columbia? September 8, 2014 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment Homecoming 2/6 Marines, Fox Company February 19, 2011 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment I’m pleased to reprint the account below by Elaine Swierszcz Gaither, recounting her son’s recent return from Afghanistan (with permission): HOMECOMING 2/6 MARINES, FOX COMPANY, January 4, 2011 To understand the ending of the story, I have to begin at the beginning. In June, our family made a marathon round-trip to Camp LeJeune, NC to bid farewell to our son Josh, a Lance Corporal with the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, who was deploying to Afghanistan. We arrived a scant 90 minutes before departure, barely enough time to hug him one last time, tell him how proud we were of him, to reassure him (and ourselves) that he would be back before too long. I think it was the first time I truly realized how scared he was, how terrified I was. As hard as it was to say goodbye to him, it was almost harder to see the Marines saying goodbye to their children, their pregnant wives, the babies who would be celebrating their first Christmas without their dad. One Marine dad sat on the ground and played one last time with his young son. The families stood in the parking lot as the buses pulled out, waving until they were out of sight. And then a new family formed…a family of those left behind. We hugged, we cried, we gave words of encouragement and strength, we exchanged names, email addresses, and phone numbers. After a bit we were able to tear ourselves away and head home. As the months crept by we heard infrequently from our Marines, but as soon as one of us did, the word was passed. It didn’t matter that they were in different companies, different parts of Marjah, different jobs. One of our own was heard from, and we celebrated. Facebook became a lifeline for us. Like all families, we mourned each combat loss, celebrated each new member of the 2/6 family added by birth, consoled those whose Marine was injured, shared news about travels and illness. Life went on here in the States, and the family formed in that parking lot was there for support. In November we were given tentative arrival dates. Each company was assigned a three to five day window; Fox Company was due January 4 – 7. Excitement began to build, a flurry of information about travel arrangements and hotels was exchanged, welcome home banners ordered, and the countdown began. The days dragged on, the holidays came and went without too much celebration. On January 2, we got our 48 hour confirmed notice; Fox Company was due to arrive onboard Camp LeJeune Tuesday, 4 January at 1930 hours. It was time to head back to North Carolina. It was time to welcome our Marine home. I think that Monday was 100 hours long! The students in my classes kept asking me what was wrong…I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t concentrate…I now have a better understanding of ADHD! We left home at five in the morning on the fourth, seven hours later we were at the hotel in Jacksonville. We headed over to the base mid-afternoon; I had seven cases of Girl Scout Cookies and a huge carton of donated candy to deliver for the reception. We grabbed something to eat at the Commissary, found the rest of our family and friends who had made the trip, and headed over to the Field House. It was time to meet all those wonderful people I had met via the internet, and to say hello again to those I had met in June. Welcome Home signs hung from the bleachers, and the excitement and anticipation was almost palpable. Little ones played on the gym floor, wives clustered together, parents found each other and chatted, other Marines came in, many of them wounded, and waited with us for word that Fox Company was on the ground at Cherry Point, and enroute back to LeJeune. Around 6, cell phones began to ring, word began to spread as more and more of the Marines were calling their wives, their dads, moms, girlfriends…they were on the ground and headed back. Except they were still a good 90 minutes away, and they would first have to go to the Armory to turn in their serialized gear and weapons. The Marines would then march from the Armory to the Field House. The excitement continued to build and the wait became more and more unbearable. Finally, after hours of waiting, we heard they were at the Armory and then the announcement we were waiting for was made. If quite could be loud, it was. A silence fell over the Field House as the moments of waiting drew to a close. But it was a loud silence…maybe it was all the excited breathing, maybe it was the pounding of all our hearts, maybe it was the sound of joy. The doors swung open and in single file Fox Company began to march in. The roar of the crowd, the applause, all suddenly faded as I glimpsed Joshua coming through the door. I remember saying to someone the next day that it was like giving birth as he emerged into the Field House. I remember bursting into tears. I remember jumping up and down and whispering his name. As the Marines continued to come through the door, I again became aware of the noise, but I could not take my eyes from Josh. As the last Marine entered and stood in formation, the Company Commander (I think) made some brief remarks (I think it had something to do with the mission) and then, I swear, he dismissed the company. I bolted for Josh only to be stopped, because they had not been dismissed. Instead, all the members of Fox gathered around their leader, and they toasted the Marines who were not going to be coming home. Each of them popped open a beer they had been handed just before coming in to the Field House, and drank in memory of their fallen brothers. If there had been a dry eye in that building up until that point, there wasn’t any longer. The Marines were then dismissed, and I took off again. I got to Josh first, followed by other members of the family, and then his friends. I could not stop touching him. After Josh checked in to his new quarters, and I realized that none of the “civvies” we brought him would fit (he said they had nothing else to do but work out), we went out to dinner…it was, by now, 11pm. At the restaurant, following a Marine tradition, the family presented the now Corporal Gaither with his new NCO Ceremonial Sword. Eventually we found our way back to the hotel and ended what had been a very long, very emotional day. Almost three weeks later, I find myself still moved to tears by different things. We had delayed fully enjoying the secular aspect of Christmas until Josh began leave. I ordered a Welcome Home Cake with the Marine Corps logo on it. When I went to pick it up, I placed the cake in the bottom of the cart and went about shopping. One man passed me by and said “Semper Fi”. I was too stunned to respond. Another man stopped and asked about the cake. I explained and he said “tell your son thank you. Not many are willing to make that sacrifice so I can live in this wonderful country, and enjoy what we have here. And thank you for giving your son to us.” Then, as I was leaving the store, the guy who checks your cart and receipt asked me if my son had just gotten out of the Marines. I again explained that he had just returned from Afghanistan. The man reached over, hugged me and said “tell him a Vietnam Veteran says I’m glad he made it back and thank you.” After thanking him, I left the store in tears. I hide my tears from Josh when he offers up a short recounting of what he’s been through, what he’s seen. He has talked about bullets hitting the ground near his feet, about a buddy hit in the neck, a child who was shot. He talks about how they killed an animal purchased from a local farmer so the Marines could have something fresh to eat, how they couldn’t drink the water, how the children begged for food. He mentions the school that the Marines built and opened and how the girls wouldn’t go in to it, he talks about the irrigation ditches they had to jump over, how their feet were always wet. And he pulls out of his belongings a pile of small stuffed animals that people sent, and that he kept them to remind him of what he’d done, where he’d been, and how great it was that strangers remembered them. Our journey with the Marine Corps will probably end in June, unless Josh decides to re-enlist. For many reasons I think it would be a good thing for him to stay in, but I know that would, most likely, mean another combat deployment. I don’t know if I want to go through that again, I do know I will miss being part of a unique family. Semper Fi. By Elaine Swierszcz Gaither I’m so glad that Josh and his colleagues are “watching our six”! Thank you for sharing this story, Elaine. January 3, 2011 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 21,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships. In 2010, there were 17 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 99 posts. There were 22 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 16mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month. The busiest day of the year was February 2nd with 598 views. The most popular post that day was The President’s Take on NASA’s Future: Mission to Nowhere. The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com, twitter.com, home.comcast.net, and stumbleupon.com. Some visitors came searching, mostly for earth, panzer, p-47, space shuttle, and itokawa. The President’s Take on NASA’s Future: Mission to Nowhere February 2010 In the Thunderbolt on D-Day — a Hell Hawks! Excerpt in Air Force Times June 2009 An in-depth look at “Planetology” on “The Space Show” December 2008 Where’s the Vision? – Letter from Carpenter, Cernan, Duke, Buckbee February 2010 William Farrell’s “Thunderbolt Patriot” December 2008 Thank you to all my visitors in 2010, and best wishes for a Happy and Successful 2011! Astronaut Speaker Tom Jones — Appearances Summer 2009 June 24, 2009 By TOM JONES Leave a Comment Here are a few upcoming events where I’ll be signing Planetology, Hell Hawks!, and other books: June 27 — Barnes & Noble, Webster, TX — 7 pm — “Planetology” book signing July 6 — Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum — Baltimore, MD — “Future Space” — http://www.marylandaviationmuseum.org/events/index.html Sep. 16 — Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology — Kansas City — “Planetology” — http://space.lindahall.org/lecture3.shtml Sep. 22 — Air Force Academy Society of Washington, DC — Arlington, VA — “Hell Hawks!” — http://www.afasw.org/ Sep. 23 — National Museum of the U.S. Air Force — Dayton, OH — “Hell Hawks!” — http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Calendar/default.aspx Oct. 9 — Healthcare Financial Management Association — Atlantic City, NJ — “Sky Walking & Teamwork” Tom Jones speaks at the Maryland Science Center, June 2009 (APL) For more details about a speaking event with astronaut Tom Jones, contact his speakers bureau, or visit www.AstronautTomJones.com Why We Built the Space Station Check out this new film from United Space Alliance. A beautiful view of our foothold in space, discovering a better life on Earth. STS-119 drank in this view as they departed the Space Station, March 25, 2009 (NASA) Here, the departing STS-119 crew looks back at the nearly complete ISS. Compare it to the view I had in 2001. (read about how we built the ISS in “Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir“) My STS-98 crew said good-bye to the Station, with new lab Destiny, on Feb. 16, 2001. (NASA) And the Space Station is just a stepping stone…to the Moon, the asteroids, and Mars! Going Live with Orion at NASA JSC I appeared on Fox News Channel this morning, April 2, 2009, on America’s Newsroom, to discuss the new Orion crew exploration vehicle. Host Bill Hemmer conducted the inteview with me in Bldg. 9, the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF) at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Watch the 5-minute segment here. The Orion mockup in Bldg. 9 in Houston is used for crew seat arrangement tests, installation of proposed instrument panels and avionics, and fit checks of cargo container designs. Other mockups of the Orion crew module are involved in water handling and recovery tests (next week at the Cape), the Ares I-X flight test launch from Pad 39B in late summer, and in the upcoming pad abort tests at White Sands Missile Range, NM. Orion is the shuttle’s replacement. It’s time to get on with building and flying it. We will miss the shuttle. But it can’t go to deep space. America needs Orion to continue to lead in space exploration. Orion crew module mockup at Naval Surface Warfare Center near Washington, DC, on April 1, 2009 (NASA) The Voice of Quentin C. Aanenson December 31, 2008 By TOM JONES 2 Comments Quent Aanenson narrates "A Fighter Pilot's Story" (from his web site) Quentin C. Aanenson, in Tribute By Thomas D. Jones Quentin C. Aanenson, WWII fighter pilot and understated witness to the physical and psychic wounds of that war, earned national recognition fifteen years ago, when his self-written video documentary A Fighter Pilot’s Story aired on public television. Aanenson, who died on December 28, 2008 at the age of 87, was that fighter pilot of the title, surely one of the most reflective American warriors of the Second World War. Aanenson was born and raised in Luverne, Minnesota, but in recent decades was a life insurance executive and resident of Bethesda, Maryland. He set out in the early 1990s to make for his family a record of his combat experiences flying the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber in 1944-45, supporting Eisenhower’s GIs as they advanced from Normandy’s beaches all the way into the heart of Germany. He fought a very dangerous war, dive-bombing and strafing the German army from low altitude. Aanenson was over the D-Day invasion beaches in June 1944, and he directed air strikes as a forward air controller through the American crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. His frank observations of how the brutality of war affected his own life during and after combat offered today’s Americans some of the most revealing insights into what “the Greatest Generation” experienced in World War II. Aanenson’s video combined his own photographs with images and film garnered from the National Archives, woven together with his memories and excerpts from his letters home. He wrote to one particular girl: Jacqueline Greer, a secretary he had met at the airfield in Baton Rouge where he trained in the powerful Republic P-47. Jackie was his confidant, and his letters home to her, and her replies, formed the narrative backbone of the moving A Fighter Pilot’s Story. The love Aanenson expressed to her and the support Jackie lent him in those letters proved a welcome island of tenderness in the swirl of combat that surrounded him for nine months. Word of Aanenson’s powerful story soon spread beyond his family and friends and led to a 1993 broadcast on Maryland public television. A Fighter Pilot’s Story went on to air nationally, adding to the historical tribute being paid to America’s WWII veterans to mark the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Aanenson’s introspection was rare among fighter pilots, men of few words, selected not for their self-awareness but for aggressiveness in the air. They typically let their record in combat do the talking. Quentin Aanenson was an exception. Co-author June English and I included one of his letters home to Jackie in our 1998 book for young people, chronicling the nation’s military history. His words, telling her what he was going through, how the deaths of close friends affected him, were direct even as they tried to spare her the horrors he saw every day from this Thunderbolt. Aanenson’s letter helped us bring home to today’s young Americans what it meant to be a citizen-soldier in World War II. Flying with the 391st Fighter Squadron of the 366th Fighter Group, Aanenson saw much of death and destruction as the Allies pushed the German army across France and penetrated Hitler’s Reich. Attacking rail yards in Rouen, France in July 1944, his Thunderbolt took a direct hit from a deadly German 88mm antiaircraft shell. The fuse failed to explode; he flew the battered plane back to base. On August 3, German flak over Vire again caught his plane, damaging his controls and setting his cockpit afire. Battle damage had jammed his canopy; he couldn’t bail out. Trapped, Aanenson determined not to burn alive in the cockpit: he dove his plane, “looking like a comet,” straight toward the ground. But the steep, high-speed plunge extinguished the fire, and the 23-year-old pilot somehow got the Thunderbolt lined up with his nearby runway. He put the barely controllable P-47 down at 170 mph, but a blown tire caused the damaged landing gear to collapse, spinning the big fighter around. The impact tore loose his shoulder harness and cracked his skull against the gunsight. Two ground crewmen pulled him from the smoking wreckage, unconscious but alive. Ninety minutes later, burns bandaged but still suffering from a concussion (which caused blinding headaches for years after), Aanenson managed to stand in front of his mangled fighter for a Picture Post photographer. The image captured a young man, wounded, weary–yet determined to do the job he was assigned until victory was won. How did he climb into a cockpit to face death again and again? “It changed from patriotism to fighting for my buddies and the guys on the front lines,” he told me in June 2006 in an interview for a new book about the Thunderbolt men. Assigned in the winter of 1945 to direct air strikes from an observer’s post on the front lines, Aanenson lived and fought with the GIs he had helped so often from the air. On Feb. 23, near Duren, Germany, an enemy shell exploded in his post in the great hall of a ruined castle, spraying him with bits of what had once been a soldier’s body. He calmly brushed off the gore and got back on the radio, vectoring more Thunderbolts onto the target. After surviving 75 combat missions, Aanenson rotated home in March 1945, and a month later married his sweetheart, Jackie. Their marriage, forged in the harrowing separation experienced by so many wartime couples, thrived for 63 years. Producer Ken Burns featured the Aanensons’ story in his epic 2007 documentary The War. Thrust into that devastating conflict, Quentin Aanenson faced its horrors again and again, and fought determinedly to bring his country victory. Ninety of his fellow pilots from his 366th Fighter Group didn’t make it home. He closed A Fighter Pilot’s Story with these words: Only rarely, now, in my dreams or nightmares, do I revert to those days of death and despair that took place so long ago. I see the faces of my buddies who were killed. I see them as they were ‑‑ while those of us who survived grow old ‑‑ they will be forever young. I will always remember them ‑‑ and I will always wonder how it was that I escaped their fate. Aanenson’s powerful postwar testimony reminds us of that sacrifice, freely offered up by so many to guarantee the liberty we enjoy today. With Quentin Aanenson’s fellow airmen, and grateful Americans everywhere, I mourn his passing, even as we remember his eloquence and courage. Thomas D. Jones, pilot and veteran shuttle astronaut, is the author (with Robert F. Dorr) of Hell Hawks! (Zenith, 2008) the true story of a band of Thunderbolt brothers who fought in the air alongside Quentin C. Aanenson. Filed Under: History, Uncategorized	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2285
__label__cc	0.735773	0.264227	Atkinson-Baker Deposition Services Where’s your evidence? DNA, fingerprints and expert witnesses Evidence collection has evolved significantly over the years. During the early 1900s, for instance, fingerprinting was a new technology that allowed law enforcement investigators to link individuals to crime scenes and provided them with real physical evidence that could be used in court to gain a conviction. DNA profiling is much more recent and was first introduced in 1984 by Dr. Alec Jeffreys, an English researcher studying the patterns found in various human DNA strands. For both types of evidence, enlisting the help of a qualified expert witness to explain the results can provide added help for attorneys in presenting their cases effectively. Fingerprinting and classifications In 1880, Henry Faulds first made the case that fingerprints could be used to identify suspects in criminal cases. This theory was published in Nature, a major scientific journal of the time. Faulds’ theory went unremarked for many years and was eventually appropriated by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and an unashamed plagiarist who based his own forensic theories on Faulds’ work without ever giving proper credit to his source. Galton developed a system by which fingerprints could be classified and distinguished. This method was soon superseded by more intuitive systems that were adopted by Scotland Yard and other law enforcement agencies sometime in the early part of the 20th century. DNA and the RFLP test Although James Watson and Francis Crick are often credited with the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA, the real honor should be given to Dr. Friedrich Miescher of Switzerland. Dr. Miescher isolated DNA from wound dressings; Watson and Crick were primarily responsible for identifying the double helix, a double-stranded DNA molecule. There is no such controversy, however, regarding the innovator who made DNA testing possible. Dr. Alec Jeffreys developed a test that could distinguish individuals from each other based solely on their DNA patterns. The restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) test required a large sample of DNA from each individual for comparison purposes, making it relatively impractical for use in criminal investigations. Polymerase chain reaction testing Although polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests had been around since 1984, it was not until the latter part of the decade that these processes were applied to DNA. PCR testing offered significant advantages over RFLP in practical use: PCR tests can identify matching patterns using much shorter strands. This allows the evaluation of older DNA samples that may have been degraded or have broken down over time. Less material is required to make a valid comparison using the PCR testing method. Forensic scientists can provide valuable testimony and evidence regarding the likelihood that a particular individual was at the scene of a crime or that they committed incriminating acts. Today, mitochondrial-based testing offers even greater pinpoint accuracy in determining whether two sets of DNA match up. For attorneys, obtaining testimony from expert witnesses with experience in fingerprint and DNA evidence can offer added support for a particular version of events. Remote depositions from acknowledged experts in these fields can be of benefit to both the prosecution and the defense in presenting their cases to judges and jurors in the courtroom setting. How 3-D printing can assist in presenting evidence Advances in 3-D printing techniques have made a splash in the business and academic environments and have been used to create custom parts and models in a wide range of industries. The items produced by 3-D printers have been used to reconstruct fossils, to create prosthetics for patients, to fabricate educational materials, and to produce an impressive list of consumer products. The use of these devices in the legal field, however, has been somewhat limited. Understanding how 3-D printing works can help your legal firm make the most of these new technologies in presenting evidence effectively. The basics of 3-D printing Also known as additive printing, 3-D printing techniques create custom objects by building them one layer at a time according to the specifications entered by the computer operator. This contrasts with most other methods of fabrication, which typically involve shaping of or subtraction from materials to create the finished item. Top-end 3-D printers offer exceptional accuracy and precision to allow the production of extremely small parts for industrial or medical use. The precise results provided by 3-D printing techniques have also been used to recreate forensic evidence to assist law enforcement officials in investigating crimes. 3-D in the courtroom setting Some companies are now offering 3-D services to legal practices to assist in the presentation of evidence in the courtroom setting. By creating models of critical exhibits, attorneys can clearly demonstrate various injuries and other critical elements of their cases: Broken bones can be accurately reproduced from X-rays to demonstrate the severity of the impact sustained in an auto accident Crime scenes can be reproduced at a smaller scale to reinforce a particular point or perspective Fingerprints can be duplicated and enlarged to show points of comparison Because 3-D printed items are not actual evidence, they can be safely handled and examined by jurors in the courtroom setting. This can allow a more hands-on approach to evidence presentation while ensuring that jurors have access to the most accurate information on which to base their decisions. Integrating 3-D presentations into legal cases In many cases, 3-D models are actually cheaper to produce than comparable computer animations. As 3-D printers and printing services continue to go down in price, the use of 3-D models in the courtroom is likely to increase. By establishing a relationship with a reliable 3-D reconstruction firm early on, legal firms can ensure access to these valuable evidence presentation tools and can make a positive impact on jurors. This can establish your firm as a leading resource for top quality representation and can ensure the best possible outcomes for your clients. New technologies are revolutionizing the way legal firms like yours do business in the courtroom and in the office environment. Remote depositions, iPad projections, and 3-D models can help you to deliver the most effective arguments on behalf of your clients. By staying on the cutting edge of these advances, you can ensure that your presentations make the right impression on every member of the jury. The value of tech training for your legal staff Modern software platforms can streamline your legal processes and provide your staff with added collaboration tools. Proper training in these new technologies is essential to ensure the most effective deployment of cloud storage platforms, video conferencing services, remote depositions, and collaboration software suites in your workplace. By investing in training for your staff, you can reduce their learning curve and ensure the most positive results for your software implementations. Different learning styles Allowing for differences in how the members of your legal team learn new skills can take some of the stress out of the training process. Some staff members may learn best by doing; by allowing them to test out the new software on their own, these tech-savvy staffers may be able to master these technologies more quickly. Others may require visual aids like videos or flowcharts to make sense of the new software platform. In-depth documentation should be provided for all members of your legal team as a reference and guide to more complex processes and functions. A relatively small investment in training can pay off in improved morale, increased productivity and greater employee engagement with the learning process. By putting new software tools to work in your office, you can enjoy the benefits of today’s technological age. 5 techy tips for managing security in the office For many attorneys, the availability of new technologies has led to increased digitization and online storage of documents and data related to past and current cases. These advances can allow members of the legal team to access information remotely to allow anytime, anywhere editing and updating of critical information. Implementation of cloud computing strategies and centralized data storage requires added attention to security for sensitive client information. Here are five helpful tips for protecting legal data in the modern computing marketplace. Engage your employees An important first step in establishing best security practices for your legal practice is to bring your staff members on board with your new policies. Explaining in clear and simple language the steps required of your legal team and the reasons behind these security measures can increase staff buy-in and can ensure the most positive results for your practice. By presenting the same information in printed form, you can reduce the risk of errors by your valued legal team. Prioritize your data Not all data is created equal. Determining the most critical information and making arrangements to protect and back up this data can help you manage the next steps of your security implementation more effectively. Create tiered levels of access Maintaining certain information on a need-to-know basis can help your legal practice protect sensitive client information from unauthorized access or accidental disclosure. By creating tiers of access within your organization to provide added control over your data, you can reduce the risks to your clients and the potential legal liabilities for your law office. Evaluate your cloud services provider If you choose to store case information with a third-party cloud services provider, it is critically important to read the fine print regarding how your data will be protected in various scenarios, including the following: What happens to your data if the cloud services provider is forced to shut down for financial or other reasons? Who has access to your data at the remote location? Will your data be stored alongside that of other clients or on a separate server? How is your information protected against unauthorized access from outside and inside the provider offices? Are redundancies and backups in place to ensure the integrity of your data even if a specific server is corrupted or fails altogether? Ensuring continuous access to and protection for information stored in the cloud is essential for your overall data security plan. Seek professional help The intricacies of encryption can be challenging even for the most computer-savvy individuals. By working with a professional firm to manage and oversee your data security needs, you can often achieve better results and increased safety for sensitive client information. These five steps can form the foundation of a solid security strategy for your practice and can ensure that you stay on the right side of confidentiality requirements and protection of your legal data. How cloud storage can streamline required disclosures Cloud storage solutions are becoming more and more prevalent in the business community. In the legal field, allowing secure login access to specific documents in the cloud can actually speed the delivery of relevant documents to opposing counsel and can ensure full compliance with all regulations pertaining to both the sharing of information and the securing of that same information against unauthorized access. Tiered levels of access Depositions are a good example of documentation that must typically be shared among all members of a legal team. Attorneys may also be required to share this information with their counterparts on the other side of the case. By creating tiered access to the specific documents and evidence that pertain to a particular court case, legal professionals can eliminate tedious copying duties and can reduce the effort involved in delivering these materials directly to the opposing counsel. Along with the improvements to disclosure procedures, cloud storage solutions can allow improved collaboration among the members of your legal team. Modern software platforms allow tracking of all changes and edits to case documentation for greater accountability and accuracy. In this way, these advanced software suites can boost productivity during the critical lead-up to the big day in court. 3 top apps for managing time for legal professionals Modern software tools can make it easier than ever before for attorneys to track billable hours and manage their time more effectively. Here are three of the best iPad productivity apps for busy lawyers. Time Master + Billing Recommended by the American Bar Association for attorneys who must track billable hours on the go, Time Master offers a number of ways to track time spent on various cases. This iOS app offers several organization options and can be easily uploaded to desktop or laptop computers for easy time management in the future. Fastcase Attorneys can access U.S. statutes, cases, and precedents through this convenient and searchable app. Fastcase provides the utility of its higher-priced counterparts and can be downloaded for free from iTunes, making it a truly cost-effective solution for law library access. Court Days A customizable calendar program that allows quick and easy calculation of the available court days scheduled between two dates, Court Days can be fine-tuned to show court holidays and other dates of interest. At less than a dollar on iTunes, it’s a solid investment in time management. These three iOS apps can save time and effort in tracking billable hours and maintaining productivity both in and out of the law office setting. Get organized: How online transcripts lighten a lawyer’s workload For many attorneys, juggling the particulars of a heavy caseload can prove daunting at best. Online access to deposition transcripts can assist in managing evidence more effectively and can provide added flexibility for legal teams in sharing critical testimony and important information assets during the preparatory stages of a case. By choosing a court reporting agency that offers fast turnaround on deposition transcripts and online access to these resources, legal firms can ensure optimal time management when organizing evidence and preparing to represent their clients in court. Posted in Atkinson Baker Going high-tech: iPads and iPhones in the legal profession As portable technologies become more popular in the public marketplace, the role of smartphones, iPads, and other tablet computing devices becomes even more critical for legal professionals. Specialized applications designed specifically for Android and iOS devices can provide added help in presenting evidence in the courtroom setting, accessing transcripts of depositions and sworn statements and in managing larger caseloads and multiple cases effectively and conveniently. Court reporting: Why flexibility is so crucial to cases Court reporting companies like Atkinson-Baker are essential in managing the sizable number of depositions and statements required to pursue class actions in the legal environment. These companies deliver flexible court reporting services that can help attorneys to manage the full range of depositions, statements, and evidence collection activities needed to achieve success in class actions and large-scale lawsuits, making them a valuable asset for legal professionals in obtaining settlements and awards for their clients. Class suits, also known as representative actions, are cases in which a few plaintiffs stand in for a much larger group of affected individuals. The amount of money awarded in these cases can potentially amount to millions or billions of dollars and can represent a major financial loss on the part of the defendant or defendants. Product liability cases and large-scale disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are among the highest profile class actions and often attract significant attention from the press. To prove these cases in court, numerous depositions and sworn statements must typically be obtained from potential plaintiffs to demonstrate the degree of damages sustained by the average victim of the event or product. Depositions and statements Trained court reporters like those employed by Atkinson-Baker can travel to locations convenient for defendants and plaintiffs in class actions. This makes it easier for these individuals and businesses to provide evidence crucial to their cases. The Deepwater Horizon class action The explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, resulted in extensive damage to fishermen and small business owners along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. These injured parties experienced significant financial losses in the aftermath of the incident and sought compensation from BP, Halliburton Energy Services, Transocean, and other companies deemed to be responsible for the accident. The U.S. Department of Justice also filed a civil suit against BP and other companies involved in the drilling operations in the Gulf for violations of the Clean Water Act. On Sept. 4, 2014, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier found that BP was grossly negligent; this finding paved the way for private individuals and class action participants to recover punitive damages from the companies found responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Pursuing the case in court While most class actions do not receive the attention given to the Deepwater Horizon case, the process is similar for all types of representative actions. To file a class action, four elements must be present: Commonality refers to the similarity of damages experienced by the individuals included in the same case. Cases with widely disparate types of damages sustained due to the same event may not be suited to resolution through class actions. Adequacy is achieved when the individuals chosen to represent the class are capable of doing so effectively. Numerosity is required to ensure that a sufficient number of potential plaintiffs exist to justify class action status. Typicality is ensured by choosing the most representative cases to stand in for the other plaintiffs in a class action. These four requirements must be met to file a class action and provide useful guidelines for attorneys in determining whether a particular case can be managed in this way. The role of the court reporter in assisting legal firms with class actions is a vital one. The court reporting services provided by Atkinson-Baker are designed specifically to provide optimal flexibility and maximum accuracy for depositions. Atkinson-Baker Provides Legal Videographers Atkinson-Baker Now Providing Electronic Exhibits for Depositions Atkinson-Baker Provides Court Reporters Outside of the US Atkinson-Baker is Celebrating 30 Years as a Leader in Court Reporting Services Atkinson-Baker is Offering Web Conferencing for Depositions Atkinson Baker Atkinson Baker at wordpress.com Follow Atkinson Baker on Blogspot Atkinson Baker at Blog.com	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2286
__label__cc	0.601047	0.398953	UNESCO. Category 2 Institutes/Centres, 35 results 35 Aalborg Centre for Problem-based Learning in Engineering Science and Sustainability in Denmark (proposed), 3 results 3 Regional Center for Quality and Excellence in Education, 2 results 2 International Training Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia and the Pacific Region (China), 2 results 2 Regional Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (proposed), 1 results 1 Regional Centre for Training and Water Studies in Arid and Semi-arid Regions (Egypt), 1 results 1 International Mother Language Institute, Bangladesh (proposed), 1 results 1 International Centre of Martial Arts for Youth Development and Engagement in Republic of Korea (proposed), 1 results 1 International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (Netherlands), 1 results 1 Regional Educational and Research Centre for Oceanography for Western Asia, Iran Islamic Republic (proposed), 1 results 1 Asia and the Pacific, 12 results 12 Denmark, 2 results 2 Americas and the Caribbean, 2 results 2 Egypt, 2 results 2 Syrian Arab Republic, 1 results 1 Spain, 1 results 1 Item, 3 results 3 UNESCO. Category 2 Institutes/Centres Accord entre l'UNESCO et le Gouvernement de la République algérienne démocratique et populaire concernant la création et le fonctionnement d'un Centre régional pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immatériel en Afrique en tant que centre de catégorie 2 placé sous l'égide de l'UNESCO FR PUNES AG 8-LEG-A-1169 Agreement between UNESCO and Shenzhen Municipal Government, the People's Republic of China concerning the establishment of an International Centre for Higher Education Innovation in Shenzhen, China as a UNESCO Category 2 Centre Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of Japan regarding the International Centre for Water Hazard and Risk Management (ICHARM) (Category 2) under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of Norway regarding the Nordic World Heritage Foundation as a Centre Under the Auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) FR PUNES AG 8-LEG-A-795-3 Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of Sudan concerning the establishment in Sudan of the Regional Centre on Capacity Development and Research in Water Harvesting as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of Ukraine regarding the designation of the State Entreprise International Children Centre (ARTEK) as a Centre under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) FR PUNES AG 8-LEG-A-941 Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt concerning the renewal of status of the Regional Centre for Training and Water Studies in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt on the establishment of the Regional Centre for Adult Education (ASFEC) in the Arab Republic of Egypt as a category 2 centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Argentine Republic on the establishement of the International Centre for the Advancement of Human Rights as Category 2 Centre in Buenos Aires (Argentina) Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria regarding the establishment and operation of the Regional Centre for Integrated River Basin Management (RC-IRBM) in Nigeria as a Category II Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding the establishment of a Regional Education and Research Centre on Oceanography for West Asia as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh on the establishment of the International Mother Language Institute under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the People's Republic of China regarding the establishment in Beijing of an International Training Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region under the Auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) FR PUNES AG 8-LEG-A-1006-1 Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the People's Republic of China regarding the establishment of an International Knowledge Centre for Engineering Sciences and Technology in Beijing (People's Republic of China) as a as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Republic of Bulgaria regarding the establishment in Sofia of a Regional Centre for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in South-Eastern Europe under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) Instrument signed by Irina Bokova and Vezdi Rashidov. Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Republic of Korea regarding the International Centre of Martial Arts for Youth Development and Engagement under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Republic of Serbia regarding the establishment of the Water for Sustainable Development and Adaptation to Climate Change Centre as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka concerning the establishment of a South Asian Centre for Teacher Development in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the United States of America concerning the establishment of the International Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources... Agreement between UNESCO and the Kingdom of Denmark regarding the establishment of the Aalborg Centre for Problem-based Learning in Engineering Science and Sustainability as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Kingdom of Spain regarding the establishment of the "International Centre on Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves, Two Coastlines United by their Culture and Nature" as a category 2 centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Kingdom of the Netherlands concerning the establishment and operation of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in the Netherlands as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between UNESCO and the Republic of Slovenia concerning the transformation and operation of IZUM - Regional Centre for Library and Information Systems and Current Research Information Systems, Maribor, Slovenia - as a Category 2 Centre The file contains a signed original agreement for the operation of IZUM as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO. Agreement between the Government of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and UNESCO regarding the establishment of the Regional Center for Quality and Excellence in Education (RCQE) as a category 2 centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and UNESCO concerning the establishment and operation of the International Sustainable Energy Development Centre in Moscow, Russian Federation, as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Agreement between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria regarding the "Institute for African Culture and International Understanding" under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2) Agreements between UNESCO and the Government of the United Arab Emirates on the Regional Centre for Educational Planning (RCEP) in the United Arab Emirates Agreements between UNESCO and the Nordic World Heritage Foundation Agreements for the establishment of the Aalborg Centre for Problem-based Learning in Engineering Science and Sustainability as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Cooperation Agreement between UNESCO and Brazil (Category 2 Centre in San Paolo) Original Portuguese and English agreements as well as memorandum from DIR/KSD to Archives regarding transfer. Joint Statement of Intent between UNESCO and Aalborg University regarding the establishment of the Aalborg Centre for Problem-based Learning in Engineering Science and Sustainability as a Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO Letter of Intent between UNESCO and the Ministry of Education in the Syrian Arab Republic about Procedures for Establishing a Training Center in the Field of Early Childhood Development in the Syrian Arab Republic Memorandum of Understanding between Regional Center for Quality & Excellence in Education (RCQE), Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and UNESCO Projet d'accord entre l'UNESCO et le Gouvernement du Royaume du Maroc concernant la création d'un Centre régional pour les énergies renouvelables et l'efficacité énergétique	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2288
__label__cc	0.740933	0.259067	Category: Central African Republic Map of the Romance Speaking World Here is a very nice map of the parts of the world that speak a Romance language, in whole or in part. The main languages covered here are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian. Nice map of the Romance languages of the world. Click to enlarge. The heavy Spanish speaking zone is Spain, Rio Muni, New Mexico and Latin America except for Brazil, the Guyanas, Haiti and some Caribbean islands that speak French. To a lesser extent, it is spoken Spanish Sahara and Belize. To a much lesser extent, it is spoken in parts of the US and in the Philippines where it is a dying colonial language. The heavy Portuguese speaking zone is Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, other parts of Africa and East Timor. In the latter countries, it is a lingua franca. French is heavily spoken in France, Quebec, French Guyana, French Polynesia, Belgium and Switzerland, less heavily in much of Africa, especially Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mali, Togo, Cote d’Ivorie, Burkino Faso, Senegal, West Africa, Central Africa, Djibouti and Madagascar, less in the rest of Canada, and even less in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Louisiana, where it is a dying colonial language overtaken by national languages in Southeast Asia, Arabic in Northwest Africa and English in Louisiana Italian is spoken heavily in Italy and less so in Libya and Albania. Romanian is spoken heavily in Romania, Moldova and Serbia. Author Robert LindsayPosted on March 14, 2010 Categories Africa, Algeria, Americas, Belgium, Belize, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Central Africa, Central African Republic, Central America, Congo, Europe, France, French, Grenadines, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Italian, Italic, Italy, Ivory Coast, Laos, Latin America, Lebanon, Libya, Louisiana, Madagascar, Mali, Middle East, Morocco, Mozambique, North Africa, North America, Pacific, Philippines, Polynesia, Portugal, Portuguese, Quebec, Romance, Romania, SE Asia, Senegal, Serbia, South, South America, Spain, Spanish, Switzerland, Togo, Tunisia, USA, Vietnam, West Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire6 Comments on Map of the Romance Speaking World Bad Place to Visit, Wouldn't Want To Live There Repost from the old site. This article has produced a tremendous amount of controversy, angry comments, and even, oddly enough, virulent hate mail. I guess I hit some raw nerves. I stand by my comments that these cities are some of the worst in the world, and, in doing further research on the Net, have found only further support for my thesis. Some of these cities, such as Bogotá, for instance, have large wealthy districts that are apparently quite pleasant. If one is rich, one can make a nice life just about anywhere on the globe. But this is not important – what is important is how the majority live. The title is a play on the line, “Nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there”, said about many less-than-desirable tourist locales. This post is about the worst places on Earth to visit, and probably to live too. The ratings were based on research done on the Internet in various places, including here and here. I’m going to focus on the places that are dirty, smelly, crime-ridden, trashy, rip-off havens, unsanitary and dangerous (Third World), and avoid places that are merely depressing, unsightly, rude, etc. (First World). Why? Because I live in the US, and those Third World qualities are going to be the most disturbing to me. I’m also avoiding active war zones because everyone knows they are horrible. To be fair to the “Third Worldists” out there, I noted that many people slammed various places in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, Ireland Italy, the US, Great Britain and Australia for various reasons, mostly because they are said to be unfriendly, depressing, tacky, cheesy, boring, etc. Detroit seemed to top the list as worst US city, along with Newark (though it had one fan), East St. Louis and New Haven (though some liked New Haven) were runners-up. Various small towns in the Rockies (especially Idaho) and Texas also were listed. For some reason, a lot of people hate Vancouver, BC in Canada. To my thinking, many of the horrible cities below point out the catastrophe of Latin American, Indian, Indonesian and Philippine capitalism. In much of Africa, capitalism doesn’t seem to working very well. For all its faults, impoverished Cuba certainly does not resemble any of these Latin American hellholes in any way, shape or form. I don’t think that capitalism in the First World is failing, but looking at many of the cities below, it’s hard to argue that capitalism is doing anything but failing in those places. Some of the winners in the Loser Destination Contest: Colon, Panama: A dirty, crime-ridden disaster of a city. The most dangerous city in Latin America, full of residents who seem like they would just as soon knife you as say hello. Other than the free trade zone, the entire city seems to be sprawling slum. Colon has no redeeming qualities. This city topped many worst lists. Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador: Guayaquil is horrible. A stinking, steaming, downright dangerous heap of a city with miles of slums. With armies of glowering gang members, this place is dangerous even in mid-day. There are garbage dumps everywhere with corpses laying out in plain sight and guns going off all the time. Quito is similar. Guayaquil topped many worst city lists. Johannesburg, South Africa: How sad that this country now has one of the worst violent crime rates on Earth. Although popular with tourists, this city is downright dangerous. This city also topped many worst lists. This blog supports the Mandela government, but the problems of this tragic nation seem insurmountable. Lagos, Nigeria, or the whole country: This city, and even the whole country, seems to top everyone’s list. Garbage is everywhere, the city stinks, the poverty is horrible, animals are slaughtered on the streets, and it seems that at least half the population wakes up every morning thinking, “Who can I rip off today?” Up to 90% of the economy may be “underground”, off the books, or crime-related in some way or another. Nigeria has what must be the worst government on Earth and the country is rated the second most corrupt on Earth. The national airlines are dangerous and not recommended. The ripoff attempts often start as soon as you land at the airport and won’t let up until you leave. It’s best to assume that most, if not all, Nigerians you meet in Lagos are out to rip you off in some way or another and then proceed from there. The city is full of impostors, and you really do not know if anyone is really who they say they are. The police and Customs officials are all crooks and so is 99% of the government. Most bank and post office employees are also crooked. Imagine waiting in line at the post office, and a group of swaggering gangsters with fake ID’s strut in to pick up their stolen goods reshipped from overseas. They go straight to the front of the line ahead of everyone else, pick up their stolen property, and walk away laughing, having paid off the Post Office clerks. Welcome to Nigeria. There are Internet cafes all over the city, where 150,000 full-time Internet scammers ply their trade in plain view of anyone to see, and the government doesn’t bat an eye or lift one finger to stop them. In many cafes, 80% or more of the patrons are Internet scammers. Nigeria is now world-famous for Internet scams. Even out-of-work TV newscasters scam away in the cafes, trying to steal from Americans. The scammers started out with the famous 419 email scams but have now branched out into lottery, romance, auction, roommate, orphanage and check-cashing scams. The scams are continuously evolving, and Nigerian con artists are widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the world, as they have been practicing the art for decades now. On highways outside of Lagos, you can see numerous vehicles wrecked on the side of the road, or even in the middle of the road, some with dead bodies still in them or beside them. Thieves pick through the wreckage and rifle the corpses looking for stuff to steal. All of the roads are dangerous, as armed robbers often set up roadblocks to shake down travelers. Nigeria is now a world center for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, credit card fraud and drug dealing, and a district of Lagos, Oluwole, is now a world center for top-notch forgery. The FBI and the US Merchant Risk Council recently came to Nigeria and inspected 40 packages coming into the country from the US to check for stolen goods. 39 of the 40 packages contained stolen property. When the agents arrived at a Lagos neighborhood and tried to arrest an 18-year-old boy for reshipping scams that targeted US merchants, much of the neighborhood – up to 100 people – rushed out of their homes to defend the local punk from Big Bad Whitey. Although the country is awash in oil, the power goes out all the time because the government power company is so crooked. The power company has either stolen all of its own budget money or the power comes in, but the crooked company resells it on the side. As with elsewhere in Africa, Whitey is blamed for all the troubles here. Hatred of Whitey is higher in Nigeria than in much of the rest of Black Africa and the White visitor will definitely feel it. The degeneration of Nigerian society is complete, and the culture appears near collapse. Mobs lynch thieves in the street and kill them in public for as meager a crime as stealing a cellphone, yet crime rages on anyway. Anyone can just up and say they own your house, put it on the market and sell it and you are out a house. Law enforcement, courts and anything resembling government seem to be nonexistent. Lima, Peru: When they tell you to visit Peru, they don’t mean the nightmarish capital. There are teeming slums as far as the eye can see, horrible crime (although not a lot of violent crime), pickpockets everywhere, and on top of all that, the sun never comes out. The fog mixes with the smog and the filthy streets to make a toxic brew. Lima made many worst lists. But it has its fans, and the upscale Miraflores district is said to be nice. The execrable Shining Path took up their nihilistic, deranged war in this country for a reason – because Peru is a rotten heap of a country. Medan (Sumatra), Jakarta, Surabaya, Indonesia: Jakarta is a reeking city with terrible pollution, open sewers and wrenching poverty. Medan seemed to top many lists for worst city on Earth, though it has a few fans. It’s hot, dirty and polluted, with factories, thieves and leering, menacing men everywhere. There is also nowhere to stay, not that you would want to stay anyway. Besides Medan, the rest of Sumatra is much better. The river running through Surabaya is so polluted you might vomit walking across the bridge. As you suppress your gag reflex, you will look down and notice that people are actually washing their clothes in this river. Mumbai, Patna (Bihar), Calcutta, all large Indian cities, India: Indian cities are very dirty and teeming with some of the most miserably poor and wretched people you will ever see, but at least there is not a lot of crime. The Hindu religion keeps crime down because believers fear they will be punished by returning in the next life as something terrible, like one of the huge rats you see scurrying about. Mumbai has pollution that is so bad that people actually get lung cancer from breathing the air. Mumbai, a stinking and sometimes dangerous city, made many worst city lists. Patna is the sorry capital of Bihar, the poorest state in India. It’s dirty and miserable, and it’s almost impossible to even get a taxi to get you out of town, which means it’s hard to leave the place. Calcutta is generally agreed to be one of the worst cities in India. Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang, China: Deadly pollution, mostly from coal. Bucharest, all of Romania: Stalinist pollution covers the whole country and everyone seems depressed. Bali (in particular Kuta Beach), Indonesia: Hopes so high, reality so low. It seems everyone is out to rip you off. Surly locals hungry for money. Dangerous roads, nightmarish traffic, rude, leering men. When it rains, the sewers flood into the streets. Very high crime rate, hustlers everywhere. Most of the rest of Indonesia is pretty nice. Kuta is a tourist trap gone to Hell. Manila, Philippines: A crime-ridden hellhole. There are armed guards everywhere, especially in front of banks due to constant bank robberies. Their nemeses, criminal gangs armed to the teeth, roam streets filled with prostitutes and transvestites. It’s a town where everyone seems like they are out to rip you off in one way or other, and the hotel workers and cab drivers are all crooked. The latest advice is to have your Filipino friend meet you at the airport and head straight to their place, thereby avoiding all the ripoffs and con artists that seem to descend on every tourist. Traffic is horrible, and pollution is so bad it kills people. But some people don’t mind it. Gdansk, Poland: Combine a high crime rate and daylight robberies with totally crooked, thieving officials, and you get this Polish city. However, a number of others said it’s just fine. Mexico City, Villahermosa, Mexico: Mexico City is a dirty, polluted city suffering an insane, surreal epidemic of street crime, especially violent crime. Add 20 million people, stir well, bring to a boil, cover with a lid of otherworldly smog, and simmer. Reportedly, tons of human waste are blown into the air every day, and much of the population has constant respiratory infections. The sewer system is reportedly above ground and more or less runs through lots of neighborhoods where many people are residing. Villahermosa is a Mad Max-style, violent, crime-ridden disgrace of a city. There are stabbings and shootings galore here, even with a 10 PM curfew in place. Tangier, Morocco: This is a dangerous place with lots of street crime. That’s unusual for a North African country, but Tangier is so close to Europe that it is almost a part of Europe. Cairo, Egypt: Cairo has horrible pollution, smells terrible, there is trash everywhere, nothing works, there are armies of miserably poor people and it boasts some outrageously awful traffic. In the souks there are huge rats and wild, mangy scavenging dogs running about in plain sight. There seems no escape from aggressive, pestering hawkers. On top of all that, all the Customs officials are criminals. The crime rate is fairly low, though. Thank President Hosni Mubarak. 25 years ago, Cairo was one of the great world cities. Bangkok, Thailand: This gigantic city has pollution so bad you need to wear a mask over your face. However, some folks like this city and say it has many positive attributes. Brindisi, Naples, Italy: No one seems to like Brindisi. It’s a sad, dirty, polluted and ugly city, with hostile, brawling, drunken locals, hungry stray dogs, belligerent drivers, horrible traffic, and miles of soul-killing tenements. You would think that despite all of that, being genuine Italians, they could still manage to make a decent pizza. Forget it: even the pizza is terrible. Brindisi topped many worst lists, although it has a couple of fans. I had never even heard of Brindisi and had to look it up on a map. It’s located in southern Italy on the East Coast, southeast of Naples. Naples has a great deal of crime, and many think this city is overrated as a tourist destination, although others say that, despite the drawbacks, it has its joys. All of southern Italy has a lot of crime, but it’s mostly property crime. Athens, Piraeus, or the whole country, Greece: Greece, especially Athens, gets mixed reviews. A lot of people really hate Athens; others don’t. The detractors say the city is dirty, ugly, depressing, polluted, and covered with garbage and traffic. I was surprised that Athens made the list, as I had always thought it was a wonderful city. The port city of Piraeus is a nasty place. The whole city smells like a giant sewage treatment plant, and the ocean offshore has a sickening color to it. Suburbs of Paris, France: These tragic towns, full of hostile Arab immigrants angrily refusing to assimilate to French culture or join French society, are a sign that the French model is not working well, at least for some folks. There is a terribly high crime rate here, and cops and firemen often won’t go there because they get attacked as soon as they show up. These mournful towns are packed with angry, unemployed young Arab men who like to seriously riot every year or so, or even more often if the mood strikes them. Lately, they have been staging mini-riots every night. If only 100 cars are burned, that’s a good night. Otherwise, Paris, of course, is one of the world’s great cities. But that doesn’t mean you might not walk into a subway station reeking of urine and see junkies shooting up in plain sight. But still, Paris is a must on any serious travelers’ list. Brussels, Belgium: As with Paris, the districts with many Arab immigrants are quite dangerous and unpleasant, but the rest of the city is as nice as any big city. Abidjan, Ivory Coast: With one of the worst crime rates in Africa (although it has plenty of competition), this city topped many worst lists. Bangui, Central African Republic: One of the worst cities in Africa, as bad as Lagos. The crime rate is totally insane. The locals will try to steal everything you own and even a contingent of armed guards will not be enough to protect you. Your hotel room will feel like a war zone. This fiendish city made a number of worst city lists. Lonely Planet’s guidebook more or less tells you to avoid this city altogether. Here is a harrowing report of a visit to Bangui. Bamako, Mali: Mali has one of the worst governments in Africa, admittedly a race with a lot of competition. Bamako is a sick joke of a town, where the tourist surcharge is rigorously enforced, and the ridiculous, potholed streets are undriveable by any vehicle. Guatemala City, Guatemala: A totally dangerous, dirty, polluted, terminal patient of a city, full of scary, heavily armed teenage soldiers. The soldiers are there to keep the teeming, crime-ridden slums that stretch as far as the eye can see, from overrunning the place. But this city has a few fans. Belize City, Belize: This sweltering, miserable, impoverished, crime-ridden, very dangerous city is built on a swamp, with a jungle for a backyard. The beggars are aggressive and even menacing, and shady characters shadow you on the streets as you walk about. Cops are nowhere to be seen. This is one of the worst cities in the Americas. But the rest of the country is a great place to vacation. Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Sao Paulo is the industrial engine of Brazil. This major city is full of garbage and very dangerous. There are hustlers as far as the eye can see, chaotic streets that render maps useless, not enough cops and Godawful traffic. Rio de Janeiro, the popular tourist destination with the killer skyline perfect for any postcard, is a deceptive place. It’s a very dangerous city with lots of violent crime. Street gangs armed to the teeth regularly shoot it out in military-style wars with the cops. Death squads of off-duty cops funded by local businessmen roam the streets at night, murdering homeless, drug-addicted street kids and petty criminals with impunity in a sickening “social cleanup” campaign. There are pickpockets and muggers all about, often in menacing, youthful gangs (especially on the famous beach) and they frequently operate in broad daylight. A dystopian horrorshow of a city. Nairobi, Kenya: Unfortunately, this city is seriously crime-ridden. Even locals admit that violent crime has reached catastrophic proportions. Caracas, Barquisimeto, or the whole country, Venezuela: The crime is very bad here, sadly, and there is garbage everywhere you look. This blog supports Hugo Chavez, but crime in Venezuela is a tragic, long-standing problem with no quick fixes. Guinea-Bissau: There is no water, no electricity, no place to stay, and the only hotel is half-demolished. San‘a’, Yemen: In a Dickensenian touch, children are actually chained up here in order to beg! Moynaq and Nukus, Uzbekistan: These two cities broiling in a merciless desert have been ruined and turned into ecological dead zones by Stalinist pollution. San Pedro Sulu, Honduras: This sad town has a horrible amount of crime. Swarms of locals will attack you on the bus, trying to steal your luggage. You will have to fight them off if you wish to retain your suitcase. Like the rest of this wreck of a country, it’s full of US gang members gone home to Honduras. People here are very poor and desperate. If you can make it to the nice part of town and afford to stay there, though, you can be quite safe. Dakar, Senegal: According to some, this large West African city has horrible street crime – it is very dangerous. They say if you don’t have armed guards with you, don’t even go outside your hotel room. However, others report that they spent a week there and found it to be safe, in fact safer than many American cities. Violent crime is reportedly rare, and the country is one of the most stable in Africa, and has been that way since independence. Port Au Prince, Haiti: This filthy, degraded, extremely dangerous and desperately poor mess of a city is best avoided at all costs. It sports open sewers, enslaved children, riots, killings and lots of other fun things. This blog did support President Aristide’s efforts to improve the tragedy of a nation called Haiti. Lome, Togo: Criminals are as common as mosquitoes here, walking around fearlessly in broad daylight in this terrible city full of miserable people and crooked taxi drivers. Istanbul, Turkey: The 200% tourist markup is fully in force in this dirty, ugly city full of harassing, hawking, hostile locals and crumbling buildings, and you can scarcely find a merchant who does not enforce it. There is also a lot of crime here, including some violent crime, unusual for a Muslim city. The weather is lousy, but there are some pretty mosques to visit. However, Istanbul does have a fan or two. The rest of the country is a great place to visit, has many fans and is one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Best bet for Turkey is just to head to the tourist spots and blow off Istanbul altogether. Phnom Penh, Kampuchea: This city has become a very dangerous, crime-ridden place. The gangs of little girl prostitutes add a particularly poignant touch. Bogotá, Colombia or really the whole country: Bogotá is one of the most dangerous places in the Americas but there seems to be agreement that Colon, Lima and Guayaquil are worse. Really, all of Colombia is dangerous as Hell, to be honest. This comment about Bogotá was recently rebutted by a Bogotán blogger, with more comments here. His post aggressively taking issue with this entry is in Spanish, but my Spanish is good enough to get the gist of it. Also I am getting a lot of comments coming in from Bogotáns on the Internet aggressively objecting to the content. The sole issue that these Defenders of Bogotá are taking issue with is my contention that the city is a very dangerous place. To be honest, Bogotá used to have a truly horrible reputation for crime, but in recent years, there has been a huge effort put into cracking down on street crime. For some more agreement that Bogota is dangerous, see here, here, here and here. I will now attempt to prove that. There are twice as many murders in Colombia as in the US, and the US has seven times as many people. That means that the murder rate in Colombia is an outrageous 14 times that of the US, and the US is considered to have a high murder rate for the developed world. Colombia has the highest murder rate on Earth, with Washington, DC and Johannesburg not far behind, but in the case of Colombia, we are talking about a whole country, not some festering city. Out of every 100,000 people, 60-70 will be killed every year. Defenders may try to argue that this is due to a simmering civil war, but 75% of the 25,000 homicides are merely of the criminal variety. On an average day in Colombia, there are 2 bank robberies, 8 highway robberies, 72 murders and 204 assaults or muggings. You have a greater chance of being murdered in Colombia than you do of dying of cancer! Death squads made up of soldiers and off-duty cops roam the streets, murdering drug-addicted, petty criminal street kids, transvestites, homosexuals and prostitutes. In fact, probably more prostitutes and homosexuals are murdered per capita in Colombia than even in the most barbarian parts of the Muslim World. Want to fly a plane in Colombia? Don’t. There have been 138 plane crashes since World War 2, with 2,745 deaths. One of the most popular things in Bogotá is scopolamine. This drug is used by crooks to disable their victims so they can rip them off. It is sprayed in the face, dumped in your drink or spiked into a cigarette. Bogotá hospitals receive an incredible 2,000 scopolamine victims every month, or an astounding 66 a day. The drug knocks you out and can cause medical problems. Colombia has one of the world’s worst road systems. Many roads are not even marked. Drivers are reckless and many cars don’t have headlights at night. Cows have a tendency to wander into the road. Taxis are totally dangerous and are best avoided, if possible. Women are advised to avoid all taxis at night. Anyone is advised to avoid any taxi that already has someone in it. In many cases, this is a criminal accomplice of the thuggish driver. In addition to getting scopolamine sprayed in your face, another popular scam is the “jump-start”: you are told that the taxi has stalled and asked to get out and help push. As you do so, the taxi driver leaves with your luggage. Buses are also best avoided. Thieves haunt the buses, waiting for you to fall asleep, at which point, they rip you off. Certain bus lines are frequented by thieves offering drugged gum, sweets, food and cigarettes. After the drug knocks you out, they rob you blind. In addition to theft and druggings, kidnapping and extortion are also rife on buses. In view of all of the above, it is nothing short of amazing that all of these Colombians are angrily protesting my characterization of their country as dangerous. Or perhaps they doth protest too much? Managua, Nicaragua: This dirty, crime-ridden, dangerous disaster of a city has a bombed-out look about it. This blog supports Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista Party and prays that they can ameliorate this mess. San Salvador, El Salvador: See Managua. Full of dangerous former LA gang members. Death squads roam the streets, slaughtering gangsters by the dozen, but for every one you kill, it seems five more pop up in his place. This blog supports the FMLN’s efforts to reform this ruined land, but the crime here has become so terrible, one wonders if anything short of an act of God could make things better. In fact, I used to make contributions too the FMLN’s weapons fund via an FMLN agent in Los Angeles during the 1980’s. Detroit, New Haven, Newark, Gary (Indiana), Hammond (Indiana), USA: Detroit topped all lists as the worst city in the US. An ugly, dangerous, depressing and filthy city with a downtown that looks like a war zone – a despairing district surrounded by miles of crumbling, abandoned industrial buildings, torn-down fences and rusting cars. Newark is similar, with few to no redeeming qualities. It’s a frightening, polluted city with a postwar look of miles of weedy, trash-strewn vacant lots where crumbling apartment buildings have been torn down. It’s also a dangerous city with a high crime rate. New Haven, despite the presence of Yale University, is similar. There are legions of homeless, begging drug users clogging the streets, and the crime rate is very high due to hordes of crack-dealing gangs shooting it out on the streets. Congress and Columbus Avenues are notorious for drive-by shootings, drug dealing and muggings. It is reportedly the HIV capital of the East Coast due to IV drug use. A lot of the more respectable people have been moving out for some time now. Although much of the city is quite ugly, New Haven does have its bright spots, thanks to Yale. There are nice parts of town, parks, trees, etc. Gary is yet another postindustrial Rust Belt train wreck of a town. A grimy town full of abandoned factories, overgrown lots, rusting fences, graffiti, barred windows and vomit. Go downtown and see tall buildings all boarded up, with no vehicles in sight and unhinged stoplights swaying in the wind – for all practical purposes, a ghost town. This was once a vibrant, working-class city, and now it looks like Road Warrior. Hammond is similar, a suicidally depressing city lined with shuttered factories on the shores of Lake Michigan. Yet another Rust Belt post-industrial ruin. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: A collapsing, dirty, crime-ridden hellhole. Osaka, Japan: I never would have thought that this city would make the list but according to my friend Tumerica, she says it is the worst city she has ever lived in. I tagged her with the title of this story. In blogging, tagging mean you are supposed to write on the topic – kind of like, “Tag, you’re it.” I will let her explain why Osaka is such a crappy place in her post here. Author Robert LindsayPosted on June 10, 2009 Categories Africa, Americas, Asia, Belgium, Belize, Brazil, Cambodia, Caribbean, Central Africa, Central African Republic, Central America, China, Colombia, Crime, Dominican Republic, East Africa, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Europe, France, Greece, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Honduras, Humor, India, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Latin America, Mali, Mexico, Middle East, Midwest, Morocco, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Africa, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Romania, Scams, Senegal, South Africa, South America, South Asia, Thailand, Togo, Travel, Turkey, USA, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, West Africa, Yemen149 Comments on Bad Place to Visit, Wouldn't Want To Live There	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2290
__label__wiki	0.984707	0.984707	NHRA Funny Car champion Raymond Beadle dies at 70 Beadle was a three-time champ Autoweek Staff LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC NHRA Funny Car champion Ray Beadle died at age 70. Raymond Beadle, a three-time NHRA Funny Car world champion and driver of the famed Blue Max Funny Car, died Oct. 20 at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. He was 70. Beadle, who got his start in NHRA in the early 1970s driving for team owners Prentiss Cunningham, Mike Burkhart and Don Schumacher, started his own team with Harry Schmidt in 1974 and the duo raced to 13 NHRA national-event victories in 28 final-round appearances and won world championship titles in 1979, 1980 and 1981. He was a two-time winner of the Chevrolet Performance U.S. Nationals, claiming victories at the world’s most prestigious drag race in 1975 and 1981. The Spur, Texas, native’s first world championship title in ’79 ended Don “The Snake” Prudhomme’s four-year reign of Funny Car dominance. Beadle is one of only four Funny Car drivers in NHRA history who have won at least three consecutive championship titles. His Blue Max Funny Car was one of the most popular machines on the national drag-racing match race circuit, and he is widely credited with being the first in motorsports to sell team-branded souvenirs such as T-shirts and hats. Arie Luyendyk, Rusty Wallace named to 2014 Motorsports Hall of Fame of America class Beadle also was successful in other forms of motorsports. In 1989, he and driver Rusty Wallace teamed to win the NASCAR Cup championship. Before that, his NASCAR team featured Tim Richmond as driver. He also fielded a World of Outlaws Sprint Car for Sammy Swindell. Beadle was named No. 20 on the list of NHRA’s greatest drivers through its first 50 years. In 1980, he was named to the American Auto Racing Writers & Broadcasters All-America team. Already a member of the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, Beadle earlier this year was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in Novi, Mich. Once he retired from motorsports in 1990, Beadle operated cattle ranches in Texas and Arkansas, as well as a farm for quarter horses. Prior to his death, he and wife Roz resided in Dallas.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2292
__label__cc	0.699993	0.300007	Frank M. Verno, Jr. Send Flowers Add Memory Add Condolence Obituary of Frank M. Verno, Jr. April 20, 2019. Frank is predeceased by his parents, Frank & Caroline Verno & dear friend, Sam Augello. He is survived by his wife, Susan A. Verno; daughters, Lisa (Mike) Marrapese & Kara (Tyler) Moulton; grandchildren, Mikey Marrapese & Brynn Marrapese; brother, Mike (Rose Mary) Verno; several nieces, nephews, cousins and dear friends. Frank's life story will be shared during his visitation, Thursday, April 25th, 2-4 & 7-9 PM at the funeral home, 1411 Vintage Lane (Between 390 & Long Pond Rd.) His funeral service will be celebrated, Friday, April 26th, 11 AM at the funeral home, followed by his burial in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. In lieu of flowers donations may be sent to Camp Good Days & Special Times, 1332 Pittsford-Mendon Rd., Mendon, NY 14506 in Frank's memory. Frank Verno, Jr. was born to his parents Frank & Caroline Verno, April 12, 1956 in Rochester, NY. His family made their home in Gates NY on Appian Way. Frank was a graduate of Gates Chili High School. It was during a photography class in high school that Frank's life would be forever changed. It was here at the age of 16 that he met the love of his life Susan Hilt. The two were married at the age of 20 and have been in love ever since. Frank was devoted to his family. There were five very happy days in his life, the first was his marriage to Susan, the next two were his daughters, Lisa & Kara's wedding day and finally the two days that his grandkids were born. The grandkids called him grandpa nugget because once or twice a week he would just show up at the house with McDonald's Happy Meals. He enjoyed spending times at the casinos, watching Survivor & Big Brother on TV and listening to the Beatles, Bruno Mars and 70's music. Frank had a very easy going personality, very little would rattle him. He will be remembered by those who loved him as: reliable, even tempered, patient, good listener, hardworking, a good man and that he truly enjoyed the simple things in life. He wil be missed by all who knew and loved him. Send Flowers Print	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2294
__label__cc	0.654539	0.345461	‘Russiagate’ Was Manufactured By The Clinton Campaign 26 Oct 2017 Barracuda Brigade Of course, they manufactured the story! That’s because they could not manufacture a winning candidate! Hillary and the Democrats are the sorest losers EVER! Now let’s put a special prosecutor on the Uranium One deal and let the heads start rolling… Whether they be Democrat and Republican so we can get on with making America great again. The central mystery involving what has become known as Russiagate is the lack of any real understanding of what exactly took place. It is alleged in some circles that Moscow somehow interfered in the 2016 Presidential election and might even have tilted the result in favor of candidate Donald Trump. Others suspect that the tale is politically motivated in an attempt to exonerate Hillary Clinton and find Donald Trump or his associates guilty of collusion with an unfriendly foreign government. Caught in between are those who are not completely convinced by either narrative and are demanding evidence to confirm that there was a sequence of events involving Russia and various American individuals that demonstrates both intent and actual steps taken which would lend credibility to such a hypothesis. So far, in spite of a year and a half of highly intrusive investigation, there has been remarkably little evidence of anything apart from the unchallengeable fact that someone took files from John Podesta as well as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers and the stolen information wound up at WikiLeaks. One of the most damaging revelations made regarding Donald Trump consisted of the so-called “Dossier,” which had been compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Initial reports suggested that Steele’s investigation was commissioned initially by a Republican opponent of Trump, possibly Jeb Bush, and later it was possibly continued by someone connected to the Democratic Party. This genesis of the document was widely reported at the time but no “names” were attached to the claims even though the identities of those who had commissioned the work were known to some journalists who had uncovered additional details relating to the investigation. The drafts of some parts of the document itself began to make the rounds in Washington during the summer of 2016, though the entire text was not surfaced in the media until January. The dossier was reportedly still being worked on in June by Steele and by one account was turned over to the FBI in Rome by him in July. It later was passed to John McCain in November and was presented to FBI Director James Comey for verification, which he agreed to do. Read more at TDC. Tags:Russia FBI Agrees to Turn Over Everything It Knows About Trump Dossier... Which Comey Helped Fund President Trump Personally Ordered DOJ To Lift Gag Order On Clinton-Uranium One Informant Major paper calls on NY Governor Cuomo to fire city's highest official over blackout	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2296
__label__wiki	0.538516	0.538516	Jacqueline Gens Interview August 20, 2018 August 19, 2018 Simon Pettet [Jacqueline Gens – Photo: Allen Ginsberg] Long before she began working with Allen Ginsberg in the 1980s, Jacqueline Gens was inspired by the Beat writers. Discovering their work when she was in her teens, she points to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish” as one that “just rocked my world.” A poet in her own right – she was a director and a founder of the Master of Fine Arts Programme in Poetry at New England College, and for many years worked at the Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado, where she first met Ginsberg – Gens played a crucial role when Ginsberg’s photography was beginning to gain acclaim through gallery shows, reproductions in books and magazines, and with the publication of the Twelve Trees Press monograph Allen Ginsberg Photographs. For over six years, she acted as the primary archivist for the photography collection, along with handling much of the administrative work. A resident of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, she was interviewed over Skype in the summer of 2017. JS: You knew Allen before you started working with him and his photographs, yes? JG: I was the assistant director with the summer writing program at Naropa, and had worked with Allen a number of times before 1987, which is when I got involved with his photography. In fact, the first time I saw his photographs, he brought a box of them, to the summer writing program in 1985. I remember we were sitting in this mansion donated to Naropa for the summer where faculty were housed. I stayed with Allen that summer as kind of an overseer at this house. I still remember sitting in that elegant living room, we were all dressed up because there was going to be a party, and he was in suit and tie and I had this dress on, and he had this box, and he showed me these photographs, one by one, and I just knew I wanted to have something to do with them. I was quite taken with them, as they seemed to have a sacred quality to them. They were just so beautiful to me. In the mid-1980s, Raymond Foye, Robert Frank, and Berenice Abbott, among others encouraged him to take his photography seriously. So when I came in 1987, he asked me to organize an archive of his negatives. The office was having a difficult time locating negatives because they were frequently asked to produce photographs for magazines and other publications. JS: What interested you about the photos? JG: Allen just loved his friends, they were his sacred world. It went beyond his homosexuality, although there was that element too. In his later years, he always photographed ordinary people as well. I was recently reading the New York Times review of the National Gallery Beat show (“Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg”) that basically pans it, saying he’s not a great photographer. I think the beauty of his photography collection is that his entire world is included, not just the Beats. As he grew older, he would, for example, photograph a kid at an ice cream stand, or he would photograph just street scenes. Towards the end before I left, he was involved with all the painters like Francisco Clemente, Sandro Chia. He had entered that sort-of realm of high society, it wasn’t just the literary world, it was big money; they lived in glorious lofts, and he photographed them all, as portraits. He was very magnanimous in his appreciation for others and his keen perception of people no matter who or where they come from. And that’s what really drew me to him as a person as well. [ Francesco Clemente in the studio – photo; Allen Ginsberg] JS: How did you go about setting up the photography archive? JG: What Allen had me do is call all the great photographers – Richard Avendon, Robert Frank – and ask them how to set up this archive. I wasn’t a photographer; I knew nothing about photography. Between both of them, they suggested each negative be numbered. I couldn’t really do that, so we created these funky binders with the contact sheets, which were numbered, and then there was an opposite sleeve with the negatives. For the six years or so that I worked with Allen and the photographs, that’s what he used. Eventually of course everything would be digitized. JS: Did you arrange for the prints to be made as well? JG: Sid (Kaplan) and Brian (Graham) were the two go-tos for printing. I would hand-deliver the negatives and pick up the prints, or sometimes Sid would drop them off. So, not only did I do that, I also curated the photos for the Ginsberg film (The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, directed by Jerry Aronson). I collected all those photographs and had them printed. It was an enormous job. And we also had very large shows in Europe and Japan that I helped with, often with the curators, helping them select the photos to show. There was a lot of big money and a lot of politics around the shows. They had to be produced and curated. The photographs then had to be printed and then captions added to them. It was a lot of work, not to mention the enormous magazine requests for reproductions. JS: What were the logistics of the operation? JG: We would get an order, like maybe the Kerouac on the fire escape. After either Sid or Brian printed them I had to take them to Allen for him to write the captions. I spent a lot of time with Allen as he would hand-write on the finished prints. It’s the captions that enliven them and bring them to life. He couldn’t just write them and have them strewn around the office. You had to hand him the photograph, then you had the pens, he had to write them and leave them to dry, and then write another photograph caption. They said I was the “photography person” in the office, but I was also the office manager. The requests were coming in at a rapid rate in an office that was very understaffed. And when I first started with Allen and working on the photographic archive, it was in Allen’s tiny apartment on East 12th Street, and working with the negatives and getting everything together, it was really chaotic. JS: The timing, the mid-1980s, seemed ideal for the rediscovery of Allen’s photographs. KG: Allen’s collected works had recently come out. That sort-of became a renewal of his fame. Of course, he was always famous: I remember when I was a teenager and I’d see him on late-night TV. But in 1985, the collected works came out (Collected Poems 1947-1980), and it came out to rave reviews, so there was a renewed interest in the Beats generally, and in Allen specifically, so he began to walk around with his camera. Because of this renewal in his literary career, as Allen said in an interview once, if you’re really well known in one art, people might take you seriously in another art, and that’s what happened (with the photography). He took his camera because he had been encouraged by Robert Frank and Berenice Abbott. Richard Avendon had photographed his family as well, so Allen already knew a lot of photographers. Raymond Foye had a very important role in the transition from merely personal snapshots to an historical chronicle of a literary movement. But he was kind-of out of the picture when I came around two years later. JS: Was a pricing model established for reproductions? JG: It was somewhat negotiable. He was being published in a lot of different venues, such as magazines and newspapers. I didn’t have anything to do with the money, I was just doing the hands-on work, working with Sid and Brian, and then also working with Allen to find the photographs. Sometimes we’d have a stack of photographs that had to be signed. I often would take them to his house to do them there. Allen had strange office hours. He kind-of came alive around 4:00 PM, just as we were getting ready to leave. Sometimes I would leave them overnight on his desk. JS: Did Allen pay close attention to the contact sheets and make decisions on what to print? JG: Oh yeah, he would circle what he thought were great photos. He wasn’t just blindly selecting photos. And once in a while, other people would point out, “Here’s a good photo.” In the early period, Robert Frank would look at them all, and Frank was really the one that influenced him. Some of Allen’s photos, the greatness of them, I think they are as close to Robert Frank as they can be. There’s the one of Neal Cassady outside the billboard marquee in San Francisco, as well as some of those intimate portraits. Beat Memories Francesco Clemente Jacqueline Gens Jerry Aronson John Shoesmith Naropa Summer Writing Program Previous Tom Clark (1941-2018) Next Jacqueline Gens Interview – part 2	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2300
__label__cc	0.585946	0.414054	July 15, 2019 July 13, 2019 / rtrube54 / 6 Comments Less of More, Chris Nye. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019. Summary: Proposes that the American dream is making us miserable and that the vision of the kingdom turns the American dream upside down, leading us to a truly rich life. Chris Nye proposes that the American dream is killing us. Visions of unlimited growth are pressing up against the operating limits of the only place where we can live. Depression and suicide among the young are rising. Our politics are mired in discord pitting groups who share a common citizenship against one another. Nye writes, “we never had more than we do now, and we’ve never been more depressed about it,” Nye’s challenge in this book is the counter-cultural message of Jesus that we must lose our lives to save them. He contends that the American dreams of growth, self-sufficiency, fame, power, and wealth are gained at the cost of our souls. In chapters on each of these “dreams” he articulates the alternative the gospel of Jesus offers. He speaks to our infatuation with growth, especially the infatuation among Christians with church growth and measuring goodness by bigness. He counters that the message of the gospel is one of “pace,” of keeping pace with God’s often slow but certain work of transformation. He challenges the hyper-individualism of our culture and the idea that we are more connected than ever with the reality that many are more isolated than ever. He observes the gospel alternative of the connectedness of the welcoming table. He contrasts the quest for fame and gaining a name for oneself with the practice of hiddenness and the downward journey exemplified by Henri Nouwen and Jean Vanier at the L’Arch Communities. The culture defines greatness in terms of power. Nye proposes the humble and vulnerable community, where we reveal rather than hide weakness, and stoop to serve and protect each other. Finally we define ourselves by how much we are worth, by the wealth we have accumulated. Nye invites us to discover that while saving might feel good, giving feels great. Nye concludes with a pointed challenge. Despite dreams of American greatness, history tells us that the American Epoch will end, the Empire will fall. Christian hope has survived the fall of every empire and challenges us to consider to which we have given our allegiance. He writes, “To follow Jesus is to follow him out of America and into the kingdom of God, from our own weak, man-made houses and into the mansions he has built that await us.” I wouldn’t be surprised that there is pushback to this book (and perhaps this review). We want both the American dream and to have Jesus to as our eternal insurance policy. It seems to me that Nye is on good ground here in arguing that these are diametrically opposed to one another and that we can’t have both. Jesus himself said that we can’t have two masters, and the truth is that both the American dream and the call of the kingdom of God are a call to serve a master. But Nye goes further. He names the things that make are making us miserable, and the alternative life of the kingdom that restores wholeness. Nye diagnoses our American sickness. The question is whether we will recognize our dis-ease, and what can make us well. Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. July 12, 2019 July 11, 2019 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment Fall of a Cosmonaut (Porfiry Rostnikov #13), Stuart M. Kaminsky. New York: Mysterious Press, 2000. Summary: Chief Inspector Rostnikov and his team are charged with investigating three cases, a missing cosmonaut, a stolen film, and a brutal murder in a Paranormal Research Institute, only the first of the murders in the course of the story. My son often manages to find books I probably never would have noticed that end up as fascinating reads. This book was such a case. It is actually the thirteenth installment in Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov series and the real find here is the character of Rostnikov who combines the savvy political instincts necessary to survive in a cutthroat Russian bureacracy with an intuition about human behavior that leads him to surround himself with shrewd associates, and solve crimes. In this installment, there is not one, but three cases that his boss, the Yak, has assigned him, expecting results. One is a cosmonaut that has disappeared, along with secret knowledge of events on the Mir space station, knowledge that others have already died without revealing, the most recent by a swift injection from an umbrella-bearing man that is following Rostnikov and his son Iosef, as they travel to the village where Tsimion Vladovka grew up. In the second case, a movie director, Yuri Kriskov has just completed what is adverted to be a great epic on the life of Leo Tolstoy. Then he receives word that the movie and its negatives have been stolen, and are being held for a ransom that if not paid will result both in the destruction of the movie and the death of Kriskov. It turns out that this is a plot of an assistant, Valery Grachev who is in love with Vera, Kriskov’s wife, and Vera, who wants to be rid of Yuri. Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeva are assigned to this case, trying to find the manic genius who has stolen the film, and is seeking a way to kill Yuri. The third case involves the gruesome death by claw hammer of a sleep and dream researcher at a Paranormal Studies Institute. Emil Karpo and his understudy Zelech are assigned this one. Zelech is sidetracked by a woman researcher who suspects him of special abilities. Karpo collects shoes, finds a suspect who is a reclusive researcher who claims he is framed, and homes in on a jealous fellow scientist good at covering tracks. Rostnikov has the skill to adeptly counsel each both on the cases and their personal lives. Karpo needs a personal life. Tkach is estranged from his wife. Elena and his son Iosef are engaged. Zelech is single. They eventually unravel each case, but not before others die and their own lives in several instances are endangered. The cases also provide “information” that “the Yak” can use to advance his own ambitions, and his ability to control and manipulate others. I mention all the figures associated with the cases because, like any good Russian novel, keeping track of the names and who is doing what is more than half the battle! The narrative keeps moving back and forth between the cases briskly enough that we don’t lose the thread of any of them as we move to the climax and resolution of each. Altogether, there are sixteen numbers in Kaminsky’s Rostnikov series. I don’t know if I’ll get around to reading all of them, but I did pick up another one as a result of reading this. I think one of the most intriguing thing about mysteries is the distinctive character of the detectives–Holmes, Poirot, J. B. Fletcher, Kay Scarpetta, Robicheaux, Maigret, and Rostnikov–each seems a world different from the others and the delight is as much in the depths of these characters as in the resolution of these cases. I think I’m going to have to modify the bibliophile’s complaint and say, “So many series and so little time!” July 10, 2019 July 9, 2019 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World, Paul M. Gould, foreword by J. P. Moreland. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019. Summary: Contends that in our disenchanted post-modern world, the apologist needs to engage in a culturally aware apologetic that appeals to goodness, truth, and beauty. One thing anyone engaged in Christian witness for any length of time in a western cultural setting will tell you is that the landscape has changed. While the message of the gospel has not changed, the culture in which the message is shared has. Paul Gould’s one word description of that change is “disenchantment.” From a world shot through with the presence and majesty of God, the embrace of materialism and naturalism as all-encompassing accounts of the world results in a sense of the absence and irrelevance of God, and a culture that is sensate, focused on the physical senses, and hedonistic, focused on our desires. I found this intriguing, particularly considering the growing fascination with dystopian apocalypses, and conversely, with fantasy and alternate worlds, that might suggest a longing for re-enchantment or despair of its possibility. Gould contends that in this context, there is still a place for apologetics, but not that of past generations, focused exclusively on rational evidences, although these still have a place in Gould’s proposal. Gould contends for what he calls as cultural apologetics. By this, he means the “work of establishing the Christian voice, conscience, and imagination within a culture so that Christianity is seen as true and satisfying (italics in text).” The author believes that a cultural apologetic that does this appeals to a universal longing for truth, goodness, and beauty. It is an apologetic that appeals to the longing of truth through reason (voice), that appeals to the longing of goodness through conscience, and that appeals to the longing for beauty through the imagination. The aim of this to foster the awakening of desire (satisfying) and a return to reality (truth) that constitutes a “re-enchantment” eventuating in the decision to trust and follow Christ. Gould focuses a chapter each on imagination, reason, and conscience, employing C.S. Lewis’s approach of both “looking at,” and “looking along,” the latter considering the reality to which truth, goodness, and beauty point. The chapter on imagination draws upon Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care (reviewed here), that makes the case for how beauty may open the hearts of people to faith, exemplified in Masaaki Suzuki’s recognition that the music of Bach is a kind of “fifth gospel” that has led to interest in or the embrace of Christianity among many Japanese. The chapter on reason contends there is a case to be made for recovering the lost art of persuasion and sounds at first glance the most conventional of the three. However, Gould moves beyond classic arguments to appeal to the plausibility structures and sacred cores of one’s hearers. The appeal to conscience addresses the longings for goodness, wholeness, justice, and significance and seeks to demonstrate in practice and examples how Christianity has made the world a better place and why that is so. Addressing barriers to belief is an important part of this approach. It includes the internal barriers of anti-intellectualism, fragmentation, and unbaptized imagination within the Christian community. It also involves the external barriers of the belief that science disproves God, that objects to the exclusivity of Jesus, that believes God is not good, and considers the ethic of the Bible archaic, repressive, and unloving. Gould offers brief responses to each of these barriers and then describes the “journey home” from initial enchantment through disenchantment to re-enchantment as we join the “dance of God.” One of the things I appreciated about this work amid the strains of anti-intellectualism in significant swaths of evangelicalism was the affirmation of intellectual leadership. He writes, “If we are to be strategic in our cultural apologetic, we must work to cultivate Christian leadership and a Christian presence within the halls of the academy. The perceived reasonableness and desirability of Christianity depends upon how effectively we accomplish this task” (p. 143). I also appreciate the integrated appeal to goodness, truth, and beauty. It seems that we often prefer one of these to the inclusion. If reasoning about truth alone is not helpful, abandon it for beauty or goodness. Gould recognizes that to be human means we long for all three. Also, the posture of culture care, as opposed to culture clash assumes that people are drawn by desire rather than overcome by arguments. Finally, Gould reframes rather than retreats from the apologetic task. It seems to me that this is vital in an age where many are not merely indifferent to Christianity but vigorously opposed, and willing to make a case against the Christian faith. He reframes apologetics in a way that challenges the church to live into its heritage: to abandon trivial banality for a rich artistic imagination, to abandon a slovenly anti-intellectualism for vibrant intellectual engagement, and to abandon moral compromise for a fragrant goodness. It seems to me this would be good both for the church and the world. July 8, 2019 July 7, 2019 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment Presidents of War, Michael Beschloss. New York: Crown Publishing, 2018. Summary: An account of eight American presidents who led the nation into war, how they coped with its stresses, and the consequences of their actions with regard to presidential power. As recent tensions (I write in July 2019) with North Korea and Iran underscore, the potential and power of a U.S. president to lead the nation into war is great, and brings solemn consequences in terms of loss of life, ongoing entanglements, or the ultimate cataclysm of nuclear conflict. Michael Beschloss, in this work, studies eight American presidents who led the nation into war. The presidents are James Madison (War of 1812), James Polk (Mexican-American War), Abraham Lincoln (the Civil War), William McKinley (Spanish-American War), Woodrow Wilson (World War I), Franklin Roosevelt (World War II), Harry Truman (Korea) and Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam). It is fascinating to see pretexts and concealed motives for conflicts. For example, Madison took a poorly equipped nation into conflict with Great Britain over impressments of American sailors and the high-handedness of George III, while entertaining ambitions to invade and seize Canadian territory. James Polk, similarly had territorial ambitions to annex territory in the southwest from Mexico and used clashes on the disputed Texas-Mexico border to seek a declaration of war. The fall of Fort Sumter was the flashpoint of the simmering conflict between North and South that both knew was about slavery. Yet until the summer of 1862, Lincoln spoke of the war as an effort to restore the Union. The sinking of the Maine, likely caused by a shipboard accident, served as the cause for the Spanish-American War, allowing the McKinley administration to seize the Philippines and achieve “regime change” in Cuba. Critical intelligence was not passed on to fleet commanders at Pearl Harbor, and the catastrophic Japanese attack gave Franklin Roosevelt the mandate he needed to lead a reluctant nation into war. Dubious attacks in the Tonkin Bay in response to covert US activity resulted in a congressional resolution that served as the basis for Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam conflict. Beschloss also chronicles a tension inherent in the U.S. Constitution. While Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution entrusts the sole power to declare war to Congress, Article II, Section 2 names the President the commander in chief of armed forces, entrusting to him the power to launch and direct military operations and deploy our forces, important in the event of attacks upon the country. In this work we see not only how presidents used various pretexts to argue for war declarations up through World War II, but also how Presidents avoided seeking such declarations in the case of Korea and Vietnam, actions that turned out to be unpopular with the American people. Beschloss notes that today’s all-volunteer armies and the lack of a draft make this easier. Presidents used war to push the limits of presidential power, whether in the suspension of habeas corpus, in executive orders, in harnessing civilian industry to war aims (such as Harry Truman’s takeover of a strike-plagued steel industry), or even the Emancipation Proclamation, effecting an end of slavery without constitutional amendment. At the same time, failure in the exercise of these powers brought new curbs or temporarily weakened the presidency, such as the 1973 War Powers Act, after Vietnam, and the weakened administrations of Ford and Carter, post-Vietnam. Beschloss also studies how different presidents coped with the pressures of war. Madison seemed not to cope well at all, offering indecisive leadership and being routed from Washington. Polk was the first president who paid a toll with his health for fighting a war, barely surviving his presidency in broken health. Lincoln admitted, “This war is eating my life out” and he had a strong impression that he would not live to see its end (he barely did before an assassin’s bullet struck him down). McKinley turned to his Bible and justified the seizure of the Philippines as a trust to bring Christianity to the archipelago. His life was also ended by assassination while in office. Wilson suffered a stroke after fighting for his Fourteen Principles, the League of Nations, and the Treaty of Versailles. Roosevelt also suffered a fatal stroke on the eve of the allied victory and Johnson’s health was seriously impaired with his death coming within five years of leaving office. Fate is not kind to most war presidents. This work is an excellent survey of many of America’s wars, and of presidential leadership, both in taking the nation into war and leading the country through them. It is disturbing how many times the country is deceived or deprived of critical information in being led into war, and how often fervor substitutes for a sound basis for war, perhaps most notably in 1812 and in Vietnam. Given the high stakes of modern warfare, Beschloss’s work suggests that questions of character, demonstrated leadership, and the mental and physical fitness of the holders of the office of President should weigh heavily in our electoral processes. It also suggests the critical role of Congress in the exercise of its War Powers, and its role of requiring a President to make the case for war to the American people. The fate of a nation, or even the world, may rest on how our President, and our elected representatives act. July 5, 2019 July 4, 2019 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, edited by Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019. Summary: A collection of presentations from the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, discussing the work, and particularly the fiction, of Marilynne Robinson with contributions from Robinson. It is not unusual at an academic conference to discuss the work of a particular author. What is perhaps more remarkable is to discuss the work of a living author with the author present and contributing. The subtitle of this work calls this “a theological dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, and this is true in two senses. The various essays do engage the theology, particularly the Calvinism of Robinson’s work. But the conference also engaged Robinson, with a presentation by her (“The Protestant Conscience”) and a conversation between her and Rowan Williams, and an interview with Wheaton College President Philip Ryken. Most of the essays focus on some aspect of the theology found in Robinson’s work. Timothy Larsen considers the main character of her fiction, Reverend John Ames, his heritage as the grandson of a staunch abolitionist in the mold of Wheaton’s Jonathan Blanchard, his reaction against that as a pacifist, and the mindset of the 1950’s Christian Century which he and fellow minister Boughton regularly discussed. Han-luen Kantzer Komline explores Ames “heart condition,” both physical and spiritual, and his struggle to forgive and extend grace to Jack Boughton, the wayward child of his friend. Timothy George explores the unusual, for an academic and a writer, embrace of Calvinism by Robinson, with its doctrine of predestination, emphasizing grace and undercutting human presumption. George notes the central focus of Robinson on Christ and so does Keith L. Johnson in a discussion of Robinson’s metaphysics. Here he teases out Robinson’s understanding of the significance of the cross as the demonstration of the love of God for us rather than on its sacrificial character, a focus Robinson engages and differs with. Lauren Winner focuses on the preaching of John Ames–the 67,500 pages and 2,250 sermons in the course of his pastorate in Gilead and his conclusion that “they mattered or they didn’t and that’s the end of it.” One of the most intriguing essays for me was that of Patricia Andujo on the African American experience in Robinson’s works. She explores how these works reflect the attitudes of mainline white churches in the 1950’s, a kind of passivity in the face of racism, even while raising the uncomfortable issue of Jack Boughton’s inter-racial marriage, and the lack of response when the town’s black church burns down and the congregation leaves. Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s essay on “Space/Time/Doctrine” raises the intriguing idea of the influence of Robinson’s understanding of predestination, and the shifts backwards and forwards in time in her novels. Joel Sheesley, a midwestern artist, focuses on the landscape of Robinson’s novels. In the penultimate essay Rowan Williams explores the theme of the grace that is beyond human goodness. He writes: “Grace, not goodness, is the key to our healing. To say that is to say that we’re healed in relation not only to God but to one another. Without that dimension, we’re back with toxic goodness again, the goodness that forgets and excludes. Lila’s problem in the novel is that the instinctive warmth, the human friendliness, the humanly constructed fellowship that characterizes Gilead cannot allow itself to be wounded and broken open in such a way that the stranger is welcome, whether that stranger is the racial other, or simply the socially marginal and damaged person like Lila herself. But to be wounded in our goodness, to learn to have that dimension of our self-image and self-presentation cracked open, is the beginning of where grace can act in us” (pp. 163-164). The final essay is Robinson’s on “The Protestant Conscience,” in which she defends not only the freedom of conscience of religious believers but argues that the Protestant idea of conscience defended the freedom of all rather than enforcing a Christian conscience upon all through means of the state. This presentation is followed by conversations with Rowan Williams, and an interview with Philip Ryken. In this collection, I found these diverting, but not nearly as substantive and satisfying as the various essays. Perhaps a highlight was the difference between Robinson and Williams on the literary merits of Flannery O’Connor, of whom Robinson is no fan. This is a great volume for any who, like me, love the work of Marilynne Robinson. It helped make greater sense of some of the themes I’ve seen in her work, particularly her Calvinism. It served to invite me to a re-reading of her work in its exploration of themes of place, race, and grace. Robinson’s presence by no means muted the critique of her work, and yet I saw no defensiveness in her comments, which bespeaks the evidence of grace in her life. All in all, this is well worth acquiring if you have followed Robinson’s work. For those who have not, read the novels first, and then you will appreciate this volume! Priscilla, Ben Witherington III. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019. Summary: An imaginative rendering of the story of Priscilla, a companion of Paul, as a dictated narrative recorded by her adopted daughter Julia, as she faces possible trial before a Roman tribunal. Priscilla (or Prisca) is one of those fascinating minor characters we meet in the book of Acts and several of the letters of Paul. Often mentioned before her husband Aquila, she is described as a tentmaker, who works with her husband and Paul to support their mission efforts. When Paul writes the Corinthians, he sends their greetings along with his own. Later, in the letters to the Romans and the second letter to Timothy, he sends greetings to them. Perhaps most significantly, Priscilla and her husband instructed Apollos, who became a noteworthy preacher, in the truth of the gospel. This book is an imaginative filling out of her story, and that of the early Christian movement. As the story opens, Priscilla is a woman of 80, still proprietor of a tentmaking business in Rome. Her nightmares about the early Neronian persecution of Christians, during which she lost her husband, result in her determining to tell her whole story to her adopted daughter Julia, who takes it down on wax tablets to copy to papyrus. She traces her Christian journey from the day of Pentecost, when she and her mother became followers of the Way, and were expelled from their home. Eventually, they take up tentmaking in Rome. Prisca meets Aquila, another believer. She describes persecutions of Jews in Rome and their banishing to Corinth, their encounter with and travels with Paul, their instruction of Apollos, to whom she later. attributes the Letter to the Hebrews. Witherington creates an urgency to the account. Shortly after beginning the narrative, Priscilla receives a summons to appear in a month before the tribunal of Domitian, who has resumed the persecution of Christians. The theme of persecution runs through the narrative–the brutalities of Nero, who illuminated the city with burning Christians, banishments, the trials of Paul, of Peter and many others. Priscilla’s narrative incorporates descriptions of everyday life, often assumed in scripture, and makes connections that help flesh out the development of the early Christian movement–the ministries of Peter, James, and John, and their writings, along with the gospels of Luke and John Mark. The account also chronicles the ideal of Paul about Jewish-Gentile relationships in the church, and the struggle, and ultimately failure to achieve this ideal as differences separated these two and the number of Jewish followers of the Way declined. There were both external pressures from the rest of the Jewish community, and the struggle to grasp the new covenant realities that made inclusion of the Gentiles possible. Finally, the portrayal of Priscilla and the discussion of women and their roles in the church and the world helps us understand both cultural limits and the gospel possibilities Paul envisioned. This commentary by Priscilla, responding to a question from Julia reflects Witherington’s understanding of Paul on women: ” ‘That’s true, but Paulus’s pastoral principle was ‘start with them where they are, and lead them where you want them to go.’ He knew the places Timothy and Titus served were male-dominated, especially on Crete, but if you carefully read the first letter Paulus wrote to Timothy, he mentions female deacons. Those texts were never meant to exclude women from praying or prophesying or teaching or whatever they were gifted and called by God to do so. Paulus view was to change those in the body of Christus over time rather than change society at large.’ “ Sadly, Priscilla probably didn’t envision that two thousand years later the church would still be wrestling with this one. There are times when the incorporation of explanations of daily life seem a bit artificial, and the use of Latin or Greek terms, and then explanation, while helpful from a historical perspective, seems unnatural in a conversation. Nevertheless, the narrative reflects Witherington’s extensive understanding of the New Testament and its Mediterranean context, and helps us return to the biblical narratives with fresh eyes. The extensive use of illustrations to complement the text add to the reader’s understanding and interest. The use of the impending appearance before the tribunal adds narrative tension, and offers the opportunity for a discussion of the realities of Christian hope that have strengthened believers facing persecution in every age. This is a book both to inform and encourage! Review: Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination, David Lyle Jeffrey. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019. Summary: A collection of essays tracing the influence of the scriptures, and particularly the poetry of scripture, upon poetry in the English language from medieval to modern times. If you are a Jeopardy fan, you may have noticed how most contestants avoid categories involving biblical knowledge. Friends of mine in university English departments tell me that there is a similar avoidance of Bible as literature courses by university faculty. This is particularly striking given the profound influence of the Bible upon English literature throughout history. In this work, Baylor University English professor David Lyle Jeffrey focuses on a very specific aspect of that influence–the influence of the Bible, and particularly its poetic character, on English language poetry. He states: “The central purpose of this collection of essays will be to explore some of the ways Holy Scripture has shaped the English poetic imagination, not merely through subject, cadence, idiom, and various echoes of its diction, but by effecting something deeper in the consciousness of English-speaking poets from Caedmon in the eighth century to Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg among our contemporaries. Essentially, this involves an atunement of the vernacular English poetic imagination to biblical poetics as a wellspring of inspiration.” Jeffrey begins with poetry in God’s own voice, the passages of scripture where God speaks, whether through the Old Testament prophets or the parables of Jesus up through the final visions of the Revelation to St. John. The remainder of the book then explores the English poetic imagination from the medieval period up to the Reformation, and then from the Reformation to the present time. The first part includes discussions of the works of Caedmon, Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare. The second part begins with John Donne and George Herbert. In Donne, we see human love transmuted into love for the divine. In Herbert, we find one who has deeply digested the scriptures, whose poetry is a prayerful commentary of scripture as a whole. And what scripture? The following chapter explores the profound influence of the King James Version on poetry from the time of this translation forward, as perhaps the pinnacle of English expression not to be matched by modern translations, however accurate they may be. The last chapters introduced me to modern poets I have not explored: Margaret Avison, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Foremost of these is Richard Wilbur, named poet laureate of the United States in 1987, one who Jeffrey says, “teaches us to be open ourselves to wonder.” His descriptions left me wanting to read all of them, Wilbur in particular. He concludes with the contemporary disarray of the humanities that have ceased “being purveyors of high and noble verities for low, and often trivial, advocacies.” He sees in an academy that has dismissed the higher authority found in Holy Scripture, a place given over to the exercise of power. Against all this, he urges the community of those who are people of the Book (harking back to an earlier work) to the task of the preservation of literature in which they recognize expressions of truth that reflect that Book. This is a book written particularly for those familiar both with the literature about which Jeffrey writes, and the academic language in which Jeffrey’s fellow academics discuss these texts. This is not so much an introduction to the influence of the Bible on poetry, as an extended rigorous disquisition for students and teachers of English literature showing from medieval to modern periods that much of English poetry cannot be well-understood apart from the biblical text that served as the wellspring of the imaginations that crafted these works. Those without this background may despair after a few chapters. If they are hungering for a deeper engagement with literature, they might begin with other writers like Karen Swallow Prior. This is a more advanced work, especially suitable both for Christians and those who are not who are engaged in literary studies and suspect the Bible has a greater influence on the works they are studying than credited. I think Jeffrey makes a case well worth considering as well as offering a searching analysis of the parlous state of literary studies at the present time. Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. Review: Upside-Down Spirituality June 28, 2019 June 27, 2019 / rtrube54 / 4 Comments Upside-Down Spirituality, Chad Bird. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019. Summary: Highlights nine areas in which Christian faith turns cultural conventions on their head, turning the world “upside-down.” When you ask most people what they think a real Christian is, the answer is often some version of people who are nicer than those around them. Often, we buy that, adopting the way those around us think of a good, or even successful life, covering it with a veneer of Christian-y sounding language. Years ago, I had a seminary course in New Testament Ethics, the primary text of which was Allen Verhey’s The Great Reversal. I have to admit that at the time, I still regarded Christian ethics as a nicer version of the world’s, but was bothered by the title. Over the years of reading and re-reading the Bible, I began to suspect more and more that Jesus really did inaugurate a great reversal, literally turning the world’s ethics on their head, blessing the meek and the humble and making the least the greatest. Chad Bird’s Upside-Down Spirituality develops a similar idea. Whereas we tend to celebrate good people who succeed, Bird proposes that this common sense needs to be turned on its head. He proposes: “Failures of a faithful life–that’s what we’ll be talking about in the chapters that follow. What this world’s common-sense wisdom reckons as failures, anyway. The failure to be extraordinary, the failure to live independent lives, the failure to go big or go home, the failure to think love sustains our marriages, even the failure to have a personal relationship with Jesus….For there are areas in all our lives–personally, in our families and marriages, as well as in our churches–where we’ve become so habituated to the empty platitudes of our culture that we don’t even realize our hearts have gone astray” (p. 24). Bird discusses nine failures under three categories. The first category is how we think of ourselves. He challenges the idea of believing in the God who believes in you. Instead, he argues that God doesn’t believe in us but through “Jesus only” we discover the God who loves us despite our failures. He contends that failing to make a name for ourselves, living what may be hidden lives of faithfulness carries the great assurance that our names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. He calls out a culture that urges us to follow our hearts, and invites us to follow not our hearts, but Jesus. The second part considers how we think about our lives. He begins by puncturing the dream of being the perfect parent. He cites a Facebook post outlining a long litany of things the perfect mom does and contrasts it with the list used by former generations: “feed them sometimes.” The truth is that all of us who have been parents have done mediocre jobs, and that our real hope is that our children grow up, not in perfect houses with perfect parents, but in houses of grace where we all come to understand that our hope is being God’s forgiven children. Instead of questing for our ideal “calling,” Bird challenges us that there is no sacred-secular divide, and that we may live as called persons wherever we are, and in whatever we do. The chapter in this part I loved the most was where he argues against the myth of finding one’s soulmate. When I hear marrying couples say this, I either gag or tremble, fearing that they are headed to an early divorce if they don’t wake up to the reality that no person can live up to that ideal. We are both unique, and often self-centered and marriage will sooner or later bring those differences and our fallenness to the surface. Bird proposes that it is not love that sustains marriages, but rather marriages that sustain love as we press into Christ for his help to do what is humanly impossible. Finally he challenges some of the success myths of the church. One is the myth of us versus them, that to not conform to the world, we need to cut ourselves off from the world. He explores what it means to be resident aliens, building bridges into Babylon, seeking its peace and prosperity, even as we embrace our true citizenship in the kingdom. He gives the lie to having “a personal relationship with Jesus,” that faith is a private thing. Rather, we relate to Jesus as part of communities who are his body. His final chapter wonders about something I’ve wondered about. Why do so many of us drive past fifty churches to go to the “big box” church across town rather than worshiping with those who live near where we live? He contends that instead of buying into “bigger is better,” we find contentment and joy wherever the crucified and risen Christ is preached. Each chapter ends with a “beatitude,” all of which are summarized at the end. A couple of my favorites: 3. “Blessed are those who don’t follow their hearts, for they follow the Lamb where he goes.” 5. Blessed are those who fail to find their calling, for theirs is the kingdom where life and love and service find them.” Bird writes with candor and vulnerability. He’s been through a divorce and done everything from pastor to drive a big rig. He punctures the success myths of contemporary Christianity as one who has failed and found grace, and a far more vibrant and honest life as a humble follower of Christ. He offers hope that when we fail, we may be closer than ever to the grace of God and the kingdom of Jesus, who turns the world upside down. Guest Review: Enriching our Vision of Reality June 27, 2019 June 26, 2019 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment Enriching our Vision of Reality, Alister McGrath. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2017 Summary: The natural sciences and Christian theology can enrich each other’s understanding of reality and help us better understand this strange world in which we find ourselves. The fundamental theme of Alister McGrath’s book is that “the natural sciences and Christian theology can enrich each other’s understanding of reality and help us better understand this strange world in which we find ourselves.” (p. 77) His intended audience is “scientists with an interest in theology and theologians aware of the importance of the natural sciences” (p. viii), of which I happen to be neither. McGrath suggests that “insisting that we use only scientific methods, forms and categories confines us to a narrow world that excludes meaning and value, not because these are absent but because this research method prevents them being seen.” (p. 16) McGrath discusses the shortcomings of Ian Barbour’s four general approaches (conflict, independence, dialogue and integration) to the relation of science and religion, then goes on to favorably describe John Polkinghorne’s four approaches (deistic, theistic, revisionary, and developmental). The developmental approach is described as a continuously unfolding exploration wherein Christian doctrine is revised in the light of new insights. He points out the numerous ways in which scientific and theological thinking are similar, particularly regarding Darwin’s theory and Christian theology, in that “both scientific and religious theories find themselves confronted with mysteries, puzzles and anomalies that may give rise to intellectual or existential tensions but do not require their abandonment. . . . In each case, there is a common structure of an explanation with anomalies, which are not regarded as endangering the theory by its proponents but are seen as puzzles that will be resolved at a later stage.” (pp. 147-8) And it wouldn’t be an Alister McGrath book without a discussion of natural theology, which he describes as “an attempt to demonstrate the existence or character of God by an appeal to the order or beauty of the natural world, without presupposing or relying on any religious assumptions or beliefs.” (p. 165) McGrath suggests that “Christianity offers a framework that makes sense of what is otherwise a happy cosmic coincidence.” (p. 11) In summary, McGrath provides an exploration of the relation of the natural sciences and theology and how they can complement each other. Along the way, McGrath responds to the views of some of the New Atheists, particularly Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The book includes a two-page “For Further Reading” but no Index. The only fault I can find with this book is that the publisher chose to go with end notes (28 pages of them) instead of footnotes, thus requiring constant page-flipping. This guest review was contributed by Paul Bruggink, a retired technical specialist whose review interest is in the area of science and faith. Review: The Heart’s Necessities The Heart’s Necessities: Life in Poetry, Jane Tyson Clement with Becca Stevens. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2019. Summary. A collection of the poetry of Jane Tyson Clement, a member of the Bruderhof Community, interleaved with biography and comments by musician Becca Stevens, who has set several of Clement’s works to music. Jane Tyson Clement grew up in the shadow of Columbia, began writing poetry in high school and went to Smith College. Like many, she lost and then recovered her faith. She married in the shadow of World War II, to Robert, a lawyer. Both pacifists, they eventually found their way to the Bruderhof communities where they lived the rest of their lives. Some of Jane’s poetry was published during her lifetime. More of it was found after her death from Alzheimer’s disease in 2000. This newly published work offers a sampling of her poetry throughout her life combined with biography, and the comments of Becca Stevens. Becca is a musician who found in Clement’s Winter and February Thaw the words she was searching for to express grief for Kenya Tillery, a musical collaborator lost to breast cancer. Both of these works appear in this volume and one can listen to the song, Tillery, and four other settings of Clement’s poems at Songs for The Heart’s Necessities. One of the marks of Clement’s poem is the keen observation of nature–the sea, birds, trees, the seasons–and the whispers of the transcendent that we overhear in her poems, speaking to or echoing the heart’s longings. The lines from which the book finds its title, in the poem Winter, are a good example: The heart’s necessities include the interlude of frost restricted peace on which the sun can brood. Manasquan Inlet II is one of her last poems, and she is still connecting the ebb and flow of the tides and the “powers beyond our ken”: No one can stem the tide; now watch it run to meet the river pouring to the sea! And in the meeting tumult what a play of waves and twinkling water in the sun! Ordained by powers beyond our ken beyond all wisdom, all our trickery, immutable it comes, it sweeps, it ebbs and clears the filthiness and froth of men. Some of the most moving poems in this collection are the “To R.A.C.” poems, written to Robert, her future husband. She traces the growth of their love from her first recognition of him, and she believes, he of her, to be followed by him walking out the door. We listen as they share their love of the world’s beauty while their own love is growing. We hear her struggling with whether her love is some constructed thing, as she writes, “I will remember you not as you are/but as I willed you were.” Her later poems testify to her deepening faith, and are often piercing in insight. Lord, Show Me Thyself speaks to our longings for God, and yet how unprepared we are when God actually shows up and we are faced with the choice of whether we will “stand and open wide/the doors of being to thy light.” She describes many of us, the respectable sinners, in Resolve as she declares, “My sins are inward and refined, my friends the gentle friends of God; I must go seek the publicans, the wild companions of my Lord.” Becca Stevens strikes me as one of many who are the “spiritual but not religious,” one of those sometimes called a “none.” Yet the poetry of Jane speaks deeply to her, and perhaps illustrates how more may be drawn to authentic beauty than persuasive attempts. She observes that “Jane has a rare ability to talk about God, spirituality, and faith in a way anyone can relate to–not in an alienating way….She looks to the movements of birds, the sea, and the seasons to answer her unresolved struggles with faith.” For that reason, Stevens involvement in this book seems to work. She doesn’t impose interpretations upon us so much as let us hear her own musings on Clement’s work. Her contributions allow us catch our breath after drinking deeply as we read the poetry. Interspersed biography helps us understand the settings of poems from different periods. The photography combines some of the places Jane Tyson Clement would have frequented and the creative process of Becca Stevens. All in all, it is exquisitely done. This book makes a wonderful gift to a friend, or to oneself, inviting us all to ponder “the heart’s necessities.”	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2303
__label__cc	0.501583	0.498417	AltaGas Appoints Randall Crawford as Chief Executive Officer November 20, 2018 5:45 AM CNW AltaGas solidifies senior leadership team and readies to execute on opportunities in Gas and U.S. Utilities CALGARY, Nov. 20, 2018 /CNW/ – AltaGas Ltd. (AltaGas) (TSX: ALA) today announced the appointment of Randall (Randy) Crawford as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors, effective December 10, 2018. Mr. Crawford assumes this role from David Cornhill and Phillip Knoll who will continue as interim co-CEOs until the effective date. Mr. Crawford will join the AltaGas senior leadership team in Calgary, Alberta, and will lead the next stages of the company's ongoing evolution. Mr. Crawford is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of experience in the natural gas industry. In his most recent role as Senior Vice President and President, Midstream and Commercial with EQT Corporation (EQT), a premier U.S. integrated gas company, Mr. Crawford successfully led EQT's ambitious growth strategy in the Marcellus natural gas play. He has also held progressively senior roles at EQT's regulated gas utility, including serving as its President. “Randy's extensive experience in our base businesses and long track record of driving top-tier performance makes him the ideal candidate to lead the next chapter in AltaGas' evolution,” said David Cornhill, interim co-Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board. “His operational expertise and financial acumen will serve us well as we continue to optimize and reshape our business, refine our asset portfolio and strengthen our balance sheet.” Mr. Crawford will lead and develop AltaGas' ongoing strategy, including: strengthening AltaGas' financial position; reshaping AltaGas to focus on opportunities in the Gas and U.S. Utilities segments; and, leveraging the existing Gas and U.S. Utilities businesses to drive the next phase of growth and value creation at AltaGas. “Given the quality of AltaGas' employees and assets, I believe there is tremendous opportunity to leverage the asset footprint for long-term, sustainable growth,” said Mr. Crawford. “I look forward to working alongside our entire AltaGas team to continue to enhance the value of our assets and position us as a leading player in North American energy infrastructure.” Prior to joining EQT, Mr. Crawford held various senior financial and regulatory management positions with Consolidated Natural Gas Company in Pittsburgh. Mr. Crawford previously served as a director for the American Gas Association, the Energy Association of Pennsylvania, the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association and the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. He's a director of the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation, a member of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Council, and a past West Virginia Wesleyan College Trustee. About AltaGas AltaGas is an energy infrastructure company with a focus on natural gas, power and regulated utilities. AltaGas creates value by growing and optimizing its energy infrastructure, including a focus on clean energy sources. For more information visit: www.altagas.ca. Advisories & Contact This news release contains forward-looking information (forward-looking statements). Words such as “may”, “can”, “would”, “could”, “should”, “will”, “intend”, “plan”, “anticipate”, “believe”, “aim”, “seek”, “propose”, “contemplate”, “estimate”, “focus”, “strive”, “forecast”, “expect”, “project”, “target”, “potential”, “objective”, “continue”, “outlook”, “vision”, “opportunity” and similar expressions suggesting future events or future performance, as they relate to AltaGas or any affiliate of AltaGas, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking statements with respect to, among other things, business objectives, expected growth, results of operations, performance, business projects and opportunities and financial results. Specifically, such forward-looking statements included in this document include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the following: the anticipated effective time of Randy Crawford's appointment as CEO; the expected continuance of the current co-CEOs in their role until the effective date; expected reshaping of the business, refining of the asset portfolio and strengthening of the balance sheet; and expected execution of the strategy, including expected focus areas, growth and value creation. AltaGas' forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties which could cause results or events to differ from current expectations, including, without limitation: access to and use of capital markets; market value of AltaGas' securities; AltaGas' ability to pay dividends; AltaGas' ability to service or refinance its debt and manage its credit rating and risk; prevailing economic conditions; potential litigation; AltaGas' relationships with external stakeholders, including Aboriginal stakeholders; volume throughput and the impacts of commodity pricing, supply, composition and other market risks; available electricity prices; interest rate, exchange rate and counterparty risks; the Harmattan Rep agreements; legislative and regulatory environment; underinsured losses; weather, hydrology and climate changes; the potential for service interruptions; availability of supply from Cook Inlet; availability of biomass fuel; AltaGas' ability to economically and safely develop, contract and operate assets; AltaGas' ability to update infrastructure on a timely basis; AltaGas' dependence on certain partners; impacts of climate change and carbon taxing; effects of decommissioning, abandonment and reclamation costs; impact of labour relations and reliance on key personnel; cybersecurity risks; risks associated with the financing of the WGL Acquisition and the underlying business of WGL; and the other factors discussed under the heading “Risk Factors” in the Corporation's AIF for the year ended December 31, 2017. Many factors could cause AltaGas' or any particular business segment's actual results, performance or achievements to vary from those described in this news release, including, without limitation, those listed above and the assumptions upon which they are based proving incorrect. These factors should not be construed as exhaustive. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in this news release as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, sought, proposed, estimated, forecasted, expected, projected or targeted and such forward-looking statements included in this news release, should not be unduly relied upon. The impact of any one assumption, risk, uncertainty or other factor on a particular forward-looking statement cannot be determined with certainty because they are interdependent and AltaGas' future decisions and actions will depend on management's assessment of all information at the relevant time. Such statements speak only as of the date of this news release. AltaGas does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by these cautionary statements. SOURCE AltaGas Ltd. View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2018/20/c6030.html AltaGas EQT Marcellus	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2304
__label__wiki	0.669622	0.669622	50 Years Of BMW Turbocharging Alex Tock, April 29, 2019 April 30, 2019 , BMW News Today, the entire BMW passenger car lineup relies on force-fed combustion for motivation. As many of us remember, however, it was only a short time ago that the BMW model portfolio used some of the best naturally aspirated engines ever made. Here at BimmerLife, we’ve delved into these topics in great detail, examining some of the most important turbocharged and naturally aspirated models and engines made by BMW. More recently, we looked at the evolution of one of the marques more compelling engine architectures, the BMW V12. Not long ago though, BMW put out a press release comparing their very first turbocharged four-cylinder, used to power racing versions of the BMW 2002ti and internally referred to as the M121, with the newest edition of the same forced induction four-cylinder architecture, the P48, which will see use in the M4 DTM beginning this May. Although inline sixes, V8s, and V12s effortlessly capture our imaginations, it is the four cylinder engine that has by-and-large been the motive force behind the vast majority of all things automotive for the past century. Up there with the likes of competitors originating from manufacturers such as Alfa Romeo, Cosworth and numerous others, what is perhaps the most important BMW four-cylinder arrived in the early 1960’s within the engine bay of the New Class sedan. It wouldn’t be long before this engine lineup, which now falls under the M10 moniker, was expanded in terms of displacement and advanced with new forms of technology. Mechanical fuel injection allowed two-liter versions of the venerable four-cylinder to enter a new realm in terms of output and performance capability, while a short time later, Bosch injection systems helped to keep the SOHC mill current almost 30 years after it had been introduced. Although most consider the M31 to be the first production turbocharged BMW engine, likely thanks to its use in the short-lived yet very special 2002 Turbo, the M121, which powered the European Touring Car Championship winning 2002ti to victory in 1969, is actually the forerunner. This engine, based on the aforementioned M10 SOHC four cylinder, was a technological marvel for its time. Displacing 1,990cc just like the most celebrated versions of the M10, the M121 employed mechanical fuel injection and an early turbocharger to develop approximately 280 horsepower at 6,500 rpm, more than double the output of the most powerful twin carb version of the era. The turbocharger, which was regulated by a boost gauge, had theoretical maximum boost pressure of over 25 PSI, but in 1969, such force would have been great enough to cause the cylinder had to separate and lift from the block. Other visual hallmarks, such as the rather lengthy charge air pipe, and metal intake manifold plenum have since been relegated antiquity. The same can be said for the mechanically actuated throttle valve, while competition engines have also moved away from accepted fundamentals such as wet-sump lubrication and the rudimentary crankshaft-powered cooling fan. It also bears mentioning that, when the M121 was modified for series production, and took the form of the M31 used in the 2002 Turbo, output was adjusted to a more civilized and reliable 168 horsepower. The year is now 2019 though, and despite the P48 and M121 sharing a few underlying basics, such as cylinder count and two-liter displacement, much has changed. The P48 can develop as much as 630 horsepower owing to over 36 PSI of boost pressure, while the lubrication is handled by a dry-sump system that is much more efficient in its targeting of oil flow. Gone is the lag-induced charge air pipe, while single wires and lines have been done away with in favor of integrated systems such as a carbon-fiber reinforced plastic cable tray for ignition wire routing. There’s no blow-off valve, and instead of a mechanical throttle system, power is regulated by an electronically actuated butterfly valve. Perhaps the only holdover, a mechanical pump is still tasked with fuel injection, but even accessories we are all used to seeing, such as the starter and alternator, have been moved from the engine itself to the transaxle. Fuel injection now occurs at over 350 bar or 5,000 PSI, the same staggering pressure found in modern production BMW engines like the B58, S58, N63, and S63. Most importantly, however, as the public mourns the loss of the previous V8 DTM engine, the P48 four weighs less than half, is more powerful, and has a full competition service interval of over 3,700 miles. Efficiency is also greatly increased, a huge factor in modern DTM competition, with a 10% gain over its predecessor, and nearly 50% over the M121. With 50 years between them, there are a lot of differences between the M121 and P48, but its difficult to understate the importance of both two-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engines. We look forward to the upcoming DTM season where the incredibly potent and revolutionarily efficient P48 will make its debut, but will also remember that BMW has been dusting the competition with turbos for over 50 years the next time someone says the brand has lost its way.—Alex Tock [Photos courtesy BMW AG.] BMW Group Sales Grow In June Alex Tock, July 13, 2019 July 14, 2019 , BMW News The BMW Group posted positive sales results for June, more specifically year-over-year growth of 0.7%, with 240,674 BMW, MINI... BMW Shifts U.K. Engine Production As Brexit Looms BMW Group Plant Hams Hall, located in Birmingham, England produces engines, and in 2018, the facility had output of... BMW Group CEO Harald Krüger To Step Down After One Term Alex Tock, July 6, 2019 July 7, 2019 , BMW News In a move that some saw foresaw as inevitable after the company missed earnings estimates for the first time... North American BMW Sales Strong In June BMW brand sales grew 7.5% to 31,627 during June on a year-over-year basis in North America, a substantial increase... Vision M Next Offers A Glimpse Of Tomorrow Alex Tock, June 29, 2019 July 1, 2019 , BMW News There’s no reason the future has to be the dark, grey, dystopian vision that Hollywood has instilled in our... This Is What Next-Gen EVs Could Sound Like Alex Tock, June 29, 2019 June 29, 2019 , BMW News Creative genius Hans Zimmer has accumulated a long list of awards and honors over the years for his work... BMW Embraces Four-Door Performance Luxury With 8 Series Gran Coupé Just over a year after the world premier of the 8 Series coupe, and nearly eight months after we... North American BMW Dealerships To Use Smart Glasses BMW North America is in the rollout stage of the new Technical Information System (TIS 2.0). Developed by BMW... Augmented And Virtual Reality Aid BMW Production ProcessesCelebrating The Big Coupe At Southeast Sharkfest Alex Tock A member of the San Diego Chapter of the BMW CCA, Alex Tock is also a prolific writer for the popular car auction website Bring a Trailer, and moonlights as an operations administrator for a local small business. His current garage includes a 135i Dinan S2 and a 1985 325e coupe, but something new (or old) is always on the horizon. Alex enjoys light wrenching on his fleet, drinking local San Diego beer, and sharing his passion for all things automotive, mechanical and technical through writing.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2308
__label__wiki	0.729042	0.729042	It’s Never Too Late To Leverage Up 14 May 2019 \| 10.03 am Eunan Ryan’s Cult Drinks presses the accelerator After taking part in Crowe’s business builder programme, owner-manager Eunan Ryan decided to press the accelerator Eunan Ryan will be one of the older competitors at the National Enterprise Awards at the Mansion House in Dublin in May. Ryan (56) is founder of Cult Drinks, based in Donabate in north Dublin, which picked up €5,000 from Fingal Local Enterprise Office for winning the local area heat in the competition. The entrepreneur has been in the niche drinks sector for many years, and recently he has raised his game. Eunan Ryan’s family is associated with the Beggar’ Bush pub in D4 and, formerly, the 51 pub a stagger away on Haddington Road. Ryan (pictured) developed an alcopop called ‘Fat Frog’ in 2004, which is still going and was the platform for Ryan to establish Piranha Beverages Ltd in 2007, which trades as Cult Drinks and houses an eclectic assortment of niche alcohol products. Ryan and his team look for a niche, devise the drink, outsource the manufacture, and then hook up with distributors or sell directly to multiples. For the younger shots crowd, there’s Piranha Schnapps (15% abv), which is made in sour apple, kola, sour cherry and peach flavours. In the same shots ballpark is Krauter-Stein (22% abv), another Cult Drinks invention that is less potent and therefore cheaper than the similar Jagermeister. Cult Drinks isn’t all about cheap and cheerful. Its Heytesbury Rum (above) is a premium product priced at €90 in the Celtic Whiskey Store. There’s also the Jack Ryan 12 Year Old Single Malt, priced at €65 and with ‘Beggars Bush’ proudly stamped on the label. A few years ago, Ryan says he got to thinking about where his business was going. He sought counsel from accountancy firm Crowe, and took part in their business value builder programme. “We went to Crowe initially for a conversation and worked with them for about a year, looking at putting a structure in place to build the business and expand into overseas markets,” says Ryan. “Over the last few years we have made a fairly substantial investment in personnel and software. We now have ten staff and we are well positioned to properly address export markets.” Ryan says the Crowe discussions focused his mind on an exit strategy. He decided that if he didn’t change gear he’d be locking the office door whenever he retired and that would be it. “I realised that I have to build the business and build value within the business. I don’t have that much of a pension, and that focused my mind.” Ryan also let go some control. Sarah-Jane Brangam (pictured above), who has been working in Cult Drinks since 2009, became a director and shareholder in 2017. “As you get older you get set in your ways,” Ryan muses. “Sarah-Jane is young and enthusiastic and between the two of us we realised that to bring the company to where we want to get to, we have to look at export. That’s where the growth is, and in recent years we have developed good relationships with distribution partners overseas.” To progress, Ryan and his partner have been prepared to take on debt. The company’s July 2018 balance sheet shows bank debt of €409,000, up from €196,000 a year earlier. “I never went to the bank before because I thought it would be a waste of time. AIB are our main bank and they have been very supportive over the last two years,” says Ryan. In the year to July 2018, Piranha Beverages booked a pre-tax profit of €127,000. Improved trade is evidenced by trade debtors increasing from €277,000 to €630,000 in 2017/18, though Ryan may have to rein in credit terms going forward, as year end cash in the balance sheet was just €3,000. The strategy for this year and into 2020 is to develop the Fat Frog brand in the US, Asia and Africa, and to roll out the whiskey and rum brands in Europe. Taking The Pulse Of Laid Back Micro Businesses Ireland's micro firms average 3.1 employees Intuity Technologies Acquires Office Technology Combine has over 2,000 customers	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2309
__label__cc	0.689042	0.310958	Blind Travellers meet blind school students in Thailand Published by Elle Hartle On 26th February 2019 Following up from my previous blog, I have recently come back from my volunteering in Thailand in Pattaya with the Redemptorist School for The Blind. All the students who attend the school are either blind or severely sight impaired. The schools aim is to increase their independence and give the students a mainstream education. Our job as a group before we arrived at the school was to raise funds for the sch ool which would provide the school and students with equipment an essentials that will enable the students to be more independent for the future. For example with the money we raised we were able to buy the younger children with reusable swimming nappies. Having these allowed the children to go swimming for the first time. Seeing the look on their faces as their feet touched the water was such a wonderful sight. I felt so proud that I had enabled a young child to do something that they would not have been able to do if it were not for the money that we raised. The school has over 100 students ranging from age 4 to age 20, all of the students have different needs and different levels of eyesight. Being a partially sighted young person and doing something this big to help other young blind and partially sighted people filled me with pride and motivation to do more to help support and help these young students to be more independent. The week started with a welcome assembly where the school introduced us to some of their cultural music and acknowledged how grateful they were for us coming to spend the next few days with them. Learning each other’s different cultures and introducing them to the equipment that we bought from the money that we raised felt so great from our side as we made that happen. Seeing the students interact with the activities and equipment that we provided them was so wonderful. I felt so privileged to be there and to have this opportunity as a young partially sighted person to come out to Thailand and help these students become more independent. The following day we had a goal ball match against the school. Some members of our group knew how to play so the y played with a few of the students. Goalball is a team sport designed specifically for people with a vision impairment. Participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it into the opponents’ goal. The ball is always thrown by hand. The following day the students at the school also introduced us to bead making as part of the cultural exchange they showed us how to thread beads to eventually make some wonderful things such as key rings and bags. The creativity that the students have was so fascinating to see considering that every one of them is blind or severely sight impaired which would make, making the key rings and bags much harder as they would not be able to see what they were creating. During the bead making from our end, we thought the head teacher and some of his teachers how to play the board game Monopoly. As this board game is not sold anywhere in Thailand. We had a braille version of the board game to make it easier, however in some ways it was quite hard as the teachers spoke very little English and we knew very little Thai. Me individually only knew two words off by heart Sowadica and cupcunca these words are the female version. The endings of these words are different for males. These words mean hello and thank you in Thai. During the days that we were at the school, we also ate lunch at the school. Every lun chtime before the students eat they sing two or three songs. Seeing their culture compared with ours was fascinating as in the UK as a society we do not tend to sing songs before we sit down to eat. It was then apparent to me that their culture and beliefs are very different as to that of the UK. As a young partially sighted person, I found it very interesting sharing both our cultures with their cultures. The two cultures are very different and unique. On the final day, the students and teachers arranged a leaving ceremony for th e school to say thank you to us for coming and for all the stuff that we had brought them with the money that we raised. They got us all to stand at the front of the assembly hall as they all sung to us. The lead singer was a blind young girl who had previously won an award for her singing. It was truly wonderful to see how much the visit and the things we brought them meant to both the students and the teachers. As soon as we gave the items to them, they were in use almost immediately. I cannot emphasise what it felt like to help and support everyone who attended the school in many different ways. I love helping and supporting people in any way I can I thrive on it. So therefore going to the school was so important to me because I felt like I was making a difference to these people’s lives both the students and the teachers. As we were offering them so much to enable their students to be more independent.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2310
__label__wiki	0.507996	0.507996	AD REINHARDT Artists on Ad Ad and Artists Ad's Thoughts and Practices Ad and Spirituality Black Paintings Black Paintings January 16th, 2014 Pictures of One Thing by Barry Schwabsky Barbara, you asked me to say a bit more about a question I raised when reviewing Kirk Varnedoe’s 2006 book Pictures of Nothing: Why didn’t Varnedoe discuss Reinhardt given that—as you said in your email—“if there was ever a picture of nothing, it’s a black Reinhardt?” There are two tempting responses to this question. One is to say that a Reinhardt black painting is not a picture; the other is to say that it’s not of nothing. The first potential response I dismiss out of hand. A Reinhardt black painting is definitely a picture. At a time when other artists were trying to entirely evacuate pictorial space and ended up making objects, Reinhardt continued to insist on pictorial space—in fact, his version of it just might be the ultimate iteration of synthetic cubism, with its tightly-knit little near-monochromatic facets ironed out into the squares of a grid and its shallow space reduced to the unstable optical differences between almost indiscernible shades of near-black. The second idea is harder to come to terms with—because who knows what nothing is or how anything can be “of” it? But to my mind think that although Reinhardt (like any thinking person, probably, but especially by any thinking person who has delved into Asian traditions of religious thought) was very interested in nothing, he wasn’t interested in painting it. Remember what he said: “The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing.” That’s a curious and complicated statement; one of the most surprising things about it is that it is not simply, “Art is one thing.” The subject of the sentence is not “art” but rather “thing,” or to be more specific the noun phrase “the one thing to say.” One way to read this is to take it that art might be one thing, or it might be many things, or it might be nothing—no matter, as long as you say it is one thing. The sentence deliberately presents itself as a statement of dogma rather than of fact. That’s very Reinhardt. Nonetheless, I suspect that Reinhardt really did consider art to be one thing, and not nothing, let alone many things. And as his paintings were pictures of art, they could not (in his eyes) be pictures of nothing. What Reinhardt wanted his paintings to do was not to produce this “one thing” but to make it accessible. “Without an art-as-art continuity,” he claimed, and an “abstract point of view, art would be inaccessible and the ‘one thing’ completely secret.” The art tradition, in this view, is like a tradition of esoteric learning, with the central teaching being handed down from master to master (though in this case not in words). But the content of such hermetic transmission is always threatened with impurity and confusion—with “combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing,” as Reinhardt put it; if the chain of transmission were to be broken, the “secret” would be lost, perhaps forever. So Varnedoe was right not to include Reinhardt among the “pictures of nothing” because they are not of nothing but rather of this one thing that Reinhardt called art. And of course that one thing, whatever it is, is the one thing that cannot be encompassed in Varnedoe’s liberal pluralism. It is the absolute. Ours, we keep being reminded and rightly so, is a market-based culture. When the absolute is put to market, it is no longer absolute. It is one option among many. The art that Reinhardt called for, like the museum he called for and the academy he called for, cannot really exist in the modern world. The only place for their “soundlessness, timelessness, airlessness, and lifelessness” is on the moon. Did Reinhardt really believe that the art he called for could exist, that the museum he called for could exist, that the academy he called for could exist? I have to think he was too intelligent for that. But “the one thing to say” was that they had to exist. In the museum we really have, his art is not one thing, except in the sense of being one thing among many, and of that one thing there are necessarily many perceptions, many understandings. There we can enjoy his adumbration of the absolute as a manifestation of style without wondering what it would mean to assent and maintain a commitment to it. But among the many perceptions and understandings to which the museum gives a home, Reinhardt remains to remind us that the many is always one too few, and that it’s possible to imagine that the missing one might be worth all the rest. Barry Schwabsky BARRY SCHWABSKY is the art critic of The Nation. AD REINHARDT: Blue Paintings by Eleanor Ray OCT 2017 \| ArtSeen Ad Reinhardt is known as an artist of extremes. While committed to abstract painting that became infamous for its austerity, he also had an expansive curiosity about art and the world. He was a vocal critic of the art market and his peers, as well as a proselytizer of art and architecture from disparate regions and periods, which he obsessively photographed for slide lectures. by Nathlie Provosty 1943, the year Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Tehran to discuss their war strategy, Ad Reinhardt made a deep blue and green oil painting that is the earliest work in this Zwirner Gallery exhibition. by Alex Bacon This presentation at David Zwirner Gallery is the largest exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s blue paintings ever assembled, and the first dedicated to them since a seminal 1965 show at the Stable Gallery. CLOSEENCOUNTERS Barry Schwabsky with Jarrett Earnest APR 2017 \| Art Barry Schwabsky is art critic for the Nation and co-editor of international reviews at Artforum.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2311
__label__wiki	0.979734	0.979734	Raptors sign Stanley Johnson as post-Kawhi roster begins to take shape The Toronto Raptors have officially signed forward Stanley Johnson and guard Terence Davis. The team did not release terms of the contracts. The Athletic last week reported Johnson’s contract to be a two-year deal worth $7.5 million US. The six-foot-seven, 245-pound, Johnson split last season between Detroit and New Orleans, averaging 6.9 points, 3.3 rebounds and 18.3 minutes in 66 games (seven starts). He scored in double figures 17 times, including a season-high 22 points Nov. 9 at Atlanta and grabbed a season-best 12 rebounds Oct. 31 at Brooklyn. The Los Angeles native has averaged seven points, 3.4 rebounds and 21.6 minutes in 285 career games (64 starts) with Detroit and New Orleans. He was picked eighth overall by the Pistons in the 2015 NBA draft. Young gun ready to show out. <a href=”https://twitter.com/iAmSJ?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@iAmSJ</a> \| <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/WeTheNorth?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#WeTheNorth</a> <a href=”https://t.co/uziwBtlgr5″>pic.twitter.com/uziwBtlgr5</a> —@Raptors Davis, a six-foot-four, 205-pound senior out of Ole Miss, averaged 12.5 points, 4.9 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 1.2 steals and 24.3 minutes in 121 career games (82 starts) during four seasons with the Rebels. He went undrafted at last month’s NBA draft but impressed in his Summer League debut with Denver before signing with Toronto. The Raptors hope to have found another overlooked prospect in Davis much like Fred VanVleet, who went undrafted in 2016 before signing with Toronto and becoming an impact player for the team.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2313
__label__wiki	0.543797	0.543797	Home › Nonfiction › Shackleton’s Last Voyage › Preface Sir Ernest Shackleton died suddenly; so suddenly that he said no word at all with regard to the future of the expedition. But I know that had he foreseen his death and been able to communicate to me his wishes, they would have been summed up in the two words, “Carry on!” Perhaps the most difficult part of my task has been the recording of the work of the expedition. It has been to me a very sad duty, and one which I would gladly have avoided had it been possible. The demand, however, for the complete story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last expedition has been so widespread and insistent that I could no longer withhold it. In the subsequent pages of this book the reader will find recorded the story of the voyage of the Quest, the tight little ship that carried us through over twenty thousand miles of stormy ocean and brought us safely back. I make no claim to literary style, but have endeavoured to set forth a plain and simple narrative. The writings of explorers vary, but in my opinion they have all one common fault, which is, that they have attempted to combine in one volume the scientific results with the more popular story of the expedition. This book is for the public. I have sought to eliminate the mass of scientific details with which my journal is filled, to avoid technical terms, and to retain only that which can be easily understood by all. Of the parts of the narrative that deal with Sir Ernest Shackleton I have passed over very shortly. Pens far more able than mine, notably those of Mr. Harold Begbie and Dr. Hugh Robert Mill, have written of his life and character. Though I was his companion on every one of his expeditions, I know little of his life at home. It is a curious thing that men thrown so closely together as those engaged in Polar work should never seek to know anything of each other’s “inside” affairs. But to the “Explorer” Shackleton I was joined by ties so strongly welded through the many years of common hardship and struggle that to write of him at all is extremely difficult. Nothing I could set down can convey what I feel, and I have a horror of false and wordy sentiment. I trust, therefore, that those readers who may think that I have dealt too lightly with the parts of the story which more intimately concern him will sympathize and respect my feelings in the matter. I must take this opportunity of acknowledging my deep feeling of gratitude to Mr. John Quiller Rowett. What the expedition owes to him no one, not even its individual members, can ever realize. There have been many supporters of enterprises of this nature, but usually they have sought from it some commercial gain. Mr. Rowett’s support was due solely to his keen interest in scientific research, which he had previously instituted and encouraged in other fields. He bore practically the whole financial burden, and this expedition is almost unique in that it was clear of debt at the time of its return. But, in addition to this, I owe him much for his kindly encouragement, his clear, sound judgment, and his unfailing assistance whenever I have sought it. Mrs. Rowett has given me invaluable assistance throughout the preparation of the book and has corrected the proofs. For her kindly hospitality I owe more than I can say, for to myself and others of the expedition her house has ever been open, and we have received always the most kindly welcome. In this connexion I could say a great deal, but it would be inadequate to convey what I feel. The expedition owes also a debt of gratitude to Sir Frederick Becker, for his encouraging assistance was rendered early in its inception. To the many public-spirited firms who came forward with offers of assistance to what was considered a national enterprise I must make my acknowledgments. It is regrettable that many of the smaller suppliers of the expedition seized the chance of a cheap advertisement at the time of our departure, but a number of the more reputable firms made no stipulation of any sort, but presented us with goods as a free gift. I can assure them that I do not lightly regard their share in helping on the work, for we were thus enabled to carry in our food stores only the best of products, Sir Ernest Shackleton rigidly eliminating all goods which he felt unable to trust. To Mr. James A. Cook I owe much for the hard work he has done at all times and for the help which he rendered whilst the expedition was away from England. To my many other friends who have at one time and another been of assistance I tender my grateful acknowledgments, knowing full well that they will realize how impossible it is for me to thank them all by name. I must thank Dr. Macklin for the care he took in keeping the official diary of the expedition. This and his own private journal, from which I have freely quoted, have both been invaluable to me. To “The Boys,” those who stood by me and gave me their loyal service throughout an arduous and trying period, I say nothing—for they know how I feel. Frank Wild.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2314
__label__cc	0.580013	0.419987	When a State Representative Works for Your Company /in Blog, C3 Culture, Company, Job, Uncategorized /by Dakota Silver C3 Metrics’ Jim Nasser ran for State Representative at 22. While a senior in college finishing his Political Science degree, the then Representative in his district was arrested for unsavory activities. It was big news in his town, and even bigger news for him. This is when he decided it was finally time to do what he always wanted: run for office. He won his primary in September, the general election in November, and in December 2016 was sworn in as a State Representative. After swearing in, newly elected Representatives can request committee assignment, and Jim Nasser picked the Fish and Game Committee. He always loved the outdoors, and although not a hunter, he’s been fishing since very young: spending many hours on Pawtuckaway Lake. One of the most challenging issues that came before the committee was a bill addressing carrying loaded weapons in vehicles (which aside from handguns is currently illegal). One of his Honorable colleagues came to testify for the bill, bringing a plastic rifle to demonstrate how safe it would be to keep a loaded weapon in the car. With the plastic gun leaning up against a table, it actually fell over during the speech. In the end, this helped prove the committee’s point that it was just too dangerous to keep a loaded rifle in a vehicle, and the State kept the law as it stands now. New Hampshire is a unique state for many reasons. For one, the House of Representatives is the fourth largest legislative body in the English-speaking world. Because of its size (400 Representatives and 24 Senators) and pay of $100 a year, it’s made up of citizens just like Jim Nasser. When not keeping the State of New Hampshire beautiful, safe, and on the straight and narrow, he’s working on data quality assurance for C3 Metrics working with some of the largest advertisers, agencies, and technologists. He is one of youngest State Representatives in the state of New Hampshire serving the people of Rockingham District #2, and the clients of C3 Metrics. https://c3metrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Jimmy-2.png 320 756 Dakota Silver https://c3metricssite-c3metrics.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/c3logo.png Dakota Silver2017-10-17 19:57:332017-10-17 19:57:33When a State Representative Works for Your Company Why TV’s Thor Ain’t Easy To Lift Ad Fraud “SportBot” On NFL + ESPN Sites Rips $250MM	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2315
__label__wiki	0.968672	0.968672	June 6, 2019 / 8:02 AM / a month ago Ford to close engine plant in Wales in latest blow to UK car sector Costas Pitas LONDON (Reuters) - Ford said it would close its plant in Bridgend, south Wales next year because of falling demand for some of its engines, putting 1,700 jobs at risk in a further blow to Britain’s once booming car industry. A road sign is seen near the Ford engine plant at Bridgend, Wales, Britain June 6, 2019. REUTERS/Rebecca Naden Ford, which will take a roughly $650-million pre-tax charge to cover the cost of closing the plant, is making cuts in several countries to turn around loss-making operations in a stagnating European car market. The U.S. automaker has also repeatedly warned the UK government that it needs free trade to be maintained with the European Union after Britain leaves the bloc, but said Thursday’s announcement “has nothing to do with Brexit”. Production of Ford’s 1.5-litre petrol engine, which has seen lower demand, will end in February, whilst a contract to supply Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) finishes in September 2020. Britain’s once thriving car sector, rebuilt since the 1980s mainly by foreign carmakers, has suffered slumps in sales, output and investment over the past two years. “Changing customer demand and cost disadvantages, plus an absence of additional engine models for Bridgend going forward make the plant economically unsustainable in the years ahead,” said Ford Europe President Stuart Rowley. The Bridgend plant, which opened in 1977, built around 20 percent of Britain’s 2.7 million automotive engines last year. Ford said it was committed to its other British engine factory in Dagenham, east London. The firm builds a total of 1.3 million engines in Britain which are exported for fitting in vehicles in Germany, Turkey, the United States and elsewhere. Britain’s biggest trade union vowed to fight the factory closure. “We will resist this closure with all our might, and call upon the governments at the Welsh Assembly and Westminster to join us to save this plant,” said Len McCluskey, head of the Unite union. Ford said in January a turnaround of its European operations would involve cutting thousands of jobs, possible plant closures and discontinuing loss-making vehicle lines. It is axing more than 5,000 jobs in Germany and more than 500 white-collar roles in Britain. Workers have long pushed for Bridgend to produce hybrid technology and electric vehicle components alongside a new third-party manufacturer to fill any surplus space but such investment has not been forthcoming. “Significant efforts to identify new opportunities have not been successful,” said Ford. The Ford plant closure is the latest blow to the sector this year. JLR has said around 4,500 mainly British jobs would go and Honda has said up to 3,500 roles would be axed when it closes its British plant in 2021. A series of investment decisions are also pending as sales continue to slide, including whether Peugeot parent PSA will keep its Ellesmere Port plant open and if JLR will choose to make electric cars in Britain. British car sales are down 3.1 percent so far this year, after falling in 2017 and 2018. Ford is among many major carmakers which are opposed to a no-deal Brexit, fearing it could add tariffs and customs checks to their vehicles, engines and components, raising costs. Thursday’s announcement, a day after the U.S. President left Britain and as the governing Conservatives pick a new leader, comes as French politicians are scrambling to fend off blame for the collapse of a proposed merger of Renault and Fiat Chrysler. Reporting by Costas Pitas; editing by Guy Faulconbridge/Elaine Hardcastle	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2316
__label__wiki	0.644631	0.644631	Girl Guides converge onto Sylvan Lake for rare international camp Eva Ferguson, Calgary Herald Getting organized for the 2000 Girl Guides from across the globe arriving for Guiding Mosaic 2016 from July 9-17 at Camp Woods, about 10 kilometres west of town along the shores of Sylvan Lake.this week. Nearly 2,000 Girl Guides from across the planet are converging onto the resort town of Sylvan Lake for a rare international camp, benefitting local businesses and educating guides in leadership and resourcefulness. Guiding Mosaic 2016 takes place from July 9-17 at Camp Woods, about 10 kilometres west of town along the shores of Sylvan Lake. Pathfinders and Rangers aged 12 to 18 will share in outdoor adventure, cultural awareness and building community. “This is a very big undertaking. We have nearly 2,000 Girl Guides here. And we will literally be building a village,” said Brigitte Trau, camp director, explaining that the camp includes guides from as far away as Africa, Europe, South America and Australia. “It’s a great way to show all of the girls that we are a world organization. Regardless of our cultures, and the different ways we all live, the girls will learn that we all have the same values, the same promises and the same goals of leadership, self-confidence, environmental awareness and peace in the world.” Of the 2,000 guides, about 400 will be from Calgary, all eager to take part in camping activities and service projects, including constructing park benches, picnic tables and making dolls for kids in the developing world. Because of its massive size, the international camp is a rare occurrence, only running once every five to six years, with the most recent being in 2010 in Guelph, Ontario. Officials hope their next Mosaic Camp can be set for 2020, back in Central Canada, possibly in Quebec or Ontario again. Meanwhile, Sylvan Lake businesses like Leanne Bertram’s Clean Conscience Recycling have already signed on to work with the 2016 camp, teaching the Girl Guides important skills while helping their own bottom-line. Clean Conscience has already set up at the Camp Woods site, providing opportunities for Girl Guides to recycle, reuse and reduce their environmental footprint. “My business is going to be very busy because of this camp,” said Bertram. “I’m really excited to be able to develop a waste reduction plan for this event. We’re raising the bar and trying to recycle as much as we can, from glass to paper, to plastics, and even composting. “It’s important to teach our youth to preserve the planet for future generations.” Campers will also participate in arts and crafts with recyclables and participate in a lakeshore clean-up event. The Guiding Mosaic will also have Girl Guides participate in day trips to Calgary and Edmonton, visiting the Stampede, the Calgary Zoo, Heritage Park and West Edmonton Mall, all in uniform to ensure they’re easily recognizable. Denise Bryan-Williams, executive director with the Sylvan Lake Chamber of Commerce, is thrilled her central Alberta town is hosting the unique camp. “It’s a great choice given our proximity to Calgary, Edmonton and other Central Alberta destinations where the girls have exciting day-trips lined up,” she said. “We certainly appreciate that the Girl Guide organization reached out to us in their search for local suppliers. An event of this size and calibre brings many opportunities for local businesses and certainly puts the spotlight on our lake community. “We welcome the troops and delegates and look forward to seeing them in and around town.” eferguson@postmedia.com Cancer behind her, champion barrel racer aims to add Stampede title City police investigate two separate stabbing incidents overnight Elevator cable breaks in Calgary Tower, eight people rescued	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2317
__label__wiki	0.805566	0.805566	Buddy brilliant! When Deborah Gundle’s son Zach was born, she knew instinctively that something wasn’t right. At seven months old, he was diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, which meant he’d grow up with profound learning disabilities. Deborah and Zach today Looking back, Deborah says one of the things she struggled most with was solving day-to-day problems. “Zach was still crawling till he was about seven, and I spent ages trying different things to protect his knees, which were always rough and bruised,” she says. “Finally, I hit on the perfect solution – goalkeeper trousers for kids, which were padded in all the right places. But Zach was nearly six by then and I couldn’t help wishing I’d known earlier.” That’s how the idea for Netbuddy came about. Launched in September 2010, it provided a place for parents, carers and anyone supporting people with learning disabilities to share practical tips and information. The aim was to capture that huge wealth of expertise that parents and carers have, and make it readily available for other people to tap in to. “It would have been so helpful to have something like Netbuddy, with tips and ideas for all the problems I encountered when Zach was growing up,” says Deborah. “I knew other people had probably solved the same problems I was dealing with, and I wished I had access to their knowledge.” Unlike other forums or chat rooms, all the information shared at Netbuddy was collected and saved, so people could visit the site and search for tips on specific issues, such as bedwetting, challenging behaviour or a trip to the hairdressers. Parents could talk to other parents who’d experienced similar issues and find out what worked for them; and they could also share their own breakthroughs within a community that appreciated the hard work that had gone into them. Practical problem-solving Netbuddy quickly hit a chord, not just with family carers, but professionals too – occupational therapists, health workers, teachers and physiotherapists, all contributing to help people help each other. “Netbuddy fills a very basic need for practical problem-solving that everybody has,” says Deborah. “We’ve had people writing in telling us that a tip they’ve picked up on Netbuddy has changed their lives. Sometimes it can be a really simple idea, but it might have given them their first full night’s sleep in 10 years or provided the breakthrough in toilet training they’d been desperate for. And of course when you’re the parent of a disabled person, caring doesn’t end when they become an adult. Netbuddy offers tips for people of all ages, as Deborah points out: “Zach is 20 now, and he’s going through one of the most important stages of his life – the transition from children’s to adults’ services. I value Netbuddy tips now more than ever, and Zach’s new support workers also find them to be an invaluable resource. That’s what Netbuddy is all about – passing on what you have learned to others who can benefit from it.” In June 2012, Netbuddy and Scope worked together on a national campaign to raise awareness of the issues faced by fathers of disabled children. The campaign was called Dad and Me, and it was to be the beginning of a close partnership between the two charities, who both shared similar goals of supporting disabled people and their families to have fulfilling lives. In January 2014, Netbuddy merged with Scope to become part of the new online community which launches this week. “This is a really exciting opportunity for us to reach even more people in the same situation as ourselves,” says Deborah. “I know the new Scope community will embrace the essence of Netbuddy and grow from strength to strength, because people in the disability community want to help each other. If they can offer some support or advice that will make someone else’s journey easier, they will.” “I would just like to say a huge thank you to all our Netbuddy followers and supporters, who have contributed their time, experience and tips over the years to bring us to this point. We couldn’t have done it without you!” Find out more about Scope’s new online community. Previous Post“He was so keen to help, he ended up breaking the wheelchair ramp at 2am…”Next PostIntroducing our new online community!	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2321
__label__cc	0.683872	0.316128	General Scientific News Large Teams and Small Ones in Science By Derek Lowe 20 February, 2019 I had a book review recently in Nature, on a new volume (Thrifty Science) that looks over the history of early scientific experimentation from the viewpoint of its frugal nature – the idea of reusing and repurposing equipment, objects, and even rooms in one’s house. There was indeed a lot of this sort of thing, as the book makes clear, but I wondered about one of its conclusions – which was that this sort of thing could well be making a comeback. I’m not so sure about that. While there are things that can still be discovered by basement experimenters and make-do apparatus, my own belief is that the bar to discovery has been creeping inexorably higher just because of the nature of science. We build on each other’s work, and we’ve built on an awful lot of stuff that was discovered with simple equipment and under simple conditions. So over time, working in any of those areas tends to become progressively less simple. A countervailing trend is the availability of such equipment, but the stuff that’s widely available tends to be so because lots of people have already done lots of research with it. If you’re going to make new scientific discoveries on your own out in the garage, you can get plenty of apparatus, but you’re going to have to be more ingenious than ever to come across something that no one has has already explored. Robert Boyle and the rest were indeed great scientists (Newton deserves his high reputation even after any historical adjustments you care to make), but they did have plenty of open room to run in as well. And the open spaces of today, it seems to me, are less and less available to thrifty home experimenters. Mind you, I wish that weren’t so. But I don’t think that the scanning tunneling microscope (to pick one example) could have been prototyped in a garage lab. One response to this is “Well, PCR could have been”, but think about the state of molecular biology when PCR was first developed – I’m not so sure about that at all. This recent paper in Nature has perhaps some bearing on this topic. The authors are looking at a measure of the impact of published papers: Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. Work from larger teams builds on more-recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future—if at all. They quantify this by an ingenious bibliographic technique. When a paper gets cited, do those citing it also cite many of the references in the original paper? If so, that original paper is more likely to represent work that’s consolidating or extending a field that was already somewhat worked out. By contrast, if a paper is cited, but more in a solo manner, it is more likely to represent a new direction by itself, leaving those coming after it to cite it alone without other examples of something similar. To go to extremes, at one end you have review articles – very useful, but deliberately not breaking any new ground whatsoever. And at the other, you have one-off reports (at least at first!) of something that no one’s ever thought of or tried. Applying this “disruptiveness” metric works surprisingly well – for example, papers that are known, in retrospect, to have contributed directly to major discoveries (as measured by eventual prizes and recognized impact) do indeed rank higher on this lone-citation scale. And when you look at the number of authors on all these papers, you find a very noticeable trend: the number of such “echo citations” (my phrase) grows as the size of the team grows. Which means that average disruptiveness goes exactly the other way. When you look at the set of most-disruptive papers, they are much more likely to have been smaller-than-median teams, for any given scientific discipline. This distribution also holds for the patent databases, and even for code and routines published on GitHub. Differences in the subjects being researched and the way the experiments are (or have to be) set up are real, but the team-size factor is larger than any of them (although the relative sizes of the teams varies in each data set). If you look at the top 5% in each category (developmental versus disruptive), the graphs shown above diverge even more robustly. Think, for example, of the famously huge author lists found in high-energy particle physics. If there are seven hundred and forty-three authors, the resulting paper is more likely to be the long-sought confirmation of some extremely difficult-to-observe phenomenon (like the Higgs boson) whereas the paper that proposed that something like the Higgs boson had to exist will have had nowhere near such an army behind it. Such ideas take a while to catch on to the point that you can get seven hundred coauthors to work on them – and such large teams are more vulnerable to failure if the whole idea is wrong, too. But this team-size effect holds up from almost every angle. The relative disruptiveness of review articles is not large, for example, but the most disruptive ones have the smallest number of authors. If you remove self-citations or try cutting out all the references but the high-impact ones, the effect is still there. Controlling for publication year doesn’t get rid of it, nor breaking things down by scientific discipline. Controlling for authors themselves actually make the correlation more robust: any given scientist’s most disruptive papers are generally those published with the smallest number of co-authors. Looking at the patterns of the citations themselves, it appears that smaller teams (and solo authors) tend to reach back to older and/or less popular ideas, rather than chime in on something that’s already rolling along. It’s for sure that more of these small-team papers disappear without much of a trace, and they tend to have a long delay before citations pick up, but when they have an impact, it’s a larger one. The lesson of this paper is not “Small teams good, large teams bad”, though. Both kinds of work are needed, and they’re part of the normal development of scientific ideas. I was gratified to find that the paper addresses the washing-your-car-to-make-it-rain problem: you don’t necessarily generate disruptive work just by artificially forming people into small teams. That’s not how it works – disruptive work instead tends to cause smaller teams to form around it. Funding small teams by traditional means (renewable grant proposals, for example) may well be a recipe for filtering out what could have made them interesting in the first place: We analysed articles published from 2004 to 2014 that acknowledged financial support from several top government agencies around the world, and found that small teams with this funding are indistinguishable from large teams in their tendency to develop rather than disrupt their fields. . .This could result from a conservative review process, proposals designed to anticipate such a process or a planning effect whereby small teams lock themselves into large-team inertia by remaining accountable to a funded proposal. To circle back to the topic I started off with, it would also be interesting to know what sort of facilities and equipment correlate with disruptive work. There probably is a tendency towards increasing cost and complication as you go to larger teams (it’s hard to see how there could not be). But it’s important to get that causality right: giving people fewer resources is probably not the recipe to make them more inventive, since the great majority of people will not respond in the manner you’re trying to induce. And my guess is that the relative technical sophistication (and cost) of even the smaller teams, for a given discipline, has increased over time as well. 20 comments on “Large Teams and Small Ones in Science” navarro says: “. . . giving people fewer resources is probably not the recipe to make them more inventive, since the great majority of people will not respond in the manner you’re trying to induce.” This observation has relevance to my field. I realize that comparing education and teaching to scientific discovery is somewhat of a grapefruits to peaches comparison, if not a tire rims to peaches comparison, but this statement does remind me of some things I’ve heard over the past 24 years. Indeed, I have heard superintendent level administrators say that “Money won’t solve the problems of education. The more money you give to teachers the less creative they are.” I’ve heard folks from the agency over education in the state in which I live and work say that giving districts and teachers more money to work with would only decrease the level of innovation our teachers display. I’m not sure how they’ve come to their conclusions but they seem to believe, or at least hope, that teachers will respond to adversity by doing more and being more creative. Hap says: When they say that, I’d like to pay them less and see how innovative they get. I think more money and larger teams tends to be a safety play – you want to make sure you don’t fail, not that you succeed really big. People that don’t have money (or smaller teams) are likely to either succeed big or fail, and probably much more often fail. If that’s true, then less money means you’ll get a population with a few big wins and many losses (either a few good results or a few good schools and educated people). It’s probably worse to have a feast and famine system rather than spending money for consistency – I don’t know if the overall benefit is positive or negative, but there will be lots of bad stuff from the people who fail and eventually feast/famine systems are likely to fail when the faminers go after the feasters or are aroused by an almost-feaster. aairfccha says: The problem with that thinking is that it considers creativity as a goal in itself rather than a means to an end. Even if less money is stimulating creativity to compensate for the money shortfall, results are still quite likely to lag behind what you would have gotten with proper funding. navarro, “fewer resources … stimulate creativity” — I have seen writings on both sides (at least w/r/t science and scientific research). Many say that stress caused by a lack of resources, low pay, admin pressure to produce results from nothing can have an impact on creativity and productivity. Some say negative, some say positive, and they say it to varying degrees. But there are other generalizations that apply, such as (for chemist-Pipeliners) ‘no matter how much bench space you are allocated, you will always fill it up!’ More generally, you will often use all available resources to do your best on a project. If you have more resources, you will think of more ways to make it better and to do that ‘one more thing’ to strengthen or improve it. With fewer resources, you may wish for better support and you might even pull an HC Brown (see my other post on this topic) and figure out how to make do with what you’ve got, even if it takes longer or isn’t as accurate. There is another generalization, from surveys I have read about (it’s psychology, so there may be a lot of wiggle room or complete refutation), that no matter how content they are, people typically want more than what they already have. Even if they admit that they are getting by, low income earners typically say, “If I only had ~10% more, I’d be able to replace the ’69 Chevy with a ’92 Ford.” But high income earners say the same thing! “If I only had ~10% more, I could buy another vacation home, this time in Tahoe.” Having been in poorly resourced situations and in well funded situations, I can assure you that I prefer the latter and I do not feel that it suppresses my creativity. You make some good points. From the teacher perspective, most of us have developed an attitude of “as long as you’re not slapping me in the face while I’m trying to eat, it’s okay.” Unfortunately some states, since each state is in control of its own pay scale etc., have decided to reduce teacher salaries, add unpaid days and hours to the school year, or both. That has led to some of the teacher strikes you’ve seen over the past year even in states unfriendly to unions and strikes like Oklahoma. I guess adversity really DID spur creativity. MrXYZ says: The story of Eric Betzig and his co-invention of the super-resolution microscopy technique PALM is an interesting example of what you are thinking about in your last paragraph (https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/quitting-failures-a-microscope-in-the-living-room-nobel-prize/). It was definitely shoe-string work (complete with living room microscopes) but Betzig, Hess, and all their collaborators were incredibly technically sophisticated. tlp says: I see here some general principle that ‘to thoroughly develop an idea requires much more material resources than to generate it; the latter in turn requires much more mental resources’, which also applies to the topic of academic vs industrial drug discovery as well as many others (e.g. science vs engineering). Sort of like Pareto principle with additional physical-vs-mental dimension. loupgarous says: tlp said on 20 February, 2019 at 12:55 pm: “I see here some general principle that ‘to thoroughly develop an idea requires much more material resources than to generate it; the latter in turn requires much more mental resources’, which also applies to the topic of academic vs industrial drug discovery as well as many others (e.g. science vs engineering).” It’s a useful principle in the field of drug development. It allows for sharp distinction between – the resources needed to discover the foundations on which new drug families are based (primarily academic research) and – the resources needed to thoroughly develop that foundational knowledge into useful new drugs and assure they are better therapy than existing drugs, and more beneficial to the patient than they are toxic. Smaller teams are involved in foundational research than in drug development (multi-center clinical trials can involve dozens of co-authors). The intellectual scope of drug development work is necessarily narrower than foundational (“what happens if we inhibit this protein’s function ?”) research, and its costs are much higher. The scope for drug development research to be disruptive is mostly confined to serendipitous findings in clinical trials such as the ability of PDE5 inhibitors to treat erectile dysfunction (they were being studied as cardiology drugs at the time). AQR says: “Submarine” or “Blue Sky” research is a case in point. The work is by its very nature speculative, maybe even a bit off the wall, and can only be pursued with minimal resourcing. Nevertheless, it is seen by the researcher as sufficiently valuable that they are willing to devote some time and resources to it rather than on the work for which they will be officially evaluated. Of course, the large majority these efforts never bear fruit, but the ones that do hold the potential of being disruptive. The inventor/author will be that one researcher with the insight who was willing to take the chance. This recent paper in Nature has perhaps some bearing on this topic. The authors are looking at a measure of the impact of published papers: (… ) When a paper gets cited, do those citing it also cite many of the references in the original paper? If so, that original paper is more likely to represent work that’s consolidating or extending a field that was already somewhat worked out. By contrast, if a paper is cited, but more in a solo manner, it is more likely to represent a new direction by itself, leaving those coming after it to cite it alone without other examples of something similar. To go to extremes, at one end you have review articles – very useful, but deliberately not breaking any new ground whatsoever. And at the other, you have one-off reports (at least at first!) of something that no one’s ever thought of or tried. The relative ease with which one can read supporting citations in papers one cites to establish a fact in a modern research paper may skew the metric the authors of that paper in Nature are using. I was a medical writer in the old days before medicine made wide use of the Internet to publish papers. My employers, a growing cardiology center with clinics throughout the Louisiana Gulf Coast, were careful men and women of science who examined useful facts in their intellectual context when publishing reports on their own research. This required periodic trips from the facility where I worked to the university medical libraries of New Orleans to make photocopies of every journal article we wished to cite, and moreover, copies of some of the articles cited by that article. Nowadays, I can do all of that without stirring from my chair, if I had access to every article of interest which is behind a paywall. The authors who identify this “disruptiveness” metric should examine the effect the Internet has had on making it remarkably more easy to go deep in citing supporting citations and the articles they, in turn, cite. It’s easier to cite other people’s research in what used to be considered great detail, now. Google Scholar’s publication of “impact metrics” for authors of published research has created an odd sort of log-rolling between authors who wish to appear to have more impact on their fields than they actually do. “Predatory” pay-to-publish journals depend on people paying to publish papers which either have marginal impact on their fields or are entirely fraudulent – but are cited by the authors’ friends, in exchange for having cited them. One hopes that this study of “65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014” winnowed out the garbage papers that even reputable pay-for-publication and open access journals have had to retract in that time period for academic misconduct and articles which never saw meaningful peer review, but were published because their authors’ check cleared the bank. Nature paper: Paywall!!! In some of his autobiographical accounts, H. C. Brown (Nobel Prize; boron chemistry) describes the limited resources at his first independent position at Wayne University (before it was renamed WSU). He had very little equipment so he had to come up with research and experiments that could be done with what he had. One of those experiments (I think, … this is all from memory now), was to measure some physical properties, such as vapor pressure, of some compounds. That he did with some hand drawn capillary tubing and a lousy vacuum pump. He goes on to tell how, years later, some guys at MIT, using very fancy and very expensive equipment, verified his measurements (got the same values) which had cost just a few dollars for the glass tubing and a salvaged vacuum pump. “From little acorns, mighty oaks grow.” Although he did beta-lactam synthesis as a grad student with Sheehan, Corey started his independent career doing more physical organic chem than natural products synthesis. I wonder why? Maybe it’s easier to publish a result, no matter what it is, from P Org Chem whereas nat prod synthesis is riskier: nobody really wants to publish a failed route(s). “… STM … in a garage lab.” — This comment is about the Westinghouse / Intel / Regeneron Science Contests (for pre-college students). One winner, several years back, was a student who built a high energy laser in her garage and did some experiments with it. It kind of helped that her father was a PhD physicist at IBM or Intel or similar and provided guidance and access to professional labs, equipment, and numerous helpful colleagues where she was able to learn about what she was supposed to be doing at home. I estimate at least $100k worth of research funding (not counting the no-cost consulting) to build the laser at home and do the other research. Another winner was a student in the Boston area who did his research over the course of ca two years at his father’s biotech company. Likewise, probably at least $100k of “free” research funding for him. When I was in high school, using “advanced” books from the local low-tech public library, I set out to build to a spectrometer using cardboard tubes, Al foil, … and a $2 prism from the local hobby shop. (I think I still have the prism!) If I had been able to get into a lab to see a REAL spectrometer, even just for 5 minutes, I think I would have been able to spend my time (and $10 budget) more productively … on pizza. (I don’t see how “have nots” have any chance to win such science contests with such a lack of access to better resources. I’m talking about LAB sciences, not math or co sci.) AQR, “many never bear fruit” — Disruptive or a nothing-burger? Starlite en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Starlite was a one-man one-kitchen chemistry discovery that got a lot of press in the 1970s-80s and the attention of NASA and other large national and private labs. It seems to have fizzled out. Maybe it was too much Starlite that kept it from catching on fire. Betzig example: He still had access to expensive equipment and resources. Rules, regs, Homeland Security, etc. — It has come up many times In The Pipeline that these are no longer the days of Max Gergel’s Columbia Organic Chemicals or Elmer Fike’s Fike Chemicals. You can math, computers, even some biology in a kitchen or garage lab, but not chemistry. Just placing an order for some chemicals or equipment gets you on a watch list and possession can get you a prison sentence. Also to mention, if it isn’t mentioned in the cited works (book, Nature paper), is Derek J. de Solla Price’s “Little Science, Big Science.” It is a broader picture of the growth of science in general and the growth of Big Science itself. NJBiologist says: “One winner, several years back, was a student who built a high energy laser in her garage and did some experiments with it. It kind of helped that her father was a PhD physicist at IBM or Intel or similar and provided guidance and access to professional labs, equipment, and numerous helpful colleagues where she was able to learn about what she was supposed to be doing at home. I estimate at least $100k worth of research funding (not counting the no-cost consulting) to build the laser at home and do the other research.” As a judge for a high school science fair, this kind of thing frustrates the living hell out of me. Every year, there are kids who obviously had access to well equipped labs and substantial “consulting” support. Many of them ran with it, and more power to them. But every year, there are also kids who struggle to get access to equipment, reagents, etc.; I’ve seen a presentation that was basically supposed to be LC analysis, but the school’s LC packed it in and they didn’t have the budget to fix it, so the bulk of the presentation was the kid’s attempt to homebrew a system. dave w says: Re: regulations etc. – in many cases it’s the vendors themselves who have a “we only sell to Companies, not Individuals” policy – for example: http://www.espimetals.com/index.php/faq ” … we are restricted from selling to individuals. Because we sell materials which are hazardous we must verify that our sales are made to established companies. Before we can sell to any company, even if the purchase will be made using a credit card, we must receive and verify a bank reference and three relevant trade references.” In his book _Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Science_, Robert Root-Bernstein develops the observation that researchers tend to be innovative for their first ten years in a new field. Age doesn’t matter – as long as they change fields every ten years, they keep innovating. But, of course, who wants to publish with a relative newcomer? Another factor may be simply that very few people are brave (or foolhardy) enough to work on an idea which doesn’t already have lots of support. It could be interesting to look at the distribution curve of number of researchers doing early work on highly innovative ideas. I suspect the curve would slope upward toward zero like a Pareto distribution – which would imply that there’s lots of innovative ideas that no one is willing to work on, and if we want more innovation we need to change the incentive structure. Seymour Benzer’s career was a great example of this: solid state physics, phage genetics, genetic basis of circadian rythyms, structure of the brain, aging and neurodegenerative diseases. He was a busy man. Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior but Jonathan Weiner is a great overview of Seymour Benzer’s scientific life. He appears to have changed fields about every 10 years. When considering PCR as an example of an exciting but garage-compatible discovery, consider also that PCR was developed in 1983. That’s thirty-six years ago now: near enough half a lifetime. (Or a full career–finish your Ph.D. at 29, retire at 65, and that’s your 36 years.) Impactful “garage-compatible” discoveries are not frequent happenings. (Consider also the number of working scientists now versus a century or two ago–the decline in the per-capita rate is brutal.) There are five basic personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (OCEAN). These traits are largely determined by genetics. Openness is associated with creativeness. Neither money nor man power can supply the genetic deficiency. bs_detector says: Asserts facts not in evidence. ChemBioJr says: This is an interesting point, that is very real to me at the moment. Due to my field of training and the nature of work I want to pursue in the future, I am finding that I have to be very picky when reviewing universities for a future junior faculty position. Which, we know, being “picky” with faculty jobs is something that is nearly impossible. It is more like, “be thankful you were considered by anyone”. But it would be futile accepting a position at a small uni that has no ability to support the work (w/ high tech instrumentation, etc) that I’ve been trained to do.. even if that is my only option for a job in academia. I recently (Pipeline, Precision Medicine Real Soon Now, 31 January, 2019) mentioned FA Cotton’s lament that, even at TAMU, offers were not made to candidates that he felt were the best, brightest, and most creative. Offers went to candidates who would be fundable within existing NSF, NIH, DoE, DoD, or other well heeled program structures. Back then, it was buckyballs and fullerenes. Today, it could be Graphene, Photoredox, CO2 Reduction, … or the Kurrent Kudzu-du-jour (referencing Derek, from another Pipeline article). A famous chemist once told me that some ideas are “too academic even for academia.” 🙂 or should I say ;-( Even if your research program using start-up money is successful, if there is no way to obtain outside funding, you are toast. They will know that and not want to waste start-up money on you. If you want to find a place to fit in, SHOW THEM THE MONEY (funding streams that you will exploit). Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA. 4 − three =	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2324
__label__wiki	0.935466	0.935466	63 years serving in the Legion of Mary Mr Douglas Rozario has been a member of the Mother of Christ Praesidium at the Church of the Holy Family for more than six decades. He is seen here wearing the papal Benemerenti medal and standing beside its certificate.In this Year of Faith feature, CatholicNews speaks to Douglas Rozario, who at the age of 84, is still serving the church in various capacities With 63 years of service in the Legion of Mary, 84-year-old Douglas Rozario is probably one of the organisation’s longest-serving members today. “Working for Our Lady and my devotion to her keeps me going,” the member of Mother of Christ Praesidium at the Church of the Holy Family told CatholicNews. Mr Rozario, who prays three Hail Marys several times a day, joined the Legion of Mary in 1949 at the age of 21. Then, he was working with Cable and Wireless, a British telegraph communications company, as an accounts clerk. The Holy Family Church praesidium was originally named Queen of Peace but was later changed to Mother of Christ “when the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace was built to avoid confusion”, Mr Rozario recalled. The basic unit of the Legion is called a praesidium which usually has members based in a parish. A parish may have more than one praesidium. As part of his Legion work in the 1950s, he would bring Communion to the house-bound. “My fellow member and I used to cycle for home visits to see if the sick needed anointing from a priest,” he said. “If the poor needed financial assistance, we would refer them to the St Vincent de Paul Society.” Mr Rozario also recalled “cycling to the end of Jalan Eunos hill weekly to teach catechism to children not attending Catholic schools to prepare them for the sacraments”. A 1950s photo of members of the Mother of Christ Praesidium with spiritual director Fr Paul Decroix. A young Mr Rozario stands at the extreme right.Back then, he and his fellow Legionaries visited people from Joo Chiat Road to Changi Point. “However, as more churches were built in the east area, we had less area to cover.” Other work that the Legionaries did included taking the parish census, clerical duties at the church presbytery, bookshop duty and selling the Malayan Catholic News, as the archdiocesan newspaper was called then. At a time when the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults had not started, Legionaries helped prepare adults for baptism either in a meeting room in church or at catechumens’ homes and sometimes till late into the night. In 1969, there were very few volunteers to serve at the wakes of deceased parishioners, so Legionaries were also “asked to assist”, Mr Rozario said. Mr Rozario, the third child in a family of three girls and five boys, clearly has no difficulty empathising with the people he reaches out to. “My father was not working in the 1930s due to the recession and my mother was sickly, so our family depended on St Anthony Bread fund at St Joseph Church (Victoria Street) and the St Vincent De Paul Society for financial assistance. “This experience brought me closer to my faith,” he shared. After retiring from his job as principal clerk at Cable and Wireless at the age of 55, he served as secretary at Holy Family Church from 1984-2005. His work involved “preparing weekly church bulletins, organising meeting room bookings, taking Mass bookings and assisting priests”. In 1997, he was given the papal Benemerenti award for his long service to the Legion of Mary and for his work with the parish. According to Mr Rozario, “the Benemerenti is the highest honour presented to a lay person by the pope”. Later in 2007, after he and his wife moved to Tampines, he started serving as Communion minister and funeral minister at the Church of the Holy Trinity. In 2009, he became a member of the Night Prayer Ministry for wakes and a member of the funeral choir. “Douglas has been the pillar of our praesidium because of his experience,” Mr Aloysius Chia, current president of Mother of Christ Praesidium, told CatholicNews. “He has guided us through our work.” Mr Rozario’s wife, Marie, told CatholicNews: “Douglas is very committed to his work; that’s his nature. He has always had that type of commitment, dedication and love to serve the Lord.” When asked what advice he would give to young people who wish to serve the Church, Mr Rozario said: “I would recommend that the younger people join a church ministry they can relate to and stick to it. There are the altar boys, youth ministry, RCIA, catechists and so on.” And on his longtime church service, he shared, “I don’t expect any reward for what I do now but an eternal reward later.” Mr Rozario has a son and daughter and seven grandchildren. By Martin See SERVICE TO THE CHURCH Church of the Holy Family 1938-1983: Member of the church choir 1949-present: Member of the Legion of Mary 1954-1960: Served as the first treasurer of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Junior Curia), Legion of Mary 1960: Founder member of the Singapore Senatus, Legion of Mary 1968-1974: Founder member of Our Lady of the Island, East Curia, and also its first president 1976 -1987: Catechist, member of the animator/lector ministry 1981-2005: Communion minister 1984-2004: Funeral minister 2007-present: Communion minister, funeral minister 2009-present: Member of the Night Prayer Ministry 2009-present: Member of the funeral choir Category: NOVEMBER 18, 2012, Vol 62, No 23 Chancery Notice - 29 June 2015 (3 matches) Chancery Notice - 28 August 2017 (2 matches) Fr Loiseau called to the Lord (2 matches) Good Shepherd Sister Mary dies at 82 (2 matches) Legion of Mary connects with young Mandarin speakers (2 matches) Legion of Mary needs new ‘zeal for evangelisation’ (2 matches) Legion of Mary draws the young (2 matches) Serving SSVP for 50 years (2 matches) Serving underprivileged children for 70 years (2 matches) Sympathetic archbishop, loved telling jokes (2 matches)	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2330
__label__cc	0.627523	0.372477	Mon, 15 Jul 2019 19:06:35 UTC \| login Packages starting with "c" in tag cloud7-opennebula-4-el7.centos-build Inherited: yes no 0 \| 1 \| 2 \| 3 \| 4 \| 5 \| 6 \| 7 \| 8 \| 9 \| a \| b \| c \| d \| e \| f \| g \| h \| i \| j \| k \| l \| m \| n \| o \| p \| q \| r \| s \| t \| u \| v \| w \| x \| y \| z \| all No packages	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2331
__label__cc	0.666146	0.333854	Conflict Minerals Company Rankings Compared to CSRHub Ratings and “The Carrot” [fa icon="calendar'] Sep 24, 2013 7:51:29 AM / by Cynthia Figge By Cynthia Figge Companies are under pressure from many stakeholders to report progress towards improved corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has created a new source of pressure. The 2012 final rule from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), requires most companies subject to SEC filing rules to report to the SEC by May 31, 2014, if any of their products produced in calendar year 2013 contain conflict minerals. In July, a federal judge ruled against a challenge to the new conflict mineral rules and upheld the law. Even companies headquartered outside of the United States, and those which do not report to the SEC, may be subjected to conflict minerals requests from customers that report to the SEC. The reporting requirements are intended to eliminate an important stream of funding for armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and surrounding countries where much of the world’s supply of conflict minerals is mined. At CSRHub, we track over 270 sources of ratings data on how companies are performing on environmental, employee, community and governance issues. Our scrutiny includes how companies manage the conflict minerals in their supply chain. Conflict minerals include tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold (often referred to as 3TG). They are found in many products, including TVs, cell phones, electronics, and automotive products. The CSRHub team recently examined ratings published by The Enough Project in 2012 that compared the conflict minerals performance of 24 companies in the electronics industry. Enough Project has been ranking these companies since 2010, as they have built systems for managing the new supply chain conflict minerals requirements. Their 2012 report showed that many companies have made significant improvements, with Intel receiving the top score of 60. Of course, there have been some notable laggards, such as Nintendo which received a score of 0. CSRHub compared Enough Project’s 24 ratings with the governance, environment, employee and community ratings for these same companies on CSRHub. We found a 35% correlation between the Conflict Minerals performance ratings and CSRHub’s governance ratings and a 16% correlation between the Conflict Minerals ratings and CSRHub’s employee ratings. There was almost no correlation between Enough Project’s ratings and the CSRHub community or environment ratings. Our data shows that companies that are good at governance are probably also good at managing their conflict mineral programs. Their Boards have become involved in the process, their leaders understand the ethical need to care about conflict mineral issues, and they have the necessary commitment to transparency and reporting infrastructure needed to correctly handle the SEC’s new requirements. The connection to employee treatment may come from the fact that there are health, safety and training issues involved with improving conflict material supply chain management. Companies with good programs in this area may get a step ahead of those that have not invested as much. These results are the latest of CSRHub’s research efforts. Because we now have data on more than 8,000 companies in 104 countries, and because our data set includes input from more than 270 different sources of sustainability information, we are able to find broad connections between operating issues and CSR. For instance, in June CSRHub unveiled some research that proves the relationship between brand and CSR is even more profound than we thought — around the world, across industry type, and company size. We ran five years of our data against the data of Brand Finance, the global brand analyst headquartered in London. With our overlapping datasets, we analyzed over 1,000 companies, and for 2012 we got a 0.28 correlation between brand strength and CSR. Most astonishing to us was our analysis over time. When we looked back over five years of data, we found that Brand strength to CSR correlation has suddenly strengthened in the last year, doubling in 2012 over 2011. The relationship stayed relatively constant over the previous 4 years. Then in 2012 that correlation more than doubled. We hope soon to reveal research that will show the relationship between reputation and CSR and between operating returns and CSR. We believe that connections such as these are necessary, if we want to make CSR and sustainability programs breakthrough platforms for building strategic advantage. We hope that the SEC’s conflict minerals requirement will be a major factor in the right direction for the estimated 6,000 companies that will need to tighten up their supply chains. Cynthia Figge is a forerunner and thought leader in the corporate sustainability movement. She is COO and Cofounder of CSRHub, the world’s largest database that aggregates and organizes data and knowledge on the social, environmental, and governance performance of 8,400 companies to provide sustainability ratings to the marketplace. In 1996 she co-founded EKOS International, one of the first consultancies integrating sustainability and corporate strategy. Prior to founding EKOS, she was an officer of LIN Broadcasting / McCaw Cellular, and led new businesses and services with Weyerhaeuser, New York Daily News; and with New Ventures. Cynthia is Board Director of the Compassionate Action Network International. Cynthia received her bachelor's degree in Economics and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. She lives in the Seattle area. [fa icon="comment"] 2 Comments posted in conflict minerals, CSR, Cynthia Figge, Uncategorized, SEC, 3TG, brand and CSR, Consumer Protection Act, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform, DRC, The Enough Project	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2335
__label__wiki	0.955376	0.955376	Start Over You searched for: Authors Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.) ✖Remove constraint Authors: Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.) Formats Text ✖Remove constraint Formats: Text Collections NLM Publications and Productions ✖Remove constraint Collections: NLM Publications and Productions Languages English ✖Remove constraint Languages: English Dates by Range 1850-1899 ✖Remove constraint Dates by Range: 1850-1899 1. Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army: supplement to catalogue Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.) Washington [D.C.] : G.P.O., 1872 2. Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office: synopsis of style [Washington, D.C.? : s.n., ca. 1897] Abstracting and Indexing as Topic -- standards 3. Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army: with an alphabetical index of subjects Washington : G.P.O., 1872 4. Specimen fasciculus of a catalogue of the national medical library Washington [D.C.] : Government Printing Office, 1876 5. Alphabetical list of abbreviations of titles of medical periodicals employed in the Index-catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army, from volume I to volume XVI inclusive 6. Alphabetical list of abbreviations of titles of medical periodicals employed in the Index-catalogue Washington, D.C. : Government Printing Office, 1886 [Washington, D.C.? : Library of the Surgeon-General's Office?, 1880?] Catalogs, Library 8. Abbreviations of titles of medical periodicals to be used in the subject-catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office 9. Medical periodicals and transactions of societies in the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.), U.S. Army: arranged alphabetically by countries [Washington, D.C.? : Library of the Surgeon General's Office?, 1888?] 10. Titles of books and papers relating to mineral waters in the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, June 1, 1895 Mineral Waters Balneology NLM Publications and Productions✖[remove]66 Medicine in the Americas, 1610-192016 Libraries, Medical54 Periodicals as Topic6 Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.)4 Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (U.S.)✖[remove]66 Alphabetical list of abbreviations of titles of medical periodicals employed in the Index-catalogue2 Abbreviations of titles of medical periodicals to be used in the subject-catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office1 Alphabetical list of abbreviations of titles of medical periodicals employed in the Index-catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army, from volume I to volume XVI inclusive1 Catalogue of books in the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, Washington, D.C: alphabetically arranged, with an appendix1 Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army: with an alphabetical index of subjects1 Text✖[remove]66 English✖[remove]66 Bibliography64 Catalogs58 Indexes50 Abbreviations4 Public domain66 1850-1899✖[remove]66	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2342
__label__wiki	0.93808	0.93808	Sports NBA basketball Professional basketball Basketball Men's basketball Men's sports NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship Higher education Education Social affairs College basketball College sports School athletics Men's college basketball Women's sports Bribery, graft and conflicts of interest Crime General news Government programs Government and politics Coaching Corruption in sports Michigan State Big Ten Auburn SEC Final Four runs don't mask problems in college sports By EDDIE PELLS - Apr. 04, 2019 05:25 PM EDT Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl answers questions after a practice session for the semifinals of the Final Four NCAA college basketball tournament, Thursday, April 4, 2019, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Matt York) MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — One team's coach got kicked out of the sport for three years, and two of his assistants have been named in bribery scandals. Another team's coach is the most high-profile name in an athletic department scarred by its handling of a massive sex-abuse scandal. Few would argue Auburn's Bruce Pearl and Michigan State's Tom Izzo shouldn't be at the Final Four. But some of the problems they've faced in their past offer sobering reminders about issues that can't be erased by a magical run through March Madness. "I knew what I knew, and I knew all that I didn't know," Pearl said Thursday, when asked about the troubles enveloping his assistants. "So therefore, I was comfortable that if we stayed the course, that we were going to be fine." Auburn is more than fine as it gets ready for Saturday's national semifinal against Virginia. But at around the same time the Tigers were revving up for what turned into the program's first trip to the Final Four, former assistant Chuck Person was pleading guilty to conspiracy charges for accepting bribes to steer NBA-caliber players to a financial adviser. That same week, Auburn placed Person's replacement, assistant Ira Bowman, on administrative leave while it investigated allegations that he was involved in a bribery scheme at his previous job at University of Pennsylvania. While Pearl, the 58-year-old coaching lifer, hasn't taken offense to those who might question his judgment for hiring those coaches, he's been a little more prickly with those who want to relive his past. He was fired at Tennessee in 2011 for bringing a recruit to a barbecue at his house — a violation made worse by the fact he lied about it, and asked others to do the same. It branded him with a three-year NCAA "show cause" penalty — the equivalent of being completely kicked out of basketball. Auburn took a chance as the sanction was expiring. Pearl bristled a bit — then later apologized for bristling — at a question at the start of the tournament asking if he wondered if he'd ever get another chance. "So, I basically have been coaching my whole life. And so you're going to ask me a question about the three years I wasn't coaching?" Pearl said. Like it or not, it's part of his resume. His son, Steven, who serves as an assistant for Auburn, said his dad always wanted to get back into the game. "It was just a matter of where," Steven Pearl said. "Do you have to jump into a mid-major and work your way back up, or does someone like Auburn take a chance on a coach like that and bring him back in?" For Izzo, it was never a matter of being welcomed in, but rather, whether he might be looking for a way out. Michigan State has been the epicenter of the scandal involving Larry Nassar, the former team doctor who sexually abused hundreds of gymnasts and other female athletes. Though Izzo says he didn't know Nassar, the scandal put every facet of Michigan State's athletics program under the microscope. Izzo came under scrutiny for not properly dealing with members of his program accused of sexual assault. In detailing some of those cases, an ESPN report linked Izzo and football coach Mark Dantonio to Nassar in a graphic with the title "Hidden Secrets." In the end, no criminal charges were filed. The NCAA has cleared Michigan State, and both Izzo and the program were deemed to have handled the cases properly. "It wasn't about what happened, it was about a picture that will go down the rest of my life as the lowest part of my life, to be on there with a pedophile like I was on there with," Izzo said last fall. Despite that, the Nassar scandal has left an indelible taint at Michigan State. The athletics director, the university president and that president's replacement are all gone. Michigan State has settled lawsuits by the gymnasts to the tune of $500 million. When the words "Michigan State" come up in the headlines these days, they're every bit as likely to be about the Nassar scandal as anything Izzo and his basketball program are accomplishing. Nobody would've blamed the coach for leaving, either for the NBA or for a comfortable retirement. But he preferred to stay, in the hopes he could be part of the solution at Michigan State. "We've been through a lot here," Izzo said earlier this week, noting the support the team has received for its run. "It's part of the process of people just expressing the platform we have, and what it can do in a positive way. And if I can be a small part of it, that's as good as it gets." AP Sports Writer Larry Lage in East Lansing, Michigan, contributed to this report.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2343
__label__wiki	0.967877	0.967877	Charles Matthews Jon Teske Xavier Simpson Jordan Poole Sports Men's basketball Men's sports Basketball College sports College basketball Men's college basketball NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship Michigan Big Ten Texas Tech Big 12 Another Sweet 16 for Michigan, but no further glory By NOAH TRISTER - Mar. 29, 2019 03:38 PM EDT Michigan guard Charles Matthews leaves the court during the team's loss to Texas Tech in an NCAA men's college basketball tournament West Region semifinal Thursday, March 28, 2019, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — In the past two seasons, Michigan reached a Final Four and a Sweet 16 on the strength of its outstanding defense. Then the Wolverines ran into a Texas Tech team that's making a similar run. Michigan's season ended with a thud Thursday night — a virtual hailstorm of missed shots from the perimeter in a surprisingly lopsided 63-44 loss to the Red Raiders. It was Texas Tech's defense that won the day, and it was a disappointing ending for the Wolverines, who won their first 17 games and looked like one of the nation's top teams for much of the season. "I will give you the message that we had in the locker room, that this game shouldn't define who we are," coach John Beilein said. "(Assistant coach) Saddi Washington was great to bring that up." Michigan made the Sweet 16 for a third straight season and the fifth time in seven years, but the Wolverines couldn't match their exploits of 2017-18, when they won the Big Ten Tournament and went to the Final Four. This season's team fell just short of a conference title in the regular season, losing twice to rival Michigan State. Then the Wolverines fell to the Spartans a third time in the title game of the league tournament. Michigan (30-7) made it through the first weekend of the NCAAs without much drama, but the Wolverines fell flat against Texas Tech, shooting 1 for 19 from 3-point range and allowing the Red Raiders to pull away early in the second half. Michigan experienced occasional offensive lulls this season, and this was one night the Wolverines couldn't afford to have their 3-point well run dry. "It was a bad day to have a bad day against a really good Texas Tech team," Beilein said. "We will grow from it. These guys understand it and it hurts because of the nature of the loss. We got down so big and could not come back, a little bit like our Villanova loss last year." That Villanova loss took place in the 2018 national title game, and when Michigan routed the Wildcats 73-46 in a November rematch, the Wolverines served notice that they were still a team to be reckoned with — even after losing Moe Wagner to the NBA. Michigan also beat North Carolina by 17 in November. The Wolverines didn't necessarily get worse after that, but other teams improved to their level. Ultimately, the three losses to Michigan State may sting more than the game against Texas Tech — although the one-sided nature of Michigan's final game was somewhat shocking. "We didn't hit shots we usually hit," freshman Iggy Brazdeikis said. "There was a lot of plays that, you know, I feel like on some days we would make those shots and make those plays. But today it just wasn't our day and they did a great job defensively. All credit to them." Brazdeikis was Michigan's scoring leader this season, and like Wagner, he gave the Wolverines a player who could score both inside and behind the 3-point arc. Charles Matthews and point guard Zavier Simpson anchored the team's tenacious defense, while 7-foot-1 Jon Teske emerged as a significant contributor at both ends of the court. Jordan Poole had his ups and downs but was the team's second-leading scorer and shot 37 percent from long distance. Matthews is expected to turn pro, but if the other key players return, the Wolverines would be in good position to contend again for a Big Ten title and more. "Last year we lost a lot of guys who left, and now we have a lot of guys that are returning," Poole said. "We're going into the offseason extremely excited and ready to play next year." AP Sports Writer Joe Reedy in Anaheim, California, contributed to this report. More AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/Collegebasketball and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2345
__label__wiki	0.985119	0.985119	Crime/Rescue Terance Mann Devin Vassell Phil Cofer Justin Robinson Ahmed Hill Nickeil Alexander-Walker Sports College sports Men's college basketball College basketball Basketball Men's basketball Men's sports NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship Charlotte police shooting ACC Virginia Tech Florida State Monmouth Virginia Florida No. 12 FSU beats No. 16 Virginia Tech 65-63 in OT at ACCs By AARON BEARD - Mar. 14, 2019 09:52 PM EDT Virginia Tech's Isaiah Wilkins, right, and Florida State's Raiquan Gray, left, fight for a rebound during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament in Charlotte, N.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Nell Redmond) CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — With the clock winding down in a tie game, Florida State's Terance Mann pushed upcourt and launched a twisting off-balance shot that ended with him flat on his back, his feet up in the air and the ball rattling around the rim. Never a doubt, right? "I knew," Mann said. "I knew it was going in." Mann's shot with 1.8 seconds left helped the No. 12 Seminoles edge No. 16 Virginia Tech 65-63 on Thursday in the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament quarterfinals, keeping the Seminoles' hot hand with the wildest-looking — yet nonetheless effective — of shots. Mann's shot broke a 63-all tie for the fourth-seeded Seminoles (26-6), who secured the win when Nickeil Alexander-Walker missed a long 3-pointer at the horn on a desperation inbounds play from the far end. Mann had the biggest shot of the game, but the Seminoles had two other big ones to secure this one in a testament to their balance. That included freshman Devin Vassell hitting a contested 3-pointer with 4.5 seconds left in regulation to force overtime. "That's just how our team is," said Mann, who had 10 points and nine rebounds. "Whoever feels comfortable with the position they're in, they're going to do it. And we all have full faith in here in everybody to do so." Vassell scored 14 points to lead the Seminoles, who started the game with a 17-4 lead yet ended up in that tense finish. It finally came down to Alexander-Walker missing a contested shot in the paint with about 10 seconds left in overtime. The Seminoles didn't call timeout, opting instead to push the ball back the other way. "I was going to live and die with whatever happened as a result of that," FSU coach Leonard Hamilton said. Alexander-Walker finished with 21 points for the Hokies (24-8), including a 3 that bounced up off the front rim and dropped through the net for a 63-60 lead with 1:40 left in OT. The lead didn't hold up in the second overtime matchup between the teams in the past 10 days — both won by FSU. "He made a great drive, I just tried not to foul," Virginia Tech's Ahmed Hill said of Mann's shot. "He made a beautiful floater and it happened to go in." Virginia Tech: The Hokies have been grinding through games without injured point guard Justin Robinson (foot) since late January. The Hokies fought their way to win six wins in their final 10 regular-season games, then beat Miami in Wednesday's second round to advance. They just couldn't protect that final lead, with FSU's Phil Cofer hitting the tying 3 at the 1:15 mark of OT to set the stage for Mann's winner. Florida State: The Seminoles arrived in Charlotte as one of the hottest teams in the country, winning 12 of 13 games to secure a double-round bye into the quarterfinals. They found a wild way to add to that streak. QUICK THINKER Mann said he was looking to drive to the rim when he took a pass near halfcourt on that final transition chance. He pushed to the right against Hill and felt a bump, so he lifted off for a shot that ultimately bounced around the rim, touched the backboard and dropped through the net. "I knew it wasn't a hard-enough bump to get the whistle," Mann said. "So once I was in the air, I knew I had to shoot it. I'm used to doing it." Mann paused. "It's like a 0.5-second thinking process right there," he said with a laugh. ROBINSON'S STATUS Virginia Tech coach Buzz Williams had ruled out Robinson for the ACC Tournament last week but said Thursday he's "making progress." Williams said team medical staff will take new pictures of foot injury Sunday to see how he has progressed. He said Robinson had also been able to participate in at least some practice work Monday and Tuesday. "He was able to do a little bit more than Monday," Williams said. "So God's the ultimate healer and we're praying that it works." Virginia Tech: The Hokies will wait for Selection Sunday to find out their NCAA Tournament destination. Florida State: The Seminoles advanced to Friday's semifinals to face second-ranked and top-seeded Virginia, which beat eighth-seeded North Carolina State earlier Thursday. Follow Aaron Beard on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/aaronbeardap	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2346
__label__wiki	0.641523	0.641523	Site Review Policy Kickstarter Policy How to Review Comics How to Get Review Copies How to Make Comics Must-Read Comic Classics Manga Starting Points KC’s Westfield Columns Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books March 22, 2011 Johanna Comic News 2 comments Change Is Difficult LinkBlogging: Lois Lane Books, Alex Segura Interview, More Two people I like talk to each other: Tim O’Shea interviews Alex Segura about his role as Executive Director of Publicity and Marketing for Archie Comics. They also cover Alex’s creative work, including a story he’s writing for an upcoming issue of Archie & Friends, about the first-ever Riverdale Comic Con. (Write what you know…) Lois Lane, 11-year-old reporter, by Dean Trippe Lois Lane: Girl Reporter: Dean Trippe shares his pitch for a terrific-sounding kids’ book project that wasn’t picked up. It’s always the best-sounding works that don’t match the owners’ vision for the characters. This quote made me sad, in an article about the NY Times changing their style guide: One broad category of changes was the deletion of some aging or outdated technical terms: CD-ROM, floppy disk, Dictaphone, Usenet, newsgroups, VHS, CAD-CAM and I.S.D.N. Poor Usenet and VHS. But in spite of the recent AP style change to email (announced on Twitter!), the Times is sticking with the unnecessary and old-fashioned hyphen when they use the term. They are now allowed to say “an e-mail” instead of “an e-mail message”, though. Dean Trippe Thanks so much for the post and kind words, Johanna. The response to this has really made my…I dunno, life? With or without DC, this is the kind book I’m gonna be doing. This week has really proven to me that there IS an audience for the kind of stories I like. 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__label__wiki	0.668997	0.668997	In victory for i4i, appeals court upholds Microsoft Word injunction The appeal court rejects Microsoft’s appeal of the patent cause, forcing the vendor to yank custom XML from Word Android eats iPhone market share in five years 5 billion mobile apps to download in 2014 Netbook shipments jump 103 per cent in ’09, research says Netbook shipments will slow down as prices of ultrathin laptops fall Obama selects tech veteran for top cybersecurity post Howard Schmidt is respected by many but will have his work cut out for him #8 Newsmaker of the year: Ron Cuthbertson of The Source With his well-run subsidiary dragged into the parent company’s bankruptcy, Ron Cuthbertson and The Source have re-emerged under new ownership #9 Newsmaker of the year: Carol Hochu of Ontario Electronic Stewardship As the point-person for rolling-out Ontario’s e-waste recycling program and the fees that support it, Carol Hochu had an apprehensive IT channel community to work with Citrix XenDesktop 4: Flexible and fast While it’s not a lightweight platform, it seems to be the most flexible Cloud Computing: How VARs Can Get Started Plus, unified communications and mobile workers and advice for MSPs Symantec announces new mobile security and management strategy New products aimed at mobile business users to help protect against security risks Cisco signs Avnet for UCS, data centre distribution Distributor Avnet Technology Solutions will form a new business unit dedicated to Cisco’s data centre product suite #7 Newsmaker of 2009: Todd Thibodeaux of Comptia It’s been a year of strong membership growth for industry trade association Comptia Looking ahead to 2010 in the IT channel In 2010 we can hope for a recovery and perhaps a return of sanity, if only temporarily. As always, what does it mean for the channel? CES: LG Display develops thinnest-yet LCD TV panel The 2.6mm screen will be put on show at January’s CES PC makers introduce netbooks with new Atom processor The netbooks are smaller and offer longer battery lives Firefox 3.5 edges ahead in browser race Firefox adoption exceeds that of IE in particular versions 23456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287288289290291292293294295296297298299300301302303304305306307308309310311312313314315316317318319320321322323324325326327328329330331332333334335336337338339340341342343344345346347348349350351352353354355356357358359360361362363364365366367368369370371372373374375376377378379380381382383384385386387388389390391392393394395396397398399400401402403404405406407408409410411412413414415416417418419420421422423424425426427428429430431432433434435436437438439440441442443444445446447448449450451452453454455456457458459460461462463464465466467468469470471472473474 480481482483484485486487488489490491492493494495496497498499500501502503504505506507508509510511512513514515516517518519520521522523524525526527528529530531532533534535536537538539540541542543544545546547548549550551552553554555556557558559560561562563564565566567568569570571572573574575576577578579580581582583584585586587588589590591592593594595596597598599600601602603604605606607608609610611612613614615616617618619620621622623624625626627628629630631632633634635636637638639640641642643644645646647648649650651652653654655656657658659660661662663664665666667668669670671672673674675676677678679680681682683684685686687688689690691692693694695696697698699700701702703704705706707708709710711712713714715716717718719720721722723724725726727728729730731732733734735736737738739740741742743744745746747748749750751752753754755756757758759760761762763764765766767768769770771772773774775776777778779780781782783784785786787788789790791792793794795796797798799800801802803804805806807808809810811812813814815816817818819820821822823824825826827828829830831832833834835836837838839840841842843844845846847848849850851852853854855856857858859860861862863864865866867868869870871872873874875876877878879880881882883884885886887888889890891892893894895896897898899900901902903904905906907908909910911912913914915916917918919920921922923924925926927928929930931932933934935936937938939940941942943944	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2349
__label__wiki	0.616839	0.616839	HomeChild WelfareIndian Child Welfare Act Under Fire: Federal Judge Strikes Down 40-Year-Old Law, Appeals Could Lead to Supreme Court Indian Child Welfare Act Under Fire: Federal Judge Strikes Down 40-Year-Old Law, Appeals Could Lead to Supreme Court October 7, 2018 John Kelly Child Welfare, Featured, ICWA, News 3 The Indian Child Welfare Act, passed in 1978 to prevent the removal of Native American children from their families and tribes, has been deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a 40-year-old law that was passed to protect against the separation of American Indian children from their families and tribes by state-run child welfare systems. In Brackeen v. Zinke, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled in favor of three states – Texas, Indiana and Louisiana – and several foster and adoptive couples, declaring that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was a race-based law lacking a present-day articulation of its need. Citing a recent Supreme Court ruling on sports gambling, O’Connor also ruled that ICWA unfairly expected states and tribes to enforce federal standards. Though ICWA has been contested in court myriad times since its passage in 1978, this is the first time that a federal judge has put the future of the law in jeopardy. No federal court “has determined any provision of ICWA to be unconstitutional, even though these arguments have been raised in various courts, including the Supreme Court,” said Chrissi Ross Nimmo, deputy attorney general of Cherokee Nation, in an email to The Chronicle of Social Change. Critics of ICWA praised O’Connor, saying it rolls back a law that puts Native American children at risk. The decision “is a great victory for the rights of Native American children throughout the United States, who deserve the same strong protections against abuse and neglect as their peers of other races,” said Timothy Sandefur, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute, which filed a friend of the court brief in the case. “ICWA denies them that protection and prioritizes their race over all other considerations. That’s immoral, and today’s decision rightly holds that it’s also unconstitutional.” The Cherokee Nation and three other tribal defendants will seek an immediate stay of the ruling and appeal O’Connor’s decision to the Fifth Circuit, Nimmo said. The other defendants in the case are leaders of two federal agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of the Interior. “We remain optimistic that the federal government will continue to defend the constitutionality of ICWA as they have done thus far,” Nimmo said. “The Department of the Interior strongly opposes any diminishment of ICWA’s protections for Indian children, families, and tribes,” said Tara Mac Lean Sweeney, assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the agency. “The Department will continue to work with tribes and states to implement ICWA moving forward.” HHS has not issued any public statement yet about the decision. If the Fifth Circuit upholds O’Connor’s decision, the fate of ICWA could wind up in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. Protecting Tribes ICWA was passed in 1978 at a time when a staggering number of Indian children were taken from reservations and placed with white families, often far away from their tribes and families-of-origin. In the 1960s and 70s, the Association on American Indian Affairs found that 25 to 35 percent of all Native children were being removed from their families. The law mandates that, when a child is removed from home for abuse or neglect, state and tribal child welfare agencies take clear steps to keep children connected to their families and tribes. Placement with non-Indian foster families should thus be a placement of last resort in the foster care continuum. Adoptions by non-Indian families can be challenged for up to two years by tribes if they believe the parent’s consent for it was obtained by fraud or under duress. Chrissi Nimmo, Assistant Attorney General for Cherokee Nation. Photo: Cherokee Nation Office of the Attorney General Opponents of ICWA have long argued that the law endangers Indian children. Attorneys with the conservative Goldwater Institute have challenged ICWA nearly a dozen times on grounds that the law “discriminates” against Native children, placing the tribe’s best interests above those of the child. Nimmo dismissed those claims as mostly emanating from think tanks that see rolling back ICWA as a “first step in the erosion of tribal sovereignty.” “If they are allowed to take our children, then they are allowed to steal the future of our tribes and undermine our very status as the indigenous people to this country,” Nimmo said. Some youth advocacy groups have filed briefs critical of ICWA’s reach – though not opposed in principle to the law – in previous court challenges, including the Center for Adoption Policy, Advokids and the National Council for Adoption. Three Families, Three States This current case centers on three non-Indian families seeking to adopt children of Native American ancestry. Two of the children have parents or grandparents who are enrolled members of tribes; one child’s biological father is an unregistered descendant of a tribe. The Brackeen family, of Texas, is seeking to adopt a baby from Arizona identified in the case as A.L.M. The child’s biological parents – the mom a member of the Navajo Nation and the father a member of the Cherokee Nation – both support the Brackeens’ efforts to adopt. The adoption process is moving forward, but under ICWA, either tribe could challenge it for up to two years to argue for a placement with a relative or another Native American family. The states involved in the case as plaintiffs claim that the requirements of ICWA are a burden on their ability to recruit foster and adoptive parents, and find suitable placements for Indian children. The Texas Department of Family Preservation Services asserts that, because of the process dictated by ICWA, the Brackeens said they were unlikely to seek adoption of another Native American child. Race and States U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, writing the decision for the District Court for the Northern District of Texas, found ICWA to be a race-based law that requires “strict scrutiny” aimed at avoiding unnecessarily broad protections. This assertion contradicts previous court findings that ICWA is a political protection that requires only a “rational basis.” In his opinion, O’Connor, who was appointed in 2007 by George W. Bush, criticized government and tribal lawyers for failing to offer a defense of the law’s importance. “The Federal Defendants have not offered a compelling governmental interest that the ICWA’s racial classification serves, or argued that the classification is narrowly tailored to that end,” O’Connor wrote. “Because the government did not prove — or attempt to prove — why the ICWA survives strict scrutiny, it has not carried its burden to defend the ICWA.” Nimmo said that “decades of federal case law has held that statutes that give unique benefits or burdens to Indian people and Indian tribes are not race-based,” and that “there was no reason to justify why ICWA withstands ‘strict scrutiny’ because the law is … not subject to such review.” It will surely be a point of debate in the Fifth Circuit appeal. Nimmo said that even if the law were to be considered race-based, it would stand up to strict scrutiny. “Sections 1901 and 1902 [of ICWA] list Congressional findings on the need for ICWA and the federal government’s role as trustee for Indian tribes and their people,” Nimmo said. O’Connor also ruled that ICWA amounted to an unconstitutional shift of costs and enforcement to state governments. He cited the recent Murphy v. NCAA case, which this year ended the federal limitations on states permitting sports gambling. The gambling ban violated the anti-commandeering doctrine because it “regulated states rather than individuals.” ICWA, O’Connor judged, violates the same principles. Under the law, he wrote, “Congress shifts all responsibility to the states, yet ‘unequivocally dictates’ what they must do.” Destined for High Court? Should this case reach the high court, soon operating for the first time with a full slate of nine justices, it will be the second high-profile ICWA case in five years. The other, a 2013 case called Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, involved a Native American father fighting the adoption of his daughter by a non-Indian couple in South Carolina. The court did not strike down ICWA or any provision of it in that case, but did make clear that its protections were limited. “The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was enacted to help preserve the cultural identity and heritage of Indian tribes, but under the State Supreme Court’s reading, the Act would put certain vulnerable children at a great disadvantage solely because an ancestor — even a remote one — was an Indian,” said Samuel Alito, writing for the majority. Native Americans in Foster Care There were 17,896 American Indian or Alaska Native youth in foster care in 2012, according to federal data obtained by The Chronicle. That number had risen to 20 percent, to 21,576, by 2016. In most states, these youth make up a tiny fraction of the overall foster care population. But they make up a third of all foster youth in six states: Minnesota, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota, Alaska and South Dakota. Federal data also shows an increase in foster homes that identify as American Indian or Alaska Native households. There were 3,793 such foster homes in 2016, about 1,000 more than there were in 2012. Sixty-four percent of those homes are in the six states with the highest percentage of Native foster youth, but it is hardly an even split. For example, Oklahoma has more than 1,000 Indian foster homes by itself. In South Dakota, where 60 percent of foster youth are American Indian, federal data shows only 16 American Indian foster homes. A recent award-winning investigation into South Dakota’s child welfare system by NPR found that the number of Indian youth in foster care was wildly disproportionate to their proportion of society, and that 90 percent of those youth were not kept with their families or tribes. Christie Renick contributed to this article. Note: This article was updated on Monday, October 8 to further clarify the circumstances under which a tribe could appeal an adoption. American Indian Youth in Foster Care by State maltreatment Addressing Trauma May Be the Key to Helping Foster Youth Succeed in the Workplace Brown Signs Law to Ease Licensing Path for Relatives, Vetoes Foster Care Mobile Response Plan Why Do Government Lawyers Run the Child Welfare System? May 29, 2013 Waln Brown, Ph.D. Blogger Co-Op, Opinion Comments Off on Why Do Government Lawyers Run the Child Welfare System? The foster care alumni movement asserts that child welfare professionals must meet increasingly higher standards of knowledge the more they influence the lives of at-risk youth. This is especially true for non-alumni whose decisions affect […] An Invitation to Remake Child Welfare January 3, 2019 Guest Writer Child Welfare, Opinion, Top Stories Comments Off on An Invitation to Remake Child Welfare A few days before Christmas, the federal government extended an invitation to state child welfare agencies that has the potential to completely transform the system. The invitation did not arrive with great publicity. Nor was […] New York Child Welfare Leader Takes Up Obama Legacy, Foster Care Hackathons November 28, 2016 Daniel Heimpel Child Welfare, Featured, News, Tech Comments Off on New York Child Welfare Leader Takes Up Obama Legacy, Foster Care Hackathons In May, a couple hundred technologists, child welfare experts and foster youth gathered on the grounds of the White House for the first foster care hackathon to reach such national prominence. During the last hour of […] Judge Rules Indian Child Welfare Act Unconstitutional \| Federal judge strikes down much of Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) as unconstitutional \| Overlawyered The New Racism has ICWA in its cross hairs in Brakeen v. Zinke \| Blue Mass Group	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2363
__label__cc	0.54237	0.45763	January 12, 2019 By squirt “Our Future, Our Democracy” Poster for Women’s March 2019 “Our Future, Our Democracy” 2019 Offset Poster Signed and Numbered Edition of 200 Sold Out – Thank You! Unsigned / un-numbered posters will be distributed in Washington, DC at: The Outrage Last year’s Women’s March 2018 poster is available HERE • The Outrage donates 100% of all sales of my poster to Planned Parenthood I am very proud to contribute my talents and many thousands of posters to the Women’s March January 19, 2019 across the country and in Washington, DC. My poster will be available through the official Women’s March merchandise and info point in Washington. It is gratifying to continue in the committed efforts of the women’s movement by working closely with the The Outrage in Washington, DC. The Outrage donates 100% of all sales of my posters to worthy causes, and is working closely with Women’s March and others to leverage the 2019 blue wave take over of the House of Representatives in the United States Congress, and to fight back for our future. Filed Under: News Tagged With: Chuck Sperry, Planned Parenthood, The Outrage, Washington, Women's March March 3, 2018 By squirt Chuck Sperry in “Posters for Change – Tear, Paste, Protest” – a Collection of Removable Posters Chuck Sperry’s political poster “Humanity” was selected to appear in “Posters for Change – Tear, Paste, Protest: 50 Removable Posters” from Princeton Architectural Press. “Posters for Change” is an important record of resistance, touching most of the political movements of today, including 50 beautifully reproduced, removable images from the world’s most relevant designers. This impressive book will be released on March 20, 2018; it can be pre-ordered through the publisher through this link – Posters for Change – Tear, Paste, Protest: 50 Removable Posters. Paperback, perforated pages 50 color illustrations From The Guardian • March 3, 2018 • Kathryn Bromwich As the night of Tuesday 8 November 2016 dragged into the early hours of Wednesday morning, people around the globe were readjusting their expectations for what the world would look like over the following four years. The 45th president of the United States would not be Hillary Rodham Clinton, as had been widely predicted, but Donald J Trump. The day after he was inaugurated, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Washington as part of the Women’s March; worldwide, millions attended hundreds of related marches. Since then, Trump’s presidency has been marked by protests. “It all started with the election – we were like, ‘We need to do something,’” says Jennifer Lippert, editorial director at Princeton Architectural Press in New York. She spotted a blog post showing a sign in a window that said “Everyone Welcome Here” and this sparked an idea: PAP would put out a call for political posters and publish the best as a book, donating the proceeds to non-profit organizations. “We didn’t want curse words in it, and we didn’t want it to be about Trump – we wanted it to be about the issues,” says Lippert. They received 800 submissions from around the world, covering topics such as climate change, civil rights, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, feminism and gun control. “In the last couple of years there’s been so much happening with protests. Since the election we’ve definitely seen more people engaged in the political environment,” says Lippert. The 50 posters in the book were chosen on the strength of their graphic design, the clarity of their message and their ability to grab people’s attention. They are also detachable: “The whole point of the book was that they would be hung up – in windows, in shops, in dorm rooms, on front doors, in offices…” Graphic design activism has a rich history, and when putting the book together, Lippert’s editorial team did extensive research into protest art going back to the 1960s. It found that although there is now much more computer-generated art, other techniques have remained the same – hand-drawn posters and collages are still among the most popular. And while there is now more focus on LGBTQ rights, many of the issues being discussed 50 years ago are still relevant – the environment, peace, equal rights. “It’s hard to think about things not getting better. But I feel like there are so many issues we still have to overcome that we’ve always had to overcome. The biggest, I think, is equality for everybody.” Lippert remains hopeful: the recent rise in activism, she believes, is a promising sign for the future. “I think when you start taking things away from people – their right to speak out, equality – it sparks a change. People realise that they do have a voice and they need to use it, otherwise change will never happen. I think that’s what we’re seeing now.” Posters for Change – Tear, Paste, Protest: 50 Removable Posters is published by Princeton Architectural Press on 20 March Support important non-profit causes by acquiring more of Chuck Sperry’s posters at The Outrage, the official merchandising outlet of the Women’s March: Sperry’s Women’s March Anniversary Poster 2018 • available here! Sperry’s Women’s March Poster 2017 • available here! Sperry’s March for Science 2017 • available here! Filed Under: News Tagged With: Chuck Sperry, civil rights, Climate Change, feminism, gun control, healthcare, LGBTQ issues, March For Science, Posters for Change Tear Paste Protest 50 Removable Posters, Princeton Architectural Press, The Guardian, Women's March “Women Rising” Poster for Women’s March 2018 “Women Rising” 2018 Two-sided / two images Posters will be distributed in Las Vegas at: Women’s March Merchandise 7000 East Russell Road Posters will be distributed in Washington, DC at: I’ll be making a very limited online release of 200 signed and numbered offset Women’s March 2018 posters on Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at a random time. “We’re exactly one week away from the anniversary of the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. On Sunday, January 21st, we’re gathering in Las Vegas for the official Women’s March Anniversary: Power to the Polls event kicking off our year-long campaign to win in 2018!” – Women’s March 2018 I am very proud to contribute my talents and many thousands of posters to the Women’s March January 21, 2018 in Las Vegas and Washington, DC. My poster will be available through the official Women’s March merchandise and info point in Las Vegas and in Washington. It is gratifying to continue in the committed efforts of the women’s movement by working closely with the The Outrage in Washington, DC. The Outrage donates 100% of all sales of my posters to worthy causes, and is working closely with Women’s March, NOW, She Should Run and others to leverage the November 2018 mid-term election and fight back for our future. Filed Under: News Tagged With: Chuck Sperry, Las Vegas, NOW, Planned Parenthood, She Should Run, The Outrage, Washington, Women's March January 2, 2018 By squirt 2017 Year In Review: 25 Amazing Prints in ’17 Read More: Sperry’s beautiful new art book, “Helikon, The Muses of Chuck Sperry” (2017) Filed Under: News Tagged With: 311, Conscious Alliance, Dave Matthews, Demeter, Eleutheria, Erato, Greensky Bluegrass, Helikon, Jerry Garcia, Leftover Salmon, March For Science, Ostracon, Pretenders, Primus, Queens of the Stone Age, SFMOMA, String Cheese Incident, Supersuckers, SXSW, TRPS, Twiddle, Women's March “Resist” Women’s March Poster Release “RESIST” 2017 Signed Edition Open Edition Offset Lithograph Gold Edition of 100 1 color screenprint on gold paper Filed Under: Art Prints Tagged With: Chuck Sperry, Protest Poster, Women On Washington, Women's March, Women's March Oakland, Women's March on Washington, Women's March Poster, Women's March San Francisco	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2364
__label__wiki	0.743036	0.743036	(913) 403-0032 info@circleauction.co New To Bidding Auction Preview Sign-Up KC Auction Blog Articles Circle Auctions KC About Us Thomas Hart Benton: Artist of Kansas City Missouri Roots \| Becoming America’s Artist \|Kansas City Art Institute \| Benton Murals \| Home & Studio By Circle Auction \| March 2019 Considered an American master and leader of the Regionalist Movement, Thomas Hart Benton holds a revered place in Kansas City’s art scene. After becoming a nationally renowned artist, he lived here for forty years, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, made friends and enemies, and created many well-known works from his home studio. Local collectors (including the Kemper family) are Benton art devotees. His home in the Valentine neighborhood has been preserved as a state historic site, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum holds the largest public collection of his works, including one of his most significant and controversial paintings, Persephone. So how did one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century become a permanent figure in Kansas City lore? THOMAS HART BENTON SELF PORTAIT LITHOGRAPH Benton’s Missouri Roots: On April 15, 1889, Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, MO to one of Missouri’s most prominent political families. Young Tom, as he was known to most, loved to draw and constantly sketched scenes from his imagination and his surroundings. His mother supported his artistic aspirations, but his father, a lawyer and four-time U.S. congressman, strongly opposed. “That I should even think of becoming an artist gave him a sense of outrage,” Tom recalled. “It would never do for a Benton to descend so low.” As a child, Missouri’s rural landscapes and faces became etched in Benton’s mind. When the family relocated to Washington D.C. for his father’s political career, Tom studied the intricate murals in government buildings and imitated the cartoons he saw in the Washington Post. By the time the Bentons returned to Missouri in 1904, Tom’s determination to be an artist had only increased. At the age of 17, he was hired as a cartoonist for the Joplin American, making $14 a week. Eventually, Benton was allowed to pursue his passion for art, studying at the Art Institute of Chicago before continuing his education at the Académie Julian in Paris. Returning to the states, he taught and painted in New York City and served as a draftsman for the U.S. Navy in WWI. All of these experiences helped young Benton develop a unique style and eye for detail. Becoming America’s Artist: In the 1920s, Benton changed his artistic focus. After a trip to Missouri to visit his dying father, he set off on several explorations of the South and Midwest. He spent time walking the countryside, talking with locals, and sketching everything he saw. It was during this period that he deserted modernism and developed his own colorful, stylized realism depicting blue-collar and rural Midwestern life. His work was bold, muscular, and distinctly American. While quiet and focused in the studio, Benton cultivated a brash, hard-drinking, tough-talking persona for the press, never shying from controversy. His enormous murals, most notably America Today (1930) and The Arts of Life in America (1932) broadened his audience. In 1934, Benton was the first visual artist ever featured on the cover of Time magazine. The accompanying article highlighted his work alongside fellow “earthy midwesterners” Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. After years of eking out a living, Thomas Hart Benton was now an outstanding artistic success. THOMAS HART BENTON ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE The Artist as Teacher: Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute: In 1935, Benton was at the height of his fame. When invited to teach painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, he relocated his young family and moved back toward the source of his artistic inspiration — the American heartland. Benton’s notoriety was a huge asset to KCAI. Enrollment boomed as students rushed to register for his classes. Some of the artists he influenced during this period include Glenn Gant, Frederic James, Jackson Lee Nesbitt, Roger Medearis, Margot Peet, and Delmer J. Yoakum. Though popular as a teacher, Benton’s penchant for ruffling feathers limited his time at the Art Institute. He refused to give his students grades, contrary to school policy, and he was dismissed in 1941 after publicly accusing several employees of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of being homosexual. Thomas Hart Benton Murals: The late 1930s and early 1940s were significant for Benton’s career. He published his autobiography, An Artist in America. He began printing limited edition lithographs. He painted Persephone. And in 1936, he created what he considered to be his best work: a mural inside the state legislature building in Jefferson City. Longstanding connections with several Missouri politicians helped Benton gain the commission and he engaged some of his KCAI students to assist in the early stages. A Social History of the State of Missouri is a thirteen-panel narrative and contains an impressive 235 individual portraits. These include several of Benton’s family members, well-known figures of Missouri history and legend, and even some infamous faces, such as Boss Tom Pendergast, whose political organization controlled Jackson County politics at the time. With typical boldness, Benton approached Pendergast directly and asked him to model for the mural. Benton considered the Missouri mural to be his best work. THOMAS HART BENTON PLAYING MUSIC WITH HIS FAMILY IN HIS HOME IN KANSAS CITY. Thomas Hart Benton Home & Studio: In 1939, Benton and his wife Rita welcomed their second child and moved to their permanent home at 3616 Belleview, converting the carriage house into an art studio. Folk music filled their house and inspired many of Benton’s paintings. He picked up the harmonica at age 41 and became so fascinated with it that he invented a new system of harmonica notation. His wife and children were also musical and the family frequently welcomed other artists and musicians into their home. In 1942, Tom and his son, T.P., collaborated with friends to produce a record of folk tunes titled Saturday Night at Tom Benton’s. After WWII, Abstract Expressionism captured the art world’s imagination and Regionalist artists like Benton fell out of vogue. He never again achieved the lost fame of the 1930s but continued to create masterpieces from his Kansas City studio for the rest of his life. Today, Benton’s significance is unquestionable. He was a master of his craft, uniquely capturing an American era. At the age of 85, Tom Benton died in his Kansas City studio, just as he was preparing to place his signature on a completed mural for Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame. His workspace and house have been preserved as a museum, the Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site. Circle Auction is thrilled to be able to include several Thomas Hart Benton limited edition lithographs and personal letters in our March Art + Antiques Auction. COLLECTION OF SIGNED THOMAS HART BENTON WORKS IN OUR MARCH ART + ANTIQUES AUCTION If you have a Thomas Hart Benton piece you would like to have evaluated or considered for auction, our appraisers would love to hear from you. Sign up for the Circle newsletter and receive new articles, updates on upcoming auctions, and other helpful info. Charles and Ray Eames For Herman Miller Charles and Ray Eames: Pioneer Designers For Herman Miller The Early Years \| Herman Miller \|Lounge Chair \| Eames Toys By Circle Auction \| June 2019 We all have certain names that come to mind when we hear the phrase "power couple." In music? Beyonce and Jay-Z. In... Hermès At Auction: The History and Value of Hermès Handbags and Scarves Hermès at auction, the history and auction value of Hermès scarves, the Kelly bag, the Hermès Birkin, and more from the Paris fashion house. The History of Lalique Glass The history of Lalique: crystal figurines, vases, time in France, and more about the luxury brand founded over 130 years ago in Paris by visionary craftsman, René Lalique. Never miss an auction Sign up to receive notifications about our upcoming auctions	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2367
__label__cc	0.626238	0.373762	„When I started doing the 'Bursts' [paintings Gottlieb started c. 1958] I began to do part of the painting horizontally. It was necessary to do that because I was working with a type of paint which had a particular viscosity, which flowed, and if it were on a vertical surface it would just run. If it were on a horizontal surface, I could control it... I was using a combination of brushes and knives, palette knives... and spatulas... I’ve tried everything, rollers, rags, I’ve put paint on with everything.“ — Adolph Gottlieb, p. 55-59. Adolph Gottlieb „Sylvester: When was it that you first did a painting with one or two simple lines, horizontal or vertical, across the surface? Newman: I would say that it began in '46— '47. In those years, whenever I did a painting with one or two elements in it, it did always have a sense of an atmospheric background, I suppose — with the exception of a painting which I called Euclidian Abyss, where the background is black and has some of the white coming through, but there's no true atmosphere.“ — Barnett Newman American artist 1905 - 1970 „Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are more a sticks rather than brushes – the brush doesn't touch the surface on the canvas, it's just above.... [so] I am able to be more free and to have greater freedom and move about the canvas, with greater ease.“ — Jackson Pollock American artist 1912 - 1956 „Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.“ — Frank Stella American artist 1936 „I don't like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting. [quote of 1948]“ — Arshile Gorky Armenian-American painter 1904 - 1948 In: Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32 „Just start, your palette will help you. (if you worried about a painting or dread to start painting“ — Johannes Warnardus Bilders painter from the Northern Netherlands 1811 - 1890 version in original Dutch: Begin maar, je palet helpt je wel voort. (als je tobde over een schilderij of ertegenop zag om te beginnen) Quoted by Maria Bilders-van Bosse, in her letter to A.C. Loffelt, 23 June 1895; from an excerpt of this letter https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/excerpts/763 in RKD-Archive, The Hague his usual reaction if you worried about a painting or dread to start painting „I started doing paintings of landscapes in private and wanted to show people what I could do, and to really do that, I needed to do portraits, so I started practising.“ — Pricasso Australian painter 1949 „I started in, got it [former Monet's house, where he lived 1878 - 1881 in Vetheuil; [Mitchell bought the house and used it mainly first in the weekends] in summer of 67, Yeah, well, and then I started... I was still painting at Fremicourt and I remember starting the 'Sunflowers' [series, c. 1969-72], which I saw in Vetheuil and painted them in Fremicourt, you see... The thing about [the studio in] Fremicourt, also about St. Marks: I had to roll [large] paintings to get them out, which was a real drag, because of thickness [of the paint which cracked]. And when I started painting in Vetheuil, you can just take the [stretched] paintings out [in open air]. Well, that really changed unconsciously an awful lot of... Walk them out stretched, it's great.“ — Joan Mitchell American painter 1925 - 1992 second side of the first tape „I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn't know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.“ — Bob Ross American painter, art instructor, and television host 1942 - 1995 Cathy Hainer (October 28, 1993) "PBS' stroke of serenity / Bob Ross brings brush of zen to 'Joy of Painting'", USA Today, p. 3D. „The three horizontal bands at the top [ in his collage: landscape with paintings 1954] correspond to sea, sand and sky, while the yellow/white and red/white shapes at the bottom are the paintings – though of a kind I actually painted only later. It was the collage that suggested the idea of doing such paintings.“ — Ellsworth Kelly American painter, sculptor, and printmaker 1923 - 2015 p. 18 : 'Notes from 1969' „Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set out to paint.“ — Edward Hopper prominent American realist painter and printmaker 1882 - 1967 In: Three Hundred Years of American Painting, Alexander Eliot; New York: Time Inc., 1957, p. 298 „A painting grows like a plant. Use all colours, all shapes. Everything that attracts and excites me is a part of me. Painting is about proportions, relationships which breathe life. "Painting is a harmony which runs parallel to nature".“ — Stefan Szczesny German painter and sculptor 1951 „It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks... So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks... And I did those charts, big palettes... two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task.“ — Cy Twombly American painter 1928 - 2011 „When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over (about eight years ago), I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it.“ — Gerhard Richter German visual artist, born 1932 1932 Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to , 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/grey-paintings-9 „After doing the imaginary landscapes until say 1956, in ’57 I came out with the first Burst painting... There was a different type of space than I had ever used and it was a further clarification of what I was trying to do. The thing that was interesting that it was a return to a focal point, but it was a focal point with the kind of space that existed in traditional painting. Because this was like a solitary image or two images that were just floating in the canvas space. They had to hold the space and they also had to create all the movement – that took place within the rectangle.“ — Adolph Gottlieb American artist 1903 - 1974 p. 55-59. „I do both: I make preliminary drawings, other times I paint directly, other times I start a painting and then paint it out so that it becomes another painting or nothing at all. If a painting doesn't work, throw it out. When I work from preliminary sketches, I don't just enlarge these drawings, but plan my areas in a large painting by using small drawings for separate areas. I combine them in a final painting, often adding to or subtracting from the original sketches.... There are certain canvases here in my studio - the little one over there – that I've worked on for a good six months – painting most of it out and then painting it over and over again. I think I've got it now.“ — Franz Kline American painter 1910 - 1962 „I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.“ — Paul Gauguin French Post-Impressionist artist 1848 - 1903 p. 22: quote in a letter to Ambroise Vollard, 1900	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2370
__label__wiki	0.733783	0.733783	Civil War Buff Posts Tagged ‘Model 1842’ An Epitome of Warfare: The Rifle-Musket The American Civil War saw widespread use of breechloading and repeating guns. Revolvers were a staple of cavalry armament, and Colt continues to be a brand that rings bells worldwide up to this day. The Henry 16-shot repeating rifle using metallic cartridges was allegedly tested by Abraham Lincoln and made Union soldiers who carried it feel superior over their muzzleloading rifle-toting Confederate foes. Colt’s revolvers, though, were still “just” muzzleloading, multi-chambered percussion pistols which used paper cartridges, and they had seen their first military use almost twenty years earlier during the Mexican-American War. Besides, they were mostly a cavalry sidearm. Breechloading repeaters using metallic cartridges like the Henry or Spencer rifles delivered more firepower than traditional military muskets, but they were expensive (a Henry cost $32 at a time when the average Federal private received $13 a month), were of small caliber, used cartridges that the Ordnance Department did not furnish to infantrymen—and for which said department did not offer spare parts—and, especially in the case of the Henry, were not always intended for the rigors of military use on hard campaigns. What spoke most for them was the massive firepower they delivered. It was on the other side of the big pond where the Prussian needlegun—Nicolaus Dreyse’s Zündnadelgewehr—was approved in the 1840s and saw common use during the German wars of unification, therey pointing the way that military rifles would go. The needlegun rifle was a bolt-action like the famous Mauser rifles that would follow in its footsteps and which, in one form or the other, are still used worldwide in military sniper rifles as well as sporting and hunting rifles today. Therefore, despite the advent of breechloaders, it was another kind of firearm that characterized the American Civil War: the muzzleloading single-shot percussion rifle-musket. It is this weapon in which a two-century old tactical tradition found its culmination but which also pointed to the future of warfare. Early handheld firearms had been unwieldy, inaccurate implements that rather instilled fear in horses and in those men who had not yet come into contact with them. It was during the 16th and especially the 17th century that matchlock muskets saw widespread use on the battlefield—the musketeers who inspired Alexandre Dumas were more likely to have drilled loading their muskets and stabilizing them on the forked sticks that held their weight than to train with rapiers. Military reformers like the Dutch prince William of Orange introduced uniforms and drill procedures as well as tightly regulated standing armies of professional soldiers that succeeded the rather independent-minded mercenaries of the condottieri during the Dutch-Spanish Eighty Years War and the nightmare that succumbed the German lands and was later named Thirty Years War. According to legend, the defenders of the besieged Bayonne, having run out of powder and balls, put knives into the muzzles of their muskets in 1640, thereby inventing the bayonet. Thus, by the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries, it were not ragtag, colorful groups of Landsknechte with two-handed swords, halberds, and the odd arquebuse that dotted battlefields as they did a hundred years earlier, but musketeers moving in formations they had learned on paradegrounds, who were able to defend themselves with fixed bayonets against mounted opposition and who could deliver timed volleys of musketry fire from their flintlock-ignited “firelocks,” organized in regiments that wore the same uniform and obeyed orders of their “chef.” Building upon the peace-time army that had learned its drill on his father’s—called the “Soldier’s King”—paradegrounds all over Prussia, many of them Prussian conscripts themselves (but with a good number of mercenaries thrown in), it was Frederick II, called “the Great”—or, fondly, “der alte Fritz,” the old Fritz—who perfected the synchronized geometrical movements of his regiments to deliver crushing blows especially to his Austrian enemies. In an army whose discipline was strict—where seemingly minor offenses were punished with the Gassenlauf where the defendant had to walk in-between two lines of his comrades who would strike blows at him with their iron musket ramrods—he had the perfect tool. The school of the soldier consisted of knowing how to move in formation, how fast to go, where to stand and be at a certain command. It told the recruit how to load his musket—called “Potsdam” by English-speaking collectors because its origin was stamped into the barrel, and “Kuhfuß,” or cow foot, by Prussian soldiers because of the shape of its wooden buttstock—in several times and motions: tearing the paper cartridge filled with powder and ball, filling the pan with powder for priming, pouring powder down the barrel, followed by the round ball, ramming the whole load down, cocking the hammer with the flintstone, “aiming” (or rather leveling the musket in the direction of the enemy), and firing on command. This had to be done by all soldiers at the same time so that they could fire a volley of concentrated musketry on the enemy line of battle, eventually charging him with the bayonet (which was always fixed) to carry the field. Strict discpline and drill was needed to form a body of soldiers that would obey under whatever possbible circumstance. One of the major changes that Napoleon I Bonaparte, a great admirer of the “old Fritz,” brought to the battlefield was that his infantrymen did not only act as “heavy” infantry. Heavy, or line, infantry usually stayed in close formation. Their musket fire was inaccurate at longer range—they relied on firepower and a few volleys before resorting to the cold steel. Light infantry, or what were known in German as “Jäger” units, did exist—they shot patched ball through rifles. The musket of a common infantryman was a smoothbore musket, whose barrel is very much like today’s shotguns. The ball, usually smaller than the diameter of the barrel, could be easily rammed down even after blackpowder fouling had collected after a couple of shots. But when propelled, a round ball would dodge the walls of the barrel, and, when exiting the barrel, move more like a bumblebee than a straight-flying projectile. At 100 meters, it was possible to hit a man-sized target; at 200 meters the optimum range was arrived where a hit might still be deadly. But then, muskets were not about marksmanship but about firepower. For sniping, light infantry soldiers, usually recruited from hunters for whom the first accurate shot on their prey counted, used rifled guns. “Rifled” means that on the inside of a barrel are lands and grooves, or “hills and valley.” A tight-fitting bullet, when being propelled by the ignition of the powder charge and forced toward the opening of the barrel, receives a spin from the rifling, which makes the projectile much more accurate because it is stabilized. The British redcoats felt the effect of well-aimed shots from rifles during the initial stages of the Revolutionary War in their North American colonies, whereby the myth of the American rifleman was born. Instead of operating in tight formations, the rifle-armed American militiamen and their Hessian Jäger counterparts operated in loose skirmish formations, taking cover behind tree stumps and other obstructions to be safe from enemy fire and to be able to take aimed shots at officers and other important military personnel. The shortcoming of rifles though was that they were loaded with bullets that were paper-patched, therefore taking longer to get rammed down the barrel, and they fouled quicker because the blackpowder residue collected in the grooves. In the armies of Revolutionary and Bonapartist France, infantrymen were instructed in moving both in the tight formation line of battle as well as the more loose skirmish line. Although their primary weapon was still the rather—at least at longer ranges—inaccurate smoothbore musket, infantrymen deployed as skirmishers were successfully used to reconnoiter the battlefield, find the enemy, and engage him while his troops were still deploying, thereby obstructing his advance and warning one’s own forces. Other European armies quickly followed the French example. Still, armies like the Prussian one continued to employ Jäger units, and also the British recruited rifle regiments—most likely because of their experience on the North American continent. It is also during this time that target practice became standard, at least in armies of the German principalities. While not the most accurate type of weapon, muskets could still be employed with some success up to the aforementioned ranges, which is testified by for example Prussian target practice instructions from the 1810s. While the flintlock had ruled the battlefield for over a hundred years, it had its shortcomings, especially during wet weather. Moisture makes blackpowder quickly unusable, and a heavy rainstorm renders even the most disciplined force armed with flintlock useless, especially because muskets of the day had to be primed in the pan with blackpowder. Also, a flintstone has to be sharpened to do its job of creating friction and thereby sparkles to ignite the priming powder. Therefore, the invention and introduction of the percussion cap signaled a revolution on the battlefield. It rendered the flintstone obsolete and saved powder for the actual charge. A percussion cap is a little brass cylinder with mercury in it. When struck by the gun’s hammer, the mercury ignites, shoots fire through a whole in the barrel, thereby igniting the blackpowder within. The percussion is much less prone to malfunction during wet conditions than the flintlock. And, best of all, it was easy to convert flintlock guns to percussion, thereby easing the transition and saving money. Shortly afterwards, a new ballistic invention continued the revolution. To cut a long story short, several European officers thought of a way to rifle guns to make them more efficient than the old rifles. Eventually, it was found that grooves could be cut in a barrel and a conical bullet of a little less than caliber-size with a dent at the bottom could be rammed down as easily as a round ball. The new conical ball, which was slightly flattened in the barrel, would then be propelled by the powder’s ignition and forced through the lands and grooves, thereby receiving a spin. As the new bullets were more aerodynamically shaped, they were also helped being stabilized. It was the French who first employed both percussion-ignited and rifled guns during some of their North African colonial wars, and they were quickly followed by other nations. To make aiming more accurate—before, there was usually only a frontsight—rearsights, like on the rifles of the Jäger, were added. As with the conversion from flintlocks to percussion, it was easy to convert musket to rifled muskets—gunsmiths just had to add lands and grooves and a rearsight. Since most of the old and converted musket were of a caliber around 0.69 inch, and since military sciences and the fascination with natural sciences increased during the 19th century, producing smart military men who thought about ever better and better ways to kill one’s fellow man, new military longarms were devised that build upon the old pattern of muskets but incorporated the latest technological advances in both percussion and rifling as well as eased production. The result was the rifle-musket. American officers at that time were closely following what happened on the European continent, and their big role model was the French army. Not only were American uniforms inspired by the French army; so were tactics, strategy, and even the design of their guns. Looking at the last Springfield flintlock muskets, Models 1816 and 1822—according to which collector’s definition one follows—the resemblance to the French Modelle 1777 “Charleville” musket is striking. In the 1840s, the United States armories at Springfield and Haper’s Ferry started production of the Model 1842—the last American smoothbore musket, the first American percussion musket, and the first totally interchangeable musket worldwide, thanks to the implementation of the “American system.” In the 1850s, the M1855 Springfield rifle-musket was introduced. It followed the latest trends: a smaller caliber (0.58 inch), a Minié-style conical bullet (named after one of the French ballisticians), and a sophistaced ladder rear-sight going up to a thousand yards. With the rifle-musket, the need for two types of infantry—heavy and light—was more or less eliminated. One infantryman could perfectly fill out the role of both. He could be part of a line formation, loading and firing volleys on command, or he could take aimed shots as a skirmisher. While the new bullets theoretically increased the effective range of fire, practice proved harder to achieve. The British army, a professional military body, established musketry schools were non-commissioned officers took courses in how to estimate ranges, how to adjust the sights, and how to fire aimed shots; afterwards, they were sent back to their respective units to teach their subordinates the intricacies of accurate musketry. There was also a growing literature on the topic, both in Great Britain and in the United States. But the U.S. Army was a small military body, whose officer corps was torn apart by the secession crisis, and the Civil War necessitated that masses of civilians with no prior knowledge of military affairs became volunteers, were quickly outfitted and received usually practical training in the school of the soldier up to and including the movements of a company or regiment and only rudimentary instruction in how to fire—that is, they learned the century-old steps of loading and firing but more often than not did not fire any live practice shots on a shooting range. Therefore, most Civil War soldiers did not know how to estimate ranges and how to adjust their sights—but these were important skills to effectively fire the new rifle-muskets. In the beginning, tactics resembled more the wars of Napoleon I or Frederick the Great. “Napoleonic tactics” though confuses most modern students of warfare because the Napoleon who is meant is the III. While the French emperor (and nephew of his more famous predecessor) had a keen interest in military affairs and pushed the introduction of rifle-muskets, the successes of his Zouave light infantry with the cold steel in the 1859 Italian campaign had reversed his opinion. Now, bayonet charges were en vogue again. The notions of Sir Walter Scott-like warfare of chivalry did their part as well. Quickly, though, American warriors found out that with the new rifle-muskets, defensive, intrenched troops were superior to charges of tight formations. Still, most Civil War firefights took place at distances almost equal to those of smoothbore-musket days (it should not be forgotten that in the early days of the Civil War, many volunteer and militia units were outfitted with the old smoothbores because the production and/or importation of rifle-muskets was not yet in full force), and soldiers still needed incredible amounts of lead to kill one enemy. The new concial bullets though were more deadly than the old roundballs, especially at greater distances—what is called a “spent” bullet in contemporary accounts was usually a round ball that had lost its force after 200 yards, while miniés were deadly up to a thousand yards. Despite what speaks for the rifle-musket, the debate among scholars about its effectitivy, deadliness, and impact on tactics continues. Let us take a look at the rifle-musket from the point of the soldier. Whether it be the U.S. Model 1861 rifle-musket, produced by Springfield Armory and numerous contractors, or the only slightly differing British Pattern 1853 “Enfield” rifle-musket imported by both North and South—of the latter about 500,000 imported, of the former and its 1863 and 1864 deviations around one-and-a-half million produced—the functioning and maintenance are easy. Loading and firing function as mentioned earlier (with the difference that the percussion cap is put in its place only after the load is rammed down the barrel). Disassembly is quick and simple: half-cock the hammer, remove the ramrod from under the barrel, remove the barrel bands, use the government-issued musket tool to loosen three screws to free the lock and the barrel from the stock, take out the lock and barrel. The lock with its mechanics should only be disassembled by a gunsmith. For field cleaning—the aforementioned procedure was only to be proceeded on special order by the commanding officer—it was only necessary pour water down the barrel to remove most of the fouling, then screw a wiper, called “worm,” on the ramrod and clean out the remaining residue with a small piece cloth or hemp. Outside rust was to be removed with a oiled rag and some ash, brickdust, or flower of emery. While the British rifle-musket’s barrel was blued to prevent rust, the American Springfields had “armory bright” barrels which are prone to rust but look more martial when glistening in the sun. Another big difference is the rearsight: the “Enfield” uses a sophisticated ladder sight with increments up to a 1000 yards while the Springfield only has a simple leaf-sight with three leaves for 100, 300, and 500 yards. Concerning accuracy, both rifle-muskets—the U.S. in .58, the British in .577 caliber—are basically the same. Overall, the rifle-musket was the epitome of warfare with muzzleloading blackpowder longarms. A soldier armed with such a gun could be deployed both in the traditional way, firing volleys, or as a skirmisher, taking aimed shots (if he knew how to). Concerning construction, the Springfield with its interchangeable lock, stock, and barrel was ideal to be mass-produced and issued to volunteers who needed a durable and easy-to-maintain gun. But its longrange capability and contemporary breechloaders already pointed to a new style of warfare that had its advent during the Civil War. From the 1860s onwards, fast-shooting, accurate long-range rifles that combined the accuracy of the rifle-musket, the rapid-fire capability of repeaters, and the dependable bolt-action of the needlegun (and later the machinegun) gave the defender the upper hand over the attacker, as the wars after the Civil war would show. And it would take another hundred years until the last “lock, stock, and barrel” Springfield rifle in the guise of the semiautomatic 7.62 mm M14 would be replaced by the space-age aluminum and synthetic M16 5.56mm assault rifle combining an accurate caliber for marksmanship and manageable full automatic function with the firepower of machineguns. Tags:5.56mm, 7.62mm, Abraham Lincoln, aim, Alexandre Dumas, American Civil War, armory, arquebuse, ball, battlefield, bayonet, Bayonne, blackpowder, Bonaparte, breechloader, breechloading, British, bullet, caliber, cavarly, Charleville, cock, Colt, Colt's, condottiere, Confederates, conical, der alte Fritz, discipline, drill, Dutch, Eighty Years War, Enfield, entrenched, Federals, field cleaning, firelock, firepower, fixed bayonets, flintlock, Frederick II, Frederick the Great, frontsight, Germany, grooves, gun, heavy infantry, Henry, Hessian, hunting rifle, ignition, infantry, Jäger, Kuhfuß, lands, Landsknecht, light infantry, line infantry, line of battle, M14, M16, machinegun, marksmanship, matchlock, mercenary, metallic cartridge, military, military science, Minié, Minnie, Model 1816, Model 1822, Model 1842, Model 1855, Model 1861, Modelle 1777, musket, musketeer, musketry, muzzleloader, muzzleloading, Napoleon I, needlegun, Nicolaus Dreyse, pan, paper cartidge, paradeground, Patter 1853, percussion, Potsdam, Potzdam, powder, Prussia, rearsight, regiment, repeater, repeating, Revolutionary War, revolver, revolving pistol, rifle, rifle-musket, rifled musket, rifleman, rifling, round ball, school of the soldier, shooting range, shotgun, sidearm, skirmish line, skirmisher, smoothbore, sniper, Spanish, Spencer, spent ball, sporting rifle, Springfield, standing army, tactics, target practice, Thirty Years War, uniform, Union, warfare, wars of unification, William of Orange, wiper, worm, Zündnadelgewehr, Zouave Posted in American Civil War \| Leave a Comment »	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2371
__label__wiki	0.803887	0.803887	Stakeholders Discuss National Sports Policy The Bhutan Olympic Committee submitted a proposal to the government for the development of the national sports policy. The Government directed the Ministry of Education to develop the policy, which would be finalised by June next year. Stakeholders Discuss National Sports Policy. (Source: http://www.kuenselonline.com/) Bhutanese athletes have brought home more than 180 medals from the international and regional competitions. Bhutan’s sports and competence level have witnessed commendable growth over the years. Yet, the country does not have a national sports policy. Developing Bhutan’s national sports policy At the first multi-sectoral meeting held in preparation for the national sports policy in Thimphu on November 14, the President of Bhutan’s Indigenous Games and Sports Association, former Lyonpo Dr. Kinzang Dorji said that developing national sports policy was in the plan for a long time. “We have an independent consultant preparing the policy. There is no chance of compromising goals and there will be no clashes among the sectors. It should not be biased and influenced by any stakeholder and organisation. It should be beyond what we have now,” he said. Among other factors, the development of high-performance sports (elites sports) or the sporting events that contribute to knowledge development and health promotion (mass sports) were discussed. The Senior Lecturer of Paro College of Education, Lungten Wangdi, said that there is a need to conceptualise the theoretical approach of the policy. “The sports policy should address the needs of all the people and the approach towards professional sports should be realistic. Development of sports into mass participation is happening through value education and physical sports programmes at schools. In the end, it is the specialisation of sports that needs more studies. To get participants of international standards, we need to go for talent hunt.” Dawa Gyaltshen (Ph.D.) of the Health and Physical Education Department, said that the approach of the policy will be determined by the objectives and goals. “It’s not a right time to focus on mass sports or elites sports. These are the focus of the policy and they are interconnected. The policy should have clear goals and objectives.” Promoting a healthy lifestyle is one of the goals Education Minister Norbu Wangchuk said that it would be a difficult choice. “It’s between raising a few professionals and the entire well-being of society and the promotions of health. We need every member of the society to be healthy and happy through sporting activities. At the same time, we need people to win medals from international competitions.” The minister added that the focus should be on both. The policy should be inclusive and the implementation would be conditional to recourses available and according to the aspirations of the people. Thimphu Thrompon Kinley Dorji said that the capital had reached a situation where it needed enough recreation facilities with increasing youth problems. While developing the policy, to promote and encourage sporting events from the grassroots, there is a need to consider the situation in other thromdes and gewogs. “We have 34 schools and many schools have playing fields, but it was limited to the use of the public. They remain closed after school. The policy should explore ideas to use these available playing space,” Thrompon said. According to the concept note proposed by the Bhutan Olympic Committee (BOC) for the preparation of sports policy, around 80 percent of the sporting facilities available in the country are owned by schools and institutions. They are poorly maintained and are not accessible to local communities. It also stated that the committee and most of the federations do not have proper governance and administrative systems and funds, which hampered the development of sports in the country. Most of the federations do not have territorial representations, which is mandatory according to the norms of the Olympic Charter. The policy would look into possible ways of collaborations between the private sector and the government to build more sports infrastructure in thromde areas. The BOC submitted a proposal to the government for the development of the national sports policy. The Government directed the Ministry of Education to develop the policy, which would be finalised by June next year. By Nima (This article has been edited for the Daily Bhutan) This article first appeared on Kuensel. Bhutan Olympic Committee Bhutan Sports Stakeholders Discuss National Sports Policy Bhutanese Bodybuilders Hope to Win Medals The 9th World Bodybuilding and Physique Sports Championships is underway in Ulaanbaatar, the Capital of Mongolia. Four... Bhutan wins 1 gold, 2 bronze at 9th WBPF Championships Bhutan’s Thinley Dorji won a gold medal in the Men’s Athletic Physique (for heights up to 1.82m) category at the World... Bhutanese Female Archer makes a Comeback Sherab Zam is a former national archer with the Bhutan Archery Federation. The 35-year-old retired in 2013 to become a... The Perils of Dha – Bhutan’s National Game Dha (Archery), the national sport of Bhutan is a double edged sword – while it is entertaining, it can also be... Coach Pema Returns to Lead National Squad Coach Pema has the experience of leading the boys since he first took over the squad in the match against the Maldives... Taekwondo coaching camp popular in Mongar Never miss out on new happenings and news stories!	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2373
__label__wiki	0.760011	0.760011	It’s The Christian Right’s Turn In The Closet W. James Antle III Managing Editor A member of a religious minority can, as a conscientious objector, be exempt from taking up arms in wartime. Most Americans would recognize that as the type of freedom that makes the country worth fighting for in the first place. But a member of a religious minority cannot be exempt from baking a cake for a ceremony contrary to her faith. That, some say, is bigotry. Well. I happen to think pacifism is misguided, but that’s not a good argument for forcing pacifists to fly B-52s. (The aircraft, not the band.) We’re not talking about the kind of anarchy that would prevail if soldiers were allowed to pick and choose which wars they were willing to fight. And we’re not talking about letting the local McDonald’s manager decide same-sex couples are too “happy” for Happy Meals. The truth is that few businesses would want to turn away gay customers even if it was allowed — Indiana already lacks laws banning private sector discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but there’s little evidence such discrimination is widespread — and any that chose to do so would pay a competitive price, if not be boycotted and picketed out of existence. Make no mistake, the famous baker, photographer and florist are a religious minority. Who has more social, political and market power — Apple CEO Tim Cook and the hundreds of corporations asking the Supreme Court to rule in favor of gay marriage, or the small number of Christian wedding vendors who want to act on a private belief in the same definition of marriage Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton not long ago were in favor of enshrining in law? “God’s in the mix,” Obama said of how marriage is defined during the 2008 presidential campaign. God’s not in the cake mix, bigot, say liberals in 2015. The Indiana religious freedom law dust-up reveals that liberals who believe in the sentiment wrongly attributed to Voltaire — “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — have been supplanted by pat-a-cake progressives who demand “Bake me a cake as fast you can.” In fact, the new social liberals sound a lot like the old social conservatives. We have a public moral code around here and if you don’t comply with it, you’d better keep it to yourself. When closeted gay marriage opponent Brendan Eich, whose closest friends and coworkers never knew about his surreptitious social deviance, was outed, he lost his job. Christian sociologist George Yancey has researched what he calls “Christianaphobia.” Here are some of the sentiments he found. “Keep all religion in your church, in your home, out of the public square, and most of all, out of my face,” one survey respondent said. Another stated, “Christian Right people can do what they want in their churches and homes, but not in the public arena.” Others sounded more like a secular version of the hate-filled Westboro Baptist Church: “Churches and houses of religion should be designated as nuclear test zones.” “Kill them all, let their god sort them out.” “The only good Christian is a dead Christian.” Yancey wrote a book titled “So Many Christians, So Few Lions” based on a response he got joking about feeding Christians to lions. Poring over the American National Election Studies, Yancey found a “third of respondents rated conservative Christians significantly lower (by at least one standard deviation) than other religious and racial groups.” “[A]nimosity toward Christians involves racial, educational, and economic factors; the people most likely to hold negative views of conservative Christians also belong to demographic groups with high levels of social power,” he wrote in Christianity Today. “Rich, white, educated Americans are major influencers in media, academia, business, and government, and these are the people most likely to have a distaste for conservative Christians.” Normally, people advocate civil rights protections against policies that will have a disparate impact on hated, marginal groups. But the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is now seen as reactionary rather than progressive precisely because conservative Christians may conceivably benefit. “What started out as a shield for minority religious practitioners like Native Americans and the Amish is in danger of being weaponized into a sword against civil rights,” Dale Carpenter complained in the Washington Post. Carpenter’s piece is fairer than most anti-RFRA polemics, bringing up some legitimate points, but its headline still puts scare quotes around “religious freedom” but not “civil rights.” Naturally, those who fought conservative Christians for the legal recognition of their relationships are unlikely to have much sympathy for their defeated opponents. To critics of the Indiana boycott, they might say, “Call me when your churches are treated like the Stonewall Inn.” But they have inadvertently validated the zero-sum logic of some Christian right activists: someone’s values must prevail; why not ours? W. James Antle III is managing editor of The Daily Caller and author of the book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Follow him on Twitter. Tags : jim antle religious freedom restoration act W. James Antle III	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2374
__label__cc	0.578235	0.421765	Gallup: Americans Have Best Perception Of US World Image Since 2003 Amber Athey White House Correspondent Americans’ favorability perception of the United States’ image around the world is the highest it’s been since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, according to a new Gallup poll. Fifty-eight percent of Americans surveyed said that they believe the United States is viewed “very” or “somewhat favorably” in the eyes of the world, up slightly from 55 percent last year. Notably, that is the highest net favorability rating since 2003, when Gallup recorded 61 percent of respondents believe the United States was viewed favorably in the world’s eyes. A soldier salutes the flag during a welcome home ceremony for troops arriving from Afghanistan on June 15, 2011 to Fort Carson, Colorado. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) The poll results suggest Americans no longer feel burdened by the strain of the Iraq War, which polling at the time suggested soured international opinions of the United States. (RELATED: Donald Trump Called The Iraq War A ‘Disaster.’ His New National Security Director Was Its Biggest Cheerleader) The increase in American perception of U.S. world image was driven by Independents — who jumped from 50 percent to 58 percent — who said the United States is viewed somewhat or very favorably. Despite the increase in perceived world image, 53 percent Americans are still dissatisfied with the country’s overall standing in the world. That 53 percent figure, however, is the lowest level of dissatisfaction recorded since 2005. Just 31 percent of respondents in the survey said they believe President Donald Trump is respected by world leaders. Gallup surveyed 1,016 adults by phone in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for the survey. Follow Amber on Twitter Tags : donald trump gallup Amber Athey	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2375
__label__cc	0.63976	0.36024	Latest Event Leaderboard About Meadmin2019-02-15T12:38:15+12:00 Recent Bio ‘Hillier while still young at just 20 has already amassed a number of key titles including two New Zealand Junior U19 Championships in 2015 and 2016, the 2017 Australian Junior Championship, a Charles Tour professional event in the 2015 Harewood Open, as well as two New Zealand Amateur Championships in 2015 and 2017. In 2018 during his second overseas tournament campaign in the USA, Hillier was co-medalist at the US Amateur Championship held at Pebble Beach Golf Club. There were initially 7463 entries in the US Amateur qualifying events, and of the 312 players that qualified to compete at Pebble Beach, 39 were ranked in the top 50 Amateurs in the World.’ Hillier made his debut in the senior NZ Men’s Representative team when he competed at the 2016 Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship Cup in South Korea, where he finished 15th in the individual standings. He was 6th in the same tournament when it was held in New Zealand in 2017. In September 2018, Daniel represented New Zealand as part of the Eisenhower team in Dublin. Team New Zealand finished in 4th place, while Daniel was tied 3rd overall in the individual standings. In his most recent appearance at the 2018 Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship Cup in Singapore, Hillier finished a creditable 13th place in a strong international field in very difficult climatic conditions. Daniel’s best ranking on the World Amateur Golf Ranking system (WAGR) is 14th as at 14/02/19. WAGR uses tournament results from the previous 2 year period to compare all Amateur golfers worldwide. Why I chose to play golf... When I was a toddler I had a plastic club and would constantly be hitting balls around the house, so Dad got me a small golf club and I used to go to his cricket matches and spend the day chipping the ball around the boundary flags of his cricket field. He took me to Pauatahanui Golf Course a few days before my 5thBirthday and I played 5 holes, and have been playing ever since. What is it about golf that appeals to me the most... I think it’s the heat of the competition and the fact the mental fortitude you need to compete in pressure situations. You can’t rely on someone else to step up when you want to hide away in the corner which I think adds to the excitement. Playing golf in New Zealand is also great, I’m always competing against and travelling with the same bunch of guys so I’ve been able to develop some really strong relationships because of that. What I feel is the strongest part of my game... I’d say my driving and my wedge game are my strongest suits. What I think is the most difficult thing about golf... The most difficult thing about golf would probably be the fact that a competitive round takes 4-5 hours and you’re spending less than a quarter of that time actually hitting a golf ball, so there is a lot of time to think and sometimes those thoughts can have a negative impact on your game. It can be very mentally taxing trying to fight those thoughts that you don’t want in your head, so you need to learn to quiet your mind and focus only on what you can control when things get heated. “When I was a toddler I had a plastic club and would constantly be hitting balls around the house, so Dad got me a small golf club and I used to go to his cricket matches and spend the day chipping the ball around the boundary flags of his cricket field. He took me to Pauatahanui Golf Course a few days before my 5th Birthday and I played 5 holes, and have been playing ever since.” – Dan Hillier Watch here for New Zealand Golfs full video interview at Royal Aberdeen with super caddy George Harper Jnr! Click here to download Golf Tournament Results from 2012 till now “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful.” Watch Daniel Hillier tee it off in the second round of the US Open 2019 DAN HILLIER GOLF 2018 \| © WEBSITE BY CLICK CREATE LTD My Instagram YouTubeNZ Golf Instagram	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2378
__label__cc	0.698935	0.301065	PUBLISHING BOOKSTORE AUTHORS PHILOSOPHY ABOUT CONTACT Dear Mother Dear Father Letters Home by John Corcoran Wallis 1927-1949 Born in Victoria, Fr John Wallis (1910-2001), Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Hobart, founded the Australian Religious Order, the Missionary Sisters of Service, in Tasmania, in 1944. The Sisters were to be available to go into the highways and byways; and flexible to meet the pastoral needs of isolated communities throughout Australia. This series of letters to John’s parents and family gives us a rare and precious insight into his life as a seminarian and young priest. They also reflect a growing development of his piety and spirituality, where seeds were sown that would develop into his deep concern for people, especially the poor and the marginalised in rural and outback areas of Australia, and for ways to meet their pastoral and social needs. The letters have been arranged in ten chapters, with a general introduction about that period in John’s life. Each letter itself has a commentary that contextualises the letter, providing biographical and other details that make the entire series come to life, tracing his experiences, development, misgivings and plans. They anticipate his enthusiasm for the changes that followed the Second Vatican Council and played such a part in his priestly ministry. The series of letters in each chapter close with insightful reflections from eminent Australians who consider John’s character and spiritual growth as well as applying his insights into contemporary Church life in Australia. ‘Bernadette Wallis has provided the contemporary reader with a lovingly familiar insight into the development and vision of one of Australia’s great pioneer priests…’ Fr Frank Brennan SJ Bernadette Therese Wallis MSS was born in Melbourne. She joined the Missionary Sisters of Service in 1965 and worked pastorally in rural and outback parish settings of Tasmania and New South Wales before commencing ministry with the Catholic Deaf organisation in Victoria. Bernadette has been a director of The John Wallis Foundation and is presently a director of Highways and Byways – A Community of Service, both entities having been established to work in today’s world in the spirit of the Missionary Sisters of Service and their founder, Father John Wallis. Bernadette is also a member of the Stewardship Council of the Missionary Sisters of Service. Author Bernadette T Wallis Publication Date 5 July 2019 Imprint Coventry Press Tags: Catholic Life; Priesthood; Biography Coventry Press © 2019	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2385
__label__cc	0.597556	0.402444	Raúl M. Grijalva Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has represented Southern Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2002. He is one of Congress’ most outspoken champions for endangered species, wilderness, national parks, public lands, and stronger oil and gas regulations. He authored the National Landscape Conservation System Act and the Federal Lands Restoration Act, both of which President Obama signed into law in 2009 as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act. After he became Chair of the Natural Resources Committee at the beginning of 2019, Congress passed the historic John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, which, among many other important accomplishments, included permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund – a widely supported program that previous Republican leaders on the Committee had opposed.Since becoming the top Democrat on the Committee in 2015, Grijalva has focused on diversifying the environmental movement beyond traditional activist groups. He has especially emphasized participation in environmental decision-making by Latino organizations, Native American tribes and other traditionally underrepresented communities, and in June 2019 led a historic convening of environmental justice advocates from across the country on Capitol Hill. He has a lifetime 96 percent score from the League of Conservation Voters and is widely recognized as a national leader on public lands and habitat conservation.Chair Grijalva remains one of Congress’ foremost advocates for protecting our open spaces, defending tribal sovereignty and treaty rights, respecting our bedrock environmental laws, and restoring the values of long-term planning and environmental stewardship to our nation’s economy. Roles: Special Guest Festival year:	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2390
__label__wiki	0.854637	0.854637	Jonathan Demme, Saverio Costanzo Get Venice Film Festival Jury Duty Oscar-winning helmer Jonathan Demme and lauded Italian director Saverio Costanzo, whose Hungry Hearts was a major winner on the Lido last year, have been named presidents of the Horizons and Lion of the Future juries, respectively. As jury chairs, they join Alfonso Cuaron who was previously appointed head of the main competition panel at the Venice Film Festival. Demme will be logging time in Europe in the next month or so as his Meryl Streep-starrer Ricki And The Flash world premieres as the opening night film of the Locarno fest on August 5. The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia helmer has himself had films in various sections of Venice including 1980’s Melvin And Howard, 2004’s The Manchurian Candidate, 2007 doc Man From Plains, 2008’s Rachel Getting Married, 2011’s I’m Caroline Parker: The Good, The Bad And The Beautiful, and Enzo Avitabile Music Life in 2012. Costanzo had a hit with last year’s Hungry Hearts, his fourth feature, which took the Venice acting prizes for Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver. It was also nominated for seven David di Donatello awards. Costanzo’s other credits include Private, In Memory Of Me and The Solitude Of Prime Numbers which competed in Venice in 2010. He also directed the Italian adaptation of In Treatment, seasons 1 and 2, for SKY Cinema. The international jury of the Horizons (Orizzonti) section will award prizes for Best Film, Best Director; Best Actor or Actress, Best Short Film and will hand out a Special Jury Prize. No ties will be allowed. The international jury of the “Luigi di Laurentiis” Venice Award for a Debut Film – Lion of the Future gives a $100K cash prize to one debut feature from across the competitive sections. No ties allowed here either. Venice opens September 2 with Baltasar Kormakur’s Everest. The main lineup for the event whcih runs through September 12 will be unveiled on July 29 in Rome. This article was printed from https://deadline.com/2015/07/jonathan-demme-saverio-costanzo-venice-film-festival-jury-1201483217/	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2391
__label__wiki	0.602531	0.602531	Tag Archives: George Gough Booth Using Archives—The Quest for the Gold Ciborium The pursuit of historical truth, from national heritage to community identity or individual biography, depends upon archives—the portion of records selected for permanent preservation. In the west, recordkeeping emerged within the development of justice and administration—the earliest English law code is that of King Aethelberht of Kent, c.600, following the arrival of Augustine of Canterbury and the encouragement of peaceful dispute resolution. Henceforth, a fundamental and enduring feature of legal process comes to us from the Anglo-Saxons: the writ and the charter. Yet, throughout the early middle ages, grants and other legal deeds were made in public ceremonies where the attendant witnesses were the ‘memory’ of the act, not always supplemented by a charter. But, by the thirteenth century, documentary evidence had become necessary to prove ownership of land or other grants of the king, and records began to constitute the activity itself. Over time, the type, format, and number of records has proliferated but those that are preserved, as archives, are the critical vestiges of ancient and recent memory—individual memories, institutional memories, national memories. They are primary sources essential to historical method to evidence claims of historical fact based on a reasoned interpretation of the records—these are the tasks of historians and scholars whose published research is found in secondary sources. Both types of sources are necessary when greeted with the archival FAQ, “I want to know more about this person, place, or thing—what do you have?” A recent request related to a church vessel, the “gold ciborium” at Christ Church Cranbrook. As is the case with any research, the starting place is to discover what has already been done. The first place to look for information on the art works at Christ Church Cranbrook is the Pilgrims’ Guide, first published in 1939, which guides visitors through the church with details of its artworks and craftsmen. The Pilgrim’s Guide (4th Ed.), Thistle [Henry S. Booth], 1956 While the Guide is full of meticulously researched information, there was no mention of a ciborium. The reference files were similarly silent, except a photocopied memo from George Gough Booth dated 1927, listing a ciborium made by Arthur Stone (1992-01 5:2). And, sure enough, in the George Gough Booth Papers (1981-01, 22:7), there is correspondence with Arthur Stone about a gold-plated ciborium. Voilà! Well, not quite… it was not the right one. So, we found a photograph of it in the photo files, though it had no date, photographer or artist details, only the words “silver gilt ciborium”. Silver Gilt Ciborium Copyright Cranbrook Archives, photographer unknown. An inventory written by Henry Scripps Booth in 1960 (1981-01 20:6) has two ciboriums listed—that of Arthur Stone and another one with blanks for the creator and date of creation. But, taking a step back to the contemporaneous records for the building of the church, there are detailed ledgers for its construction and decoration. If the ciborium was purchased by George Gough Booth, there would most certainly be a record of it. Looking closely at the ledger pages, it is clear that a ciborium was commissioned from three separate artists: A. Nevill Kirk, Arthur Stone, and Helen K. Mills. These have certificate numbers which can be matched up with the ‘Cranbrook Church notebook’. So, we know that a third ciborium was purchased from an artist called Helen K. Mills, and the notebook gives us the date, February 7, 1928. Pages of ledger showing entries related to chancel furnishings and equipment George Gough Booth Papers, Ledger—Cost of church, rectory, furnishings, etc., 1925-1935 (1981-01, 21:6) There is correspondence with Kirk and Stone in the Christ Church Cranbrook series of George’s papers but none with Helen Mills. But there must be some elsewhere. When we are processing archives, we must carefully consider three things: content (who created the documents and what is in them?), context (in what circumstances were they created and why?), and structure (how do they relate to other documents in the collection and the institution?). These things can also be applied in using archives. So, in looking for correspondence with artists regarding artwork at the time of the construction of the church, there is another place to look—the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts correspondence. Here we find correspondence between Helen Keeling Mills, Helen Plumb, and George Gough Booth. Correspondence of Helen Keeling Mills, Helen Plumb, and George Gough Booth, January 26, 1928, and February 8,1928George Gough Booth Papers, Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts 1914-1957 (1981-01, 12:19) Correspondence of Helen Keeling Mills, Helen Plumb, and George Gough Booth, January 26, 1928, and February 8,1928 George Gough Booth Papers, Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts 1914-1957 (1981-01, 12:19) While records might initially be kept to evidence an activity, over time they are of historical value. They can help us understand a person, provide knowledge of an organization, contribute to knowledge of a craft or a culture, they inform us of the creation of an object so that it may be maintained and preserved in its most beneficial environment. Last, but not least, a document becomes an artifact in itself because of who wrote it, what it says, and because it is simply beautiful. This correspondence was kept initially to document his transaction with Helen as part of the wider collection of records for the church. But we can learn much more from it. We know something about the creative process of the ciborium—what it is made of, the saints depicted upon it, that it was sent to another artist after which it was damaged. We know the importance that Helen placed in her work and her regret of the damage. We can see George’s gracious response and understanding—his appreciation of her devotion to her work and the joy that will be taken in the object she created. This research query helped to draw information out of the archive that was hitherto not expressly known. There is now a reference file to aid future researchers so that the knowledge is accessible with references to the records that document it, and the research process need not be made again. And so, just as teachers learn from their students, the archive and archivists learn from their researchers. – Laura MacNewman, Associate Archivist Archives/Arts and Crafts/Christ Church Cranbrook/Objects/preservation Arthur Nevill Kirk/arthur stone/Author: Laura MacNewman/ciborium/Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts/George Gough Booth/helen keeling mills/helen plumb/Henry Scripps Booth/research Christmas in San Remo Henry and Carolyn Booth spent the Christmas of 1933 at the Villa Eveline in San Remo, Italy with their children Stephen (8), David (6) and Cynthia (10 months). In Henry’s letters home he writes about the traditions he and Carolyn tried to maintain while spending Christmas away from home. He also writes about the “rustle of palm trees” in their garden and the crowds of people gathering at the churches on St. Stephen’s Day – a national holiday in Italy. Henry Scripps Booth carrying the Christmas tree with Stephen and Cynthia (in stroller), 1933. In one of Henry’s letters to his parents, he writes, “greetings from our Christmas tree and it’s real candles, to yours of the electric bulbs.” He later describes the event of Christmas night as lighting the candles and sparklers on the tree, “I never expected to see that kind of illumination again, and probably the children never will in future.” Holiday wishes from Henry Scripps Booth to his parents, Ellen and George Gough Booth, 1933. The photos sent home are both formal and candid – very much like posed photos captured on photo cards today, as well as informal images of families and friends enjoying time together at the holidays. My favorite shows a very happy Cynthia following Christmas dinner! Cynthia and Carolyn Booth, Dec 1933. 7 months ago Short URL 3 Comments Author: Gina Tecos/Carolyn Farr Booth/Christmas/Ellen Scripps Booth/George Gough Booth/Henry Scripps Booth/italy/san remo A Face Above Beauty Sometimes we walk past something 100 times and see it but never really “notice” it. For me, it is the masque of “Art” (left) in the Cranbrook School Quadrangle, near the dining hall. It is a woman’s face beautifully created by sculptress Elizabeth Palmer Bradfield, but, as always, there is more to the story. Elizabeth Virginia (Palmer) Bradfield (1875-1954) was born in Port Huron and grew up in Pontiac. Her grandfather was Charles Henry Palmer (railroad and mining developer who established the Pewabic mine in the Upper Peninsula). The Palmer family was well known in Pontiac and their house still exists on Huron Street. In the months before her wedding, Elizabeth traveled to Paris with her parents, where she studied sculpture at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1896, she married Thomas P. Bradfield. Elizabeth Palmer Bradfield with her mother, Mrs. Charles H. Palmer, Jr. Source Thomas and Elizabeth Bradfield lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, until 1904. The Bradfields and their two children (Virginia Palmer Bradfield Ward and Thomas Palmer Bradfield) later settled in Pontiac, Michigan, where Bradfield lived until her death in 1954. In 1914, Bradfield began exhibiting her work — first paintings, then sculpture — in the Scarab Club’s Annual Exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Arts, alongside such artists as Myron Barlow, Katherine McEwen, and James Scripps Booth. The Scarab Club honored her sculpture “Myra” with their first presentation of the annual Scarab-Hopkin Prize for Sculpture. She exhibited again in 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1921. In 1921, she won “Honorable Mention” for her bronze sculpture “Baby’s Head.” It is likely George Gough Booth met Bradfield at one of these exhibitions; correspondence between them began in 1926 when Booth purchased a small bronze of a dog from her. Dog, 1912, by Elizabeth Palmer Bradfield (CEC 188). Booth then commissioned her to model “two large groups of Great Danes ready for plaster cast” to be displayed at Cranbrook School. These sculptures were to be approximately 6 feet high, by 2 feet wide, by 3 feet tall, but subject to Eliel Saarinen’s approval. Bradfield used the studio and architectural office, without expense to her. It is not known if Bradfield ever completed these large dogs, or if Saarinen negated the idea, but the sculptures were never realized in full scale. Milles’ “Running Dogs” probably replaced them on the Cranbrook Campus. The masque of “Art” was purchased by Booth in October 1927. It was exhibited in two shows. One was in March 1929 – the annual exhibition of the Detroit Society of Women Painters. It was written up in the Detroit News, which said, “The masque has the imponderable quality we find in things of lasting beauty.” It was then in the first Cranbrook Art Museum for several years before being installed over the “Beauty Arch” in Cranbrook School’s Quadrangle. The “Art” Masque, that “lasting beauty,” hangs over George Booth’s famous quote, “A life without beauty is only half lived” on the so-called “Beauty Arch” in Cranbrook School’s Quadrangle Clothing worn by Elizabeth Virginia (Palmer) Bradfield Archives/Cranbrook School/Cultural Properties Author: Leslie Mio/Carl Milles/elizabeth palmer bradfield/George Gough Booth/scarab club/sculpture Metals & Cranbrook House George Booth was a connoisseur. As an avid collector of beautiful objects, he acquired decorative and fine art to adorn his home, Cranbrook House (and later, the various Cranbrook institutions). One of the most collected categories: metal objects. He was, after all, descended from a line of copper and tinsmiths. At fifteen, George Booth started a two-year apprenticeship at the Red Foundry in St. Thomas, Ontario, where he learned the fundamentals of the millwright and blacksmithing trades. He expanded his interest in craftsmanship through investment into an ornamental ironworks firm in Windsor (Evans and Booth) soon thereafter. While he sold his share of the iron business in 1888, Booth continued sketching designs for metal products throughout his life. They’re collected in his sketchbooks . Some of his sketches for gates, furniture, and decorative elements were realized by Samuel Yellin of Philadelphia, while others were completed by local forges, and some simply ideas. In examining photographs of Cranbrook House from Booth’s lifetime, I’m struck by the careful arrangement of art objects, specifically art bronzes, in the space. In the image above, on the table sits Albin Polasek’s 1917 sculpture Woman with Moon, still on view in the house. (Click images to enlarge) If you look at enough images of the house, you will realize Booth was constantly rearranging his collection. Here, Eli Harvey’s 1904 work Recumbent Lioness is on the mantelpiece. Starting in 1915, Booth loaned decorative and fine artworks to the Detroit Institute of Arts, including many bronzes previously on display in his home. In 1919, he gifted ninety-six of these objects (in iron, ceramics, wood, silver, and bronze) to the DIA, where many are still on view. You can flip through the DIA’s 1919 Bulletin describing Booth’s gift (in text and images). Once Booth began developing the Cranbrook campus, he spent less energy collecting for Cranbrook House. However, the house has on occasion welcomed contemporary design, like the 1950 competition for Cranbrook Academy of Art students for the design of Packard automobiles and hood ornaments. Cranbrook Academy of Art students admiring designs for the Packard Motor Competition on display in the Cranbrook House Library, December 1950. Harvey Croze, Photographer. Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives. Next week, students and alumni of the Academy’s Metalsmithing department will be gathering in Cranbrook House to show their work in the context of the Booth home in an exhibition organized by current students, A Line of Beauty: Cranbrook House Inhabitation. Taking their work out of the typical museum gallery setting (and off of the usual white pedestal) will provide a new framework in which to understand and view their pieces, and will also be a continuation of what George Booth did in his own lifetime: bring new art into the home to be placed among other items of beauty. I mentioned that George Booth was a connoisseur. Curator and educator Charles Montgomery, who in the mid-twentieth century helped professionalize the genteel ideas of connoisseurship, wrote that the budding connoisseur must learn “to approach every object with an inquiring mind as well as with an inquiring eye.” He continued that “when first looking at an object, it is important to let oneself go and try to get a sensual reaction to it. I ask myself: Do I enjoy it? Does it automatically ring true? Does it sing to me?” What I look forward to in the pop-up exhibition with the Metalsmithing department is not only the opportunity to see work from students and alumni, but also to view the many objects already in the house in a new light. Montgomery recommends looking at objects with half-closed eyes and from various angles, and next Friday night, I plan to do the same. Ye Triumphe Ship, 1918 Henry Brundage Culver, with Untitled, 2017, Adam Shirley, CAA Metalsmithing 2010 A Line of Beauty: Cranbrook House Inhabitation will take place Friday, January 26th from 5:30 to 8:30pm. The presentation is curated and organized by the Cranbrook Academy of Art Metalsmithing Department, and is presented at Cranbrook House through the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. All are welcome. Editor’s Note: New works shown are by Adam Shirley, Alberte Tranberg, Natalia Sarrazin, and Iris Eichenberg. collections/Cranbrook Academy of Art/Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research/Cranbrook House/Metalsmithing Albin Polasek/Author: Kevin Adkisson/Connoisseur/Cranbrook House/Detroit Institute of Arts/Eli Harvey/George Gough Booth/Iris Eichenberg/Metals/Metalsmithing/Packard Motor/Tiffany & Company The Tale of a Bodhisattva Nearly every day I run across some previously unknown person or event relative to Cranbrook’s history. My latest obsession is with a Chinese wall painting purchased in 1939 by George Booth for the Art Museum’s collection. Sadly, it is no longer in our collection, but the story is quite interesting nonetheless. As early as 1916, Booth was acquiring Chinese objects from the Japanese dealer Yamanaka & Company, and soon after from Duveen Brothers and the Parish-Watson Company in New York, Spink & Son in London, and Gumps in San Francisco. As was customary, dealers maintained a relationship with their clients via letters often suggesting objects they might be interested in and including photographs and catalogs. In 1939, Booth began a relationship with the well-known Chinese dealer, C.T. Loo, who had offices and gallery space in both New York and Paris. Bodhisattva from the Five Dynasties Period. Cisheng Monastery, Wenxian, Henan Province, China. You can clearly see where the wall painting had been cut into three sections in order to remove it from the temple. Loo was widely considered one of the most prominent, and controversial, dealers in Chinese art and artifacts in the early twentieth century. Loo traveled annually to China to hand-pick the objects he wanted, many of which were chiseled out of or pilfered from ancient Buddhist Temples and monasteries. Daisy Yiyou Wang, Curator of Chinese and East Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the pre-eminent scholar of Loo, stated “he is remembered as a culprit for the depletion of the nation’s cultural heritage.” Loo justified his practice by stating that he was preserving China’s history by getting the objects out of China – that the Chinese couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them! In 1915, after a visit to the U.S., Loo opened a gallery in New York. His first sale was to Charles Lang Freer. The three sections were shipped to Paris and reassembled by restorers there. Booth’s first interaction with C.T. Loo came in the fall of 1939 when he acquired two Chinese bronzes. In correspondence about the bronzes, Loo also suggested to Booth a large “fresco” (or wall painting) which stood thirteen feet tall. After consultation with Eliel Saarinen, Booth acquired the work, which arrived in January 1940. Part of the detail drawing of the Art Museum’s east wall. Saarinen designed a recessed panel which housed the painting. AD.11.236, November 5, 1940. Courtesy Cranbrook Archives In December 1941, John Gettens of the Fogg Museum examined the painting and found it to be in generally good condition. It was of the “usual mud wall of Chinese temple paintings” which included organic matter – straw, seed hulls, and rice. It was covered with a very thin white coating of kaolin, and the colored pigments were malachite, azurite, red iron oxide, yellow ochre, vermilion, and white clay. The painting hung in the main gallery of Cranbrook Art Museum for more than thirty years. In 1974, the Museum Committee unanimously decided to sell the painting instead of pay the $5-6,000 to have it restored. Funds from the sale were to go towards the care and restoration of other works in the collection, as well as for renovations to museum storage space. Tracing which shows the location of small areas of in-painting by Cranbook’s Marshall Fredericks, October 1941. Courtesy Cranbrook Archives. Thus ends the saga of the Chinese temple wall painting at Cranbrook as we do not know its whereabouts today. Other temple paintings can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Toledo Museum of Art. Archives/collections/Cranbrook Art Museum Author: Leslie S. Edwards/Bodhisattva/C.T. Loo/Eliel Saarinen/fresco/George Gough Booth/temple painting Tranquil Still Room “My father got me started the other day decorating and coloring a very elaborate plaster ceiling and nobody knows when I’ll get it finished.” So wrote James Scripps Booth in a letter to a favorite artist’s model Helen Knudson. The elaborate ceiling he referenced is the ceiling of the Still Room at Cranbrook House: George G. Booth created the Still Room as a part of his office suites in 1918. It was as a place to take a noonday rest. In old English country houses, the Still Room was a place where medicines were prepared, herbs and flowers were infused in water or oils, and where home-brewed beers and wines were made. As Henry Scripps Booth recalled in another letter, “We started applying the term to the small room at the south end of the wing although Mr. Booth had no intention of making whiskey, beer or wine, but on using it as a quiet place for reading, conversation and taking undisturbed naps.” Commissioned by Booth, Ulysses Ricci and Anthony DiLorenzo designed the ceiling for the Still Room in 1919. The ceiling depicts classical Pompeiian figures, animals, and motifs of swags, festoons, masks, floral and foliage. The ceiling consists of four arched sections, a central medallion, and a tympanum* piece on each wall. James Scripps Booth described his painting method for the ceiling: “I have to lie down in a steamer chair that is rigged up high on a scaffold, when I work and there is such a lot of detail design it keeps me guessing…” James painted the ceiling in blues, pinks, greens, yellows, purples, and browns against an off-white background. Words can not describe the beauty of the ceiling. As they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words. – Leslie S. Mio, Associate Registrar, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research *tympanum is a semi-circular or triangular decorative wall surface over an entrance, door or window Archives/Arts and Crafts/Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research/Cranbrook House/Cranbrook House and Gardens/Cultural Properties/Historic Properties/Images Anthony DiLorenzo/George Gough Booth/James Scripps Booth/Ulyses Ricci Hidden in Plain Sight at Brookside The Cranbrook 50th Anniversary Rug (BS 1), 1973. Cultural Properties Collection, Brookside School. In honor of the Cranbrook Kingswood Alumni Association’s Reunion Weekend, I thought I would share the story behind The Cranbrook 50th Anniversary Rug. In 1973, New York designer Rhoda Sablow (1926-2013) was commissioned to design a rug for the Cranbrook 50th Anniversary Auction. The idea for the rug came from Mrs. Arthur Kiendl, wife of the first President of the Cranbrook Educational Community. The border and geometric squares are reminiscent of Eliel Saarinen’s designs and surround depictions of various Cranbrook buildings and sculptures. The buildings are Christ Church, Kingswood, Cranbrook School, and Brookside. The sculptures are Orpheus, Jonah and the Whale, Europa and the Bull, Orpheus Fountain, Triton with Shell, Siren with Fishes, and Diana. The rug was needlepointed by Cranbrook Schools parents: Mrs. Iain Anderson, Mrs. Richard Darragh, Mrs. Micheal Davis, Mrs. Fritz Fiesselmann, Mrs. Walter Flannery, Mrs. Robert Flint, Mrs. Mounir Guindi, Mrs. Wilfred Hemmer, Mrs. Charles Himelhoch, Mrs. James Holmes, Mrs. Lee Iacocca, Mrs. Arthur Kiendl, Mrs. George Kilbourne, Mrs. Jamse Lowell, Mrs. James May, Mrs. David Mott, Mrs. John McCue, Mrs. Richard Pearce, Mrs. Donald Pendray, Mrs. J. Pierson Smith, Mrs. Edwin Spence, Mrs. Wright Tisdale, and Mrs. James Williams. Ellen Scripps Booth with granddaughter Elizabeth Wallace at Cranbrook House, circa 1919. Copyright Cranbrook Archives. Elizabeth Wallace McLean bought the needlepoint rug at an auction during the three-day celebration of the founding of Cranbrook schools. Mrs. McLean, the granddaughter of Cranbrook founders George and Ellen Booth, immediately donated the tapestry back to the school in honor of its golden anniversary. Elizabeth was in the original class of seven who attended Brookside School, so it is appropriate that the rug now hangs inside the main entrance of Brookside. The Cranbrook 50th Anniversary Rug (BS 1), 1973, on display in the Brookside Main Entrance. Cultural Properties Collection, Brookside School. Archives/Brookside School/collections/Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research/Cranbrook Educational Community/Cranbrook School/Cultural Properties/Kingswood School/Objects/Schools anniversary/Author: Leslie Mio/Elizabeth Wallace McLean/Ellen Scripps Booth/George Gough Booth/needlepoint/Rhoda Sablow/tapestry Out From the Shadows #2: Colonel Edwin S. George Many years ago, when I worked at the Oakland County Pioneer and Historical Society, I came across a man named Edwin S. George in reference to his home, “Cedarholm,” which he built in 1923 in Bloomfield Hills, and is now a part of Kirk in the Hills Presbyterian Church. What many people do not realize is the colonel’s long-standing connection to Cranbrook. Recently, while searching for photographs for a researcher, I stumbled upon the negative of a stocky, kind-looking man standing by a grove of trees. Fortunately, early Cranbrook photographers kept great records and I was able to look up the subject on the index of negatives in the archives, and it is indeed a photo of Colonel George. Colonel Edwin S. George, Apr 1930. W. Bryant Tyrell, photographer. Much can be read about the Colonel’s acumen as an influential Detroit businessman and philanthropist, and there is no doubt that he and George Booth knew one another in Detroit. However, once they both moved to Bloomfield Hills, the relationship grew. The colonel organized the Bloomfield Hills Country Club of which Booth was a founding member, and both men were members of the Bloomfield Open Hunt Club. In 1912, Colonel George became one of the stockholders in the Bloomfield Hills Seminary (the pre-cursor to Brookside School) established by George Booth, and in 1926, the two men worked together to bring a post-office to the then Village of Bloomfield Hills. Cranbrook School students with Colonel George (seated), The Edwin George Reserve, Sep 1930. W. Bryant Tyrell, photographer. But certainly the most important contribution Colonel George made to Cranbrook was through the Institute of Science. In 1930, the colonel became a member of the Institute’s first Board of Trustees, a position he held until just before his death in 1950. That same year, he donated 1,250 acres of land near Pinckney, Michigan to the University of Michigan to be used not as a public park, but as an educational resource for University of Michigan students, scout troops, and Cranbrook School students. Known as “The Edwin George Reserve,” it featured hiking trails, streams and a small lake, stables, outbuildings, a gate lodge, and even an airstrip. Colonel George also stocked the reserve with wildlife including deer brought from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and antelope from Alberta, Canada. The colonel wanted the boys to have “an appreciation of the truer values of life as expressed by the truth in Nature,” and provided a place for them to do so. So, while we have no direct proof that Booth and the colonel discussed the virtues of nature as education, it sure seems to me that they had a lot more in common than we previously thought! Archives/Cranbrook Institute of Science/Cranbrook School Author: Leslie S. Edwards/Bloomfield Hills Country Club/bloomfield hills seminary/bloomfield open hunt club/cedarholm/colonel george/Detroit/edwin george reserve/edwin s. george/George Gough Booth/kirk in the hills presbyterian church/pinckney/University of Michigan Eat, Greek, and Be Merry: the Greek Theatre Turns 100! Drama and arts and crafts have been intertwined in Detroit history for more than 100 years. Under the auspices of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (DSAC), on January 19th 1910, May Morris (daughter of William Morris) captivated a capacity crowd at the Detroit Museum of Art with her illustrated lecture “Pageantry and the Mask.” Morris’s presentation helped mark a turning point in propelling Detroit onto the national stage as an arts and crafts center. Almost immediately after May Morris left Detroit, Alexandrine McEwen, a bookplate artist and founding member of the DSAC, penned what was termed a “modern immorality play” called Everywoman with characters named “Suffrage” and “Art.” Less than a month later, she wrote The Masque of Arcadia, another outdoor play held on the grounds of Clairview, J.L. Hudson’s Grosse Pointe estate. These performances led to the DSAC being the first to foster a little theatre as part of their program. By 1914, George Booth (the first president of the DSAC) already had plans in mind for a bathing pavilion and a theatre on the hill overlooking Cranbrook House. (My own suspicion is that he did not like the fact that the DSAC performances were not held on HIS estate!) In early 1915, Booth commissioned Canadian architect Marcus Burrowes to draw up the plans for an outdoor Greek Theatre. The open-air amphitheater, constructed of stone, seats nearly 300 people and was described in contemporary news articles as a “gem of architecture” and a “temple of art.” By May 1916, landscaping was underway and red tulips graced the front of the bathing pavilion. Invitation Card, The Cranbrook Masque, June 1916. George Gough Booth Papers. Meanwhile, the DSAC was planning the production of The Cranbrook Masque which would also serve as the public dedication for the new Greek Theatre. The play showed the development of drama from ancient to modern times in five episodes, emulating May Morris’s lecture theme from 1910. For more on the play, see an earlier blog post. The Cranbrook Masque at the Greek Theatre, 1916. Hand-tinted glass slide. Fast forward to 1991 and the 75th anniversary of the Greek Theatre. A team of dedicated Cranbrook staff, historians, and theater enthusiasts initiated the restoration of the Greek Theatre and a contemporary production, using the script from the original Masque, this time with cast members from St. Dunstan’s Guild and dancers from Jessie Sinclair’s Cranbrook Kingswood Dancers. Cranbrook House sunken garden (originally called the kitchen garden) with staked tomato plants, ca 1915. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Greek Theatre and a long-standing tradition of theater programs at Cranbrook. In honor of this memorable event, the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research will be presenting “Edible Landscapes: A Midsummer Night’s Dinner.” Architecture/Archives/Arts and Crafts/Cranbrook House/Cranbrook House and Gardens/Historic Properties Alexandrine McEwen/Author: Leslie S. Edwards/Clairview/Cranbrook Kingswood Dancers/Cranbrook Masque/Detroit/Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts/DSAC/Edible Landscapes/Everywoman/George Booth/George Gough Booth/Greek Theatre/Grosse Pointe/J. L. Hudson/Jessica Sinclair/Jessie Sinclair/Marcus Burrowes/May Morris/St. Dunstan's Guild/sunken garden/The Masque of Arcadia/William Morris New Center Logo & A Fond Farewell The Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research has officially launched our new logo! What follows is a description of where each of the letters comes from in the history of Cranbrook or the location on the campus! The (first) C in Cranbrook is from the logo George Gough Booth created for the Cranbrook Press in 1901, three years before he and his wife Ellen established their estate in Bloomfield Hills. The Cranbrook Press (1900-1902) was founded by George Booth in the attic of the Detroit Evening News Building. Booth emulated the work of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press, not just in design but also in the level of hand-craftsmanship. 2D design/3D design/Architecture/Archives/Arts and Crafts/Christ Church Cranbrook/Cranbrook Academy of Art/Cranbrook Educational Community/Cranbrook House/Cranbrook Institute of Science/Cranbrook School/Cultural Properties/Exhibitions/Historic Properties Author: Stefanie Dlugosz-Acton/cranbrook press/detroit evening news/Eliel Saarinen/George Gough Booth/katherine mccoy/kelmscott press/Oscar Bach/Pewabic Pottery/steven holl/William Morris	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2395
__label__cc	0.605612	0.394388	Tag Archives: Presidents/Residents From Drawing to Driftwood: The Artwork of Wallace MacMahon Mitchell During the Archive’s Reading Room relocation at Cranbrook Art Museum, we have been digitizing negatives for preservation and access. This has enabled a new collection for CONTENTdm which highlights the artwork of Wallace MacMahon Mitchell (1911-1977). There are thirty images so far, with more being added soon. Five of Mitchell’s paintings can also be viewed during tours through Saarinen House: Presidents/Residents, 1946-1994. Wally Mitchell in his studio, early 1940s. Courtesy Cranbrook Archives. The collection features images of the rich diversity of Mitchell’s artwork, from his early drawings and still life paintings to his later geometric abstract works and painting-constructions. Mitchell’s later works include many driftwood sculptures and Plexiglas paintings. Driftwood in Three Sections, 1965. Estate of Wallace MacMahon Mitchell/Courtesy Cranbrook Archives. In 1946, two of his paintings were included in the European Exhibition of the Guggenheim-funded Museum of Non-Objective Painting. These two pieces, with two other paintings added in 1948, are now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Between 1950 and 1962, Mitchell’s work was frequently exhibited at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York. He was also commissioned to design murals, such as one installed at the University of Kentucky in 1962, based on his painting Turnabout Number One from 1952. University of Kentucky Mural, installed in 1962 based on a painting ‘Turnabout Number One’ from 1952. Estate of Wallace MacMahon Mitchell/Courtesy Cranbrook Archives. Mitchell’s archival collection will be available for research again when the Archives Reading Room reopens in July. Mitchell’s collection contains professional papers relating to his studentship and work as an instructor and administrator at Cranbrook. It also includes interviews and correspondence related to Joan Bence’s 1983 publication, The Art of Wallace Mitchell. There are also audio-visual materials including negatives, transparencies, slides and photographs. Villa-Neuve-Les-Avignons, 1938. Estate of Wallace MacMahon Mitchell/Courtesy Cranbrook Archives. Mitchell was born in Detroit in 1911. After receiving his BA from Northwestern University in Chicago, Ill. in 1934, he studied with Zoltan Sepeshy for a year (1934-1935). He then toured Europe before returning to Cranbrook in 1936 as a painting instructor. His career at Cranbrook spanned 1936-1977, during which time he taught Arts and Crafts at Cranbrook School (1944-1947) while he was painting instructor (1936-1956), he was Registrar for the Academy of Art (1944-1956), Director of the Cranbrook Art Museum (1956-1970), and President of the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1970-1977). A retrospective exhibition of his work planned for his retirement at the end of the 1976/1977 academic year became a memorial exhibition following his death in January 1977. -Laura MacNewman, Associate Archivist Wallace McMahon Mitchell Papers (1990-21) Chad Alligood, What to Paint and Why: Modern Painters at Cranbrook, 1936-1974 (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Art Museum, 2013) Joan Beehler Bence, The Art of Wallace Mitchell – Cranbrook’s Op Art Master Colorist (Unpublished, 1983, 1996) Wallace MacMahon Mitchell, 1911-1977: a memorial exhibition of paintings and painting-constructions, 1936-1976 (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1977) Archives/Cranbrook Academy of Art/Cranbrook Art Museum/painting Author: Laura MacNewman/Cranbrook Academy of Art/Cranbrook Archives/Digital media/Presidents/Residents/Saarinen House/Wallace Mitchell	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2396
__label__cc	0.607564	0.392436	August 23, 2014 \| David F. Coppedge Moon Still Has Hot Core Japanese scientists have determined that a soft, hot core remains in the center of the moon, contrary to expectations. A question resulting from a new model of the lunar interior made by scientists at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan is, “how can the bottom of the lunar mantle maintain its softer state for a long time?” The researchers used measurements from their Selene orbiter to infer a hot core that should not be there. Another investigator, Prof. Junichi Haruyama of Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, mentioned the significance of this research, saying, “A smaller celestial body like the Moon cools faster than a larger one like the Earth does. In fact, we had thought that volcanic activities on the Moon had already come to a halt. Therefore, the Moon had been believed to be cool and hard, even in its deeper parts. However, this research tells us that the Moon has not yet cooled and hardened, but is still warm. It even implies that we have to reconsider the question as follows: How have the Earth and the Moon influenced each other since their births? That means this research not only shows us the actual state of the deep interior of the Moon, but also gives us a clue for learning about the history of the system including both the Earth and the Moon.” Another article on tidal heating and lunar history was published by the University of California, Santa Cruz, but the press release doesn’t mention whether the heat should have lasted for billions of years. Presumably, tidal heating can preserve some of the primordial heat from the moon’s formation for a time, but heat is lost more rapidly from a small body than a large one. The problem is explained in the opening paragraph of the paper in Nature: The theory of equilibrium figures of rotating fluid bodies is a classic problem in geophysics, and it has been helpful in understanding the shapes of the Sun and planets. However, the origin of the Moon’s shape has remained an open problem in the past century, and the body’s deviations from any simple tidal–rotational (spherical harmonic degree-2) figure are large. This difficulty is surprising given the Moon’s presumably simple early thermal history: born hot and quickly cooled, one might expect the Moon to be described by a simple figure of equilibrium. The authors found a way to model the “surprising” observations (see Sid Perkins’ summary on Science Magazine). It remains true, nevertheless, that what they found was not what they expected. Lunar lightning: Another surprising finding was announced by the University of New Hampshire: there may be lightning in the soil of the moon. Because the lunar surface is dry, there is no way to dissipate the buildup of electrostatic charges from the solar wind except by sparking. The discharges in the top levels of soil would have the effect of breaking up rock particles and creating lunar regolith, or soil. The study, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, proposes that high-energy particles from uncommon, large solar storms penetrate the moon’s frigid, polar regions and electrically charge the soil. The charging may create sparking, or electrostatic breakdown, and this “breakdown weathering” process has possibly changed the very nature of the moon’s polar soil, suggesting that permanently shadowed regions, which hold clues to our solar system’s past, may be more active than previously thought. Assuming similar processes occur on other bodies, this finding “could change our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system,” the article says. Life on the moon: New Scientist published a hypothesis that rocks launched from earth could carry certain microbes to the moon, where they might survive as fossils. Meanwhile, the Russians are wondering how sea plankton found its way onto the exterior of the Space Station: did the station get contaminated by human transport, or did the organisms get launched upwards naturally somehow? See breaking news on Space.com. These are the kinds of findings the simplistic animations on TV shows don’t talk about, but you need to know. They have the effect of complicating simple stories of how the solar system came to be over millions and billions of years. It takes a lot of parameter tweaking to keep the old-and-gradual scenario going. It’s strange how when processes imply that bodies cannot be as old as claimed, the scientists either go silent or change the subject. Tags: core, craters, discharge, electromagnetic, electrostatic, moon, regolith, Selene, spark, thermodynamics, tidal flexing, tidal heating, volcanism Categories: Astronomy, Dating Methods, Geology, Physics, Solar System tjguy says: As has so often been pointed out, how many times can a theory withstand findings that are “contrary to expectations” before it needs to be junked? Does a theory that can be tweaked to accommodate any contrary finding have any value whatsoever? Does such a “theory” really deserve to be called a theory in the scientific sense of the word? If so, if a “theory” can be eternally tweaked to accommodate contrary expectations, what does that tell us about the trustworthiness of our current scientific theories? To me it says that they are probably not right and still have a lot of tweaking to go before we can get near the truth. And how will we ever know if we got it right if tweaking and in some cases major rewriting is always a possibility?	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2397
__label__cc	0.69746	0.30254	constituent-groups when-hashtags-follow-gun-violence Public Policy Division Scott Peska, Ed.D., Dean of Students at Waubonsee Community College twitter @NASPAtweets on Twitter When Hashtags Follow Gun Violence Over the last 10 years, we have seen many celebrations, including the first-African American President elected in the United States, the pageantry of a British royal wedding, and even my Cubbies winning a World Series. However, we have also seen seven of the 10 deadliest mass shootings experienced in the U.S., which took place in our churches, our classrooms, our communities and our colleges. #Enough. #Neveragain. Since the deadly and senseless mass shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL this past February, these two hashtags were commonly found in tweets, social media posts, and on protest signs. However, after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings in December 2012, we learned that hashtags, thoughts, and prayers are not enough. If we want to see change, we need to take action. That is exactly what the young survivors and their classmates around the world are showing us. They showed us when thousands left their classrooms during the March 14, 2018 Women’s March Youth EMPOWER, National School Walkout. They will show us at the “March For Our Lives” marches taking place on March 24, 2018 in Washington DC and many other cities throughout the U.S. They will show us again during another National School Walkout being planned for April 20, 2018, marking 20 years since the Columbine school shootings. It is clear that today’s youth are exercising their first amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly to demand changes to our second amendment right to bear arms. Uniquely, today’s high school students have grown up witnessing a barrage of deadly mass shootings unlike any generation previously. Prior to the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, the deadliest mass shooting was sixteen years earlier in 1991 in Killeen, TX. Since then we have seen the deadliest mass shooting change from the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 to the Orlando Pulse Night Club shootings in 2016 and yet again to the Las Vegas Concert shootings in 2017. We have witnessed that six out of the 10 deadliest mass shootings used a similar type of semi-automatic weapon: the AR-15, which was invented in 1958 to be used in the Vietnam War as a weapon specifically for mass killing. Today, it is being used as a weapon of mass killing with little to no restriction. Today’s students might think we, as a society, are becoming numb and desensitized as we watch active shootings unfold on the news and on social media. This generation is aware that too many of their peers have easy access to guns. They know that over half of the guns used in shootings in K12 schools were obtained legally by students or were acquired from their home or the home of a relative. They seem fed up active-shooter training and are demanding to learn how to protest peacefully to require our lawmakers to create sensible laws to help reduce this growing gun violence. This year it seems not a week can go by without a news story about another shooting. As I write this post, we are still learning details about a shooting at a high school in Maryland on March 20, 2018. The NASPA Enough is Enough Campaign Against Gun Violence was created 10 years ago after the late Dr. Zenobia Lawrence Hikes, then Vice President of Student Affairs at Virginia Tech, gave the closing address to the NASPA Annual Conference in Boston in 2008. Her speech called on student affairs practitioners to heed this warning and, with a fierce urgency, stem the tide of this growing societal violence. Once again, we must renew our commitment and support to our future students whom are acting with a fierce urgency and demanding changes in our laws. For example, they seek to raise the legal age to purchase guns from 18 to 21, establish a stronger universal background check system, and ban the sale of some semiautomatic weapons, the sale of extended magazines, or accessories and modifications that make these guns fire like automatic assault weapons. They are making progress with the Florida Gun Bill that was passed and signed into law by Governor Rick Scott. However, this bill leaves much to be decided at the federal level. In place of any hashtags, here are a few things you can do to support our students. Host an Enough is Enough Week (April 2 – 6, 2018) on your campus. Visit the Enough is Enough initiatives webpage for sample initiatives and resources on hosting quality programs and activities. Support students on your campus who want to partake in marches and walkouts. Help them find ways to peacefully demonstrate or protest and provide safe space for all sides of the issues to engage in dialogue. Become educated on how to be prepared for and how to respond to acts of gun violence on your campus by reading “Enough is Enough: A Student Affairs Perspective on Preparedness and Response to a Campus Shooting” and “College in the Crosshairs: An Administrator’s Perspective on Prevention of Gun Violence.” These are two great resources available to you through the NASPA Bookstore. Follow Enough is Enough or other anti-gun violence campaigns, such as Thetrace.org, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, and non-profits like the Sandy Hook Promise on Facebook. Contact your legislators. Local, state, and federal. Call, visit, and write them. With programs like Resistbot, which can be used in social media platforms or through texting, it has never been easier to let your representatives know where you stand on issues. Do it. Right now. And Often. As one state legislator shared with me, occasionally on lobby days he hears from a parent who lost a child or a grandparent who lost their grandchild. However, any given week or month, he seldom hears from constituents in his district on the issue. While polls and posts indicate mainstream America is ready for change, representatives need to hear from you directly. I implore you to consider helping us by taking one or more of these actions. This post started with the last decade, and 10 years ago I worked on the campus of Northern Illinois University when a mass shooting took place on February 14, 2008 that left five dead, 18 injured with gunshot wounds, and countless others directly impacted. Within the hour there were three or four news helicopters overhead; that sound today still is an emotional cue for me. A month after the shooting I was asked to lead an office to provide support to this unique population of student survivors and the families of the deceased as we tried to move forward as a campus and community. Forward, Together Forward became a defining mantra taken from NIU’s fight song and it holds special meaning to all of us affiliated with NIU during that time. Every year, on the date and time of the shootings, the student survivors and the families come back to campus to a Memorial Garden to remember and pay tribute to those we lost. Many of us were gathered together when the news broke about the Parkland, FL shootings. It is difficult to describe the emotional toil that this group experiences every mass shooting that has taken place since 2008, let alone one taking place on the same day and nearly the exact same time. So I ask you again, will you heed the warning Dr. Hikes shared with us a decade ago, will you stand in unity with our future students who are demanding changes to our laws, and will you do a part to help reduce gun violence on your campus and in your communities? The Enough is Enough Campaign Against Gun Violence is affiliated with the Campus Safety Knowledge Community. Visit our page if you have a desire to join us! (Photo courtesy of NIU Creative Services, 2018.) Opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of NASPA. If you agree or disagree with the content of this post, we encourage you to dialogue in the comment section below. NASPA reserves the right to remove any blog that is inaccurate or offensive.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2399
__label__wiki	0.664199	0.664199	1. On What the Communist Party Is: Part 1a: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_introduction_1a.mp3 Part 1b: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_1b.mp3 2. On the Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_2a.mp3 Part 2c: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_2c.mp3 Part 2d: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_2d.mp3 Part 2e: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_2e.mp3 3. On the Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party: 4. On How the Communist Party Is an Anti-Universe Force 5. On the Collusion of Jiang Zemin with the CCP… 6. On How the CCP Destroyed Tradititional Culture: Part 6f: http://media.soundofhope.org/audio01/2006/10/14/ninecommentaries_6f.mp3 7. On the Chinese Communist Party’s History of Killing: 8. On How the Chinese Communist Party Is an Evil Cult: 9. On the Unscrupulous Nature of the CCP: http://ninecommentaries.sohnetwork.com/ http://tuoisang.wordpress.com/nine-commentaries-on-ccp/ http://cid-aa81455a56faec30.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/9commentariesonccp Nine Commentaries On Communist Party: Part 01/10: On What the Communist Party Is More than a decade after the fall of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European communist regimes, the international communist movement has been spurned worldwide. The demise of the Chinese Communist Party is only a matter of time. Part 02/10: On the Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party Why did the Communist Party emerge, grow and eventually seize power in contemporary China? Did the Chinese people choose the Communist Party? Or, did the Communist Party gang up and force Chinese people to accept it? The CCP has set itself above all, conquering all in its path, thereby bringing endless catastrophe to China. Part 03/10: On the Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s violence and abuses are even more severe than those of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty. The CCP’s philosophy is one of “struggle,” and the CCP’s rule has been built upon a series of “class struggles,” “path struggles,” and “ideological struggles,” both in China and toward other nations. Part 04/10: On How the Communist Party Is an Anti-Universe Force In the last hundred years, the sudden invasion by the communist specter has created a force against nature and humanity, causing limitless agony and tragedy. It has also pushed civilization to the brink of destruction. It has become an extremely malevolent force against the universe. Part 05/10: On the Collusion of Jiang Zemin with the CCP to Persecute Falun Gong Why is Falun Gong, which upholds the principles of “Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance” and has been promulgated in over 60 countries worldwide, being persecuted only in China, not anywhere else in the world? In this persecution, what is the relationship between Jiang Zemin and the CCP? Part 06/10: On How the Chinese Communist Party Destroyed Traditional Culture The CCP has devoted the nation’s resources to destroying China’s rich traditional culture. The CCP’s destruction of Chinese culture has been planned, well organized, and systematic, made possible by the state’s use of violence. Since its establishment, the CCP has never stopped “revolutionizing” Chinese culture in the attempt to completely destroy its spirit. Part 07/10: On the Chinese Communist Party’s History of Killing The 55-year history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is written with blood and lies. The stories behind this bloody history are not only brutally inhumane but also rarely known. Under the rule of the CCP, 60 to 80 million innocent Chinese people have been killed, leaving their broken families behind. Part 08/10: On How the Chinese Communist Party Is an Evil Cult The Communist Party is essentially an evil cult that harms mankind. Although the Communist Party has never called itself a religion, it matches every single trait of a religion. At the beginning of its establishment, it regarded Marxism as the absolute truth in the world. It exhorted people to engage in a life-long struggle for the goal of building a “communist heaven on earth.” Part 09/10: On the Unscrupulous Nature of the Chinese Communist Party What is most terrifying is that the CCP is going all out to try to destroy the moral foundation of the entire nation, attempting to turn every Chinese national to various degrees into a scoundrel in order to create an environment favorable for the CCP to “advance with time.” It is especially important for us to understand clearly why the CCP acts like scoundrels and to discern its criminal nature. Part 10/10: Conclusion http://www.dailymotion.com/NTDTV Posted in Nine Commentaries On Chinese Communist Party. Tags: Nine Commentaries On Chinese Communist Party. Leave a Comment »	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2401
__label__wiki	0.512633	0.512633	Online & Low-Residency Minors & Certificates Drexel Storylab Co-op & Experience Drexel Co-op Drexel Writers Room Seminars & Colloquia Support Our College Call for Essays: Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies Awards The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to officially announce the undergraduate student call for essays: Africana Studies-V.P. Franklin Award ($500 applied to student’s Drexel account) Women’s and Gender Studies-Martha Montgomery Award ($200 applied to student’s Drexel account) For consideration of either award: Awards are for essays or papers dealing with critical issues pertaining to Africana Studies or Women’s and Gender Studies topics. Submission must have been written for a CoAS course during the past year (spring 2016- winter 2017). Current students should consider nominating themselves for this award by submitting their paper for consideration. Though there are no page or word count requirements, it is strongly suggested that your submission is a minimum of two pages. Students may be from any of Drexel’s colleges and majors, and do not need to be an AFAS or WGST minor to apply. Essays must be submitted to globalawards@drexel.edu by April 1st. Please indicate the following in your email: Professor’s name Term in which you were enrolled in the course Award that you would like to be considered for Important Note: Please make sure that your name is on the paper, and save file as your name as well. The V.P. Franklin Award (Africana Studies): The V.P. Franklin Award, named after one of the founders of the Africana Studies program, recognizes an outstanding essay that highlights critical issues within Africana Studies. This competition is open to students who enrolled in AFAS and AFAS cross-listed courses as well as courses taught throughout the College of Arts & Sciences. The Martha Montgomery Award (Women’s and Gender Studies): This award is given in celebration of Martha Montgomery – an administrator, scholar, colleague and most important a mentor and supporter of all women on the Drexel campus. Dr. Martha Montgomery, who was a professor of philosophy, a department chair and senior administrator, stood for excellence in academic work, intellectual curiosity and integrity, professionalism, and commitment to values of diversity and empowerment of women. In naming this award after Martha Montgomery, we remember her with great pride and admiration. This competition is open to students who enrolled in WGST and WGST cross-listed courses as well as courses taught throughout the College of Arts & Sciences. Winning the Martha Montgomery Award is a wonderful way to gain recognition and visibility from the larger Drexel University community for high quality, undergraduate scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies. For additional information or questions concerning the awards, please contact Jessica Kratzer, department administrator for the Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages, at jkk55@drexel.edu. Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 215.895.2000, © All Rights Reserved	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2407
__label__wiki	0.649834	0.649834	Partners and Supporters of Classifieds Join The Racingjunk.com Partner Program American Super Cups American Super Cups are half scale racecars that look just like their big brothers on the NASCAR circuit. These racecars are raced on primarily 1/4 and 1/3 mile paved oval tracks in the Midwest for nearly 20 years. Our main emphasis is to provide an affordable stock car racing experience. Drivers can start at the age of 10. These cars are safe, they include a roll cage and a five point harness. These cars are inexpensive by comparison to other forms of motor racing. Engines, tires and other parts that are critical to racing can easily last an entire season. Equality in racing leads great racing – The rules keep cars competitive and allow the driver to determine their own fate on the track. Working on the cars is easy enough for one person with a little mechanical skill. Most of all - FUN and the opportunity to race on a Saturday night at your hometown tracks. With all the benefits and more listed above you can get out of the stands and onto a track and race. For more information please contact www.AmericanSuperCups.com, Facebook and Twitter or email us at [email protected] for more information. Arizona Sport Shirts Arizona Sport Shirts (Indianapolis, IN) was founded in 1974, and since that time, Arizona has had the best and most influential designs and shirts in the racing industry. The most famous and decorated drivers ever to turn a wheel have had shirts produced by the famed Arizona Sport Shirts. From top of the line designs and tee shirts, to a full embroidery department for caps and jackets, Arizona has been the leader producing the ‘Original Racing Shirt’ for 40 years and counting. AMS is located on approximately 820 acres in Hampton, Georgia, approximately 30 miles south of downtown Atlanta. AMS is located in a top-ten media market, and has the long-standing reputation of offering fans some of the best on-track competition in NASCAR. AMS has a modern 1.54-mile, lighted, asphalt, 24-degree banked, quad-oval superspeedway, an on-site 2.5-mile road course and 46 condominiums overlooking the speedway. AMS has permanent seating capacity of approximately 71,000, including 93 luxury suites. Car Chix Car Chix is the premier motorsports organization for women, founded by Jeanette DesJardins. Since 2010, the award-winning organization has been advertising, promoting and providing resources world-wide to women in motorsports and the automotive industries. In addition, Car Chix has a pristine reputation for delivering motorsports events geared towards women, including the Car Chix Ladies Only Drag Races and the Drag Racing for Life Breast Cancer Fundraiser. For more information on Car Chix or to shop their online merchandise store, visit: www.carchix.com Carolina Thunder Motorcycle Drag Racing Headquarters in Summerfield NC, Carolina Thunder Motorcycle Drag Racing (CTMDR) is an East Coast Motorcycle Drag Racing series run on 1/8th mile Drag Strips in and around the Carolinas. Champion Brands, LLC Champion Brands, LLC, originally Lowe Oil Co. founded by Ralph Lowe in 1956, is a globally recognized industry leader in specialty lubricants for over 60 years. Champion also produces and blends more than 300 products including fuel, brake fluid, oil and engine additives and lubricants for the automotive, heavy truck, agricultural and specialty markets. Champion Brands understands the complexities of doing business in today’s market and is always looking for new and better ways to make your company more efficient and increase your bottom line. Quality products are more than a commitment at Champion; our high standards define the way we do business. Cordova International Raceway Cordova International Raceway (CIR) is home of the 64th annual World Series of Drag Racing, the world’s longest continually running drag racing event. Located in the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa, the 190-acre facility features a 1/4-mile drag racing strip sanctioned by the International Hot Rod Association. Weekend drag racing events are held all summer. Specialty events beyond the World Series of Drag Racing include the original Super Chevy Show, the School's Out Junior Nationals and the 39th annual AMC Nationals. For more information on CIR, visit www.racecir.com or connect on Facebook @RaceCordova. Drag Racing Online Frantic Ford Check out the Frantic Ford Nostalgia Funny Car tribute with the 50th Anniversary Tour. This year Frantic Ford will be running the 1975 Mustang II with Drew Sweetman behind the wheel as a tribute to the late Dodger Glenn. The long standing history of the Frantic Ford team since 1969 running from the West to East tracks setting records along the way. Hot Rodders of Tomorrow Hot Rodders of Tomorrow is a non-profit 501(c)(3) and S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) educational program, whose mission is to develop the future of today’s youth for the aftermarket racing, performance and automotive accessory industry. We provide national events which give students an opportunity to showcase their talents and knowledge gained during classroom sessions and workshops. The program grants opportunities for students to practice teamwork, demonstrate their skills, enthusiasm, and ingenuity and build their confidence and commitment to excellence. Our goal is to raise scholarship funds to help the Hot Rodders of Tomorrow students further their education, along with funding internships and mentorships and providing opportunities for High School instructors to grow enthusiasm in their auto tech programs. Hot Rodders of Tomorrow represents opportunities to promote the performance aftermarket as a whole to the general public in a new and exciting way, and to grow the future base of performance enthusiasts for the performance aftermarket industry and the supporting brands. The International Motor Contest Association (IMCA), organized in 1915, is the oldest active automobile racing sanctioning body in the United States. J. Alex Sloan, a native of Pittsburgh, Pa., was instrumental in establishing IMCA and ran more races than all other promoters in the United States combined, all under the IMCA sanction. After Sloan’s death in 1937, his son John continued the IMCA tradition. Under his leadership, IMCA continued to grow and held its first Late Model race on November 9, 1947 in Lubbock, TX. In the late 1970′s Keith Knaack introduced the IMCA Modified division. Few knew then that Keith’s vision and innovation would result in the largest class of race cars in the country. Since exploding onto the racing scene in 1979, the Modifieds have become the calling card of IMCA. These open wheel wonders push the limits of power and excitement. With a one-tire rule and the well-known engine claim, the grandstand enthusiast can now afford to strap on the safety belts and have a realistic opportunity to compete and WIN feature events. IMCA’s other divisions incorporate these philosophies and are continuing to see excellent growth. IMCA will continue the mission of affordable, entertaining and competitive auto racing as a sanctioning body. We are committed to establishing and enforcing fair and consistent rules that will strengthen and promote the racing industry. Never resting on our laurels, IMCA is driven by past success to achieve future goals. International Hot Rod Association Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida, the International Hot Rod Association (IHRA) is one of the world’s largest Motorsports sanctioning bodies. The IHRA promotes professional and sportsman drag racing for drivers of all levels. The IHRA sanctions nearly 100 motorsport facilities in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Bahamas and welcomes 80,000 racers annually to their IHRA-sanctioned facilities. The IHRA oversees multiple Sportsman racing programs including the Summit Racing Equipment SuperSeries and the Sportsman Spectacular. For more information, visit IHRA.com or visit IHRA on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Located in Sparta, Kentucky, and constructed on 1,000 acres of land, Kentucky Speedway showcases the best in stock car racing on its 1.5-mile tri-oval. The track has 14-degree banking in the turns, a 1,600-foot backstretch that is 57-feet wide and includes a 12-foot apron. The facility also features a paved quarter-mile track. This season's "Quaker State 400" anchors the NASCAR tripleheader weekend that opens Thursday, June 28 with the Camping World Truck Series "UNOH 225" and continues Friday, June 29 with the Nationwide Series "Feed The Children 300." Kinross Speedpark The Kinross Speedpark is a semi-banked 1/4 mile asphalt oval located at the Chippewa County Fairgrounds in Kinross, Michigan. Originally opened in 1995, Kinross is proudly celebrating it's 25th Anniversary Season in 2019. Promoted by Fox Boyz Racing, the longest serving promoters for the facility, the Speedpark is operated 100% by volunteers each and every summer. This season season (2019) is gearing up to be the biggest in the track's history. Along with switching to primarily Saturday Night Racing, Kinross will be the proud home of the 6th Annual Hot Shoe 100. The Hot Shoe is one of the largest asphalt Modified events in the United States, paying $10,024 to win and will be highlighted by the participation of 25-year NASCAR star KENNY WALLACE among the many other cars and stars from across North America. On top of the Hot Shoe, Kinross is the home of the Memorial Invitational in Memory of Randy Dewitt & Ted Brooks, 2nd Annual Baby Shoe - Hot Shoe 100 Qualifier and John Lowery II Tribute along other exciting events. The track's bi-weekly schedule sees regular shows feature Modifieds, ABC Stock Cars and Four Cylinders. For more information please log on to www.racekinross.com and follow them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kinrossspeedpark Lucas Oil MLRA Lucas Oil MLRA (Midwest Latemodel Racing Association) celebrates 30 years of existence with the beginning of the 2018 Season. MLRA's rich history of heartland racing has established it as one of the longest running regional motor sports series of its kind. To date, MLRA has conducted more than 690 racers throughout the Midwest, including Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota. If you want to see family-oriented action and excitement, come out and experience a Lucas Oil MLRA event. Lucas Oil Speedway Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Missouri is quickly becoming the Motorsports Hub of the Heartland - and for good reason. Its world-class family-friendly facility is host to the nation's most popular grass-roots racing series, featuring late models, modifieds, sprint cars, pro pulling, drag boats and now West Coast-style short course off-road racing! Add to that a central tower complex featuring the best food and refreshments, merchandise retailers and all-ages entertainment. Every seat puts you in the center of the racing action, and the fan-friendly pits let you meet your favorite drivers and teams and see their magnificent machines up close. For a weekend full of traditional American motorsports at its finest, you'll find no better destination than Lucas Oil Speedway - Fast, Family, Fun! Maryland International Raceway Maryland International Raceway (MDIR) is the premiere motorsports facility in the Washington-Baltimore region and features over 100 events annually. The facility opened in 1966 and features a 1/4-mile drag strip with nonstop action from March until November. Annual events include professional and sportsman drag racing, car shows, athletic competitions, and a wide variety of other special events. MDIR is sanctioned by the International Hot Rod Association (IHRA) and hosts multiple races for the International Drag Bike League (IDBL). For more information on MDIR, visit www.RaceMDIR.com or connect on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @RaceMDIR. Max Chevy Memphis International Raceway Memphis International Raceway (MIR) is the Mid-South’s premier racing destination for racers and spectators alike. It is located minutes outside of Memphis in Millington, Tenn., and includes a 1/4-mile drag strip sanctioned by the International Hot Rod Association, a 1.8-mile road course and a NASCAR 3/4-mile paved tri-oval. Prestigious events such as the original Super Chevy Show, Red Bull Global RallyCross, NASCAR races and the IHRA Summit World Finals take place at the facility. For more information on MIR, visit raceMIR.com or connect on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @RaceMIR. Mid-West Pro Mod Series The Mid-West Pro Mod Series (MWPMS) is a professional drag racing organization, led by veteran racer and businessman Keith Haney, which delivers a generous sponsor package, star drivers, immaculate cars and an unrivaled eighth-mile show to complement host tracks' special events. The racing facility needs only to provide track prep, the MWPMS racers' purse, hotel accommodations for the tech inspector and accommodations and a car for the live feed crew. However, the track also keeps 100 percent of all MWPMS car and crew entry fees, plus any applicable testing fees the day prior to an event, as well as whatever extra spectator revenue is associated with an MWPMS appearance. Further, the all-eighth-mile MWPMS protects its sponsors' investments if an event doesn't happen for any reason by refunding sponsor payments for the affected event or allowing a carryover to the next MWPMS event (minus any event-specific costs already incurred). The MWPMS features both modern and classic American body styles, as well as every major engine combination - supercharged, turbocharged and nitrous boosted - in Pro Mod and Radial vs. the World classes. Mopar Max Motorsports Directory Motorsports Directory is the next great generation of an online Motorsports Directory; and we’re not stopping at just F1. As a group of sportsman drag racer and family of NASCAR fans, we’re starting with just that. We are building what will be known as THE trusted source in Motorsports as all data will be 100% human verified annually. We are indexing the top 16 social media channels for featured categories such as Shops & Builders, Dynos & Tuners, Tools & Equipment, Trucks & Trailers, Race Teams, Drivers & Crew, Military Veterans and a Memorial. We have partnered with Hall of Fames to build their inductee’s profiles for the world to know their motorsports accomplishments, military service and social media tribute sites. From asphalt, hydro and sand dragstrips to flat track, motorcross, figure 8, road coarse and kart dirt oval. We're listing currently open and lost but not forgotten closed tracks in America, Canada and Australia for in 2017. Submit your race team, crew, sanctioning body, foundation or motorsports related Company today at MotorsportsDirectory.com/get-listed/ National Auto Sport Association (NASA The National Auto Sport Association (NASA) was formed in 1991 to deliver high-quality motorsports events to enthusiasts at major racing venues throughout the nation. NASA has created programs that allow owners of both racecars and high-performance street-driven vehicles to enjoy the full performance capabilities of their cars in a safe and controlled environment. NASA offers many different programs that will allow you to enjoy motorsports on a number of different levels, including our High-Performance Driving Events (HPDE), Rally Sport, Time Trial, NASA-X and Competition Racing programs. National Hot Rod Association Headquartered in Glendora, Calif., NHRA is the primary sanctioning body for the sport of drag racing in the United States. NHRA presents 24 national events featuring the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series, NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series and NHRA Pro Mod Drag Racing Series. NHRA provides competition opportunities for drivers of all levels in the NHRA Summit Racing Series and the NHRA Drags: Street Legal Style presented by AAA. NHRA also offers the Summit Racing Jr. Drag Racing League for youth ages 8 to 17. In addition, NHRA owns and operates five racing facilities: Atlanta Dragway in Georgia; Auto-Plus Raceway at Gainesville in Florida; National Trail Raceway in Ohio; Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis; and Auto Club Raceway at Pomona in Southern California. For more information, log on to NHRA.com, or visit the official NHRA pages on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. New England Dragway New England Dragway (NED) is a 1/4 mile NHRA Drag Strip in Epping, New Hampshire, a small town in Rockingham County, United States. NED started making history here in Epping in 1966. NED is open four days a week from the beginning of April through the end of October featuring everything from grudge racing to world class events like the its annual NHRA New England Nationals. Following it’s credo, “Built by racers for racers,” New England Dragway continues improving its facility in order to keep pace with a new generation of racers who bring faster and more complex machines to race at its legendary quarter mile. New Smyrna Speedway New Smyrna Speedway (NSS) is a high-banked, half-mile paved oval located just five miles west of New Smyrna Beach, FL and only 12 miles from Daytona International Speedway. NSS has been home to some of the finest and most thrilling stock car racing in the entire county for over 50 years. NSS opened in 1967 as a dirt track but was paved only six months later to begin hosting the World Series of Stock Car, nine nights of intense stock car racing during Daytona International Speedway/NASCAR Speedweeks. Over the half-century that NSS has operated, the track has welcomed numerous famous NASCAR drivers, such as Richie Evans; Donnie, Bobby and Davey Allison; Neil Bonnett; Harry Gant; Tony Stewart; Kyle Busch; Ryan Newman and many others. NSS also welcomes up-and-coming stars like Harrison Burton, Todd Gilliland and many others. NSS is a proud NASCAR Whelen All-American Series track, hosting weekly NASCAR grassroots racing from March through October. NSS also play host to numerous special events throughout the years – such as the Red Eye 100 in January, the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing in February, the Fourth of July’s Clyde Hart Memorial, the Florida Governor’s Cup in October and much more. NSS also hosts the NASCAR K&N Pro Series during the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing. As a small-town, local venue, NSS is heavily involved in the community by welcoming in local organizations like local schools, boosters, sports teams, and other charitable organizations. NSS’s owners also created the Hart to Heart Breast Cancer Foundation at New Smyrna Speedway. North American Trailer Dealers Association The NATDA Trade Show & Convention caters specifically to the trailer dealers (not open to the public) of the industry. Their annual trade show continues to grow every year and is the perfect opportunity for dealers to network with industry professional where they will be able to buy, sell, learn and network all under one roof. All segments of the trailer industry are represented, including: cargo, race car, horse, marine, dump, flatbed and toy hauler markets. Dealers, trailer manufacturers, product/service vendors, financial institutions and insurance companies all come together at one show with the sole purpose of conducting business. In recent years, NATDA has experienced significant growth from markets related to the trailer industry, such as truck accessories and RV’s. This year's show will be held in St. Louis, MO at the America’s Center on September 5-7th. Osage Casino Tulsa Raceway Park Tulsa Raceway Park is a 1/4 Mile NHRA Drag Racing Facility located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In fact, TRP has been a popular testing ground for America’s top drag racing team for decades. But only recently has the track stepped back out onto the national stage with a breath of fresh life. And in that short time, Tulsa Raceway Park has gone from a beauty queen of the 1970s to a modern day Miss America contender. Today, Osage Casino Tulsa Raceway Park has grown into a true destination racetrack. The infamous Throwdown in T-Town has turned into one of the biggest non-sanctioned drag races in the country. The Midnight Drags continue to be a hit. And the last time the PDRA was in town, fans were piling in by the car-full through midnight. Outlaw Diesel Super Series LLC The owners of Scheid Diesel, RLC Motorsports, TS Performance and Rudy’s Diesel Performance operate some of the best diesel drag racing and diesel pulling events in the nation. Each business owner/promoter is committed to delivering a high quality, action packed event that attracts thousands of diesel fans. Each event serves as a showcase for your products. This group has come together with the goal of increasing the value of their individual diesel events for vendors, spectators, and participants. With guidance from the owner of Crossroads Dragway, this desire has manifested itself in the formation of the Outlaw Diesel Super Series, LLC. The intent of the Outlaw Diesel Super Series (ODSS) is to create a points series to standardize payouts and increase competition at each event. Palm Beach International Raceway Palm Beach International Raceway (PBIR) is an acclaimed motorsports and entertainment facility located in Jupiter, Florida. The venue features a 2.2-mile road course, a 0.8-mile World Karting Association sanctioned kart track, an all-concrete 1/4-mile drag strip sanctioned by the International Hot Rod Association (IHRA) and resident driving school Bertil Roos Racing School. The state-of-the-art facility hosts events year-round including sportsman and professional drag racing, driving schools, endurance races, autocross, car shows, concerts, corporate events and much more. PBIR is also home to the Palm Beach Driving Club (PBDC), the pre-eminent members only club for automotive enthusiasts in the United States. For more information on PBIR, visit RacePBIR.com or connect on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @RacePBIR. PDRA Professional Drag Racers Association The PDRA was founded in 2014 by an elite group of racers committed to bringing credibility and stability to the sport of 1/8 mile drag racing. Jason Scruggs, Tommy Franklin, Gene Hector, and Roger Henson started the PDRA to preserve a viable door-slammer series that would benefit the fans, marketing partners, racers, and all those affiliated with the professional drag racing industry. The PDRA has over 200 professional race teams poised and ready to compete for Championships in their respective classes. This Championship tour includes stops in major markets found here... http://www.pdra660.com/schedule The PDRA philosophy is based on honesty, hard work, and the pursuit of excellence in every facet of the sport. We are looking forward to a very successful campaign for many years to come. The PDRA will race at 8 events in 2018, while providing exciting, entertaining, and safe races for the quickest professional drag racers in the country. Our goals are to ensure that our fans experience the greatest racing on the planet, our racers will have the safest and best prepared tracks to compete on, and that our marketing partners are guaranteed the most cost effective return on investment possible. RaceCarBook.com Racecarbook.com publishes technical books and manuals about race engine tuning. Research and development is done in the race car, race boat, and other racing fields. Book titles include Fuel Injection Racing Secrets, 5000 Horsepower on Methanol, Blown Nitro Racing on a Budget, High Horsepower tuning for Mechanical Fuel Injection, and Jetting for Racing Mechanical Fuel Injection. All books are written by Bob Szabo, a long-time drag racer and former welding engineering consultant. Rhino Dyno, LLC Rhino Dyno, LLC is a Mobile Chassis Dynamometer Testing Service based out of Metro Detroit. Offering testing capability of up to 2000 wheel horsepower, 200 MPH, Torque, and more. This valuable data allows for better tuning and year round testing. Additionally, a great attraction for car shows, cruises, and automotive based events. Rhino Dyno is fully mobile and travels throughout the Midwest. Richmond Dragway Richmond Dragway is a 1/4 mile International Hot Rod Association sanctioned dragracing facility in Sandston, VA. The site features 130 acres with a full service concession stand, VP Fuel Station, and a 3 story Timing and Scoring tower. Rock Solid Funding Rock Solid Funding is a professional financial services provider specializing in trailer, boat, RV, travel trailer, and motorcycle financing. We offer a safe and efficient finance process with tailored products to dealers and retail customers. We have rates as low as 5% and loan terms up to 240 months and we can work with challenged credit. We are located in Colleyville, Texas, and finance customers all across the United States. We work with dealer sales and private party sales alike. If you’ve found “the one” here on RacingJunk.com, we can help secure the funds to make it yours. Rocky Mountain Superchargers We are drag racers who enjoy our sport and want to build it by competing with beautifully prepared cars to engage our fans and make each event memorable. This isn’t high-dollar corporate racing. We value our sponsors and use their products and services. You may see our family members when you talk with us in the pits. Ours is a family sport. For the Racer: A well planned series, a choice of eliminators, guaranteed purses, and big crowds to enjoy watching your car perform – cheering the results of your team’s efforts. All of this culminates in an end of year Championship. Will you wear the Champion’s jacket? For the Fan: This is racing the way it is supposed to be. Side by side blasts down the quarter mile, superchargers screaming, and the variety of cars fans want to see. Add in accessible racers in the pits, memorabilia to buy and take home, countless photo opportunities, hero cards, and autographs and the Rocky Mountain Superchargers provide a memorable experience for every youngster who attends – no matter their age! For the Sponsors: Rocky Mountain Superchargers is ready to introduce you to the most loyal fans in the sports world. Show them the best of your products and services and they will become loyal customers, clients, and guests of your company. This is real world marketing to real world people. For the Racetrack: Add the Rocky Mountain Superchargers to your event schedule and watch the enthusiasm build! This is a sponsored series and we do the marketing for you. Put our expertise to work for you. Seekonk Speedway Seekonk Speedway is a family owned 1/3 mile banked oval that has been operating since 1945. Seekonk is located between Boston and Providence and runs a full NASCAR season featuring 4 divisions between May and October. Pro Stocks, Street Stocks, late Models & Sport Trucks make up the 4 NASCAR divisions. the Speedway also features a “Fast Friday” with 17 races between June and October showcasing Pure Stocks, Legends, Sport 4’s and Seekonk Youth racing. Some of the biggest events at the track are the Sunday Thrill Shows featuring Spectator drags, enduros, figure 8 races, fireworks and monster trucks. Check out all the info and whats happening at www.seekonkspeedway.com SEMA offers its 6,600+ member companies a variety of business tools and resources to help their business succeed and prosper. Whether you are a manufacturer, retailer, jobber, distributor, rep or installer, SEMA is here to help you make smarter business decisions; be more strategic and targeted with your promotions; save money through group purchases, and network with key businesses and leaders in the industry. Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series The Southern All Star Dirt Racing Series will start its 34th season of dirt late model racing across the southern United States with 22 events already booked and several more tracks in negotiations with the series for events in 2017. SPORTALITY Corporation SPORTALITY, celebrating 20 years of providing individuals and corporations with travel and trackside hospitality packages for the F1 race in Montreal. Enjoy the race weekend in our Legends Club Hospitality Suite with our featured guest speaker, the 2-time F1 World Champion “Emerson Fittipaldi”. Visit www.sportalitygp.com for complete details. Super Cup Stock Car Series The Super Cup Stock Car Series was formed in late 2007 as an affordable alternative to existing full-bodied stock car racing tours, offering a fun and laid back atmosphere for competitors, fans, and their families. It’s Racin' the Way It Used To Be! The series, featuring 3,300 lb. 600hp machines, enters its 11th full season of competition with races currently scheduled at pavement short tracks in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia with more locations possible. Multiple generations representing up to 10 states across the eastern part of the country make up the diverse assortment of drivers. SCSCS teams have been showcased in front of a national audience on several occasions. Production of races as part of a renewed partnership with Sopwith Motorsports continue to air on MAVTV and LucasOilRacing.tv. For more information about "Racin' the Way It Used To Be!", please visit www.supercupstockcarseries.com or follow along on Facebook and Twitter. The Jennerstown Speedway Complex Located in the scenic Laurel Highlands of Western PA, the Jennerstown Speedway Complex is one of the country's premier asphalt racing ovals. The fast .522 oval is also one of the oldest racing facilities in the country, dating back to the late '20s. The Jennerstown Speedway operates weekly from the month of May through September, with a weekly five-division racing program along with touring series such as the Must See Racing Sprints and the Super Cup Stock Car Series. The speedway also hosts the All Star Monster Truck Tour. For affordable family fun, please visit www.jennerstown.org. The Outlaw Truck and Tractor Pulling Association The Outlaw Truck and Tractor Pulling Association(OTTPA) was formed in Springfield, Missouri, in 1982. OTTPA is the premier pulling association in the Midwest sanctioning over 65 sessions of pulling in 50 cities and towns from Texas to South Dakota. With 14 classes offered and 250 plus competiting vehicles, OTTPA offers the best in truck and tractor pulling to promoters in the Midwest. The 350 OTTPA competitors from 17 different states are competing for over $1.7 million in prize money on the OTTPA "Thunder In The Dirt Summer Tour". OTTPA has become the choice of the promoters in the Midwest for its fast and exciting events. In 2012 OTTPA purchased a 12 x 16 ft. big scree to enhance OTTPA's events and showcase sponsors. It does instant replays, slow motion, puller profiles and a leader board. This has only increased the entertainment value of the OTTPA events. On October 3, 2014, OTTPA started a 30 minute weekly show on Velocity Channel that aired every Friday at 2:30 P.M. central time for the remainder of 2014. Starting in July of 2015, OTTPA has a 30 minute weekly show on NBC Sports, airing for 9 months, starting again in Fall of 2016. OTTPA is dedicated to bringing the most heart pounding, fast paced and exciting show possible. OTTPA is the most powerful sport in the Motorsports Industry and is continuing to grow in events and audience annually. The United States Modified Touring Series (USMTS) The USMTS is the fastest growing and most popular dirt modified touring series in the world. The fast-paced, fan-friendly event format, exciting wheel-to-wheel show and most talented and professional modified drivers on dirt create an enthusiastic and loyal fan base. Enjoying their 21st season of competition in 2019, the USMTS routinely competes in front of capacity crowds and when it comes to modified racing, nobody gets the dirt on the USMTS. Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park (TSMP) is one of the oldest continuously operating racetracks in New England. Opened in 1940, its 5/8 mile paved oval features events including TSMP's four NASCAR divisions and the Whelen Modified Tour. The 1.7 mile road course at TSMP was recently reopened in 2014 and is the host to the annual Vintage Motorsports Festival. TSMP also has a 1/10 mile quarter midget track, a restaurant with catering and banquet facilities, and a first class golf course. Tonya Kay's Pinup Pole Show Classic cars, pinup girls, retro-burlesque and pole champions! A 1955-1965 styled company of cheeky, kustom kulture women and the hot rods they love. Traxxas Monster Truck Tour Powered by the leader in R/C Technology, the TRAXXAS Monster Truck Tour brings your favorite TRAXXAS R/C cars to life at events all over the world. Come witness the destruction of the TRAXXAS Monster Truck Tour; as we bring monster trucks, freestyle motocross, lawn mower racing, demolition derby, tuff trucks and more to an arena or speedway near you! Tucson Dragway Just a few minutes south of Interstate 10, located on the Pima County Fair Grounds, Tucson Dragway is one of the nation’s most active drag racing facilities. Having offered a full and dynamic schedule with nearly 100 events in 2016, Tucson Dragway is excited about continuing its success in 2017 and beyond. Tucson Dragway is proud to be a part of the NHRA Member Track Network and holds events such as The Tucson Dragway Reunion, Import Face-Off, Friday Night Drags, Street Car Rally Nights, Midnight Drags, The Summit Super Series, and Jr. Drag Racing featuring tomorrow’s drag racing stars. UMI Motorsports Park UMI Motorsports Park (UMIMP) is a short course road race track and high performance vehicle test center situated in beautiful Clearfield County, PA. UMIMP is attracting racers from across the United States and Canada and has become a must-attend facility for the Pro-Touring crowd. Featuring a unique, spectator friendly auto-x and road race layout, UMIMP is perfect for the racer looking to explore the handling limits of their corner carving machine in a safe, fast environment. In addition to hosting auto-x and road race events, our facility is set up for½ mile paved oval racing and other outdoor entertainment events. UMI Performance’s vision for UMI Motorsports Park is to create a family friendly motorsports entertainment complex featuring multiple high-energy yearly events and drawing spectators and guests from across the country. UMI Performance also uses UMIMP to test and perfect our ‘Made in Pennsylvania, USA’ line of high performance suspension component United States Motorsports Association The United States Motorsports Association (USMA) is a 501(c)4 nonprofit organization that exists to promote the powerful economic benefits of grassroots racing across America. The USMA is mobilizing racers, participants, industry, and fans to take action and voice the benefits of racing. The USMA actively engages elected officials through racing events and political rally's and conducts public and private research of value to the racing industry, government agencies and public officials. Virginia Motor Speedway Virginia Motor Speedway is one of the nation’s premier dirt track facilities in the country featuring a half-mile clay track with 14 degree banking in both corners and 4 degrees on the front and back stretch, Virginia Motor Speedway runs on select Saturday nights from April through the first week of October. The track offers plenty of thrills for newcomers and longtime fans alike. Western Drag Racing League The WDRL was formed in 2015 to organize the fastest Door Car Drag Racing in Western Canada into a positive, fun organization. The WDRL features Belair Power Pro Modified and RH Race Cars Top Sportsman 1/4 mile drag racing, as well as the WDRL Heads Up series, including Outlaw 10.5, Outlaw 275 and Outlaw 8.5 for the best in heads up 1/8 mile drag racing, and Open Comp for fast and fun 1/4 mile handicap racing. The WDRL works closely with Track Operators, Racing Teams, Marketing Partners and the Fans, for a great racing experience at each Track the organization has an event. The Goal of the WDRL is to provide a great experience for the Fast Door Car drag racing teams, Sponsor Partners and Fans along with helping the race tracks provide an awesome fan experience World Racing League World Racing League is America’s premier amateur endurance racing series, created to offer a pro-level racing experience on an amateur racer’s budget. World Racing League (WRL) is a "club level" series where motorsports enthusiast can campaign virtually any car from any racing series in real endurance races lasting 8 to 24 hours, and enjoy all of the challenges and strategy involved. WRL is what road racing should be – safe, affordable and enjoyable, without fat, convoluted rule book to navigate. There are no penalty laps or club politics, and no one gets penalized in the middle of a race for being too fast. It really is this simple: You bring a car that meets WRL safety rules, we class it with cars of equal performance potential, and your team spends a fun-filled weekend trying to out-drive, out-strategize and outlast the other teams in your class.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2410
__label__cc	0.613618	0.386382	52005DC0666 Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and Thhe Committee of the Regions - Taking sustainable use of resources forward - A Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste {SEC(2005) 1681} {SEC(2005) 1682} /* COM/2005/0666 final */ [pic] \| COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES \| COM(2005) 666 final COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THHE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS Taking sustainable use of resources forward: A Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste {SEC(2005) 1681}{SEC(2005) 1682} 2. The current situation 4 3. Aims of an evolving EU policy on waste 6 4. Action 6 5. What will be the impact of the proposed changes? 8 6. The international situation 11 7. Monitoring and evaluation 12 8. Review process 12 ANNEX I: Main actions 13 ANNEX II: Legislative Financial Statement 13 Taking sustainable use of resources forward: A Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste (Text with EEA relevance) Waste is an environmental, social and economic challenge for Europeans. For some, it conjures up negative images: rubbish bags, litter and toxic waste dumps. For others, waste is an opportunity – Europe’s drive to deal with waste in environmentally sound ways has generated jobs and business opportunities. The waste management and recycling sector has a high growth rate and has an estimated turnover of over €100 billion for EU-25. It is labour-intensive and provides between 1.2 and 1.5 million jobs. The recycling industry is providing increasing amounts of resources to manufacturing industry: at least 50% of the paper and steel, 43% of the glass and 40% of the non-ferrous metal produced in the EU are currently derived from recycled materials. In the last 30 years waste has been at the centre of EU environment policy and substantial progress has been made. Heavily polluting landfills and incinerators are being cleaned up. New techniques have been developed for the treatment of hazardous waste. Hazardous substances are being removed from vehicles and electrical and electronic equipment. The levels of dioxins and other emissions from incineration are being reduced. With time, waste is increasingly seen as a valuable resource for industry. Approaches such as re-use, recycling and energy recovery are starting to be applied to regulated wastes - packaging waste, end-of-life vehicles, waste electrical and electronic equipment, biodegradable waste and tyres. Diversion of biodegradable waste from landfills and increasing recycling and recovery are contributing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, despite these successes, waste remains a problem. Waste volumes continue to grow. Legislation is, in some cases, poorly implemented and there are significant differences between national approaches. The potential for waste prevention and recycling is not yet fully tapped. The emerging knowledge about the environmental impact of resource use is not yet fully reflected in waste policy. The unsustainable trends in waste generation and the policy issues are causes for concern because the generation of waste can be a symptom of environmentally inefficient use of resources. Furthermore, waste management generates emissions to air, water and soil as well as noise and other nuisances which contribute to environmental problems and cause economic costs. In addition, EU waste law often remains unclear despite Court jurisprudence and has been the subject of considerable litigation on its interpretation. This results in regulatory overlaps and uncertainty for competent authorities and the waste industry and may impede necessary investments. Taking all this into consideration, it is time to analyse and assess EU waste policy, with a view to setting the strategic framework for the future. As prescribed in the Sixth Environment Action Programme (EAP), this strategy sets objectives and outlines the means by which the EU can move towards improved waste management. In the process, it substantially simplifies and clarifies the current legal framework, in line with the EU’s better regulation objectives. Waste has been identified as a priority area for the simplification of Community legislation [COM(2005) 535]. This Strategy spells out the initial steps that this first revision exercise has shown to be necessary and lays down the approach the Commission will take to achieve better regulation in EU waste law. Finally, the Strategy builds on existing legislation and extensive stakeholder consultation, and identifies full and effective implementation by Member States as a condition for making progress towards the goals set in this strategy. 2. THE CURRENT SITUATION At present in the EU municipal waste is disposed of through landfill (49%), incineration (18%), recycling and composting (33%). In the new Member States, where major efforts and investments have been made to align with the EU acquis , the situation is evolving rapidly but still dominated by landfill. There are wide discrepancies between Member States, ranging from those which recycle least (90% landfill, 10% recycling and energy recovery) to those which are more environmentally friendly (10% landfill, 25% energy recovery and 65% recycling). Current EU waste policy is based on a concept known as the waste hierarchy. This means that, ideally, waste should be prevented and what cannot be prevented should be re-used, recycled and recovered as much as feasible, with landfill being used as little as possible. Landfill is the worst option for the environment as it signifies a loss of resources and could turn into a future environmental liability. The waste hierarchy should not be seen as a hard-and-fast rule, particularly since different waste treatment methods can have different environmental impact. However, the aim of moving towards a recycling and recovery society means moving up the hierarchy, away from landfill and more and more to recycling and recovery. The legal framework[1] underpinning this strategic approach includes horizontal legislation on waste management, e.g. the Waste Framework Directive, the Hazardous Waste Directive, as well as the Waste Shipment Regulation. These are complemented by more detailed legislation concerning waste treatment and disposal operations, such as the Landfill and Incineration Directives, and legislation to regulate the management of specific waste streams (waste oils, PCBs/PCTs and batteries). Recycling and recovery targets have been set for some key waste flows, i.e. packaging, end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) and waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). See Annex III contained in the Commission Staff Document SEC(2005) 1682 for a chart setting out the relevant legislation. Despite the considerable progress which has been made, overall waste volumes are growing and the absolute amount of waste going into landfill is not decreasing. Between 1990 and 1995 total waste generation in the EU and EFTA increased by 10% whilst GDP increased by 6.5%. Municipal solid waste (MSW) generation has been contributing significantly to this increase and is coupled to the level of economic activity as both MSW generation and GDP in EU-25 increased by 19% between 1995 and 2003. Smaller but important waste streams are also growing: hazardous waste generation increased by 13% between 1998 and 2002 whilst GDP grew by 10%. With higher levels of economic growth anticipated, overall volume growth is predicted to continue and will concern most wastes. For example, the European Environment Agency predicts that paper/board, glass and plastic waste will increase by 40% by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. The OECD predicts that MSW generation will continue to grow until 2020 but at a slightly slower rate. The Joint Research Centre predicts an increase in MSW generation of 42.5% by 2020 compared to 1995 levels. Relatively faster MSW growth is predicted in the new EU-10 Member States. While recycling and incineration are increasing, the absolute amounts of waste landfilled are not decreasing because of the growth in waste generation. For example, the amount of plastic waste going to landfill increased by 21.7% between 1990 and 2002 yet the percentage of plastic waste being landfilled dropped from 77% to 62%. These unsustainable trends are due in part to unsatisfactory implementation of waste laws which, in turn, is due in part to certain elements of the policy and legal framework that could be improved. There are a number of implementation problems, ranging from dumping of waste at mismanaged landfills to shipments of hazardous waste in violation of international conventions. Unclear definitions and differing views on how to implement the laws have not helped to improve implementation and have resulted in litigation. Despite rulings by the European Court of Justice, certain aspects, such as when waste ceases to be waste, are still not clear. Although waste prevention has been the paramount objective of both national and EU waste management policies for many years, limited progress has been made so far in transforming this objective into practical action. Neither the Community nor the national targets set in the past have been satisfactorily met. Recycling and recovery are increasing. However, they cover only a limited proportion of waste. Recycling Directives have so far targeted individual waste streams and have enabled Community waste policy to reduce environmental impact by promoting source separation and recycling of waste streams such as batteries, packaging, vehicles and waste electrical and electronic equipment. These fast-growing waste flows are of particular importance due to their hazardous nature and complexity. However, they account for only a limited proportion of all waste generated. Furthermore, while the amount of waste being recycled is increasing, treatment standards exist only for landfills and incinerators and, partially, for recycling. This poses an environmental problem as some recycling facilities can cause pollution if badly operated. Standards are needed not only for environmental protection but also for business reasons – to promote a level playing field for recycled material. Against this background, preparations for this Thematic Strategy involved a major review of the existing situation and identification of problems and issues. This has led to the proposals set out below for a more comprehensive approach to waste prevention and recycling. 3. AIMS OF AN EVOLVING EU POLICY ON WASTE EU waste policy has the potential to contribute to reducing the overall negative environmental impact of resource use. Preventing waste generation and promoting recycling and recovery of waste will increase the resource efficiency of the European economy and reduce the negative environmental impact of use of natural resources. This will contribute to maintaining the resource base, essential for sustained economic growth. The basic objectives of current EU waste policy – to prevent waste and promote re-use, recycling and recovery so as to reduce the negative environmental impact – are still valid and will be supported by this impact-based approach . The long-term goal is for the EU to become a recycling society, that seeks to avoid waste and uses waste as a resource. With high environmental reference standards in place the internal market will facilitate recycling and recovery activities. 4. ACTION In order to achieve these objectives and, hence, secure a higher level of environmental protection, the proposal is to modernise the existing legal framework – i.e. to introduce life-cycle analysis in policymaking and to clarify, simplify and streamline EU waste law. This will contribute to resolving current implementation problems and move the EU decisively onto the path of becoming an economically and environmentally efficient recycling society. The current level of environmental ambition will be maintained and enhanced while providing the basis for sustained growth. This requires a combination of measures promoting waste prevention, recycling and re-use in such a way as to produce the optimum reduction in the accumulated impact over the life cycle of resources, including: - A renewed emphasis on full implementation of existing legislation . There are different problems with implementation across the Member States, varying from the continued existence of illegal landfills in several Member States to differences of interpretation in others. Part of this strategy is designed to remove ambiguities, resolve disputed interpretations and amend legislation which has not brought the expected environmental benefits. The Commission will use the Waste Management Committee as a forum for exchange of information and best practice and also for bringing to light difficulties with implementation. It will continue to take legal action to ensure equal enforcement of the acquis across all Member States. - Simplification and modernisation of existing legislation where experience has shown that this is necessary to reduce administrative burden while maintaining the level of environmental protection, in line with the objectives of better regulation. This will result in more cost-effective waste legislation and will involve several actions. Firstly, an amendment of the Waste Framework Directive merging it with the Hazardous Waste Directives, introducing life cycle thinking, clarifying when waste ceases to be waste and the definitions of recovery and disposal, introducing a definition of recycling, and solving overlaps between different pieces of waste and other environmental legislation. Secondly, the repeal of the Waste Oils Directive and the transfer of its provisions on collection of waste oils in the Waste Framework Directive. Thirdly, a proposal in 2006, to consolidate the three Directives on waste from the titanium dioxide industry. Fourthly, beyond the proposals adopted together with this Strategy, in the context of a continuous and systematic review of EU waste legislation, the Commission will assess the need for additional steps taking the better regulation and simplification objectives further, in line with the time line planned in Communication COM(2005) 535. This shall inter alia include the upcoming reviews required by waste directives, such as the 2006 review of the Directive on end-of-life vehicles and the 2008 review of the Directive on waste electric and electronic equipment, and a review of the system of waste nomenclature. Finally, with the common standards proposed by this Strategy in place, there will be new opportunities to create a simplified regulatory regime for the shipment of waste that further encourages recycling and recovery of waste. - Introduction of life-cycle thinking into waste policy. Environmental policy traditionally focused on the early and the final phases of the life cycle: extraction, processing and manufacturing at one end and waste management at the other. It is now recognised that the environmental impact of many resources is often linked to the use phase[2]. All phases in a resource’s life cycle need to be taken into account as there can be trade-offs between different phases and measures adopted to reduce environmental impact in one phase can increase the impact in another. Clearly, environmental policy needs to ensure that negative environmental impact is minimised throughout the entire life cycle of resources. By applying the life-cycle approach, priorities can be identified more easily and policies can be targeted more effectively so that the maximum benefit for the environment is achieved relative to the effort expended. The life-cycle approach will be incorporated in EU legislation by clarifying the objectives of the Waste Framework Directive so that they explicitly consider the life-cycle perspective. This will have significant consequences for framing new policy and for waste management principles and practices in the future. The recent review of recycling and recovery targets for packaging waste materials was the first example of using life-cycle thinking for policymaking. New targets are set for each material concerned by analysing the environmental and economic impact throughout the life cycle of the material. The review of the management of waste oil is another area in which life-cycle thinking was applied. - Promotion of more ambitious waste prevention policies by clarifying Member States’ obligations to develop publicly available waste prevention programmes. At EU level the Commission will promote the use of the IPPC Directive, IPP and other tools to encourage the spread of best practice. - Better knowledge and information which will underpin the continued development of waste prevention policy. - Development of common reference standards for recycling. In order to ensure the proper functioning of the internal market for recycling, the proposal is to set minimum standards across the Community for recycling activities and recycled materials so as to ensure a high level of environmental protection and to prevent the threat of “eco-dumping”. This approach will be based on amendments to the Waste Framework Directive and to the IPPC Directive. This approach will be applied to biowaste as a priority. - Further elaboration of the EU’s recycling policy. Building on the implementation of existing EU waste legislation, new ways to foster recycling will be sought. A detailed analysis of the long-term feasibility and viability of a material-specific approach will be undertaken. Member States will also be encouraged to make more use of economic instruments and to exchange experience/best practice through improved coordination in the Waste Management Committee. The action and changes proposed are explained in greater detail in Annex I which also gives an indicative timetable for presentation of the various proposals to implement the Thematic Strategy. 5. WHAT WILL BE THE IMPACT OF THE PROPOSED CHANGES? This Thematic Strategy is expected to have implications for current practices in the Member States and to create new opportunities for waste management options other than landfill, thereby encouraging a general move up the waste hierarchy. These are summarised below (for more detail see the Impact Assessment which accompanies this strategy). Less waste to landfill The action taken under the Thematic Strategy will contribute to continuing to move waste flows away from landfill. The stronger focus on implementation and on the promotion of economic instruments will help to bring landfill prices up to a level which better reflects the real environmental impact of this waste management option, with the result that less waste should go to landfill. But, as that waste management option is still the default solution in many Member States, moving away from landfill will take time. Furthermore, for some types of waste, landfill might remain the only viable option. The new Member States will need time to build up alternative infrastructure and to deal with the legacy of the past. The amounts of waste going to landfill in the EU will be reviewed in 2010. If the amounts and types of wastes being landfilled remain unacceptable, and the move away from landfill is not progressing quickly enough, further landfill bans will be envisaged. More compost and energy recovery from waste As waste moves away from landfill it will be channelled into a variety of options higher up the waste hierarchy, all of which will be better for the environment. The development of quality benchmarks for composting facilities and for compost will increase the prospects for composting. Where energy is recovered from waste the Strategy will increase energy efficiency. The Commission proposes to start introducing the use of efficiency thresholds to classify waste treatment in municipal incinerators either as recovery or disposal. This will also help the EU meet its targets under the Directive on the promotion of electricity produced from renewable energy sources. It is for individual Member States to decide which option is the environmentally best option in given circumstances. More and better recycling The next five years will be a key period in terms of implementation of the Recycling Directives. By setting minimum quality standards for some recycling facilities, a significant improvement is expected, moving from the current situation where only 8 to 10% of wastes are covered by minimum quality standards to a situation where a substantial part of waste for recycling is covered. This coverage will be adapted in proportion to the environmental risk. This will ensure that as recycling increasingly becomes the preferred option for waste, the environmental impact of the option is controlled and the market conditions to allow recycling to continue its current pace of growth are created. Quality standards for recycling will stimulate demand for and acceptability of recycled materials. This will then pull waste flows towards recycling and re-use. In addition, an improved internal market for recycling based on EU standards will allow recycling to take place where it is most efficient. This will reduce costs and thereby further facilitate recycling and re-use. Recycling of a number of materials is currently working well, with high market prices driving growth in recycling rates. For example, utilisation of waste paper for the production of new paper has doubled between 1991 (25%) and 2004 (50%). For other materials, obstacles appear to be preventing full development of the recycling market, and work is underway to remove them. The situation will be reviewed in 2010. If recycling of materials that would lead to an environmental benefit is not taking place, further action can be taken focussing on materials, using the policy tool that is most appropriate (economic instrument, producer responsibility, landfill ban, collection or recycling target). Key benefits and positive impacts These efforts have the potential to improve the cost-effectiveness of EU waste policy and to deliver significant environmental and social benefits: - waste policy will become more focused on environmental impact, thereby becoming more efficient and cost-effective; - the regulatory environment of waste management activities will be improved, leading to decreased costs and reduced barriers for waste recycling and recovery activities; - waste prevention policies will be implemented at national level, ensuring the highest environmental and economic efficiency and promoting action closest to the point of generation of the waste; - increases in waste recovery will reduce emissions from waste disposal and result in environmental benefits such as reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. These positive impacts can be illustrated by the following quantified examples: - further diversion of municipal waste from landfill to composting, recycling and energy recovery could produce additional reductions in greenhouse gas emissions ranging from 40 to over 100 Mt CO2 equivalent per year; - clarifying when wastes cease to be waste could reduce part of the administrative costs related to waste legislation. For example, the aggregates recycling sector estimates these costs at roughly 1% of turnover; - increased recycling creates jobs: recycling 10 000 tonnes of waste need up to 250 jobs compared with 20 to 40 jobs needed if the waste is incinerated and about 10 for landfill. Taking into account reduced job creation in the extraction and production of virgin materials this should result in a limited net creation of jobs. 6. THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION Most developed economies and many developing countries are pursuing the objective of improving waste management. Countries with less developed waste management systems usually aim at improving basic waste management practices, especially as regards landfilling of municipal waste and management of hazardous waste. Countries with more mature waste management systems seek to prevent waste generation and to increase recycling and recovery of waste. The most important initiatives taken at international level are the Convention on the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal (the Basel Convention) and the OECD work on controlling shipments of waste and developing internationally agreed benchmarks for environmentally sound management of waste. This aims inter alia at reinforcing institutional and non-institutional capacities in waste management in developing countries. The EU is contributing to the creation of a control system at international level through its policies an in particular by its waste shipment regulation that aims at ensuring a high level of environmental protection. Recently, at the instigation of Japan, the G8 started work on reducing, re-using and recycling waste. Examples of policies developed by other industrial countries: - Japan has extensive legislation related to waste and other sustainable production and consumption policies under the “3Rs - reducing, re-using and recycling” umbrella. These include laws setting targets for general waste prevention, waste recycling and avoidance of final disposal. Japan aims to recycle 24% of municipal waste and to limit final disposal of waste to 50%. In addition to these targets, Japan has developed a number of recycling laws, some mirroring the objectives of the EU Recycling Directives (on packaging, WEEE and ELV), others on issues not covered by legislation in the EU (construction materials and food). At local level, some local governments set waste treatment fees and levy taxes on landfilled industrial wastes. - The USA has developed policies at Federal and State levels. The Federal government has set a long-term indicative target of a national recycling rate of 35% of municipal waste and is supporting this through a number of mainly voluntary programmes. This includes efforts to foster smart design and reduce the environmental impact of products. Several individual States have developed legislation restricting landfill and promoting the recycling of various waste flows, including legislation mirroring the objectives of the EU Recycling Directives (on packaging and WEEE). Attention is also given to the high level of municipal waste generation. - China has enacted a number of laws that relate to waste management. In particular, these are pursuing the objective of promoting “the circular economy”. Currently, China is developing medium-term and long-term plans for the development of this concept. There is also growing demand in China for recyclable materials. This has recently exerted pressure on the markets for these materials and is predicted to intensify in the future. 7. MONITORING AND EVALUATION The strategy will be monitored on an ongoing basis. This will require a continuous effort to improve statistics on landfill and recycling and to build a stronger knowledge base relative to environment impact and impact indicators. Assessment of national waste policies, analysis of Member States’ implementation reports and continued consultation of stakeholders will contribute to this. 8. REVIEW PROCESS The Commission will review the progress made towards achieving the strategy’s objective in 2010. This review will, in particular, assess progress on waste prevention policies, on applying life-cycle thinking to waste management – including management of biowaste – and towards a European recycling society and will feed into the final evaluation of the Sixth EAP. ANNEX I: Main actions 1. SIMPLIFICATION AND MODERNISATION OF EXISTING LEGISLATION The definition of waste The Waste Framework Directive defines waste as products or materials that are discarded. In the light of extensive stakeholder consultation the Commission has concluded that there is no need substantively to amend the definition of waste, but that it is necessary to clarify when a waste ceases to be a waste (and becomes a new or secondary raw material). Therefore, an amendment to the Directive is proposed which would establish waste-stream-based environmental criteria to determine when a waste ceases to be a waste. This could both improve the environmental performance of recycled products, by encouraging businesses to produce recycled products that conform to these environmental criteria, and reduce unnecessary burdens for low-risk recycling activities. Additionally, the Commission will publish a Commission Communication containing guidelines, based on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and addressing the issues of by-products in relevant industry sectors, on when by-products should or should not be considered as waste in order to clarify the legal situation for economic operators and competent authorities. Within the review of this strategy in 2010, the Commission will assess the effectiveness of the guidelines. The current definition of waste sets no clear boundaries for when a waste has been adequately treated and should be considered a product. This is problematic, as it creates legal uncertainty and administrative costs for businesses and competent authorities. It can lead to diverging views from Member State to Member State and even from region to region, which creates problems for the internal market. On top of this, poor-quality recycled material circulates on the market, generating difficulties both for potential purchasers and also for reputable sellers. Discussions with stakeholders and with the Member States as well as analysis by the Commission have revealed that a relatively small number of waste streams are concerned by this issue. This means that it is possible to select those waste streams for which criteria need to be set on the basis of potential environmental and economic benefit. The first wave of waste flows to be addressed by this system will include compost, recycled aggregates, and subject to the outcome of an ongoing study on environmental impacts, the use of tallow as a fuel. The Commission proposes to take a two-step approach to this issue: firstly, to establish in the Waste Framework Directive the procedure for adoption of the criteria and, secondly, to propose specific waste streams for this system, selected on the basis of environmental and economic benefit. The Commission will conduct studies and stakeholder consultations before coming forward with a proposal. This approach should result in: - improved environmental performance of recycled products as economic operators seek to attain the level required for their recycled product no longer to be considered a waste; - greater certainty and predictability for purchasers of recycled products or materials; - regulatory simplification for low-risk wastes used as secondary materials. One precondition for implementation of this approach will be to set environmental criteria at a high level to reduce environmental risk. In addition to environmental criteria, it will also be necessary to set fitness-for-use criteria to ensure that the recycled products can find a viable market. Such fitness-for-use criteria could be derived from existing CEN standards or other similar sources. A range of factors will be considered in the selection of waste streams and development of criteria. Notably, these include the risk that the recycled product could be used in an inappropriate way, or transported outside the EU for sham use, or otherwise have an environmental impact which classification as waste would have prevented. Another factor is the existence of a viable market for the recycled product in question. The Commission will weigh up these factors when proposing waste streams and criteria. The definition of recovery and disposal activities The main present problem with the definitions of recovery and disposal in the Waste Framework Directive is that they are used for different purposes. In the Recycling Directives they are used to set targets and in the Waste Shipment Regulation they are used to determine whether the internal market rules apply to shipments of waste. Ideally they would only be used for setting targets and a simpler system would be used for shipments of waste. However, because of gaps in existing European waste management standards and because of the need for waste management structures and policies to adapt, it is too early for such a change to the waste legislation. The definitions contained in the present legislation, as interpreted by the European Court of Justice, do not promote best environmental practice, for example as regards recovering energy from waste in municipal incinerators. The Commission considers that further definition is required and is therefore proposing an amendment to the Waste Framework Directive which will base the definition of recovery on the concept of substitution of resources in the economy as opposed to in the specific plant. In addition, the amendment will make it possible to deal with the environmental issues raised by new technologies and practices case by case through a committee procedure. The Commission proposes to start introducing the use of efficiency thresholds to classify waste treatment in municipal incinerators either as recovery or as disposal. Current jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice classifies the overwhelming majority of municipal incinerators as disposal facilities. This classification could have negative implications, leading to a degradation of the environment. For example, incineration with energy recovery is usually considered a means of diverting biodegradable municipal waste from landfills. However, there are concerns that if incineration is defined in the same category as landfilling, some local authorities could be tempted to choose the cheapest option (landfilling), which will in turn degrade the environment. Additionally, municipal incinerators with high energy efficiency are negatively discriminated against compared with co-incineration operations with similar energy efficiencies but less stringent emission controls. A definition of recovery that takes into account that energy produced by a municipal incinerator substitutes the use of resources in other power plants will better reflect the environmental benefits of incineration. However, the energy efficiency of municipal incinerators can vary dramatically. At low energy efficiencies incineration might not be more favourable than landfill. At high energy efficiency incineration could be as favourable as mechanical recycling or composting of certain waste flows. The Impact Assessment shows that application of an energy efficiency threshold for municipal incinerators could generate both economic and environmental benefits. Setting the level of the threshold by reference to the performance of a BAT (best available techniques) plant would facilitate achievement of the targets for diversion from landfill. The Commission is proposing an amendment to the Waste Framework Directive to include an energy efficiency threshold above which municipal incineration is considered a recovery operation. The threshold takes BAT as guidance and takes into account the recommendation in the BREF (BAT reference document) on waste incineration to use an equivalence factor of 2.6 to compare energy in the form of electricity to energy in the form of heat, i.e. 1 kWh of electricity is equivalent to 2.6 kWh of heat, and a factor of 1.1 for district heating. This proposal will promote diversion from landfills and the use of BAT for recovering energy from waste burned in municipal incinerators. It will also allow continuous improvement of the environmental performance of such energy recovery as the efficiency threshold will be regularly reviewed to reflect technological progress. This clarification of definitions should facilitate the functioning of an internal market for recycling applying high environmental standards. At the same time, it is necessary to continue to review the situation. Another example of the type of issues this system will be able to address are the cases in which use of waste materials to build landfills may be considered a recovery operation. The definition of recycling A definition of recycling needs to be introduced in the Waste Framework Directive to serve as guidance in defining recycling policies and targets. Other simplification measures With a view to better regulation: - overlaps between the permit procedures set up in the Waste Framework Directive and the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive will be removed by indicating that if an IPPC permit is held, no additional waste permit is necessary; - Directive 91/689/EEC on hazardous waste will be merged with the Waste Framework Directive with a view to clarifying and removing overlaps and obsolete provisions; - the Commission will propose in 2006 a consolidation of the three Directives on waste from the titanium dioxide industry, modernising the provisions and removing any obsolete provisions The Commission will take account of better regulation in the reviews of waste directives provided for in EU waste legislation, e.g. as regards the incineration, ELV, landfill, WEEE and RoHS directives, and, in the context of a systematic review of EU legislation on waste, propose amendments to existing EU legislation, as appropriate. 2. INTRODUCING LIFE-CYCLE THINKING IN WASTE POLICY The environmental benefits of waste policy are complex because they occur at different stages of the life cycle and in different forms and can consequently be difficult to quantify or compare. But, clearly, waste policy needs to contribute to minimising environmental impact throughout the entire life cycle of resources. In many cases this just means using common sense to look at the wider picture, but sometimes it could mean using assessment tools such as life-cycle assessments. The Commission proposes to clarify the objectives of waste policy under the Waste Framework Directive in order explicitly to apply life-cycle thinking. EU waste policy should aim to reduce the negative environmental impact of waste generation and management and to contribute to an overall reduction of the environmental impact of the use of resources. 3. IMPROVING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE Life-cycle thinking requires an improved knowledge base on the impact of resource use, waste generation and management and more systematic forecasting and modelling. This will be provided mainly through the mechanism described in the Thematic Strategy on resources and through initiatives taken in the context of Integrated Product Policy. Beyond this, the European Environment Agency, Eurostat and the Joint Research Centre will all continue to play a role in building a robust scientific and economic information base for waste policy. Another important step will be to define, in consultation with the scientific and stakeholder community, basic guidelines to make life-cycle tools easily usable in waste policymaking, with an agreed approach and methodology. The aim is to make these tools easier to use in policy decisions from local to European level. 4. WASTE PREVENTION The potential for waste prevention depends on a number of factors - economic growth, the extent to which economic operators have already adopted best practice in reducing waste, etc. Prevention can only be achieved by influencing practical decisions taken at various stages of the life cycle: how a product is designed, manufactured, made available to the consumer and finally used. Production of municipal waste is also affected by consumer behaviour which is related to the social structure, personal income and societal wealth. This strategy does not prescribe EU waste prevention targets as this would not be the most effective and eco-efficient way to foster waste prevention. This is because such targets fail to address the complexity of environmental impact: the weight of waste could be reduced yet the environmental impact could increase, whereas small weight reductions can bring large reductions in environmental impact. In addition, prevention policies should take into account national production and consumption patterns, their projected trends and their relation to economic growth. This strategy prescribes a coordinated approach to waste prevention which will focus prevention policies on reducing environmental impact and set a framework for specific national policies. Action on waste prevention needs to be taken at all levels of governance. At European level, the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive and Integrated Product Policy can make a major contribution to waste prevention. Best available technique reference documents (BREFs) developed under the IPPC provide useful information on waste prevention. These aspects of BREFs should be reinforced and Member States, industry and other stakeholders should exchange information on best practice on a more regular basis. Finally, the Commission intends to revisit the issue of developing a framework for eco-design initiatives in the framework of Integrated Product Policy. Most prevention measures, however, will have to be taken at national, regional or local level. This could include waste prevention targets. The Waste Framework Directive will be amended to clarify the obligation for Member States to develop publicly available waste prevention programmes, in the context of sustainable production and consumption. 5. TOWARDS A EUROPEAN RECYCLING SOCIETY As resources placed on the market are bound, sooner or later, to become waste and any productive activity generates some form of waste, measures to put waste back in the economic cycle are necessary. The recycling sector needs a regulatory environment that encourages recycling activities. The current trend is towards increasing controls and restrictions on shipments of waste on the internal market. This will not significantly improve the environmental situation and could lead to detailed legislation and micro-management of waste at national or regional level. This could potentially reduce availability of recyclable waste for the EU industry, especially in small Member States. To counter this trend a level playing field is needed for recycling activities throughout the EU. Recycling itself needs to be environmentally sound and this requires the introduction of standards. While in certain cases market forces have fostered the development of recycling, market signals tend to push waste towards disposal. There is therefore a need for incentives for waste recycling and recovery. Economic instruments and national landfill taxes have high potential in this regard. A level playing field for recycling Building an internal market for recycling applying high environmental standards would have the advantage of spreading good practice across the whole of the EU and would also assist the recycling industry by allowing it to benefit from the internal market. A number of measures will complement existing legislation and enable the EU to fill the waste standards gap. They include: - introducing efficiency criteria for selected recovery processes under the Waste Framework Directive and developing guidelines for the application of certain provisions of the Waste Shipment Regulation to combat sham recovery; - spreading good practice through minimum standards in the Waste Framework Directive for relevant recovery processes and future extension of the scope of the IPPC Directive to selected waste management activities; - adding a new provision to the Waste Framework Directive to allow the adoption of environmental criteria for specific waste flows in order to specify when they no longer fall under the scope of waste legislation but are to be considered products instead. Improved exchange of information on national disposal taxes There is broad consensus that disposal taxes are cost-effective and can dramatically improve waste management. Moreover, large differences in disposal taxes between Member States could lead to unnecessary shipments of waste and affect competition between waste management operators in different Member States. As the prospect of reaching agreement on action at EU level in this area is limited, a first step would be to encourage the Member States to use this type of economic instrument at national level. The Commission encourages Member States to exchange information on their approaches to disposal taxes while keeping the Commission fully informed. New ways to foster recycling Recycling Directives adopted over the last decade are facilitating the setting-up and financing of recycling infrastructure for large waste streams. However, it is difficult to justify application of this approach to a new range of waste streams. For smaller waste streams or waste streams with less environmental impact, such an approach could create heavy administrative burdens compared to the environmental benefit obtained. However, if organisation and promotion of recycling for all waste streams is left to the market it will not be possible to reap the full environmental benefits that recycling can deliver. While the present priority is to ensure complete implementation of the EU Recycling Directives, what is needed for the future is a complementary approach that is both more flexible and broader in its coverage. The review of this strategy will assess the need for further measures to promote recycling. In particular, it will consider moving towards a more material-based approach, possibly using producer responsibility. This would involve assessing whether the market is likely to drive the development of recycling of a given material adequately on its own or if measures are needed to overcome obstacles to recycling. In this context, a wide range of measures could be considered, and life-cycle thinking will contribute to ensuring that the environmental benefits of recycling are achieved at the lowest cost possible. Recycling targets Recycling and recovery targets are used in several EU Waste Directives. The recent revision of the recycling and recovery targets contained in the Directive on packaging and packaging waste has shown the importance of setting targets at the appropriate levels in proportion to the scope of the definition and of taking into account the specifics of each material. Without such an analysis, there is a risk of setting targets that promote processes with little or no environmental benefit or which fail to promote technologies that could deliver sizable environmental benefits but find it difficult to break into the market. Because of these complexities, the level of targets should be fixed taking into account the scope of the definition of recycling for the different materials as has already been the case in the review of the Packaging Directive targets, and should take into account the specific characteristics of each material. Future proposals for new or revised recycling or recovery targets need to optimise the cost-efficiency of recycling and recovery and avoid promoting inappropriate technologies for given materials. Management of biowaste The main negative impact of biowaste occurs when biowaste is landfilled. This produces methane, a greenhouse gas which is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In order to tackle this environmental threat, Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste provides for redirecting two thirds of biodegradable municipal waste away from landfills and requires Member States to establish and regularly review national strategies for management of the waste diverted from landfill. Full implementation of this obligation will make a significant contribution to reducing the environmental impact of biowaste, in particular in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases. However, the Commission’s report on the national strategies concluded that “having analysed the strategies it is unclear whether the landfill reduction targets will be achieved for those Member States where this is not already the case. It looks like additional efforts will be necessary to achieve the targets. The Commission will pay particular attention to the attainment of the target of 2006 and take all appropriate measures to ensure good implementation of the directive”[3]. There is no single environmentally best option for the management of biowaste that is diverted from landfills. The environmental balance of the various options available for management of this waste depends on a number of local factors, inter alia collection systems, waste composition and quality, climatic conditions, impact on climate change, the potential of compost to contribute to fighting soil degradation and other categories of environmental impact. Therefore strategies for management of this waste should be determined by the Member States using life-cycle thinking. The Commission will produce guidelines on applying life-cycle thinking to management of biowaste and will communicate these guidelines to Member States and invite them to revisit their national strategies. These guidelines will also assist local and regional authorities that are generally responsible for drawing up plans for management of municipal waste. Aspects related to waste standards also need to be addressed at EU level. Compost quality criteria will be adopted under the end-of-waste provision proposed for the Waste Framework Directive and the Commission will propose that biological treatment of waste be brought under the scope of the IPPC Directive when it is revised. Council Directive 86/278/EEC on the protection of the environment, and in particular of the soil, when sewage sludge is used in agriculture will be revised with a view to tightening the quality standards under which such use is allowed following the adoption of the Thematic Strategy on soil and the associated measures. The review of the strategy will, in particular, address the progress made on management of biowaste and assess the need for additional measures. Management of waste oils Life-cycle thinking has been applied to the waste oil legislation (Directive 75/439/EEC). This Directive regulates the disposal of waste oils and prescribes waste oil regeneration. The law has not been well implemented, and several cases have been taken to the European Court of Justice which has ruled against five Member States. Recent analysis, using the life-cycle approach, has shown that the priority given to regeneration of waste oils over use as a fuel is not justified by any clear environmental advantage. In addition, waste oil collection rates remain too low. So while improper disposal of waste oils can have substantial negative impacts and should be avoided, the current law is not achieving the desired results. Therefore, it will be repealed and replaced by a new provision in the Waste Framework Directive, which will maintain the obligation for Member States to ensure collection of waste oils but will not give priority to regeneration. This will secure the full implementation by the Member States of the collection obligation that addresses the greatest environmental issue of waste oils. Next steps: Timetable for action implementing the Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste and other measures and activities that will contribute Action proposed and/or planned by the Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste \| Timing \| Proposal for a directive amending the Waste Framework Directive and repealing the Waste Oils Directive \| Proposed together with this strategy \| Report on implementation of Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste \| 2006 \| Review of the targets set under Directive 2000/53/EC on end-of-life vehicles \| 2006 \| Proposal for a directive bringing together in one directive the three Directives on waste from the titanium dioxide industry \| 2006 \| Publication of guidelines, based on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice, on the issue of when by-products should or should not be considered waste \| 2006 \| Publication of guidelines for Member States on applying life-cycle thinking to management of biodegradable waste that is diverted from landfill \| 2006 \| Improving the knowledge base on impact of resource use, waste generation and waste management and more systematic forecasting and modelling \| Starting in 2006 \| Proposal to clarify and extend the scope of the IPPC Directive to additional waste management activities, including biological treatment for recovery of waste and preparation of hazardous waste for incineration and of incineration slags for recovery \| 2007, when the IPPC Directive will be subject to a general review \| Proposal for revision of Council Directive 86/278/EEC on the protection of the environment, and in particular of the soil, when sewage sludge is used in agriculture \| 2007 \| Publication of basic guidelines to make life-cycle tools easily usable in waste policymaking, with an agreed approach and methodology \| 2007 \| Publication of guidelines on certain provisions of the Waste Shipment Regulation to combat sham recovery \| 2007 \| Publication of guidelines on minimum environmental standards for permits of installations that are not covered by the IPPC Directive and on best available techniques for the mixing of hazardous waste \| 2007 \| Assessment of the state of play and of the need for additional measures to stimulate the move to a European recycling society \| 2007 \| Review of the targets under Directive 2002/96/EC on waste electrical and electronic equipment \| 2008 \| Adoption of a first set of quality standards for defining when certain waste flows cease to be waste, starting with compost and recycled aggregates \| 2008 – subject to the entry into force of the revised Waste Framework Directive \| Other measures and activities that will contribute to the Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste \| Market development Several Member States have launched initiatives to develop the waste recycling market, aiming at removing technical and economic obstacles to recycling and at increasing the demand for recycled materials (e.g. development of standards, improving availability of market-relevant information and public procurement). Such approaches appear to have some potential to complement core recycling policies and could be taken on board in national roadmaps for implementation of the Environmental Technology Action Plan. \| Research and technology The Commission will ensure that the European funds available for research and development work on waste technology better tackle the key environmental impacts of waste. \| Best practices The Commission will support the dissemination and transfer of best practices concerning awareness, education and incentive initiatives and systems developed at national, regional and local level. \| State aid The guidelines on state aid for environmental protection will be reviewed. This review will, inter alia, clarify in which cases state aids may be granted to support waste recycling activities. \| In addition, the review of the strategy in 2010 will, if necessary, identify additional measures needed to promote waste prevention and apply life-cycle thinking to waste management and to progress towards a European recycling society. ANNEX II LEGISLATIVE FINANCIAL STATEMENT 1. NAME OF THE PROPOSAL: Thematic Strategy on the prevention and recycling of waste 2. ABM / ABB FRAMEWORK Policy Area: 07 – Environment Activity: 07 04 – Implementation of environment policy 3. BUDGET LINES 3.1. Budget lines (operational lines and related technical and administrative assistance lines (ex- B..A lines)) including headings: 07 01 04 01 - Legislation, awareness-raising and other general actions based on the Community action programmes in the field of the environment - Expenditure on administrative management. 07 04 02 – Awareness raising and other general actions based on the Community action programmes in the field of the environment. 3.2. Duration of the action and of the financial impact: The strategy has a time span of 10 years (2005-2015). The present LFS covers the financial aspects relative to the initial five years (2005-2010). 3.3. Budgetary characteristics : Budget line \| Type of expenditure \| New \| EFTA contribution \| Contributions from applicant countries \| Heading in financial perspective \| 07 04 02 \| Non-comp \| Diff[4] \| NO \| NO \| NO \| No 3 \| 4. SUMMARY OF RESOURCES The needs for human and administrative resources shall be covered within the allocation granted to the managing DG (DG Environment) in the framework of the annual budget procedure. 4.1. Financial Resources 4.1.1. Summary of commitment appropriations (CA) and payment appropriations (PA) EUR million (to 3 decimal places) Expenditure type \| Section no. \| Year 2005 \| 2006 \| 2007 \| 2008 \| 2009 \| 2010 \| Total \| Operational expenditure[5] \| Commitment Appropriations (CA) \| 8.1 \| a \| 0.230 \| 0.380 \| 0.230 \| 0.230 \| 0.080 \| 1.150 \| Payment Appropriations (PA) \| b \| 0.130 \| 0.280 \| 0.330 \| 0.230 \| 0.180 \| 1.150 \| Administrative expenditure within reference amount[6] \| Technical & administrative assistance (NDA) \| 8.2.4 \| c \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| TOTAL REFERENCE AMOUNT \| Commitment Appropriations \| a+c \| 0.230 \| 0.380 \| 0.230 \| 0.230 \| 0.080 \| 1.150 \| Payment Appropriations \| b+c \| 0.130 \| 0.280 \| 0.330 \| 0.230 \| 0.180 \| 1.150 \| Administrative expenditure not included in reference amount[7] \| Human resources and associated expenditure (NDA) \| 8.2.5 \| d \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 2.916 \| Administrative costs, other than human resources and associated costs, not included in reference amount (NDA) \| 8.2.6 \| e \| 0.002 \| 0.088 \| 0.088 \| 0.090 \| 0.086 \| 0.084 \| 0.438 \| Total indicative financial cost of intervention \| TOTAL CA including cost of Human Resources \| a+c+d+e \| 0.488 \| 0.804 \| 0.954 \| 0.806 \| 0.802 \| 0.650 \| 4.504 \| TOTAL PA including cost of Human Resources \| b+c+d+e \| 0.488 \| 0.704 \| 0.854 \| 0.906 \| 0.802 \| 0.750 \| 4.504 \| Co-financing details If the proposal involves co-financing by Member States, or other bodies (please specify which), an estimate of the level of this co-financing should be indicated in the table below (additional lines may be added if different bodies are foreseen for the provision of the co-financing): Co-financing body \| Year n \| n + 1 \| n + 2 \| n + 3 \| n + 4 \| n + 5 \| Total \| …………………… \| f \| TOTAL CA including co-financing \| a+c+d+e+f \| 4.1.2. Compatibility with Financial Programming X Proposal is compatible with existing financial programming. ( Proposal will entail reprogramming of the relevant heading in the financial perspective. ( Proposal may require application of the provisions of the Interinstitutional Agreement[8] (i.e. flexibility instrument or revision of the financial perspective). 4.1.3. Financial impact on Revenue X Proposal has no financial implications on revenue ( Proposal has financial impact – the effect on revenue is as follows: EUR million (to one decimal place) Prior to action [Year n-1] \| Situation following action \| Total number of human resources \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 5. CHARACTERISTICS AND OBJECTIVES 5.1. Need to be met in the short or long term Address the environmental concerns relative to the management of waste. The Strategy will launch actions to improve waste management and the regulatory environment within which the waste management activities take place. 5.2. Value-added of Community involvement and coherence of the proposal with other financial instruments and possible synergy Waste management is an economic activity taking place in the internal market. This activity is highly regulated and common approaches are necessary to improve the efficiency of the market. 5.3. Objectives, expected results and related indicators of the proposal in the context of the ABM framework The strategy’s objective is to set out a series of actions that will allow reducing the environmental impacts of waste and contribute to reducing the environmental impacts of the use of resources. In order to do that, a number of concrete actions are foreseen: 1) Simplification and modernisation of the regulatory environment of waste activities. 2) Improvement of the knowledge in this area. 3) Development of incentives to promote the prevention and the recycling of waste. More details on the expected results and their impacts are in the Communication and in the impact assessment attached to it, respectively. 5.4. Method of Implementation (indicative) X Centralised Management X directly by the Commission ( indirectly by delegation to: ( executive Agencies ( bodies set up by the Communities as referred to in art. 185 of the Financial Regulation ( national public-sector bodies/bodies with public-service mission ( Shared or decentralised management ( with Member states ( with Third countries ( Joint management with international organisations (please specify) Relevant comments: The measures foreseen under the strategy will be directly implemented by the Commission (launch of studies, organisation of meetings, running of service contracts etc) and by Member States (implementation of legislation and recommendations). 6.1. Monitoring system The Commission proposes to review the effectiveness of the Thematic Strategy five years after publication of the Communication. For this purpose the Commission will prepare a report which will be published and submitted to the Institutions. 6.2. Evaluation 6.2.1. Ex-ante evaluation The Thematic Strategy has been the object of an Impact Assessment that will be published at the same time as adoption of the Communication. 6.2.2. Measures taken following an intermediate/ex-post evaluation (lessons learned from similar experiences in the past) The approach of policy-making using the tool of a Thematic Strategy is a novelty of the Sixth Environmental Action Programme[10]. However, the measures contained in this specific strategy do not go beyond normal administrative practice (launch of studies, organisation of expert meetings, service contracts of relatively small amounts of money) for which appropriate financial safeguard procedures are in place. 6.2.3. Terms and frequency of future evaluation 7. ANTI-FRAUD MEASURES The proposed activities only consist of expenditure on personnel, expert meetings and study contracts. The latter will be subject to the Commission’s usual control mechanisms and therefore there is no need for supplementary anti-fraud measures. In particular, potential beneficiaries and contractors shall comply with the provisions of the Financial Regulation and provide the evidence of their financial and legal soundness. For grants, they are required to supply provisional statements of income and expenditure related to the project/activity for which funding is requested. Payments are made on the basis of the terms and conditions related to the grant agreement and on the basis of expenditure and income statements duly certified by the beneficiary and checked by the relevant service of the Commission. On the spot controls are also possible and beneficiaries are required to keep all details and supporting documents for a period of five years after the completion of the project. 8. DETAILS OF RESOURCES 8.1. Objectives of the proposal in terms of their financial cost Commitment appropriations in EUR million (to 3 decimal places) 8.2.2. Description of tasks deriving from the action The tasks to be performed are within normal administrative practice and include launch of studies, organisation of expert meetings, management of service contracts, and the likes. 8.2.3. Sources of human resources (statutory) X Posts currently allocated to the management of the programme to be replaced or extended ( Posts pre-allocated within the APS/PDB exercise for year n ( Posts to be requested in the next APS/PDB procedure ( Posts to be redeployed using existing resources within the managing service (internal redeployment) ( Posts required for year n although not foreseen in the APS/PDB exercise of the year in question 8.2.4. Other Administrative expenditure included in reference amount (XX 01 04/05 – Expenditure on administrative management) Budget line (number and heading) \| Year 2005 \| Year 2006 \| Year 2007 \| Year 2008 \| Year 2009 \| Year 2010 \| TOTAL \| Other technical and administrative assistance \| - intra muros \| - extra muros \| Total Technical and administrative assistance \| 8.2.5. Financial cost of human resources and associated costs not included in the reference amount Type of human resources \| Year 2005 \| Year 2006 \| Year 2007 \| Year 2008 \| Year 2009 \| Year 2010r \| Officials and temporary staff (XX 01 01) \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 2.430 \| Staff financed by Art XX 01 02 (auxiliary, END, contract staff, etc.) (specify budget line) \| Total cost of Human Resources and associated costs (NOT in reference amount) \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 0.486 \| 2.430 \| Calculation– Officials and Temporary agents Each FTE is rated at €108,000 per annum. Calculation– Staff financed under art. XX 01 02 8.2.6 Other administrative expenditure not included in reference amount EUR million (to 3 decimal places) \| XX 01 02 11 02 – Meetings & Conferences \| XX 01 02 11 03 – Committees[16] \| 0.080 \| 0.080 \| 0.080 \| 0.080 \| 0.080 \| 0.400 \| XX 01 02 11 04 – Studies & consultations \| XX 01 02 11 05 - Information systems \| 2 Total Other Management Expenditure (XX 01 02 11) \| 0.002 \| 0.088 \| 0.088 \| 0.090 \| 0.086 \| 0.084 \| 0.438 \| 3 Other expenditure of an administrative nature (specify including reference to budget line) \| Total Administrative expenditure, other than human resources and associated costs (NOT included in reference amount) \| 0.002 \| 0.088 \| 0.088 \| 0.090 \| 0.086 \| 0.084 \| 0.438 \| Calculation - Other administrative expenditure not included in reference amount It is assumed that an average mission would cost €1,000. [1] See Annex III for detailed list of legal acts. [2] COM(2003) 302, Integrated Product Policy. [3] COM(2005) 105. Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament on the national strategies for the reduction of biodegradable waste 潧湩⁧潴氠湡晤汩going to landfills pursuant to Article 5(1) of Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste. [4] Differentiated appropriations. [5] Expenditure that does not fall under Chapter xx 01 of the Title xx concerned. [6] Expenditure within article xx 01 04 of Title xx. [7] Expenditure within chapter xx 01 other than articles xx 01 04 or xx 01 05. [8] See points 19 and 24 of the Interinstitutional agreement. [9] Additional columns should be added if necessary i.e. if the duration of the action exceeds 6 years. [10] Decision No 1600/2002/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 July 2002 laying down the Sixth Community Environment Action Programme (OJ L 242, 10.9.2002, p. 1). [11] As described under Section 5.3. [12] Cost of which is NOT covered by the reference amount. [14] Cost of which is included within the reference amount. [15] Reference should be made to the specific legislative financial statement for the Executive Agency(ies) concerned. [16] Specify the type of committee and the group to which it belongs.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2416
__label__wiki	0.996141	0.996141	Mac Miller's cause of death revealed By Sarah Michaud and Karen Mizoguchi Mac Miller‘s cause of death has been revealed. The 26-year-old rapper — who was found dead in his Studio City, California, home on Sept. 7 — died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol, PEOPLE confirmed. The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner ruled in a statement released Monday that Miller’s death was accidental and due to mixed drug toxicity. The autopsy was completed three days after the star’s death and his body was released to his family, according to Los Angeles County coroner’s spokeswoman Sarah Ardalani. Robin Marchant/Getty Images RELATED: Chance the Rapper, John Mayer, more celebrate Mac Miller at emotional tribute concert A source previously told PEOPLE Miller, born Malcolm James McCormick, had gone into cardiac arrest after appearing to suffer a drug overdose. At the time, PEOPLE confirmed that paramedics never transported him to a hospital, and he had already died before he was found unresponsive and could not be revived. Miller’s home was reportedly “swept clean” so that there would be no evidence of drug use, according to TMZ, which also reported that only a small amount of white powder was found in Miller’s home when police searched for clues as to how he died. At the time, an insider told PEOPLE that Miller, who just dropped his fifth and final studio album Swimming on Aug. 3, spent the evening before his death watching football with friends. Miller’s casual night with friends seemed so benign, “that’s why this is such a shock,” the insider said. “Everyone who he worked with was aware that he was delicate, but thought it was because of the new album, nerves, nothing like this.” During his lifetime, the rapper was open about his battle with substance abuse. In a 2016 short documentary by music magazine The Fader, Miller explained how he came to rely so heavily on codeine-based cough syrup mixed with soda. “It started by me just sitting inside all day and then it’s like, then you get bored. Then you’re like, ‘Well I could just be high, and I could have a whole adventure in this room,’ ” the “Self Care” rapper began. “I’m always like, if someone’s like, ‘You wanna try this?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah sure.’ It f—s you up when you have a bunch of money because you try a drug, you like it, then you can buy a lot of it. I went through about everything.” RELATED: Mac Miller’s Will Reveals He Left His Entire Estate to His Parents Miller was arrested for DUI in May, less than a week after his split from ex Ariana Grande was made public, but the Los Angeles city attorney confirmed the charges would be dropped in the case. Christopher Polk for EW Last week, Mac Miller‘s legacy and music career were honored at his celebration of life concert benefitting the newly formed The Mac Miller Circles Fund. The star was remembered by many of his famous friends and former collaborators including Action Bronson, Anderson.Paak, Chance the Rapper, Dylan Reynolds, Domo Genesis, Earl Sweatshirt, J.I.D, John Mayer, Miguel, Njomza, ScHoolboy Q, SZA, Thundercat, Travis Scott, Ty Dolla $ign and Vince Staples. By Sarah Michaud By Karen Mizoguchi Whitney Houston charts first new song on Billboard Hot 100 in 10 years	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2420
__label__wiki	0.736231	0.736231	← Belgique : Colloque sur l’homosexualité et les traditions, le 14/12 Une première en Isère : des enfants raflés à l’école → Gay groups back lesbian candidate for US Secretary of Labour Publié le 5 décembre 2008 par entr3lles By Tony Grew • December 5, 2008 – http://www.pinknews.co.uk A coalition of 12 leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans organisation in the United States have written to the country’s President-elect urging him to nominate Mary Beth Maxwell as Secretary of Labour in his new Cabinet. Ms Maxwell is the founding executive director of American Rights at Work. Launched in 2003, its mission is to modernise and reform America’s labour laws. "Ms Maxwell is a strong supporter of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community’s effort to enact comprehensive employment protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity," the letter read. "Through her leadership, American Rights At Work is a strong ally in the fight to pass an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act." The letter to President-elect Barack Obama was signed by Human Rights Campaign, the Gay and Lesbian Leadership Institute, Lambda Legal, the National Centre for Transgender Equality, the Servicemembers Legal Defence Fund and other groups. Mary Beth Maxwell’s position on the shortlist is an historic moment – if nominated and confirmed by the Senate she would become the first openly gay person to serve in the US Cabinet. The other candidates for Secretary of Labour are both female state Governors: Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. Barack Obama was elected on November 4th, beating Republican John McCain. He will take the oath of office in an elaborate inauguration ceremony in Washington DC on January 20th. "Barack Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity," according to a statement on LGBT rights on the Presidential transition website. "While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees’ domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy. "Obama also sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation." A recent survey commissioned by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) found a slight majority of US adults (51%) favour protecting gay and transgender people under existing federal laws that prohibit discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Existing non-discrimination laws cover gay and transgender people in only 12 states and the District of Columbia, and eight other states’ laws cover sexual orientation but not gender identity. Attempts by the US Congress to pass a federal law protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans Americans from workplace discrimination fell apart earlier last year amid acrimonious claims and counter-claims over trans rights. In November the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was passed by the House by 235 to 184. ENDA was originally designed to make it illegal to fire, refuse to hire or promote a person based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The decision to remove trans people from the scope of the legislation caused anger among the LGBT community in the US, with many demanding an "all or nothing" stance. Many of the House Democrats serving their first term did not want ENDA to include protections for trans people, fearful of a backlash from conservatives. President Bush indicated he would veto ENDA. The White House expressed constitutional concerns that the proposal could "trample" religious rights. The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies include sexual orientation in their employment nondiscrimination policies. Equality Forum reported that 471 (94.2%) of the 500 American corporations voluntarily include sexual orientation.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2422
__label__wiki	0.649197	0.649197	(-) Remove <label class='research-domain' title='The Social World, Diversity, Population'>SH3 (43)</label> filter SH3 (43) Displaying 1 - 10 of 43. Show 10 \| 20 results per page. Project acronym AlgoFinance Project Algorithmic Finance: Inquiring into the Reshaping of Financial Markets Researcher (PI) Christian BORCH Host Institution (HI) COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL Summary Present-day financial markets are turning algorithmic, as market orders are increasingly being executed by fully automated computer algorithms, without any direct human intervention. Although algorithmic finance seems to fundamentally reshape the central dynamics in financial markets, and even though it prompts core sociological questions, it has not yet received any systematic attention. In a pioneering contribution to economic sociology and social studies of finance, ALGOFINANCE aims to understand how and with what consequences the turn to algorithms is changing financial markets. The overall concept and central contributions of ALGOFINANCE are the following: (1) on an intra-firm level, the project examines how the shift to algorithmic finance reshapes the ways in which trading firms operate, and does so by systematically and empirically investigating the reconfiguration of organizational structures and employee subjectivity; (2) on an inter-algorithmic level, it offers a ground-breaking methodology (agent-based modelling informed by qualitative data) to grasp how trading algorithms interact with one another in a fully digital space; and (3) on the level of market sociality, it proposes a novel theorization of how intra-firm and inter-algorithmic dynamics can be conceived of as introducing a particular form of sociality that is characteristic to algorithmic finance: a form of sociality-as-association heuristically analyzed as imitation. None of these three levels have received systematic attention in the state-of-the-art literature. Addressing them will significantly advance the understanding of present-day algorithmic finance in economic sociology. By contributing novel empirical, methodological, and theoretical understandings of the functioning and consequences of algorithms, ALGOFINANCE will pave the way for other research into digital sociology and the broader algorithmization of society. Present-day financial markets are turning algorithmic, as market orders are increasingly being executed by fully automated computer algorithms, without any direct human intervention. Although algorithmic finance seems to fundamentally reshape the central dynamics in financial markets, and even though it prompts core sociological questions, it has not yet received any systematic attention. In a pioneering contribution to economic sociology and social studies of finance, ALGOFINANCE aims to understand how and with what consequences the turn to algorithms is changing financial markets. The overall concept and central contributions of ALGOFINANCE are the following: (1) on an intra-firm level, the project examines how the shift to algorithmic finance reshapes the ways in which trading firms operate, and does so by systematically and empirically investigating the reconfiguration of organizational structures and employee subjectivity; (2) on an inter-algorithmic level, it offers a ground-breaking methodology (agent-based modelling informed by qualitative data) to grasp how trading algorithms interact with one another in a fully digital space; and (3) on the level of market sociality, it proposes a novel theorization of how intra-firm and inter-algorithmic dynamics can be conceived of as introducing a particular form of sociality that is characteristic to algorithmic finance: a form of sociality-as-association heuristically analyzed as imitation. None of these three levels have received systematic attention in the state-of-the-art literature. Addressing them will significantly advance the understanding of present-day algorithmic finance in economic sociology. By contributing novel empirical, methodological, and theoretical understandings of the functioning and consequences of algorithms, ALGOFINANCE will pave the way for other research into digital sociology and the broader algorithmization of society. Project acronym ASSHURED Project Analysing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey Researcher (PI) Elena FIDDIAN-QASMIYEH Summary Since 2012, over 4 million people have fled Syria in ‘the most dramatic humanitarian crisis that we have ever faced’ (UNHCR). By November 2015 there were 1,078,338 refugees from Syria in Lebanon, 630,776 in Jordan and 2,181,293 in Turkey. Humanitarian agencies and donor states from both the global North and the global South have funded and implemented aid programmes, and yet commentators have argued that civil society groups from the global South are the most significant actors supporting refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Whilst they are highly significant responses, however, major gaps in knowledge remain regarding the motivations, nature and implications of Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement. This project draws on multi-sited ethnographic and participatory research with refugees from Syria and their aid providers in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey to critically examine why, how and with what effect actors from the South have responded to the displacement of refugees from Syria. The main research aims are: 1. identifying diverse models of Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement, 2. examining the (un)official motivations, nature and implications of Southern-led responses, 3. examining refugees’ experiences and perceptions of Southern-led responses, 4. exploring diverse Southern and Northern actors’ perceptions of Southern-led responses, 5. tracing the implications of Southern-led initiatives for humanitarian theory and practice. Based on a critical theoretical framework inspired by post-colonial and feminist approaches, the project contributes to theories of humanitarianism and debates regarding donor-recipient relations and refugees’ agency in displacement situations. It will also inform the development of policies to most appropriately address refugees’ needs and rights. This highly topical and innovative project thus has far-reaching implications for refugees and local communities, academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Since 2012, over 4 million people have fled Syria in ‘the most dramatic humanitarian crisis that we have ever faced’ (UNHCR). By November 2015 there were 1,078,338 refugees from Syria in Lebanon, 630,776 in Jordan and 2,181,293 in Turkey. Humanitarian agencies and donor states from both the global North and the global South have funded and implemented aid programmes, and yet commentators have argued that civil society groups from the global South are the most significant actors supporting refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Whilst they are highly significant responses, however, major gaps in knowledge remain regarding the motivations, nature and implications of Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement. This project draws on multi-sited ethnographic and participatory research with refugees from Syria and their aid providers in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey to critically examine why, how and with what effect actors from the South have responded to the displacement of refugees from Syria. The main research aims are: 1. identifying diverse models of Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement, 2. examining the (un)official motivations, nature and implications of Southern-led responses, 3. examining refugees’ experiences and perceptions of Southern-led responses, 4. exploring diverse Southern and Northern actors’ perceptions of Southern-led responses, 5. tracing the implications of Southern-led initiatives for humanitarian theory and practice. Based on a critical theoretical framework inspired by post-colonial and feminist approaches, the project contributes to theories of humanitarianism and debates regarding donor-recipient relations and refugees’ agency in displacement situations. It will also inform the development of policies to most appropriately address refugees’ needs and rights. This highly topical and innovative project thus has far-reaching implications for refugees and local communities, academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Project acronym BAM Project Becoming A Minority Researcher (PI) Maurice CRUL Summary In the last forty years, researchers in the Field of Migration and Ethnic Studies looked at the integration of migrants and their descendants. Concepts, methodological tools and theoretical frameworks have been developed to measure and predict integration outcomes both across different ethnic groups and in comparison with people of native descent. But are we also looking into the actual integration of the receiving group of native ‘white’ descent in city contexts where they have become a numerical minority themselves? In cities like Amsterdam, now only one in three youngsters under age fifteen is of native descent. This situation, referred to as a majority-minority context, is a new phenomenon in Western Europe and it presents itself as one of the most important societal and psychological transformations of our time. I argue that the field of migration and ethnic studies is stagnating because of the one-sided focus on migrants and their children. This is even more urgent given the increased ant-immigrant vote. These pressing scientific and societal reasons pushed me to develop the project BAM (Becoming A Minority). The project will be executed in three harbor cities, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Malmö, and three service sector cities, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Vienna. BAM consists of 5 subprojects: (1) A meta-analysis of secondary data on people of native ‘white’ descent in the six research sites; (2) A newly developed survey for the target group; (3) An analysis of critical circumstances of encounter that trigger either positive or rather negative responses to increased ethnic diversity (4) Experimental diversity labs to test under which circumstances people will change their attitudes or their actions towards increased ethnic diversity; (5) The formulation of a new theory of integration that includes the changed position of the group of native ‘white’ descent as an important actor. In the last forty years, researchers in the Field of Migration and Ethnic Studies looked at the integration of migrants and their descendants. Concepts, methodological tools and theoretical frameworks have been developed to measure and predict integration outcomes both across different ethnic groups and in comparison with people of native descent. But are we also looking into the actual integration of the receiving group of native ‘white’ descent in city contexts where they have become a numerical minority themselves? In cities like Amsterdam, now only one in three youngsters under age fifteen is of native descent. This situation, referred to as a majority-minority context, is a new phenomenon in Western Europe and it presents itself as one of the most important societal and psychological transformations of our time. I argue that the field of migration and ethnic studies is stagnating because of the one-sided focus on migrants and their children. This is even more urgent given the increased ant-immigrant vote. These pressing scientific and societal reasons pushed me to develop the project BAM (Becoming A Minority). The project will be executed in three harbor cities, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Malmö, and three service sector cities, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Vienna. BAM consists of 5 subprojects: (1) A meta-analysis of secondary data on people of native ‘white’ descent in the six research sites; (2) A newly developed survey for the target group; (3) An analysis of critical circumstances of encounter that trigger either positive or rather negative responses to increased ethnic diversity (4) Experimental diversity labs to test under which circumstances people will change their attitudes or their actions towards increased ethnic diversity; (5) The formulation of a new theory of integration that includes the changed position of the group of native ‘white’ descent as an important actor. Project acronym BAPS Project Bayesian Agent-based Population Studies: Transforming Simulation Models of Human Migration Researcher (PI) Jakub KAZIMIERZ BIJAK Summary The aim of BAPS is to develop a ground-breaking simulation model of international migration, based on a population of intelligent, cognitive agents, their social networks and institutions, all interacting with one another. The project will transform the study of migration – one of the most uncertain population processes and a top-priority EU policy area – by offering a step change in the way it can be understood, predicted and managed. In this way, BAPS will effectively integrate behavioural and social theory with modelling. To develop micro-foundations for migration studies, model design will follow cutting-edge developments in demography, statistics, cognitive psychology and computer science. BAPS will also offer a pioneering environment for applying the findings in practice through a bespoke modelling language. Bayesian statistical principles will be used to design innovative computer experiments, and learn about modelling the simulated individuals and the way they make decisions. In BAPS, we will collate available information for migration models; build and test the simulations by applying experimental design principles to enhance our knowledge of migration processes; collect information on the underpinning decision-making mechanisms through psychological experiments; and design software for implementing Bayesian agent-based models in practice. The project will use various information sources to build models bottom-up, filling an important epistemological gap in demography. BAPS will be carried out by the Allianz European Demographer 2015, recognised as a leader in the field for methodological innovation, directing an interdisciplinary team with expertise in demography, agent-based models, statistical analysis of uncertainty, meta-cognition, and computer simulations. The project will open up exciting research possibilities beyond demography, and will generate both academic and practical impact, offering methodological advice for policy-relevant simulations. The aim of BAPS is to develop a ground-breaking simulation model of international migration, based on a population of intelligent, cognitive agents, their social networks and institutions, all interacting with one another. The project will transform the study of migration – one of the most uncertain population processes and a top-priority EU policy area – by offering a step change in the way it can be understood, predicted and managed. In this way, BAPS will effectively integrate behavioural and social theory with modelling. To develop micro-foundations for migration studies, model design will follow cutting-edge developments in demography, statistics, cognitive psychology and computer science. BAPS will also offer a pioneering environment for applying the findings in practice through a bespoke modelling language. Bayesian statistical principles will be used to design innovative computer experiments, and learn about modelling the simulated individuals and the way they make decisions. In BAPS, we will collate available information for migration models; build and test the simulations by applying experimental design principles to enhance our knowledge of migration processes; collect information on the underpinning decision-making mechanisms through psychological experiments; and design software for implementing Bayesian agent-based models in practice. The project will use various information sources to build models bottom-up, filling an important epistemological gap in demography. BAPS will be carried out by the Allianz European Demographer 2015, recognised as a leader in the field for methodological innovation, directing an interdisciplinary team with expertise in demography, agent-based models, statistical analysis of uncertainty, meta-cognition, and computer simulations. The project will open up exciting research possibilities beyond demography, and will generate both academic and practical impact, offering methodological advice for policy-relevant simulations. Project acronym CANCERSCREEN Project Screening for cancer in the post-genomic era: diagnostic innovation and biomedicalisation in comparative perspective Researcher (PI) Stuart James HOGARTH Summary Cancer screening and the diagnostics industry: a comparative analysis of the political economy of diagnostic innovation A decade after the Human Genome Project, major public and private investments continue to fuel expectations of a genomic revolution in biomedicine. The freight of expectations surrounding the new “age of diagnostics” is accompanied by much uncertainty about how public policy should steer diagnostic innovation, with much debate about inter alia the harms of creating diagnostic monopolies through gene patenting, and the risks of under- or over-regulation. However, due to the paucity of research on diagnostic innovation, policy deliberation is driven more by anecdote and expert opinion than empirical evidence. With a specific focus on screening/early detection of cancer, this project will map industry dynamics, technological trajectories and regulatory developments in Europe and the USA from 1996 to the present day. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the project’s innovative dimensions include a new conceptual model of socio-technical transition in the diagnostics sector, and the first integrative analysis linking scientometric data on the interactions between public and private actors in the diagnostic research domain with comparative transnational analysis of regulatory decision-making. Through a novel integration of conceptual insights from the literature on biomedicalisation and scholarship on socio-technical regime change, this project aims to advance both fields of research by applying a new multi-scale, multi-level model of socio-technical transition. The project will provide unprecedented insight into the factors shaping the development of a new generation of molecular diagnostic tests, and examine how these technologies are reconfiguring disease categories and redrawing the boundaries between health and sickness. We will establish a platform of theory and methods for a broader programme of work on diagnostic innovation. Cancer screening and the diagnostics industry: a comparative analysis of the political economy of diagnostic innovation A decade after the Human Genome Project, major public and private investments continue to fuel expectations of a genomic revolution in biomedicine. The freight of expectations surrounding the new “age of diagnostics” is accompanied by much uncertainty about how public policy should steer diagnostic innovation, with much debate about inter alia the harms of creating diagnostic monopolies through gene patenting, and the risks of under- or over-regulation. However, due to the paucity of research on diagnostic innovation, policy deliberation is driven more by anecdote and expert opinion than empirical evidence. With a specific focus on screening/early detection of cancer, this project will map industry dynamics, technological trajectories and regulatory developments in Europe and the USA from 1996 to the present day. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the project’s innovative dimensions include a new conceptual model of socio-technical transition in the diagnostics sector, and the first integrative analysis linking scientometric data on the interactions between public and private actors in the diagnostic research domain with comparative transnational analysis of regulatory decision-making. Through a novel integration of conceptual insights from the literature on biomedicalisation and scholarship on socio-technical regime change, this project aims to advance both fields of research by applying a new multi-scale, multi-level model of socio-technical transition. The project will provide unprecedented insight into the factors shaping the development of a new generation of molecular diagnostic tests, and examine how these technologies are reconfiguring disease categories and redrawing the boundaries between health and sickness. We will establish a platform of theory and methods for a broader programme of work on diagnostic innovation. Project acronym CHILDMOVE Project The impact of flight experiences on the psychological wellbeing of unaccompanied refugee minors Researcher (PI) Ilse DERLUYN Summary Since early 2015, the media continuously confront us with images of refugee children drowning in the Mediterranean, surviving in appalling conditions in camps or walking across Europe. Within this group of fleeing children, a considerable number is travelling without parents, the unaccompanied refugee minors. While the media images testify to these flight experiences and their possible huge impact on unaccompanied minors’ wellbeing, there has been no systematic research to fully capture these experiences, nor their mental health impact. Equally, no evidence exists on whether the emotional impact of these flight experiences should be differentiated from the impact of the traumatic events these minors endured in their home country or from the daily stressors in the country of settlement. This project aims to fundamentally increase our knowledge of the impact of experiences during the flight in relation to past trauma and current stressors. To achieve this aim, it is essential to set up a longitudinal follow-up of a large group of unaccompanied refugee minors, whereby our study starts from different transit countries, crosses several European countries, and uses innovative methodological and mixed-methods approaches. I will hereby not only document the psychological impact these flight experiences may have, but also the way in which care and reception structures for unaccompanied minors in both transit and settlement countries can contribute to reducing this mental health impact. This proposal will fundamentally change the field of migration studies, by introducing a whole new area of study and novel methodological approaches to study these themes. Moreover, other fields, such as trauma studies, will be directly informed by the project, as also clinical, educational and social work interventions for victims of multiple trauma. Last, the findings on the impact of reception and care structures will be highly informative for policy makers and practitioners. Since early 2015, the media continuously confront us with images of refugee children drowning in the Mediterranean, surviving in appalling conditions in camps or walking across Europe. Within this group of fleeing children, a considerable number is travelling without parents, the unaccompanied refugee minors. While the media images testify to these flight experiences and their possible huge impact on unaccompanied minors’ wellbeing, there has been no systematic research to fully capture these experiences, nor their mental health impact. Equally, no evidence exists on whether the emotional impact of these flight experiences should be differentiated from the impact of the traumatic events these minors endured in their home country or from the daily stressors in the country of settlement. This project aims to fundamentally increase our knowledge of the impact of experiences during the flight in relation to past trauma and current stressors. To achieve this aim, it is essential to set up a longitudinal follow-up of a large group of unaccompanied refugee minors, whereby our study starts from different transit countries, crosses several European countries, and uses innovative methodological and mixed-methods approaches. I will hereby not only document the psychological impact these flight experiences may have, but also the way in which care and reception structures for unaccompanied minors in both transit and settlement countries can contribute to reducing this mental health impact. This proposal will fundamentally change the field of migration studies, by introducing a whole new area of study and novel methodological approaches to study these themes. Moreover, other fields, such as trauma studies, will be directly informed by the project, as also clinical, educational and social work interventions for victims of multiple trauma. Last, the findings on the impact of reception and care structures will be highly informative for policy makers and practitioners. Project acronym CIC Project Context, Identity and Choice: Understanding the constraints on women's career decisions Researcher (PI) Michelle Kim RYAN Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER Summary There has been vast improvement in workplace gender equality, but there remain marked differences in the roles in which women and men work. Explanations for this inequality have focused on the barriers women face. However, as women begin to enter male-dominated roles, a new explanation has arisen: that remaining gender inequality must reflect fundamental differences between women and men, including differences in (a) ambition and desire for power, (b) needs for work-life balance, and (c) willingness to take career risks. Central to this analysis is the assumption that the glass ceiling is broken and thus inequality must be due to women’s active choices. This explanation downplays the fact that social context continues to be a barrier to women’s success and places responsibility for gender inequality on women themselves. Indeed, there has arisen the suggestion that gender equality necessitates women overcoming ‘internal obstacles’, ‘leaning-in’ and altering their choices (Sandberg, 2013), rather than challenging the status quo. I argue that diametrically contrasting structural barriers with women’s choices is unhelpful. Instead, I suggest that women’s choices are shaped and constrained by the gendered nature of organisational and social contexts and how women see themselves within these contexts. I propose a programme of research, across 3 integrated streams, that investigates how social and organisational structures define identities and constrain women’s choices in relation to ambition, work-life balance, and career risk-taking. I have four key objectives: (1) to clarify how organisational and social contexts define identity and constrain women’s choices, (2) to use an interdisciplinary, multi-methodological approach, to produce innovative theory and data, (3) to work collaboratively with stakeholders, and (4) to inform practical interventions designed to facilitate the increase of women’s participation in hitherto male-dominated roles. There has been vast improvement in workplace gender equality, but there remain marked differences in the roles in which women and men work. Explanations for this inequality have focused on the barriers women face. However, as women begin to enter male-dominated roles, a new explanation has arisen: that remaining gender inequality must reflect fundamental differences between women and men, including differences in (a) ambition and desire for power, (b) needs for work-life balance, and (c) willingness to take career risks. Central to this analysis is the assumption that the glass ceiling is broken and thus inequality must be due to women’s active choices. This explanation downplays the fact that social context continues to be a barrier to women’s success and places responsibility for gender inequality on women themselves. Indeed, there has arisen the suggestion that gender equality necessitates women overcoming ‘internal obstacles’, ‘leaning-in’ and altering their choices (Sandberg, 2013), rather than challenging the status quo. I argue that diametrically contrasting structural barriers with women’s choices is unhelpful. Instead, I suggest that women’s choices are shaped and constrained by the gendered nature of organisational and social contexts and how women see themselves within these contexts. I propose a programme of research, across 3 integrated streams, that investigates how social and organisational structures define identities and constrain women’s choices in relation to ambition, work-life balance, and career risk-taking. I have four key objectives: (1) to clarify how organisational and social contexts define identity and constrain women’s choices, (2) to use an interdisciplinary, multi-methodological approach, to produce innovative theory and data, (3) to work collaboratively with stakeholders, and (4) to inform practical interventions designed to facilitate the increase of women’s participation in hitherto male-dominated roles. Project acronym CRIMTANG Project Criminal Entanglements.A new ethnographic approach to transnational organised crime. Researcher (PI) Henrik VIGH Summary Linked to terrorism, moral breakdown, and societal decay, Transnational Organised Crime (TOC) has come to embody current global anxieties as a figure of fear and cause of disquiet. Yet despite its central position on the social and political radar, our knowledge of it remains limited and fragmentary. Quantitative analyses may have identified the scale of the problem, but its underlying socio-cultural logic and practices remain under-researched and largely obscure. TOC is on the rise, and we need better insights into how it develops and expands, who engages in it and why, and how it is linked to and embedded in social networks that straddle countries and contexts. CRIMTANG proposes a unique approach to the study of the social infrastructure of contemporary TOC. It develops a research strategy that is ethnographic and transnational in design and so attuned to the human flows and formations of TOC. The project comprises a trans-disciplinary research team of anthropologists, criminologists and political scientists, and builds on their prior experience of the people, regions and languages under study. It explores the illegal and overlapping flows of migrants and drugs from North-West Africa into Europe, following a key trafficking trajectory stretching from Tangiers to Barcelona, Paris and beyond. In so doing, CRIMTANG sheds new light on the actual empirical processes in operation at different points along this trafficking route, whilst simultaneously developing new theoretical and methodological apparatuses for apprehending TOC that can be exported and applied in other regions and contexts. It reimagines the idea of social entanglement and proposes new transnational and collective fieldwork strategies. Finally, it will advance and consolidate the European research environment on TOC by creating a research hub for transnational ethnographic criminology at the University of Copenhagen. Linked to terrorism, moral breakdown, and societal decay, Transnational Organised Crime (TOC) has come to embody current global anxieties as a figure of fear and cause of disquiet. Yet despite its central position on the social and political radar, our knowledge of it remains limited and fragmentary. Quantitative analyses may have identified the scale of the problem, but its underlying socio-cultural logic and practices remain under-researched and largely obscure. TOC is on the rise, and we need better insights into how it develops and expands, who engages in it and why, and how it is linked to and embedded in social networks that straddle countries and contexts. CRIMTANG proposes a unique approach to the study of the social infrastructure of contemporary TOC. It develops a research strategy that is ethnographic and transnational in design and so attuned to the human flows and formations of TOC. The project comprises a trans-disciplinary research team of anthropologists, criminologists and political scientists, and builds on their prior experience of the people, regions and languages under study. It explores the illegal and overlapping flows of migrants and drugs from North-West Africa into Europe, following a key trafficking trajectory stretching from Tangiers to Barcelona, Paris and beyond. In so doing, CRIMTANG sheds new light on the actual empirical processes in operation at different points along this trafficking route, whilst simultaneously developing new theoretical and methodological apparatuses for apprehending TOC that can be exported and applied in other regions and contexts. It reimagines the idea of social entanglement and proposes new transnational and collective fieldwork strategies. Finally, it will advance and consolidate the European research environment on TOC by creating a research hub for transnational ethnographic criminology at the University of Copenhagen. Project acronym DECIDE Project The impact of DEmographic Changes on Infectious DisEases transmission and control in middle/low income countries Researcher (PI) Alessia Melegaro Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI Summary Population structure and change and social contact patterns are major determinants of the observed epidemiology of infectious diseases, including the consequences on health. Demographic structure and the components of demographic dynamics are changing over time and substantially differ within countries and most critically between countries. However, some of the overall consequences of demographic changes remain unclear, though urbanisation and fertility decline will certainly have a profound impact on social structures, family composition and, as a consequence, on disease spread and on the identification of effective public health measures. DECIDE will explore the following questions: 1. What are the major short- and medium-term impacts of demographic changes on the patterns of infectious disease (morbidity and mortality)? 2. How are these demographic changes affecting contact patterns that are of fundamental importance to the spread of infectious diseases? Are there new and different modes of transmission within and between populations? 3. What are the implications of demographic changes for infection control strategies? What is the interplay between demographic changes and public health policies in shaping future trajectories of infectious diseases? In order to answer these questions, DECIDE will use the following strategy: analyse harmonised demographic and health survey data (DHS), and health and demographic surveillance system data (HDSS); develop new estimates of social contact patterns and other socio-demographic variables collecting data from representative samples of both urban and rural settings in selected countries; develop a theoretical framework to predict the likely chains through which demographic change influences the burden of infectious diseases; develop and parameterise mathematical population models for the transmission of infectious diseases to evaluate the impact of public health measures under changing demographic conditions. Population structure and change and social contact patterns are major determinants of the observed epidemiology of infectious diseases, including the consequences on health. Demographic structure and the components of demographic dynamics are changing over time and substantially differ within countries and most critically between countries. However, some of the overall consequences of demographic changes remain unclear, though urbanisation and fertility decline will certainly have a profound impact on social structures, family composition and, as a consequence, on disease spread and on the identification of effective public health measures. DECIDE will explore the following questions: 1. What are the major short- and medium-term impacts of demographic changes on the patterns of infectious disease (morbidity and mortality)? 2. How are these demographic changes affecting contact patterns that are of fundamental importance to the spread of infectious diseases? Are there new and different modes of transmission within and between populations? 3. What are the implications of demographic changes for infection control strategies? What is the interplay between demographic changes and public health policies in shaping future trajectories of infectious diseases? In order to answer these questions, DECIDE will use the following strategy: analyse harmonised demographic and health survey data (DHS), and health and demographic surveillance system data (HDSS); develop new estimates of social contact patterns and other socio-demographic variables collecting data from representative samples of both urban and rural settings in selected countries; develop a theoretical framework to predict the likely chains through which demographic change influences the burden of infectious diseases; develop and parameterise mathematical population models for the transmission of infectious diseases to evaluate the impact of public health measures under changing demographic conditions. Project acronym DiaDev Project Investigating the Design and Use of Diagnostic Devices in Global Health Researcher (PI) Alice Naomi STREET Summary Many people living in resource-poor settings have never had access to the laboratory facilities or technical expertise that are needed to diagnose diseases. With the development and deployment of a new generation of affordable, easy-to-use, and portable diagnostic devices that are designed for places with no laboratory infrastructure, the global landscape of diagnosis is dramatically changing. Can portable diagnostic devices strengthen health systems in resource-poor settings? DiaDev is the first study to comprehensively address this question through comparison across multiple devices, sites of production, and contexts of use. Diagnostic technologies are often championed as universal solutions to health equity and access. This ethnographic study investigates the extent to which how diagnostic devices work and what they can achieve depends on the locally specific relationships through which they are designed and used. Five ethnographic case studies from the USA, India and Sierra Leone examine the partnerships between donors, governments, humanitarian organisations and users that characterise current models of technological innovation and implementation in global health, the processes by which diagnostic devices are integrated with health infrastructures in target settings, and the practices of knowledge production and use they entail. The ultimate aim is to generate new insight into (i) changing relationships of power between governments, donors, and business in global health, and (ii) the ways in which diagnostic devices are transforming health systems in resource-poor settings. It will produce a new context-specific and comparative framework for exploring the opportunities and challenges involved in the design and use of diagnostic devices. Through innovative collaborative methods it will also develop a set of ‘health system strengthening tools’ that will enable stakeholders to improve the design and use of these devices in dialogue with the project findings. Many people living in resource-poor settings have never had access to the laboratory facilities or technical expertise that are needed to diagnose diseases. With the development and deployment of a new generation of affordable, easy-to-use, and portable diagnostic devices that are designed for places with no laboratory infrastructure, the global landscape of diagnosis is dramatically changing. Can portable diagnostic devices strengthen health systems in resource-poor settings? DiaDev is the first study to comprehensively address this question through comparison across multiple devices, sites of production, and contexts of use. Diagnostic technologies are often championed as universal solutions to health equity and access. This ethnographic study investigates the extent to which how diagnostic devices work and what they can achieve depends on the locally specific relationships through which they are designed and used. Five ethnographic case studies from the USA, India and Sierra Leone examine the partnerships between donors, governments, humanitarian organisations and users that characterise current models of technological innovation and implementation in global health, the processes by which diagnostic devices are integrated with health infrastructures in target settings, and the practices of knowledge production and use they entail. The ultimate aim is to generate new insight into (i) changing relationships of power between governments, donors, and business in global health, and (ii) the ways in which diagnostic devices are transforming health systems in resource-poor settings. It will produce a new context-specific and comparative framework for exploring the opportunities and challenges involved in the design and use of diagnostic devices. Through innovative collaborative methods it will also develop a set of ‘health system strengthening tools’ that will enable stakeholders to improve the design and use of these devices in dialogue with the project findings.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2423
__label__wiki	0.632473	0.632473	Project acronym CutLoops Project Loop amplitudes in quantum field theory Researcher (PI) Ruth Britto Summary The traditional formulation of relativistic quantum theory is ill-equipped to handle the range of difficult computations needed to describe particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) within a suitable time frame. Yet, recent work shows that probability amplitudes in quantum gauge field theories, such as those describing the Standard Model and its extensions, take surprisingly simple forms. The simplicity indicates deep structure in gauge theory that has already led to dramatic computational improvements, but remains to be fully understood. For precision calculations and investigations of the deep structure of gauge theory, a comprehensive method for computing multi-loop amplitudes systematically and efficiently must be found. The goal of this proposal is to construct a new and complete approach to computing amplitudes from a detailed understanding of their singularities, based on prior successes of so-called on-shell methods combined with the latest developments in the mathematics of Feynman integrals. Scattering processes relevant to the LHC and to formal investigations of quantum field theory will be computed within the new framework. The traditional formulation of relativistic quantum theory is ill-equipped to handle the range of difficult computations needed to describe particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) within a suitable time frame. Yet, recent work shows that probability amplitudes in quantum gauge field theories, such as those describing the Standard Model and its extensions, take surprisingly simple forms. The simplicity indicates deep structure in gauge theory that has already led to dramatic computational improvements, but remains to be fully understood. For precision calculations and investigations of the deep structure of gauge theory, a comprehensive method for computing multi-loop amplitudes systematically and efficiently must be found. The goal of this proposal is to construct a new and complete approach to computing amplitudes from a detailed understanding of their singularities, based on prior successes of so-called on-shell methods combined with the latest developments in the mathematics of Feynman integrals. Scattering processes relevant to the LHC and to formal investigations of quantum field theory will be computed within the new framework.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2424
__label__cc	0.562243	0.437757	According to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the standard American source on stem cell research, three characteristics of stem cells differentiate them from other cell types: (1) they are unspecialized cells that (2) divide for long periods, renewing themselves and (3) can give rise to specialized cells, such as muscle and skin cells, under particular physiological and experimental conditions. When allowed to grow in particular environments, stem cells divide many times. This ability to proliferate can yield millions of stem cells over several months. Human Embryonic Stem Cells Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are capable of dividing for long periods of time and can give rise to specialized cells under particular conditions. Embryonic stem cells are a particular type of stem cell derived from embryos. According to US National Institutes of Health (NIH), in humans, the term "embryo" applies to a fertilized egg from the beginning of division up to the end of the eighth week of gestation, when the embryo becomes a fetus. Between fertilization and the eighth week of gestation, the embryo undergoes multiple cell divisions. Umbilical Cord Blood Stem Cells (UCBSC) Umbilical cord blood (UCB) stem cells are hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) that are recovered from the blood of the umbilical cord and placenta after birth. Umbilical cord blood is rich in cells that express the CD34 molecule, a surface protein that identifies cells as stem cells. Prior to the discovery of UCB stem cells, it was standard procedure to discard the umbilical cord and placenta; now much effort is devoted to raising public awareness and to encouraging people to store or donate cord blood. Hematopoietic Stem Cells The discovery of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) provided a pioneering step in stem cell research. HSCs are a type of multipotent adult stem cell, characterized by their ability to self-renew and differentiate into erythrocyte (red blood cell) and leukocyte (white blood cell) cell lineages. In terms of function, these cells are responsible for the continual renewal of the erythrocytes, leukocytes, and platelets in the body through a process called hematopoiesis. They also play an important role in the formation of vital organs such as the liver and spleen during fetal development. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer in Mammals (1938-2013) In the second half of the twentieth century, scientists learned how to clone organisms in some species of mammals. Scientists have applied somatic cell nuclear transfer to clone human and mammalian embryos as a means to produce stem cells for laboratory and medical use. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is a technology applied in cloning, stem cell research and regenerative medicine. Somatic cells are cells that have gone through the differentiation process and are not germ cells. Somatic cells donate their nuclei, which scientists Subject: Theories, Technologies, Processes Intraspecies Chimeras Produced in Laboratory Settings (1960-1975) When cells-but not DNA-from two or more genetically distinct individuals combine to form a new individual, the result is called a chimera. Though chimeras occasionally occur in nature, scientists have produced chimeras in a laboratory setting since the 1960s. During the creation of a chimera, the DNA molecules do not exchange genetic material (recombine), unlike in sexual reproduction or in hybrid organisms, which result from genetic material exchanged between two different species. A chimera instead contains discrete cell populations with two unique sets of parental genes. Subject: Organisms, Processes The Notch Signaling Pathway in Embryogenesis The Notch signaling pathway is a mechanism in animals by which adjacent cells communicate with each other, conveying spatial information and genetic instructions for the animal's development. All multicellular animals utilize Notch signaling, which contributes to the formation, growth, and development of embryos (embryogenesis). Notch signaling also contributes to the differentiation of embryonic cells into various types of cells into various types of cells, such as neurons. Mesenchyme Mesenchyme is a type of animal tissue comprised of loose cells embedded in a mesh of proteins and fluid, called the extracellular matrix. The loose, fluid nature of mesenchyme allows its cells to migrate easily and play a crucial role in the origin and development of morphological structures during the embryonic and fetal stages of animal life. Mesenchyme directly gives rise to most of the body's connective tissues, from bones and cartilage to the lymphatic and circulatory systems. Nuclear Transplantation Nuclear transplantation is a method in which the nucleus of a donor cell is relocated to a target cell that has had its nucleus removed (enucleated). Nuclear transplantation has allowed experimental embryologists to manipulate the development of an organism and to study the potential of the nucleus to direct development. Nuclear transplantation, as it was first called, was later referred to as somatic nuclear transfer or cloning. Tissue engineering is a field of regenerative medicine that integrates the knowledge of scientists, physicians, and engineers into the construction or reconstruction of human tissue. Practitioners of tissue engineering seek to repair, replace, maintain, and enhance the abilities of a specific tissue or organ by means of living cells. More often than not stem cells are the form of living cells used in this technology. Tissue engineering is one of the disciplines involved in translating knowledge of developmental biology into the clinical setting. Reassessment of Carrel's Immortal Tissue Culture Experiments In the 1910s, Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon and biologist, concluded that cells are intrinsically immortal. His claim was based on chick-heart tissue cultures in his laboratory that seemed to be able to proliferate forever. Carrel's ideas about cellular immortality convinced his many contemporaries that cells could be maintained indefinitely. In the 1960s, however, Carrel's thesis about cell immortality was put into question by the discovery that human diploid cells can only proliferate for a finite period. Subject: Processes, Theories Embryonic Differentiation in Animals Embryonic differentiation is the process of development during which embryonic cells specialize and diverse tissue structures arise. Animals are made up of many different cell types, each with specific functions in the body. However, during early embryonic development, the embryo does not yet possess these varied cells; this is where embryonic differentiation comes into play. The differentiation of cells during embryogenesis is the key to cell, tissue, organ, and organism identity. Teratomas Teratomas are embryonal tumors that normally arise from germ cells and are typically benign. They are defined as being composed either of tissues that are foreign to the area in which they form, or of tissues that derive from all three of the germ layers. Malignant teratomas are known as teratocarcinomas; these cancerous growths have played a pivotal role in the discovery of stem cells. "Teratoma" is Greek for "monstrous tumor"; these tumors were so named because they sometimes contain hair, teeth, bone, neurons, and even eyes. Subject: Processes, Disorders Endothelium The endothelium is the layer of cells lining the blood vessels in animals. It weighs more than one kilogram in adult humans, and it covers a surface area of 4000 to 7000 square meters. The endothelium is the cellular interface between the circulating blood and underlying tissue. As the medium between these two sets of tissues, endothelium is part of many normal and disease processes throughout the body. The hedgehog signaling pathway is a mechanism that directs the development of embryonic cells in animals, from invertebrates to vertebrates. The hedgehog signaling pathway is a system of genes and gene products, mostly proteins, that convert one kind of signal into another, called transduction. In 1980, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, identified several fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) genes. Process of Eukaryotic Embryonic Development All sexually reproducing, multicellular diploid eukaryotes begin life as embryos. Understanding the stages of embryonic development is vital to explaining how eukaryotes form and how they are related on the tree of life. This understanding can also help answer questions related to morphology, ethics, medicine, and other pertinent fields of study. In particular, the field of comparative embryology is concerned with documenting the stages of ontogeny. Fate Map Early development occurs in a highly organized and orchestrated manner and has long attracted the interest of developmental biologists and embryologists. Cell lineage, or the study of the developmental differentiation of a blastomere, involves tracing a particular cell (blastomere) forward from its position in one of the three germ layers. Labeling individual cells within their germ layers allows for a pictorial interpretation of gastrulation. This chart or graphical representation detailing the fate of each part of an early embryo is referred to as a fate map. The Role of the Notch Signaling Pathway in Myogenesis Among other functions, the Notch signaling pathway forestalls the process of myogenesis in animals. The Notch signaling pathway is a pathway in animals by which two adjacent cells within an organism use a protein named Notch to mechanically interact with each other. Myogenesis is the formation of muscle that occurs throughout an animal's development, from embryo to the end of life. The cellular precursors of skeletal muscle originate in somites that form along the dorsal side of the organism. The French Flag Model The French flag model represents how embryonic cells receive and respond to genetic information and subsequently differentiate into patterns. Created by Lewis Wolpert in the late 1960s, the model uses the French tricolor flag as visual representation to explain how embryonic cells can interpret genetic code to create the same pattern even when certain pieces of the embryo are removed. Wolpert's model has provided crucial theoretical framework for investigating universal mechanisms of pattern formation during development. The Process of Implantation of Embryos in Primates Implantation is a process in which a developing embryo, moving as a blastocyst through a uterus, makes contact with the uterine wall and remains attached to it until birth. The lining of the uterus (endometrium) prepares for the developing blastocyst to attach to it via many internal changes. Without these changes implantation will not occur, and the embryo sloughs off during menstruation. Such implantation is unique to mammals, but not all mammals exhibit it. Multi-Fetal Pregnancy In humans, multi-fetal pregnancy occurs when a mother carries more than one fetus during the pregnancy. The most common multi-fetal pregnancy is twins, but mothers have given birth to up to eight children (octuplets) from a single pregnancy. Multiple fetusus can result from the release of multiple eggs or multiple ovulations, the splitting of a single fertilized egg, and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) which involves the insertion of many fertilized eggs into the mother's uterus.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2427
__label__wiki	0.739099	0.739099	Fox's Peter Pan & the Pirates (Redirected from Peter Pan and the Pirates) Find sources: "Fox's Peter Pan & the Pirates" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Fox's Peter Pan & the Pirates is an American animated television series based on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan that aired on Fox from September 8, 1990 to September 10, 1991. Title screen Chris Hubbell Larry Carroll David Carren Jason Marsden as the voice of Peter Pan Tim Curry as the voice of Captain James Hook Voices of Chris M. Allport Jack Angel Adam Carl Debi Derryberry Ed Gilbert Whitby Hertford Tony Jay Josh Keaton Aaron Lohr Jack Lynch David Shaughnessy Cree Summer Eugene Williams Michael Wise Buzz Potamkin Don Christensen Hiroshi Ohno (TMS) Production company(s) Fox Children's Productions Southern Star Productions Fox (Fox Kids) September 8, 1990 (1990-09-08) – September 10, 1991 (1991-09-10) The television show focuses as much on the pirates as it does on Peter Pan. Captain Hook and Mr. Smee traditionally are the only pirates who receive any attention in the story, but here, the other crew members of the Jolly Roger (Robert Mullins, Alf Mason, Gentleman Ignatious Starkey, Billy Jukes, and Cookson) are given distinct personalities and character development. A real force to be reckoned with, Hook is a powerful, temperamental, cultured, intelligent, and charming pirate with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. Some attention was also given to the Native American characters (no longer called Redskins). They and their customs were often featured in the storyline. One episode featured Wendy's daughter Jane (who appears at the end of the original play Peter Pan and at the end of the original book Peter and Wendy). Jane, from the future, visits the Neverland. At the end of the episode, Wendy is a little sad, because she knows that the existence of her daughter means that one day Wendy will leave Neverland and grow up. CharactersEdit This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. Please consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding subheadings. (May 2018) MainEdit Peter Pan (voiced by Jason Marsden, adsent in 64 episodes) - The titular protagonist of the series and main leader of the group, which includes ten children with him (and one fairy). He has dark brown hair worn in a ponytail and (in this version) wears a brown costume (which distinguishes him from other versions, in which Peter Pan normally wears green). He's always up for a challenge and game for adventure no matter how perilous, sometimes is too confident and sees just everything as a game. In his behavior, he doesn't notice the bad consequences or his mistakes (as if he doesn't make any) and doesn't get wiser after the event. He can't read and forgets nearly everything. The most important for him is having fun and playing games, where he knows and accepts the rules, but not once finds it more funny and interesting not to consider and (suddenly) to change them. Generally, difficulties are just the perfect challenge for him. There, he is very assertive and confident about himself and especially when hearing (usually of Tink) that the chosen situation is just hopeless and there is no chance for anybody to master with it, he clearly emphasizes, that he is not anybody, but Peter Pan! As in Barrie's novel and other versions, he can imitate other peoples' voices, where he regularly imitates the one of Hook, what saves himself and his friends from difficult situations. One of his favorite activities is his confrontations with Captain Hook, what he enjoys a lot. He can find himself in negative situations, where not once he can come out by himself, but can also get into trouble, where alone he is helpless, so he needs the help of his friends or can be lucky the opposite side is not careful and/or inattentive, what can be an advantage for him. Despite his cockiness, recklessness, willfulness, and selfishness, he still always manages to come through in the end. Even though he may be naive, stubborn and always up for fun and games, he knows and recognizes the danger and cares for his friends. In fact, he's the only one, who is independent, cunning, quick, and brave enough to handle it alone with Hook and the whole pirate crew while his friends are not and depend (more) on Peter. He is the good guy who cares for justice and a happy end. However, whole peace and harmony are not for him. It's very important to have action, where danger and adventures belong to. He'd never allow that it would ever come to the end of Hook as well as there will never be an alliance between the two of them, because this way Peter's place and life would become quiet and boring. He does everything to keep Hook and the pirates in Neverland. Wendy Darling (voiced by Christina Lange, 58 episodes) - The oldest of the Darling siblings, the big sister of John and Michael and only girl of the (human) group. She has short black hair, dark mint coloured eyes, wears a pink dress and a crown made of white flowers. Even if she changes her everyday clothes, she usually wears pink, it rarely happens she has other colours. As in Barrie's novel, she's very tidy, can't stand the mess, is like a mother for the boys and tells them bedtime stories. As Peter claims that girls are smarter and more intelligent than boys, Wendy is often calmer and more mature than the rest of the group and can become very serious without having time for games and fun just as the perfect opposite of Peter. She also believes even Captain Hook isn't really a bad person and has feelings. However also she likes playing games and having fun and can take part in playing a joke on someone. She's often closer to Peter than anyone else and spends the most time with him. She can be in trouble, where the others, especially Peter, care for her and regularly gets showed some special consideration as being the only girl to whom this kind of treatment is all obvious. It happens that she refuses taking part at the adventures and the fights, but is generally an active person and has a big participation in the action. Tinker Bell (voiced by Debi Derryberry, 54 episodes) - A red-headed fairy and Peter Pan's sidekick. She's often the more practical of the two and is there for him and the others to get them out of jams if and whenever she can. One way is her fairy dust that not only allows humans to fly, but also has other abilities, like (re)moving machines or making fire or light. The other is the fact that she often has the widest knowledge from Peter's friends, what is necessary for the boy to solve his problems and as being bodily much smaller than everyone else of her friends she can be easier overlooked and manages to go through tight places. However as being this size she also is physically more touchy and sensitive and as created by Barrie, her power and existence is depended on the human belief in magic and fantasy, especially Peter's. The same she is also able to take away everyone's ability to fly by making a clear decision by her own or if anything gets wrong with her health, the humans who depend on her automatically get affected, too. It's obvious her home and main place is at Peter's, but she is regularly active at the Small Monday Island, where she has her fairy duties, together with other fantastic creatures and on the side is interested in copper and pots. Peter is the most important person for her and she'd love to have him all for herself, and regularly becomes jealous of Wendy and would like not to help her but better getting her out of way and it regularly can be clearly seen that the two girls have very different views and opinions. Nevertheless she is a good person and would never allow anything to happen neither to Wendy nor to anyone else! John Darling (voiced by Jack Lynch, 54 episodes) - The middle Darling sibling; Wendy's and Michael's brother. He has hazel blond hair and wears a brown bowler hat or derby. It's obvious, that his main place is in the Darling Family, but not once can be seen (with his gender and age) also as one of the Lost Boys. He also shares the bed with them and often fights with the pirates using a magic sword of wood, which always grows again after breaking, as it does with the six Lost Boys. The big difference is that he wears more formal clothes and more often takes off his headdress. From all the friends, he's the one who spends the most time with books and it can be clearly seen that he can read and write. He also likes making notes and writing journals and enjoys painting. Not once he leads himself by his knowledge and his mind, not by greenness or desire for games and adventures. Michael Darling (voiced by Whitby Hertford, 53 episodes and 1 cameo - "Hook, the faithful son") - Wendy and John's brother and the youngest of the Darling siblings. He has light brown, curly hair and wears blue, overall-like, footy pajamas. As in the novel, he is the youngest and smallest of the group, has a big basket as his own bed. Sometimes he is slower and more frightened, so Peter and the others must look after him, where the most he desires the care of Wendy, the others care for him, too, but not so often and not always the same person. He loves playing around, having fun and especially enjoys running after animals. Even if being the "pet of the family" and often not able to take part at the action, he doesn't like and prefer being the passive one and doing nothing. He can take part at the fights and adventures and not once comes out as the only one, who can save the situation. The Lost Boys - a group of six confederates of Peter, only male gender (as clearly explained by Barrie, there is no possibility of the existence of a "Lost Girl"), who got orphaned or basically are no longer with us. They only remember their life in Neverland, don't know how it is and looks beyond this world, so they don't have their own families. Their home and place is at Peter's. Their clothes are informal and a little disrupted. They all wear caps shaped from various animal heads, which are a very big and important part of them. Taking them off is a very special rarity. They spend all the time wearing their caps, even if they go to bed, change their everyday clothes or take a swim in trunks. Not once they have some other headdress, but their main cap hidden under it, but can also have only another cap. There can be a situation, where they need to take their caps off or because of a (little) accident they fall them off. Slightly (voiced by Scott Menville, 50 episodes) - The tallest and 2nd eldest Lost Boy. He has very light skin, pale honey blond hair and wears a cap in the shape of a parrot's head. As a reference to his name, he constantly uses the word "slightly" in his sentences and this way also someone else when talking to him uses this word as well. His ambition is to be Peter's second-in-command 'coz of what he's jealous of Nibs, but when he is appointed such, he finds he is not cut out for the position. He is often naive and immature when making decisions what can cause trouble for the others, however he has a clearly seen sincerity and, just the opposite of Peter, doesn't hide to be scared of something and is aware of his mistakes and when making some he honestly admits. It's important for him to take part at the action, but can also prefer the calmness and staying out of the danger and adventures. He sees Peter and the others as his family and is also very important to them. Even if not being the leader he can take the orders, knows what to do during a battle and has his role in the gang of Lost Boys, where he knows how to act and behave. One known hobby of him is collecting shells and not once he likes to have some private creations published to be seen for everyone (in "The Neverscroll" he expresses his wish of creating the "Slightly's Gorge"). From the Pirate Crew, he is the closest to Billy Jukes. Nibs (voiced by Adam Carl, 50 episodes, 2 cameos - "The Dream", "Elementary, my dear Pan") - One of the tallest and the eldest of the Lost Boys. He has light golden blond hair and wears a cap shaped like a bear's head with the face cut out. He is Peter's second-in-command and makes the orders when Peter is absent. He's the one who is qualified for this role for being the most responsible, sensible and mature when making decisions. When the general action takes place, exactly an argument with Hook, he just gets automatically determined and as being in charge right after Peter, he decides immediately to attack the pirates. However also he not once has a changeable being, where he can become (too) brash and confident and likes to be (more) in spotlight and then another time rather quiet and reluctant and taking either none or at least very little part at the action. As it's usual for children he loves having fun, can also act naively and irresponsibly and sometimes can be a little too slow and inattentive and doesn't note the danger or some important details that surround him. However he also is a brave person. There can be a situation, where he has no choice and just has to enter a strange or risky place, but it's not always this way, as other circumstances are, that it's not necessary to venture. He is well aware of the danger and inconvenience of unpleasant or strange and unknown places and, even if he doesn't have to do this, anyway acts with courage and betakes there. Another big advantage he has is his physical strength, what can be seen, that he not once carries one of his friends or can hold somebody for a longer time. Even if sometimes being unsteady and getting lead by his carelessness and having no knowledge, nevertheless he works on himself to be active and to solve the problem and as being one of the oldest from the group, he cares for the little ones. He knows what to do when acting as the leader, but also listens to Peter and the others when they have their own ideas. Curly (voiced by Josh Keaton, 49 episodes, 1 cameo - "Tootles, the bold") - A hispanic Lost Boy with a cap shaped like a tiger's head with the face cut out. He has a tanned complexion, caramel brown hair and a very slim figure. From the age he is exactly in the middle of the Lost Boys, where Nibs and Slightly are older and the Twins and Tootles are younger, so because of this and also his way of acting he's neither the leader nor the pet of the family. Regularly he stays closer to Nibs and Slightly, whereas the half of the Lost Boys they either are the ones, who hold each other back and have none or the least important role in the chosen episode or opposite and from all the six Lost Boys they get the biggest role. But in fact he doesn't have a special person of the group, he is particularly close to (as Tink to Peter, Michael to Wendy or the Twins to each other) and can be seen to be more on his own. It's obvious and all naturally he belongs to and has his role and place in the gang of Peter and the Lost Boys, where it's no problem for him to take the orders from the leader and/or to discharge his duty and also knows what to do when fighting. He has a sense of humor and loves having fun, but also knows and recognizes when the situation is more serious and there is no time for laughing and joking around. He can become very believable and not once gets easily panicked, so it's just easy for the opposite side to take advantage of his fear. However it's very important for him, not to be seen by the others as useless or clumsy, so he tries to act in a more determined and independent manner. The Twins (voiced by Aaron Lohr and Michael Bacall, adsence: Tall Twin - 51 episodes, 1 cameo - "Pirate Boys, Lost Men"; Short Twin - 49 episodes, 2 cameos - "Pirate Boys, Lost Men", "Peter in Wonderland") - Two Lost Boys who are biracial Twins (and very much remind of the twin girls Lucy and Maria Aylmer, born 1997). They aren't identical, aside from both wearing caps in the shape of a leopard's head with cut-outs in the front for their faces. Individually (and only in the written language) they're known as Tall Twin and Short Twin, their heights being the main distinction. Other distinctions are their complexions and hair color, Tall Twin having a darker complexion and black curly hair, and Short Twin having fair skin and straight ginger hair. They're so synchronised that they accomplish more when they work together and when talking they finish each other's sentence. They also do practical everything together and are never apart. They are known as the mechanics and inventors of the group and most of their activity is creating, building and testing their own inventions and machines. In the episode "The Great Race", they fall out and find themselves unable to act normally, as they would when together, and their inventions fall apart. It can come out, that their inventions are the rescue in a difficult situation and another time it is their (general) knowledge and acquaintance on machines. Not once they do not anticipate some details in their inventions, what can cause secondary effects and trouble. From all the Lost Boys they have the biggest role in the series and appear in the most episodes and all in all they accompany Peter in the most adventures. One reason is because their machines are a very big help (for Peter) to play tricks and jokes on the pirates, who represent the main action in the episodes. However, there is no episode that got titled and dedicated only to them, eventually they are the heroes of the episode "The Great Race" and have a big role in "When Games become deadly" and "Hook, the faithful Son". And they get the biggest or only role in all the most significant and important episodes from the series, as there the viewer is getting the most information of Captain Hook - "After the Laughter", "Knights of Neverland", "First Encounter", "Ages of Pan, pt. 1 & 2" and "A Hole in the Wall", except "Immortal Pan" and "The Rake". (In "First Encounter" their important role is, that from them Peter knows about Hook, who presents all the action in the series. But the other important role have Tootles and Nibs, as they are the reason, Peter cut off Hook's hand, the worst cruelty Peter ever did to Hook, also explained in the novel.) Tootles (voiced by Chris M. Allport, 44 episodes) - The youngest and smallest of the Lost Boys who wears a cap in the shape of a panda's head with face cut-out and has a black blotch around his left eye for the emphasis of this animal. He is very small and has a round stomach, but because he loves eating and always finds time for this. As created by Barrie he is often clumsy which can cause problems for the others when looking for adventures. He can also become too sensitive, especially when getting judged or not noticed by the others. Even though he has his role in the group, knows what to do when fighting (the pirates), can come out with the idea how to save the situation and as referred to in the episode "Tootles and the Dragon" he is the most patient of the group. Of the Lost Boys, he is the one who is the closest to Michael, thanks to whom his position generally can be seen. When Michael is at the same place, Tootles is not the little one and just helpless, but more mature and independent and equal with the older boys. But not once, especially when Michael is not around, Tootles as being the smallest and youngest Lost Boy must be looked some more after by the others. From Peter's closest friends he has the smallest appearance in the series, however there are three episodes which got titled and dedicated to him, the most number, all the other friends have less of it. And in episode "First Encounter" it is explained, why he is (together with Nibs, whose role is just a little smaller,) the main reason, Captain Hook lost his right hand and from then on became famous for his steel hook. VillainsEdit Captain James Algernon Cloudesley Hook (voiced by Tim Curry, 64 episodes) - The main antagonist of the series and Peter Pan's nemesis. As his title implies, James Hook is the head of his pirate crew. Although he's well-known for his ruthless and nefarious nature, the Hook in this version is more complex and in many ways closer to the portrayal in Barrie's book. He's missing his right hand and has a sharp iron hook instead. Rather than the traditional long black hair (or wig) and long mustache, this Hook is clean-shaven and has his white hair styled in the manner of a powdered wig. As the captain of the ship called "The Jolly Roger", he has a pirate crew and a parrot named Short Tom. In contrast to his bumbling crew, Hook is very much the aristocrat, and is very well-read and charming in a sinister way. He can be called a fine musician and, despite the loss of his hand, he is very good at playing a harpsichord, his beloved instrument he not once treats as a treasure and can become sensitive to its point, for instance if someone else plays it or uses it carelessly. He usually expresses dissatisfaction about his crew. However, the same way can see the advantages at one them, what he wants to make (sensible) use of. He can get into trouble, where he not once is able to come out by himself. But it can also happen in that he needs the help of Peter and/or the other heroes. He is immune to Neverland's usual magic, however can be affected by strange magic. Two members of his family are mentioned, although they are already dead: his brother Patch, who owned his own pirate ship called "The Rake", and his mother, who is referred to as having had some unfulfilled wishes about her son James and after her death the only thing left of her memory being a portrait that Hook has in his cabin, but is never shown completely. However, it is strongly implied that she was hideously ugly and terrifying. As generally having a very rude and cruel character, Hook has a weakness for mothers, not only his own, but also strange mothers and can become sensitive, when he hears of her thoughts or feelings. Insight to his past is given in the episode "Hook's Christmas", where it is shown that, together with his brother, they were once partners in piracy. However, when Hook's fiancé discovered that he was a pirate, she left him. Heartbroken and moody, Hook would later duel his brother for command of the ship, a fight that claimed the latter's left eye. Also, in "Ages of Pan", Hook mentions that he served in the British Navy at some point in his life. Smee (voiced by Ed Gilbert in an Irish accent, 64 episodes) - Captain Hook's loyal first mate and the closest he has to a friend, although he rarely seems to appreciate it. He's determined by him as a big dummy and not once also by the other pirates. Smee is of Irish descent and in his appearance he is small, but rather slim, has grey-brown hair and a beard and oval dirty blue eyes. As known from Barrie's novel, his weapon is a sword that he named Johnny Corkscrew. The main difference from the other pirates is that he is often clumsy and not really able to capture any of the Lost Boys, it is a big rarity when he manages to do this. Generally, the closest person to him is Captain Hook. Despite all the confusion and his environment, it is important for him not to leave the pirate crew. He is faithful to his Captain and stays on his side, but not once can also be more equal to the other pirates. The Pirate Crew – A group of pirates, various aged, all male gender, whose home address is the Jolly Roger. They take the orders of Captain Hook and are subjected to him. Even if not being completely pleased of the life they live and this position with being the servants of this kind of man and regularly getting only criticized and almost hunted by him, they are, in fact, all dependent on Hook and only by having him as their captain their daily life can run normally. Similarly, Captain Hook needs to be with his crew, especially for catching Peter and his band, who, as children, are smaller and weaker than the grown-up men, so they have no chance to refuse. "Gentleman" Ignatious P. Starkey (voiced by David Shaughnessy, 62 episodes) - A foppish yet gentlemanly and English member of Hook's crew. He speaks with a "dash-it-all" accent, has a high physique, long black hair he wears in a ponytail and a thin mustache. He wears a long cape and as a weapon uses a rapier, he always has with and can easily pull out, being ready for the battle and also tries it as a pugilist. He is believed to be the first mate and can become conceited and confident in himself. Not once also he overestimates himself and thinks to be able to be the Captain instead of Hook but, in fact, will never be the right one for this pose. He can come into trouble, where he is not able to come out by himself and someone else must do this and also not once has no courage, so he admits that he is scared. Eucrates Cookson (voiced by Jack Angel in a Greek accent, 56 episodes) - The ship's disgusting chef, who has his individual method for his dishes and menu. Instead of typical weapons, he can use kitchen devices and is very good in using a fishing net. From all the others, he spends the most time in the kitchen, where he can be seen cooking. As having his main place in the kitchen and a massive build, it usually comes out he doesn't take part in the action, where physical exercise is needed and generally disclaims going on land and when he leaves the Jolly Roger, his plans are finding some food. Not once his dishes are good not for eating, but for performing his own miracles. In fact, he is not very intellectual and seldom thinks before acting. He is a miserable singer. Alf Mason (voiced by Tony Jay, 57 episodes) — A member of Hook's crew who serves as a carpenter and strongman. He has a strong physical build, is tall, very muscular, has no hair, and wears a blue nightcap. As a weapon, Alf often wields a mallet. Although he fears Hook as much as the rest of the crew if the pirates are doubtful about an order from the captain, he is usually the first to voice it. It can happen that he is inattentive or helpless. A big benefit is his strong build and physical strength, where the others, especially Peter's friends, have no chance to oppose him. Even so, he can become emotionally sensitive and shows his feelings. Robert Mullins (voiced by Jack Angel, 62 episodes) - A member of Captain Hook's crew who hails from Brooklyn. He is medium height, muscular, has a long face, light brown hair and mustache and a scar at his left eye. He is very good in sword fighting and tends to clash with his leader more than anyone else on the ship. Although he refers to Captain Hook as "the finest pirate who ever lived", he sometimes schemes to take over command. However, he has no chance to become the leader, as Captain Hook is just too autonomous and powerful, and Mullins is never going to consider him. His biggest disadvantage is that he is deeply superstitious and prone to landsickness. Despite this, he often leaves the ship; it rarely happens that he comes off in a land expedition but stays on the Jolly Roger or it happens, that he has his important duties to do on land, that there is no mention of his intolerance and without any problem he copes with this. Robert is good friends with Billy Jukes and has taught him about pirating. Billy Jukes (voiced by Eugene Williams, 57 episodes) - The youngest pirate who is of Old World/Indian descent. Before he became a member of the pirates, he was a castaway on a desert island. Billy was rescued by Captain Hook's crew and taught pirating by Robert Mullins, to whom he is very loyal to. As not being an adult as the other pirates, he is not well risen and has no facial hair. Billy is very slim, has dark skin and thick brunette hair that often conceals one eye. Despite his age, he is not excluded by the crew (certainly not as much as bo'sun Smee). And it's obvious that his main place is at the pirates. It is seldom emphasized, that he is the youngest and immature at his age. He also doesn't often have a sword with, which he uses as his weapon, as the other pirates do. Instead, he is the ship's gunner and responsible for the cannons, so he is never far away from the big cannon, 'Long Tom', that is his main weapon and at the skirmishes with Peter and the others, he's the one who shouts with it. He cares to keep it clean and sometimes also sleeps on it. As he is the closest to the cannon it usually comes out, that he doesn't go to the land with Hook and the others. He is an active person and physically moves a lot, where in his young age it is no problem for him to do activities with (some) more effort. One his very unpleased disadvantages is, that he is not a good swimmer, so prefers to avoid to go diving but when he knows that there is no other way to solve a difficult situation he never hesitates. He also has a wide knowledge at machines and other uncommon instruments and is the inventor among the pirate crew, what is a big feature he has in common with the Twins. Not once he cooperates with Peter and his band, where it can come out for him as being just a liar and traitor, but sometimes shows he really has a good heart and cares for the boys. The Croc (19 episodes) - A big reptile, the same crocodile that had devoured Captain Hook's hand. She lives in her caves, that have the shape of a crocodile's head and doesn't tolerate any kind of intruders. Not once Peter and the others only can handle with the pirates by using the Croc's help. A ticking clock is heard every time the Croc is near. In the series, the clock is magical and controls the whole time of day in Neverland. Indians - A tribe of Natives who reside in Neverland and often help out Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Only three of them figure prominently in the series, some other were seen only briefly in the episode "Pirate Boys, Lost Men". Tiger Lily (voiced by Cree Summer, 5 episodes-main, 4 episodes-minor, 1 cameo - "Play Ball") - The daughter of Great Big Little Panther and sister of Hard-To-Hit. She and her little brother sometimes tag along with and aid Peter and their other friends on their many adventures. Generally, she is physically active, but also a friendly person, and can be recognized as being calmer. Finding it unnecessary to take a risk and to prove to be the better one and showing to be more mature. Together with her brother, they love having fun as it's obvious for children and not once are too naive and inattentive. However, they also know and recognize when the situation is more serious and act much more mature. Great Big Little Panther (voiced by Michael Wise, 12 episodes) - The Indian chief and father of Tiger Lily and Hard-To-Hit. He's very wise and often assists Peter and his friends when they have (some big) problems. Hard-to-Hit (voiced by Aaron Lohr, 6 episodes-main, 5 episodes-minor, 1 cameo - "Play Ball") - Great Big Little Panther's son and Tiger Lily's younger brother. He is very active and knows the weapons of his tribe and how to use them. Generally, he gets accompanied by his sister, although it's seldom if ever he's on his own. At the same time, it is obvious for him to be less mature and, as a boy, he not once wants to have challenges and to prove (in fact especially himself) to be independent and able to care for his own. Unfortunately, not once he is not careful enough, where there can come out some bigger trouble, where he just needs the help of someone else. The Mermaids - A group of young women, who are half human and half fish. They live in the sea and are most seen at the Mermaids' Lagoon or nearby. They're vain and care for their looks and good appearance. They enjoy playing, joking and having fun and collecting items from the land. From all the humans who live above the water they only like Peter and no-one else. Like Tinkerbell and the fairies, the Mermaids are magical. Their singing can hypnotize and lure men to their doom, conjure bubbles which sink or float, make bubbles big enough to supply air for or trap humans, command tides, conjure water spouts, and manipulate water in other ways. Crooked Tail (voiced by Linda Gary, 2 episodes-main, 2 episodes-minor) - A mermaid who is feared by the Purple and Blue Mermaids. She was once beautiful, but conceited and haughty until a potion to enhance her beauty went horribly awry turning her into a green-skinned mermaid. In "Vanity, Thy Name is Mermaid", she helped Peter Pan rescue Wendy from two mermaids who tried to turn Wendy into a mermaid. She is the only mermaid who shows respect to all the human children, not only Peter. The Purple and Blue Mermaids - Two mermaids who only appear twice as villains in the series. One has shoulder length blonde hair and a deep lilac tail. The second has short pale red hair and blue scales which covers her tails, chest, shoulders and arms. While they are usually seen together, they often insult each other and both are very vain. They appear in "The Ruby" and "Vanity, thy name is Mermaid", where it can be emphasized that Crooked Tail is their opponent and has just opposite purposes to them. They are against all humans and not even befriend Peter, who is known as a big attraction to all the other mermaids. Alde Baran (1 episode-main, 4 episodes-minor) - A dwarf, who works with miniature-horses and has magical boots. A good friend of Tinker Bell, as he is her size. Olook (voiced by Jack Angel, 5 episodes) - A grumpy giant troll who lives in his big cave with a secret entrance, has an own library, is able do special troll-magic and interested in valuable items. When fighting, only his strong body is enough to be a big fear. However, not once he uses his big cudgel. The Girl in the Moon (voiced by Kath Soucie) - A blonde girl in a turquoise dress who is responsible for bringing the night by replacing the sun that appears during the day with the moon at the normal time. When any problems arise and the day and night cannot appear normally as the result the normal daytime loses its balance. Wherever - A big and powerful spirit. He appears when somebody loses something to take possession of this lost object and then brings it to his big caverns that are located deep under the sea. King Kyros (voiced by Jack Angel) - The Ice King of Neverland. He owns a giant ice cave with lots of corridors and tunnels and has some elves as his subworkers. In fact, King Kyros is not one of the bad guys. The conflict with him was started by Peter, who just entered the King's home without any permission and took away one of his crystals claiming it was his own. Captain Patch (voiced by Ed Gilbert) – Jasper Hook is the older brother of James Hook who once served as his midshipman. Hook took out Jasper's left eye years ago when Jasper wouldn't give James a bigger share of their loot, and he wore a patch ever since, which is why he is known as Captain Patch. Presumably Patch died not long afterwards, and his chest of treasures somehow ended up hidden in a cave in Neverland with a curse. In the episode "The Rake", this chest was found and soon it ended up summoning Captain Patch's ghost who then summoned his ghost ship called the Rake in order to take revenge on his brother. Later, Jasper appeared in "Hook's Christmas" where first the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Captain Hook as he once used to work with his brother until the incident that led up to Jasper's loss of an eye. His spirit later appeared as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. It should be noted Patch and his ship appeared somewhat different in each of the two episodes. Jack O Lantern - A ghost which revives in Halloween. Jane - Wendy's daughter from the future. Nico - Wendy's wolf. Short Tom - A malicious parrot who is Captain Hook's mischievous pet with an eye-patch. He is capable of speaking but is limited to phrases obviously taught to him. Frequently, he tries to alert the pirates when seeing Peter Pan sneak aboard. But because of his limited speech, he usually fails to get them to understand. Short Tom is the faithful pet of Hook, who cares to keep his parrot close to himself and not to leave the Jolly Roger. Frau Brumhandel - A valkyrie. King Oberon - The king of the fairies. Queen Gloriana - The queen of the fairies. Django - A gipsy dwarf who is a showman. Forget-Me-Not - A fairy. The dragon - He is resurrected by a key. DifferencesEdit The following show the differences from J.M. Barrie's book or other Peter Pan versions: This series doesn't feature a beginning introducing the whole Darling family, who lives in the real world in London, nor explains how Peter takes Wendy to Neverland. From the first episode, they already live in the underground house, know Hook and the pirates, and are friends with the Indians. The same it has no clear end, where the Darling siblings leave Neverland and return home as they decided to grow up. As for the typical US order of showing episodes, no chronology is needed and there is no episode to have a clear accentuation to be the last one, as thanks to the order of airing of every single episode it is shown not to be natural. F.in. it is discernible, that the events of the episode "Vanity, thy name is Mermaid" are taking place before "The Ruby", however the episode "The Ruby" got produced and shown earlier than "Vanity, thy name is Mermaid". The same is with "The Girl, who lives in the Moon", where Tink talks with her friend about the day, when the pirates stole his seven league boots, but this event is taking place in the episode that got broadcast later - "Seven League Boots". The same it is mysterious, what is the fate of the Lost Boys, Peter's allies, that they are in Neverland and without the series having a well known end like in Barrie's novel, it is unclear if they get adopted by the Darling parents and grow up (as it happens in Peter Pan (2003) or Peter Pan Live!) or decide to stay in Neverland, as they want to be with Peter forever (like Disney's Peter Pan or The Adventures of Peter Pan). And it is unknown, which was the order, Peter took them to Neverland. In the first episode "The coldest Cut of all" Nibs is asking Peter, how it looks in the ice caves, showing the viewer he hasn't visited thiis place yet. Little later, Tootles is telling, he already visited the caves as Peter took everybody with, the last time he went there, so all the Lost Boys, who already were Peter's allies. This shows it is known, that obviously Tootles came to Neverland before Nibs, and some boys more, but who exactly is unknown. In episode "First Encounter" Peter is telling, how it was before the Darlings came to Neverland and in his flashback the Lost Boys who appear are Tootles, the Twins and Nibs. It can be concluded, that together with Tootles, the Twins are the ones, who also came before Nibs and Slightly and Curly weren't yet in Neverland. However this is only a possibility but no presumption. It may also be that Slightly and Curly just don't get a role in this episode, as compared with all the others, there regularly are episodes, where someone doesn't appear, (what even was made in one episode with Peter and in another with Hook,) but it's still obvious, he/she is somewhere in Neverland, just this time doesn't get presented to the viewer. In other versions, Peter always wears his knife next to his waist at the belt, but in this version he has it attached to his right boot. In the book, Tinker Bell has her own "fairy language", which humans only hear like the sounds of ringing bells (Disney's Tinker Bell Movies). Likewise, she doesn't speak in most other versions, but makes tinkling or other sounds, which Peter understands "Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", Peter Pan Burbank or "Peter Pan Live!"). In this version and some others, she can speak the human language ("The Adventures of Peter Pan", Hook or The New Adventures of Peter Pan). In the novel, Barrie describes Tink's figure as somewhat plump - "She was slightly inclined to embonpoint", but in this version (and most of the others) she is portrayed as slim. In Barrie's novel Captain Hook's hair is black, so many versions present him with this look ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", "Hook" or "Peter Pan Live!") and in some other it is not exactly black, but still dark ("The Adventures of Peter Pan", "Peter Pan Burbank" or "The New Adventures of Peter Pan"). But here it is white. In the episode "After the Laughter" it is shown, that not even in his childhood his hair was black, but fair. In most other versions, Captain Hook becomes frightened, panicked, and almost petrified when hearing the ticking of a clock, indicating that the crocodile is close ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan Burbank" or "The Adventures of Peter Pan"). In this version, his behavior is inconsistent. Hook often is ready to bridle, when he notes the presence of the crocodile. In the original book and some other versions, John wears a (black) stovepipe hat ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", "The Adventures of Peter Pan" or "Peter Pan Live!"). Here, he has a (brown) derby. The look of the figures is not much described by J.M. Barrie. But in most of the other versions, Wendy is either blonde ("The Adventures of Peter Pan", "Peter Pan Burbank" or "Peter Pan Live!") or has, at least, lighter hair ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)" or "Hook") and from the Darling siblings the lightest hair color ("Peter Pan (2003)", "The Adventures of Peter Pan", "Peter Pan Burbank", "The New Adventures of Peter Pan" or "Peter Pan Live!") while frequently, her brother John has the darkest hair color ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", "Peter Pan Burbank" or "Peter Pan Live!"). In "Peter Pan and the Pirates" Wendy with black hair has the darkest and John being dark blond has the lightest hair color from the Darling siblings. As described in the novel and in some other versions, the Twins, two of the Lost Boys, are monozygotic twins and look identical ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", "Peter Pan Burbank" or "Peter Pan Live!"). However, in this version, they are dizygotic and look very different. One is short and Caucasian, the other is taller and clearly African. They are recognized as twins by wearing similar caps and doing everything together. In the novel, Barrie describes the clothes of the Lost Boys as being skins from bears that they'd once executed. Here, they wear normal clothes and from animals, they have only caps of their heads, which are an important part of them. And only two of them, Nibs and Tootles, have caps from bears' heads, the rest of the boys have other animals. In other Peter Pan movies or series, in Neverland, only Peter is able to fly all the time, while the Darlings only do it for coming there ("Disney's Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", "The Adventures of Peter Pan", "Peter Pan Burbank" or "Peter Pan Live!") and everyone else can fly only when Tink gives them her fairy dust, effective only for a finite period of time (Disney's Return to Neverland or "The New Adventures of Peter Pan"). In "Peter Pan and the Pirates" not only Peter, but also his closest friends, the Darlings and the Lost Boys, can fly all the time. EpisodesEdit Storyboard by "The Coldest Cut of All" Karen Willson and Chris Weber Don Christensen 8 September 1990 (1990-09-08) 7F02 King Kyros's Ice Realm is one area of Neverland where Peter Pan is not welcome. But the arrogant and reckless boy is not about to let a cranky ice god spoil his fun. Peter takes an ice crystal from the ice caves and returns home to share his treasure and adventurous tale with Wendy, Tink and the Lost Boys. His friends will also be sharing his punishment when Kyros retaliates ... "Living Pictures" George Hampton, Mike Moore, Larry Carroll, David Carren Don Christensen 17 September 1990 (1990-09-17) 7F01 Peter and the boys always love listening to Wendy's stories, which she writes and reads. There Tinker Bell knows something better. She uses her magic to make the contents of story books real, so that everybody can take part in the action. "River of Night" Brynne Stephens, Michael Reaves Don Christensen, George Hampton 18 September 1990 (1990-09-18) 7F03 Peter joins Hard-to-Hit and Tiger Lily in a journey down the Mysterious River to seek out an ancient golden arrow. Hook and the Pirates pursue them through a series of perils along the way. Every group has its own methods to go through the obstacles, that are on the way. "Slightly in Stone" Lawrence Ditillio Don Christensen 19 September 1990 (1990-09-19) 7F04 Tink has a magic powder she bought from Olook, the troll and wants to try it out on berries. It's too heavy for her, so it falls out of her hands and gets in touch with Slightly. Now Peter, Wendy, and the Lost Boys must scavenge Neverland for the supplies needed to cure Slightly. "The Rake" Peter Lawrence and Michael Reaves 20 September 1990 (1990-09-20) TBA Peter, Slightly and John accidentally open a box that contained the Ghost of Captain Patch (AKA Jasper Hook), who raises his ship called the Rake and plans his revenge on his younger brother, Captain James Hook for blinding him years ago. Now Captain Hook must work together with Peter Pan in order to defeat Captain Patch. "Peter on Trial" Larry Carroll, David Carren 27 September 1990 (1990-09-27) TBA Peter and Tink sneak on board the Jolly Roger in order to play with Hook's harpsichord. Hook catches them in the act and captures Peter, destroying his beloved instrument in the process. All looks grim for Peter until Wendy flies over and convinces Hook to give Peter a trial. "The Wind and the Panther" Charles Kaufman, Larry Carroll, David Carren 17 October 1990 (1990-10-17) TBA Hook tampers with Great Big Little Panther's magic sand, which can create and control the weather, sending the weather of Neverland into a frenzy. Peter must retrieve this property before the storms Hook created kill anyone. "Treasure Hunt" Peter Lawrence 1 November 1990 (1990-11-01) TBA In the early morning Peter appears on the Jolly Roger and annoys the pirates. This makes Hook going insane, that he draws up a phony treasure map in order to lure Peter and the Darlings into a trap and to take revenge on them. "The Plucking of Short Tom" George Hampton, Mike Moore 5 November 1990 (1990-11-05) TBA Short Tom leaves the Jolly Roger and makes good friends with Tink. Smee knows how important this parrot is for his Captain, so that he takes some of the pirates to the land to get the pet back, while the others, who stayed on the ship, must busy Hook, not to let him notice, what'd happened. Unfortunately he finds out, that his beloved Short Tom is missing and decides to take care of this problem by himself. This could be dangerous for Peter's friend … "The Dream" Peter Lawrence 7 November 1990 (1990-11-07) TBA Michael keeps having a strange nightmare about the Crocodile and a red eagle, which just cannot stop and only chases him. It's up to Peter and the Darlings to find out what it means and stop it for good. The Indian chief gives them advice, they start to follow. Unfortunately Hook wants to interfere, as usual … "Demise of Hook" Larry Carroll, David Carren 8 November 1990 (1990-11-08) TBA Peter and the Lost Boys cause a commotion among the pirates when they steal the Jolly Roger's flag. In trying to retaliate, Hook puts too much gunpowder into Long Tom and gets blown to smithereens. The rest of the pirates decide to leave Neverland since their captain's vendetta with Peter was the only thing that kept them there. Peter is devastated that Hook is dead and that the pirates are gone, but he may just get one last showdown with his archenemy when the Lost Boys tell him that Hook's back. "Pirate Boys, Lost Men" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 9 November 1990 (1990-11-09) TBA In the middle of the night the Lost Boys are hunting a bear, while the Pirates want to steal a magic crystal. Because both of this targets are located on the same place, at the same time, it's not possible for the two parties to converge with each other and then to go through the unpleased consequences. "After the Laughter" Sean Roche 13 November 1990 (1990-11-13) TBA The jealous Mermaids of the Lagoon capture Wendy and tickle her laughter out of her. This disturbs the spirit of Cavern Wherever in the process. Now Peter and Wendy must journey into the Cavern under the lagoon and get Wendy's Laugh back, before she is destroyed, encountering Hook's lost childhood in the process. "Stupid Smee" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 16 November 1990 (1990-11-16) TBA Hook is unpleased with Smee, who can never do anything right and finally expulses him. Now Smee is left to fend for himself and soon Wendy starts feeling with him. She tries to befriend him and to persuade Peter and the Lost Boys to help him, as it'd be better not only for Smee, but also for themselves. "The Play's the Thing" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 19 November 1990 (1990-11-19) TBA While searching for Peter Pan's hideout, the pirates spy the Lost Boys rehearsing a Shakespeare play in the woods. Hook is so appalled by their incorrect recitations that he steps out of hiding and wows everyone with a flawless rendition of a soliloquy from Julius Caesar. Everyone then agrees on a temporary truce so that Hook can direct a production of Romeo and Juliet starring Wendy as Juliet. It's a tense truce that threatens to turn deadly when Hook decides to use the play's sleeping potion as a way to poison Wendy. "Hook's Mother's Picture" Peter Lawrence, Tony Zalewski 23 November 1990 (1990-11-23) TBA Up in the sky Wendy builds a cloudstatue that represents her mother. The Lost Boys get curious, as they don't know what a mother is. To let them know Peter decides to go to the Jolly Roger to take a look at a portrait of Hook's mother, so they'd at least know how a real mother looks like. As the boys really want to know this, they don't care about the danger there and go with Peter. Being careful, they get to Hook's cabin and fulfil the quest. To make things funnier, Peter steals the picture. The pirates try to replace it, which causes confusion over which is the real picture. "A Wee Problem" Michael Reaves 26 November 1990 (1990-11-26) TBA Everyone is awestruck at the appearance of three moons above Neverland. Tinker Bell is especially thrilled, for this gives her the ability to shrink Peter down to fairy size and take him to visit the Fairy King. But she's not too happy when Peter insists that the Darlings and the Lost Boys come along. Tink messes with the others' ability to fly, which leads to such disaster that King Oberon kicks Wendy and the boys out. With the children unable to revert to their former size, they become easy prey for the pirates and the Crocodile, especially since Tink is keeping Peter distracted. "Knights of Neverland" William Overgard 27 November 1990 (1990-11-27) TBA Peter and the others are playing one of Wendy's stories, King Arthur and the Knights. For the game, they are all wearing heavy armor, which makes them unable to fly. At the same time Wendy remembers that she had a dream of a wolf, named Nico which turns out to be real. Soon this wolf gets kidnapped by the Pirates. Despite the difficulty and danger without flying, three of the Lost Boys try to release the animal, but don't succeed and (literally) get hung up by the Pirates. Wendy then tries to free them all in a more female way, by talking and staying calm, but also this is without any effect, so she gets tied up as well. Finally, Peter comes to save the day with the help of the rest of the Boys and Tink's fairy dust. At the end he can (literally) hang up Hook and the Pirates and rescue his friends and the wolf. Wendy is happy nothing bad'd happened to Nico. She cares for his freedeom, so the two of them say goodbye to each other. "Pirate Shadows" William Overgard, Peter Lawrence 28 November 1990 (1990-11-28) TBA While playing Michael gets frightened by a shadow, that he cannot calm down. Peter means he doesn't have to as shadows are peaceful and would never hurt anybody. In the same night he steals the Pirates' shadows. Unfortunately they are more dangerous than he realizes. Soon they become independent and start to try and do Peter in. With the loss of their shadows, the Pirates are not able to walk normally and must do so on their hands. The only way to make everything normal again is for the Pirates' to reunite with their shadows. But not necessarily everybody has to be connected to his own ... "Now Day Party" Sean Roche 17 December 1990 (1990-12-17) TBA Michael wishes to celebrate his birthday and Wendy decides to fulfil this. Everybody agrees and is ready to help and take part. Everybody except Peter. He is against birthdays, as they mean to get older and finally to grow up. The only way not to celebrate this birthday is not to allow the next day to come is to keep the night lasting. He takes the girl from the moon down to the earth and makes everything to her liking so that she doesn't want to return to the moon, which stucks unmoved in the sky. "When Games Become Deadly" William Overgard 18 December 1990 (1990-12-18) TBA Peter and the others are having a lot fun by playing games. Suddenly they get disturbed by a new cannon developed by the Pirates. The Twins find that interesting and decide to fight back with their own inventions. However Peter sees that Hook has started to change the rules the two groups have between each other. As calling himself the one who always wins, Peter knows that he must go on with the idea of the Twins, so they can make the last attack. "Eternal Youth" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 20 December 1990 (1990-12-20) TBA Peter makes Hook and his crew believe that there is a magic river in Neverland with water that can make everyone and everything younger. First Hook is sure this all is only a stupid joke, but finally he tries it out on his own parrot, Short Tom, and sees the results the next day. He wants Smee to take him to the place where he got this magic water. He doesn't know that Peter has his own plans in store. "The Foot Race" Chris Trengove, Peter Lawrence 24 December 1990 (1990-12-24) TBA Peter and Wendy are playing hide and seek with Tiger Lily and Hard-to-Hit. A No Flying rule is in place to give the Indians a fair chance, but Peter breaks the rule in order to win the game. Hard-to-Hit becomes angry about this and claims that Peter could never win anything without his flying power. This brings about a contest in which an earth-bound Peter and Wendy race Hard-to-Hit and Tiger Lily in retrieving various artifacts around Neverland. Unfortunately, the competitive boys make each round more dangerous since there is never a clear winner to the race, so that finally Hook gets attentive. "Nibs and the Mermaids" William Overgard 31 December 1990 (1990-12-31) TBA Nibs decides to journey to the bottom of the lagoon in order to see the Mermaids' Grotto. "All Hallow's Eve" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 4 January 1991 (1991-01-04) TBA It's All Hallows Eve, so Peter and the Lost Boys are playing tons of pranks on the pirates. One prank they pull is to steal the pirates' lantern. This revives the Jack O Lantern ghost, who gets Smee to steal the lantern back from Peter. The ghost then summons other ghosts, witches, and goblins from the volcano to wreak havoc all over the island. At first Hook and the crew think Smee is a deserter and hunt him down, but when they learn about the ghost they realize their mistake. The pirates and the Lost Boys must team up if they're to reclaim the lantern before Neverland is completely overrun by the undead! "Billy Jukes, Lost Boy" Doug Booth 7 January 1991 (1991-01-07) TBA When Robert Mullins comes down with Neverfever and Billy Jukes goes after him in order to find a cure, Slightly tries to prove himself to the others by capturing them. Only for the three of them to be caught in a thunderstorm. While taking refuge in a cave and planning to find the antidote needed to cure Robert, Slightly learns about Billy and Robert's past. "The Phantom Shaman" Chris Trengove and Peter Lawrence 9 January 1991 (1991-01-09) TBA Cookson poses as a shaman in order to lure Peter and Wendy to their doom. "Tootles and the Dragon" Bruce Schaefer 14 January 1991 (1991-01-14) TBA Peter and the boys find a giant magic key that is stuck in Dragon's Rock. After everyone's failure to wrestle it free, Tootles touches it and makes the stone come alive. "First Encounter" Ted Lederson, Steven Waves 26 January 1991 (1991-01-26) TBA John is in an inquisitive mood today and wants to know how certain events in Neverland came to pass. Peter begins answering John's questions by explaining why he made the Croc swallow the clock. He then describes how the Jolly Roger was brought to Neverland by a strange hurricane and how the Lost Boys and the pirates first met. During the course of the story, Peter reveals that he cut off Hook's hand when he thought that the pirate had killed Nibs and Tootles in their first battle. The flashbacks show that Hook's scream of pain could be heard all over the island as a signal that life in Neverland would never be the same. "Slightly Duped" Larry Carroll and David Carren 31 January 1991 (1991-01-31) TBA Slightly visits the "oracle" of Neverland wishing to be Peter's second in command, which he is eventually appointed to. After being much too naive and getting tricked first by his friends, as a joke, and later by the pirates, more seriously, he causes a lot of trouble for everybody and finally realizes he's not qualified for the position. "Professor Smee" Matthew Malach 1 February 1991 (1991-02-01) TBA Smee finds a big shell, which tells him everything he wants to know. This can be the big chance for Hook to find out the home of Peter and the others. "Evicted!" Lawrence Hartstein 2 February 1991 (1991-02-02) TBA A little stone gnome in a closet of the Underground House suddenly comes to life and orders the Lost Boys to leave, by threatening to tell Hook about their living place. "The Girl Who Lives in the Moon" Sean Roche 4 February 1991 (1991-02-04) TBA Robert Mullins's quest to cure his land sickness with a magical spell causes the moon to plummet from the sky. Hook saves the Girl Who Lives in the Moon and becomes completely captivated by her beauty and charm. In an attempt to prove to Peter that not all children hate him, Hook tries to win the Girl's affections by convincing her he wants to help put the moon back in the sky. Somehow, Peter must get the Girl away from the pirates and return her home to the proper place. "Hook's Christmas" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 5 February 1991 (1991-02-05) TBA Captain Hook believes that Christmas is a waste of time even after he crashes his crew's Christmas party and locks himself in his cabin for the remainder of the evening. He is then visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past (who resembles Wendy), Ghost of Christmas Present (who resembles Smee), and Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (who resembles Captain Patch) who end up teaching him the meaning of Christmas. A parody of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. "Tootles the Bold" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 6 February 1991 (1991-02-06) TBA Tootles wishes to be the hero of a great adventure, but is a little scared not to be qualified for that. Tink helps his courage with a 'talisman' and Tootles makes friends with a whale family. "The Hook and the Hat" Larry Carroll, David Carren 7 February 1991 (1991-02-07) TBA Peter takes the hat from Hook and suddenly thinks to be the Captain himself. Disappointed of the big defeat Hooks leaves the Jolly Roger and now the Pirates have to look after themselves. Mullins decides to become the new Captain and tries to take back the pirate's hat from Peter, but because of his landsickness he is too weak to fight outside the ship, so Peter beats him and soon has the control of the pirate crew and the Jolly Roger, where he moves with the Boys. Wendy knows this won't end good so she decides to find Hook, who she wants to return and bring everything back to normal. "Ages of Pan, Part One" Peter Lawrence, Matthew Malach 8 February 1991 (1991-02-08) TBA After Hook taunts Peter with the fact that the boy will never grow up, Peter decides to prove his nemesis wrong by wishing he would grow up. However, as Peter ages, his belief in magic slowly fades away, causing all of Neverland to fade away as well. Note: Both parts of this episode were originally released commercially to home markets throughout North America as "Hook's Deadly Game". "Ages of Pan, Part Two" Peter Lawrence, Matthew Malach 9 February 1991 (1991-02-09) TBA As Neverland continues to fade away, Hook and the Pirates succeed in capturing Wendy and the Lost Boys, and the now elderly Peter. As the fantastic creature in Neverland, which is the closest to Peter Pan, Tinker Bell is now the only one who can help Peter renew his faith and trust in magic. "The Ruby" Lawrence Hartstein 11 February 1991 (1991-02-11) TBA The Purple and Blue Mermaids steal a map of Crooked Tail's and give it to the Pirates in order to lure Peter into the ocean. Both, Peter and the Pirates are set on finding the ruby and claiming it for themselves. "Friday the Thirteenth" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 12 February 1991 (1991-02-12) TBA Peter and Curly play tricks on the Pirates, making them believe they have bad luck. "Immortal Pan" Sean Roche 13 February 1991 (1991-02-13) TBA Tired of Hook's obsession to destroy Peter Pan, the Pirates make a deal with Tinker Bell to trick Hook into thinking that Peter is immortal. "The Lost Memories of Pirate Pan" Sean Roche 14 February 1991 (1991-02-14) TBA After bringing a young girl named Jane (who is revealed to be Wendy's daughter from the future) into Neverland, Peter is suddenly stricken with amnesia and joins Hook's pirates as "Pirate Pan". Wendy, Jane, and the Lost Boys must head to the Cavern of the Fairy Forget-Me-Not to collect all of Peter's memories and save their friend. "Dr. Livingstone and Captain Hook" Larry Carroll, David Carren 15 February 1991 (1991-02-15) TBA Hook gets hit at his head and suddenly thinks that he is the big scientist, David Livingstone. The next day he makes a journey with his pirate crew, to explore the place and find another tribe. Unfortunately they get too close to the place where Peter and his friends live. Now it's up to children to protect their home. They all must take part in the game to entice the pirates away not to let them discover the location of their underground house. "Vanity, Thy Name is Mermaid" Matthew Malach, Jennifer Louden 16 February 1991 (1991-02-16) TBA While playing with two mermaids in the lagoon, Peter innocently claims that Wendy is the most beautiful being in Neverland. The two mermaids get jealous and later capture Wendy where they slowly turn her into a mermaid minus the ability to breathe underwater. When Peter goes underwater to rescue Wendy, he ends up getting the unlikely help of Crooked Tail. Note: episode without Hook "The Great Race" Larry Carroll, David Carren 18 February 1991 (1991-02-18) TBA The Twins have build a new machine that shall be the fastest vehicle on the land. While testing it they have an accident and each one of them tells the other he'd have seen some unsolved mistakes. This conflict soon evolves into a big argument. In order for this to end, Peter and the others decide to plan a race, which will bring the two together again. "Curly's Laugh" Sean Roche 19 February 1991 (1991-02-19) TBA After Curly pours a bunch of water on Peter and his friends as a joke, Peter tells him that he's not funny. Curly then asks if Tinker Bell if she couldn't change this with her magic. Tinker Bell does so and warns him not to do use it while she's around. Every time he speaks, Curly's friends burst into laughter. Meanwhile, Captain Hook is trying to plan a play, but he can't find the right comedian who can make him laugh for it. "Mardi Gras" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell and Tony Zalewsk 20 February 1991 (1991-02-20) TBA Peter and the Lost Boys honor a cease-fire with the pirates after Hook rescues Michael from the Croc. They go together to Mardi Gras to have fun with each other, but the pirates have different plans in store ... "The Never Ark" Larry Carroll, David Carren 21 February 1991 (1991-02-21) TBA When Smoky Top begins to rumble menacingly, Peter and the Lost Boys go to see Great Big Little Panther for help. However, the shaman has gone on a retreat, so Hard-to-Hit attempts shaman magic to call forth a vision of what is to come from the sacred flames. He deciphers that Neverland is about to be destroyed. Peter sets about warning everyone in Neverland while the Lost Boys evacuate the Underground House. Wendy brings up the fact that not all the animals can fly away, so Peter decides that Hook's ship will have to suffice as an Ark to carry the animals to safety. "The Croc and the Clock" Bennett McClellan 22 February 1991 (1991-02-22) TBA The sun is rising and setting so fast that no one can keep track of what time it is. Tink and the Lost Boys figure out that the clock inside the Crocodile has stopped ticking and that fixing it will put time back to normal. But first they have to get the clock from the cranky Croc; that's not easy now that the animal is free to stalk its prey undetected. Captain Hook, the beast's favorite victim, learns this the hard way. "Three Wishes" Sean Roche 23 February 1991 (1991-02-23) TBA Peter eagerly awaits the passing of a shooting star so that he can be granted three wishes. But Hook hears about the star's magic and recites the rhyme to call its power at the same time as Peter. The two enemies decide to split their wishes, each getting one and a half, but the half wishes are granted first and don't turn out quite right. When the adventure takes a fatal turn for Hook, Peter uses his full wish to make sure the whole thing never happened. "A Hole in the Wall" Matthew Malach 20 April 1991 (1991-04-20) TBA Peter and the Darling children find a parallel universe in Neverland with an Egyptian theme. Will they escape or be enslaved like their Egyptian counterparts? "Hook the Faithful Son" Peter Lawrence, Charles Kaufman 25 April 1991 (1991-04-25) TBA Peter tricks Hook into thinking his mother wanted him to be a pilot, instead of a pirate. "Wendy and the Croc" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 26 April 1991 (1991-04-26) TBA Wendy wants to know how it is like to be a fairy. Tink decides to give her the possibility, when suddenly, during the transformation the Croc interferes. "Elementary, My Dear Pan" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell, and Jim Carlson 27 April 1991 (1991-04-27) TBA While Wendy is reading The Hound of the Baskervilles to Peter and the others, Peter finds out his pan flute has gone missing. It's then up to "Sherlock Pan" and "Dr John Watson" to solve the case. "Frau Brumhandel" Matthew Malach 29 April 1991 (1991-04-29) TBA Michael awakens Frau Brumhandel, a vast, Valkryie-like operatic nymph who has the ability to enslave others with her music. Frau Brumhandel joins the pirates and falls in love with Captain Hook, on whom the magic singing has no influence. "Play Ball" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell, and Ken Vose 30 April 1991 (1991-04-30) TBA Captain Hook comes across Peter and the Lost Boys playing baseball and overhears them talking about stealing 'bases'. Believing they are talking about 'bases' in alchemy, he demands to play against them. The game begins once Great Big Little Panther, the only person that both sides consider fair and trustworthy, agrees to serve as the umpire. The pirates perform their usual acts of trickery and cheating in order to win the game. In the end, Hook succeeds in stealing all the bases but is highly disappointed when he tears them apart and learns they are worthless. "Jules Verne Night" Peter Lawrence, Matthew Malach 1 May 1991 (1991-05-01) TBA Peter and the Lost Boys wish to explore the depths of the sea while Hook tries to fly to the moon. "The Pirate Who Came to Dinner" Larry Carroll, David Carren 6 May 1991 (1991-05-06) TBA Hook injures himself while trying to capture Peter Pan and Wendy insists they take care of him until he's well again. When Hook learns from the gnome doctor that he has been misdiagnosed and is well after all, he pretends to be still injured in order to trap Pan. "The Neverscroll" Larry Carroll, David Carren 7 May 1991 (1991-05-07) TBA Peter and the Lost Boys discover the Neverscroll, a magical map which holds the fate of Neverland in its parchment. Hook steals the Neverscroll and decides to erase Neverland from the map, which will destroy Peter if left unchecked. "Peter in Wonderland" George Hampton, Mike Moore 8 May 1991 (1991-05-08) TBA After John writes his own adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Peter and Wendy, with a little help from Tinker Bell's magic, are thrown into the book's pages to live the adventure within, with everyone else in Neverland, including Hook and the pirates, as the other characters. "A Day at the Fair" Matthew Malach 13 May 1991 (1991-05-13) TBA Michael goes to a place where everybody in Neverland comes to have fun. When the pirates join in, he decides with Tink to pull some pranks. Note: episode without Peter "Count de Chauvin" William Overgard, Peter Lawrence 14 May 1991 (1991-05-14) TBA A mysterious swordsman appears and challenges Peter to a duel...and wins! "Seven League Boots" Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell 27 May 1991 (1991-05-27) TBA The pirates steal a pair of magical boots that will grant the wearer's wish. "Invisible Tootles" Lee Schneider 9 September 1991 (1991-09-09) TBA At the underground house nobody listens or even notices Tootles, so he start's talking about himself being invisible, which results in it actually coming true. "The Letter" Larry Parr 10 September 1991 (1991-09-10) TBA Starkey thinks his mother is going to visit him on the Jolly Roger. CrewEdit Michael Bell - Voice Director Lee Dannacher - Voice Director Tony Pastor - Voice Director BroadcastEdit The series originally aired on Fox from September 8, 1990 to September 10, 1991. Repeats continued to air until September 11, 1992. A repeat of the series' Christmas episode was aired on December 25, 1993. The series was then on Fox in re-run form on weekday mornings from November 4, 1996 to March 28, 1997. Reruns were then shown on Fox Family in 1998. VHS and DVD releasesEdit Select episodes from the series were released on video in 1992. They have long been out of print. Titles of these included: Release name Classifaction Peter Pan & the Pirates - Ghost Ship 2 July 1992 G Fox Video NTSC English None 23 minutes [1] Peter Pan & the Pirates - Demise of Hook 2 July 1992 G Fox Video NTSC English None 23 minutes [2] Peter Pan & the Pirates - Hook's Deadly Game, Part 1 2 July 1992 G Fox Video NTSC English None 23 minutes [3] Peter Pan and the Pirates (Vol 1) 10 August 1992 U Fox Video PAL English None Episodes 18, 42 & 13 [5] Peter Pan and the Pirates (Vol 2) 10 August 1992 U Fox Video PAL English None Episodes 5, 50 & 63 [6] Peter Pan and the Pirates (Vol 3) 5 April 1993 U Fox Video PAL English None Episodes 17, 8 & 53 [7] Peter Pan and the Pirates (Vol 4) 5 April 1993 U Fox Video PAL English None Episodes 22 36 & 54 [8] Peter Pan and the Pirates (Volume 1) 23 August 2004 U Maximum Entertainment PAL English None Episodes 1, 3, 8, 17 & 33 66 minutes [9] DVDEdit Select episodes were released on a single DVD for the UK market in 2004. This is now also out of print. Episodes released included: Coldest Cut Of All River Of Night Wee Problem The Girl Who Lives In The Moon DVD Title # of Disc(s) In France, a box set of the entire first half of the series was released up to Ages of Pan part two. Peter Pan and the Pirates (Volume 1) 1 1990 1 1, 3, 8, 17 & 33 N/A 30 August 2004[10][11] N/A Peter Pan and the Pirates 3 1990 1 Unknown N/A N/A N/A Peter Pan and the Pirates (Volume 2) 1 1990 1 4, 18, 53 and some other N/A N/A N/A Video gameEdit A video game titled Peter Pan and the Pirates was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System by third party publisher THQ. The game was generally received poorly by critics. In this single player side-scrolling action game, the player controlled Peter Pan, who could collect bags of fairy dust to fly and wielded a sword that boasted a short range. The player started out in the forest and was required to destroy all the pirates in each level to advance to the next, with the final goal of reaching the pirate ship and battling Captain Hook. ComicsEdit In addition to the TV Series a German imprint Bastei-Verlag, inter alia with the Turkish comic book artist Yalaz, released seven comics. They are originally German and tell new stories of the Fox Peter Pan and his closest friends. TitlesEdit The main titles of the comics and their stories, all with English translation: 1. Rettung für das Einhorn – Peter saves the Unicorn Ein Piratenschiff geht fliegen – A Pirates' Ship takes Flight (note: a remake from the episode "The Rake") Sturm über dem Niemalsland – Stormy Neverland Tinkerbell sitzt in der Falle – Tink is trapped 2. Das tickende Krokodil – The tickling Croc Wer andern eine Grube gräbt ... – Who digs a pit for others ... Die Jagd nach dem goldenen Stein – Hunting the golden Stone Captain Hook geht baden – Captain Hook goes swimming 3. Captain Hook und der Zauberring – Captain Hook and the Magic Ring Captain Hook und der Zauberring – Captain Hook and the Magic Ring Angeltour mit Hindernissen – Go fishing with obstacles Reise in die Vergangenheit – Journey to the Past Die verzauberte Statue – The enchanted Statue 4. Die Hexe mit dem grünen Daumen – The Witch with the green Thumb Die Hexe mit dem grünen Daumen – The Witch with the green Thumb Alles wegen Ingwerbeeren – All 'coz of the Ginger Berries Verrat im Nilpferdteich – Betrayal at Hippopo-Pond Tootles auf Abwegen – Tootles goes astray Der falsche Peter – The wrong Peter 5. Die Hexe lässt das Blitzen nicht – The Witch who did not stop Lightning Die Hexe lässt das Blitzen nicht – The Witch who did not stop Lightning Der Heiratsschwindler – The Wedding Swindler Captain Hook hat Schwein – Hook and his Guinea Pigs Ein Pirat und ein Gentleman – The Pirate and the Gentleman Zaubern will gelernt sein – Doing Magic is to be learned 6. Ein Ehrengast zieht Leine – A Special Guest goes away Ein Ehrengast zieht Leine – A Special Guest goes away Ein Monstervogel muckt auf – Rebel of a Monster Bird Der Piratenausverkauf – Pirates' Sale Captain Hook geht in die Falle – Hook gets trapped Eis und heiß im Niemalsland – Hot'n Cold in Neverland 7. Viel Radau beim Mädchenklau – Making this much Noise, the Girl has no Choice Viel Radau beim Mädchenklau – Making this much Noise, the Girl has no Choice (note: story without Hook) Ein Möhrchen zum anbeißen – To get a Nibble from the Carrot Der Stein der vom Himmel fiel – The Stone from Sky (note: story without Hook) Rettung für die Streithähne – Rescue of the Squabblers Freitag der dreizehnte – Friday the Thirteenth (note: Not to be mistaken with the episode from the series) Differences from the TV seriesEdit It is emphasized that Peter Pan cannot read, however in the episode "Curly's Laugh", it is shown that the Lost Boys, except Slightly, can. In the comic series, Peter is not alone with this disability, but also all the six Lost Boys cannot read as well. For the Indians, only three have their appearances and roles in the series. The whole tribe is never introduced. But in the comics, they are more developed. Also when asking them for help, Tiger Lily has the biggest role and regularly accompanies Peter and the others, while Hard-to-Hit appears very rarely and does not get any role, except in one story. There he also gets presented as being Lily's cousin. But in the TV series, he is her brother (which can be deduced in the episode "Count de Chauvin", where Panther says both of them are his children, so it is obvious Tigerlily and Hard-to-Hit have the same father). In the comics, only Peter is able to fly all the time, but his friends cannot always do this, as they are regularly seen walking and performing other activities, like being on the sea in a boat, which they would not do if they flew. Sometimes it seems that they first obtained Tink's powder and at other times they seem to be really independent when flying, but not always. From the characters, the Twins are synchronized. And when talking, they do it together, so one starts the sentence and the other finishes it or they speak in breaks, where one stops talking, but the other one goes on with it. In the comics, they generally speak on their own. They are also known, as well as Billy Jukes, to be the mechanics and inventors in the series. But in the comics, none of them does this. The animals are not able to speak normally and also aren't high developed as the humans, but just act naturally as animals do and are able to understand. In the comics, they also don't speak the human language. Yet they often get widely developed thoughts, especially the Croc, and are shown to be more intelligent, not as animals usually are in reality. In the TV series, there aren't many characters, especially not human beings, who have the ability of abstract thinking. In the comics, Neverland is more developed and also has not only more humans, but also cities and realms, where a lot people live. Of all the Lost Boys, the Twins get the biggest physical appearance in the TV series. But in the comics, it is Slightly who is seen in most of the stories and takes the most part at the action. In the series, Cookson is very fat and could always eat while Mason's biggest advantage is his muscular body type and his physical strength. But in the comics, Mason is fat and immovable, and gets criticized by Captain Hook for eating too much and being physically very lazy. From Peter's friends, little Michael never has a teddy bear with him or any other cuddly toy (as it is in "Disney Peter Pan", "Peter Pan (2003)", "Peter Pan Live!", or some episodes of "The New Adventures of Peter Pan"). But in some comic stories, he does. It never came to any real love relationship between Peter and Wendy, just maybe a little in episode "The Play's the Thing" where it's a pity for Wendy (maybe a little for Peter, too) that while she's playing the main female character in Hamlet's tragedy, Juliet, Peter cannot be her Romeo. And in "Count the Chauvin" where Peter is praising Wendy for her courage and then kissing her hand, or better the glove she's wearing. But in the comics there is one story where Peter purposefully is taking Wendy to a place he wants to be romantic for the two of them. And in another Peter is catching Wendy, while she's falling down and after holding her in his arms, the two of them want to forget their current problem with Hook and to concentrate only on each other. ^ "Peter Pan & the Pirates - Ghost Ship [VHS] (1992)". amazon.com. Retrieved 19 May 2012. ^ "Peter Pan & the Pirates - Demise of Hook [VHS] (1992)". amazon.com. Retrieved 19 May 2012. ^ "Peter Pan & the Pirates - Hook's Deadly Game, Part 1 [VHS] (1992)". amazon.com. Retrieved 31 March 2012. ^ "Peter Pan & the Pirates V1 [VHS]". amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 19 May 2012. ^ "Peter Pan and the Pirates - Volume 1 [VHS]". amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 19 May 2012. ^ "Peter Pan and the Pirates - Vol. 1 [DVD]". amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 19 May 2012. ^ "Peter Pan and the Pirates: Volume 1". British Video Association. Retrieved 19 May 2012. Peter Pan & the Pirates at the Big Cartoon DataBase Fox's Peter Pan and the Pirates on IMDb Peter Pan and the Pirates at TV.com Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fox%27s_Peter_Pan_%26_the_Pirates&oldid=906016728"	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2428
__label__wiki	0.931614	0.931614	Dickson, William Steel (DNB00) ←Dickson, William Gillespie Dickson, William Steel by Alexander Gordon ‎ Dicuil→ Dickson, William SteelAlexander Gordon ‎1888 DICKSON, WILLIAM STEEL, D.D. (1744–1824), United Irishman, eldest son of John Dickson, tenant farmer of Ballycraigy, parish of Carnmoney, co. Antrim, was born on 25 Dec. 1744, and baptised on 30 Dec. by the name of William. Jane Steel was his mother's maiden name, and on the death (13 May 1747) of his uncle, William Steel, family usage gave the addition to Dickson's name (improperly spelled Steele). In his boyhood Dickson went through the ‘almost useless routine of Irish country schools,’ but was grounded in scholarship and ‘taught to think’ by Robert White, presbyterian minister of Templepatrick. He entered Glasgow College in November 1761, and owns his great obligations to Moorhead, professor of Latin, Adam Smith, John Millar, professor of law, and Principal Leechman. From Leechman he derived his theological, and from Millar his political principles. On leaving college he seems to have been employed for a time in teaching; his adoption of the ministry as a profession was due to the advice of White. In March 1767 he was licensed, but got no call till 1771, in which year he was ordained to the charge of Ballyhalbert (now Glastry), co. Down, by Killeleagh presbytery, on 6 March. His social qualities had ingratiated him during his probationary years with several of the leading county families, and it was probably to the influence of Alexander Stewart, father of the first Lord Londonderry, that he owed his settlement at Ballyhalbert. Till the outbreak of the American war of independence he occupied himself mainly in parochial and domestic duties, having become ‘an husband and a farmer.’ A sermon against cock-fighting (circulated in manuscript) had an appreciable effect in checking that pastime in his neighbourhood. His political career began in 1776, when he spoke and preached against the ‘unnatural, impolitic and unprincipled’ war with the American colonies, denouncing it as a ‘mad crusade.’ On two government fast-days his sermons—on ‘the advantages of national repentance’ (13 Dec. 1776), and on ‘the ruinous effects of civil war’ (27 Feb. 1778)—created considerable excitement when published, and Dickson was reproached as a traitor. Political differences were probably at the root of a secession from his congregation in 1777. The seceders formed a new congregation at Kirkcubbin, in defiance of the authority of the general synod. Dickson entered with zest into the volunteer movement of 1778, being warmly in favour of the admission of Roman catholics to the ranks. This was resisted ‘through the greater part of Ulster, if not the whole.’ In a sermon to the Echlinville volunteers (28 March 1779) Dickson advocated the enrolment of catholics, and though induced to modify his language in printing the discourse, he offended ‘all the protestant and presbyterian bigots in the country.’ He was accused of being a papist at heart, ‘for the very substantial reason, among others, that the maiden name of the parish priest's mother was Dickson.’ On 1 Feb. 1780 Dickson resigned the charge of Ballyhalbert, having a call to the neighbouring congregation of Portaferry in succession to James Armstrong (1710–1779), whose funeral sermon he had preached. He was installed at Portaferry in March, on a stipend of 100l., supplemented by some 9l. (afterwards increased to 30l.) from the regium donum. He realised another 100l. a year by keeping a boarding-school, and was not without private means. On 27 June 1780 he was elected moderator of the general synod of Ulster at Dungannon, co. Tyrone. Though the contrary has been stated, Dickson was not a member of the volunteer conventions at Dungannon in 1782 and 1783. He threw himself heart and soul into the famous election for county Down in August 1783, when the houses of Hill and Stewart, representing the court and country parties, first came into collision. Dickson, with his forty mounted freeholders, failed to secure the re-election of Robert Stewart, who eventually took refuge ‘under the shade of a peerage.’ But in 1790 he successfully exerted himself for the return of Stewart's son (also Robert), better known as Lord Castlereagh. Castlereagh proved his gratitude by referring at a later date to Dickson's popularity in 1790, as proof that he was ‘a very dangerous person to leave at liberty.’ In 1788 Dickson was a candidate for the agency of the regium donum, but the post was conferred on Robert Black [q. v.] As early as December 1791, Dickson, who was now a D.D. of Glasgow, took the test as a member of the first society of United Irishmen, organised in October at Belfast by Theobald Wolfe Tone. He labours to prove that he attended no further meetings of this body, devoting himself to spreading its principles among the volunteer associations, in opposition to the ‘demi-patriotic’ views of the whig clubs. At a great volunteer meeting in Belfast on 14 July 1792 he opposed a resolution for the gradual removal of catholic disabilities, and assisted in obtaining a unanimous pledge in favour of total and immediate emancipation. Parish and county meetings were held throughout Ulster, culminating in a provincial convention at Dungannon on 15 Feb. 1793. Dickson had been a leading spirit at many of the preliminary meetings, and, as a delegate from the barony of Ards, he had a chief hand in the preparation of the Dungannon resolutions. Their avowed object was to strengthen the throne and give vitality to the constitution by ‘a complete and radical reform.’ Dickson was nominated on a committee of thirty to summon a national convention. Before he left Dungannon he was called upon for a sermon to the times, and had an immense audience, the established and catholic clergy being present. The Irish parliament went no further in the direction of emancipation than the Relief Act (33 Geo. III, c. 21), which received the royal assent on 9 April, and remained unextended till 1829; while the passing of Lord Clare's Convention Act (33 Geo. III, c. 29), still in force, made illegal all future assemblies of delegates ‘purporting to represent the people, or any description of the people.’ The Convention Act put an end to the existence of the volunteers as a political party; those who were disinclined to accept the situation became more and more identified with the illegal operations of the United Irishmen. Dickson got up political meetings and preached political sermons, which were considered ‘fraught with phlogistick principles’ (Musgrave). He maintains that he exerted himself to prevent outbreak, and that ‘reform alone was sought for.’ In October 1796 several members of his congregation were arrested, and a reward of 1,000l. was offered to one Carr, a weaver, for evidence which would secure Dickson's conviction The suspects were liberated without trial at the summer assize in Downpatrick, 1797; and Dickson, though a watch was kept on his movements, would have been safe but for his own folly. In March and April 1798 he was in Scotland arranging family affairs. During his absence the plan of the northern insurrection was digested, and Dickson soon after his return agreed to take the place of Thomas Russell as ‘adjutant-general of the United Irish forces for county Down.’ This appointment he does not deny, though with great ingenuity he disposes of the insufficient evidence brought forward in proof of it: ‘I may have been a general for aught that appears to the contrary; and I may not have been a general, though people said I was.’ A few days before the projected insurrection he was arrested at Ballynahinch. The date of the arrest has been variously stated, but his own very circumstantial narrative fixes it on Tuesday evening, 5 June. He was conveyed to Belfast, and lodged in the ‘black hole’ and other prisons, till on 12 Aug. he was removed to the prison ship, and detained there amid considerable discomfort till 25 March 1799. From Ireland he was transferred to Fort George, Inverness-shire, arriving there on 9 April. Here, with his fellow-prisoners, he was exceedingly well treated. His liberty was offered him on condition of emigration, but he demanded a trial, which was never granted. At length, on 30 Dec. 1801, he was brought back from Fort George, and given his freedom in Belfast on 13 Jan. 1802. Dickson returned to liberty and misfortune. His wife had long been a helpless invalid, his eldest son was dead, his prospects were ruined. With fierce humour he reckons his losses at 3,618l., and sets down his compensation as 0,000l. His congregation at Portaferry had been declared vacant on 28 Nov. 1799. William Moreland, who had been ordained as his successor on 16 June 1800, at once offered to resign, but Dickson would not hear of this. He had thoughts of emigration, but decided to stand his ground. Overtures from the congregation of Donegore were frustrated by hints of the withdrawal of the regium donum. At length he was chosen by a seceding minority from the congregation of Keady, co. Armagh, and installed minister of Second Keady on 4 March 1803, on a stipend of 50l., without regium donum. He soon became involved in synodical disputes with Black, the leader of synod, and on the publication of his ‘Narrative’ (1812) he narrowly escaped suspension ab officio. His political career closed with his attendance on 9 Sept. 1811 at a catholic meeting in Armagh, on returning from which he was cruelly beaten by Orangemen. In 1815 he resigned his charge in broken health, and henceforth subsisted on charity. Joseph Wright, an episcopalian lawyer, gave him a cottage rent free in the suburbs of Belfast, and some of his old friends made him a weekly allowance. He lived to exult in Black's fall from power. At the synod in 1816 William Neilson, D.D., of Dundalk, proposed Dickson as a fit person to fill the divinity chair which was about to be erected, but the suggestion was not entertained. He acted on the committee for examining theological students till April 1824. His last appearance in the pulpit was early in 1824. Robert Acheson of Donegall Street, Belfast (d. 21 Feb. 1824), failed to meet his congregation; Dickson, who was present, gave out a psalm and prayed, but did not preach. He died on 27 Dec. 1824, having just passed his eightieth year, and was buried ‘in a pauper's grave’ at Clifton Street cemetery, Belfast. He married in 1771 Isabella Gamble, who died at Smylodge, Mourne, co. Down, on 15 July 1819; she appears to have had some means, which died with her. Dickson's eldest son, a surgeon in the navy, died in 1798; his second son was in business; of other two sons, one was an apothecary; Dickson had also two daughters, but seems to have survived all his children. A grandson was a struggling physician in Belfast. Dickson was a man of genius, a wit, and a demagogue; his writings give the impression that he would have shone at the bar; as a clergyman he was strongly anticalvinistic in doctrine, assiduous in pastoral duties, and of stainless character. He published: 1. ‘A Sermon … before the Echlinville Volunteers,’ &c., Belfast, 1779, 4to. 2. ‘Funeral Sermon for Armstrong,’ Belfast, 1780, 4to. 3. ‘Sermons,’ Belfast [1780], 12mo (two fast sermons and two others). 4. ‘Psalmody,’ Belfast, 1792, 12mo (an address to Ulster presbyterians, issued with the approbation of nine presbyteries). 5. ‘Three Sermons on the subject of Scripture Politics,’ Belfast, 1793, 4to (reprinted as an appendix to No. 6). 6. ‘A Narrative of the Confinement and Exile,’ &c., Dublin, 1812, 4to; 2nd edition same year (both editions were published by subscription; the second was of two thousand copies at a guinea, but it fell flat, and is exceedingly scarce). 7. ‘Speech at the Catholic Dinner, 9 May,’ Dublin, 1811, 8vo. 8. ‘Retractations,’ &c., Belfast, 1813, 4to (a defence of No. 6 against Dr. Black). 9. ‘Sermons,’ Belfast, 1817, 4to. [For Dickson's life the main authority is his own Narrative, amended on some minor points in his Retractations, but bearing evident marks of genuineness and truth. A short biography is given in Witherow's Hist. and Lit. Mem. of Presb. in Ireland, 2nd ser. 1880, p. 226 sq.; Classon Porter, in Irish Presb. Biog. Sketches, 1883, p. 10 sq., is fuller, but often inaccurate. Northern Star, 14 July 1792, 16 and 20 Feb. 1793; Report from the Committee of Secrecy, 1798, App. pp. cxxv, cxxix; Musgrave's Mem. of the different Rebellions in Ireland, 2nd ed. 1801, pp. 123 sq., 183; Northern Whig, 30 July 1819; Teeling's Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion, 1828, p. 226 sq.; Montgomery's Outlines of the Hist. of Presb. in Ireland, in Irish Unit. Mag. 1847, p. 333 sq.; Madden's United Irishmen, 2nd ser. ii. 431; Reid's Hist. Presb. Church in Ireland (Killen), 1867, iii. 396 sq.; Killen's Hist. Congr. Presb. Church in Ireland, 1886, pp. 148, 163, 215 sq.; Minutes of Gen. Synod; information from Rev. C. J. M'Alester, Holywood, and Mr. A. Hill, Ballyearl, Carnmoney.] A. G. Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Dickson,_William_Steel_(DNB00)&oldid=6139464"	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2429
__label__wiki	0.848745	0.848745	Halford, Henry (DNB00) ←Hales, William Halford, Henry by George Thomas Bettany ‎ Halfpenny, Joseph→ Halford, HenryGeorge Thomas Bettany ‎1890 HALFORD, Sir HENRY (1766–1844), physician, was second son of Dr. James Vaughan, a successful physician of Leicester, who devoted his whole income to educating his seven sons, of whom John (d. 1839) became judge of the court of common pleas, Peter (d. 1825), dean of Chester, and Charles Richard (d. 1849), envoy extraordinary to the United States. The sixth son, Edward Thomas, was father of Dean Vaughan, master of the Temple. Henry, born at Leicester on 2 Oct. 1766, entered at Christ Church, Oxford, and graduated B.A. in 1788 and M.D. in 1791. After studying some time at Edinburgh he settled in London, having borrowed 1,000l. on his own security. His good manners and learning soon made him friends, and he was elected physician to the Middlesex Hospital in 1793, and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1794, having been appointed physician extraordinary to the king in the previous year. In March 1795 he married Elizabeth Barbara, the third daughter of Lord St. John, and by 1800 his practice had so greatly increased that he gave up his hospital appointment. He inherited a large property on the death of Lady Denbigh, widow of his mother's cousin, Sir Charles Halford, seventh baronet, and consequently changed his name from Vaughan to Halford by act of parliament in 1809. George III, who had a strong liking for him, created him a baronet in the same year, and he subsequently attended George IV, William IV, and Queen Victoria. For many years after Dr. Matthew Baillie's death he was indisputably at the head of London practice. He was president of the College of Physicians from 1820 till his death, an unbroken tenure which was by no means favourable to reform and progress; but he was largely instrumental in securing the removal of the college in 1825 from Warwick Lane to Pall Mall East. He was made K.C.H. on this occasion and G.C.H. by William IV. He died on 9 March 1844, and was buried in the parish church of Wistow, Leicestershire. His bust by Chantrey was presented to the College of Physicians by a number of fellows. His portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence is at Wistow. He left one son, Henry (1797–1868), who succeeded to the title, and one daughter. Halford was a good practical physician with quick perception and sound judgment, but he depreciated physical examination of patients, knew little of pathology, and disliked innovation. His courtly, formal manners and his aristocratic connection served him well. His chief publications were first given as addresses to the College of Physicians, his subjects being such as ‘The Climacteric Disease,’ ‘Tic Douloureux,’ ‘Shakspeare's Test of Insanity’ (‘Hamlet,’ act iii. sc. 4), ‘The Influence of some of the Diseases of the Body on the Mind,’ ‘Gout,’ ‘The Deaths of some Illustrious Persons of Antiquity,’ &c. Halford is described by J. F. Clarke (Autobiographical Recollections) as vain, cringing to superiors, and haughty to inferiors. James Wardrop [q. v.], surgeon to George IV, termed him ‘the eel-backed baronet.’ Some charges of unprofessional conduct are made against him by Clarke, who further states that when Charles I's coffin was opened in 1813 he obtained possession of a portion of the fourth cervical vertebra, which had been cut through by the axe, and used to show it at his dinner-table as a curiosity. This may be held to be confirmed by Halford's minute description of this bone in his ‘Account.’ Halford published: 1. ‘An Account of what appeared on opening the Coffin of King Charles I,’ 4to, 1813. 2. ‘Essays and Orations delivered at the Royal College of Physicians,’ 1831; 3rd edition, 1842. 3. ‘Nugæ Metricæ. English and Latin, 1842, besides several separate addresses and orations. [Halford's life by Dr. Munk in Lives of British Physicians, 2nd edit. 1857; Pettigrew's Medical Portrait Gallery, vol. i.; J. F. Clarke's Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 340–53; Sir B. Brodie's Autobiography, p. 110, in Collected Works; Notes and Queries, 5th ser. ii. 93, 6th ser. vii. 387, xi. 317.] G. T. B. Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Halford,_Henry_(DNB00)&oldid=4495050"	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2430
__label__wiki	0.761845	0.761845	Popular Science Monthly/Volume 65/June 1904/On the Significance of Characteristic Curves of Composition < Popular Science Monthly‎ \| Volume 65‎ \| June 1904 ←Copernicus Popular Science Monthly Volume 65 June 1904 (1904) On the Significance of Characteristic Curves of Composition by Robert Edouard Moritz The Physiographic Control of the Chattanooga Campaigns of the Civil War→ 1418934Popular Science Monthly Volume 65 June 1904 — On the Significance of Characteristic Curves of Composition1904 ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHARACTERISTIC CURVES OF COMPOSITION. By ROBERT E. MORITZ, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA. A FEW months ago, while studying the variation and interrelation of certain sentence constants, as average sentence-lengths, predication averages and simple-sentence frequencies in prose composition, my attention was called to an allied investigation, directed by Dr. T. C. Mendenhall, which takes for its basis the words used by an author rather than the sentences. The investigation in which I was then employed made it clear that the theory which asserts that an author uses invariable average sentence proportions is not true except when modified in essential respects, and I recognized at once that similar modifications would become necessary if the word instead of the sentence were taken as the element of composition. The allied investigation to which I refer is set forth in two papers by Dr. T. C. Mendenhall, one in Science, March 11, 1887, entitled 'The Characteristic Curves of Composition,' the other, 'A Mechanical Solution of a Literary Problem' in The Popular Science Monthly, December, 1901. These papers deal with the relative frequency of words of different lengths employed by an author. It was found that different groups of a thousand words each, taken from the same author, manifested a rather remarkable uniformity in the frequency of words containing a given number of letters. Larger groups showed still greater uniformity, and hence it was inferred that if sufficiently large groups of words from the same writer were examined, they would yield practically the same relative frequencies of words with a given number of letters. The results were exhibited graphically. The number of letters per word were used as abscissas, the number of words per thousand containing a definite number of letters were taken for ordinates, and the resulting points connected by straight lines. Thus a graph or diagram was obtained which presents to the eye in a simple manner the relative frequencies of words of different lengths. Two such diagrams from the same author will agree more or less closely, depending upon the number of words in the groups upon which the averages are based. In the writer's own words: "When the number of words in each group is increased there is, of course, closer agreement of their diagrams, and this became so evident in the earlier stages of the investigation that the conclusion was soon reached that if a diagram be made representing a very large number of words from a given author, it will not differ sensibly from any other diagram representing an equally large number of words from the same author. Such a diagram would then reflect the persistent peculiarities of this author in the use of words of different lengths and might be called the characteristic curve of his composition. Curves similarly formed from anything that he had ever written could not differ materially from this." (The italics are mine.) After some preliminary work which seemed to bear out the conclusion ventured above, the writer states: "From the examination thus far made I am convinced that 100,000 words will be necessary and sufficient to furnish the characteristic curve of a writer—that is to say, if a curve is constructed from 100,000 words of a writer, taken from any one of his productions, then a second curve constructed from another 100,000 words would be practically identical with the first—and that this curve would, in general, differ from that formed in the same way from the composition of another writer, to such an extent that one could always be distinguished from the other." Such is the author's own statement of his theory, which the facts adduced apparently support. The culminating test consisted in the examination of different groups of 100,000 or more words from each of several authors, and it was found that the corresponding graphs did actually coincide. This, in the words of the author, 'must be regarded as convincing evidence of the soundness of the original assumption.' The existence and uniqueness of characteristic curves being granted, its practical application as a test of disputed authorship is obvious. To quote again, "If it can be proved that the characteristic curve exhibited by an analysis of 'David Copperfield' is identical with that of 'Oliver Twist' of 'Barnaby Rudge,' of 'Great Expectations,' etc., and that it differs sensibly from that of 'Vanity Fair,' or 'Eugene Aran,' or 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'Don Quixote,' or anything else, in fact, then the conclusion will be tolerably certain that whenever it appears it means Dickens." The title of Dr. Mendenhall's second paper, 'A Mechanical Solution of a Literary Problem,' refers to the application of this theory to the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, which, we are told, formed the objective point of the whole investigation. The characteristic curves resulting from 400,000 words of the plays, and 200,000 words from Bacon's 'Henry VII.,' 'Advancement of Learning' and the 'Essays' were constructed and exhibited together as in Fig. 20. The concluding remark that 'the reader is at liberty to draw any conclusion he pleases from this diagram' only strengthens the impression that the conclusion intended is considered unavoidable, though we are told at the outset that 'the investigation is not to be looked upon as a final solution of the principal problem.' Considering that it is now over fifteen years since the theory of characteristic curves was first outlined and that no denial of it has appeared, it must be taken for granted that the theory has found general acceptance. It is for this reason that I undertook an investigation, which proved laborious and unattractive in the main, in order to combat with facts an error which to me seemed obvious from the outset. The data which I have now at hand, though necessarily meager, are amply sufficient to establish a duality, if not a multiplicity, of characteristic curves for many authors. But this amounts to a denial of Dr. Mendenhall's major premise, and consequently invalidates his conclusion. Fig. 20, instead of furnishing a convincing proof, or even contributary evidence, leaves the problem of disputed authorship wholly untouched. In fact, my results throw considerable doubt upon the very existence of characteristic curves in the sense that the word has been employed by Dr. Mendenhall. I shall, therefore, use the term word-curve when referring to curves representing the relative frequencies of different length words used in composition. Dr. Mendenhall states that the validity of his method as a test of authorship implies two assumptions: first, that the author makes use of a vocabulary which is peculiar to himself, and the character of which does not change from year to year during his productive period; and second, that in the use of that vocabulary in composition, personal peculiarities in the construction of sentences will, in the long run, recur with such regularity that short words, long words and words of medium length will occur with definite relative frequencies. These two assumptions are of course independent. Suppose it be granted that authors use vocabularies peculiarly their own. It does not at all follow that these peculiarities will manifest themselves in varying word-lengths. Obviously an indefinite number of different vocabularies is conceivable, each yielding the same average word-length or even fitting to the same word-curve. Now, it is true that if authors are endowed with a word-sense or word-instinct by means of which personal traits are reflected through their vocabularies (first assumption), and if, moreover, this word-sense manifests itself in measurable differences in the relative frequencies of words of a given length (second assumption), then these personal traits or peculiarities of an author will in general modify the contour of the word-curve. But the converse of this by no means follows, that the differences in the contours of word-curves are necessarily due to any personal peculiarities in the respective authors. The average word-length may be reasonably assumed to depend upon other factors besides the author's word-sense, as the form of composition, the subject matter, etc. A man's gait differs according as he is walking for pleasure or on business, alone or in the company of others, on a long journey or to escape from danger. Similarly the average word-length of the language current in the market place, the street or the drawing-room differs from that employed on the rostrum, in learned discourse or in polite conversation, even though used by the same person. Why should not this difference manifest itself in the written utterances of an author? Dr. Mendenhall, by an enormous expenditure of labor, attempts to prove his second assumption. How? By taking for granted the converse of the very proposition which he wishes to establish. He actually constructs the word-curves for Mill, Jonson, Dickens, Bacon, Shakespeare and finding that they differ in contour, attributes these differences to personal peculiarities of the respective authors. Not once seems the question to have been raised, much less answered, whether these differences are not due wholly or in part to other determining conditions, such as the form of composition or other accidents. Now not only can it be shown that the form of composition, at least, is a modifying factor of the word-curve and average word-length, but it appears, indeed, to be the predominating factor, overshadowing all others. Works agreeing in form of composition, though written by different authors, will be found to yield curves more nearly in agreement than different works of widely divergent forms of composition by the same author. Whether or not the author-component in the word-curve can be separated from the others is unknown; certain it is that nothing of the kind has as yet been attempted. With our present knowledge concerning word-curves, conclusions regarding the authorship of spurious or disputed writings based upon a comparison of the word-curves of works differing either in the form of composition or in other essential respects must be considered worthless. It is not difficult to predict in a general way in what respects word-curves of different types of composition will differ. In the vernacular of a language, so nearly devoid of inflection as our English, three-and four-letter words will naturally predominate. The development of oral speech, following the path of least resistance, will naturally be from the simple to the complex. Combinations of five, six or more letters, representing as many elements of sound, will not generally be resorted to so long as there are abundant simpler combinations, consistent with the possibilities of vocal articulation, to draw from. Now while the possible combinations of two and three letters into words is inadequate for a civilized language, the possible number of two-, three and four-letter words, aggregating thousands, is sufficient to supply the majority of words needed for every-day speech. The word-curve of common conversation may therefore be expected to show a maximum ordinate for three or four letters. Words containing five, six or more letters will occur with diminishing frequencies. Few words of more than ten letters will occur. Now this is exactly what takes place. Swift's 'Polite Conversation,' which is a reproduction of the conversation of the uncultured, yields the word-curve shown in Fig. 1. This, after a correction for an excess of seven-and eight-letter words, due to the frequent occurrence of the words ladyship, lordship and certain proper names, is the typical word-curve of extreme light dialogue. What now will be the probable variations as we pass from this extreme type of composition to other forms of dramatic prose? As conversation becomes more sustained Fig. 1. 5,000 Word-curves from Swift's Polite Conversation.' Corrected curve. the relative frequency of the personal pronoun 'I' will naturally diminish, the use of prepositional phrases will cause two-letter words to increase, words of six and seven letters will become more numerous at the expense of the frequency of three-and four-letter words. The resulting word-curve must, therefore, cross the former in two places, once between the abscissas one and two, and again near the abscissa five. If we pass from the heavier forms of dramatic prose to narrative, in which dialogue alternates with description and still heavier composition, the personal pronoun will diminish still more in frequency, two-letter words will continue to increase as will also words of six, seven and more letters, and to compensate for this there must be a further decrease in the relative number of three-and four-letter words. This law of change will continue as we pass from fiction to pure description and from the essay style to the opposite extreme of scientific and philosophic discourse. Here the personal pronoun 'I' will have disappeared, leaving the indefinite article 'a' the practically sole representative of one-letter words; with the accumulation of phrases and clauses there is a corresponding accumulation of two-letter prepositions, three-and four-letter words will have reached a minimum to make room for longer derivatives, compounds and technical terms. Throughout these changes the five-letter word will probably vary least, since the variations on opposite sides of it are in contrary directions. We assume it constant. Taking furthermore Swift's 'Polite Conversation' and Mill's 'Political Economy' as representatives of the opposite extremes of the chain of forms of composition just described, we have the following schematic types of word-curves (Fig. 2) characteristic not of any particular author, but of the form of composition employed. Of course no one would expect anything more than an approximate conformation to these types in any specific case, for We have already stated that the form of composition into which an author casts his Fig. 2. Schematic Word-curves representing, (A) 'Light Conversation,' (B) Classic Dramatic Prose, (C) Fiction, (D) Essay and Description, (E) Scientific and Philosophic Discourse. Fig. 3. Actual Word-curves, (A) Swift's 'Polite Conversation,' (B) Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramatic Works, (C) Dickens's 'Christmas Carol,' (D) Bacon's 'Essays' and 'New Atlantis' and 'Henry VII.,' (E) Mill's 'Political Economy.' thought is but one of several possible factors affecting the word-curve. But Dr. Mendenhall's diagrams seem to show that it is the predominating factor. In Fig. 3 I have superimposed on one the other four of Mendenhall's diagrams, and to complete the series I have added the word-curve of Swift's 'Polite Conversation.' A more striking corroboration of our hypothesis could scarcely be expected from data intended to establish the theory of characteristic curves. It may be pointed out in passing that our hypothesis explains several puzzling phenomena brought out in Dr. Mendenhall's investigations. It is now clear why none of the thousand word-graphs from Dickens's 'Oliver Twist' 'could by any possibility be mistaken' for any one of ten similar graphs from Mill's 'Political Economy,' why the 10,000 word-curve from Mill's 'Political Economy' varies very strikingly from a similar curve from his 'Essay on Liberty' (Fig. 4). It explains why the two word-curves of 10,000 words each, one from 'Oliver Twist,' the other from 'Vanity Fair,' agree so closely, fully as closely in fact as two different curves of 10,000 words each from Dickens himself (Fig. 5), an occurrence which Mendenhall remarked, 'must be largely the result of accident, and it would not be likely to repeat itself in another analysis.' Finally our hypothesis removes all cause for surprise that Shaler's 'Armada Days,' composed 'in the spirit and style of the Elizabethan Age,' should yield a word-curve resembling that of Shakespeare's plays. Seeing that the assumption that word-curves vary according to the composition employed accounts for nearly everything which had been attributed to personal characteristics of the authors, and that it also explains so much which is inexplicable on the opposite assumption, I Fig. 4. Two 5,000 Word-curves (after Mendenhall) from John Stuart Mill. (A) 'Political Economy,' (B) 'Essay on Liberty.' Fig. 5. Three 10,000 Word-curves of Fiction (after Mendenhall). (A) Dickens's 'Oliver Twist,' (B) Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair,' (C) Dickens's 'Christmas Carol.' sought for a way to test it. But how? According to Dr. Mendenhall, 'no one has written enough in two or three different styles, as prose, poetry, history, essay, drama, etc., to produce normal characteristic diagrams.' This, if true, would exclude any positive test of our hypothesis, but a moment's reflection convinced me that the assumption is entirely unwarranted. Goethe has among his prose works alone, volumes each of drama, biography, fiction, travel, science, criticism and correspondence. Schiller, too, has written far to exceed 100,000 words each of prose, drama and history. And what about Voltaire with his seven volumes of drama, eleven of history, seven of essays, ten of philosophy and eighteen of correspondence, besides several others of poetry, romance, science and commentaries; or George Sand or Lamartine with their libraries of books written in various forms of composition? Our own Dryden, also, has written of essays and prose dramas each more than sufficient to furnish a normal word-curve from each. Here then was sufficient material to demonstrate the truth or falsity of our hypothesis, if only means could be found to carry out the work. Dr. Mendenhall convinced himself that no less than 100,000 words are necessary to yield an invariable curve, and it would evidently require several such curves to furnish any safe ground for induction. But the examination of several hundred thousand words, allowing but two hours for the tabulation and classification per thousand, would require a greater sacrifice of time than other duties would permit me to make. Indeed, Dr. Mendenhall found himself in the same predicament, from which he was rescued by the generosity of a private citizen, who supplied the salaries of two assistants for several months during which the necessary data were collected. Then it occurred to me that though one hundred thousand words may be necessary to yield an invariable curve, a much smaller number might suffice to establish the existence of such a curve within certain limits. If these limits for the curves of different forms of composition from the same author turn out to be mutually exclusive, our hypothesis would be established, though we had not examined a sufficiently large number of words to determine the locus of the curves with accuracy. Thus, possibly, the work necessary to test our hypothesis might reduce itself to manageable proportions. The first author examined was Goethe. To eliminate as far as possible the disturbing effect of unconscious bias, I decided to count in word-groups of consecutive thousands, always beginning with the first of the work. Quotations, footnotes, headings and, in the case of dramas, stage-directions, etc., were uniformly omitted. These rules were strictly adhered to in all the data which follow. Five groups of one thousand words each were taken from each of Goethe's 'Bürgergeneral,' and 'Literatur Recensionen,' (B). The results were tabulated as follows: Each thousand words was now plotted separately and the resulting two sets of five curves compared (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). These results far exceeded my expectation. No curve of the one set could possibly be mistaken for any curve of the other set. Three-letter words, of which there were between 319 and 338 in each thousand of the first set, were reduced to 250 to 268 per thousand in the second set; nine-letter words, which did not exceed 26 in any thousand of one, rose to 73 in the other. A similar contrast prevailed in the relative frequencies of four-, seven-, eight-and ten-letter words in the two sets of data. In this case then, at least, five thousand words seemed Fig. 6. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Goethe's 'Dee Bürgergeneral.' (See Table I.) Fig. 7. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Goethe's' Literatur: Recensionen.' (See Table I.) sufficient to indicate the limits of the invariable curves which a larger number of words would yield, and these limits are actually exclusive except in the proximity of the intersection of the two sets of curves. The normal curve for each group of five thousand words is given in Fig. 8. Goethe may possibly be exceptional in manifesting such striking uniformity in the curves for successive thousands of the same work, Fig. 8. Two 5,000 Word-curves from Goethe. (Table I.) (A) Prose Drama ('Der Bürgergeneral'), (B) Criticism ('Literatur: Recensionen'). and an equally striking divergence in any two curves belonging to different works. So I turned to Schiller. Ten thousand words were examined, five thousand from his 'Kabale und Liebe,' a prose drama, and five thousand from Ms 'History of the Thirty Years' War.' A glance at the corresponding word-curves for each thousand words (Figs. 9 and 10) shows that here, too, five thousand words will determine the limits within which the unknown invariable word-curves will be confined with a sufficient definiteness to convince us that the curves can in no wise resemble each other. Four-letter words occur only about half as frequently in the 'History' as in the 'Play'; ten-, eleven-, twelve-letter and longer words are increased two and three-fold. Table II. Fig. 11 gives the word-curves constructed from five thousand averages of the two works. Fig. 9. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Schiller's 'Kabale und Liebe.' (See Table II.) Fig. 10. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Schiller's 'Thirty Years' War.' (See Table II.) Next I tabulated ten thousand words from Goldsmith, choosing the drama 'She Stoops to Conquer' and his essay on the 'Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.' Table III. Goldsmith: 'Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.' Here the results, graphically exhibited in Figs. 12, 13 and 14 are somewhat less satisfactory than in the case of Schiller or Goethe, yet Fig. 11. Two 5,000 Word-curves from Schiller. (Table II.) (A) Prose Drama 'Kabale und Liebe,' (B) History 'Thirty Years' War.' even here any one-thousand word-curve of the one work is easily distinguished from all the curves of the other work. The most marked contrast is shown in the relative frequencies of two-, four-, eight-, nine- and ten-letter words. Fig. 12. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Goldsmith's.'She Stoops to Conquer.' (See Table III.) Fig. 13. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Goldsmith's 'Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.' (See Table III.) On the other hand, Dryden's one-thousand word-curves (Fig. 15 and Fig. 16) appear fully as differentiated as any yet examined. Five thousand words each from 'Sir Martin Mar-all' and the 'Essay on Satire' give: Table IV. Here not only are five thousand words sufficient to indicate that the invariable curves for the two kinds of writing differ essentially, but the number of four-letter words alone in any single thousand seems to characterize the drama from the essay. It seemed hardly necessary to augment these data which may seem to the reader more than adequate to establish the multiplicity of the Fig. 14. Two 5,000 Word-curves from Goldsmith. (Table III.) (A) Drama 'She Stoops to Conquer,' (B) Essay 'Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.' so-called characteristic curves of an author. Still I ventured another test. Suppose several five-thousand word-curves from different dramatic works of an author were constructed, and again several five-thousand word-curves of various other prose productions as criticism or history by the same author. Suppose it were found that each set of curves agrees in the main, but differ, in essential respects, from all the curves of the other set, could this be interpreted otherwise than that the nature of the composition is the determining factor of the curves? With this thought in mind, I tabulated four additional groups of five thousand words each from Goethe, two groups each taken from single works, the other two groups made up of single thousands from each of ten different productions. These together with the five thousand averages previously obtained from the 'Bürgergeneral' and 'Literatur Recensionen' (B), are given in Table V., and the corresponding word-curves are given in Fig. 18. Fig. 19 shows the two curves which result if the entire fifteen thousand words are taken Table V. as the basis. These will approximately coincide with the invariable curves for the two kinds of composition in question. Throughout our work we have used the word-curve as the basis of comparison. But the mere fact of divergence of such curves for diferent forms of composition could have been much more readily established Fig. 15. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Dryden's 'Sir Martin Mar-all.' (See Table IV. Fig. 16. Five 1,000 Word-curves from Dryden's 'Essay on Satire.' (See Table IV.) by an inspection of the average word-lengths of various works. It will pay to compare carefully the numbers given in the last columns of our tables. None of the averages per thousand in Goethe's prose dramas exceeds 4.8 letters per word; in none of his other works examined do the averages fall below 5.4. The limits of the average word lengths for the two forms of composition are thus seen to be not only exclusive, but they are separated by a wide gap. Goldsmith's averages, 4.0 and 4.9 letters per word, respectively, show a similar difference, and so do Schiller's and Dryden's averages. Doubtless this factor of average word-length alone which can be determined with an expenditure of but a small fraction of the time required for the determination Fig. 17. Two 5,000 Word-curves from Dryden. (Table IV.) (A) Prose Drama 'Sir Martin Mar-all,' (B) Essay 'Essay on Satire.' Fig. 18. Six 5,000 Word-curves from Different Works of Goethe. (See Table V.) (A) Three dramatic prose curves, (B) Three curves of criticism and description. of the figures necessary to construct the word-curves, would in general be indicative of the nature of the curve, so that in critical cases only, the word-curve would need to be examined. The question still remains whether two word-curves of the same author may vary as much as the word-curves of different authors, that Fig. 19. Two 15,000 Word-curves from Goethe. (Table V.) (A) Dramatic prose, (B) Criticism and description. Fig. 20. (A) 400,000 Word-curve from Shakespeare; (B) 200,000 Word-curve from Bacon. (After Mendenhall.) is, whether, so far as word-curves indicate anything, an author differs as much from himself as from other authors. This question can not be definitely answered until a large number of authors have been compared, that is, until we have obtained the maximum variation between authors, as well as the maximum variation between various forms of composition. But so far as the evidence at hand may be trusted, it is to the effect that the line of demarcation follows the form of composition rather than the author. Figs. 11, 11, 17 and 19 show variations that must be attributed to the form of composition; the difference in the curves of Fig. 20 may reasonably be ascribed to the same cause. Fig. 21 shows four five-thousand word-curves, representing two authors and two styles of writing. The curves representing the same style not the same author follow each other. Fig. 22 contains four words-curves of dramas (Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe and Jonson), and four word-curves from the prose writings of Bacon, Dryden, Goldsmith and Mill. While the latter show considerable variations among each other, they are all clearly differentiated from each of the drama curves. Fig. 21. Two Curves each of Dramatic Prose and Descriptive Prose from Different Authors. Dramatic Prose, (A) Goethe, (B) Schiller; Description, (C) Goethe, (D) Schiller. Fig. 22. Eight Word-curves from English Works; Dramas (Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Jonson), Prose Writings (Bacon, Dryden, Goldsmith, Mill). The theory of characteristic curves is exactly parallel to that of constant sentence proportions. Both rest upon the same fallacy—that personal peculiarities outweigh all other determining factors to such an extent as to make it unnecessary to consider them. Elsewhere[1] I have shown that the average sentence length, instead of being invariable for a given author, varies between wider extremes for different styles employed by the same author than for different authors writing in the same style. Goethe alone shows average sentence lengths varying from 5 to 38 words per sentence. Is it not likewise probable that a more extended inquiry would reveal, in the case of versatile writers like Goethe, Voltaire and others, not two only, but a whole series of invariable word-curves, distributed something like the curves in Fig. 2? It was the theory of spectrum analysis which first suggested to Dr. Mendenhall the analogous conception of word-spectra or characteristic curves. Just as the light-rays of various wave-lengths emitted by a substance combine to form its spectrum, so a combination of words of various lengths in proper definite ratios make up an author's word-spectrum or characteristic curve. The analogy is imperfect, but we admit it. But is it true that each substance has a single spectrum? This was the supposition when the science of spectrum analysis was in its infancy, and upon this supposition Dr. Mendenhall bases his analogy. The fact is that over forty years ago it was demonstrated that some substances have several spectra, and to-day it is generally believed that all substances have several spectra, corresponding to the several stages of disassociation or molecular composition of their molecules. The analogy to spectrum analysis, therefore, demands the modification of the theory of characteristic curves, which I have tried to point out in the preceding pages. ↑ The Sherman principle in rhetoric and its restrictions. Popular Science Monthly, October, 1903. On the variation and functional relation of certain sentence constants in standard literature, University (of Nebraska) Studies, July, 1903. Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_65/June_1904/On_the_Significance_of_Characteristic_Curves_of_Composition&oldid=8839448"	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2431
__label__wiki	0.810056	0.810056	SILK ROADS Dialogue, Diversity & Development About the Silk Road The UNESCO Silk Road Online Platform The International Network for the Silk Road Online Platform Documentary Heritage World Cultural Heritage Traditional Craftsmanship Movable Heritage and Artifacts Cities alongside the Silk Roads World Natural Heritage, Biosphere Reserves and Geoparks Underwater Heritage alongside the Silk Roads Silk Road Themes › Intangible Cultural Heritage › Olonkho, Yakut heroic epos russian_epic_russia.jpg national_committee_on_unesco_affairs_of_the_sakha_republic_yakutia_2.jpg national_committee_on_unesco_affairs_of_the_sakha_republic_yakutia.jpg One of the oldest epic arts of the Turkic peoples, the termOlonkho refers to the entire Yakut epic tradition as well as its central epic.Today, it is still incidentally performed in the Sakha Republic, situated in the far east of the Russian Federation. The poetic tales, which vary from 10 to 15,000 verses in length, are performed by the Olonkho singer and story-teller in two parts: a sung part in verse alternates with the prosaic part composed of recitatives. In addition to possessing good acting and singing skills, the narrator must be a master of eloquence and poetic improvisation. The epic consists of numerous legends about ancient warriors, deities, spirits and animals, but also addresses contemporary events, such as the disintegration of nomadic society. Given that each community had its own narrator with a rich repertoire, numerous versions of Olonkho circulated. The tradition was developed within the family context for entertainment and as a means of education. Reflecting Yakut beliefs, it also bears witness to the way of life of a small nation struggling for survival at times of political unrest and Read more about this element on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage website. Russian Federation.jpg Capital: Moscow Region: Europe and North America Route: Land Oral traditions and expressions This platform has been developed and maintained with the support of: china_flag.png Flag of Kazakhstan.jpg © UNESCO Flag_of_Germany.svg_.png Oman.jpg azerbaijan.jpg Republic of Azerbaijan	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2433
__label__wiki	0.653757	0.653757	Axioms \| Article about Axioms by The Free Dictionary https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Axioms (redirected from Axioms) Related to Axioms: Euclid's axioms axiom, in mathematics and logic, general statement accepted without proofproof, in mathematics, finite sequence of propositions each of which is either an axiom or follows from preceding propositions by one of the rules of logical inference (see symbolic logic). ..... Click the link for more information. as the basis for logically deducing other statements (theorems). Examples of axioms used widely in mathematics are those related to equality (e.g., "Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other"; "If equals are added to equals, the sums are equal") and those related to operations (e.g., the associative lawassociative law, in mathematics, law holding that for a given operation combining three quantities, two at a time, the initial pairing is arbitrary; e.g., using the operation of addition, the numbers 2, 3, and 4 may be combined (2+3)+4=5+4=9 or 2+(3+4)=2+7=9. ..... Click the link for more information. and the commutative lawcommutative law, in mathematics, law holding that for a given binary operation (combining two quantities) the order of the quantities is arbitrary; e.g., in addition, the numbers 2 and 5 can be combined as 2+5=7 or as 5+2=7. ..... Click the link for more information. ). A postulate, like an axiom, is a statement that is accepted without proof; however, it deals with specific subject matter (e.g., properties of geometrical figures) and thus is not so general as an axiom. It is sometimes said that an axiom or postulate is a "self-evident" statement, but the truth of the statement need not be evident and may in some cases even seem to contradict common sense. Moreover, a statement may be an axiom or postulate in one deductive system and may instead be derived from other statements in another system. A set of axioms on which a system is based is often wished to be independent; i.e., no one of its members can be deduced from any combination of the others. (Historically, the development of non-Euclidean geometry grew out of attempts to prove or disprove the independence of the parallel postulate of Euclid.) The axioms should also be consistent; i.e., it should not be possible to deduce contradictory statements from them. Completeness is another property sometimes mentioned in connection with a set of axioms; if the set is complete, then any true statement within the system described by the axioms may be deduced from them. control of the LABOUR PROCESS is a further topic of general importance. See also INTELLECTUAL LABOUR. (as in geometry, but also in social theory) the taken-for-gr anted assumption or postulate of a model or theory from which other propositions can be derived. See also FORMAL THEORY AND FORMALIZATION OF THEORY. in a given theory, a proposition that is not proved in the deductive construction of the theory but is accepted as a basic starting point in proving the theory’s other propositions. Usually the propositions of the theory under examination chosen as axioms are known to be true or can be considered true within the framework of this theory. Originating in ancient Greece, the term “axiom” is first encountered in Aristotle. It then entered geometry through the works of Euclid’s followers and commentators. Because of the popularity of Aristotelian philosophy during the Middle Ages, the term came to be used in other areas of science and then in everyday life. A general proposition which, being completely apparent, does not require proof came to be called an axiom. The nature of this obviousness was seen, according to views going back to Plato, that such fundamental truths as mathematical axioms were innate to man. I. Kant’s doctrine of the a priori quality of axioms—that they precede all experience and do not depend upon it—was the culmination of such views. The first strong blow to the view of axioms as eternal and immutable a priori truths was the construction of a non-Euclidean geometry by N. I. Lobachevskii. In criticizing Hegel’s views on logical axioms, the figures of Aristotelian syllogisms, V. I. Lenin wrote that “man’s practical activity had to lead man’s consciousness billions of times to the repetition of various logical figures, so that these figures could attain the significance of an axiom” (Filosofskie tetradi, 1969, p. 172). The obviousness of axioms, which are considered as truths not requiring proof, is caused by the conditionality of centuries-old human experience and practice, including experimentation, and the development of science. In addition, the decline of the concept of an axiom as an a priori truth led to the bifurcation of the concept of axioms. The need to experiment in the sphere of construction of new theories, ever-increasing in connection with the investigation of practice; the need to exchange one axiom for another, as well as their relativity; their dependence on the previously encountered concrete conditions of experience and on the level of the development of science; and the impossibility of selecting once and for all as axioms such propositions to be true absolutely under all conditions —all this caused the appearance of a concept of axioms in a sense which differed somewhat from the traditional. This concept of axioms depends on which theory is being examined and how it is being pursued. Thus, axioms of a given theory become those propositions that in the deductive construction of the theory are accepted as initial, no matter how simple and obvious they are. Moreover, from experience, for example, from the construction of various non-Euclidean geometries and their later interpretation and practical application, it is apparent that to require a theory’s axioms to be true while constructing that theory is impossible. The creation of a developed apparatus of mathematical logic is connected with the subsequent development of the concept of axioms. In formal calculus, an axiom is no longer an assumption of some inclusive scientific theory but simply one of those formulas from which, according to the rules of deduction in this calculus, are deduced the remaining formulas (theorems) demonstrated in it. A. V. KUZNETSOV [′ak·sē·əm] Any of the assumptions upon which a mathematical theory (such as geometry, ring theory, and the real numbers) is based. Also known as postulate. 1. a generally accepted proposition or principle, sanctioned by experience; maxim 2. a self-evident statement 3. Logic maths a statement or formula that is stipulated to be true for the purpose of a chain of reasoning: the foundation of a formal deductive system (language) A commercially available subset of Scratchpad, from IBM. ["Axiom - The Scientific Computing System", R. Jenks et al, Springer 1992]. (logic) A well-formed formula which is taken to be true without proof in the construction of a theory. Compare: lemma. aleph 0 Archimedean ordered field Archimedes' axiom axiom of Archimedes Axiom of Choice Axiom of Comprehension AXIOM* axiomatic Axiomatic Method axiomatic set theory axiomatic S-matrix theory Axiomatic Theory of Sets Banach-Tarski paradox Brentano, Franz Cantor's Axiom Make sure the faint-of-heart risk avoiders understand what could occur if they fail to act upon the mission imperative (see Axiom 1. The Rogue Program Management Art of War: Ward & Quaid's excellent 8 1/2 Axioms; All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. (G. K. Chesterton "on Gargoyles") To them, if the standard axioms can't settle the continuum hypothesis, it's not that the hypothesis is a meaningless question, but rather that the axioms are insufficient. From this point of view, Cohen's result indicates that mathematicians need to add to their roster of axioms about infinite sets. Infinite wisdom: a new approach to one of mathematics' most notorious problems He showed that if one began with an axiom that stated "Through a given point, not on a given line, any number of lines can be drawn parallel to a given line," then that and the remaining axioms of Euclid could be used to draw up a new "non-Euclidean" geometry. Nearly a century before, the Italian mathematician Girolamo Saccheri (1667-1733) had been struck with the idea of beginning by supposing that the axiom was not true. Non-Euclidean geometry axial-type mass flowmeter Axiant axiation axil axilla axillary axillary bud axillary sweat gland Axinellina axinitization axiolite Axiomatic Architecture Description Language axiomatic semantics axis cylinder axis of abscissas axis of acoustic symmetry axis of circulation axis of freedom axis of homology axis of ordinates axis of pelvis axis of perspective axis of rotation Axis of Rotation, Instantaneous axis of sighting axis of symmetry axis of the bore Axis of the Celestial Sphere axis of thrust axis of tilt axis of torsion axis of trunnions axis of twist axis of weld Axis Sally Axis, Neutral Axiomatization axiomatize axiomatized axiomatizes axiomatizing Axiome axiomesial axiomesiocervical Axiomesiodistal axiomesiodistal plane axiomesiodistal, of teeth plane axiomesiogingival axiomesioincisal Axiomessiocervical Axiomm Axioms of an equation Axioms of an inequation Axioms of equation Axion Dark Matter Experiment Axion Spatial Imaging, Inc. Axions axioocclusal axioplasm axiopodium axiopulpal Axiós	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2434
__label__wiki	0.546082	0.546082	As a ingredient that has been tested time and time again and shown to positively affect the building of muscle, GAT has taken the highest-quality compound to create Essentials Creatine. Using HPLC-tested pharmaceutical grade creatine that's tested to be 99.9% pure, Essentials Creatine provides 5 grams in every serving which can increase muscle size, boost strength, and enhance muscle recovery. Keep Reading » The general sentiment among nutrition experts is that creatine monohydrate is, for most people, the best bet. It’s the cheapest form and more importantly, it’s the most well-researched. Hundreds of studies have been performed on creatine monohydrate and there’s no evidence of ill effects, whereas many of the more novel forms of creatine have one or sometimes no studies supporting them. Do standard/oblique crunches. Lie down on a mat and position both arms behind your head without locking the hands. Bend your knees so that your feet are flat on the ground. Pushing the small of your back into the ground, slowly roll your shoulders off the ground only a couple of inches (not to a full sitting position). Don't use your momentum to help you up; use slow, regulated movements. Repeat 3 x 20. The majority of studies focusing on creatine supplementation report an increase in the body’s’ creatine pool [15-17]. There is a positive relationship between muscle creatine uptake and exercise performance [17]. Volek et al [18] observed a significant increase in strength performance after 12 weeks creatine supplementation with a concurrent periodized heavy resistance training protocol. The creatine supplementation protocol consisted of a weeklong loading period of 25 g/d followed by a 5 g maintenance dose for the remainder of the training. These positive effects were attributed to an increased total creatine pool resulting in more rapid adenosine triphosphate (ATP) regeneration between resistance training sets allowing athletes to maintain a higher training intensity and improve the quality of the workouts along the entire training period. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Cooper R, Naclerio F, Allgrove J, Jimenez A (July 2012). "Creatine supplementation with specific view to exercise/sports performance: an update". Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 9 (1): 33. doi:10.1186/1550-2783-9-33. PMC 3407788. PMID 22817979. Creatine is produced endogenously at an amount of about 1 g/d. Synthesis predominately occurs in the liver, kidneys, and to a lesser extent in the pancreas. The remainder of the creatine available to the body is obtained through the diet at about 1 g/d for an omnivorous diet. 95% of the bodies creatine stores are found in the skeletal muscle and the remaining 5% is distributed in the brain, liver, kidney, and testes [1]. Creatine supplementation at 300mg/kg for one week (loading with no maintenance) in youth subject to six repeated 35m sprints (10s rest, known as the Running-based Anaerobic Sprint Test or RAST) noted that the increased average and peak power output seen in creatine was not met with a reduction in fatigue, although there was an attenuation in inflammation from exercise (TNFα and CRP).[299] Stash away your scale for several weeks — and set a strength training goal instead. That’s the advice of Lisette Cifaldi, director of behavioral health at Hilton Head Health weight loss resort who counsels patients. “I think strength training shifts your perspective,” she says. “The happiness doesn’t come from achieving a certain number [on the scale]. It comes from the process of getting stronger and feeling empowered that you’re navigating your own success.” Cyclocreatine (1-carboxymethyl-2-iminoimidazolidine) is a synthetic analogue of creatine in a cyclic form. It serves as a substrate for the creatine kinase enzyme system, acting as a creatine mimetic. Cyclocreatine may compete with creatine in the CK enzyme system to transfer phosphate groups to ADP, as coincubation of both can reduce cyclocreatine’s anti-motility effects on some cancer cells.[96] Teresa Giudice, who's best known as a personality on Bravo's Real Housewives of New Jersey, competed in her first bodybuilding contest Saturday. — Carly Mallenbaum, USA TODAY, "'Real Housewives' star Teresa Giudice shows off new muscles at bodybuilding competition," 10 June 2018 His first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, suggested in an interview with Time magazine, with little evidence other than his penchant for bodybuilding and mirror-gazing, that Omar Mateen could have been gay. — Tim Fitzsimons /, NBC News, "What really happened that night at Pulse," 12 June 2018 The physique competition will be held at McGlohon Theater and includes the following categories: bodybuilding, fitness, men’s physique, figure, bikini, classic physique and women’s physique. — Courtney Devores, charlotteobserver, "Your 5-minute guide to the best things to do in Charlotte \| June 22-28," 21 June 2018 Fans who have been following Giudice closely on social media have watched the reality star workout in videos, but Giudice hasn't posted publicly about her first bodybuilding competition. — Carly Mallenbaum, USA TODAY, "'Real Housewives' star Teresa Giudice shows off new muscles at bodybuilding competition," 10 June 2018 Carolyn Marvin, who served as the graduate adviser for both Prosper and Nirenberg, pointed to his thesis, an autoethnography about the subculture of bodybuilding. — Josh Baugh, San Antonio Express-News, "Nirenberg knew immediately that he’d eventually marry Erika Prosper," 17 Mar. 2018 The bodybuilding competition is one of two hosted produced each year in Louisville by Kentucky Muscle promoter Brent L. Jones. — Matt Stone, The Courier-Journal, "Bodybuilders, fitness athletes go flex at 2018 KDF Derby Championships," 29 Apr. 2018 Father John Brown is basically a bodybuilding legend, having won two Mr. Universe titles and three Mr. World crowns. — Jr Radcliffe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Facts you may have missed about each Packers draft choice in 2018," 4 May 2018 The affable Louisville man helped bring back the bodybuilding show culture in 2011 with 90 competitors. — Matt Stone, The Courier-Journal, "Bodybuilders, fitness athletes go flex at 2018 KDF Derby Championships," 29 Apr. 2018 Take time to rest. To give your muscles time to recover, rest one full day between exercising each specific muscle group. You might choose to work the major muscle groups at a single session two or three times a week, or plan daily sessions for specific muscle groups. For example, on Monday work your arms and shoulders, on Tuesday work your legs, and so on. “There is a lot of mixed research on creatine’s ability to improve muscle strength,” the government website says. “However, analyses of this research show that creatine seems to modestly improve upper body strength and lower body strength in both younger and older adults.” Creatine has also been shown to improve athletes’ performance in rowing, soccer, and jumping height. The bulking and cutting strategy is effective because there is a well-established link between muscle hypertrophy and being in a state of positive energy balance.[19] A sustained period of caloric surplus will allow the athlete to gain more fat-free mass than they could otherwise gain under eucaloric conditions. Some gain in fat mass is expected, which athletes seek to oxidize in a cutting period while maintaining as much lean mass as possible. Consult your physician and follow all safety instructions before beginning any exercise program or using any supplement or meal replacement product, especially if you have any unique medical conditions or needs. The contents on our website are for informational purposes only, and are not intended to diagnose any medical condition, replace the advice of a healthcare professional, or provide any medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 2-4 Minutes Rest: Ideal for “tension exercises,” which includes most primary compound exercises. I personally take 3 minutes for the big stuff, sometimes going into the 3-4 minute range depending on exactly what I’m doing and what I feel like I need at the time. Since making strength gains is the main focus of these exercises, longer rest periods like this will be optimal for making it happen. A proper warm-up is an important part of an effective strength workout. Start by foam rolling your muscles to wake 'em up. "Foam rolling loosens up tight muscles so that they work the way they're designed to," says Davis. A dynamic warm-up is another important part of your pre-workout routine, it preps your muscles for the work they're about to do and helps increase your range of motion. Increasing your range of motion allows you to go deeper into those squats and fully extend those bicep curls, which means more muscle recruitment and better results. "These two combined reduce your risk of injury and allow you to push harder during your workout," says Davis. Get started with this five-minute warm-up. Co-ingesting creatine with caffeine partially negated the benefits of creatine supplementation (at 5mg/kg bodyweight) during the loading phase in one study.[590] The exact mechanism responsible for this effect is not known, but might be related to opposing actions on muscle contraction time.[591] However, another study in trained men found that co-ingestion of 300mg caffeine per day during creatine loading at 20g per day (split into 4 doses) had no effect on bench press 1RM, time to fatigue, or sprinting ability.[592] However, this study also found that creatine alone or when combined with caffeine had no effect on any of these parameters over placebo, either. Thus, the study may have been underpowered or done in too short a time frame (the test was done after only 5 days of loading) to observe any possible effects.[592] Mr. Olympia is part of the International Federation of Bodybuilding Professional League. The I.F.B.B. says that it operates under the guidelines of the World Anti-Doping Agency and that competitors are subject to drug testing. Chang, who oversees the Mr. Olympia contest, said that I.F.B.B. testing is random, but is not conducted during the Mr. Olympia contest itself. Young adult athletes who reported creatine usage for over two years prior to the study (retrospective design) were not significantly different than controls.[501] Elsewhere, in a similar cohort of athletes reporting creatine usage for up to four years, failed to note significant differences in liver enzymes, although a nonsignificant reduction in LDH was noted.[502] Although research is underway, doctors do not know the long-term health effects of taking creatine supplements, especially in children who are still growing. Because of these unknown risks, children and adolescents younger than 18 years and pregnant or nursing women should never take creatine supplements. People with kidney problems also should never take creatine supplements. Whey protein contains high levels of all the essential amino acids and branched-chain amino acids. It also has the highest content of the amino acid cysteine, which aids in the biosynthesis of glutathione. For bodybuilders, whey protein provides amino acids used to aid in muscle recovery.[27] Whey protein is derived from the process of making cheese from milk. There are three types of whey protein: whey concentrate, whey isolate, and whey hydrolysate. Whey concentrate is 29–89% protein by weight whereas whey isolate is 90%+ protein by weight. Whey hydrolysate is enzymatically predigested and therefore has the highest rate of digestion of all protein types.[27] The basic principles of weight training are essentially identical to those of strength training, and involve a manipulation of the number of repetitions (reps), sets, tempo, exercise types, and weight moved to cause desired increases in strength, endurance, and size. The specific combinations of reps, sets, exercises, and weights depends on the aims of the individual performing the exercise. Creatine non-response is when muscular loading of creatine is under a certain threshold (10mmol/L), while “response” to creatine means having more muscular creatine loading (20mol/L or more). There also exists a “grey area” inbetween, where some benefits are achieved but not as many as pure responders will experience. Response appears to be positively correlated with muscle mass and type II muscle fibers. Creatine transport has been shown to increase when muscle creatine stores are depleted. This was only noted to occur in muscle with particular fiber types (soleus and red gastrocnemius), while other fiber types, such as white grastrocnemius, did not show any clear trend.[146] This indicates that transport in relation to total creatine levels varies across different muscle fiber types. More specifically, you can expect to end up in the upper half of these ranges ONLY if you are a beginner, younger, and/or have amazing genetics. You can expect to end up in the lower half of these ranges if you are an intermediate or advanced trainee, older, and/or have poor genetics. The average person can expect to end up somewhere in the middle. Additional details here: How Much Muscle Can You Gain? Bodybuilders also understand how to diet. This is perhaps the most important aspect other athletes can learn from. I can’t think of any athlete that comes close to bodybuilders who know how to build massive amounts of muscle and then can diet with the type of precision that gets them absolutely shredded on a specific date. Most resistance training sports use weight classes to compete. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that shedding body fat without losing muscle can be a major advantage. Competing at a lower weight class because you are leaner while maintaining strength and performance is a very valuable and effective strategy. Diet to build LEAN muscle to keep weight low for a competitive advantage. Compound exercises work several muscle groups at once, and include movement around two or more joints. For example, in the leg press, movement occurs around the hip, knee and ankle joints. This exercise is primarily used to develop the quadriceps, but it also involves the hamstrings, glutes and calves. Compound exercises are generally similar to the ways that people naturally push, pull and lift objects, whereas isolation exercises often feel a little unnatural. “I would really focus on learning how macros work, how your body works and how it reacts to certain foods, and what your body requires each day to maintain your weight,” he advises. “Then you can start playing around with increasing calories [to bulk up], and decreasing calories when you're dieting.” Our beginner's guide to macros will definitely help. In today's extra-large society, we tend to focus on the admirable guys who train hard and switch up their diet to transform their bodies by losing weight. We highlight their quests to lead healthier lives every chance we get — but there's another side of the wellness scale that can be just as difficult, depending on your body's makeup: Gaining mass and muscle. In regard to practical interventions, concurrent glycogen loading has been noted to increase creatine stores by 37-46% regardless of whether the tissue was exercised prior to loading phase.[176] It is important to note, however, that creatine levels in response to the creatine loading protocol were compared in one glycogen-depleted leg to the contralateral control leg, which was not exercised.[176] This does not rule out a possible systemic exercise-driven increase in creatine uptake, and the increase in creatine noted above[176] was larger than typically seen with a loading protocol (usually in the 20-25% range). Consistent with an exercise-effect, others have reported that exercise itself increases creatine uptake into muscle, reporting 68% greater creatine uptake in an exercised limb, relative to 14% without exercise.[153] Lung disease (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). Early research on the effects of creatine in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is inconsistent. Some research suggests that taking creating daily does not improve lung function. However, other research suggests that taking creatine may improve lung function or exercise capacity. That pump is tangible, real-time biofeedback to let you know that blood is flowing to your muscle cells, beginning a chain of events that stimulates protein synthesis. Maybe that's why it's easy to overlook how important good nutrition is in the mass-building equation. When you choose to eat, say, chicken instead of ice cream, there's no immediate muscle gratification -- no pump to keep you motivated. Creatine is a naturally occurring compound found in muscle in large amounts. Creatine monohydrate is the supplement form and combines is a combination of the amino acids arginine, glycine, and methionine. Creatine drives the important creatine phosphate energy pathway, which is important in high-intensity activity such as weightlifting. Creatine can improve body bulk and training performance in high-intensity activities. Be aware that not everyone responds to creatine supplementation and 30 percent of users may not see any improvement. Women may not benefit as much as men. In weight training, increased strength, bulk, and fat loss are reasonably consistent results. The creatine kinase system appears to be detectable in endothelial cells.[314][315] Under basal conditions, creatine itself is expressed at around 2.85+/-0.62μM[316] (three-fold higher than HUVEC cells[314]). When incubating the medium with 0.5mM creatine, endothelial cells can take up creatine via the creatine transporter (SLC6A8) and increase both creatine (almost doubling) and phosphocreatine (nearly 2.5-fold) concentrations.[316] When assessing the antioxidant effects of creatine, it does not appear to sequester superoxide and may not be a direct antioxidant.[241] Additionally, creatine failed to protect neurons from H2O2 incubation to induce cell death via pro-oxidative means.[241] These results are in contrast to previously recorded results suggesting creatine acts as a direct anti-oxidant.[242] Health-food stores sell creatine supplements in capsule, chewable, and powdered form, the most popular being the powder. One teaspoon of powder contains 5 grams (g) of creatine monohydrate. The recommended daily dose is 1-2 teaspoons dissolved in 8 ounces of water or sweetened beverage. Manufacturers and distributors suggest a five- to seven-day loading phase with intake of 10-20 g (2-4 scoops) daily to fill up the muscle. The maintenance phase of 5-10 g/day is recommended before and/or immediately following a workout. This protocol is claimed to increase creatine muscle stores by 20-50%. When assessing type I muscle (slow twitch) against type II muscles (fast twitch) in response to creatine supplementation, it seems that glycogen accumulation may only occur in the latter as assessed in rats,[359] where the soleus muscle is a model for slow twitch muscle fibers and the gastrocnemius is a model for fast twitch. This is similar to human creatine distribution, which seems to accumulate in type II muscles rather than type I.[367] Many athletes follow a "loading" protocol of around 25 grams a day for five days, but this isn't essential. But as Ciaran Fairman notes in the article "Do I Need to Load With Creatine," you can also get the same benefits with around 5 grams a day, potentially with none of the mild side effects of the loading protocol, which include stomach pain and water weight gain. The catch is that you have to take it consistently. Don't skip it! The creatine transporter (CrT) is positively regulated by proteins known to be involved in sensing and responding to the cellular energy state, including the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR[158]). Upon activation, mTOR stimulates SGK1 and SGK3[159][160] to act upon PIKfyve[161] and subsequently PI(3,5)P2[162] to increase CrT activity.[161] Beyond mTOR, SGK1 also is stimulated by intracellular calcium[163] and a lack of oxygen (ischemia).[164] Because transient ischemia is associated with increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production after blood flow is restored (reperfusion) it has been hypothesized that muscle contraction may increase creatine uptake through a similar ROS-mediated mechanism.[165] Sound complicated? Fortunately, there's an easy rule of thumb for increasing your training volume: For each exercise, perform three to six sets of six to 12 reps, resting for 30 to 90 seconds between each set, she says. The weight used should be enough that you can get out your last reps with proper form but wouldn't be able to perform any additional reps. Higher percieved effort during heat (or due to elevations in body heat) are thought to be mediated by either the serotonergic system (suppresses performance)[388] or the dopaminergic system (enhances performance),[389][234] and creatine is thought to be involved in percieved effort during heat training since it has been noted previously to interact with neurotransmission by enhancing both serotonergic[253] and dopaminergic[230] neurotransmission. Unfortunately, it’s hard to significantly increase levels through food alone. That’s where supplementation comes in. For instance, in one 12-week study of resistance-trained individuals, taking HMB in tandem with a high-intensity lifting routine significantly improved muscle strength and size compared to lifting alone. Plus, in the off-chance that you push yourself too hard, HMB helps prevent the effects of overtraining—including muscle loss. How to maximize its effects: Take 20 grams of whey protein powder in the 30 minutes before working out, and take 40 grams within 60 minutes after training. Also consider taking 20-40 grams of whey immediately upon waking every morning to kick-start muscle growth. Your best bet is to choose a whey powder that contains whey protein hydrolysates (whey protein broken down into smaller fragments for faster digestion) or whey protein isolate.	cc/2019-30/en_head_0000.json.gz/line2441

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