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Book Review: The Wrong Man by Kate White
She wanted to be more daring, but one small risk is about to cost her everything—maybe even her life.
Bold and adventurous in her work as owner of one of Manhattan's boutique interior design firms, Kit Finn couldn't be tamer in her personal life. While on vacation in the Florida Keys, Kit resolves to do something risky for once. When she literally bumps into a charming stranger at her hotel, she decides to make good on her promise and act on her attraction.
But back in New York, when Kit arrives at his luxury apartment ready to pick up where they left off in the Keys, she doesn't recognize the man standing on the other side of the door.
Was this a cruel joke or part of something truly sinister? Kit soon realizes that she's been thrown into a treacherous plot, which is both deeper and deadlier than she could have ever imagined. Now the only way to protect herself, her business, and the people she loves is to find out the true identity of the man who has turned her life upside down.
Adrenaline-charged and filled with harrowing twists at every turn, The Wrong Man will keep readers riveted until the final page.
I hate to say it, but I was pretty disappointed with the quality of the writing here. I had hoped that, with her latest release, White would have tightened up on some of the issues that I found in her earlier book. There is still way way way too much writing for the story. I felt like we were dragged through every second of Kit's day, when only 60% of what we read was relevant to the story. It could have easily lost fifty pages of Kit walking places, making coffee, or riding in airplanes. It definitely didn't help that the plot and characters were over-the-top unbelievable and the dialogue was cringe-worthy. I was really unimpressed in terms of writing.
It was more entertaining than it was well-written, but I have to say that even here I expected more. I read the author's book The Sixes and, while I also found it to be over-written, I enjoyed the read. In this one, however, I figured out the "twists" well ahead of time and didn't find myself caring all that much about the characters and what would happen to them. I did like that the author also used cliff-hanger chapter endings in this book, but I felt like some were very anti-climactic.
I had hoped for more. I enjoyed my read of The Sixes despite some issues with the writing, but I found the writing in this one to be so distracting that I couldn't get past it and lose myself in the story. I also found the characters less compelling and never really attached to them, making it hard to care whether or not they made it out of their mess alive. I have one other book by the author, and I do still plan to read it and see if it's more like The Sixes or more like The Wrong Man before giving up on the author. This is a potential read for those who are fans of very light and easy to follow romantic suspense, but probably won't capture the attention of those like me who are still looking for the next Gone Girl read-alike. I'd probably recommend passing on this one for the time and picking up The Sixes instead.
Thanks to TLC for providing me with a copy to review! Click here to see the other stops on the tour.
The Choose Your Own Adventure Book Club (Adventure 3)
This month's Choose Your Own Adventure Book Club (click here if you're new to the idea) theme was Frienemies and BFFs. Halina showed up with homemade apple sharlotka and of course we had lots of coffee and tea and book talk. I'm going to jump right in with the list of what we read.
Rachel read Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
It's pretty quickly making its way through the book club lending circle (I had my turn last week) and it's becoming a favorite of everyone. I love reading a graphic novel with a believable female protagonist and the friendship/rivalry between Ballister Blackheart and Amborsius Goldenloin is so adorable I can barely stand it. It's a must read and I'll have a review posted at some point in the future.
Stephanie read The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos
The friendship in this one is between sisters, which is one of my very favorite relationships to explore in books. I've got a copy of this one and I'm a fan of de los Santos' other books, so I'll be boosting this one up the TBR list for sure.
Halina read Reunited by Hilary Weisman Graham
Ex-best-friends go on a road trip to see a reunion show played by their favorite boy band. What's not to love here? I've added it to my list - it sounds like a perfect summer read.
And I read The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
You can click here to see my full review of the book, but the long and short of it is that it's an intriguing and shocking story about two ballet dancers, a vicious murder, and a mysterious mass murder at a prison for young girls. You should definitely read it.
A few others I've read recently that I think would make good choices:
All the Rage by Courtney Summers (or really any of her books, including Some Girls Are and Cracked Up to Be)
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Lumberjanes by Noelle Stevenson
And a few things we spent a good bit of time discussing that are totally and completely unrelated but worth mentioning:
Gilmore Girls (if you haven't watched it, do, and if you don't like it, never tell Stephanie). Somehow this one seems to come up at pretty much every meeting, so you can go ahead and assume it was discussed at some point during every meeting we've ever had.
Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog
Next month's adventure is Books Set in a Boarding School. As always, I'd love to see any of your own recommendations for books about BFFs and Frienemies OR for books set in a boarding school!
Comics Friday: Bodies by Si Spencer
VERTIGO brings you a graphic novel with four detectives, four time periods, and four dead bodies - all set in London. Edmond Hillinghead is an 1890s overachiever who's trying to solve a murder no one cares about while hiding his own secret. Karl Whiteman is our dashing 1940s adventurer with a shocking past. Shahara Hasan is 2014's kickass female Detective Sergeant, who walks the line between religion and power. And Maplewood, an amnesiac from post-apocalyptic 2050, brings a haunting perspective to it all.
So the cover here is amazing, am I wrong? It's the first thing that grabbed my attention. I love the juxtaposition of the proper vintage lady with the blood splatter. Even the font used for the text is cool and reflects the various time periods during which the series is set. The artwork on the inside is no less beautiful. I have nothing but great things to say about the quality of the illustrations and how much fun this is to look at. I'll be seeking out other work by Tula Lotay and Phil Winslade.
That said, I was less than impressed with the story itself. The first few issues had me very much intrigued. I wanted to know more about the secret society that seems to have its hand in decades worth of mystery and I really liked the characters, especially Shahara Hasan (the modern day detective). I was super disappointed with the ending, however. I just didn't think it made a lot of sense and it felt very anti-climactic. It has a huge build up and what felt like a very small and hurried ending. The travel through time periods was hard to get used to at first, but once I got into it, it was less of a problem.
I think there are certain readers this will appeal to, but I'm not one of them. I didn't like the way the end seemed thrown together and didn't make total sense. I wasn't sure at the end who the "bad guy" was and if there even was a bad guy. Maybe that makes it more sophisticated, but for me it made it confusing and disappointing. Not the best I've read by any stretch.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a copy to review
Book Review: After a While You Just Get Used to It by Gwendolyn Knapp
Growing up in a dying breed of eccentric Florida crackers, Knapp thought she had it rough—what with her pack rat mother, Margie; her aunt Susie, who has fewer teeth than prison stays; and Margie’s bipolar boyfriend, John. But not long after Knapp moves to New Orleans, Margie packs up her House of Hoarders and follows along. As if Knapp weren’t struggling enough to keep herself afloat, working odd jobs and trying to find love while suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, the thirty-year-old realizes that she’s never going to escape her family’s unendingly dysfunctional drama.
Knapp honed her writing chops and distinctive Southern Gothic–humor style writing short pieces and participating in the renowned reading series Literary Death Match. Now, like bestselling authors Jenny Lawson, Laurie Notaro, and Julie Klausner before her, Knapp bares her sad and twisted life for readers everywhere to enjoy.
There's a certain brand of memoir that I feel like I've read too much of lately. It's a woman approximately my age who can't seem to grow up and get settled - she spends the entire book drinking, sleeping with everyone, and has little to no self-esteem (like Lena Dunham or Alida Nugent). And it's supposed to be super funny. I am so happy to say that this is NOT one of those memoirs. Knapp struggles and dates the wrong guy and messes up, but she's also working hard on her life and on being an adult. She takes responsibility for herself and tries to do better, which makes it so much more enjoyable to read about the hilarious situations she winds up in. The reader doesn't have to feel guilty for laughing, because you trust that Knapp is actually going to make it in the end.
Not only does Knapp's humor not make me sad, it actually makes me laugh. I can really appreciate a dysfunctional Southern family and that's what Knapp has in spades. She keeps it genuine, including some of the difficulties, but her sense of humor shines through all of it. I definitely think the comparison to Jenny Lawson and Laurie Notaro is apt.
I guess my comments on the writing could also be taken as comments on the entertainment value. It's funny, it made me laugh out loud, and I thought Knapp was charming and believable. I've avoided a lot of memoirs by authors of my generation because I do tend to find them living in a perpetual adolescence, but I loved the Knapp doesn't seem to be taking that path (much like Lawson, in my opinion). Yes, she has hard times and she does make light of them, but she's not static and stuck in her misery. I came out of the book feeling happy for her and appreciating her take on poor Southern life, rather than feeling bad for her and hoping she doesn't drink herself to death within the next five years.
I loved it, found her hilarious and uplifting, and can't wait to see what she writes next. This is a perfect follow up for fans of Jenny Lawson and makes great reading for those who want to read something by a woman who is taking on her hardships with a brilliant sense of humor. If you want to read something funny by someone smart, this is where to go.
Thanks to Roshe and Penguin Random House for providing me with a copy to review!
Book Review: The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
On the outside, there's Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer days away from the life of her dreams when something threatens to expose the shocking truth of her achievement.
On the inside, within the walls of the Aurora Hills juvenile detention center, there's Amber, locked up for so long she can't imagine freedom.
Tying their two worlds together is Orianna, who holds the key to unlocking all the girls' darkest mysteries…
What really happened on the night Orianna stepped between Violet and her tormentors? What really happened on two strange nights at Aurora Hills? Will Amber and Violet and Orianna ever get the justice they deserve—in this life or in another one?
In prose that sings from line to line, Nova Ren Suma tells a supernatural tale of guilt and of innocence, and of what happens when one is mistaken for the other.
In terms of writing, I think this is very similar to We Were Liars. It's very dreamy and poetic, what I think could certainly be described as lyrical. I feel like Suma did a good job of capturing two very different voices in the alternating narrators. It's always a good thing when you can tell which character is narrating without having to turn back to the chapter heading to remind yourself. I think she also did a great job of combining suspense and intrigue with character development, which produces a book that it fairly balanced in terms of plot and characterization. It's certainly on the more literary side of Young Adult as a genre, but it has the tension of the best popular thrillers as well.
I hate to even say it, because it's one of my pet peeves, but this really could be the literary equivalent to Gone Girl for the YA crowd. Narrators who are ambivalent at best, unreliable and unlikable at worst, make for a compelling read. And it doesn't hurt to have a creepy abandoned/burned out penitentiary as a setting. I read it in two sittings, and the only reason I didn't finish it in one is because I'm too old to stay up all night - I had to give in and sleep at some point. I still stayed up extra late reading and grabbed it again the second I woke up.
There's a lot going on in this book, and it has a lot going for it in terms of the quality of writing and in the experience you'll get in reading it. My one complaint is that I'm still not sure what to think of the ending. It's...different. I can't say more without spoilers, but it's one I'm anxiously waiting to discuss with friends because I'm honestly not really sure I fully get it. If you've read it, email me and let's talk!
Book Review: Love May Fail by Matthew Quick
Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself back in South Jersey, a place that remains largely unchanged from the years of her unhappy youth. Lost and alone, looking for the goodness she believes still exists in the world, Portia sets off on a quest to save the one man who always believed in her—and in all of his students: her beloved high school English teacher, Mr. Vernon, who has retired broken and alone after a traumatic classroom incident.
Will a sassy nun, an ex-heroin addict, a metalhead little boy, and her hoarder mother help or hurt Portia’s chances on this quest to resurrect a good man and find renewed hope in the human race? Love May Fail is a story of the great highs and lows of existence: the heartache and daring choices it takes to become the person you know (deep down) you are meant to be.
Simply breathtaking. I don't have enough words in me to rave about how beautiful this story is and how well it's told. It has multiple narrators, which made me nervous at first. It's the worst when you just feel like you're getting to know a character and they're pulled away to introduce the perspective of someone new. In this case, however, my concerns were unfounded. Despite the use of multiple narrators, the book flows smoothly. This is the rare case of a book where seeing characters through multiple points of view makes them richer and more nuanced than just seeing a single, first person narration.
It's unputdownable. I read the entire 400 pages over the course of two days because I just had to know what happened. My first reaction to the story is to wonder why Christian fiction isn't moving in this direction. I mean, obviously, I know why, because this is definitely not a "Christian" book that would sell in a Christian book store. It has sex and bad language and doesn't have an explicit "come to Jesus" moral.
Instead, it has an intensely relatable story about losing your faith, finding your faith, and questioning what faith is to begin with. We have a wide range of characters, from a devout believer to an outright atheist and all are portrayed as sympathetic and flawed. It's about doubt and struggle and reconciliation and figuring out what your purpose is - all of which make for a beautifully contemplative novel. On top of being written in beautiful language, this is exactly what I think Christian literature ought to strive for. In addition, you'll absolutely fall in love with the characters, who are hilarious and precious and written as so believably human you'll find yourself wishing they were real.
I highly, highly recommend reading this book. It's got something to appeal to everyone, from those looking for laughs to those who want heart-warming relationships to those who are searching for meaning. Read it with a pile of kleenex because I dare you not to cry at some point. I'll be immediately passing this on to everyone I know.
Thanks to TLC for providing me with a copy to review. You can click here to see the rest of the tour stops.
Book Review: Irrationally Yours by Dan Ariely
Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popularWall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. Ariely applies this scientific analysis of the human condition in his “Ask Ariely” Q & A column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he responds to readers who write in with personal conundrums ranging from the serious to the curious: What can you do to stay calm when you’re playing the volatile stock market? What’s the best way to get someone to stop smoking? How can you maximize the return on your investment at an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is it possible to put a price on the human soul? Can you ever rationally justify spending thousands of dollars on a Rolex?
I was introduced to Ariely when I took his course on irrationality offered through Coursera several years ago. I loved his brand of social psychology and its practical effects on our behavior and purchased his first three books for the course. This one is a bit different because it's formatted as a collection of questions and answers from Ariely's advice column. As in his course, I think the information he presents is fascinating and fun to read. I loved that, having seen his videos during the course, I could picture him and hear his tone of voice as I read. His personality and sense of humor translate well to the page, which only adds to the reader's enjoyment.
This certainly makes for a fun and easy read, although you'll find yourself learning more than you expect. The concepts are simple once they're pointed out, but things that most of us would never think of without prompting. Ariely includes lots of humor and the articles themselves are a page and a half at most, so they fly by. I wasn't a huge fan of the comics included - I just didn't think they added anything humorous to the book and the style looked dated to me.
Even though I wasn't a huge fan of the included comics, I have absolutely nothing but raves about the actual content of Ariely's latest book and his abilities as an author. He takes an interesting subject and illuminates it for the everyday reader by teaching it using relatable examples. If you don't find something to learn here, you're probably already a professional social psychologist. And his sense of humor makes it a pleasure to read as well. I'd recommend grabbing a copy and keeping it on your bedside table (or back of the toilet), as each entry is the perfect length for a quick read on the fly.
Thanks to Harper Perennial for providing me with a copy to review.
Audiobook Review: California by Edan Lepucki
The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they've left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable despite the isolation and hardships they face. Consumed by fear of the future and mourning for a past they can't reclaim, they seek comfort and solace in one other. But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant.
Terrified of the unknown but unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses its own dangers. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.
Like Station Eleven, I'd list this as a more literary take on the post-apocalyptic nightmare vision of America. We're not given cannibals or mutated monsters, but we do get some very dark interpretations of our future. What sets this novel apart is the slow build of suspense and the mundane quality of evil as Cal and Frida face it. Lepucki does a good job of providing the reader with a believable downfall of civilization on earth as a gradual descent brought on by several issues - climate change, a growing divide between the wealthy and the poor, and the dissolution of government services in favor of private sector funding of services for those who can afford it. While I'm not sure that all aspects of the novel itself were believable, I appreciated reading what seemed to be a realistic portrayal of how society could devolve to the state we find it in in this book.
My only issues were with characterization. I felt like there were times when both Frida and Cal were inconsistent with their attitudes and actions. For huge portions of the book I just wanted them to sit down and talk for like five seconds instead of going off of random assumptions they seems to make about what the other is thinking. You'd think after living together in the wilderness alone for several years they'd have developed some kind of communication system that works for them. Especially if they are as passionately in love as we are supposed to believe they are.
Despite having some issues with the characters, I loved the listening experience. It should be pointed out that this is definitely not something I'd describe as a typical action-based post-apocalypse. It's very much set in the heads of Cal and Frida and the suspense and intrigue elements unfold slowly. As a fan of a slow build, I had no problems with this and appreciated that the book was more psychological than action-packed.
Like many other reviewers, I was a bit perplexed by the end. While it's somewhat ambiguous, and, I believe, ultimately in keeping with Cal and Frida as characters, I felt a bit let down. I had expected the slow build to lead to something a bit more than it ever really amounted to.
No issues here. The narrator does a great job with mild changes in inflection when differentiating between character dialogue - enough that you can tell characters apart but not so much that it's distracting. She's easy to listen to and does a fine job of narrating.
This is definitely written for those who appreciate a more character-driven, literary approach to post-apocalypse as opposed to action or horror. While there is some violence (including sexual violence, but taking place "off screen") the book is mostly about the sinister nature of cults of personality and the ways that desperate people can be easily led and manipulated. I'd recommend it to those who enjoyed Station Eleven, but I'd also be sure to note that it's populated by characters who can be frustrating and unlikable.
Book Review: Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister's Killer by Jeanne Bishop
When her sister was murdered in cold blood some twenty-five years ago, along with her sister's husband and their unborn child, Jeanne Bishop thought she could forgive the teenage killer and move on with her life. She became a public defender, an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, and a supporter of mandatory life sentences for juvenile killers. But all the while she never once spoke the name of her sister's killer aloud, never once cared what had happened to him after he was convicted of the crime.
Over time she realized that God was asking more of her. Her responsibility as a Christian was not to simply tell herself that she'd forgiven the young man while secretly hoping he languished in prison the rest of his days. As Christians we have an obligation to work to reconcile with those who have harmed us.
"Change of Heart" is the story of this transformation, from someone who actively sought the killer's imprisonment for the rest of his life to one who now visits him regularly in prison. It has not been an easy journey, and at times the personal cost has been high. But this change of heart has brought Bishop to a better understanding of what it means to be a person of faith.
I was quite impressed with the quality of Bishop's writing, both in terms of its literary merit and in terms of its thoughtfulness. I expected it to be mainly memoir with some musings about forgiveness, with a mostly inspirational bent. And while Bishop's story is certainly inspiring, I was very pleased to find that she spends just as much time discussing her belief that Christians should oppose the death penalty as well as her own personal views regarding Christianity and the imposition of a life sentence without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. It took a much deeper intellectual and theological route than I expected, but in a challenging and thought-provoking way that I greatly appreciated.
I think this will appeal to a pretty wide range of readers, although it should be noted that the author is a Christian and comes at the issue from a decidedly Christian viewpoint. A large portion of the book examines her work in the justice system attempting to outlaw the death penalty and her growing concern and activism against sentencing juveniles to life without parole - most of her reasonings coming from a Christian worldview. Of course the book is also filled with inspiration surrounding forgiveness and what it means to forgive without condoning or excusing criminal behavior based on the author's personal experiences. I found it to be very compelling reading and devoured it in just two sittings. I had planned to read it a chapter at a time over the course of a few weeks, but found that I couldn't put it down.
I think this is definitely a must-read for Christians who have an interest in issues of social justice, as well as those who enjoy inspiring stories centered around forgiveness and mercy. It may also appeal to those who oppose the death penalty and are interested in looking for ways to discuss their opposition with Christians from a theological stance. I also think it's a book that can appeal to those who do support the death penalty, but who are interested in hearing other points of view. And it's absolutely idea for readers like me who are or have been on the fence.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy to review.
Double Yoga Review: The Complete Yoga Workbook and Yoga for Your Mind and Body
One of the many pleasures yoga has brought to my life has been a whole new realm of reading material. I'm on the hunt for some great reference books to keep around the house to help me improve my asanas. Rather than reviewing the writing and entertainment value of the two latest guides I've read, I think I'll just bullet point some positives and negatives from each.
Complete Yoga Workbook
No matter your age, gender, or fitness level, the Complete Yoga Workbookhas strategies for improving your health and well-being. Based on ancient principles that provide the framework for a modern-day practice, it tackles ailments ranging from arthritis and allergies to anxiety, depression, and fatigue. Sequences of simple postures that will ease discomfort appear in easy-to-follow, step-by-step photos, and there's advice on breathing, meditation, warming up and cooling down, and exercising safely.
I loved the pictures chosen here. They're just beautifully done and are posed in a way that makes the poses easy to understand.
Whoever designed the book truly did an amazing job. The layout is pleasant to look at and reflects the content of the book.
I really appreciated that the author included some of the most very basic information you'll need when you start yoga: what to wear, what equipment you'll need, what the basics of the practice include.
It's contains English and Sanskrit names for poses and lots of definitions for Sanskrit words that might be new to beginners. If you need to build your yoga vocabulary, this is a good starting point.
Each asana isn't just pictured and described, but also contains notes and precautions to take when practicing that pose.
Negatives:
It's definitely for the most basic beginners and won't move you past the basics. The information included is the bare minimum you'll need.
There aren't as many asanas included as I would have liked and the ones that are included are, again, the very basics. They're important to know, but if you've practiced for any length of time, I'm not sure you'll find a challenge in what is presented.
Large portions seem repetitive
My main critique of this title is that I think the information contained is pretty easy to find online from sources that don't require a purchase. Sites like Yoga by Candace contain the same information and highlight the same aspects of asanas, but for free - and contain more advanced poses and practices as well for after you've conquered the basics.
It's a great choice for a new yogi, and I think a decent choice for a library collection, but I'd point my friends who are interested in starting a practice towards the internet before I'd tell them to purchase the book.
Yoga for Your Mind & Body
Release your inner guru and unleash yoga's healing power. Relieve stress. Focus your mind. Build strength. Clear step-by-step instructions and photos guide you through more than 80 specific yoga poses. Study the perfect yoga poses and unlock the key to a healthy, fit, and calmer you!
Again, this is well-designed and laid out, with care taken in the selection of images
This is specifically geared toward a female teenage audience. I wasn't aware of that from the description, but I was pleased with what it contained once I realized it was intended for a YA audience. I appreciated seeing images of diverse teenage girls in age appropriate clothing. The images here aren't heavily touched up - the girls look like regular teens with healthy teen bodies.
It has a great step by step description of each pose with an accompanying picture that has key elements captioned, showing the correct positioning of hands and feet and lines and angles the body should be making.
It not only includes both Sanskrit and English asana names, it also include a pronunciation for the Sanskrit, which I found very helpful.
Modifications are included for some poses to either increase the difficulty or help those who don't have as much flexibility.
The book includes some more difficult poses, such as supported headstand and plow, with appropriate precautions and guidelines for correct posture.
Some of the captions and side notes were a bit repetitive and some were misplaced. I believe this, along with typos, could very well be the result of my having read a galley rather than the finished product.
My main change would have been to include more diversity in body type - the girls pictured all had slender, athletic builds. I'd love to see some other body types represented, particularly in a book aimed at teens.
And while I'm aware that the market many times favors the catering to a particular gender, I don't see why this book couldn't have included young men as well. There was no information included that wouldn't have applied equally to male yogis. The only thing specifically female about the book was the continued use of the world "girl" and the exclusion of male yogis.
I somehow missed that this book was geared towards young adult women, so my expectation that it be for all genders and ages was a bit off. I probably wouldn't have chosen it had I know it was for a YA audience, but I'm glad that I did. If I had a teenage daughter, I think this book would make for a great introduction to yoga and worth the investment. While it also contains poses and information that can be found online for free, I think the images of teens who actually look like regular teens sets it apart from anything else I've seen online.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with both copies to review.
What I Read in May
May was a touch and go month for the Goldens. We had some great experiences - my little brother, Buddy, graduated from college with his BFA and started an internship at an art school in Gatlinburg. My grandmother, Mema, came to visit and she and I worked on recording an oral history of our family.
But our little puppy, Chief, also got really sick. We're still not sure why, but for a while we were worried he'd have to have a major surgery or be put to sleep. The vet was saying things like "cancer" and "intestinal blockage" which are two of the worst things that can happen to Danes (or I'd assume any dog?) Anyway, it turned out to just be a horrible reaction to something he ate - which could be anything since he'll try to eat whatever he can find. He spent a few days in the pet hospital and then ate nothing but rice for another few days, but he's fine now. We, on the other hand, are left with the enormous bill. Turns out radiology for a 150 pound dog isn't cheap. On the other hand, maybe we won't cringe so hard when it comes time to pay for our hypothetical child to have braces.
All told, it put a bit of a damper on the month, between worrying about his health and worrying about how to pay for his treatment. We're thrilled that he's back to normal and will be fine financially, although we may eat a lot of ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly for the next few months. As far as books are concerned, I had a pretty good month - not as many pages read as usual, but plenty of really good books:
Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer by Jeanne Bishop
Rex Libris, Volume II by James Turner
Lumberjanes, Volume I by Noelle Stevenson
California by Edan Lepuckie
The Sixes by Kate White
Frog by Mo Yan
Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Paul Offit
What I Hate from A to Z by Roz Chast
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saez
Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn
The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman
The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad
Disclaimer by Renee Knight
I discovered the Hoopla app and content available through Free Library of Philadelphia, and I've put it to major use this month. I'm really enjoying having the ability to stream audiobooks as opposed to downloading them and taking up space on my phone, which always seems to be stretched to the limit, not matter what I delete. I'll be writing more about Hoopla soon - it seems like it's becoming popular at lots of libraries and I have nothing but raves for it.
Books read in May: 17
Total books read this year: 88
Pages read in May: 3944
Total pages read this year: 23,771
Did you read anything good in May?
Drop Caps Challenge: My Antonia by Willa Cather
I'm still a bit behind on this - My Antonia was so short I should have caught right up, but I'm now slowly but surely making my way through Great Expectations. I'll have that post up in June for sure, but it looks like the next two are also chunkers, so it may be slow going.
C is for Cather. My Ántonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent, the narrative follows Antonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture.
Holy smokes. This is some of the most beautifully descriptive landscape writing I've ever experienced. I drove through the prairie states as a child a few times, but it's never been a place I thought of as beautiful before reading Cather. She manages to put so much emotion into the description of the prairie that you can't help but see it through her eyes. Even if you've never been to that part of the country or seen the places Cather depicts, you can "see" it so clearly through her writing. I had a crystal clear image of it in my head that I can still call up immediately in my mind. The story itself is secondary to the description, which is something that I know will stick with me long-term.
I know when I say that plot takes a back seat to setting, a bunch of you started scrolling on past to the next post in your feed reader. Trust me, I'm not typically one who really falls for descriptive settings. In most cases, characterization and plot are my number ones, and excessive description is something that can really turn me off from a book (Tolkien, I'm looking at you). This is the rare case in which the writing is so stunning and the description so vivid that it doesn't get old. It helps that this isn't a giant tome - it's under 300 pages - and the story is there even if it's not the centerpiece. The characters are also sympathetic and you do care what happens to them, so following their entire lives from childhood to middle age makes for an intriguing read.
This is vying with some of my all time favorites for current favorite book on my shelf. First of all, just look at it. It's stunning and the color is even prettier in real life. It's also beautifully written and was something I had a hard time putting down, despite the fact that it doesn't fit the guidelines of what I typically enjoy. I'd say it's a literary Little House on the Prairie for adult readers (or teens). The best parts are the descriptions of the prairie itself and how life happened for those who lived there. It's also a great choice if you're looking for a story about immigration and what that looked like in American history. I strongly recommend at least giving it a try - you might be surprised to discover something unexpectedly refreshing!
Book Review: Disclaimer by Renee Knight
Finding a mysterious novel at her bedside plunges documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft into a living nightmare. Though ostensibly fiction,The Perfect Stranger recreates in vivid, unmistakable detail the terrible day Catherine became hostage to a dark secret, a secret that only one other person knew--and that person is dead.
Now that the past is catching up with her, Catherine’s world is falling apart. Her only hope is to confront what really happened on that awful day even if the shocking truth might destroy her.
I'm torn on this one. I think the author certainly achieved what she set out to accomplish in terms of creating suspense, unreliable narrators, and a mystery that keeps the reader digging. I stayed up quite late with this one two nights in a row, which is always high praise. My one qualm in saying that I thoroughly approved of the writing is this: the suspense in the entire first half of the book comes from something the characters know that is withheld from the reader. We get a first person point of view from the author of the mysterious book and we get a third person semi-omniscient point of view with Catherine, but we're not told about the event that occurs in the book, although we know it is something horrific. And I'm just not sure, even now, whether or not I really like that as a device. I've seen it in some other psychological thrillers, but somehow it just grates on my nerves to know that the characters have the full story and the author is just holding it back purely to keep us in suspense. It's something that is so obviously a device that it takes me out of the story and brings my attention to the writing - which isn't necessarily something I want out of a thriller, even a more literary thriller.
As far as the writing is concerned beyond this device, I have absolutely no complaints. I'm not sure I'd put it in the category of literary, but I think it certainly belongs in a different quality of literature than the mass-produced generic thriller. It's got much more thought and depth and doesn't rely on cheap thrills and gore to keep the reader titillated.
Obviously, I couldn't it down. It's fairly long, but I read it in two sittings - both of which kept me up significantly past bedtime. While I didn't love how the withheld information about what is contained in the book was the main pull of the first portion of the book, that doesn't mean I wasn't fully intrigued. And once the story is revealed, piece by piece, I found myself overcome with the suspense, to the point that I no longer felt like I was reading a plot device, but a dark and twisty narrative. I loved slowly realizing how the author really means business and seeing the lengths to which he was willing to go to ruin Catherine's life. And I also loved how Catherine herself wasn't always likable and how she dealt with what happened and how it is now being revealed in ways that are surprisingly real in the way that they are so damaging.
I think this will definitely appeal to those who, like me, have become obsessed with dark psychological thrillers that are much more based around the mind and the actions of normal people who are pushed to their limits than they are about blood and gore. This one is full of characters that are both hard to like and sympathetic at times. I'd certainly put it in the same category as books by Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, and Paula Hawkins. It lives up to the hype, in my opinion, and is certainly worth reading by those who are fans of the genre.
Thanks to TLC for having me on the tour. Click here to see other reviews.
The Choose Your Own Adventure Book Club (Adventure...
Book Review: After a While You Just Get Used to It...
Book Review: Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and ...
Double Yoga Review: The Complete Yoga Workbook and...
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James Primosch
When honoring him with its Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted that "A rare economy of means and a strain of religious mysticism distinguish the music of James Primosch... Through articulate, transparent textures, he creates a wide range of musical emotion." Andrew Porter stated in The New Yorker that Primosch "scores with a sure, light hand" and critics for the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as "impressive", "striking", "grandly romantic", "stunning" and "very approachable".
Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm (composed for Dawn Upshaw) or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1956, James Primosch studied at Cleveland State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. He counts Mario Davidovsky, George Crumb and Richard Wernick among his principal teachers.
Primosch's instrumental, vocal, and electronic works have been performed throughout the United States and in Europe by such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Collage, the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Twentieth Century Consort. His Icons was played at the ISCM/League of Composers World Music Days in Hong Kong, and Dawn Upshaw included a song by Primosch in her Carnegie Hall recital debut. Commissioned works by Primosch have been premiered by the Chicago Symphony, Speculum Musicae, the Cantata Singers, and pianist Lambert Orkis. A second Chicago Symphony commission will be premiered in October, 2009. He is currently at work on a commission for the Albany Symphony.
Among the honors he has received are a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two prizes from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, a Regional Artists Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Stoeger Prize of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and a fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center where he studied with John Harbison. Organizations commissioning Primosch include the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Folger Consort, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Barlow Endowment, and the Network for New Music. In 1994 he served as composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival. Recordings of eleven compositions by Primosch have appeared on the Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.
James Primosch is also active as a pianist, particularly in the realm of contemporary music. He was a prizewinner at the Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition in Rotterdam, and appears on recordings for New World, CRI, the Smithsonian Collection, and Crystal Records. He has worked as a jazz pianist and a liturgical musician.
Since 1988 he has served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Presser Electronic Music Studio.
Matins
Premiered on January 23, 2004
The most familiar form of Christian worship is the Liturgy of the Eucharist, when the community gathers to break the bread that is God's word, to bless the bread of remembrance, and to be the bread of life in Christ. It was for such gatherings that Bach's cantatas were written. But there is another traditional component of the Christian life of prayer called the Liturgy of the Hours, through which the community seeks to saturate the very hours of the day with prayers of praise, thanksgiving and petition. Matins is the name given to Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.
Matins is also the name given by Mary Oliver to the closing section of her poem Her Grave, Again. This poetic sequence, memorializing a beloved dog, closes with a song of praise to the creator who permeates our world, who acts in it, and who has filled it with gifts by which we know his goodness. The text seems within itself to enact the praying of Morning Prayer, and fairly cries out for a choral setting. I chose to join Oliver's text with a poem of Hopkins that similarly praises the God who is manifest in the creation. But in the Hopkins there is also a sense of our brokenness, of how the world is "bent", expressed in images that prophetically resonate with our contemporary sense of impending ecological catastrophe. Still, Hopkins attests that renewal is possible, beautifully imaging God as a feminine, mothering presence. With this affirmation of God's brooding presence at the close of the Hopkins, we can go on to joyfully sing Matins together.
My settings of these poems acknowledge the musical world of the Bach cantatas, sometimes using textures and rhythmic shapes that recall Bachian gestures. The concertante writing for the oboe, which acts as a kind of vocal soloist beyond words, also honors the role that the instrument plays in Bach.
I am deeply grateful to Peggy Pearson, David Hoose, and the Cantata Singers for the invitation to write this work. Knowing my music would be entrusted to artists capable of such passion and depth was a great blessing. I offer these settings that we might "make our songs for him as sweet as we can", aware of how we sear the world with our trade, but grateful for the "bright wings" that enfold us.
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Cape Girardeau History and Photos
Coming of Age in Cape Girardeau
Tag: Occupy Cape
Posted on December 15, 2011 September 16, 2015
The Faces of Occupy Cape
The Missourian ran a story about Occupy Cape in the November 6th paper, so I was hoping to run into them. The comments after the story were one of the reasons I’m sometimes ashamed to say I’m from here. Speak Out and the comments that follow stories contain mean-spirited, Yahoo-level talking parts that pass for wit in this area.
In case readers missed it the first time, one of them felt compelled to ask the question, “How about occupying a job?” twice.
Another wrote, “I observed them marching on William, in the hood, not sure what they are protesting Bet you that most of them play dungeons and draggons in their mothers basements.” [Spelling and punctuation as printed in the paper.]
I would encourage you to read the story, then the comments. Some of the demonstrators in this photo posted long, intelligent responses to the jabs and jibes. Click on any photo, by the way, to make it larger.
I spent about an hour on the corner with the group, numbering at most eight, including me. I was surprised at the number of friendly toots and waves they got. Only four people hollered, “Get A Job!”
Eric, who is from the St. Charles area, would respond, “I’m working THREE jobs and going to grad school.”
61-year-old civil engineer
The Old Man of the movement on Saturday was Walden Morris, 61, a civil engineer and an LSU grad. He had been out in Salt Lake City for a year and a half working on a gas and oil pipeline project when he decided to attend a rally just to see what it was all about. Before he knew it, he was on the State Capitol steps speaking to 400 people under the watchful eyes of TV cameras. “I had been waiting for that moment for years. I just let ’em have it.”
“Fed up with the way the country is being run”
Chris McEwen, an art major from Mobile, Alabama, said he “got stranded in Cape for youthful reasons.”
“What was her name?” I asked. He grinned and said, “You got that right.”
He was on the street corner because he’s “fed up with the way the country is bring run.” He’d like to see money taken out of politics.
Came from conservative Democrats
Nathaniel Lee, of St. Louis, came from a family of conservative Democrats. He has a dual major in accounting and international business. He’d like to get his C.P.A. and work as a federal auditor “trying to fix the system from within.”
This IS Cape, after all
The group has a website, Occupy Cape Girardeau.
I had to be amused at a note in the Nov. 12, 2011, General Assembly Minutes: “We opened by appointing by consensus Kerrick Long as this week’s facilitator, after which he read the Principles of Solidarity using the People’s Mic. The principles of solidarity were interrupted when an officer of the Cape Girardeau Police Department arrived and stated that the CGPD received a complaint about the demonstration at Freedom Corner earlier. He said if we did not keep quiet demonstrating by the road, we could go to jail. We apologized, and said we would be sure not to shout too close to the road. He told us we could continue using the People’s Mic at the benches since it was farther from the road.”
Being a bit of a rebel, I’d have asked the cop to bring out a decibel meter to tell me how much more we were disturbing the peace in the middle of the afternoon in a public park compared to other activities in the park. These folks have a lot to learn about civil disobedience and standing up for your rights.
[The Occupy movement doesn’t use mechanical megaphones. They use “The People’s Mic,” where someone who wants to say something speaks in short bursts that are re-shouted by the group. Considering that the largest assembly in Cape has been less than 20, I doubt that hearing the speaker is a problem.]
1967 Protest at Petit N’ Orleans restaurant
This was the last protest I covered in Cape. These SEMO students were protesting the Petit N’ Orleans restaurant’s dress code in 1967. The cops shut them down, too.
Education costs are rising
Brandon Burton, a pre-veterinary medicine major from St. Louis, is concerned about the rising cost of a college education.
Parts of the Occupy Cape website makes me think I’m back in my treehouse days when I see a whole section in the General Assembly Guide devoted to “Hand Gestures.” The movement strikes me as unfocused and a bit naive at times: long on feel-good rhetoric and short on practical solutions.
I will say, though, if you are tempted to roll down your window and shout “Get a Job!” pull over to the side and talk with these folks. You may find that you have more in common with them than you think. A couple of the members concluded that they and the Tea Party are both saying the same thing: the system ain’t working. They may disagree about what’s broken, how it got broken and how to fix it, but they’re starting from a common viewpoint.
Purchases made at Amazon put 6% of the total transaction price in Ken's pocket at no additional cost to you. You're going to shop online anyway, right? Do it through Amazon to support this web site. Pretty please.
Thomas J Hopen on Mary Nowell of Themis Street
Ken Steinhoff on Tom’s Pizza, Not Tony’s
Paul helfrich on Tom’s Pizza, Not Tony’s
Maria Moore on Cement Quarry Caves
Ernest D on Licking the Gateway Arch
Vanessia Horton Smith on The Last Words of Pvt. Ladd
Ken Steinhoff on Battle of Mingo Swamp
Ryan McLeary on Battle of Mingo Swamp
Hervey Howell on Cement Quarry Caves
Claude Sitze on Holiday Crisis Averted
Cape Central High Photos
Ken Steinhoff, Cape Girardeau Central High School Class of 1965, was a photographer for The Tiger and The Girardot, and was on the staff of The Capaha Arrow and The Sagamore at Southeast Missouri State University. He worked as a photographer / reporter (among other things) at The Jackson Pioneer and The Southeast Missourian.
He transferred to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, his junior year, and served as photo editor of The Ohio University Post. He was also chief photographer of The Athens Messenger.
He was chief photographer of the Gastonia (NC) Gazette for a long 18 months until he could escape to The Palm Beach Post, where he served as a staff photographer, director of photography, editorial operations manager and telecommunications manager. He accepted a buyout in 2008, after 35 years at the paper.
Most of the stories are about growing up in a small Midwestern town on the Mississippi River, but there’s no telling what you might run into.
Please comment on the articles when you see I have left out a bit of history, forgotten a name or when your memory of a circumstance conflicts with mine.
(My mother said her stories improved after all the folks who could contradict died off.)
Your information helps to make this a wonderful archive and may end up in book form.
© Ken Steinhoff – All Rights Reserved
Cape Archives
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US Senate Votes Safety Rules on Mexican Trucks
David Swan
Audio Version 215KB RealPlayer
The U.S. Senate has voted to impose safety rules on Mexican long-haul trucks in the United States, though critics say that action would violate the North American Free Trade Accord.
Following a similar move by the House [of Representatives], senators approved a series of restrictions for Mexican truckers. The measure's supporters say they are not anti-Hispanic nor opposed to free trade, but are worried about the safety of American motorists. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan said, "This is not about [being] anti-Mexico. It's not sending a message to anybody. It's simply standing up for safety on America's highways. We are nowhere near ready to be able to allow Mexican long-haul trucks into this country. Their safety standards are nowhere near compatible to ours."
The powerful Teamsters [truckers] union and private safety groups are also backing the rules. Under current law, Mexican rigs can not operate outside a narrow (20 mile) border zone. But under the terms of NAFTA, President Bush has proposed to open the nation's freeways to Mexican long-haul drivers in January.
The White House and its allies charge the safety measures would undermine the free-trade pact between the United States, Mexico and Canada. For Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, the rules can not be justified. "But you cannot defend, legitimately, honestly and intellectually, a situation where we say to our neighbors and to legitimate truckers 'You gotta stay - you can't come any more than 20 miles into the United States.' That is not where we should be."
The president has threatened to veto the trucking rules if they reach his desk. The standards are part of a larger transportation bill, which must be reconciled with the version passed by the House. Republicans hope to kill or at least modify the rules during negotiations in September.
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Senior Curator of Hong Kong M+ Visual Culture Museum, Art Critics
Pi Li, Ph.D in art theory from CAFA, has been a teacher at the School of Humanities, CAFA for 12 years. In 2012 he was appointed senior curator at M+ museum for visual culture, Hong Kong. An art critic, curator and teacher, he is actively involved in Chinese contemporary art. In his curating career he keeps promoting Chinese contemporary art both at home and abroad, and has cooperated with Centre National d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern , and a number of art institutions in Asia. In 2013 “Right is Wrong / Four Decades of Chinese Art from the M+ Sigg Collection”, his most recent exhibition, started an exhibition tour in Europe and Asia. Pi was the chief editor of Modern Art between 2001 and 2003 and published The Age of Curators and Foreign Post-Modern Sculptures in the early years of this century, introducing contemporary art in China and abroad. He has also published a number of articles in Artforum, Flash Art, Third Text and some other magazines and journals in China and abroad. His new book From Action to Concept: Transformations in Late Modernist Art Theories will be published at the end of this year.
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Seven 'Raise the Age' Work-Arounds: Doing the Right Thing When Albany Won't
By Kate Rubin
Another legislative session has ended in Albany, and a 16-year-old who jumps a turnstile or smokes marijuana in public will still be arrested and prosecuted as an adult. Efforts to raise the age of criminal responsibility once again foundered in the Legislature. The result is that New York remains one of only two states in the country that automatically prosecutes 16- and 17-year-olds in the adult criminal justice system—despite a growing consensus among researchers and law enforcement professionals that this is bad for young people and bad for public safety, too.
Because they are considered “adults,” these teenagers, who are disproportionately black and Latino, are held in adult jail and prison systems, even pre-trial, before they’ve been convicted of any crime. Found guilty, they face sentences and other penalties designed for adults, as well as the lifetime stigma of adult criminal records, which they will be asked about on college, job, and apartment applications for decades to come.
We can do better than this. Other policymakers have a moral obligation to act where legislators have failed. Here are seven steps City and State agencies can take—right now—to protect children from an outdated, abusive criminal justice system.
1. Reduce arrests of 16- and 17-year-olds. There were 17,000 arrests of 16- and 17-year-olds in the five boroughs in 2015; over 12,000 were for misdemeanors. Alternative policing strategies that don’t end in arrests, including pre-arrest diversion, could significantly reduce the number of teenagers who see the inside of a holding cell and adult arraignment courtroom. And allowing student MetroCards to be used for unlimited trips, including on non-school days, would decrease arrests for turnstile-jumping.
2. Commit to parental notification and involvement to prevent false confessions. The police currently are not legally required to notify the parents of an arrested 16-year-old. By contrast, when a 15-year-old is arrested, they must make “every reasonable effort” to notify parents, and give both the parent and child a Miranda warning prior to questioning. Since false confessions happen even among adults, the risk that a scared and vulnerable 16-year-old will make one is substantial. The NYPD should adopt a policy of notifying and involving caregivers when anyone under 18 is arrested.
3. Remove 16- and 17-year-olds from Rikers Island. The well-documented horrors of Rikers Island have spurred a growing campaign to close the entire facility, which Youth Represent fully supports. But its youngest residents often suffer the most from the isolation, inaccessibility to visitors, and culture of violence at Rikers. The Department of Correction has taken positive recent steps, like eliminating the use of solitary confinement for those under 18, but the City must do more. A plan should be implemented to remove teenagers from Rikers Island as soon as possible, and ensure that those who must be incarcerated are held near their home communities.
4. Expand alternatives to incarceration (ATI). As recommended by experts, the City can broaden ATI offerings tailored to LGBTQI youth, youth with mental illness, girls, young parents, and other groups. With appropriate precautions, ATI programs also can be expanded to young people charged with serious offenses, including violent crimes, who often stand to benefit most from them.
5. Reduce pre-trial detention. New York State law allows judges tremendous flexibility in bail-setting. But unfortunately judges typically issue only cash bail and insurance bond orders that virtually guarantee jail time for low-income defendants, including young people. The court system should encourage judges to make greater use of less onerous bail options.
6. End punitive housing policies. When a young person is arrested, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) frequently starts eviction proceedings against the entire household, before a conviction for any crime. Some families are allowed to avoid eviction only by agreeing to permanently exclude the family member who was arrested, meaning that even teenagers as young as 16 can be permanently banished from their homes. NYCHA is currently reviewing this practice, and should adopt policies that presume that no young person under 21 should be excluded from his or her family and made homeless. The City Human Rights Law also should be expanded to protect people seeking public and private housing from blanket discrimination based on criminal records.
7. Ensure fair chances for job-seekers. New York’s Fair Chance Act makes it illegal for most employers to ask about a criminal record until they’ve offered a job to an applicant, allowing job-seekers to be judged based on their qualifications, not conviction histories. But the law is only effective if employers follow it. The New York City Human Rights Commission needs sufficient resources to enforce the law. And special efforts must be made to ensure that young people with adult criminal records know how to protect their rights as job-seekers.
Even if all these, and other, measures are adopted, they are no substitute for legislative action to “raise the age.” But if years of legislative foot-dragging have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t wait for Albany to act.
Kate Rubin is director of policy and strategic initiatives at Youth Represent, a non-profit organization that provides criminal and reentry legal representation to youth age 24 and under who are involved in the criminal justice system or who are experiencing legal problems because of past involvement in the criminal justice system. Youth Represent also advocates for policies and laws that improve opportunities for such young people.
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The Peter D. Johnson Memorial Scholarship Fund
This scholarship is in memory of Peter D. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was a loving husband and father, a concerned and giving member of the community, and had a passion for enjoying all the benefits of water-skiing.
This scholarship is intended to promote the pursuit of excellence in youth and encourage mental and physical development through involvement in community, academics, employment, water ski clubs and other social activities.
A scholarship will be awarded to a senior from one of the following counties: Orange, Stafford, Spotsylvania, King George, Caroline or the City of Fredericksburg. Interested seniors must plan to attend a college in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Applicants to the Peter D. Johnson Memorial Fund must:
Attend a high school in one of the following localities: Orange County, Stafford County, Spotsylvania County, King George County, Caroline County or the City of Fredericksburg.
Demonstrate plans to attend an accredited undergraduate college or university located within the Commonwealth of Virginia
Eligible Localities: Caroline County, City of Fredericksburg, King George County, Orange County, Spotsylvania County, Stafford County
Eligible High Schools: Brooke Point High School, Caroline High School, Chancellor High School, Colonial Forge High School, Courtland High School, Fredericksburg Academy, Fredericksburg Christian School, James Monroe High School, King George High School, Massaponax High School, Mountain View High School, North Stafford High School, Orange County High School, Riverbend High School, Spotsylvania High School, Stafford Senior High School
The Peter D. Johnson Memorial Fund also requires:
Students must collect recommendations from academic instructors, employers or any of the above named community outreach areas. A coach recommendation must be collected from a mentor, coach, instructor or any person of equal measure that has been involved in the student's water sports activities at any point in the student's life.
Students must write an essay (not to exceed 900 words) that describes:
achievement in sports, including but not limited to water sports,
activities involving community outreach, including but not limited to church, fire and rescue, clubs and organizations, and volunteer work.
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Brian Bauerle
Title: Councilman
Councilman Bauerle and his wife, Kira, live in the Township's Knollwood section with their three daughters, who attend Kilmer Elementary School. As an active supporter of Cherry Hill youth sports, Brian volunteers as a coach and serves on the Board of the Cherry Hill Soccer Club, and is a member of the Barclay Farm Swim Club. Brian and his wife are actively involved in their daughter's school and extracurricular activities, as well. Before he was sworn in as a Councilman, Brian served for several years as a member of the Township’s Planning Board, and was named Board Chairman in February 2014. He is the Director of Community Development for The Cooper Foundation at Cooper University Health Care, and brings with him a wealth of experience in community and government relations, community development, public policy, and neighborhood revitalization.
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Billy Rubin's Blog
Where a spiritual descendant of Sir William Osler and Abbie Hoffman holds forth on issues of medicine, media and politics. Mostly.
Billy Rubin Blog Hero & Villain Of The Year (and Year-End Book Review)
"It's an honor just to be nominated," crowed sex columnist Dan Savage in response to Andrew Sullivan's listing of Savage in his poll for the "Moore Award". Sullivan, in his Daily Beast blog "The Dish", has a variety of year-end awards, and his "Moore" award (named after the lefty agitpropster filmmaker Michael Moore) is for "divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric". Savage garnered a nomination this year, and has thus far worn that nomination like a badge. As of this writing, with just under 10,000 votes cast, Savage is comfortably in the lead with more than 58 percent of the vote in a field of ten candidates--a sum that Mitt Romney dreams about even more than Sugar Plum Fairies as we close in on the Iowa Caucuses. (What Simon Winchester, whose entire collected works I have nearly finished over the past few years, has said or written to be included in this group is unknown to me, but it must have been a doozy, since under normal circumstances one would not describe his utterances as remotely extreme.)
Savage's nomination came as a result of a dustup between him and soon-to-be-former-candidate-for-President Representative Michele Bachmann back in September during the Republican Presidential debates. At that time, Bachmann was indulging in one of her favorite political tactics in order to separate herself from her rivals and recover some of the mojo she had lost over the summer when she had been the darling of the party and led in the polls.
That tactic would involve departing entirely from reality and making up whatever stuff she deemed suitable to rile up sufficiently nitwitted partisans, as she did earlier in the campaign when she attacked Michelle Obama for advocating breastfeeding by supporting a tax break for breast pumps, turning the tax break into a right-wing fantasy that the government was "going out to buy my breast pump". In the September debate, Bachmann had decided to stake out the anti-vaccine territory to stick it to Texas Governor Rick Perry, who was then leading in the polls. In 2007, Perry had admirably issued an executive order mandating that Texas girls receive access to the HPV vaccine, a major cause of cervical cancer as well as other maladies. That order was later overturned by the Texas legislature, causing Perry to quip--correctly--that the bill's supporters were effectively killing women who would needlessly die from the cancer.
Not that he said it that bluntly, but he came close: "no lost lives will occupy the confines of their conscience, sacrificed on the altar of political expediency", was his rather eloquent retort at the time. Unfortunately, he may have wished he never uttered those words, as the HPV order came back to bite him rather fiercely as the primary season got more contentious and governmentophobic conservatives took a dim view of his actions. Bachmann, though, decided to go for the jugular, and took the almost-reasonable sounding "there are limits to government" argument and pushed much deeper into the Twilight Zone. At the debate, she merely parroted the usual lines about governments forcing people to do things against their will, but the following day, in an interview with the Today show's Matt Lauer, Bachmann noted that she had been approached by a mother who claimed that her daughter had "developed mental retardation" after receiving the vaccine, and asked the viewers to draw conclusions for themselves.
In response to this perceived bit of a politician's own mental retardation, advocacy groups rose up in unison to denounce Bachmann's position. "There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement", wrote Dr. O. Marion Burton of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Doctors blogging on the subject blasted her, including one who chided Bachman for her "anti-vaccine porn". And a few bioethicists offered thousands of dollars to review the records searching for proof of the vaccine's harm. Bachmann, in the days to come, would disingenuously backtrack on the claim, noting that she herself never made a claim about the vaccine's harm, only that someone else had done so, in language and reasoning so slippery it invites comparison to any number of reptiles.
Enter Dan Savage.
Within two days of the blowup, Savage wrote a brief dispatch on the matter, noting that her "comments" on the HPV vaccine were much more accurately described as "lies". Then he let his savage pen loose, noting the following:
Bachmann and her ilk believe that woman [sic] who have sex—along with men who fail to purchase health insurance—deserve to die horrible deaths. That's why they hate the HPV vaccine, that's why they fought its introduction, that's why they tell lies about it now. Because they want women to die.
Presumably, Savage meant something more along the lines of "women who have premarital or extramarital sex". Regardless, Savage's characterization of Bachmann was unquestionably intemperate. It was obviously divisive. It was unambigously bitter. Thus, by Andrew Sullivan's criteria, an ideal nominee for his award!
Only one matter bears mention: Savage was almost certainly correct. And for that we name one of our favorite columnists, Dan Savage, for the Billy Rubin Blog Hero Of The Year, and his public foil, soon-to-be-just-Representative Michele Bachmann, for the Billy Rubin Blog Villain Of The Year. Happy 2011, y'all.
--br
PS--In other news, we've been catching up on our reading around here and want to give a special shout-out to the following books, most of which came out in 2010, but we're almost never that up to date on our reading until someone actually pays us to write this blog. Besides, these books will have a shelf life to come, so please do consider them if you want to read excellent books on medicine:
The Emperor of All Maladies--Siddhartha Mukherjee's phenomenal "biography" of cancer. Though the subject matter may seem intimidating and depressing, Mukherjee takes the reader along on a ride that is suffused with the insight of a great clinician, the wonder of a thoughtful scientist, and the humanity of a fine writer. For his work he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and appropriately so. (Readers wanting to delve further into cancer literature might consider watching a Japanese film that received almost zero attention in the US, 1778 Stories of Me and My Wife, detailing the struggles of a writer and his cancer-stricken spouse. Be forewarned, however, that it makes the phrase "gut-wrenching" seem inadequate. I watched it on a flight from Europe to the US, and by they end the Dutch people around me practically had to carry my sobbing ass out on a litter.)
The Panic Virus--Seth Mnookin's book about the vaccine-causes-autism movement. An excellent primer on vaccine hysteria, narrower in scope than Arthur Allen's Vaccine but no less important or readable.
Anatomy of an Epidemic--Robert Whittaker's compelling analysis of modern psychiatry, which I've written about before here.
Posted by Billy Rubin at 3:01 PM No comments:
Labels: Anatomy of an Epidemic, Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, Emperor of All Maladies, HPV vaccine, Michele Bachmann, Panic Virus, Republican Party, Rick Perry, vaccination
Lipitor Goes Generic, and Everyone Wins...Theoretically
I like to play a game with my med students, residents, and fellows--although really the game can only be played with residents and fellows as the students don't have enough medical mileage under their belts to fare well. I ask them this question: what do they think are the five greatest drugs of all time? After all, people routinely debate the greatest baseball player--I'm partial to Willie Mays--the greatest writer in the English language, the greatest movie, and the list goes on. Why not have a discussion about what makes a drug great?
So we talk about how drugs are used and what makes them good or not. I do this exercise to get them thinking about qualities that define particular drugs or entire classes of them, and why some may be preferable to others. Such qualities include "applicability" (i.e. how many people would benefit from its use, as Tysabri™ is an incredible drug that preserves quality of life, but only does so for people with advanced multiple sclerosis, a very small group), the magnitude of benefit (a drug that saves a life is more important than one that eases wrinkles, such as Botox™), ease of use, minimal side effects, and a proven track record (drugs that are new to the market often appear miraculous; most don't last, as the brief life of Xigris™ shows) among other things.
Lively debates ensue, but what I find most interesting is that the drugs that most housestaff end up agreeing on are ones that have been around a very long time and weren't developed by recent pharmaceutical company R&D programs. And by "recent" I mean the past 30 to 40 years. Aspirin may be the greatest drug of all, and has been around in its current form since the mid-19th century (and the active ingredient was found in folk remedies long before that); morphine and its narcotic siblings are likewise more than a century old; penicillin-class and sulfa antibiotics were developed before World War II; insulin was first used in the 1920's after decades of research; and beta-blockers were first developed in the 1960's.
That said, one class--relative teenagers compared to these elders--stands out, and one drug from that class stands out in particular.
The class of drugs are known as "statins", and the drug is Lipitor™, the signature product of Pfizer. Since its introduction in 1996, Lipitor has not only gone on to become a blockbuster drug--its total estimated gross is $100 billion--but has by any measure been proven to meet the definition of a wonder drug. It is reasonably safe, most people tolerate it, lots of people require it, and it saves lives. Lots of lives. It's usefulness has been proven over and over again in well-designed trials. Unlike so many other drugs, its initial promise has not begun to fade.
The biochemical pathway in which Lipitor and its fellow statins work disrupts cholesterol synthesis, but we're still learning about how it works its magic: other medications that lower cholesterol in different ways, such as ezetimibe (trade name of Zetia™), seem not to have the same benefit in terms of preventing heart attacks and death that the statins do. Moreover, while Lipitor wasn't the first statin to market, and there are six other members of the statin class, Lipitor has reigned supreme. This is due in part to a more profound reduction in "bad cholesterol" LDL and an elevation in "good cholesterol" HDL than others in the class, but also its "gentleness", as for instance rosuvastatin, whose trade name is Crestor™, lowers the LDL the most of any in the class, but does at the cost of more serious and more frequent side effects. (A useful consumer review on statins from Consumer Reports can be found here.)
Pfizer has seen an enormous windfall from Lipitor, and they have deserved every penny. It is, in other words, an "honest" drug: no ridiculous shenanigans, such as those seen in the marketing of the generally unimpressive drug Neurontin™ by the very same Pfizer corporation, or the introduction of the current #1 drug by sale, Nexium™, which is nothing more than a clever repackaging of Prilosec, whose patent was due to expire and would have deprived its maker Aztra Zeneca of billions of dollars. But today Lipitor is now open to the competition, as its patent expired on Wednesday, so generic atorvastatin can be made and marketed in the US, which should drop the price of atorvastatin considerably. Thus, although I make no claims to be an economist or an intellectual property law expert, it looks like the expiration on the patent of the greatest modern medical drug was a win-win for both consumers and the shareholders who brought the drug to market.
I say "looks like" only because Pfizer, as this article explains, still intends to protect Lipitor's brand name in some ways that defeat the entire purpose of the spirit of patent law. Some of their efforts, like direct mailings of "coupons" for lower copays for Lipitor, seem free-market legit. Others, however, have that unpleasant odor so frequently associated with Big Pharma these days. In particular, Pfizer appears to be cutting deals with so-called "Prescription Benefit Managers" to elbow out the competition. PBMs serve as third-party payers for insurance companies and administer drug formularies. Pfizer's goal in negotiating with the PBMs is to give Lipitor at a discounted price in exchange for the PBM not carrying other companies' generic atorvastatin, effectively cutting them out of large markets.
It is not an illegal practice, although I fail to understand how this benefits consumers tremendously. Nor does the CEO of Watson Pharmaceuticals, Paul Bisaro, who complained about Pfizer's tactics on CNBC's "Squawkbox"--not exactly the kind of haven for socialist ideologues. But the story is still in motion, the deals are taking place in the backrooms and boardrooms away from journalists, so time will have to tell about atorvastatin's future. Today, however, was a good day for medicine, for business, and ultimately, for patients.
PS--we also note with great enthusiasm that Gary Schweitzer's Health News Review blog has adopted a new look. Go check out the makeover! It is among the most valuable resources on medicine, and comes awfully cheap.
Posted by Billy Rubin at 7:37 AM 1 comment:
Labels: Astra Zeneca, atorvastatin, drug patents, Lipitor, Pfizer, Prescription Benefit Managers, prescription medications
Say It Ain't So, Joe
The breathtaking arrogance of Coach Joe Paterno's statement that he would continue to coach the Nittany Lions football team can only be met with a dropped jaw. While confessing to being "absolutely devastated by the developments in this case", Paterno nevertheless states that he will soldier on as head coach until season's end. Astonishingly, he manages to shoot a specific barb at the Board of Trustees, presuming to offer advice that they "should not spend a single minute discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address."
No, they really don't, and for Paterno to even think to throw his weight around indicates, alas, his complete inability to comprehend the magnitude of his errors. At best a case can be made that Paterno acted within the legal boundaries of behavior when confronted with accusations that his longtime assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, had forcibly sodomized a ten year-old child on Penn State University grounds. But no legitimate case can be made that Paterno behaved in any way that anyone with a moral compass would regard as humane or decent. How this man could possibly have the nerve to think about taking the sideline against Nebraska this weekend in light of the week's revelations about his appalling role in enabling Sandusky's predatory instincts, words cannot summon the outrage. He should be wearing sackcloth and ashes, begging anyone willing to listen for forgiveness for having allowed a monster to run amok for at least a decade. Instead, he swaddles himself in the cocoon of supporters who appear to think the Kool-Aid tastes quite fine, thanks, as he shoots off press releases without staring the disbelieving in the face.
Regardless of whether Paterno does indeed rally the Happy Valley faithful for one victory lap after having become the winningest college coach, this is an ignominious end for a fine man, one who was arguably the last of a special breed in big-time college football: the coach who saw his mission as shaping and educating the minds of young men as much as winning national titles. To distant admirers--and I count myself in that group--Paterno stood for something that I fear large Universities embody less and less with each passing year, namely, a commitment to principle. When the Jim Tressell scandal at Ohio State broke this year, nobody who had been paying any attention to the corrupt state of college football could really have been surprised, except that the ensnared head coach was one who wore sweaters and projected an image of integrity.
Like the rest of big-time college football, it was only an image, a fig leaf covering a morally bankrupt system. There was more than a hint of wink-wink nudge-nudge in the bouncy collegiate career of Cam Newton, who despite being involved in a cheating scandal at Florida nevertheless managed to finish his career leading the Auburn Tigers to the national championship. Somehow Newton managed to play for three colleges during his NCAA eligibility despite clear evidence to anyone willing to pay attention that he likely deserved expulsion from the first school, and behaved in a manner unbecoming any University in offering up his services to the highest bidder in what has since been called the "pay for play" scandal. (Two scandals for one college athlete--not bad!)
Compare this to the NCAA position thirty years earlier on running back phenom Marcus Dupree, who had left the University of Oklahoma in 1983 in an attempt to break with head coach Barry Switzer. The NCAA ruled him ineligible for two full seasons; Dupree's awkward attempted leap to the pros never panned out, and his claim to fame is being the subject of an ESPN documentary, The Best That Never Was. Such an action today, along with the so-called "death penalty" levied against Southern Methodist University, is inconceivable. Everyone is in on the joke, and most serious college football fans appear not to care terribly much. Even the Miami Hurricanes scandal, along with the shenanigans at Ohio State and the unsavory behavior of Newton, seems not to have made a blip on anyone's ethical radar screen. Yes, they get paid indirectly. Yes, a good chunk of them don't belong in college. So what? Let's talk about the injustice of the BCS rankings instead.
All of which is lamentable, but the Paterno scandal is different, as the look-the-other-way behavior (or, in the case of two senior Penn State officials, outright perjury) didn't enable some coddled athletes but instead led to little boys being raped. Several little boys--the count stands at nine who have come forward, and it seems reasonable to suppose that these are not the only nine. According to the Grand Jury report, Paterno had been told the explicit details of the rape of "Victim #2" when informed by grad student Mike McQueary in 2002. Moreover, one thinks that the Coach must have heard, at the least, rumors of some odd behavior of Sandusky in 1998 involving showering with a child. As Andrew Rosenthal notes while scratching his head, these are not the actions of a man who should be allowed to script his own exit, whatever sterling reputation he may have had previous to November 2011.
The ESPN columnist Rick Reilly argues that this story isn't really about Paterno, but I would beg to differ. Stories of pedophiles being caught, however grotesque, are not centrally important to the national news of the United States. But when powerful people in a revered institution give a free pass to a pedophile due to whatever inexplicable reasons tied to the success of a football team, that is a statement about not only the abuse of power by those people, but also the screwed-up priorities that gave such people that kind of power in the first place.
Posted by Billy Rubin at 8:15 PM 2 comments:
Labels: CNN, Joe Paterno, NY Times, Penn State University
PSA and the Embattled US Preventive Services Task Force
The US Preventive Services Task Force is a teeny tiny little group of researchers, physicians and epidemiologists who can claim the privilege of issuing recommendations on a variety of health-related issues such as screening, counseling, and preventive medication use. They're meant to be independent of the Department of Health and Human Services so as to be as far from the taint of Washington politics as possible, but alas, they've had a habit of getting themselves into the spotlight in the past few years, most recently this past week with some new recommendations on the blood test that screens for prostate cancer known as the PSA (for "Prostate Specific Antigen").
I'm not blaming them for stirring the pot so much, mind you--the USPSTF's job is to evaluate the evidence for a given current health practice and decide whether that practice makes any sense. While that concept sounds simple in theory, it becomes exquisitely difficult to accomplish without wading into dangerous political waters in practice. It was just about two years ago that the USPSTF issued recommendations about mammography as a screening test for breast cancer: they advised that women between ages 50-74 should have mammograms every other year (unlike the then-current annual recommendation) and that women under 50 shouldn't have mammograms at all unless they were in a particularly high-risk group. This fairly understated document generated an enormous backlash (which I've described before here) and caught members of the Task Force by surprise.
But when you look at the numbers, the actual data that formed the basis of the recs, it's not hard to see that the Task Force was if anything being generous about mammography. I don't have the time to review all the data here but one stat may suffice. One typical mathematical model was used by the Task Force to estimate the number of lives saved versus the number of those who would go on to be diagnosed with possible breast cancer based on an erroneous read from a mammogram (these are known as "false positives"). In the model, if you annually screened 1000 women starting at age 40 and did so for 30 years, you would save eight lives. This came at the cost of one hundred fifty-eight false positive diagnoses, at least a group of which, presumably, would progress all the way to mastectomy and possibly even radiation or chemotherapy. If, however, you started the annual screen at age 50, you would save seven lives instead of eight, but you'd reduce the number of false positive mammograms from 158 to 95..."only" 95. (Again, the USPSTF advised against annual screens for women 50-74, and there are data that can be used showing a similar effect in the every-other-year scenario, but I thought these numbers were revealing.)
So when news came this past week of the new recommendations on the PSA screen, I wasn't completely surprised to learn that the panel--which, incidentally, is a different group of doctors than those who issued the mammography guidelines--advised against its use entirely. The evidence has been mounting for several years that PSA is a less than stellar test, and its interpretation can be especially slippery when the value of the test hovers just above the normal range. This leads to many false positive diagnoses with precisely the same problems found in the mammogram. Men with false positives sometimes undergo radical prostatectomy, a surgery that can leave one not only sexually debilitated but incontinent. The test works entirely differently than a mammogram but the principle of test interpretation and the problems of overdiagnosis remain the same.
Likewise I wasn't surprised to hear of a similar backlash against the Task Force and the exchanging of academic insult followed by counterinsult, or more heated comments outside the ivory tower walls. (One advocate for the PSA, the urologist Dr. James Mohler, described the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, a PSA skeptic, like this: "I have known Otis for over 20 years. He doesn't come off as being ignorant or stupid, but when it comes to prostate-cancer screening, he must not be as intelligent as he seems." That's about as close as one can get to saying, "hey, asshole, fuck you" in the subdued world of academia without actually doing so.) At the blog db's Medical Rants, a fairly innocuous post by db was met with at least one howl of indignation, with commenter Scott Orwig accusing db of being "irresponsible, unprofessional, and unethical". (db's follow-up post is here.)
Caveat emptor: I have not yet read the Task Force report so I don't want to take sides in this post. What I can say is that slogans impress me less than an explanation of complex data, and while the latter is less sexy and the former more emotionally comforting, it's usually an indicator of which argument is more likely to be right. In all the articles I've read so far, all I'm hearing from the advocates are slogans.
Posted by Billy Rubin at 8:34 AM No comments:
Labels: breast cancer, mammography, prostate cancer, PSA, screening tests, US Preventive Services Task Force
When a Microbe "Eats" a Human
There they go again. My guess is that the science & health "editors" at the major television media outlets felt a frisson of excitement when they heard of the deaths of some teenage kids exposed to pond or lakewater from an extremely rare amoeba known as Nagleria fowleri. Why? That's lot's of eyes of worried parents zooming in to their website and passing it along to other worried parents. It's good for the news business. ABC News's piece is here; CBS's story, with a link to a piece giving tips on staying safe, is here; MSNBC's take is here. Of the majors, only CNN appears to have taken a pass at the time I write this; at Fair & Balanced, the story is buried in the "Children's Health" tab here.
That the media Bigs love a good scare story, particularly with respect to some spooky infection, isn't saying anything new (and is discussed thoroughly in Marc Siegel's great book False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear). Suffice it to say that, depending on how you slice the numbers, thousands of American children die every year and that the three deaths so far due to Nagleria hardly indicates that we need to take all of our children out of the lake. Indeed, about a thousand kids die annually due to drowning, but this substantially larger problem isn't grabbing headlines and isn't even being mentioned as a comparison in the Nagleria stories to give some sense of proportion. Yes, lakes can be dangerous places: but mostly because teenagers drink alcohol and do stupid things on boats, not because a microscopic beast lurks underwater.
Which is actually what the Rubin blog is preoccupied with at the moment: the description of Nagleria. "Microscopic beast" is something of a contradiction in terms, right? Nagleria is smaller than a speck of dust and almost pretty to look at under a microscope. Beasts, by contrast, are big. They look scary! They have big, giant...teeth. And with those teeth, they eat. No surprise then, that a sensationalistic news item indulges in a little sensationalist imagery, as every one of the news stories above refer to Nagleria as a brain-eating amoeba.
But it's nonsense for the most part. Humans are, for Nagleria, what we call an accidental host: it makes its living by hanging out in the water feeding on tiny little bacteria. Yes, it does consume brain cells once it finds itself inside a human head, but to call it "brain-eating" just amps up the raise-the-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck factor. Why not just call it "lethal", as it is almost universally so?
While we're on the subject, "flesh-eating bacteria" is--are you at all surprised?--likewise a misnomer. There is no particular species of flesh-eating bacteria, as it could be any number of bacteria. The most common bug to cause the condition of necrotizing fasciitis (the phenomenon that is caused by so-called flesh-eating bacteria) is from the family streptococcus, which lives harmlessly in the nasal passages, mouth and gut of humans. The problem isn't the bacteria per se; the real problem is when the bacteria manage to get deep into the soft tissues of the body (usually the legs, sometimes the arms, less commonly the trunk or face). In the upper layers toward the skin, bacteria have lots of physical impediments in their way to cause infection, and by the time they've lumbered along to a new patch of tissue, the immune system usually kicks in and clears the infection. We call that cellulitis.
In rare cases, though, these bacteria can dive deep and get down to an area called the fascia. Once there, there are no physical impediments, and the bacteria can move rapidly and make people incredibly sick very quickly, and typically the only "cure" is to filet the person's limb, take out the dead tissue, and hope that they survive. Often the affected limb needs to be amputated, and there's a high mortality rate. But there's nothing special about the bacteria themselves, although you wouldn't know that from seeing the news stories put out by the august organizations noted above.
Labels: ABC News, amebic encephalitis, CBS News, Fox News, mainstream media, Nagleria fowleri, NBC News, sensationalism
Media Overstatement on a Slow News Day
Right now one of the lead stories at the NY Times website deals with a potential new "miracle drug" called SRT-1720. With heavy emphasis on the scare-quotes. The article's title, "Drug Is Found to Extend Lives of Obese Mice," might be generating a huge buzz on the obese mouse circuit, but beyond this, I'm puzzled as to why this story is given such prominence in the Paper of Record. You could even argue that the story is barely worth running at all, even if placed deep in the science section of the website.
Bottom line is that this is a very preliminary study of an experimental drug. Studies like this are a dime a dozen, and it turns out that lots of fascinating things can be done in mice, but most of the time those fascinating things either don't work in humans, or end up having unacceptable risks compared to the benefits. I don't mean to belittle the experiment--it sounds very exciting--but I'm not sure that it's ready for primetime among laypeople just yet. Could it be part of a bigger article talking about strides that science is making in the field of aging? Sure: that's what the TV show NOVA is about, among other forms of popular science media. But there ain't no miracle drug coming down the pike that's going to extend the lives of obese people by 44 percent. So time to bury the story.
I can't wait to see what Gary Schweitzer is going to do to this story in his HealthNewsReview Blog. Go get 'em!
Posted by Billy Rubin at 11:36 AM 2 comments:
Labels: NY Times, scientific literacy
"Owning" a Patient & Other Quick Medical Thoughts
a. The subspecialties of medicine each have their own slightly different personalities and subcultures, and although this is a gross overgeneralization I have long thought of surgeons--that is, general surgeons and their ilk, not orthopods or, say, urologists--as the Baddest Motherfuckers in the business. These guys & gals are the toughest & most reliable hombres: they work the longest hours and rightly take enormous pride in their work. When I was in medical school and a patient was admitted to surgery, the culture of the team was that nothing, absolutely nothing, would get in the way of caring for the patient--not sleep, not food, not any kind of distraction. Although I wandered down the internal medicine pathway, I have always admired the attitude with which surgeons owned their patients.
The word "ownership" is a term we use in medicine and while it sounds rather paternalistic, I have a fondness for it, as it signifies a kind of special level of responsibility. When you "own" a patient, it means that you consider yourself to be the most important of a team of doctors & nurses, that the buck stops with you. And as I've said, during my training I never saw a group that took ownership more seriously than general surgeons and their subspecialties such as cardiothoracic, colorectal, & vascular. At the risk of redundancy, these folks are tough.
Only I've seen some weird things happening at my academic medical center as well as at my little community hospital over the past year or two, and this week while attending as a consultant I witnessed something that I found quite surprising, and I'm wondering if that cast-iron sense of ownership is eroding amongst that hardcore group. I was asked to see a patient about a pre-operative infectious issue before the patient was due to get a mitral valve--should the patient be on antibiotics & if so how long, does the surgery have to go on hold, that sort of question. When I finished the consult I had my team get on the phone to talk to the intern, whom they dutifully paged. Only the intern who answered wasn't the surgical intern, it was the medicine intern.
"Wait, this lady's on the medicine team?" I said in frank astonishment. The patient had been admitted to the hospital specifically to get a valve replacement; that's purely a surgical issue. She didn't have a lot of medical problems that required an internist to be her primary doc in the hospital. And yet, somehow, she was sitting there on a medicine team with the cardiothoracic docs serving as consultants.
For laypeople out there this may be hard to grasp why this is a bad idea, but suffice it to say that you manage patients differently based on the kind of training you've had, as well as the kind of patients you care for. Surgeons are better taking care of patients undergoing surgery because, well, they do surgeries! And the surgical patient has a host of problems that internists don't encounter in the same way: fluid shift issues, mostly, which doesn't sound like much, but can be the difference between life and death if you misread the signals. This lady really did not belong on an internal medicine service, and search me as to why she was.
This isn't isolated, as I've seen pancreatitis patients, diverticulitis patients, cholecystitis patients all get turfed to medicine in the recent past. Some of these are borderline calls and could be taken care of adequately either way; some of these are what I would consider clear-cut surgical patients and I scratch my head when they are refused by the surgeon and sent to medicine (where I work, internal medicine does not have the luxury of refusing patients except in extreme circumstances).
Anyway, I'm happy to "own" such patients although I'm not sure that it's always in the patient's best interests for internal medicine doctors to be managing surgical cases. I'm also wondering if something's changed in the ethic of those surgeons whom I have held in such high esteem for so long.
b. Many months back I took my best shot at discussing a book before I had read it. The link, which can be found here, is a discussion about a book that had made a bit of a flap in the psychiatry community called Anatomy of An Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Since I hadn't read the book, I did not venture to offer an opinion about it, but wondered about how the reviews framed what appeared to be a startling hypothesis: namely, that psychiatric drugs have, for at least a generation, made patients who suffer from psychiatric disease worse on the whole. Was the book worth reading? was my simple question, and I concluded it was and that I'd get around to it as soon as I could.
Well, I did, and my initial reaction is wow. Whitaker's book goes to the core of psychiatry and takes a sledgehammer to it, and he makes one hell of a powerful case that there's nothing behind the curtain. This is not the work of a pseudoscientific idiot who is raging against the machine; Whitaker supports his thesis by citing reputable scientific sources, and does so quite thoroughly. Unlike Celia Farber, an AIDS denialist who is short on facts and long on paranoia, Whitaker lays out his argument with the kind of precision and scientific grounding medical schools hope & pray they can impart to their students.
Whether Whitaker's contentions are completely right I cannot say; I just don't know the literature of psychiatry well enough. (A small quibble: I think he didn't portray Peter Kramer's excellent book Listenting to Prozac fairly, but it's been a long time since I read that book.) But he's without doubt persuasive, and has written a book that anyone who is seriously interested in the broad sweep of modern psychiatry should read. Next up on my reading list is Dr. Dan Carlat's Unhinged; the utterly awesome Dr. Marcia Angell, the former Editor In Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About Drug Companies, has a review about both books (as well as Irving Kirsch's The Emperor's New Drugs) in a recent New York Review of Books which can be found here.
Anyway, the point is simple: read this book.
c. Prior to her death, my only knowledge of Amy Winehouse was that she was a singer, and that her escapades with drug addiction were tabloid fodder. I had never listened to her music, but the comparison of her to Janis Joplin in the NYT obit, as well as the description of her as a jazz singer, caught my interest. I downloaded Frank and over the span of the next several days I heard her voice while driving to and from work, and suddenly shared in the collective frustration over a life that held such promise and exhibited such talent. I have not yet gotten around to listening to her signature album Back to Black, but I have become a fan.
Her place in music history is of course an open question, but even if I am blown away by Back to Black I think her troubles with addiction, which led to her decline and untimely death, will place her in that rank of singers whose talents we'll never really know. Joplin was the Times's point of comparison but I've spent some time thinking about Billie Holliday as I listen to her. Holliday gave more of her music to the world, surviving to 44 instead of Winehouse's 27, but she too represents the kind of talent that ventures too close to the flame. Match that against perhaps the greatest singer ever, Ella Fitzgerald, who kept care of herself her entire life (she died from diabetic complications, not drugs or alcohol), devoted it mostly to singing, and it's hard to listen to Holliday without some twinge of regret. Holliday in some way played the Charlie Parker to Fitzgerald's Dizzie Gillespie, the former dancing with demons on a nightly basis, the latter plugging away like a tortoise racing against a hare.
But Holliday, and Winehouse too, may have made the Faustian bargain of communing with the dark side in order to create their art, and it may not make sense at some level to shake our heads at their self-destructive recklessness. I love this clip of Holliday singing "My Man Don't Love Me" from a series that CBS television did called The Story of Jazz in 1957, two years before her death. (There's many things to love about this, actually: that one of the three major networks had a primetime series showcasing America's greatest and most serious artists; that Holliday is hardly the only important face in this ensemble, with a kind of Fania All Stars version of American jazz surrounding her like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan and others; and that it's the last time Young & Holliday had a musical tete-a-tete before they both succumbed to their addictions.) The song is beautiful, but it's dark, jagged, and bloody; in short, it is the perfect song for Holliday at her peak. Would Winehouse have been able to step into that mix and take over for Lady Day? I think so. Would the First Lady of Song? I think not.
All of which is to say that Winehouse may have paid a price for her short-lived brilliance, but to judge that bargain as inherently wrong (or indeed, to understand it as anything other than a bargain) may be to fundamentally misunderstand her talents. I tell my med students when confonted with the peculiar vices of their patients: don't judge, just understand. Should we not do the same for Winehouse as her audience?
Posted by Billy Rubin at 10:16 PM No comments:
Labels: Amy Winehouse, Dan Carlat, Marcia Angell, NY Times, psychiatry, Robert Whitaker, surgeons and surgery
Free-Market Capitalism and Death Panels: The Musical
How long ago it seems. While we await the final negotiations in Washington to figure out some solution to the budgetary battles--which will likely produce a bill, endorsed by the President, that will be either "very right" or "extremely right" but will somehow be billed as "centrist"--we at the Billy Rubin Blog are feeling nostalgic tonight for those heady days of the summer of 2009, when a health care bill was slowly working its way through Congress.
Remember that? What passed for reasonable dialogue got hijacked by a very noisy rabble of Know Nothings, a group for whom the descriptions "willfully ignorant" and "anti-intellectual" are taken as praise, who screeched at town hall meetings and demanded that "government get its hands off my medicare". But the meme that took the cake at the time, the Chant Of Nitwits as it were, was that somehow the government was secretly planning to arrange "Death Panels," and the paranoia from the imbecilic mob sent the few remaining sensible Republican politicians running for cover and pandering to save their souls (as Chuck Grassley of Iowa did here).
Between the media, who largely buy into the myth of false equivalence that every story must have two equally valid sides and thus reported on the protests without pointing out the basic stupidity of the protesters, and the politicians, too many of whom were spineless in shouting down the nonsense, the silliness carried the day. The Obama administration backpedalled in the Public Relations game, giving up ground to its political foes (sound familiar?), and the consequence was that the country ended up with two presents. The first was a not especially progressive healthcare bill. The second was the Tea Party.
Which brings us up to the present, more or less. So what did ever happen to the Death Panels? Well, they never left, argues the massively awesome blog Health Care Renewal. HCR links Bloomberg News reporter Peter Waldman's investigation into the for-profit hospices now littering the landscape. It makes for grizzly reading. For instance, Waldman relates the story of former social worker Misty Wall, who alleges in a lawsuit against Gentiva Health Services, Inc. that she was "assigned to convince people who weren't dying that they were." (A spokesman for Gentiva said that the allegations predate Gentiva's ownership of the hospice at which Ms. Wall worked. She was fired from the hospice in 2005 for refusing to continue such practices.)
Perhaps even more troubling--and that is saying something--are the allegations that for-profit hospices gave "financial kickbacks" to "referral sources" (in English, that usually means money to doctors) and tied employee bonuses to "enrollment goals". This easily has the potential to induce some employees to move the goalposts a bit and encourage hospice for some patients inappropriately. How's that for a "Death Panel"?! No grim bureaucrats in Washington doling out the Number of The Beast, but rather a "Death for Dollars" in which the most successful recruiters walk home with a tidy cash sum at the end of the day, along with the corporation supervising it.
One notes more than a touch of righteous indignation as HCR writes,
There has been a lot of blather from politicians in the US about "death panels" in debates about health care reform. Many such politicians seem worried that the US government has or will have death panels under the new health care reform legislation. We have criticized that legislation for not addressing many important health care problems. No one, however, has convincingly demonstrated how its provisions would convene "death panels."
Lest I am misunderstood, hospice has been a tremendous step forward in American medicine. It allows people to die in greater comfort and with greater dignity than before. We need hospice, which is precisely why we shouldn't sully it by making it the object of some corporation's greed. But if people don't want their government involved in their health care, the business of dying will be overseen by for-profit businesses, and the Death Panels will be convened in elegant board rooms with oak tables, plush carpeting, and executives enjoying record salaries. Sound appealing?
Labels: capitalism, Chuck Grassley, Death Panels, for-profit healthcare corporations, Health Care Renewal Blog, healthcare policy, President Obama
The Budget "Crisis" and Medical Residencies
Among the more amusing tidbits of news that came out of the state government shutdown in Minnesota were pieces like this in which certain voters expressed outrage over the stalemate and demanded their elected officials to just "get things done". "They could have talked more, but they get their feelings hurt a little bit, and act like a bunch of little kids," said one frustrated citizen.
Umm....no. What we witnessed in Minnesota, and what the media is playing up in Washington at this moment, is not merely a bunch of squabbling children, even if there are some childish antics involved. The problem, in Minny as in Washington, is that you have genuinely, truly divided government, with huge blocs of both parties with irreconcilable views about the proper function and structure of government, and to expect them to arrive at agreements on operating costs totally misunderstands the ideology of these blocs. You can't simply expect them to "go and get it done" because there's no consensus on even the most basic roles of government.
Despite what some commentators have said about the current inter-party spats being just more of the same-old same-old, the different visions being fought over today really are much more substantive than any other political fight since the early 20th century. For instance, Richard Nixon and a Democratic-led Congress, while political foils, really did agree on the basics: yes, Nixon presided over some unpleasantries in Vietnam and Cambodia, and obviously sought to limit government in ways that Democrats didn't. But Nixon bought into the concept that government could play a role in preventing drag on the economy, so much so that he proposed a comprehensive health care bill not dramatically unlike the one the current President finally got passed, the hysteria over which led to the election of a House so radically different in philosophy from Nixon (Richard Nixon!) that he would have blushed. Given the budgetary concessions that President Obama has already put on the table, and his breathtaking capitulations since the arrival of the new Congress, the fact that the House "Hell No" caucus won't budge in the current debt-ceiling discussions is evidence enough that this is not just your ordinary political dust-up.
The point here is: if it really does come to pass that the US defaults because of the political stalemate, don't blame them--because the voters were the ones who put Obama into office, and then two years later not only seated an opposition party, but an opposition who would legislate against the sunrise if the President said, "the sun will come out tomorrow" in his increasingly grating Annie-like naiveté. It doesn't make any sense to elect a Democrat like Obama (even one as willing to adopt right-wing talking points as him) and then vote for Republicans further to the right than what even George W. Bush could have dreamed of. At least the voters of my home state of Ohio were consistent when they seated a right-wing executive and legislature in the most recent elections, and now have a new budget crafted by people with a very particular view of the role of government in the lives of its people. Let's see how that one works out for you guys in the years to come; as Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders once lamented, "Hey, way to go Ohio."
Anyway, this blog is geared toward commenting on such political machinations in relation to the world of medicine (with a jaundiced eye befitting its name), and needless to say the world of medicine is going to undergo serious revisions if the Tea Party really does get its way and something resembling the Ryan medicare proposal (see here if you want to read warm fuzzies about it, and here if you prefer cold pricklies) becomes federal law. (Side note: I think there's a pretty good chance that our "Democratic" President is going to avert this "crisis" by eventually signing legislation that passes with either zero, or very few, Democratic party votes in the House.) And to that end, here are two stories (NYT and Boston radio station WBUR) discussing the huge impact that deep medicare cuts are going to have on teaching hospitals.
To help lay readers understand the structure, Medicare is the government-run health insurance program for senior citizens. While you almost certainly knew this (though obviously some people are not too quick on the uptake), what you may not have realized is that Medicare is also responsible for financing the postgraduate medical training in the US, which costs, give or take, a little over $6 billion per year, although a proposal that even Obama himself endorses would cut that amount by an estimated 60 percent. The feds don't pay residents directly, but rather pay the hospitals running the programs, which tend to be large, academic medical centers. These places may also get hit by a decreasing NIH budget to fund research at those medical centers, as this November 2010 article indicates current House Whip Eric Cantor's philosophy.
While places like New York and Boston are going to be hit disproportionally by major cuts to the residency training budget, you can bet that smaller places like Peoria, Illinois, with its 10 residencies affiliated with two local hospitals, will smart as well. In fact, as residency programs in smaller, more rural communities tend to serve as feeders of physicians who would otherwise not move to such places, the damage to residency training programs is going to reverberate well beyond the hospital parking lots, and have a good chance of doing so well into the future.
Perhaps this will all work itself out and the changes will benefit everyone; perhaps all that extra money from the taxes that nobody seems to be paying will give taxpayers more money to afford...well, afford something. We shall see, though hope (© Senator Barack Obama, 2008) is becoming as thin as gruel. Dickens would appreciate the consistency.
Labels: healthcare policy, Medicare, NY Times, Paul Ryan, politics, President Obama, residency, Richard Nixon, teaching hospitals
Republican Primary Maneuvering and Hypocrisy About Science, Writ Large
I keep telling anyone who will listen that we all better get used to the phrase "President Bachmann" as the Republican candidate increasingly looks like a not-so-improbable contender for the nomination. Extreme though she may be, she doesn't come with Mitt Romney's troubling baggage of being both Mormon and the former governor of a liberal state whose signature legislation was the passage of a health care law remarkably similar to what nearly all conservatives refer to as "Obamacare"; she doesn't have to resort to a two-step to explain why she worked for President Obama's administration as John Huntsman does; she is a good deal more media savvy than former Alaska governor Sarah Palin; and she isn't Newt Gingrich. I'm no political expert, but in the age of the Tea Party dominated Republican primaries, I see her as having a legitimate shot, with her only substantive competition being former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, unless current Texas Governor Rick Perry gets into the mix. Maybe I'm misjudging Romney's chances, but I'd call Bachmann the favorite right now.
Representative Bachmann certainly has no fears about wading into controversy, and in doing so making herself a darling of the extreme right. Earlier in the week she became the first candidate to sign a pledge for the protection of marriage entitled "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence on Marriage and Family," which as the NY Times noted in a blog post, puts her rivals--at least some of whom do not have such distinguished marital records themselves--into a tricky position. In a fairly short time, "The Marriage Vow" has managed to generate an uproar over whether or not it explicitly endorses banning pornography (it doesn't, as noted here); its not-so-subtle racism, as discussed here; and its religious fanaticism (see, for instance, here). In short, it highlights all of the qualities most commonly associated with the rightmost wing of the Republican Party, and quite possibly the group best positioned to put a candidate over the top for the 2012 nomination. And Bachmann got there first.
So let me pile on here and point out that one of its additional hypocrisies involves science: as part of the rationale for why the "Institution of Marriage in America is in great crisis," the Vow argues that "[the debasement of marriage continues due to an] anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible, and akin to other traits...as well as an anti-scientific bias that holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health." [my emphasis]
There's a lot to unpack in that pile of nonsense but here's a start: whether "non-heterosexual inclinations" are indeed genetically determined is an open question, but to say that those who posit the theory are "anti-scientific" and are making such assertions "complete absence of empirical proof" is patently false. The neuroanatomist Simon LeVay (author of the fascinating tome Queer Science--it proclaims its allegiance right on the cover!) pioneered studies on differences in brain structures between heterosexual and homosexual men, and while I'm skeptical of the results or even the meaning of the findings, there's no question that LeVay's work constitutes science--the empirical testing of hypotheses about the mechanisms of the world. He's hardly the only example, and the literature of scientific publications is rife with tests, theories and arguments about the origin and nature of human sexuality. Nobody's got a definitive answer, but The Vow label of "anti-scientific" is really just tossing out a phrase to make itself seem respectable.
An additional yuck can be had from the fact that the author of The Vow, Bob Vander Plaats, is...well, typically anti-scientific in his fundamentalist Christianity! While running for the position of Lieutenant Governor of Iowa, Vander Plaats endorsed the teaching of "intelligent design" as an adjunct to evolution. As the redoubtable Tara Smith at the blog Aetiology points out, intelligent design isn't a scientific theory at all, something even some of its proponents realize. The casual disregard for critical thought appears to be part and parcel of the document, so a disregard for science shouldn't really be a surprise. Nor should it be a surprise that Bachmann immediately signed on to it.
PS--today's Times has a fascinating article on how some schools (including Billy's medical alma mater, the University of Cincinnati!) have changed their admission interview strategies in the hopes of finding future doctors who are better team players than those who may have stellar grades but are arrogant & condescending (and who in being this way may foster poor communication leading to medical errors). I ran this past a senior colleague who works on a med school admissions committee and he seemed skeptical: "what you do in your life = what you say in a mini-interview; however, grades = long term commitment" was his quick response. Count me tentatively among those hopeful for the new system.
Labels: Bob Vander Plaats, evolution, Michelle Bachmann, NY Times, politics, Republican Party, scientific literacy
Jack Kevorkian: Goodbye, Good Riddance
The news of Jack Kevorkian's death brought out a large number of laudatory comments in The New York Times (laudatory about the man rather than his death, natch). "I hope that one day the world will look back on the service Dr. Kevorkian provided and will be shocked and saddened to learn that he was ostracized and incarcerated for the practice of providing dignity and some control to those in the late stages of terminal illness," SteveBnh of Virginia wrote in a representative sample of the praise heaped on the crusader for physician-assisted suicide.
Count me among the ostracizers. As the warm comments from seemingly well-informed readers demonstrates, Kevorkian was widely perceived to be a fierce advocate for patient's rights, a promoter of death with dignity, and the victim of a hypocritical and vindictive profession hellbent on maintain its Godlike power over patients. His trial, conviction, and imprisonment in 1999 for second-degree murder has the flavor of martyrdom, reinforcing the admiration of his followers and inviting comparisons to various legendary civil-rights activists.
In reality, Kevorkian was none of these things, but rather a creepy zealot obsessed with death who knew nothing about actual patient care. (I am not using the word "creepy" lightly; read on.) Although he was trained at a bonafide medical school and thus was a "doctor" in the general sense of the term, his training and subsequent practice was in pathology, where his work involved autopsies and analysis of human tissues on slides rather than actually taking care of living, breathing souls with joys and fears--making his public persona as "doctor" a bit misleading, as if he were the same as Marcus Welby, M.D. Kevorkian's nickname, "Doctor Death", didn't come from the notoriety he generated in the 1980s and '90s, but rather from perplexed and amused housestaff during his early days in a wry observation about his peculiar fixation on photographing patients' eyes at the precise moment of death. (Various blogs and websites supportive of Kevorkian state that this is because he wanted the profession to be able to distinguish the moment so that resuscitation could be performed, or something to that effect. It's utter nonsense: even in the 1950's, which some might consider the Dark Ages by medical standards, there were EKGs, a considerably more precise tool to determine death than staring into people's eyes, which seems positively medieval. Whatever his stated justifications, his "death photography" was pure fetish.) Long before he took up physician-assisted suicide as his cause, he bounced from hospital to hospital, disturbing various medical staffs with his distinctly unconventional preoccupations.
He was praised for his compassion despite the fact that he had not only not taken care of living patients except during his internship, but had never received any training of any kind in treating patients with depression (common enough among the terminally ill), palliative care, or any of the diseases that he claimed to treat. His choices reflect this very poor training: among the 130 or more cases in which he was the prescriber of death, several had no terminal illnesses nor were suffering, such as the case of Janet Adkins, who had been recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease but aside from mild memory loss was in otherwise reasonably good health.
Even more disturbing were the reports of the death of Judith Curren, a 43 year-old woman who not only didn't have a clear-cut underlying disorder, she had reportedly been a victim of domestic violence. These are not the only cases, but even the inclusion of these two suggests at best a sloppiness in methods, and at worst a murderous instinct hidden under the guise of medical concern for suffering. ("How could I have known?" was Kevorkian's retort after being confronted with the news of the messy life of the Curren family. Perhaps if his only acquaintance with them had not been through a questionnaire, and had been based on caring for Judith Curren in a legitimate medical practice for several years, such surprises wouldn't have popped up.)
In short, Dr. Kevorkian-the-Caring was a total media fabrication. He was a murderer, and if anything was treated gently by the justice system.
Other, far more responsible doctors have spoken out in favor of physician-assisted suicide--doctors who personally knew and ministered to their patients before taking the terrifying power into their hands and helped patients end their lives, doctors who gave such power its proper due, only arriving at that moment after slow and careful deliberation, wholly unlike Dr. Kevorkian's quickie-in-a-Volkswagen butchery. Perhaps the most famous of these doctors is Timothy Quill, a practicing doc in New York who challenged the ban on physician-assisted suicide in the State of New York which was ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court; the court decided 9-0 against Dr. Quill. Even Quill, as forceful an advocate for physician-assisted suicide as could be, found Kevorkian's behavior troubling, saying that he "is very much on the edges of what ordinary doctors do."
I have heard Timothy Quill speak on two occasions and found him an eloquent man whose concerns are ultimately for the health and happiness of his patients. That said, I still believe that physician-assisted suicide is a terrible idea. Ironically, the two times I attended lectures by Dr. Quill mark dramatic shifts in opinion I have had on the subject: the first time happened before I started medical school and was strongly in favor of his ideas, while the second time was a few years ago, after I had undergone more than a decade of medical training, and my attitude had changed considerably.
Generally, the discussions about physician-assisted suicide revolve around two themes. The first is what bizzyblog refers to as "the euthanasia theme song," or having a life that is not worth living. The second deals with the scenario of unbearable and unremitting suffering, which the supporters of physician-assisted suicide regard as the ultimate justification for the practice. This is often where the accusations of "doctors playing God" come in--docs are so invested in keeping people alive that they consider it a personal affront to allow patients to die. (In general, my experience has been the opposite, not withstanding the rather regrettable final few days of my father's life, in which we attempted in vain for several days to have his life-support removed after an episode of sudden cardiac death. Based on what I've seen, it's usually the doctors, and not the families, who see little or no value and much suffering in store for families and patients with terminal illness requiring intubation, PEG tubes and the like, and often have difficulty explaining to families the benefits of "letting nature take its course.")
It turns out that, not unlike the public misperceptions of Dr. Kevorkian, the picture of frequent, unremitting suffering of the terminally ill is for the most part a fiction. Curiously, over the past 20 or so years attitudes about physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia haven't changed a great deal among the general public or physicians in general (those numbers are different from one another, but stable over time). However, one group in which attitudes have changed significantly is among oncologists, who have had a steep drop in approval for those practices.
Why? It's hard to say with complete certainty, but it's likely because oncologists are more aware of, and tuned into, the multiple ways in which terminally ill patients can remain pain-free and finish their lives with meaning and dignity, to paraphrase the article in the link. A telling statistic: among oncologists, surgical oncologists, who deal with the long-term care of their patients far less often, were twice as likely to support physician-assisted suicide as their medical oncologist colleagues. In other words, the further away one gets from the actual practice of death and dying, the greater the fear of pain and suffering among laypeople and physicians alike, and the corresponding increase in support of physician-assisted suicide.
As for judging whether a life is worth living, that's much more straightforward. Physician's have no business judging the worth of any of their patients' lives. That is playing God.
It is not hard to kill onself in the US: over 30,000 people do it each year, and do it in a multiplicity of ways ranging from relatively peaceful to gruesome. And while there are technically laws on the books against suicide and no Supreme Court recognition of a "right to suicide," the practice is tacitly accepted. Suicides are allowed to be buried with everyone else, and the state does not seize their assets. So given the ease by which people can commit suicide, the debate around physicians being involved in the taking of lives has increasingly for me had an odd ring about it. Why must physicians be present to sanctify this process? It has the feel of approval-seeking, and docs shouldn't be in the business of approving or disapproving anything about a patient's lifestyle, except maybe smoking. Even then: maybe.
Doctors cannot take lives; it's not our job and should never be so. If we administer comfort medications that may hasten death to a suffering patient as a side effect, that is more than acceptable. If doctors withdraw tubes or machines that "artificially" keep patients alive, that's fine as well. But there's a big difference between maintaining a morphine drip and injecting a bolus of potassium chloride into a patient. The former is a drug with legitimate medical uses; the latter is never used under any conditions except to kill. Morphine is an everyday drug in hospices across the US; the potassium bolus was a "medication" unique to Dr. Kevorkian. May there never be another one like him again.
Labels: end-of-life care, euthanasia, Jack Kevorkian, NY Times, physician-assisted suicide
Racism--The Gift That Keeps On Giving
My philosophy of bedside medicine is founded on trying to be aware of how patients view the world well before I bring that quarter million-dollar scientific education to bear upon their problems. I've met docs who can form a differential diagnosis with greater length, and in faster time, than me, but I've also observed a lot of docs of that ilk who don't have a clue about how to use their stellar clinical acumen to explain to patients what they are thinking. This inability frequently leads to all sorts of problems for patients and their families, either because they are anxious and don't understand what is being told to them, or because they don't understand instructions and are afraid to ask out of a desire not to appear stupid. Being simultaneously intimidating and clueless can have lethal consequences, even when a doc is just as smart as House.
Put yourself into their shoes, I tell my med students, think about how they're feeling when you're talking to them before you start with the technical talk. Imagine, I say to them, how it feels to be lying there, usually half-naked, while an army of White Coats is standing there at your bedside, looking down at you, speaking in a language that sounds vaguely like English but makes no sense at all. (See this clip here, for instance, from the British TV miniseries The Singing Detective, which illustrates this in simultaneous hilarious and exquisitely painful detail. I mean it--follow that link, team! Not only is it a fantastic, biting satire of academic medical culture, it features a much younger Michael "Dumbledore 2" Gambon as well as Imelda "Dolores Umbridge" Staunton. And though made in the 1980s, the medical language--indeed, the medications!--hasn't changed much.) One thing Billy always does when seeing his hospitalized patients is to sit in a chair at patient's-eye level, and if no chair is present, then he gets down on his knees to communicate. It's symbolic, but I think it means a lot.
Being exposed and vulnerable is a universal condition of patienthood, but there are other factors that influence the physician-patient interaction as well, and race is one of the biggies. I don't believe that every interaction between black and white Americans has to "devolve" to race by necessity, but I sure's hell think that it's something to be aware of when you step into a room as a white doc with an African-American patient. I, nor any of my ancestors, were ever involved in any overtly racist act, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't at least be cognizant of the fact that African-Americans often are leery of white docs, and not unjustifiably so (more on this in a moment).
Race was on my mind today as I listened to a fascinating lecture about blood transfusions. Most Americans have at least a vague understanding that there are 4 major blood types (A, B, AB, and O) each of which can be described as "Rh positive" or "Rh negative"--thus 8 blood types in total. In order to have a blood transfusion safely, these types must be matched to prevent immune responses. The blood types are distributed across all races making "universal" transfusion a generally easy process. (Though some readers may recall an episode of M*A*S*H* taking the topic of race and blood head-on, when a white GI needing surgery tells the surgeons not to give him "any of that black blood"--no doubt reflecting the attitudes of real people in the 50's, when the scene was set, as well as the early 70's, when the episode was filmed. Plus there's the cultural convention in many Asian communities, especially in Japan, that the ABO blood types correlate with personality, and Japanese are even more keenly aware of their blood types than Americans are of, say, our zodiac signs. So we haven't eliminated this brand of nonsense from humanity just yet, but we're getting there.)
It turns out that the ABO and Rh+/- system is just the beginning, and the immune response to blood is a good deal more complicated than this. But in the majority of cases the model of eight blood types is sufficient to save people with the magic of transfusions. (This assumes that people have ready access to blood, which they often don't, for instance, in many northern Mexican communities, as described here, but in the US that's almost never a problem.) The exceptions to this, where patients have to have a host of other blood cross-typing done, are frequently found among patients of African ancestry, in particular among those who suffer from that quintessentially African disease, Sickle Cell Anemia. Whether this is due to the inherent genetic variation in Africans, or whether it's a process of sickle cell disease, is not fully clear to me, but from a clinician's standpoint it hardly makes any difference. Patients who have requirements beyond the eight common types need to be cross-matched for special blood, sometimes very rare blood indeed. One patient under discussion in the lecture today essentially had only one person who was known to have blood that she could accept--in the entire world. And since that patient's donor (a close relative) was still a child, not so much a help.
Anyway, the likelihood that you'll get a match for that special blood is increased if you have a large pool of donors who more closely resemble you genetically. Meaning: from your ethnic or racial group. So Africans and African-Americans--who constitute a major if not the major group of people with these rare reactions to blood transfusion--are the ones most in need of blood donors of African ancestry. And there's the rub, because African-Americans are far less likely to donate their blood, at the rate of 25 to 50 percent the rate of blood donation among whites. This is very much unlike the situation in a group of transfusion-dependent diseases called thalassemias, which sometimes afflict people of African descent, but more often are seen in Caucasians, who have a much larger pool of donors from which adequate matches can be found, and so there are far fewer transfusion crises and dilemmas.
Why is this? Well, if you don't think that American history, filled with its pernicious racism, is grasping with its fetid hands our modern system of blood donation, then you're missing just as much as the brilliant-but-clueless docs I've described above. Leave aside slavery and all of its ill consequences alone for a moment--just consider the treatment of African-Americans at the hands of doctors, some of whom were employed by the Federal Government of the United States, as they were prevented from being cured of syphilis or bombarded with radiation without awareness or consent. Or the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose ultimately fatal cancer cells became the first human cells cultured outside of the body, remaining the workhorse cells for biomedical scientists to this day, a major source of commerce in the scientific world, worth billions of dollars, while her descendants struggle to afford health insurance.
Think about that while you swallow the statistic on the poor rates of blood donation among African Americans when your next sickler needs a transfusion. Does blood donation cause syphilis? No, of course not--but would you trust a system that had treated your brothers and sisters like this for generations? As the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee Report wrote in 1996: "the [study] continues to cast its long shadow on the contemporary relationship between African Americans and the biomedical community."
Indeed. It has not only done that; it has cruelly deprived some members of its own community the lifeblood it so desperately needs. This is why doctors need to be as aware of history as they are of science.
Labels: blood transfusions, Cincinnati radiation experiment, ethics, NPR, NY Times, race, Tuskegee Experiment
Government and Medicine: Legislative and Judicial Follies
I try--I repeat, I try--to construct eloquent blog posts as often as I write them, taking care to choose my words as I tiptoe through the minefields of cyberspastic hyperbole and vitriol. That said, I could do little more than utter "blech" at this news piece that the Massachusetts State House has voted overwhelmingly, as part of an "economic development" bill, to repeal a ban on gift-giving from pharmaceutical companies to physicians that had passed in 2008. For those who have been trapped in solid ice since, say, the mid-1930s and the heyday of the Henry Cabot Lodges and William Morgan Butlers, in Massachusetts, the House belongs to the Democratic party. So how does such a law that seems to once again encourage the wink-wink nudge-nudge relationship between docs and the pill-pushers--particularly when the same legislative body clamps down on labor's bargaining rights in an effort to rein in spending costs--get passed?
Amazingly, the answer appears to lie in...the dining & entertainment lobby. According to Garrett Bradley (D) of Hingham, the sponsor of the measure, the ban stifles business, hurting convention centers and "restaurants where companies typically hosted physician events and dinners." (NB--the quote is from the article, not a direct of Mr. Bradley, though I doubt he'd quibble if the line were attributed to him.) Never mind the fact that this sector of the Massachusetts economy appears to be doing reasonably well, with an increase in overall revenue compared to last year, the measure's backers appear to be saying that it's perfectly fine if a payola-style arrangement is in place, as long as the palms continue to be greased and the filet mignon gets served with the Cabernet.
Blogger-doc Dan Carlat has already staked out the Swiftian rhetorical territory with a delightful skewering of the follies, leaving me and others to play the straight guy. So here goes my best effort: no self-respecting physician compromises the health of his or her patients by allowing themselves to be manipulated by claptrap. There is ample evidence that gift-giving induces an attitude of reciprocation, lucidly-but-luridly described in such books as The Truth About Drug Companies and White Coat, Black Hat, regardless of the actual quality of the product, and that drug reps know this and seize on the vanity of physicians to play them for dupes. Drug companies, however beneficial their societal effects may (or may not always) be, have a responsibility to shareholders, whose primary or sole interest is in the generation of wealth. To anyone in any state of mind other than that of abject denial, this is a primary objective that is in direct conflict with the caring of patients. Thus, doctors cannot accept gifts of any kind from those whose job it is to sell drugs.
A related theme is being played out in the judicial branch of government, as the US Supreme Court is hearing arguments on a Vermont law that bars the commercial use of physician prescription patterns. Based on the early returns, and noting previous Court decisions that take a fairly broad view of "free-speech" rights (at least if you are a corporation), it appears that the law is destined for being overturned. I can't claim to be a legal expert and thus won't even begin to take a crack at the wrangling over the First Amendment, other than to note a certain puzzlement at what passes for "free speech" these days among the Court's "strict constructionist" wing. Did the Founding Fathers really have the selling of a doctor's prescription habits in mind when crafting the First Amendment? I'm thinking not, but I await the peals of derision from my philosophico-legal foils (and loyal readers!) such as Ted Frank, a conservative maverick (I'm not sure if "conservative" is the right word for him; I'm certain that "maverick" is) and who ranks as the second smartest person I have ever had the pleasure of knowing in my life. (And in case anyone might misunderstand, I'm not implying that I occupy the top spot; I doubt I crack even the top 75, and I don't have that many friends.)
Regardless of the legal principles at stake, Chief Justice John Roberts made his contribution to the follies by appearing to frame this as an argument of "restricting the flow of information to doctors," as silly a line that can be uttered in such an august house as SCOTUS. How would withholding prescription info from drug companies prevent them from making their pitch for their drug? How does this even remotely "restrict the flow of information"? The naivete exhibited by the Chief Justice is pretty remarkable (and shared, without surprise, by Justices Scalia and Kennedy). The "it's all data, it's all protected by the First Amendment" argument seems to only work when big business benefits, but not the other way around. The recipe to Coke is just data, too; somehow I don't think the Coca-Cola Corporation considers that to be something that your local Joe can just barge on in and demand. Pray tell, what's the difference?
A hat-tip to Carey Goldberg at WBUR's Common Health Blog, especially for her humoring me in my response of "blech"!
Labels: ban on gift-giving, Common Health Blog, conflict-of-interest, Dan Carlat, drug companies, drug reps, NY Times, SCOTUS
Fukushima Daiichi, and the Perception of Radiation Risk
Evolutionarily speaking, we are as a species hardwired to analyze risk based off of information that's directly in front of us--immediately accessible to our five senses. We're designed not to trust food that smells funny, can instantly calculate how far away we should stay from large cats capable of having us for a snack, and do a host of other things that were very useful for us to eke out a living in Olduvai Gorge.
But we live in the 21st century, and nowadays our ability to perceive and estimate risk is hampered by the fact that many of today's risks are abstract, and require a resonably sophisticated understanding of statistics. Take, for example, a recent discussion found in the Paper Of Record about income distribution in the United States. True--it's not really a round table about "risk" per se, unless you consider radically unequal wealth distribution to be a risk to democracy, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis did when he said that "we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Still, the NY Times roundtable was remarkable in that all of the contributors, whether approaching the issue from a left or right viewpoint, agreed that most Americans had vastly underestimated how much wealth is held by relatively few. In particular, a study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely found that not only do Americans think that wealth distribution to be significantly more equitable than it actually is, but that they would prefer it to be even more equitable than what they (wrongly) perceive.
If this isn't a classic example of what George W. Bush would call "misunderestimation" then it's not clear what is, and moreover, it highlights the difficulties people have in making accurate estimates about things like the distribution of wealth in a hugely complex society: the information simply cannot be found by opening your eyes and looking around. In medicine, we see this all the time: people are often terrified of exotic diseases that pose little threat to them, while being utterly blithe to the daily assaults on their bodies--frequently self-inflicted--that are much more likely to send them six feet under. To wit: drinking, smoking, eating poorly and not exercising.
The recent events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been a case study in this process of risk assessment, and not altogether surprisingly, we haven't done well collectively in harmonizing our level of panic to the actual threat that the reactors pose. Despite a good number of depressing news stories, some cataloging evasive action by non-Japanese governments, it is far from clear how huge an impact the nuclear accident is going to have. While it is already comparable to the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and is not (yet) as catastrophic as the Chernobyl accident of 1986, the question still remains: just how dangerous is it? Though the story is far from over there with events taking dramatic swings in short periods, the short answer is something like dangerous, but not as dangerous as you think. Not nearly as dangerous as you think.
That point is neatly illustrated, both in sound and visual format, in this news story from Adam Ragusea of WBUR (Boston), and is described as the "Dread-to-Risk ratio" by Andrew Revkin of the Dot Earth blog at NYT. Both pieces have the same useful graphic to give you some sense of the relative levels of radiation that we're talking about. Live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for one full year? That will give you about 0.1 microSieverts (uSv) of radiation. (What a Sievert is, is a longer discussion, but we'll just shorthand it here and say that it's some relative value of radiation, and that the higher the number, the more dangerous it gets.) One flight from New York to LA buys you about 400 times that amount (40 uSv). That's not even the round trip! A standard chest x-ray, meanwhile, is worth about 20 uSv. But a mammogram is a whopper, clocking in at 3 milliSieverts--thus about 150 "standard" x-rays and just under forty roundtrip flights from NY to LA. A CT scan can be worth almost twice the amount of the mammogram (5.8 mSv).
(In case I've lost some people on this micro/milli distinction, you need 1000 "micros" to make 1 "milli." I'm going to flip back and forth but will point it out when I do.)
So how do these numbers stack up to the nuclear disasters? If you lived within 10 miles of the Three Mile Island plant during the accident and didn't make a run for it, the total dose of radiation you received was 80 microSieverts--far less than one mammogram. By contrast, one area near the Fukushima plant recorded a total dose in one day of 3.6 milliSieverts: less than a CT but more than a mammogram, though of course we're only talking about one day's worth of radiation. With Chernobyl, the radiation levels fluctuated wildly both in time and place so making a general statement about the radiation is essentially impossible, but had you been moved by some weird spirit to take a stroll on the grounds just last year, about 25 years after the accident, you would have gotten two mammograms' worth of radiation for your troubles: 6 milliSieverts. I won't reproduce the pic here out of respect for copyright but highly recommend it to anyone with the time; Ragusea of WBUR translates this into a tone equivalent, and the radiation from TMI is a blip, while the sound for "mammogram" is substantially longer.
I draw two conclusions from all of this. First, while the troubles at Fukushima are by no means trivial, and for that matter aren't yet finished, I think it's a bit premature to write the obituary for nuclear power. In terms of accidents, it's not nearly as dangerous as most people suppose. The problem with nukes, in the TMI and Chernobyl age as well as today, is what to do with the radioactive waste generated by the plants rather than the risks they pose viz. accidents. Second is that we should try to minimize mammograms! Do only the amount that will help save lives, and not one more after that. This was the logic behind the recently revised US Preventative Services Task Force, which recommended no mammograms to women under 50, and biannual ones to those over. Despite this entirely sensible approach--based on good research with a careful eye toward the risk/benefit ratio of the radiation, it should be noted--there were howls of indignation from people purportedly speaking for women, accusing the very bureaucrats who issued the new recs to be female-hostile, or something like that.
(NB--the first draft of this version, which snuck out prematurely, posted some incorrect calculations with respect to x-rays, mammograms, and NY-LA flights. The corrected version is now present.)
Labels: breast cancer, cancer, mammography, nuclear power, NY Times, radiation, risk-benefit assessment
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Billy Rubin
I'm a physician and an educator with a clinical focus in infectious disease. I teach the spectrum from 3rd year medical students through senior ID fellows, and try to keep everyone loose when doing so. Whether I succeed or not, you'll have to ask them. I am interested in issues where medicine intersects with politics, as well as how medical research is portrayed by media. In some ways my views are very much at the fringe of the rest of the physician community, although in several other critical ways I’m your typical stethoscope-wielding, white-coat-wearing, reflex-hammer-tapping doc and consider myself steeped in the traditions of the brotherhood and sisterhood.
Billy Rubin Blog Hero & Villain Of The Year (and Y...
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Free-Market Capitalism and Death Panels: The Music...
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Government and Medicine: Legislative and Judicial ...
Fukushima Daiichi, and the Perception of Radiation...
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Cornwall Museums Partnership is a charity that exists to support museums in Cornwall. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We help museums to work together helping create a strong voice for heritage here in Cornwall.
The CMP Team is made up of 6.6 FTEs. We support museums to do the things that they might find difficult to do on their own. This includes advocacy, audience development, fundraising, and workforce development. Find out more about the services we offer.
Emmie Kell
Emmie is the CEO of Cornwall Museums Partnership, leading on strategic planning and fundraising. Emmie has over 25 years of experience within the museum sector including working at the V&A, Somerset House, MOSI Manchester, and Thinktank Birmingham.
Emmie works part time at Cornwall Museums Partnership and as a consultant, providing strategic advice to museums across the UK.
Emmie is a member of the Institute of Fundraising, a qualified coach and was the Arts Council England Museums Clore Fellow in 2014/15.
She is also a board member of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership.
Emmie works Monday - Thursday and can be reached at emmie@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Jenny Opie
Jenny is the Finance Manager for the Museums Partnership. Jenny’s role is to manage the budgets and finances of the partnership. A Chartered Accountant with the ICAEW, Jenny is a specialist in charity finances after obtaining a diploma in Charity Accounting.
After training in Birmingham, Jenny gained extensive accounting experience working for a variety of small to medium sized business throughout the Midlands and the South West.
Jenny works Mondays and Tuesdays and can be reached at jenny@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Bryony Robins
Museum Development Officer
Bryony is Cornwall’s Museum Development Officer. She provides access to professional advice and guidance, to enable museums to achieve sustainable improvements and maximize their benefits to audiences and their communities.
Having trained in the arts, Bryony became interested in museums through an appreciation of how cultural activities engage and enrich people’s lives. Bryony is particularly interested in how this enables us to make connections with our heritage, creativity, and sense of place. She is a trustee for The Leach Pottery and member of the steering group of the Contemporary Studio Pottery subject specialist network. Bryony is undertaking a Clore Fellowship 2018-19. The Clore Fellowship is a unique programme of cultural leadership development that seeks to enrich and transform cultural practice and engagement.
Previously, Bryony was responsible for the development of a £5.5m HLF funded museum transformation project. She also has experience within museum development of overseeing regional programmes in digital engagement and learning, which took place at Museums Sheffield, MLA East Midlands and Renaissance East Midlands.
Bryony works Monday - Friday and can be reached at bryony@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Clare Pennington
Resilience Programme Manager
Clare is the Resilience Programme Manager for Cornwall Museums Partnership. Clare has extensive experience in business and marketing, having run her own Landscape Architecture company for over 15 years, with studios in Hampshire and Cornwall.
Clare manages the Resilience Programme, which has been developed in partnership with South West Museum Development, to help museums across the South West learn new skills that will help them to thrive within today’s challenging economy.
Prior to joining the Partnership, Clare has used her own personal business experience to support charities and museums with business planning and fundraising projects.
Clare works Monday - Friday and can be reached at clare@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Jenna Marrion
NPO Programme Manager
Jenna Marrion is the Programme Manager for our portfolio of NPO work. She works alongside our consortium of partner museums in delivering the key objectives and outputs for the programme.
With a degree in Language & Communications from Cardiff University, Jenna has worked in a variety of marketing and project management roles for a diverse range of organisations; including the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Natural England, the Cornwall Sports Partnership and Oxford Innovation.
Working mainly on European or government funded programmes within the creative, cultural and heritage sectors, she has experience of working with a broad range of partners on a number of community-engagement and support projects.
Jenna works on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and can be reached at jenna@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Amy Shakespeare
wAVE Community Project Manager
Amy is the Project Manager for the wAVE Immersive Experiences in Museums Project, funded by the Coastal Communities Fund. Working in partnership with Falmouth University and the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership, the project will create augmented and virtual experiences at five museums in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.
During her History degree at the University of Exeter, Amy worked at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. After graduating, she went on to work for the National Trust in visitor experience at Godolphin, the Tin Coast, and the West Cornwall portfolio. She originally joined the CMP team in 2018 as our Marketing and Impact Officer.
Amy is a trustee for Kids in Museums and South West Museums Association Rep, and was a Clore Emerging Leader in 2019. In her spare time, she is completing a Masters in Heritage and Interpretation.
Amy works Monday - Friday and can be reached at amy@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Dr Jenny Lee
Digital Coordinator
Jenny is the Digital Coordinator for the Museums Partnership. A lover of all things technological, Jenny is particularly suited to her role, as she oversees and coordinates digital projects in museums and archives across Cornwall.
Within her role, she helps to share skills and knowledge in the creation and use of digitalised content, helping others to share their resources on new platforms.
Prior to this role, Jenny worked as the Digitisation Officer and then Collections Manager at the Telegraph Museum, helping to give her a first-hand insight into the creation of digital content.
Previous to joining the Partnership, Jenny worked as a Historical Geography Lecturer at the University of Exeter, and in collections roles at Sentry Hill Historic House, the British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Jenny is currently on maternity leave, in her absence please email oliver@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Peter Lower
Marketing and Events Intern
Peter is the Marketing and Events Intern for Cornwall Museums Partnership. He supports Amy, our Marketing and Impact Officer, with a variety of tasks including maintaining the partnership’s social media pages and managing event bookings.
Peter has recently completed a History of Art Masters at the University of Bristol, where among other topics he researched the Newlyn School artist Alethea Garstin, and the Public Role of Humanities. He previously volunteered at Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange and has led alternative photography workshops in and around Penzance.
While working with the partnership, he hopes to develop his marketing skills and knowledge to pursue a career in the culture and heritage sector.
Peter works Monday – Friday and can be reached at peter@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
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Leonard F. Zandrow has served as General Counsel of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, Inc. (NSCIA) continuously since 1995. Founded in 1948, the NSCIA is the oldest and largest civilian organization in the United States serving persons with spinal cord injuries and disease.
Attorneys from Brister & Zandrow, LLP have been involved in many leading cases in Massachusetts law involving spinal cord and head injuries. The firm has litigated disputes over insurance coverage for traumatic symptoms of spinal cord injury, such as autonomic dysreflexia. See Watts v. Organogenesis, Inc., 30 F.Supp.2d 101 (D. Mass. 1998).
It has also prosecuted questions of civil fault against defendants who caused spinal cord injuries in a variety of circumstances. Appeals handled by our attorneys address whether a social host is liable for serving liquor to under-aged guests, Sampson v. MacDougall, 60 Mass. App. Ct. 394, 802 N.E.2d 602 (2004), and whether a ski operator may be held liable for an artificial condition created on its slopes. Berniger v. Meadow Green-Wildcat Corp., 945 F.2d 4 (1st Cir. 1991). In addition, the firm has tested whether the sport of snowboarding falls within the immunity granted by recreational ski statutes, and thereby secured a confidential settlement on behalf of a spinal cord-injured snowboarder.
In a leading head injury case decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the firm represented the victim of a serious motor vehicle accident against an insurance company that had tried to avoid the consequences of a previously untested statute governing the effects of its partial payments. Allstate Insurance Company v. Amy Reynolds, 43 Mass. App. Ct. 927, 685 N.E.2d 1210 (1997). Recently, the firm obtained a confidential settlement from radiologists who had failed to identify a young Down syndrome patient's Atlanto Axial Instability. The firm has also represented numerous clients who have experienced subdural hematomas as a result of accidents, obtaining confidential settlements on their behalf.
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Home » CYC in the News » Stretching it Out – George Benson
Stretching it Out – George Benson
95-year-old stays active and healthy at local yoga studio
by Mark Storer
Special to the Acorn
George Benson has been active all his life. He ran a floor care and cleaning business in the San Fernando Valley from 1977 to 2001 and has always done his best to keep moving every day.
The lifestyle has worked well for the soon-tobe 96-year-old Leisure Village resident.
Benson said he felt he was slowing down about 10 years ago when he had a back issue—a problem that led him to try yoga and a whole new way to move his body.
“My wife, Joyce, and I were walking by the shops up on Santa Rosa Road, and we walked by the yoga studio there. I said, ‘Why don’t we go in there and ask them about my back?’ It changed my life,” he said.
The studio was the Camarillo Yoga Center on Santa Rosa Road.
“He was already standing really straight and he had good posture,” said Audrey Walzer, owner and director of the center. “He got his back better and pretty quickly he was doing intermediate classes. He really works at it and at that time was in classes with 20- and 30-year-olds.”
Benson, who has been a vegetarian for more than 65 years, was “in love with yoga,” he said. He worked at it and began subscribing to yoga magazines.
“It became not only physically good for me but also a social thing. I’ve met great friends through yoga, including Audrey.”
But about three years ago, Benson developed an eye disease that required him to wear an eye patch while he healed.
Walzer said wearing the patch caused Benson to look down when he walked.
“The result was that he got hunched over pretty quickly,” the yoga instructor said.
Benson now uses a walker and that has led to problems with his legs, Walzer said.
“We’re working on loosening him up a bit,” she said, adding, “He’s been able to get back some range of motion, and we’re getting there.”
As Walzer talks, Benson demonstrates some of the stretches and movements that help him.
“It just allows me to feel better,” he said. “It upsets me to no end that I have trouble walking, but it’s the hand I’ve been dealt and I’ve got to deal with it.”
Benson served in the Navy during World War II, based at Pearl Harbor after 1941.
“I was supposed to serve on a ship called the Blackhawk that was headed to the Philippines,” Benson said. “But a lieutenant I knew wanted me to stay with him at Pearl, and he transferred me. I must have been pretty lucky because the Blackhawk was torpedoed and they lost a lot of men. I could have been one of them.”
Benson married after the war. He and his first wife had four children before she died. He married Joyce 37 years ago and they had one child.
Joyce doesn’t do yoga, but she said it’s been good for her husband.
“ He really loves it. His friends come from there and it really does help him physically,” Joyce said.
“I’m really glad he went into the classes. It’s been wonderful.”
Walzer says yoga is good for anyone of any age.
“The biggest thing that people say to me is, ‘I can’t do yoga, I’m not flexible.’ It’s kind of a misnomer,” Walzer said. “Yoga is a tool to keep yourself healthy and balanced. It’s not about being good at it. It’s not about a standard or goal. It’s about practicing healthy living.”
Benson will continue to do his best to stay healthy.
“The thing is, I move a lot and I eat fresh foods,” said Benson. “It doesn’t hurt that there are a lot of pretty girls who go to the classes with me, either.”
http://www.thecamarilloacorn.com/news/2013-02-01/Family/Stretching_it_out.html
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Remembering Frank Gillespie
By Sam Blackman
It was with sadness that we heard that Dr. Frank Gillespie, one of the greatest all-around athletes in Clemson history, died recently.
The 1949 Clemson graduate was 94 years old.
Gillespie was the model student-athlete during his career at Clemson. He was an excellent student, double majoring in electrical engineering and textile engineering. As if that wasn’t enough, he was a starter on three Tiger teams, football, basketball, and baseball. He was also the student body President.
Gillespie entered Clemson in the fall of 1942. But on a visit to Clemson before he enrolled, is what was so interesting.
Clemson Head Football Coach Frank Howard remembered the visit very well. Gillespie along with Jack Pollack, was attending the Blue Ridge School for Boys at Hendersonville, NC. Pollack asked Gillespie to go on the trip to Clemson with him. Pollack said he was going to a football tryout at Clemson.
Pollack was in the middle of the tryouts when Howard asked Gillespie “aren’t you going to suit up and try out?” Gillespie said no at first. Eventually he put on the football pads and a uniform.
“I told Frank, come on over and I’ll give you a tryout, said Howard.”
“When I was younger, I’d put on the pads and work out with the players some,” explained Howard.
“I remember very well giving Frank Gillespie a tryout, which was legal in those days. I hadn’t heard much about him, he was originally from Beckley, West Virginia. I lined up in front of him and told him to charge into me. Whomp! Bam!
I said, “That’s enough, son.
“Coach, I thought we were going to work out,” he told me.
“We have, welcome to Clemson. I signed Gillespie on the spot.”
“He went on to be one of the finest we’ve ever had. He was a great leader and athlete and could do pretty much whatever he wanted,” said Howard.
During his freshman year he played football, basketball and baseball. As a freshman he was the starting first baseman and batted .311.
Like so many during that era, he left school and served in World War II. Gillespie served in the United States Army during World War II in Patton’s Third Army and won three decorations for bravery during the Battle of the Bulge.
Gillespie came back to Clemson for the 1946-47 academic year. In an earlier interview, Gillespie remembers that time at Clemson.
“When I came back to Clemson after missing time for the war, I noticed my throwing arm was not as good,” said Gillespie. “But other than that I was still the same in other activities. The professors were willing to help and work with you. I had two good friends I studied with and this helped me a great deal. I didn’t have much time for socializing.
“I didn’t notice much difference at Clemson before and after the war. Coach Howard did not change either, he was still the same great coach,” said Gillespie.
After the war, he was a starting guard on the Tiger football team for three years, playing both ways on the offensive and defensive lines. He was also a starting guard in basketball for three years, and played three more years of baseball, where he made the All-State team as a senior. He was the captain of the baseball and basketball teams and was a game captain on the football squad.
During his Clemson career, many honors came his way.
Gillespie won the McKelvin Award as the top all-around athlete in the Southern Conference for the 1947-48 academic year, his junior season.
Gillespie, former Tiger pitcher Kris Benson and former Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson are the only Clemson athletes named a conference athlete of the year in school history.
Gillespie was the last Clemson athlete to letter in the three major sports of football, basketball, and baseball.
Long-time Greenville News Sports Editor and Columnist, Carter “Scoop” Latimer probably described Gillespie the best in his comments in a column he wrote in 1947. “Frank Gillespie, Clemson guard, is strictly a big league football player. He is as tough as the iron that comes from around his West Virginia, mountain home.”
Gillespie double-majored in electrical engineering and textile engineering and served as president of his senior class. An honor student, he was inducted into the Clemson Athletic Hall of Fame in 1977. In 1996, he was named to Clemson’s All-Centennial Team.
He was the Senior Council President, named to the Who’s Who Among Students in American University and Colleges. Gillespie was a member of the prestigious Tiger Brotherhood honorary fraternity, Blue Key, and the Block C Club.
Gillespie had a lot of fond memories at Clemson and playing on the undefeated 1948 team his senior season was one of them. Gillespie was a guard on the team and teammate Tom Salisbury was a tackle. Both of these players eventually became Baptist Pastors. “Who would have ever thought that there would be two Baptist Pastors playing side by side,” Gillespie once remarked.
Gillespie retired from IBM after 33 years service. He also was a pastor and attended seminary and earned degrees at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served as the pastor at First Baptist Church of Iva, S.C. for many years.
Later, after returning to IBM, he earned his Doctorate at Luther Rice Seminary.
Gillespie lived at Villa Rica, Ga. and passed away on March 8, 2017.
Read 672 times Last modified on Monday, 13 March 2017 23:41
More in this category: « Clemson Tigers College Football National Champions Clemson Football Nominated for Four ESPY Awards »
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Reflections on the Indian Railways
by Vrinda Baliga
“The measure of a great civilisation is in its cities and the measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks, its squares.”
– John Ruskin
The world over, the value of public spaces is being recognised by urban planners, governments and citizens. In a country like India, home to a vast, heterogeneous population, public spaces, accessible to a large cross-section of people, cutting across barriers of age, income, religion, and other factors, are that much more crucial a measure of the health and cohesion of society; a bond that holds diverse populations together.
Indian cities are on the road to rapid growth. And one of the side-effects of this growth is that urban life is shifting perceptibly from the public to the private domain. One visible shift in residential neighbourhoods, for instance, is the rise of the gated community. In the open neighbourhoods of the past, the lines between the private and the public were comfortably blurred, with homes opening out onto the streets, and personal dwellings seamlessly sharing space with the small business establishments, corner stores and door-to-door traders and hawkers catering to their needs. In sharp contrast, the gated community segregates people into enclaves of exclusivity. Malls, with their plush, formal, layouts and impersonal check-out counters, are edging out the chaotic, vibrant markets and bazaars, and the give-and-take banter that characterises them. Bigger establishments displace local kirana stores and pushcart vendors, but they need a much higher density of customers to be sustainable and hence are centrally located, not within residential neighbourhoods. Thus, they are no longer within walking distance and necessitate vehicular commute. Public city transport is overcrowded and chaotic traffic conditions result in unreliable schedules. Those who can afford it resort to private means – private cars and two-wheelers, auto-rickshaws, and taxis – while public transport is largely used by the economically weaker populations, leading to segregation even in transit.
When we end up living, commuting, working and interacting largely with people from similar backgrounds as ourselves, and when our knowledge about people who are different in their circumstances, occupations, lifestyles, beliefs or traditions comes mostly from secondary sources like the media and not from personal interaction, stereotypes of the “other” are easily created and sustained.
Meanwhile, public spaces that can counter the trend of segregation are on the decline. Parks, boulevards, waterfronts are often the first to succumb to encroachment, unplanned development and the need for the city’s infrastructure to keep up with its growth. Even pavements – those basic public spaces that encourage pedestrian users – are not spared. Pavements are rarely inviting to pedestrians; in many places they are non-existent or in a state of disrepair, or are encroached upon by businesses and chaotic parking. When a street has to be widened to accommodate the ever-increasing flow of traffic, the pedestrian pavements are often the first casualties of the expansion. Areas that disincentivise pedestrian use become places that people pass through with some specific agenda in mind, rather than places where they would be encouraged to linger and spend time. In short, they cease to be effective public spaces. In these circumstances, there is a very real need not just to create more public spaces, but also to recognise those we do have and improve their efficacy with creativity and imagination.
When we think of public spaces, we may think of city squares, parks, boulevards, markets, libraries, meeting hubs, beaches, waterfronts, walkways, and so on. If we look beyond these spaces, however, we find others that are less obvious.
The tracks of the Indian Railways crisscross across the ancient land and young country that is India, stitching together its varied regions. Spread along 65000 kilometres, the railways carry around 23 million people – nearly the entire population of Australia — to their destinations every single day. They connect the one corner of the country to the other, the underdeveloped to the developed, the rural to the urban, bridging gaps of distance and opportunity. Even in these times of reduced airfares and better road connectivity, trains remain the average Indian’s preferred and most affordable mode of transport to distant towns and cities.
The typical railway station is a hive of activity – ticket counters, waiting rooms, restaurants, book stalls, cloak rooms, platforms, all buzz with the comings and goings of people. Lists of train arrivals and departures scroll on announcement boards. Red-uniformed porters expertly ferry luggage of all shapes and sizes through the crowds – often balancing up to three suitcases on their turbaned heads and a duffel bag on each shoulder – even as the owners struggle to keep up. On the platforms, happy reunions and tearful or raucous farewells are underway, the actual travelers usually vastly outnumbered by the entourage of friends or family who have come to receive or see them off. Latecomers rush to locate their coaches. Vendors move from window to window, hawking their ware.
Aboard the train, aisles are crowded with people locating their seats and luggage that is yet to be stowed away. In every coach, the give-and-take of negotiations is under way over the space that has to be shared between strangers for the course of the journey. “Please adjust,” is a common refrain, offered by the elderly gentleman who would like to exchange his upper berth for someone else’s lower one, the hassled parent whose child is volubly insisting on occupying a window seat, or the passenger who is trying to fit his voluminous luggage into the limited space under the berth.
Passengers linger on the platform till the very last moment, their nonchalance matched only by that of the non-passengers still on board the train. Till at last, the train whistle sounds, prompting a final frenzy in which, somehow, everyone who shouldn’t be on the train has managed to get off and everyone who should has boarded.
At first, people turn to windows, watching the platform slide past, then vanish into the distance. They register the vibration of the carriage, the trundle of the wheels, but soon that too recedes into white noise. Attention begins to turn inwards as passengers size up their immediate surroundings – the elderly lady checking and double-checking her belongings, the loud child being given an even louder warning to behave, the notification tones of Whatsapp messages going off on a dozen different phones, the “chaiiiii….chaiiiii” call of the tea-vendor coming through, the young couple engrossed in each other, the man speaking on his cell phone at a volume that invites the entire coach to listen in.
As urbanist William H. Whyte, author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, observed, “What attracts people [to public spaces] most, it would appear, is other people.”
The feeling of companionship provided by the visible proximity of other people, the privacy afforded by the fact that they are strangers, and the freedom to engage to whatever extent one is comfortable with are all factors that contribute to the attraction of public spaces. In our increasingly organised lifestyles, the public space is one place where engagement can be unplanned and unstructured, and the possibility of surprise can provide therapeutic inputs to our sense of belonging and our social and emotional well-being.
In the train compartment, the typical seating arrangement of facing berths on long-distance trains ensures that it doesn’t take long for introductions to be made. Conversations usually start with the hunt for that elusive connection: “Your mother tongue is Konkani? I once had a neighbor who used to speak it too.” Or “My cousin lives in Belagavi too. Maybe you know him?” (No matter that Belagavi is home to over 600,000 people.)
Acquaintances begin to form and soon the harried mother travelling alone with two kids finds voluntary babysitters who engage her toddler with stories while she keeps an eye on the unruly older sibling. The unemployed youth travelling for a job interview is plied with encouragement and advice and the teenager on her way to engineering college is requested by her co-passenger to advise his child, barely eight years old, to “study hard.”
As people settle into the journey, packets of playing cards are broken out, travel-chess sets emerge with their magnetic boards and pieces. A group travelling together starts a game of antakshari somewhere down the compartment and a medley of old and new songs breaks out, co-passengers prodding rival teams with suggestions. Cricket is inevitably discussed, and diehard fans soon distinguish themselves by running through cricketing trivia like they were prayer beads and conducting impassioned ball-by-ball postmortems of matches that were played a decade ago. Another favourite topic is politics, which is shown the same fervor devoted to spectator sports, and, given the multitude of national and regional political parties, provides enough discussion to last a fair length of the journey.
Rarely do these discussions disintegrate into heated arguments or clashes of ego. The trolling and hateful sentiments that mar discussions between strangers in the digital world are conspicuously absent. In fact, one of the counter-intuitive aspects of human nature seems to be that when it comes to face-to-face interactions, we often engage total strangers with a courtesy and open-mindedness we may not offer people close to us, or to those with whom we interact on a daily basis. There is something about the shared journey, the particular combination of proximity and anonymity between co-passengers and the necessarily short-term nature of the association, that lets people open up to others and, in the process, open their minds to new ideas and opinions, even those in conflict with their own.
One topic leads to another and before you know it, people are having long, meandering conversations with others they would never have had the occasion to meet but for the fact that they are co-passengers. And, in the course of the journey, several mental stereotypes, preconceived notions and prejudices with respect to the “other” are quietly, almost subconsciously, confronted, dying silent deaths within the very minds that harboured them.
Come meal-time, seating bays turn into impromptu picnic sites with sheets of newspapers spread on the berths, food baskets opened and their contents served out onto paper plates. Passengers, especially those traveling in larger groups, often carry food from home, and for the rest there is always the train’s pantry car or the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation’s Food on Track e-catering service. Besides this, one of the enduring pleasures of a train journey in India is that cuisines change every few hundred kilometres and the journey is a great opportunity to experience local food and produce. Thus, you don’t pass through Lonavala without tasting its peanut brittle chikki, nor through Pune without its vada-pav. In Ernakulam, you buy packets of crisply fried banana chips, in Nagpur, the juicy oranges, in Agra, the petha, in Bikaner, the bhujia, in Dharwad, the peda, in Maddur, the vada.
These food items, among other things, often reach passengers through station stalls and the hawkers who walk the length of the train peddling their wares. The Indian Railways employ approximately 1.3 million people, making it one of the largest employers in the world. Quite apart from this, there is a whole informal economy that revolves around its network. At the stations, there are the auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers, luggage porters, stall-owners and so on. And on the trains, are hawkers, who sell books, newspapers and magazines, fruits, packaged snacks, paper cones of roasted groundnuts, street food like bhelpuri, samosas and fried bajjis, mineral water bottles, toys, luggage chains, mobile phone covers, souvenirs, handicrafts, posters, postcards and plastic ware. They board trains at intermediary stations, moving rapidly from compartment to compartment, expertly assessing at a glance when to pause at a bay for a more sustained sales-pitch and when to move on. Until the next station, where they disembark, only to board another train heading back to their home station, their entire business conducted within this to-and-fro circuit of passing trains.
Meanwhile, outside the train window, the vistas are ever-changing. A pair of bullocks draw a plough through a field and an orderly line of egrets follows in their wake, feasting on the worms the plough brings to the surface. Children run along, waving to the train. At a railway crossing, cars, motorcycles, cycles, autos, trucks, tractors and bullock carts all wait in companionable camaraderie for the train to pass before they can cross the tracks and go their own ways. Huge industrial complexes go past, as do impoverished slums; busy cities and rustic countryside, rocky hills and lush fields.
When it comes to engaging the senses, a train is every bit as immersive and satisfying as any bustling urban town square.
Given their reach and scale, the Indian Railways are perfectly placed additionally to leverage their vast network as a medium for creating awareness, facilitating public discourse, and bridging divides – yet another important role played by public spaces. There have been several interesting initiatives along these lines.
The Science Express is a science exhibition train. Started in 2007, the train’s sixteen coaches had exhibits pertaining to the cosmos and the latest developments in the field of science and technology. In 2012, when India chaired the Conference of Parties (CoP11) on biodiversity, the train, in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, was remodeled on this theme and ran as the Science Express Biodiversity Special. At present, it operates as the Science Express Climate Action Special with its themed coaches on climate change and the technologies and ideas to mitigate and adapt to it. Covering the length and breadth of the country, the train has had millions of visitors as it continues on its journey to promote a scientific temperament and engage the general public in scientific discourse and debate.
Similarly, the recently launched Tiger Express is a tourist train that creates awareness about tiger conservation and facilitates visits to the Bandhavgarh and Kanha national parks in Madhya Pradesh.
The Jeevan Rekha (Lifeline) Express, started in collaboration with Impact India Foundation, is a unique, well-equipped hospital train that makes medical facilities, including surgeries, ophthalmological procedures, immunisation, nutritional assessment and services and health check-up and awareness services available to remote towns and villages that lack such facilities. In recent times, the Jaldoot (meaning ‘water messenger’), a 50-wagon water train, carried 2,500,000 litres of water per trip to the drought-hit Latur district of Maharashtra.
Stations too, ranging from the simple, no-frill platforms in small villages to cavernous edifices such as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai lend themselves to the cause of public engagement and discourse. Some of Chennai’s Mass Rapid Transit System stations recently played host to the Chennai Photo Biennale. Among the displays was the photo exhibit at the Lighthouse MRTS station titled Urban Water that focused public attention on the situation in a city that on one hand faces water shortages, and on the other, suffered massive flooding in December 2015.
When the “Swachha Bharat Abhiyan” or Clean India Mission was launched in October 2014, the Railways were among the first to adopt it with awareness campaigns and visible improvements seen in stations and trains across the country.
Train travel is one of the best ways to experience a country first-hand – to see for oneself its varied regions, and to develop a better understanding of the problems and accomplishments of local populations. At the same time, a train journey also gives one the time and mind space to think and introspect. Across the globe, schemes such as the Millennial Trains Project that organizes crowd-funded transcontinental train travel for innovators, the Amtrak residency program for writers run aboard its long-distance trains, and the Eurail youth passes for students and young backpackers are aimed at inspiring and engaging people and opening their minds to a broader world-view.
In the words of Candy Chang, the creator of the participatory public art project “Before I Die”, “Our public spaces are as profound as we allow them to be.”
When the long whistle sounds and the city slips past the window, already looking different, removed, you are free from the moorings of everyday life, your mind free to wander away from the well-trodden paths of habitual thought. In the space and time between departure and arrival, you belong only to the journey.
Photograph © Apurva Bahadur
Edited by Sunila Galappatti
Vrinda Baliga
Vrinda Baliga is a writer based in Hyderabad, India. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary magazines such as New Asian Writing, Muse India, Reading Hour, Out of Print, India Currents and Temenos. She has won prizes in the Unisun Short Story Competition 2011 and the Katha Fiction Contests 2010 and 2012.
Dollhouses on One Up Khyber Mail
by Madiha Aijaz
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Intercultural Learning
Successfully integrating migrant families requires respect, empathy and a solid education plan
by Milena Miladinovic on September 29, 2016
Guglielmo Schinina, International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
The integration of any newcomer into a new community is always a learning process for everyone involved. To shed light on the most relevant aspects of migration today and explore the role global citizenship education can play in tackling the current refugee challenges, Milena Miladinovic interviewed Guglielmo Schinina, the Head of Mental Health, Psychosocial Response and Intercultural Communication Section at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Guglielmo has also lead the IOM’s psychosocial interventions in Lebanon, Kenya, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Kosovo and Macedonia. He launched and co-directs the Summer-Winter School in “Psychosocial Interventions in Emergency and Displacement” and teaches a Masters course at the Sant’ Anna University in Pisa and the University of Turin, both in Italy.
This interview was originally published in the Connect: Intercultural Insights for Global Citizens — curated by AFS Intercultural Programs.
Connect: Migration is a headline topic today, but many experts are not comfortable with how the challenges are framed. What should we really focus on?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently stated that “migration is the defining factor of our democracies today”, and she is right, because population mobility is not a problem but a fundamental element of our reality, strictly linked with globalization, mass communication, inequalities and individual aspirations.
We know that 71% of migrants live in highly developed countries and that most migrants originate from middle income backgrounds, not extremely poor or conflict affected countries. For this reason, it would be wrong to consider migration only through the lens of the recent influx of migrants in Europe. Migration is a global phenomenon and has been constantly and exponentially on the increase in the past few decades.
Moreover, not all migration is characterized by serious protection and socio-economic concerns. A victim of human trafficking is a migrant just as an exchange student is a migrant.
Population mobility is not a problem but a fundamental element of our reality, strictly linked with globalization, mass communication, inequalities and individual aspirations.
Connect: What type of assistance and support do migrants and receiving communities need the most to successfully integrate into their new homes?
It is important to redefine the current narratives on migration and the way migrants are received in host countries. Migrants are human beings, who need food, shelter, medical care, safety, a productive life and livelihoods, and healthy social interactions with family, friends and others — just like anyone else. Most migrants are able to attend to their basic needs by themselves without any special treatment. They simply need access to the same opportunities and services as others.
A small percentage of migrants may need special support, due to their vulnerabilities and difficult past experiences, but this is normal in any population. For some migrants it may be more difficult to establish social interactions from scratch, which can be aggravated by stigma and prejudices. In some cases, they may need to learn a new language and to conform to different values.
These challenges may affect migrants’ identity, self-esteem and wellbeing. That’s why comprehensive psychosocial support can be as important as the ability to satisfy basic needs to the integration of migrants.
The main problem may be that while safe and productive migration paths coexist with less safe and vulnerable paths, the latter paths monopolizes the political and social discussions on migration. Migrants are usually considered vulnerable and a possible burden on the social assistance systems, even a security threat. As a consequence, negative and biased public and political views on migration affect the dignity of migrants, their and our emotions, and intercultural relationships globally.
We need to focus on migrants as individuals with their own human value at the center of the narratives, policies, services and interactions. It’s about communication, acceptance of cultural diversity, avoidance of stereotyping and fake categorizations.
We need to focus on migrants as individuals with their own human value at the center of the narratives, policies, services and interactions.
Connect: How can AFS and other global citizens support the integration of refugees in our communities?
Refugees do not leave their countries voluntarily. Instead, they are forced to do so by the circumstances. In all assessments done about their intentions for the future, Syrian refugees consistently report that their hope is to go back to their country as soon as the situation allows them to do so. Now, the circumstances that oblige refugees to leave their countries, sometimes for decades, are often a local manifestation of global geopolitical inequalities, compromises and unethical decisions.
As global citizens working towards peace we should scrutinize and criticize the very global and geopolitical root causes and contradictions that force refugees to leave their countries: the real reasons for certain wars; the global roots of some conflicts; the interest of my own country in these conflicts; environmental policies that affect competition for resources; the international weapons trade that feeds conflicts that make refugees to travel to my country.
Be welcoming to refugees, looking at their diversity as a value and enrichment and not as a threat.
Being welcoming to refugees is a legal obligation for the states and a human must for all of us. All global citizens should be informed about the real facts that brought refugees to our communities and share this knowledge with others, helping to fight misinformation, misperceptions and stigma. Be welcoming to refugees, looking at their diversity as a value and enrichment and not as a threat.
Do not consider refugees as a risk to be managed, but as a possibility of growth for our neighborhoods. Do not consider refugees only for their suffering and problems, but also for their resources and strengths. Break the cycle of stigmatization in our own environments. Create occasions for exchanges and participation. This is for all of us.
Experiences from the Master program “Psychosocial Support and Dialogue” for Syrians and Lebanese working with their peers displaced within Syria and in Lebanon
Those who want to get more involved and help directly as volunteers at the borders, shores, and refugee centers are welcome to do so. Volunteers help refugees to feel heard and welcomed. Working directly with refugees at this point helps them bond in a difficult point of their life. However, you should follow certain guidelines to be effective and make a real contribution. Guidelines outlined by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Network (MHPSS.net) with the contribution and endorsement of 13 other agencies provide advice on protecting and supporting the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants.
Schools should be open for information campaigns, orientations, preventative healthcare for both students and their parents.
Connect: What can schools and educators do to help students and families adapt and integrate in new cultures and countries?
The role of schools and educators is fundamental in helping migrant students and their families to integrate in a new context for many reasons. Education is very important for the successful integration of those who migrated and schools are often the only point of contact between some migrant families and the institutions or different forms of social support.
Schools and educators need to be knowledgeable about cultural diversity and of how to manage cultural diversity in a pedagogical manner. They must include the contribution of migrants, migrant stories and migrants’ cultural products in their programs, allowing migration into the official cultural canon of the country, which can be beneficial to both the migrant and the host children for generations to come.
Pedagogues need to be aware of the fact that migrant children come from different school systems and they need time and special attention to adapt to the new ones. Teachers need to be aware of the integrational role they play, and schools should be open for information campaigns, orientations, preventative healthcare for both students and their parents. In addition, teachers should be prepared to support children whose cognitive functions and school results suffer due to high levels of distress.
Conflicts are an essential part of growing up, but they need to be managed in a positive way. Teachers who are knowledgeable of conflict mediation and transformation techniques are more likely to be able to help the integration of migrants.
Many would think that it is unrealistic for a teacher to do all of the above. Yet many teachers do it in their everyday work, intuitively or intentionally. It is essential that these competencies and activities are part of the educational national curricula and that the teachers’ competences and efforts are included into wider national policies and procedures linked to cultural diversity and integration.
Bringing refugees and their adopted communities together through intercultural learning
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Václav Havel fundraiser sends bells around the world on a journey of remembrance and gratitude
Foundation Charter 77 has started raising money for a bell to honour the late president Václav Havel on the fifth anniversary of his death in December of this year. The Bell for Havel project will send thirty small bells around the world bearing a message of remembrance and gratitude. They will eventually return to Prague to be sold in an auction. The money raised, together with contributions from individuals, will be used to cast a bell named Václav which will be placed at the Church of St. Havel in downtown Prague. I asked Evžen Hart from Foundation Charter 77 to tell me how the fund raiser will work.
New York to mark late president's 80th birthday with "Václav Havel Day"
The mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, is to declare September 28 to be “Václav Havel Day”, according to the Czech Consulate in the American city. Numerous events are to surround the roughly three-day commemoration, including performances of Havel’s plays and the unveiling of a bust of the late Czech president.
My Prague – Václav Havelka
Václav Havelka leads the guitar band Please the Trees, whose fourth LP Carp picked up the prestigious Apollo prize for Czech LP of 2015. The Krkonoše-born singer and songwriter also collaborates with lots of other musicians and regularly promotes concerts by major independent artists. Our tour of “Václav Havelka’s Prague” begins in a passageway between the streets Spálená and Opatovická that many residents probably have no idea exists. It’s home to Super Tramp Coffee, a newish café with wonderfully peaceful outdoor seating.
Václav Havel airport flies high with record passenger figures
Prague's Václav Havel Airport handled a record number of passengers last year. The airport registered over 12 million arrivals and departures, an increase by 7.9 percent compared to 2014 and the highest increase in the past decade. The numbers are expected to increase even further this year with the introduction of new regular long-distance flights. Ruth Fraňková has more.
Václav Havel Human Rights Prize 2015 awarded to Russian activist Ludmilla Alexeeva
The third Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, which honours outstanding civil society action in defence of human rights, has been awarded to veteran Russian human rights defender Ludmilla Alexeeva. The €60,000 prize was presented to her in person at a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
Václav Havel through the lens of Jiří Jírů
An exhibition called “Václav Havel through the lens of Jiří Jírů” has just opened at the Czech centre in Prague. It offers a selection of photographs of Václav Havel taken by his personal photographer during his first term in office as Czech president. At the exhibition I talked to Jiří Jírů about some of the photographs on display and how he had come to work for Vaclav Havel.
Václav Havel Fellowship programme helps young journalists from post-Soviet bloc states
The Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellowship was founded in 2011 by the Czech Foreign Ministry, Radio Free Europe and Vize 97 -the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundation, with the aim of advancing and promoting media freedom in the post-communist world. Fellows are selected from the RFE’s broadcast region where media freedom is stifled and independent journalists often work at risk. The selected journalists spend several months at RFE where they receive on-the-job training from seasoned professionals.
25 years since Václav Havel elected Czechoslovak president
25 years ago today, the dissident playwright Václav Havel became the first non-communist president of Czechoslovakia since 1948. Back then, Edvard Beneš had resigned from office in the midst of a communist putsch led by Klement Gottwald. 41 years later, the communists would vote to destroy their own monopoly on power.
Czechs mark third anniversary of Vaclav Havel’s death with mixed feelings
On Thursday, December 18th, Czechs are marking the third anniversary of the death of Vaclav Havel, the legend of the Velvet Revolution and the country’s first post-communist president. Commemorative events are taking place in different parts of the country, but some critics point out that three years after his departure, the Czech Republic has strayed far from Vaclav Havel’s philosophy and ideals.
Václav Havel to get unique honour of bust at Irish Parliament
A specially-commissioned bust of the late Czech president Václav Havel is set to be unveiled at Ireland’s parliament, the Dáil, in March next year. The man behind the idea is Bill Shipsey, founder of Art for Amnesty and also one of the initiators of the international Havel’s Place series of memorial spots. On the line to Dublin, I asked Mr. Shipsey where the idea for the bust had come from.
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University ›
Former dean, 'green' pioneer dies in hiking accident at 60
Kent Butler
Pliny Fisk III
School of Architecture Kent
UT associate dean
Published on May 17, 2011 at 1:48 pm
By Huma Munir
UT associate dean of the School of Architecture Kent Butler died last week after slipping on a trail while hiking with his two daughters in Yosemite National Park in California, according to a press release.
Butler was 60 years old and had worked at UT since 1978. According to the University's website, Butler was involved in research programs in water resources, environmental and land use planning. Over the years, Butler's efforts included a $3 million grant for urban and environmental development, according to the website.
"He was so integral to the school for so long, and the loss is so sudden, that we are still trying to cope with the loss," said Fritz Steiner, dean of the School of Architecture, in a press release.
Butler was involved in the preservation of land for more than two dozen endangered species in central Texas, Steiner said in the press release.
Pliny Fisk III, co- director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, said Butler worked to preserve ecological balance and he was also one of the first people to work on "going green" efforts in the country.
"He was a very valuable member of this team to keep ecological planning and architecture going in our region," Fisk said.
Fisk said Butler was not only extremely knowledgeable but also one of the most courteous people he knew.
"He was immediately receptive to people and ideas and [was] willing to work at the scale that is necessary for change to happen in the future of environment in Texas," Fisk said.
He said Butler was a wonderful colleague and he will surely be missed.
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Dark Horizons
Jennifer Garner for “Daredevil”
Monday, February 3rd 2003 2:00 am
Golden Globe winner Jennifer Garner, who hits the big screen as comic book heroine Elektra Natchios in Daredevil, admits that she was never much of a comic book fan. Until she was cast opposite Ben Affleck in the latest film adaptation of yet another popular Marvel comic.
The beautiful and athletic 29-year old actress, who rose to fame in the television hit Alias, admits that as one of three girls in her family, “I followed The Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon.” Now, however, she has become an ardent fan of this strange world of comic books. “I wish that I had read Electra when I was growing up because I think she’s a very empowering young woman.”
Born out of Marvel’s original 1964 comic book, the film adaptation casts Ben Affleck as blind attorney, Matt Murdock, who transforms himself into the vengeful Daredevil by night, a caped vigilante figure with heightened senses. He meets his match, love wise, with the alluring Elektra. Asked whether making Daredevil brings out a childhood fantasy within, the actress smiles before conceding that “I didn’t realize that I had the fantasy before I did it, but there were times when I’d be losing the hair at night, taking out the green contacts, losing the great clothes, putting on my sweats and just feeling like, “Oh, I like her better.'”
The actress further admits that “She’s cooler than I am to the point where I want to stay her.” It’s an intricate challenge bringing a comic book character to life. Not to mention a little daunting “because first of all you have all of these comic books to draw from, from which to build a character. You also have all of these fans that think of this character in a specific way before you ever say one word and there is a weight of the responsibility of that. Then at the same time, it’s a comic book character so you can go anywhere with it. It can be as big as you want or as real as you want or as crazy as you want so it took a little while to find our way, but it was great to start with the physicality of it.” Not only the way Garner’s Elektra looked on screen, but handling the character’s unique weapon, a deadly looking three prong Japanese sword. “That’s the first thing that really made me feel like Electra, because she’s so brutal. You can really hurt yourself with that.”
In both Daredevil and Alias, Garner comes across as one tough woman, but she doesn’t necessarily see herself as tough off screen. “I see myself as a strong person, but I’m not tough in any way, shape or form and I am not violent,” she says laughingly. “I can’t even watch violence, though now I can watch a fight scene with a little bit more interest than I could before because I like to see if it was a good reaction, or a nice kick.” One wonders whether the actress is longing to escape from these physically demanding projects into something softer and gentler. After a slight pause, Garner says that she is not worried about it. “I love this physical stuff which is why I wanted to do Daredevil because I wanted to learn what Daredevil could teach me. On Alias, I learn a fight and do it immediately the next day and just try to get better as we’re working on that scene. I don’t have time to really train so I wanted the training that I knew Daredevil would give me.”
Garner has come a long way from her birthplace of Houston, Texas. Raised in Charleston, West Virginia, by her mother, a retired English teacher, and her father, a former chemical engineer, Jennifer was the middle sibling of three girls. She spent nine years of her adolescence studying ballet, being driven by a love of the stage. Jennifer took this determination with her when she enrolled at Denison University as a chemistry major, before changing to drama. New York attracted the young actress after college where she worked as a hostess while pursuing a career in film and television. After moving to Los Angeles, she scored a role in “Felicity” where she met her future husband, Scott Foley.
Garner says that one of the reasons she married Foley, currently in a new TV comedy series A.U.S.A, was because of his sense of humour. Or more specifically, “because he’s such a dork and so ridiculously goofy.” Adding that “he’s funny in a way to me that Tom Hanks is funny. He can be totally over the top and do this great physical comedy, but he also has a way of bringing it down to earth and making it very real like he just plays kind of a straight baffled guy so well.” The couple, who just moved into a smaller house, share a similar sense of humour “except he will beat a joke into the ground to the point where I would tell him: If you try that on me one more time, I mean, I stopped laughing six months ago, so please stop.”
The marriage is still going strong, insists Garner, despite the pair’s hectic and divergent schedules. “We don’t have a ton of time together, but we know that that is what this point in our life is all about and he’s still the one I want to be with when I do have time, so we make it happen whenever we can. For example, the cast went out to dinner last night and I said I’m so sorry guys, but I have a date. I went home to be with him.”
Garner may not have expected to find success through Alias, but the series, not to mention Garner’s Golden Globe win last year, has elevated her status. “I’m really glad that the show is critically acclaimed and that it’s doing well,” she says when discussing how she deals with this new fame status. “I love that job more than anything in the world but as far as fame is concerned, it hasn’t really hit me yet and not to sound naive about it, I know that there’s awareness about me. I know that I am on the cover of a magazine right now and that’s fine, but I’m at work so much of the time that I don’t live my own normal life, so I don’t see it. Normally I would have been watching Extra, Access Hollywood, or ET and seen kind of what was happening. Now I may do the interviews, but I never see them, so I’ve kind of got my head down and I’m doing my job.”
No wonder she doesn’t have to reflect on life after Alias. “To be honest, right now it’s still so consuming just getting every single episode out. It still takes up so many just pure man hours on my part that I don’t spend a lot of time speculating about when Alias is over. I’m trying to just enjoy it while it’s here and prepare for the future during the summers and with things like Catch Me If You Can and whatever small roles I can do on the side. I’m thrilled to be given roles right now in a way that I never have been before. After all, I’ve been out there auditioning for a long time.”
But Jennifer is not without her dreams and ambitions. She is very keen on the idea of an Alias feature film, and if she could pick her dream project, that’s a no-brainer. “The one time I’ve had real envy of someone else’s career, is with these musicals. I grew up singing and dancing and I can hardly stand it, so I would stick myself smack in the middle of one of these musicals and spend a year instead of kicking and turning my foot in and making it ugly, would go back to what I would know how to do.”
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SnyderCut Billboards Spotted At Comic Con
Garth Franklin - Wednesday, July 17th 2019 5:46 am
Coster-Waldau Fine With “Thrones” Criticism
Kirby Is All For Those Catwoman Rumors
Trailer: J-Lo vs. Wall Street Crims In “Hustlers”
Zimmer On Picking “Dune” Over Nolan’s Next
Garth Franklin - Tuesday, July 16th 2019 3:44 pm
“Joker,” “Ad Astra” Target Venice Premieres
Cambridge Analytica Scandal Film Planned
Apple Nabs Mackie, Hoult, Jackson-Led “Banker”
“Just Mercy” Dated, “Sesame Street” Delayed
Harry Styles In Talks For Disney’s “Little Mermaid”
Garth Franklin - Tuesday, July 16th 2019 12:56 pm
Trailer: Chris Evans In “Red Sea Diving Resort”
Quick News: Witcher, X-Men, Babylon, Luce
First “Cats” Trailer Coming Friday?
The 2019 Emmy Nominations Announced
Malcolm D. Lee Takes Over “Space Jam 2”
Garth Franklin - Tuesday, July 16th 2019 11:55 am
Final Trailer: “The Kitchen”
Taika Waititi Helms “Thor 4” As “Akira” Stalls
Hamilton Talks Her “Terminator” Return Prep
Garth Franklin - Tuesday, July 16th 2019 5:07 am
“Spider-Man” Rumor, Cameo & Lamentation Talk
U.S. Media Subscription Spend Hits $26B In 2019
“Thrones” Author On The Problem Of Fandom
Marvel Announces “We Love You 3000” Tour
Analysts Concerned About 2020 Box-Office
“Power Rangers” & “Ninja Turtles” Team In Comic
Netflix Edits “13 Reasons Why” Suicide Scene
© 1997-2019, Dark Futures Pty. Limited. All Rights Reserved.
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HMCS Ottawa Tests Torpedo Readiness Against US Navy Subs
(Source: Royal Canadian Navy; issued March 26, 2019)
HMCS Ottawa has returned to Esquimalt after conducting torpedo readiness training with vessels of the United States Navy (USN) and supporting Operation Projection.
The Halifax-class frigate and its crew of 220 completed a month-long deployment on March 4 that included participation in a USN Submarine Commander’s Course (SCC), February 20 to 22, off the coast of Hawaii.
Ottawa sailed to Hawaii February 6 with HMCS Regina and Naval Replenishment Unit (NRU) Asterix. During their transit to Pearl Harbor, Ottawa served as the command platform for the initial task group under the leadership of Canadian Fleet Pacific Commanding Officer, Commodore Angus Topshee.
In Hawaii, they supported Regina’s and Asterix’s Operation Projection mission by working with partner navies and conducting key leadership engagements to enhance military cooperation and partnerships in support of Canada’s diplomatic efforts in the Asia-Pacific region.
Before taking part in the Submarine Commander’s Course, Ottawa was required to complete a Torpedo Readiness Inspection under the guidance of Sea Training Pacific (ST(P)). While on board, ST(P) staff helped the ship’s crew fulfil its Assisted Ship Readiness Training that included internal emergency response to fires and floods.
“With the help of Sea Training Pacific, Ottawa’s crew sharpened their skills and learned critical lessons that will be valuable moving forward, and I am proud of our capable and competent crew,” said Lieutenant Commander Tyson Bergmann, HMCS Ottawa’s Executive Officer.
The USN Submarine Commander’s Course saw Ottawa engage in exchange of unarmed torpedo fire between the ship and USN submarines. The torpedoes fired by Ottawa allowed the ship to conduct real-world training safely with other units as these torpedoes did not contain a payload and were unarmed.
“Ottawa was part of the combined task force designated to detect, track and engage U.S. submarines who were attempting to do the same to the surface ships involved,” said Sub-Lieutenant Matthew Mooney, one of Ottawa’s Bridge Watchkeepers.
“The anti-submarine warfare team did an outstanding job detecting and prosecuting the submarines and together, with the help of our USN counterparts, Ottawa was able to conduct two successful torpedo firings.”
Three USN submarines and a pair of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers - USS Wayne E. Myer and USS Michael P. Murphy - were involved along with MH60R Seahawk helicopters and a P3 Orion fixed wing, anti-submarine surveillance aircraft.
LCdr Bergmann rated his crew’s performance as “excellent” and commended them for overcoming the challenges faced in an anti-submarine warfare environment.
While deployed, the ship’s company hosted a video game tournament in its hangar to support the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre, the ship’s namesake city. Together with a 50/50 draw, $2,000 of support was raised for the centre.
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Atwater man pleads guilty to sexual exploitation of children through social media platforms
Crime, Regional News
http://www.elkgrovenews.net/2019/03/atwater-man-pleads-guilty-to-sexual.html
An Atwater, California man accused of sexual exploitation of children on social media platforms has pleaded guilty to the charges on February 25. Nikko Adolfo Perez, 26, plead guilty sexual exploitation of children, coercion, enticement of a minor, and receipt and distribution of child pornography at U.S. District Court in Fresno.
According to evidence, Perez, using the Instagram screen name captainamerica272018, victimized two boys, ages 8 and 10, in Utah by coercing them to create and send him images of them engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Perez offered to pay the boys with Google Play credits if they engaged in requested sexual acts or poses, and when one of the victims said he would call 911, Perez threatened to disseminate the sexually explicit images of the victims and threatened to harm family members of the victims.
Perez admitted in a plea agreement that he also used Skype, Kik, Discord, Snapchat, and LiveMe to communicate with between 50 and 100 minors for the purpose of soliciting sexually explicit images of those minors. In addition, Perez admitted that he persuaded the victims to pose nude or engage in sexually explicit activities, sometimes with other minors and that frequently paid victims to engage in this conduct, and he sent some of the material that he had requested to other people.
Sentencing is scheduled for May 20. Perez faces up to 30 years in prison.
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VFS Edu Support Services partners
with Oxademy to launch world’s first
‘AI-based’ online learning programmes for students
LONDON, Wednesday 19 July 2017: VFS Edu Support Services Pvt. Ltd, the education services arm of VFS Global, today announced a partnership with award-winning UK-based Edtech Oxademy Technologies and its subsidiary Oxademy Business School to form the new global digital learning platform ‘VFS-Oxademy’.
VFS-Oxademy will offer a first-of-its-kind knowledge-driven artificial intelligence (AI) cloud infrastructure called OX360 which identifies each learner’s strengths and weaknesses and generates learning paths based on individual learner’s behaviour, personalising the learning to each individual student.
The new platform is designed to be a response to the limitations of purely online courses, which have suffered from high drop-out rates, due in many cases to the lack of a personalised learning element, the monotony of rote learning, and students feeling isolated compared to education models in which they direct contact with a teacher.
The intuitive system will also provide real-time analysis of their performance data and include features such as a chat facility so that students can speak to tutors direct at any time and a mobile app to prompt students on which course material they need to study ahead of their next online session.
VFS-Oxademy will provide internationally-accredited post-graduate and executive education programmes in full online and ‘blended’ modes – combining online with classroom learning – for aspiring students and professionals from across the globe. Students can simply log on to these universally accessible programmes that will be affiliated with top universities in the UK and US, and benefit from expert tutelage of prominent alumni networks from across the globe.
Some of VFS-Oxademy’s key programmes include Masters in Business Administration (MBA), Masters in Strategic Leadership (MSL), Masters of Science in Organisation Leadership (MSOL), Global Leadership Programme (GLP), Authentic Leadership Development (ALD), Programme for Leadership Development (PLD) and Advanced Management Programme (AMP).
Uniquely, OX360 will allow MBA students to undertake a ‘virtual work placement’ with a blue chip organisation as part of the final stage of their studies, which require that they help solve a real-life business problem. This allows students in the Middle East or India to work with a company in the UK via virtual technologies. This arrangement is often preferred by employers because it means they do not have to find physical space for a work placement student, and also widens the pool from which companies can recruit work placements.
OX360 courses will also address frequently raised concerns over fake qualifications in online courses, where it is sometimes unclear that the person taking the final exam online is the person that actually signed up to the course. VFS Global’s international expertise in identification management and certification has created a system that can give learners, academic institutions and employers confidence that security is watertight. Unusually, VFS-Oxademy students also have to complete a final physical exam where they will have to prove their identity.
Another significant benefit to students is the substantially lower cost of obtaining an accredited qualification through VFS-Oxademy. The ‘study from anywhere, anytime and on any device’ model of education allows students from across the world real-time accessibility to world-class education courses, at a price that is substantially more cost effective. For example, the cost of an MBA course under OX360 will be less than one third of the usual cost.
Oxademy has already partnered with Kazan Federal University, the second oldest in the Volga region and ranked ninth best university in Russia, providing technology and modules towards their MBA, and with Northwood University in the US where it is running its Master of Science in Organisational Leadership.
VFS-Oxademy’s collaborative digital learning platform OX360 is a significant milestone for both entities. VFS Edu Support Services will leverage on its wide geographical network of technology-enabled infrastructure to support the rollout OX360 technology and learning programmes globally. The fundamental objective of this collaboration is to revolutionise education by offering students from across the globe enhanced accessibility to world-class learning through an AI-driven next-gen digital platform.
About Oxademy
Oxademy is a UK-based online education provider offering professional and academic programmes in entrepreneurship, leadership, business and management. Oxademy also boasts an artificial intelligence (AI) driven online digital learning platform that is made available to the education and corporate sectors globally.
Oxademy is an award winning Edtech and consultancy who work with clients from across the globe. The organisation’s value proposition believes in a “Learn, Innovate, Transform”. For more information please visit www.oxademy.com or for the business school www.oxademy.ac.uk
in Features, Resettlement Training
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Edinburgh Plant Science is committed to delivering fundamental and translational research, education and outreach to ensure that new discoveries bring benefits for human health, society and the environment.
Edinburgh Plant Science assembles over 600 plant scientists and social scientists that collectively provide wide-ranging expertise and capability in food security, environmental sustainability and related policy.
Our partners include: University of Edinburgh (UoE), Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (Innogen), Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA), Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), the Forestry Commission (FC) and Heriot-Watt University (HW).
Edinburgh Plant Science provides -
An inter-disciplinary forum that addresses real world problems
Consultancy for industry and policy makers
A route to access innovation and new technologies
Postgraduate training for the next generation of plant researchers
Improved understanding of plant science through education and public outreach
Edinburgh Plant Science has a global reach with partnerships and field stations in over 50 countries
Our leaflets offer a quick guide to EPS. Download PDF
Contact j.fyffe@ed.ac.uk if you would like hardcopies for distribution
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Bullying and Violence in the Schools
Act to Stop Violence and BullyingThis section provides access to additional pages
Government Strategy
Action PlanThis section provides access to additional pages
Resources and Documentation for Schools
Violence in the Schools Newsletter
Support Materials: A Few Examples
HomeSchool Administrators (public and private schools)Bullying and Violence in the SchoolsResources and Documentation for Schools
Since the Action Plan to Prevent and Deal with Violence in the Schools was launched in 2008, several documents have been produced to support and guide school boards and schools in their efforts to provide a healthy and safe environment for students and staff. Training activities, workshops and a variety of tools are available to enable schools to gain an in-depth understanding of violence and its different forms, to empower school teams in the area of student safety and well-being, and to be better able to intervene with victims, witnesses and perpetrators of violent acts.
The school boards have each designated a person who is responsible for implementing the Action Plan in their schools, and most have set up a committee to put a local intervention strategy in place. These are the resource people to contact to obtain support materials.
The tools presented in this section include a checklist (in French only) for principals. This covers the action to take when a bullying situation occurs in their school.
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Dengue prevention in Schools revisited- MoE
The Ministry of Education (MoE) in a fresh effort to minimise the spread of Dengue in schools, will next week launch a programme with new features including a mobile app to keep track of children suspected of having been infected, as more than 30% of those affected by Dengue last year were schoolchildren.
A week- long programme to eliminate Dengue breeding sites gets under way in all schools on April 3, as chances of the disease spreading were high with the intermittent showers received during the past week. Principals are supposed to organise the programmes before the new school term opens as well.
The app has been developed by Mobitel, in collaboration with the MoE, the Ministry of Health, the University of Colombo and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
MoE Health & Nutrition Director Renuka Peiris told Education Times that information regarding the app has been sent to schools.
"It is the principal or a teacher responsible for the task, who will be in charge. They have to update the information if a child suffers from Fever or Dengue, where they will monitor the spread of Dengue," she said.
Ms Peiris said that, according to the requirement, the MoE will be able to alert Public Health Inspectors and the Medical Officer of Health, in addition to the Presidential Task Force and the Armed Forces, for their assistance to prevent the spread of Dengue.
Students' parents too will be able to provide information through schools.
"The objective of the programme is to determine the area affected, as soon as possible, and act accordingly," she said.
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Nearly 700 Skilled Trades Apprentices Find Career Opportunities
The District Detroit is fast becoming a “Michigan Made-Detroit Built” reality that is providing jobs, opportunity and apprenticeships for the community.
The development, which will encompass 50 city blocks with sporting events, shopping, dining and housing, has spurred the creation of more than 670 apprentice and pre-apprentice positions since April 2015. More than half the apprentices are Detroit residents. That means that the $1.2-billion development has helped almost 700 metro Detroit residents begin careers in skilled trades such as ironwork, electrical, plumbing and carpentry.
“With Little Caesars Arena opening in next month and many more projects underway, we’re proud that hundreds of local residents have been set on a path towards new careers with more opportunities to come,” said Christopher Ilitch, President and CEO of Ilitch Holdings, Inc
Additionally, the majority of awarded contracts have gone to Detroit and Michigan-based contractors.
In fact, The District Detroit has awarded more than $445 million in contracts to Detroit-based companies, while Michigan-based companies, including those in Detroit, have received more than $650 million dollars in contracts.
More career prospects will emerge as work continues on the Little Caesars World Headquarters campus expansion and many other projects throughout The District Detroit.
Nicole Stallings, Deputy Director of Workforce Development for the City of Detroit, added that the apprenticeships in particular are preparing residents for careers in the skilled trades.
“With the construction boom the city is continuing to experience, we expect there to be an abundance of opportunities for years to come,” Stallings said.
The District Detroit is one of the largest sports and entertainment developments in the country. Located in the heart of Detroit, this 50-block, mixed-use development led by the Ilitch organization unites eight world-class theaters, five neighborhoods and three professional sports venues in one vibrant, walkable destination for people who want to live, work and play in an exciting urban environment. Home to the Detroit Tigers, Detroit Red Wings, Detroit Pistons and Detroit Lions — The District Detroit represents the greatest density of professional sports teams in one downtown core in the country.
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Listen Up - Antoine and Owena
A look at some of the emerging artists of the acoustic roots & folk circuit
This week we focus on Salisbury based duo Antoine and Owena.
Musical influences
Owena - I was brought up listening to my parents favourite artists such as Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson and Paul Simon. My brother first brought more model folk music into the house after visiting Scotland and returning with an album by Capercallie. This started us searching for other folk musicians and resulted in us going to see live acts at Salisbury Arts Centre. This introduced me to many favourites such as The Oysterband, The Levellers, Show of Hands and Four Men and a Dog.
You may have noticed the common theme of the fiddle in all these bands!
I first learnt to play the violin at school when offered free lessons at primary school. When I was 14, my parents brought me my own violin and the Thomas Hardy book of folk tunes. This was my first step into playing folk.
Antoine - I began playing the family electronic organ when I was 7 years old and then progressed onto the bass guitar when I was 14. I was in various bands of various genres before transferring to the world of folk music. After having played in rock, progressive, and indie groups, I went solo in 2012 and began exploring folk music. I first discovered folk songs through the TV series Sharpe and the work of John Tams, and from there discovered the likes of Kate Rusby, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Show of Hands, Eliza Carthy and various others. I picked up the bouzouki and began writing and playing folk songs from these and many other artists, as well as traditional songs.
Describing our music
A blend of original and traditional material. The original songs draw subject influence from historic events and people, current events and politics, and personal life experiences. Musically, there is a blend of new and old, with Owena's traditional style of fiddle playing and Antoine's more modern styled guitar and bouzouki rhythms. The harmonies add an extra dimension and allow more breadth in the songs. We try and explore different styles and melodies for some traditional songs to make them our own.
Highlights so far
As winners of the Purbeck Valley Folk Festival Award, Purbeck Rising, we enjoyed playing several Folk Festival last summer such as Poole Quay, Bridport, Wimborne, Wessex, and of course returning to Purbeck.
Highlight gigs have been supporting excellent artists such as Eliza & Martin Carthy, Dave Pegg & Anthony John Clarke and Reg Meuross. It is always an honour to share a stage with the experts in the field!
We were asked by the BBC Wiltshire to contribute our vocals to a recording of Keep The Home Fires Burning for the WW1 Centenary in November this year. We were given the honour of singing the opening and closing lines.
We recorded our debut album in May at the famous Real World Studios in Box. This has been selling very well at gigs and festivals.
Having recorded at Real World Studios for our first album, we plan to return in spring 2019 to record our next album. We are currently working on new songs for this venture and are really pleased with the tracks we have written so far including a song about today's struggles for young people trying to get on the housing ladder and a song about Antoine's roots up North, as well as our take on some traditional songs.
We are looking forward to playing at Wimborne and Bridport Folk Festival again this year and are currently accepting slots for other events such as playing support for The Crows at Wessex Acoustic Folk Club.
We plan to travel further a field next year and are in the midst of organising a tour of folk clubs during April.
We plan to release a video of Something out of Nothing alongside our new album so watch this space.
Website - http://www.antoineandowena.co.uk
Sally Free and Easy
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The Best Arguments for Gun Control
1 More Guns Means More Homicides
2 More Guns Also Means More Suicides
3 The Public Too Is Asking for Some Gun Control
4 Take UK as an Example
5 Does A Civilian Need Assault Rifles?
6 Does Banning Guns Save Lives?
7 Shooters Look For Soft Targets
8 Protection
9 Don’t We Have Enough Guns Already?
10 Arming Everyone with Guns Will Not Help
Writeandgetpaid
Before we delve into the arguments for gun control, one must know that there is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind, regarding how Americans love their guns. A little arms survey that was conducted not so long ago showed that for every hundred Americans, there are about 88.9 firearms. This number is higher than the guns that are found in West Bank/Gaza, Pakistan, Mexico and Yemen combined. Well, that is a lot of guns.
There are incidents related to gun violence occurring all over the country, and there are researches which show that owning a gun will not make you that much safe. Check out the following best arguments for gun control.
More Guns Means More Homicides
It is generally considered that arming people with guns will reduce the overall homicide levels in the state or even the country. However, research has shown over and over again, that the increase in the number of guns owned by citizens of a country has gone hand in hand with the increase in homicide levels.
The Brady Bill suggested that the license to own guns must be passed only after doing a complete check on the person. But it has been seen that easy access to the guns, means that when in rage, the person owning a gun will more likely use it.
More Guns Also Means More Suicides
One of the major arguments for gun control is suicide. Considering the kind of lifestyle that we lead, a lot of people are getting depressed and are many of those contemplate committing suicide. Having guns or having easy access to the guns will simply push them over the edge. Instead of getting some help, they will feel that it is easier to simply end life and commit suicide.
Although this may seem a little vague, studies have shown that the states which have a higher number of guns owned by its citizens, also has a suicide rate.
But then again when you really think about it, how can we say that they will not commit suicide if they have no guns.
The Public Too Is Asking for Some Gun Control
A very large percentage of Americans want strict gun laws implemented in the country. Hence, it is no wonder that the Brady Bill was passed after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady. Unfortunately Jim Brady was left partially paralyzed.
Ever since then, many people have rallied to make sure that there are laws in place for controlling gun possession. What they are really asking for is that there should be background checks done before placing these guns in the hands of people.
Take UK as an Example
Let us consider UK as an example, to understand these arguments for gun control. After the Dunblane Massacre in UK, people in UK were no longer allowed to possess modern guns. This was done to reduce massacres and murder rates. However, that largely backfired since, with every passing year, the murder rates in UK have increased. Although the homicide rate has lowered considerably after the application of the law, the number of murders has gone up. This is what the gun violence statistics have shown.
You can ban guns, but murderers always find a way to kill their victims. So, if we have learnt anything from UK, it is that banning guns doesn’t really help.
Does A Civilian Need Assault Rifles?
The second amendment was put down in order to allow every citizen to protect himself against burglars, and maybe a military invasion by another country. While the latter seems planning a little too far, the former is something that can be considered. People do need guns to protect themselves, but do they really need assault rifles? A lot of people seem to think, that it may not be required. This is one of the strongest arguments for gun control.
Does Banning Guns Save Lives?
People have always said how banning guns can help in saving lives. Well, this worked in Australia. In the year 1996, thirty five people were killed in a massacre in Port Arthur in Australia. It was one of the most gruesome and depressing gun violence incidents in the country.
The then Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard immediately clamped down on the ownership of guns and several weapons were destroyed. Ever since, the homicides and killings have reduced drastically in Australia, to the point where the number of massacres per decade has reduced to zero. We may have something to learn from here, possibly one of the best arguments for gun control.
Shooters Look For Soft Targets
Killers who go on a rampage, have just one thing in mind, they want to kill as many people as possible. A lot of them end up killing themselves at the end. Gun violence statistics have shown that these killers look for soft targets, where they know that people will not be armed, and hence, they can kill many people. These places can include schools, churches, malls or any such place. If the killers knew that every person in the church was armed, or that there were guards in school who possessed automatic weapons, then they would think twice before entering its premises.
Another major arguments for gun control placed by the people, is the fact that they would like to protect themselves with the arms that they own. In these days and times, a lot of us do not feel safe in our own homes or offices. There is a constant threat for our lives looming all over us. One may never know when a massacre may break out and he/she may be attacked.
In such situations, owning a gun will give the person a fighting chance for survival. Not only will the person possessing a gun save their own life, but also save everyone else’s. Everyone has a right to protect themselves, and hence, a lot of people argue that possessing a gun must be allowed.
Don’t We Have Enough Guns Already?
One of the most common arguments for gun control is reading the number of guns that are already available in the country. As mention in the very beginning, the number of guns present in United States alone, is higher than those present in a number of countries combined. When we look at the number of people possessing guns, in a country, then US is at the top of list. This list does not consider just the developed countries of the world, but the entire world.
Those countries which have terrorists in them or are overrun by the drug cartels too possess lesser number of arms as compared to the US. The country as a whole may have failed when a person sees a need to arm himself/herself. Considering that all the massacres and murders have lowered a life expectancy of a person by less than 50 years, we should think about slowing down. Is this one of the best arguments for gun control?
Arming Everyone with Guns Will Not Help
We can always think that if every single person is armed to their teeth, then a mass shooter will not stand a chance. Besides, we have the right to bear arms. However, on the contrary, there are very few instances where an armed civilian has managed to help subdue a killer. Although the citizens owning a gun may be great down at the range, they may not always fare so well in a real life situation. This may be because they have received absolutely no experience regarding handling these kinds of situations. So, even if they do possess guns, chances are that they may be absolutely useless in out of control situations.
Age:29 Writer
I am someone who loves to write. I am working as a writer for the past 5 years. Joined this site so I can share my a...
I am someone who loves to write. I am working as a writer for the past 5 years. Joined this site so I can share my articles with people.
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The Irony of Ash Clouds, Cisco and Tandberg
Any doubt that telepresence is a vital element of an organization's repertoire of communications tools ended this week. The first sign of approval was from Cisco, which closed its acquisition of Tandberg. The second was from Mother Nature, which grounded much of the world's air traffic.
By Carl Weinschenk | Posted Apr 20, 2010
If executives had planned to get together in San Jose or Oslo for a signing ceremony commemorating the finalization of Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg, the giant ash cloud emanating from Iceland probably would have caused the trip to be cancelled.
It is ironic that such an event, albeit an imaginary one, can be used to illustrate one of the strongest rationales for the growth of teleconferencing, which often is a key element of a unified communications infrastructure.
In any case, it's a landmark deal for the telepresence sector. CNET reports that Cisco now has 91.1 percent control of Tandberg, and is moving to acquire the rest. Fredrik Halvorsen, formerly Tandberg's CEO, will become the head of Cisco's TelePresence Group.
That the deal closed is no surprise. The real news of the week, of course, is the ash cloud. Video conferencing and teleconferencing clearly have gained, though vendors and service providers should be careful not to appear to be gloating. Service provider Regus said that its UK and mainland Europe business demand hit an all-time high on Friday, April 16. The firm says travelers in Aberdeen, Manchester, Edinburgh and at Gatwick and Heathrow airports in the UK exhibited the highest demand, and that it anticipates similar demand until the crisis resolves itself.
Once the ash starts flowing, it's not surprising that a service such as Regus would see a huge spike. The organizations that win are those that understand the need for telepresence, video conferencing and associated UC infrastructure when the skies are blue. They also understand that while telepresence and video conferencing clearly can exist outside a UC framework, it makes more sense to create a full infrastructure capable of enabling the tools to be as efficient as possible.
The cloud of ash eventually will dissipate. Just as certainly, other emergencies will occur. The energy that Cisco is giving to the telepresence sector by marrying its traditionally higher-end products with the more cost-efficient Tandberg line – and the competitive responses of competitors – clearly will benefit the business community the next time a mountain explodes.
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Ivy League a cappella group cuts Disney song
Updated Dec 05 2018 01:48PM EST
PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) — An all-male a cappella group at Ivy League university has pulled a Disney movie song from its act following a student newspaper column that suggested the song's lyrics helped promote "toxic masculinity."
The Princeton University Tigertones have performed "Kiss the Girl," a song from "The Little Mermaid," for years. " During the performances, a female audience member would be brought onstage to decide whether or not a man from the crowd could kiss her.
Noa Wollstein, who wrote the column, claimed the song's message is misogynistic and that too many women have been pulled on stage for unwanted encounters.
In a response published in the newspaper, the Tigertones president apologized to anyone made uncomfortable by the tradition. He said the group won't perform the song until it can find a way to do so without offending any audience members.
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10 of the Top Music Schools in the World
Posted on December 11, 2016 January 11, 2017 | By Bylinegramer87
Home>music>10 of the Top Music Schools in the World
Music schools around the world continue to be a haven for students wishing to learn and hone their talents and skills. But there are some that stand out above the rest. Exemplary programs, first-rate facilities, illustrious professors and faculty members, and notable alumni are just among the many top reasons why the best ones attract the finest talents across the globe. Here are ten of the most prestigious music schools in the world in alphabetical order along with the list of some of their famous graduates.
Location: New York, New York, USA
Notable Alumni: Albert Stern, Barry Manilow, Bob Berg, Gilbert Levine, Harold Blair, Helen Armstrong, Hideko Udagawa, Jeffrey Swann, Jenny Oaks Baker, Lera Auerbach, Michael Balzary, Philip Glass, Stephanie Mills, Susan Alexander-Max, Yo-Yo Ma, and a lot more
Manhatttan School of Music
Location: New York City, New York, USA
Notable Alumni: Anton Coppola, Beth Clayton, Carol Wincenc, Carolyn Banham, David Amram, Elizabeth Burkhardt, Evangeline Benedetti, Gail Archer, Guy Braunstein, Jorge Caballero, Justin Bischof, Kate Aldrich, Ned Barth, and more
Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Notable Alumni: Alan Hovhaness, Alan Pasqua, Anton Fig, Bernie Worrell, Bruce Katz, Cecil Taylor Excelsa Quartet, Cuong Vu, Dave Douglas, Fats Pichon, Fred Hersch, Harvey Mason, John Medeski, Kenneth Amis, Luciana Souza, Marilyn Crispell, Matt Savage, Matthew Shipp, Rachel Z, Ralph Burns, Regina Carter, Werner Janssen, and more
Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College
Location: Oberlin, Ohio, USA
Notable Alumni: Al Haig, Benjamin Bagby, Carrie Rodriguez, Claire Chase, James David Christie, Liz Phair, Peter Evans, and Stanley Cowell among many others
Location: Marylebone, London, UK
Notable Alumni: Andrew Foster-Williams, Annie Lennox, Arthur Sullivan, Edward Gardner, Edward German, Evelyn Glennie, Harrison Birtwistle, Henry Wood, John Barbirolli, John Dankworth, Kit Armstrong, Lesley Garrett, Michael Nyman, Myra Hess, Philip Howard, Richard Rodney Bennett, Simon Andrews, Simon Rattle, Thomas Gould, and more
Location: Kensington, London, UK
Notable Alumni: Andrew Davis, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Benjamin Britten, Colin Davis, Gillian Weir, Gustav Holst, Gwyneth Jones, Isyana Sarasvati, James Galway, Joan Sutherland, John Lill, Julian Lloyd Webber, Malcolm Arnold, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sarah Connolly, Sarah Walker, Thomas Allen, and more
Location: Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Notable Alumni: Anush Hovhannisyan, C Duncan, Jay Capperauld, John Maxwell Geddes, Karen Cargill, Kirstin Sharpin, Lucy Kay, Patrick Doyle, Paul Leonard-Morgan, and The Huggans among several others
University of Music and Performing Arts
Notable Alumni: Angelika Kirchschlager, Claudio Abbado, Fritz Kreisler, George Enescu, Gustav Mahler, Hans Richter, Joseph Joachim, Karl Goldmark, Kurt Schwertsik, Max Steiner, Mitsuko Uchida, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Wolfgang Holzmair, and more
Visva-Bharati University
Location: Santiniketan, Bengal, India
Notable Alumni: Ghani Khan, Nilima Sen, Rezwana Chowdhury, Satyajit Ray, and Suchitra Mitra among many others
Location: New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Notable Alumni: Christine Gangelhoff, Daniel Asia, David Lang, Dmitry Yablonsky, Emma Lou Diemer, Jahja Ling, Marco Beltrami, Suzana Bartal, Willie Ruff, and more
Next PostNext Post Some Of The Best Music Festivals In Europe
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Bronx's Arthur Avenue: The Biggest Little Italy
Addeo's Bakery
Arthur Avenue is the heart of the Bronx's Little Italy, its epicenter being at Arthur Avenue and 187th Street in the Belmont-Fordham neighborhood of New York City--and even going a bit beyond to Prospect Avenue. Although not as Italian in terms of the local residents as in years past, it is a haven for all sorts of Italian restaurants and many types of purveyors of Italian specialty foods. The lively, tight streets are lined with delis, bakeries, fish markets, green grocers, cookwares, butchers, cheese shops and more. This is not a tourist trap, as is the "Little Italy" in downtown Manhattan. This is the real deal.
Arthur Avenue was named after President Chester A. Arthur in the 1800s. Many Italians settled in the neighborhood while being employed to build build the Bronx Zoo. Once the word got out about how nice the neighborhood was (more like the country than down on the Lower East Side) and with the added convenience of the recently built Third Avenue elevated train ("The El"), Italian immigrants from lower Manhattan migrated north, swelling the Italian population of the neighborhood to 100,000 in the early 1900s.
Calabria Pork Store
Gino's Pastry Shop
Biancardi Meats
You'll recognize names of the rich and famous who grew up in Bronx's Little Italy: actor Chazz Palminteri, rock idol and blues singer star Dion (DiMucci) whose group's name, Dion and the Belmonts, refers to Belmont Avenue. Joe Pesci was discovered here by Robert DeNiro while working at a local neighborhood restaurant. The film A Bronx Tale was filmed here.... so was the 1955 film Marty (Hey, Marty, so... whatya wanna do?" "I dunnu, Ange... whatya wanna do?"). Tha character Marty even worked in a meat market on Arthur Avenue.
There are special events held in the neighborhood that are well worth attending. One is the “Dancing of the Giglio” and the Feast of St. Anthony. This ancient tradition originated in Nola, Italy in 409 A.D. and is still celebrated today. The giglio is a custom, hand-made wooden structure, measuring 50 feet high and weighing several tons. It takes over 100 paranza (lifers) to hoist this enormous structure up on their shoulders as they carry it through the streets while performing various ritual maneuvers. The Feast of St. Anthony is held in early June every year and features live music, carnival games, rides, and fantastic Italian food.
Mike's Italian Deli
Joe's Italian Deli
And although Ferragosto (the end of summer holiday and celebration) in Italy is in August (Agosto), in the Bronx, they celebrate in early September. It's another chance to feast on Italian delicacies and enjoy the festive atmosphere of Arthur Avenue.
Cosenza's Fish Market
Vincent's Meats
Zero Otto Nove
Calandra Cheese Shop
Casa Della Mozzarella
Randazzo's Fish Market
Terranova Bakery
Delilo Pastries
Teitel Brothers
Mike's Deli
Arthur Avenue Market
While on Arthur Avenue, don't forget to walk through the Arthur Avenue Market, an indoor market with a dozen or so vendors, purveyors and green grocers. Then after you're done buying your cheese, fish, meats and deli specialties, take in a dinner at one of the many Italian restaurants... the offerings here are authentic and far better than the cheap tourist menus in downtown Manhattan's Little Italy. Personally, I'd recommend Emilia's Restaurant. Try their brasciole!
Use the interactive map below to find your way around the neighborhood.
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Ninja Web Games
Hong Kong Ninja
Hong Kong Ninja Game
Hong Kong Ninja Game Online - Play Free Miniclip Ninja Games
Do you like ninjas, dream about going to Hong Kong, and do you also like play Miniclip games online? If you are in the same mood as us today, you probably would like to play the free Hong Kong Ninja game. This is an excellent beat-em-up arcade game which you can play for free online. Your task is to fight your way through the streets of Hong Kong. Have Fun!
Your screen is to small to play this free online game.
How to play Hong Kong Ninja game online
Use WASD to move, J to attack / pick-up, K to jump, L for strong attack, and JK for special attack.
Hong Kong Ninja is a free online game from Miniclip
Miniclip develops, publishes and distributes free online and mobile games, through the website and via app stores for mobile devices, with new games for you to play every week. Miniclip was founded in 2001, and is privately owned and privately funded, with an expanding multi-national workforce distributed across ten offices in six countries. Everyone in the Miniclip team, wherever they are around the globe, shares the Miniclip ethos of innovation and creativity in all they do whilst of course always having fun!
Hong Kong is one of the two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China, the other being Macau. It is situated on China's south coast and, enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is known for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour. With a land mass of 1,104 km2 (426 sq mi) and a population of seven million people, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.[8] Hong Kong's population is 93.6% ethnic Chinese and 6.4 percent from other groups. Hong Kong's Cantonese-speaking majority originate mainly from the neighbouring Canton (now Guangdong) province, from which many of them fled to escape wars and Communist rule in the 1930s to the 1960s. As one of the world's leading international financial centres, Hong Kong has a major capitalist service economy characterised by low taxation and free trade. The currency, Hong Kong dollar, is the eighth most traded currency in the world as of 2010. Hong Kong was once described by Milton Friedman as the world's greatest experiment in laissez-faire capitalism, but has since instituted a regime of regulations including a minimum wage.[133] It maintains a highly developed capitalist economy, ranked the freest in the world by the Index of Economic Freedom every year since 1995. It is an important centre for international finance and trade, with one of the greatest concentrations of corporate headquarters in the Asia-Pacific region, and is known as one of the Four Asian Tigers for its high growth rates and rapid development from the 1960s to the 1990s. Between 1961 and 1997 Hong Kong's gross domestic product grew 180 times while per-capita GDP increased 87 times over. Hong Kong's transportation network is highly developed. Over 90% of daily travels (11 million) are on public transport, the highest such percentage in the world.
Redneck Pets
Mimelet Game
Gladiator Arena
Bit Shift
Hip Hop Don't Stop
Candy and Clyde
Plunge for Points
Baseball Challenge
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The World's Fastest Indian meets The World's Fastest Triumph
Burt Munro (1899-1978), the slightly eccentric motorcycle racer from Invercargill, New Zealand, was one of the most likeable guys to ever grace Bonneville. Starting in 1962, at the age of 62, Munro visited the famed Salt Flats for another ten years, and in the process he set several world records and became a legend. Forever upgrading his 1920 Indian Motorcycle, which he bought new in 1920, he would often forge his own pistons, grind his own components and hammer out the forms for his streamliner known as the Munro Special, Number 35, until nearly every part was his own creation. His accomplishments as a motorcycle racer are far too numerous to get into in these pages, so here's just a glimpse of a few of the interactions between The World's Fastest Indian and The World's Fastest Triumph.
By 1965, Munro had befriended the Gyronaut's team of Alex Tremulis, Bob Leppan and Jim Bruflodt. Often pitting side-by-side and sharing tools, knowledge, and manpower, they quickly found they had similar interests in coaxing the most out of their rides. But the friendship forged was much greater than the expanse of salt they raced upon. Munro would meet up with Tremulis upon his arrival to the States, stay over at Tremulis' apartment in Ventura, and work on improving his bike on the same balcony that Tremulis often shared with countless other legends in the automotive and land speed circles.
The following photographs are all from the camera of Alex Tremulis with some clicks by his wife, Chrissie. They provide a more personal view into the life of one of land racings' most colorful characters, both on and off the salt. If you get the chance, be sure to check out World's Fastest Indian, a full-length feature film starring Tony Hopkins as Burt Munro. You won't be disappointed and with Bonneville's Speed Week just around the corner, you may even catch that same salt fever that keeps racers returning year after year in pursuit of their own dreams of being the world's fastest.
August 1965, Bonneville Speed Week: The Munro Special pitted next to the Gyronaut. It's old versus new as nearly every piece on the Munro Special was hand built by Munro. The Gyronaut, on the other hand, was put together using state-of-the-art technology: Full chromoly chassis tubing welded by the best in the business - the Logghe brothers, Ron and Gene. The twin Triumphs had the best of factory support with the top-of-the-line speed components available. And its body was shaped by long-time streamliner Alex Tremulis and master craftsman Vince Gardner. Both old and new would go on to set new world's records in their respective classes, a testament to and bookends for all the various innovative ways that land speed racers find to go the fastest.
1965: Gyronaut builder and master mechanic, Jim Bruflodt, gets up close and personal with the Munro Special. The battery in the foreground is connected to Munro's engine starter. The hole in the bodywork just above the stabilizing wheel provides access to the 45 year old engine.
Burt Munro getting suited up for a run on the record. To capture a record, two runs must be made over the same mile in opposite directions within one hour. The average speed for the two runs is then recorded as the record speed, assuming it's fast enough. In 1967, Munro averaged a speed of 183.586 miles per hour over the measured mile, a record that still stands to this day.
One of Tremulis' best black-and-whites, this shot just screams "Bad to the Bone" and commands respect for the 65(ish) Munro. With the mountains on the left, it appears Munro is about to begin an assault on the record.
Not only a racer, but obviously a fan of superb craftsmanship, here Burt Munro is seen looking over the exquisite streamliner built and raced by the legendary Bob Herda, next in line for a run towards "Floating Mountain" in the background. Noel Black, builder and driver of the twin hemi-engined streamliner, Motion I, stands in front of Munro by the streamliner's tail.
1965: Burt Munro, probably invited by Tremulis to view the record run attempts by Walt Arfons and the Wingfoot Express. Tremulis consulted for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in exchange for runs for the Gyronaut on private time, where the race course is rented during non-public events. Here Munro chats it up with Bob Leppan (Triumph Detroit T-shirt), Jim Bruflodt (cowboy hat), and another Gyronaut crew member as the Wingfoot Express gets readied.
The cruise ship Oriana sailed between New Zealand, Australia and Los Angeles during the 1960's. Probably during a dinner date on board, Chrissie Tremulis is on the right with what would most likely be a Manhattan in hand, a Tremulis staple. And surely that's Burt's grease-laden thumb holding up the photo of his streamliner. He cleans up well, although you don't see too many photos of Burt Munro in a coat and tie.
Back at the Tremulis' apartment at 275 Kalorama in Ventura, Munro works on his rear tire, apparently shaving it down with a razor blade. Shoe polish appears to be smeared on the plaid shirt rag, a trick he supposedly used to fill and hide the age cracks in his tire from the Bonneville inspectors. The discussions between Tremulis and Munro must have made for some great memories for each of these larger-than-life characters.
"He's a dirty old man, but he's nice with it." is how one woman described him in Roger Donaldson's documentary, Burt Munro: Offerings to the God of Speed. Chrissie, having been involved in the male-dominated automotive industry for over a quarter century at this point, had already heard it all, but surely Burt put a charming twist to it. That's Pete Politis in the tie, Chrissie's brother, who was also one of the Gyronaut crew members. No matter how you look at these pics, they convey the love and affection that followed Burt Munro wherever he went.
As the sun sets over the tranquil Pacific, Munro relaxes on the Tremulis' patio and looks to put a long California day behind him...
All photos copyright 2012 The Alex Tremulis Archives
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Bremont Terra Nova touches down in the region
October 21, 2014 JaseNewsBremont, GMT, Supermarine
Bremont is a young British watch brand with a little over 10 years of experience under its belt and, as a company, it produces just a few thousand watches every year. The company was founded in 2002 by Nick and Giles English, both of who are serious aviation buffs. (One look at a selection of Bremont’s watches should be enough to convince you of the brothers’ irrepressible love of aviation.)
Bremont co-founder Giles English (left) and polar explorer Ben Saunders (right)
Bremont’s watches landed on Middle Eastern shores about two years ago, about the same time that the company began proceedings to move production from Switzerland to the UK (production now originates out of the UK). Giles English was recently in Dubai with brand ambassador Ben Saunders as part of a global tour to showcase the company’s new limited edition timepiece, the titanium Supermarine ‘Terra Nova’.
Given that Bremont’s total production run is only a few thousand watches per year, the company’s limited edition watches are, as you might have guessed, seriously limited. Only 300 Terra Nova watches will ever be built and what’s interesting is that prototypes of this very watch have already been put through their paces.
Modern day explorer
Ben Saunders is one of Bremont’s brand ambassadors and he was recently co-credited with the record for undertaking the longest polar journey in history. He and his teammate, Tarka L’Herpiniere, smashed the previous record by 400 miles when they walked almost 900 miles from the north shore of Ross Island in Antarctica to the South Pole, turned around, and walked the 900 miles back to the hut.
Between October 2013 and February 2014, Ben (pictured) and Tarka made the first ever return journey to the South Pole from Ross Island on the same route attempted by Sir Ernest Shackleton on the Nimrod Expedition, and by Robert Falcon Scott on the Terra Nova Expedition
The duo walked an average of 17 miles a day, dealing with temperatures as low as -46degrees Celsius all the while hauling their own supplies – almost 200kg worth – on a sled. The 1,795 mile journey took nearly five months and the entire journey was done with prototype Terra Nova watches strapped to each man’s wrist.
Using the chronometer to measure longitude, the watch could be used to point to the South Pole using the GMT watch hand and the sun. Of the watch Saunders said, “Having the opportunity to test the next generation of watches on our journey has been fantastic. Most impressive is the weight of the Terra Nova. The titanium provides unrivalled durability without the added weight associated with so many other watches. This was an absolutely crucial aspect of the development. When you take on an endurance challenge like the Scott Expedition, every gram counts.”
This is the actual prototype Terra Nova that accompanied Saunders on his record breaking polar expedition. The hand belongs to him too ;).
The Terra Nova comprises a 43mm satin and polished titanium case and as you’d expect of a tool watch, there’s a bi-directional bezel that’s charged with SuperLumiNova. The watch is outfitted with an automatic helium escape valve, a crown protector and, on the inside of the case, there’s a soft iron anti-magnetic Faraday cage and Bremont’s patented anti-shock movement mount.
The Terra Nova features a 43mm titanium case and is water resistant to 500 metres. The watch features a Faraday cage for protection from magnetic fields
A modified calibre 13 1/4” BE-93-2AE automatic chronometer with 42-hours of power reserve sits within the case working in tandem with a Glucydur balance, Anachron balance spring, and a Nivaflex 1 mainspring. The movement beats at 28,800 bph, and is powered by a Bremont moulded and skeletonised decorated rotor. Sadly the movement is not visible to owners as a decorated titanium screw-in case back is fitted. The watch is water resistant up to 500 metres.
The Terra Nova features 24-hour GMT and date complications (at the 3-o’clock position) and, like the bezel, the dial too features SuperLumiNova coated hands and numerals. The watch has hour, minute and second hands, all of which are visible through a scratch-resistant domed sapphire crystal.
An integrated rubber strap with a pin buckle secures the Terra Nova to the wearer’s wrist but the watch can also be ordered with a titanium bracelet. The price on rubber strap in the UAE is AED 22,500 (US $6,130).
Although Bremont is a relatively young company, it has been amassing a global customer base in the years since its timepieces first appeared on the market. This is no small feat considering the sheer number of established brands that have watches in the price brackets that Bremont typically plays in.
Bremont plays in a crowded space but the company has been able to build a reasonable customer base in the years since it first appeared on the market
As a new brand to the region, it will take some time for Bremont to establish a significant foothold. That said, the English brothers have been making consistent progress with forging associations with notable brands and personalities, all of which has helped broaden Bremont’s reach and brand recall.
The watches themselves are distinctive in terms of their design and considering the quality and functionality on offer, we’ve found the timepieces are reasonably priced. Given what Bremont has managed to achieve in a little over 10 years, we reckon the future looks bright for the company – we can’t wait for the day when the company has an in-house movement that is built to be anti-magnetic (rather than being protected from magnetic fields by an iron cage).
As for the Terra Nova itself, we’ll reserve final judgment until we’ve had some wrist-time with it.
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International Journal of Medical Research & Health Sciences
Publication's web-site
Publisher: International Journal of Medical Research & Health Sciences
Number of issues per year: 12
Print frequency: Monthly
Month(s) of publication: January-December
Our goal is to stimulate new research ideas and foster practical application from the research findings. The journal publishes original research, review articles, case reports of such high quality as to attract contributions from the relevant international communities.
Critical Objective:
To maintain the highest standards of editorial integrity
To improve health, health care and health education, internationally by elevating the quality of medical care, disease prevention, and research
To publish original, important, well-documented, peer-reviewed articles on basic medical sciences subject topics
To provide doctors with continuing education in basic science to support clinical decisions
To enable physicians to remain informed in multiple areas of basic medical science, including developments In the field of health education.
To achieve the highest level of ethical medical journalism and to produce a publication that is timely, credible, and enjoyable to read.
Index abstracted with
Thomson Reuters(Database - Emerging Sources Citation Index)
CNKI Scholar
Summon(ProQuest)
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BANK, EMANUEL:
By: Herman Rosenthal, Baron David von Günzburg
Russian lawyer; born at Luknik, government of Kovno, 1840; died at St. Maurice. Switzerland, July 29, 1891. He was the son of Baruch (Boris) Bank; but, his parents being in poor circumstances, he was brought up by his aunt, Soloveitchik, in company with her son, Emanuel, who later became famous in Odessa. On leaving "ḥeder" he attended the school for noblemen at Poneviezh, and later obtained a gold medal at the gymnasium of Kovno. In 1860 Bank entered the University of St. Petersburg, where, under the tutelage of an uncle, B. Rosen, who had attained the rank of privy councilor in the ministry of marine, he was introduced into influential circles. But the disturbances fomented by the university students, and the consequent closing of the lecture-rooms, compelled him to go to Moscow to continue his studies. In May, 1864, he entered the service of the minister of justice, and, after one year, was honored by an expression of imperial satisfaction for his having unraveled the intricacies in the accounts of the Black Sea division of the fleet, which had been in a confused state for ten years.
In 1866 Bank was admitted to practise in the fourth section of the Senate Court of Appeals at St. Petersburg. There he was brought under the supervision of Valerian Polovtzov, who became president of the great railroad association, and of Ratkov-Rozhnov, afterward mayor of the city. For his début Bank committed to memory a mass of material for a report in a very complicated case, and astonished his hearers by the accuracy of his memory and the clearness of his presentation of the most involved details.
Bank was twice appointed as president of the Tribunal of Commerce; but Count Pahlen intimated to him that as a Jew he could not be allowed to rise higher than general secretary of the Senate, which post he had occupied since 1868. He was admitted to the bar in 1870, and later elected to the municipal council of St. Petersburg; ultimately coming to be regarded as its special jurist, and representing it two successive years in the provincial assembly. Mayor Likhatchov, also a jurist, joined cordially in the appreciation expressed for Bank by his colleagues of the city hall; and Koni, the Russian Cicero, was wont to describe the debates between Bank and Passover, during the lawsuit of the founders of the "Great Company," as the most brilliant oratorical tournament he had ever witnessed.
Bank's legal and social successes never caused him to forget his coreligionists; and as soon as he was able to champion the cause of the Jews, he immersed himself in the affairs of the community and bore his part in all undertakings for the amelioration of its wretched condition. He took part in the deputation presented by Baron Günzburg to Czar Alexander III., after the horrible crime of March 1-13, 1881, assuring him of the loyalty of the Jews. From 1875 until his death Bank was a constant member of the committee of the Society for the Propagation of Education Among Russian Jews. His death occurred suddenly, while he was in Switzerland, seeking relaxation from the fatigues of office and from the rigor of the St. Petersburg climate.
Bank married the sister of Dr. Levinson-Lessing. Although able to install his nephews in the profession he had so successfully followed, the unjust laws of his country closed the bar to Bank's children on account of their Jewish faith. No printed or manuscript record remains of his numerous orations, beyond two or three expositions of important civil suits. In his youth he translated into Russian an English grammar by Nurok, and performed other literary work for the publisher J. Bakst.
H. R. D. G.
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CNN's Trump mess recalls an old lesson about sources
By John Kass
When I was a young reporter, in a climate full of great political change and anger and revenge and sniping from the shadows that was very much like the Washington of today, I learned a valuable lesson about sources.
It involved a mayor who threatened the established order of Chicago, a secretly recorded tape released to damage that mayor's reputation and unnamed sources.
The art of the leak is the way politics works everywhere, and I'm reminded of it now, as CNN burns its credibility in its war with President Donald Trump with a botched anti-Trump story that has forced the resignation of three senior CNN journalists.
Because in this modern war, waged by CNN and much of what we call the Beltway journalism establishment, or simply The Hive, one thing stands out:
The use of anonymous government sources in the media's persistent effort to portray Trump -- without any evidence so far -- as something of a plaything of the Russians in the 2016 election.
How many anonymous sources have been used in this war, waged by CNN and other media outlets for the hearts and minds and eyeballs of the angry anti-Trump demographic and the massive advertising revenue that demographic represents?
Are there dozens of sources, hundreds? Or has it been just a few, passed around?
And what are their motivations?
It's impossible to say, when you consider how just one story can be repeated countless times as absolute fact by countless political activists on TV who pretend to offer analysis but who generally just serve up the talking points.
In the hyperpartisan atmosphere of Washington, where Trump threatens the establishment and the establishment fights back, and speculation and anger run wild, the political motivations of sources are kept secret from readers and viewers of news.
Reporters know the motivations of their sources. They can be noble whistleblowers or craven political operatives, or both at the same time. It doesn't matter.
Sources provide a valuable service in a free republic and offer what journalists live on: information.
And it was information that came to the Chicago Tribune in the early years of then-Mayor Harold Washington's first term.
It was a long time ago, in the 1980s, when women wore big hair and shoulder pads and red lipstick and men wore Armani.
Washington was the city's first black mayor, fighting with the established white Democratic power structure of Chicago led by Ald. Edward "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak, who is now, even at his advanced age, facing federal criminal tax charges.
Liberal historians call it a racial thing. Vrdolyak was the leader of the white bloc, the so called "Vrdolyak 29," but there was more to it than race.
It was about power. And I was a young reporter in the middle of it all.
Washington had a meeting with an ally, James "Skip" Burrell, asking him not to run for the office of 3rd Ward alderman, which was held by a ridiculous personality, Ald. Dorothy Tillman, a woman of impossibly big hats who once reportedly waved a handgun at voters.
Her wild talk often embarrassed Washington and made it easy for his opponents to lampoon him.
In their conversation, Washington mocked Tillman, but he told Burrell that he needed her where she was. Washington grew up in the Democratic machine, and though he presented himself as anti-machine, there he was, talking to Skip Burrell like a machine boss.
What Washington didn't know was that Burrell had a tape recorder in his pocket, and the recording made its way to Mike Sneed, now a columnist at the Sun-Times but then a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
The Tribune's editor then was James Squires, who'd spent years in Washington and later bred the Kentucky Derby winner Monarchos after he left the newspaper business. He was a mercurial personality who often terrified his deputies and thrived on what he called "creative tension."
He had a thick Tennessee drawl when he wanted, and he used that drawl in a meeting of the political reporters when the Tribune was about to publish the transcript of the damning Washington tape.
He said we'd print it, but he also said that we'd say where it came from: the Vrdolyak camp.
I don't remember his exact words -- I was a kid trying to hold on to his job and I kept my mouth shut and stared into the carpet -- but I do remember the reactions of older reporters after we left the room.
They were furious. They snapped their suspenders. They stubbed out their smokes. They turned red, and a few sputtered.
It was a huge story in a city torn apart by politics, much as Washington is torn today.
And the old-timers asked: How could we burn our sources? How would anyone talk to us again?
But Squires understood what was important.
It wasn't the sources. And it certainly wasn't the feelings of politicians. It was all about our readers, and our credibility.
In the end, Burrell admitted secretly taping the conversation. But the Tribune made clear that the tape came to light through Vrdolyak's people.
If we hadn't told our readers where the tape came from, if we acted as if it some angel on a mission of truth just dropped it on the way back to heaven, we'd be doing a disservice to journalism.
I've been a reporter a long time now, and I'm certain that on occasion I haven't disclosed the motivation of every source I've used since then, but I haven't forgotten the lesson:
On stories like that one about the mayor, or stories like those of today, involving the intelligence leaks against the president, telling the consumer of news about the motivations of those doing the leaking wouldn't hurt.
It wouldn't hurt at all.
John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.
© 2019 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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Fan Fest
Florida Cup 2019
Florida Cup to Welcome Brazilian Powerhouse Flamengo and German Cup Winner Eintracht Frankfurt in 2019
ORLANDO, FL – September 4, 2018 – Florida Cup officials confirmed the remaining two clubs that will join Sao Paulo FC and Ajax in the 2019 edition of the Sunshine State’s largest annual celebration of international football and entertainment. Brazilian powerhouse side Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, simply known as Flamengo, will make their Florida Cup debut alongside 2018 German Cup Champions Eintracht Frankfurt in January. The 2019 edition of the Florida Cup will take place Jan. 6 – 13, 2019.
One of the biggest, most storied and successful clubs in South America, Flamengo has won one Copa Libertadores, one Copa Intercontinental, six Brazilian Serie A titles and three Brazil Cup championships. The most popular club in Brazil with former idols such as Zico and Romario, Flamengo boasts a fan base of more than 40 million supporters around the world.
Eintracht Frankfurt, or the Eagles, is a founding member of the Bundesliga and most recently, was crowned 2018 German Cup Champion after defeating 2018 Bundesliga Champions Bayern Munich in the final. The team, who qualified for this year’s Europa League, features players from around the world, including seven players who participated in the 2018 FIFA World Cup like Croatian finalist Ante Rebic.
“Our fifth edition is the most competitive and exciting Florida Cup yet. Fans will be able to enjoy top quality international football and many other attractions at the Universal Orlando Resort theme parks in a week full of entertainment for fans of all ages,” said Florida Cup CEO Ricardo Villar.
"Bringing Flamengo abroad will open the doors to make us stronger and more competitive in relation to the richest clubs in the planet. Let's take our supporters, Rio de Janeiro and Brazil to the country where soccer has the most opportunity for development. We want to be the largest nation of fans in the world and the Florida Cup is a huge step towards this process of internationalizing our brand. It will be the opportunity to show the strength of our fanbase in Orlando to the world," said Bruno Spindel, Flamengo’s CEO.
Eintracht Frankfurt Executive Board Member Fredi Bobic said, “We are taking one more step toward our goal of traveling each year to the USA until the World Cup 2026. Having the chance to compete against such strong clubs is an opportunity that we wanted to take in order to prepare for the second half of the Bundesliga season. The media reach for the event itself also plays an important role in strengthening our presence in the USA.”
Additional event details will be announced in the coming weeks including tournament format, match schedule, and more. Visit www.floridacup.com to sign up for real-time updates, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
About The Florida Cup:
The Florida Cup is the largest international soccer celebration held annually in Florida. It is a global platform that combines sports and entertainment, with TV audience reaching more than 25 million in the past two editions. Globally recognized soccer clubs from Europe and Latin America will convene in Central Florida for this premier tournament – a final tune-up before the start of their respective campaigns. For more information on the Florida Cup, visit www.floridacup.com, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Florida Cup Partners
Copyright © 2019 Florida Cup, LLC. All rights reserved.
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In The Mix: Kenny Dope's Pool Party
With the summer just a few weeks away, artists across a variety of genres continue to release hits they hope might be the “song of the summer”. Throughout the past month, we’ve seen a number of potential nominees. As spring pushes on and the weather continues to get better, we take a look at a live DJ set located in Miami from a producer no stranger to spinning records.
Single of the Week: Nearly three months after releasing the widely successful “God’s Plan”, Drake is back with another hit. On April 6th, the Canadian rapper released a new catchy track called “Nice For What”. The track is an upbeat hip-hop tune sampled from a number of different songs from late 90s/early 2000s artists like Lauryn Hill and Big Tymers.
Drake has likely given us the number one song of the summer as it has already made its way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 list, surpassing “God’s Plan” which currently sits at number two. The catchiness and tempo of the track make it perfect for any summer playlist and shows signs of hope for Drake’s upcoming album, Scorpion, which is set to release in June of 2018.
Music Videos of the Week:
Ariana Grande – “No More Tears Left to Cry”: Ariana Grande has finally emerged in 2018 just days before performing live at Coachella. “No Tears Left to Cry” is an upbeat dance track with shades of hip-hop. Grande transitions between singing in her impressive, frequently pitch-changing voice and short 90s-style rap verses. The video for the track is creatively spectacular. With a collection of trippy visuals and gravity-defying dancing, the video for the song is an aesthetic masterpiece. The track is an impressive combination of catchy rap verses and a showcase of the depth of Grande’s voice. The song and video are both stunning, proving the Ariana Grande is back.
Flatbush Zombies ft. Joey Bada$$ – Vacation: The Flatbush Zombies (Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, and Erick Arc Elliott) made waves in the hip-hop industry back in 2016 when they released their first studio album 3001: A Laced Odyssey. Over two years later, the zombies are back with the release of their new album Vacation In Hell. “Vacation”, featuring fellow New York rapper Joey Bada$$, a track made for summer vibes has finally released an accompanying video. The track features verses from Erick, Joey, and Meech as well as Juice producing one of the best hooks of any Flatbush track. The concept behind the video is the ideal vacation. The video, featured with witty subtitles describing lyrics in the track, alternates between showing Erick and Juice exploring a tropical island via Jeep and Meech and Joey enjoying a lavish yacht. The video also features multiple women covered head-to-toe in glitter, identical to the two women that are shown on the album’s cover art. Both the track and its video will make you want to drop what you’re doing and book a vacation of your own.
Te Boté (Remix) – Casper, Nio García, Darell, Nicky Jam, Bad Bunny, Ozuna: A few weeks ago, Casper, Nio García, and Darell released a remix of their original track “Te Boté featuring stars Nicky Jam, Bad Bunny, and Ozuna. Shortly after, the group released a video for the remix showing all six artists in a rap-style video. The seven-minute long video gives each artist their own share of screen time as they each are shown singing their respective verses. Each verse shows a new artist, in front of different colored fluorescent lights, adding their own flare to the track. The track features a beat similar to that of French Montana’s “Unforgettable” with each artist adding the title, “Te Boté (You Bounce), in each of their verses. The video is a visibly pleasing addition to the catchy song as it allows each artist to shine in their own way, each with a different color accompanying them.
Each year, Nervous Records holds a music extravaganza in Miami called the Nervous Records Pool Party. The week of music showcases some of the top house DJs in the country who have produced tracks through Nervous Records. This year’s pool party featured prominent DJs like Cassy, Mike Nervous, and Kenny Dope.
Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, a 47-year old producer from Brooklyn, New York has been spinning records since the mid-1980s. A former member of Brooklyn house music group Master at Work, Dope began producing house beats from an early age. Most of his production features house music centered around heavy drum beats and up-tempo rhythms. He first teamed up with Nervous Records in 2014 with the release of Kenny Dope’s Nervous House Producer Pack, which resulted in him receiving an invitation to the pool party.
For much of the earlier part of Dope’s hour-long set, he samples Ca$h Out’s “Hold Up” laid over a traditional house beat. Dope is no stranger to samples, as he uses a variety of clips from music from the past three decades. Much of his work features sounds similar to the ones he showcases at Nervous Records Pool Party. Using samples and sounds from hip-hop music combined with old-school and traditional house beats, Dope has found a unique sound even 30 years after he began making beats.
As Dope’s set moves along, he focuses more on the dance aspect of his beats leaving behind his hip-hop samples. Along with some assistance from his table-side dancer, Kenny Dope keeps the Miami crowd moving throughout the entire set. His beats are perfectly catered to house fans as they stick to the simple house beats utilizing a variety of drum beats, often alternating between high hats and snares.
The later portion of Dope’s set takes the sound in a whole new direction. Introducing new piercing synths like catchy piano riffs and modern electronic sounds, Dope finishes his set with beats suited more for the modern house fan. From start to finish, Dope has the crowd dancing and grooving to his beats.
With his set at the Nervous Records Pool Party, Kenny Dope has shown that he’s still got it. With no official releases since 2011, Dope’s set showcases the traditional and modern talents of the DJ as he combines sounds borrowed from the late 80s up through present day. Although Dope is on the older side, he has found a way to keep audiences entertained for nearly 30 years. With his unique beats, Kenny Dope’s talent continues to flourish and the pool party showed a modern audience the natural skill of the 47-year old.
In The MixMax Nason April 26, 2018 Kenny Dope, Drake, Ariana Grande, Flatbush Zombies, Joey Bada$$, music videos, Nicky Jam, Bad Bunny, Casper, Nio Garcia, Darell, Nervous Records, Miami
Headphones: KOD proves J Cole Is Still One Of Rap's Best
HeadphonesMax Nason May 1, 2018 J Cole, Hip-Hop, Rap, music videos, music review, album of the week
Headphones: Kali Uchis Shows Off Diverse Range On Debut Album
HeadphonesMax Nason April 24, 2018 Tame Impala, Thundercat, Jorja Smith, Soul, Kali Uchis, Jazz, Steve Lacy, Indie, Tyler the Creator, R&B, indie rock
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Levi Asher • July 30th, 1994
Beat Generation Places
In the autumn of 1947, 25-year-old Jack Kerouac left San Francisco and headed for Southern California in search of unforeseen adventures. He met a Mexican girl named Bea Franco on a bus and ended up following her to an encampment of Mexican grape- and cotton-pickers, where they briefly contemplated a life together before Kerouac returned home. Kerouac's telling of this poignant episode would become part of the first trip in 'On The Road,' and was published as an excerpt ('The Mexican Girl') in The Paris Review. Kerouac hadn't even reached Mexico yet (he would soon), but the Beat fascination for Mexican culture was already clear.
The Beats didn't have much money, but they craved alternative cultures, and going to Mexico was the cheapest and easiest way to delve into what we now call the Third World. William S. Burroughs lived in Mexico City for a time, and it was here that he caused the death of his wife while playing with guns. He had to flee Mexico, but later explored South American jungles in search of a drug called Yage, and the letters he wrote to Allen Ginsberg during this time have been published as 'The Yage Letters.'
Ginsberg had his own Mexican adventures. The year before he became famous for 'Howl,' he went on an archeological expedition to the Mayan ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula, and ended up leading a spontaneous expedition of over fifty villagers to explore a volcano during an earthquake. This episode is typical of Ginsberg's career -- he didn't know exactly what he was doing, but he had the courage to do it, and when people sensed this they named him their leader.
There are more Beat connections to Mexico than I can possibly capture here. Kerouac's novel 'Tristessa' takes place there. Brooklyn poet Marty Matz was imprisoned there for four difficult years on a drug trafficking charge. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published a travel journal called 'The Mexican Night' in 1962. Timothy Leary's experiments with mind-altering drugs began with his discovery of natural Mexican psychedelics, although Leary soon adopted the use of synthetic psychedelics. Natural Mexican drugs like peyote and mescaline have always been popular, though, and Carlos Casteneda's 'Don Juan' books helped to spread this mystique. Ken Kesey, another one who liked to use synthetic psychedelics, was a fugitive from American justice in Mexico during the mid-Sixties. Neal Cassady died while trying to walk the railroad tracks between two Mexican villages on a cold night.
The European conquest of Mexico began in 1519, a few decades after Columbus' discovery of the Americas. Several advanced Native American populations such as the Aztecs and Mayans were decimated by Europeans (Cortez's murderous confrontation with Montezuma's grand empire is the subject of Neil Young's excellent song 'Cortez the Killer'). The area was known as New Spain, but the Native American population survived better than in North America, and the current population of Mexico is largely Native American in origin. The nation of Mexico was created in 1821, during the wave of independent uprisings that followed Napoleon's disruption of the European order and his conquest of Spain.
I've been to the Yucatan, and the Mayan ruins there are an amazing experience. I also just can't say enough good things about Mexican food, although I doubt any true Mexican would be very impressed by the California concoctions we Americans refer to as burritos and tacos.
No Responses to "Mexico"
by Levi Asher Saturday, July 23, 1994 02:01 pm
Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian child on March 12, 1922 in working-class Lowell, Massachusetts. Ti Jean spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English. The youngest of three children, he was heartbroken when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.
Ti Jean was an intense and serious child, devoted to Memere (his mother) and constantly forming important friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his life. He was driven to create stories from a young age, inspired first by the mysterious radio show 'The Shadow,' and later by the fervid novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he would model himself after ...
... Read more and add your thoughts
"This Is The Beat Generation" by John Clellon Holmes
by Levi Asher Sunday, July 24, 1994 02:21 pm
The original 1952 New York Times Magazine Article that introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" to the world.
by Levi Asher Monday, July 25, 1994 12:36 pm
Like the French Impressionist artists of Paris, the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term "Beat Generation" gradually came to represent an entire period in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars (at times this nearly happened).
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You have to be careful writing about Gary Snyder, because he's such a Zen guy you get the feeling anything you write will be vastly inferior to silence.
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
by Levi Asher Saturday, August 6, 1994 08:55 pm
Levi Asher reviews "Big Sur", Jack Kerouac's shattering chronicle of his early 1960s crack-up.
Dharma Bums
by Levi Asher Sunday, August 7, 1994 12:52 pm
Levi Asher reviews "Dharma Bums", Jack Kerouac's warm and colorful send-up of American Buddhism.
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Carl Solomon
by Levi Asher Wednesday, August 24, 1994 08:46 am
All the Beat writers inspired themselves with doppelgängers, authentic hipsters who embodied their ideals with great authenticity. Jack Kerouac had Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs had Herbert Huncke ... and Allen Ginsberg had Carl Solomon.
Cassidy's Tale
by John Perry Barlow Thursday, November 3, 1994 01:27 pm
"Cassidy" is one of the Grateful Dead's most beautiful songs. Lyricist John Perry Barlow tells of the two people, a Beat Generation drifter and a newborn child, who inspired it.
John Clellon Holmes
by Levi Asher Monday, December 19, 1994 08:41 am
John Clellon Holmes, earliest chronicler of the Beat Generation.
by Meg Wise-Lawrence Saturday, September 2, 1995 02:35 pm
Paul Bowles was born in New York City on December 30, 1910. He was an only child and exhibited early the existentialist's sense of alienation ...
by Sean Daniel Singer Monday, November 13, 1995 08:19 am
Bob Kaufman was born on April 18, 1925 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was, other than Langston Hughes, the greatest jazz poet who ever lived ...
Ted Joans
by Sean Daniel Singer Friday, January 12, 1996 08:21 am
Ted Joans was born Theodore Jones on July 4, 1928 on a riverboat in Cairo, Illinois. His father, a riverboat entertainer, put him off the boat in Memphis at age twelve and gave him a trumpet. He is a painter, a trumpeter, and a poet.
Poetry at the Old Longshoreman’s Hall
by Don Carpenter Friday, September 20, 1996 12:44 pm
Novelist Don Carpenter recalls a joyful moment from 1964, during the height of the beatnik/hippie convergence in San Francisco, when he stepped up to organize a spontaneous (and surprisingly large) poetry reading at the Longshoreman's Hall in Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, featuring Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen.
Literary Kicks: the Postage Stamp Series
by Levi Asher Thursday, September 20, 2001 08:51 pm
Imaginary Beat Generation postage stamp images, created for Literary Kicks in the mid 1990s.
On Western Haiku
by Cor van den Heuvel Saturday, March 2, 2002 03:17 pm
Cor van den Heuvel surveys the Western side of the Haiku tradition.
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Gov’t: Measures in place to prevent Venezuelan ID card fraud
Loop News Created : 29 May 2019 T&T News
Government said an image shared online of what appeared to be a draft version of the new Venezuelan identification card was not the approved version.
Speaking at Wednesday’s post-cabinet briefing, Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs, Fitzgerald Hinds, sitting in for National Security Minister Stuart Young, said the version spotted on social media was one of the ‘earlier mock-up versions’, however security has since been tightened to prevent any other leaks.
Hinds was speaking on the Venezuelan Migrant Registration Process, which takes place from May 31- June 14 (with the exception of June 5).
“The cards that are going to be issued to those who are registered have not yet been produced.”
“That, truthfully, I am told was one of the earlier mock-up versions…I can give you the assurance on the basis of information from the Immigration Department that that is not the final card, it does not even resemble what will be the final card which is yet to…be approved by the Minister of National Security,” he said.
“It is a disturbing feature (that the mock-up was leaked) but since then stricter arrangements have been put in place…to ensure that that is not replicated,” he said.
Acting Prime Minister Colm Imbert added that he has not yet seen the final version of the card but there would be security features to prevent the cards being duplicated.
“The registration process will not guarantee that a card would be issued, it is at the discretion of the immigration department. That card would have security features…to ensure that it is not replicated,” Hinds said.
Hinds added that the cards will not be given to registrants immediately as the requisite checks need to be done first.
“We have to verify the information we get and therefore the cards would not be given immediately but they would be given as soon as practically (possible).”
He said in the meantime until the cards are issued, registrants would be given a receipt which they can show to the authorities as proof that they completed the registration process.
Imbert said the National Security Ministry has instructions to produce the cards in the ‘soonest possible time’, adding that if all goes to plan, the first batch of registrants would get their identification cards by the end of the registration period (June 14, 2019).
Hinds said that anyone who provides false information to the authorities would be penalised.
Venezuelan Migrant Registration Process
Imbert: No need for fear
Imbert also refuted claims by some naysayers that the registration exercise is a ploy to persecute Venezuelans.
“It’s most certainly not a trick or a trap. It’s the opposite, we’re simply trying to legalise those who are illegal, there’s no trap here.”
“This is why we’ve put a seamless registration process in place. We have no need for fear, this can only bring benefit, this is Trinidad and Tobago, we’re giving you an opportunity to be here lawfully, there’s nothing to fear,” he said.
Hinds added that the registration process will help prevent human trafficking.
“We see what the situation is, we are compassionate, we are empathetic, we have relations with Venezuela and so we treat with them in a humane manner.”
“This is designed so that they can work…this will help protect them from human trafficking. And at the same time it gives us an idea of…what we are dealing with,” he said.
Venezuelan criminal elements a concern
Imbert did not give details on whether there were Venezuelans with criminal records in Trinidad and Tobago but said the matter is one of concern.
“That’s a matter of national security, I can’t speak about it. But obviously, there are concerns,” he said.
Hinds noted that information provided by registrants would be cross-referenced with the Venezuelan government.
“We’ll have a system where we’ll be cross-referencing the information we have with the Venezuelan authorities,” he said.
The registration process for Venezuelans who are here legally or illegally who do not have relevant work permits will take place from May 31-June 14, with the exception of the Eid-ul-Fitr public holiday on June 5.
The registration venues will be located at:
Queen’s Park Oval
94 Tragarete Road, Port of Spain
Achiever’s Banquet Hall
24 Adesh Drive, San Fernando
Caroline Building
Wilson Road, Scarborough
Translators will be present to assist all registrants.
For information on the Venezuelan Migrant Registration Process see here: https://www.facebook.com/Venezuelanregistration/
For pre-registration online, see here: http://venezuelanmigrantregistration.gov.tt/
Venezuelan migrant registration policy
Venezuelans
Gov't: Employers exploiting Venezuelan workers will be penalised
Gov't denies accepting international aid for Venezuelans
UN recognises Venezuelans fleeing homeland as refugees
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Korean films ready to strike back on Avengers
As the box-office smash “Avengers: Endgame” enters its third week, Korean films are set to strike back to reclaim their home turf.
Park Jin-hai | 2019-05-08 18:06
Ma Dong-seok to make Hollywood debut as producer
In yet another pre-release achievement for a Korean movie, “The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil” starring Ma Dong-seok will be remade in the United States. Kiwi Media Group, the crime-action movie's domestic distributor, said Monday it had signed a contract with Hollywood-based Balboa Productions, founded by actor Sylvester Stallone, for the remake.
Lee Gyu-lee | 2019-05-06 15:28
'Avengers: Endgame' becomes fastest film to top 10 mln admissions
"Avengers: Endgame" surpassed 10 million in attendance Saturday, becoming the fastest film to top the mark in South Korea, its distributor said.
Bong's new movie 'Parasite' out May 30
Director Bong Joon-ho's new movie “Parasite” will be released May 30, after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival mid-May. Parasite is Bong's first film in two years after the big-budget Netflix film “Okja.” This tragic-comedy revolves around two families from different environments. A brief preview was revealed April 7, but the detailed plot has not been revealed.
Culture minister vows to find optimal measures to ban screen monopolies
The culture minister has vowed to come up with optimal ways to ban screen monopolies by conglomerate-financed big-budget films. "Through simulations, I will come up with an optimal ceiling on cinema screens," Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Park Yang-woo told reporters Thursday in the southern heritage city of Jeonju after attending the opening ceremony of the 20th Je...
'It' cinematographer Chung shoots 'Zombieland' sequel
Chung Chung-hoon, a cinematographer best known for his work on “Oldboy,” has been hired to shoot “Zombieland: Double Tap,” according to IMDb. The movie, whose plot has not yet been revealed, is a sequel to the 2009 sleeper-hit dark comedy “Zombieland,” starring Oscar winner Emma Stone and Oscar nominee Woody Harrelson.
Park Hyong-ki | 2019-05-02 16:12
Hollywood to remake Korean box office hits
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BRIAN COLFAX, a minor, by and through
CHRISTINE COLFAX, his mother,
natural guardian and next friend,
JAMES JOHNSON and RUTH McFARLAND,
Defendants,
CONTINENTAL WESTERN INSURANCE COMPANY,
1. The interpretation of a written insurance policy based on stipulated facts is a question of law over which an appellate court has unlimited review.
2. An insurance policy is construed to give effect to the intention of the parties. If the policy is not ambiguous, it is enforced as made, but if it is ambiguous, it is given the construction most favorable to the insured.
3. The test to determine whether an insurance contract is ambiguous is not what the insurer intends the language to mean, but what a reasonably prudent insured would understand the language to mean.
4. In order to constitute a "use" or to be a "user" under an automobile liability insurance policy, such as to be an insured, one must be in operation of the vehicle.
5. When a person takes physical control of a moving vehicle, even though for only an instant, that person has gained control over it and is operating it within the normal definition and understanding which ordinary laypersons would give to an automobile liability insurance policy.
Review of the judgment of the Court of Appeals in an unpublished opinion filed December 10, 1999 . Appeal from Kiowa district court; JAY DON REYNOLDS, judge. Judgment of the Court of Appeals affirming the district court is reversed. Judgment of the district court is reversed. Opinion filed October 27, 2000.
E. Craig Kennedy, of Johnson, Kennedy, Dahl & Willis, of Wichita, argued the cause and was on the briefs for appellants.
William A. Wells, of Young, Bogle, McCausland, Wells & Blanchard, P.A., of Wichita, argued the cause and was on the briefs for appellee.
LOCKETT, J: Garnishee, Continental Western Insurance Company (Continental), seeks review of the Kansas Court of Appeals' affirmance of the district court's ruling that Continental provided automobile liability insurance to an individual who neither owned, operated, nor was a passenger in the vehicle insured by Continental at the time of an accident that injured a minor. Continental claims the district court erred (1) in finding that Continental provided liability coverage to an individual directing the vehicle as a "user" who contributed to the child's injuries; (2) by modifying a previous journal entry of judgment to allocate fault between the parties; and (3) by allocating negligence based on what conduct is within the scope of an insurance policy's coverage.
Ruth McFarland cared for plaintiff, Brian Colfax, and five other children. Prior to the accident, James Johnson was preparing to leave McFarland's home in his pickup truck. Johnson was aware that children were playing in the immediate area. Johnson asked McFarland to check for children behind the vehicle. McFarland walked to the back of the truck and informed Johnson that there were no children behind the pickup, and it was all right to back up. Unknown to McFarland, Colfax was under the truck. Colfax sustained serious injuries when Johnson backed the pickup.
On July 11, 1995, Colfax settled with Johnson for $17,500, without prejudice to Colfax's right to pursue a negligence claim against McFarland. On October 27, 1995, a settlement hearing was conducted as to McFarland's liability. The district court found the proposed $75,000 settlement agreement between McFarland and Colfax was fair and rendered judgment against McFarland for $75,000, plus interest and court costs. Colfax garnished McFarland's insurance company, Shelter Insurance, Inc., (Shelter). Shelter paid $2,500 as settlement of its coverage. The garnishment against Shelter was dismissed with prejudice.
On November 28, 1995, Colfax filed a garnishment against Johnson's automobile insurance carrier, Continental, claiming that Johnson's policy also covered McFarland's liability. Colfax reasoned that when McFarland instructed Johnson to back up, McFarland was a "user" of Johnson's vehicle as defined by Continental's policy. A garnishment was issued against Continental. Continental answered and denied that its policy provided coverage for McFarland's conduct.
The parties agreed that the district court must address three issues: (1) the comparative fault of McFarland and Johnson in relation to Continental as garnishee; (2) whether Continental's policy covered McFarland's conduct; and (3) if Continental's policy covered McFarland's conduct, whether its policy provided primary, secondary, or pro rata coverage.
In a July 8, 1997, memorandum decision, the district judge found that while directing Johnson to back up, McFarland was "using the vehicle." Under these circumstances, Continental's policy provided coverage for McFarland. The judge then concluded that Continental's coverage was primary. The district judge stated: "If the garnishee wishes to present further evidence and argument on the comparative fault of Johnson and McFarland, its counsel should notify all concerned parties and schedule a hearing for that purpose."
A hearing was set and Continental and Colfax filed briefs pertaining to the assessment of fault between the defendants. The district court's journal entry of judgment allocated 30 percent fault to Johnson and 70 percent fault to McFarland. It then assessed 40 percent of McFarland's fault as to her services as a caretaker, and 30 percent of her as a volunteer lookout for Johnson and allocated $22,500 to McFarland's fault as a lookout. The district judge then observed that Colfax had previously received partial payment on the judgment against McFarland ($2,500 from Shelter Insurance) and granted Colfax a $21,200 judgment (including interest) against Continental.
Continental appealed to the Kansas Court of Appeals, contending, among other things, that (1) the district court erred in finding that its policy provided liability coverage to McFarland; (2) the district court was without statutory authority to modify its original judgment, and (3) the district court erred in allocating McFarland's fault between her duties as a caregiver and her duties as a lookout. The Court of Appeals affirmed the district court. Continental's petition for review was accepted.
In the district court, the parties stipulated to the facts. The resolution of the issue of coverage requires an interpretation of the Continental insurance policy. The interpretation of a written insurance policy based on stipulated facts is a question of law over which an appellate court has unlimited review. United Services Auto Ass'n v. Morgan, 23 Kan. App. 2d 987, 992, 939 P.2d 959 (1997).
In concluding that Continental provided liability coverage to McFarland as a "user" of Johnson's truck, the district court reasoned:
"The defendant McFarland was acting as a surrogate to Defendant Johnson in attempting to maintain a lookout to the rear to facilitate the safe use and/or control of the vehicle. In effect Johnson was borrowing the 'sensory perceptions' of McFarland in performing his duty. The resulting injury from the departure of the duty was caused by the use and/or control of the vehicle.
"McFarland was being used by Johnson in the use or control of the vehicle. Johnson was responding to her directions and orders of backing or not backing. She was therefore at that moment "using" the vehicle to the extent contemplated by the policy. This is a liberal and broad interpretation of the policy to afford the greatest possible protection to the insured. See United States Fidelity & Guar. Co. v. Farm Bureau Mut. Ins. Co., 2 Kan. App. 2d 580 [, 584 P.2d 1264 (1978)]."
In its analysis, the Court of Appeals discussed Dawson v. Griffin, 249 Kan. 115, 816 P.2d 374 (1991). The question in Dawson was whether the injured plaintiff driver was entitled to uninsured motorist protection benefits under his insurance policy for actions of a phantom driver who had signaled Griffin, the defendant driver, to proceed with a left-hand turn. The phantom driver's signal for Griffin to turn left caused the accident. Dawson filed an action against Griffin and Dawson's own insurance carrier, seeking uninsured motorist benefits. Dawson settled with Griffin. Griffin was dismissed from the lawsuit.
Dawson's insurer responded that the phantom truck driver's hand motion was simply a courteous act and that Griffin's misinterpretation of the trucker's motion, as a matter of law, should not be permitted to support a contention of the trucker's negligence. The district court observed that K.S.A. 8-1527 created a duty requiring the defendant Griffin to yield the right-of-way to Dawson's oncoming vehicle. It concluded that Griffin could not delegate to the phantom driver the duty to yield the right-of-way. The district court found that the phantom driver owed no duty to Dawson, therefore, it had no liability. The court granted summary judgment to Dawson's insurer. 249 Kan. at 117. Dawson appealed.
In reaching its decision, the Dawson court also applied a duty analysis to determine if uninsured motorist protection of plaintiff Dawson's policy covered negligent acts of the phantom driver. The Dawson court agreed with the trial court that the defendant driver had a nondelegable duty to yield to oncoming traffic while making a left hand turn. 249 Kan. at 122. It concluded that if the phantom driver had no duty to the plaintiff, Dawson was not entitled to uninsured motorist protection benefits of his insurance policy.
After its discussion of Dawson, the Court of Appeals noted that Johnson had used an "extra precautionary measure" and asked McFarland to look for children behind the truck before backing out. It found that under these circumstances both McFarland and Johnson, had use or control of the truck at the time of the accident. The Court of Appeals then concluded that because McFarland had use and control of Johnson's pickup, Continental also provided insurance coverage to McFarland.
Were McFarland and Johnson both exercising use and control of Johnson's vehicle? If so, was McFarland an insured under Johnson's Continental insurance policy or acting as a volunteer lookout--protecting the children under her care from being injured by a backing car?
An insurance policy is construed to give effect to the intention of the parties. Brumley v. Lee, 265 Kan. 810, 812, 963 P.2d 1224 (1998). If the policy is not ambiguous, it is enforced as made, but if it is ambiguous, it is given the construction most favorable to the insured. 265 Kan. at 812-13. The test to determine whether an insurance contract is ambiguous is not what the insurer intends the language to mean, but what a reasonably prudent insured would understand the language to mean. Associated Wholesale Grocers, Inc. v. Americold Corp., 261 Kan. 806, Syl. ¶ 2, 934 P.2d 65 (1997).
Continental's insurance policy defines "insured" as "[a]ny person using 'your covered auto.'" "You" and "Your" are defined as the policy's "named insured and spouse." There is no dispute that Johnson was the "named insured" in the policy.
The term "using" is not defined in the policy. In its analysis, the Court of Appeals did not address the language of the insurance policy, or apply the test for "use" articulated in United States Fidelity & Guar. Co. v. Farm Bureau Mut. Ins. Co., 2 Kan. App. 2d 580, 584 P.2d 1264 (1978).
In United States Fidelity & Guar. Co. v. Farm Bureau Mut. Ins. Co., an action arose out of an automobile accident caused by a passenger who grabbed the steering wheel. The passenger claimed her act was covered by both the driver's automobile insurance and her automobile insurance policy. The district court ruled (1) the passenger's action of grabbing the steering wheel of the vehicle in which she was riding constituted "use" of the vehicle within the meaning of her policy providing coverage for her use of any automobile, and (2) the passenger's action of grabbing the steering wheel deviated materially from permission granted to her to ride in the vehicle and she was not afforded liability coverage by the omnibus clause of the driver's automobile liability policy. The passenger's insurer appealed.
The Court of Appeals found that a passenger who had yanked the steering wheel had taken control of the vehicle and operated or used the vehicle within the terms of the passenger's automobile insurance policy. In reaching this conclusion, the Court of Appeals reasoned:
"[T]he court 'must consider whether the injury sustained was a natural and reasonable incident or consequence of the use of the vehicle involved for the purposes shown by the declarations of the policy though not foreseen or expected.' In Alliance Mutual Casualty Co. v. Boston Insurance Co., 196 Kan. 323, 411 P.2d 616 (1966), the term "use" was said to be a broad catchall designed and construed to include all proper uses of the vehicle. One treatise has defined 'use' as '[a]ny exercise of control over the vehicle constitutes a use, regardless of its purpose, extent, or duration.' [Citation omitted.]" 2 Kan App. 2d at 582.
The Court of Appeals concluded:
"We believe that when a person takes control of a moving vehicle, even though for only an instant, that person has gained control over it and is operating it within the normal definition and understanding which ordinary laymen would give to an insurance policy." 2 Kan. App. 2d at 583.
Here, McFarland informed the driver of the pickup that it was safe to back the truck out of the driveway. McFarland did not have physical control of the pickup truck.
In Apcon Corp. v. Dana Trucking, Inc., 251 Ill. App. 3d 973, 623 N.E.2d 806 (1993), appeal denied 154 Ill. 2d 557 (1994), the Illinois court considered whether the general contractor's employee who directs--through the use of hand signals--the backing up of a subcontractor's truck which resulted in the truck striking and killing another person, was a "user" of the truck within the coverage of its and the subcontractor's liability insurance policy.
Plaintiffs Apcon Corporation (Apcon) and its liability insurer filed for declaratory judgment. Apcon claimed that it was entitled to coverage under a liability insurance policy issued to defendant subcontractor Dana Trucking, Inc. (Dana), by Northland Insurance Company (Northland) with respect to a wrongful death action filed by the estate of the deceased because Apcon's actions, i.e., directing the truck at the time of decedent's injury, constituted "use" of one of the subcontractor's vehicles within the meaning of the subcontractor's liability policy.
The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment. The trial court granted Northland summary judgment, finding as a matter of law Northland did not owe a duty to defend or indemnify Apcon because Apcon was not an "insured" under the subcontractor's policy.
Apcon maintained on appeal that the trial court erred in concluding that Apcon was not a permissive user of the trucking company's vehicles when its employee acted as a "spotter" and directed--through the use of hand signals--the backing up of the subcontractor's truck, so that the truck struck and killed the decedent.
Apcon asserted it controlled the subcontractor's truck in two ways: First, Apcon determined whether the truck could be on the construction site; and second, it determined what materials were to be delivered, where those materials would be loaded, where they would be unloaded, and it provided a spotter who used hand signals to the backing truck to guide the vehicle. Apcon argued that under these circumstances, the spotter and the driver were jointly operating or driving the truck at the time of the accident.
Apcon cited cases from other jurisdictions in support of its contention that a spotter who uses hand signals to guide the driver of a truck is "using" the vehicle, such that he would be an additional insured. For example, Liberty Mutual Ins. Co. v. Steenberg Construction Co., 225 F.2d 294 (8th Cir. 1955), was a case construing Minnesota law, where a general contractor was seeking indemnity from a subcontractor following a judgment in a personal injury action. The court determined that in the absence of any controlling local criteria, liability insurance policy language similar to that in the instant case provided coverage to a general contractor who directed the movements of a subcontractor's truck, by supervising and signaling from the rear of the truck. The trial court held and the Eighth Circuit affirmed that the directing by the general contractor of the backward movement of the truck made the participation of the general contractor such an immediate part of the actual operating of the truck as to make the general contractor "a person 'using the automobile', or in any event a person 'legally responsible for the use thereof', within the language and coverage of the omnibus clause of the policy." Steenberg, 225 F.2d at 296.
Similarly, in Woodrich Construction Co. v. Indemnity Insurance Co., 252 Minn. 86, 89 N.W.2d 412 (1958), the plaintiff insured (Woodrich) brought an action against three insurers to recover the amount it had paid in settlement of damages to a man injured when a subcontractor's truck backed over him. The jury awarded the injured plaintiff $80,000 against the general contractor, Woodrich. The subcontractor and the driver of the truck were found not to be liable.
On appeal, the court noted that Woodrich assumed exclusive control over the truck the moment the truck entered into the congested area, because Woodrich employed the truck to carry out its own purpose of constructing a concrete pavement. The court determined Woodrich was "using" the motor vehicle by controlling or guiding its movement. 252 Minn. at 93-94.
The Illinois court noted that contrary to plaintiffs' assertion, because of the small number of cases that have raised this issue, there did not appear to be a clear minority/majority view. It then observed that Wellman-Lord Engineers, Inc. v. Northwestern Mutual Insurance Co., 222 So. 2d 436 (Fla. Dist. App. 1969), was a similar action by a plaintiff general contractor seeking indemnification from subcontractor Redi-Mix Company's liability insurance.
In Wellman, the plaintiff general contractor was in the process of constructing an underground vault. John Atkins, an employee of the general contractor, was in charge of directing the unloading of concrete trucks. Atkins directed a truck driven by Joseph Gates, an employee of Redi-Mix, alongside the pit. Gates had been instructed by Redi-Mix to rely upon an employee of the general contractor for directions in backing the truck alongside the pit prior to unloading. Atkins negligently directed Gates to back the truck too close to the edge of the pit. The truck fell in the pit, damaging the truck, and injuring Gates.
The subcontractor liability insurance policy defined the word "insured" in virtually the same language as that used in the Northland policy in question. Citing Woodrich as authority, the general contractor contended it was "using" Redi-Mix's truck within the meaning of the policy when the truck fell into the pit.
No Florida case on this point was cited or found. The Wellman court noted that although Woodrich supported the general contractor's contention, the weight of authority and better view was to the contrary. The Florida court held that merely giving directions for a movant is not such "use" of the truck within the truck's liability insurance coverage. Wellman, 222 So.2d at 438.
The Illinois court observed that no Illinois case had been cited where a court had determined a general contractor's directing the movements of a subcontractor's truck through use of hand signals was a "use" of the truck under a policy with similar language. The Illinois court pointed out that if general contractor's interpretation were to be given to the subcontractor's policy, a store employee's directing a delivery truck where to park by pointing, or a police officer directing a motorist where to go by hand signals, would also be a "use" of a vehicle within the meaning of similar policies. It concluded that in order to constitute a "use" or to be a "user" under the policy, such as to be an insured, one must be in operation of the vehicle and affirmed the trial court. The Illinois court rejected the reasoning of Woodrich and concluded that Wellman was properly decided and determined that Apcon was not a user of the subcontractor's vehicle within the meaning of the Northland policy.
The reasoning of Apcon is sound. The Dawson court determined that when a person takes physical control of a moving vehicle, even though for only an instant, that person has gained control over it and is operating it within the normal definition and understanding which ordinary laymen would give to an insurance policy. Following the rationale of Dawson, to constitute a "use" or to be a "user" under the policy, such as to be an insured, one must be operating the vehicle. McFarland was a lookout. She did not have physical control of the vehicle; therefore, she was not "using" the vehicle at the time of the accident. McFarland is not an "insured" under the Continental policy. Her duty was as caretaker of the child. Since McFarland is not an insured under the policy, the other issues need not be decided.
Judgment of the Court of Appeals affirming the district court is reversed. Judgment of the district court is reversed.
STEVE LEBEN, D. J., assigned.1
1 Judge Steve Leben was appointed to hear case No. 80,995 vice Justice Six pursuant to the authority vested in the Supreme Court by art. 3, sec. 6(f) of the Kansas Constitution.
Updated: October 27, 2000.
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GEORGE W. MARSHALL, M.D., and
KRISTI J. WEISS and MARK G. WEISS,
Individually and as the Natural Parents and Next
Friends of JOSEPH C. WEISS,
Appellees,
KANSAS MEDICAL MUTUAL INSURANCE COMPANY,
1. When construing a statute, the court must give the statute the effect intended by the legislature. The legislative intent is to be determined from considering the entire act and every part thereof. If the statute is plain and unambiguous, the court must give effect to the language of the statute as written by the legislature. Courts, however, are not limited to examining the language of the statute alone. Courts may also consider the causes that impel the statute's adoption, the statute's objective, its historical background, and the effect of the statute under various constructions.
2. Excess limits professional liability insurance was not contemplated by the legislature when the Kansas Health Care Provider Insurance Act (HCPIA), K.S.A. 40-3401 et seq., was first enacted in 1976; since the relevant language in K.S.A. 40-3402(a) has gone unchanged, we conclude that no excess limits liability coverage should be read into the statute.
3. K.S.A. 40-3402(a) establishes the minimum "basic coverage" of professional liability insurance for health care providers and does not address excess limits insurance. Although the HCPIA refers to "basic coverage" in several statutes, the Act neither requires excess limits coverage nor prohibits insurers from offering excess limits insurance.
4. K.S.A. 40-3402 does not require excess limits liability insurance to be issued as a pure claims made policy without the limitation of a retroactive period.
5. The Kansas legislature has clearly established that Kansas public policy favors simultaneous coverage and liability. Indeed, the Kansas legislature has already addressed this public policy by requiring minimum basic professional liability insurance coverage for all licensed health care providers.
6. A party to a contract has a duty to learn the contents of a written contract before signing it. This duty has been interpreted to include a duty to secure a reading and explanation of the contract. A party's negligent failure to do so estops the party from avoiding the terms of the contract on the grounds of ignorance of its contents.
7. To provide additional protection for Kansas residents and health care providers, insurance companies should be free to contract for additional professional liability coverage, with premiums determined in accordance with the parties' needs and consistent with the risk factors disclosed to the insurance companies. Public policy supports this freedom to contract without unduly burdening either party to the transaction.
8. Preventing insurance fraud positively affects the citizens of Kansas by making excess liability insurance available at a reasonable cost.
9. After evaluating all of the public policy considerations, it is not against public policy for insurers to offer excess limits professional liability insurance on a claims made basis with limited retroactivity to health care providers.
10. The interpretation of an insurance contract is a question of law over which an appellate court has de novo review. The appellate court is not bound by the district court's interpretation.
11. If the language in an insurance policy is clear and unambiguous, it must be construed in its plain, ordinary, and popular sense and according to the sense and meaning of the terms used. An insurance policy is ambiguous when it contains language of doubtful or conflicting meaning based on a reasonable construction of the policy's language. An ambiguity does not exist merely because the parties disagree on the interpretation of the language.
12. Courts should not strain to find an ambiguity when common sense shows there is none. The court must consider the terms of an insurance policy as a whole, without fragmenting the various provisions and endorsements.
13. As a general rule, exceptions, limitations, and exclusions to insurance policies are narrowly construed. The insurer assumes the duty to define limitations to an insured's coverage in clear and explicit terms. To restrict or limit coverage, an insurer must use clear and unambiguous language. Otherwise, the insurance policy will be construed in favor of the insured.
14. The fact that a policy cannot be classified as purely claims made or purely occurrence insurance does not in and of itself create an ambiguity.
15. If a contract is ambiguous, there are two methods that may be used to reform the contract: (1) a liberal construction most favorable to the insured and (2) an interpretation consistent with the reasonable expectations of the insured. The doctrine of reasonable expectations, however, only applies when a contract is ambiguous. When an insurance contract is not ambiguous, the court will enforce the contract as written.
Appeal from Saline district court; JEROME P. HELLMER, judge. Opinion filed July 18, 2003. Reversed.
Curtis O. Roggow, of Sanders Conkright & Warren, LLP, of Kansas City, Missouri, argued the cause, and Roger W. Warren, of the same firm, was with him on the briefs for appellant.
Victor A. Bergman, of Shamberg, Johnson & Bergman, Chtd., of Kansas City, Missouri, argued the cause, and Anne E. Popper, of the same firm, and Michael D. Strohbehn and Kip D. Richards, of Walters, Bender, Strohbehn & Vaughn, P.C., of Kansas City, Missouri, were with him on the brief for appellees.
Steve A. Schwarm, of Goodell, Stratton, Edmonds & Palmer, L.L.P., of Topeka, was on the brief for amicus curiae Kansas Health Care Stabilization Fund.
GERNON, J.: This appeal by the Kansas Medical Mutual Insurance Company (KaMMCO) challenges the district court's interpretation of a professional liability (medical malpractice) insurance policy.
Collateral issues involve: (1) Interpretation of the Kansas Health Care Provider Insurance Act (HCPIA), K.S.A. 40-3401 et seq.; (2) whether the excess limits liability coverage here violates public policy; (3) whether the insurance policy was ambiguous; and (4) whether it was permissible for the district court to reform the insurance policy, given the facts in the record.
This case was transferred to this court pursuant to K.S.A. 20-3018(c).
In November 1997, Dr. George W. Marshall delivered a baby who has irreversible damage to his brain and central nervous system. The child's parents are Kristi J. Weiss and Mark G. Weiss. In October 1998, the Weiss' attorney requested copies of Dr. Marshall's medical records regarding Kristi Weiss. The Weisses sued Dr. Marshall in August 1999, alleging negligence.
Dr. Marshall was insured by KaMMCO at the time the Weiss' lawsuit was filed and had been insured by KaMMCO since 1989. In 1999, Dr. Marshall carried professional liability coverage of $200,000 per claim, with a $600,000 aggregate as required by the HCPIA. See K.S.A. 40-3402(a). Dr. Marshall also carried separate liability coverage from the Kansas Health Care Stabilization Fund (Fund) in the amount of $800,000 per claim and $2,400,000 annual aggregate. See K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3403(a) and (l)(3).
In December 1998, after receiving the Weiss' records request, Dr. Marshall applied to KaMMCO for an excess limits endorsement to his policy in the amount of $1,000,000 per claim and $1,000,000 annual aggregate. According to its terms, this coverage applied after the limits of his basic liability coverage and his additional Fund coverage were exhausted. Dr. Marshall then demanded that KaMMCO provide the $1,000,000 excess limits coverage for the Weiss' litigation. KaMMCO denied coverage on the excess limits liability endorsement, contending that the alleged negligence in the Weiss' lawsuit predated the retroactive date and there was no retroactive coverage.
Dr. Marshall filed a declaratory judgment action to force KaMMCO to pay the excess limits coverage. Agreeing with Dr. Marshall's position, the Weisses intervened. All parties stipulated that there were no material facts at issue, and each party filed a motion for summary judgment. KaMMCO appealed after the trial court granted the motions for summary judgment on behalf of Dr. Marshall and the Weisses.
(1) Does Kansas Law Mandate Claims Made Coverage for Excess Limits Insurance?
Dr. Marshall and the Weisses argue that the HCPIA includes excess limits coverage in the mandatory coverage language of K.S.A. 40-3402(a). KaMMCO, not surprisingly, argues that the statute does not mandate such coverage.
Our first task, therefore, is to examine the statutory scheme of the HCPIA. The interpretation of a statute is a question of law over which this court has de novo review. See Bell v. Simon, 246 Kan. 473, 476, 790 P.2d 925 (1990).
When construing a statute, the court must give the statute the effect intended by the legislature. The legislative intent is to be determined from considering the entire act and every part thereof. If the statute is plain and unambiguous, the court must give effect to the language of the statute as written by the legislature. Courts, however, are not limited to examining the language of the statute alone. Courts may also consider the causes that impel the statute's adoption, the statute's objective, its historical background, and the effect of the statute under various constructions. Bell, 246 Kan. at 476.
K.S.A. 40-3402(a) provides:
"A policy of professional liability insurance approved by the commissioner and issued by an insurer duly authorized to transact business in this state in which the limit of the insurer's liability is not less than $200,000 per claim, subject to not less than a $600,000 annual aggregate for all claims made during the policy period, shall be maintained in effect by each resident health care provider as a condition to rendering professional service as a health care provider in this state, unless such health care provider is a self-insurer. . . . Such policy shall provide as a minimum coverage for claims made during the term of the policy which were incurred during the term of such policy or during the prior term of a similar policy." (Emphasis added.)
It is useful to distinguish the common types of liability insurance available for health care providers. With an occurrence policy, the coverage becomes effective if the negligent or omitted act occurs during the term of the policy. Essentially, the peril insured against by an occurrence policy is the act or omission itself, regardless of when the claim against the policy is made. With a claims made policy, the coverage becomes effective if the claim is discovered or made during the effective term of the policy, so the peril insured against is the claim itself. In a pure claims made policy, the effectiveness of the policy is not dependant on when the negligent act or omission occurred.
KaMMCO agrees that K.S.A. 40-3402(a) requires health care providers to maintain a claims made liability policy but argues that the statute only applies to its basic coverage and not to its excess limits coverage.
The relevant language of K.S.A. 40-3402(a), which has been a part of the statute since it was first enacted in 1976, states: "Such policy shall provide as a minimum coverage for claims made during the term of the policy which were incurred during the term of such policy or during the prior term of a similar policy." (Emphasis added.)
When the statute was first enacted in 1976, there was no need for excess limits insurance because the Fund's liability was unlimited. Therefore, excess limits insurance was not contemplated by the legislature; since the relevant language in K.S.A. 40-3402(a) has gone unchanged, we conclude that no excess limits liability coverage should be read into the statute.
Furthermore, the plain language of K.S.A. 40-3402(a) refers to the claims made policy as a "minimum coverage" and not as "any and all" coverage. If the legislature had intended for insurers to provide any and all professional liability insurance with claims made policies, the legislature would have used the words "any and all" rather than "minimum coverage."
KaMMCO's argument that the HCPIA applies only to its basic liability coverage is further supported by K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3401(a), which defines "basic coverage" as "a policy of professional liability insurance required to be maintained by each health care provider pursuant to the provisions of subsection (a) or (b) of K.S.A. 40-3402 and amendments thereto." Thus, by definition, K.S.A. 40-3402(a) establishes the minimum "basic coverage" and does not address excess limits insurance. Although the HCPIA refers to "basic coverage" in several statutes, see K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3401, K.S.A. 40-3402, K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3403, K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3404, K.S.A. 40-3413, K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3414, K.S.A. 40-3420, the Act neither requires excess limits coverage nor prohibits insurers from offering excess limits liability insurance.
Focusing on the language in K.S.A. 40-3402 that refers to claims incurred "during the prior term of a similar policy," Dr. Marshall and the Weisses argue that the excess limits insurance must be pure claims made insurance because Dr. Marshall's alleged negligence occurred during the prior term of a similar policy. The word "similar" means "[n]early corresponding; resembling in many respects." Black's Law Dictionary 1383 (6th ed. 1990). Although both the statutory basic coverage (primary) and excess limits coverage (secondary) are similar in that they both provide professional liability insurance, the similarities end at that point.
In any review of insurance coverages, we must always be guided by the language of the insurance contract. Here, by the terms of KaMMCO's insurance contract, the basic coverage and the excess limits coverage do not apply at the same time or under the same circumstances. Thus, the coverages are not similar, and the statutory requirement of claims made minimum liability coverage in K.S.A. 40-3402 does not extend to excess limits coverage.
Dr. Marshall and the Weiss' reliance on Missouri Medical Ins. Co. v. Wong, 234 Kan. 811, 676 P.2d 113 (1984), is misplaced. Dr. Wong did not have excess limits coverage; his primary coverage limit was $1,000,000 per claim, with a $1,000,000 annual aggregate. K.S.A. 40-3408 requires the payment of all insurance amounts that would have been applicable in the absence of the HCPIA before the Fund coverage becomes effective. Because Dr. Wong only purchased a policy with one coverage limit rather than purchasing a policy with both basic and excess limits liability coverages, K.S.A. 40-3408 applied making the entire $1,000,000 coverage applicable before the Fund coverage became effective.
K.S.A. 40-3408 does not apply to Dr. Marshall's excess limits insurance. Dr. Marshall did not purchase $1,000,000 of primary insurance like Dr. Wong. Instead, Dr. Marshall purchased a basic liability policy with coverage limits as required by K.S.A. 40-3402 and an additional endorsement for excess limits coverage which, according to the terms of the insurance contract, applied only after the Fund coverage was exhausted. K.S.A. 40-3408 applies only to coverage that would have been paid in the absence of the HCPIA prior to any Fund coverage. Dr. Marshall's excess limits coverage was not effective until after the Fund limits were paid.
We, therefore, conclude that the trial court erred when it found that K.S.A. 40-3402 requires the excess limits coverage to be issued as a pure claims made policy without the limitation of a retroactive period.
(2) Does KaMMCO's Excess Limits Coverage Violate Public Policy?
Properly framed, this issue is whether the KaMMCO policy violated public policy if the excess limits coverage did not apply to professional services rendered before January 1, 1999.
The trial court did not rule on the public policy issue, though both parties raised it. Since our standard of review is de novo, we will consider the issue. See Bolz v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 274 Kan. ___, ___, 52 P.2d 898 (2002).
"Public policy consists of the 'principles and standards regarded by the legislature or by the courts as being of fundamental concern to the state and the whole of society.' Black's Law Dictionary 1245 (7th ed. 1999). The declaration of public policy is primarily a legislative function. [Citation omitted.] Where the legislature declares the public policy and there is no constitutional impediment, the question of the wisdom, justice, or expediency of the legislation is for the legislature and not for the courts. [Citations omitted.]" Bolz, 274 Kan. at ___.
The issue is a matter of first impression in Kansas. Both parties cite to cases from other jurisdictions. Although none of the cited cases are directly on point, they are instructive in resolving the public policy question.
KaMMCO summarily cites Truck Ins. Exchange v. Ashland Oil, Inc., 951 F.2d 787 (7th Cir. 1992); Gaston Memorial Hosp. v. Virginia Ins. Reciprocal, 80 F. Supp. 2d 549 (W.D. N.C. 1999); Travelers Indemnity Co. v. Mutual Ins. Co., 152 Ariz. 267, 731 P.2d 632 (1986); Merrill & Seeley, Inc. v. Admiral Ins. Co., 225 Cal. App. 3d 624, 275 Cal. Rptr. 280 (1990); General Insur. Co. v. R. B. McManus, Inc., 272 Ill. App. 3d 510, 650 N.E.2d 1080 (1995); Stine v. Continental Casualty Co., 419 Mich. 89, 97-99, 349 N.W.2d 127 (1984); N.K.K. by Knudson v. St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins., 555 N.W.2d 21 (Minn. App. 1996); Gereboff v. Home Indemnity Co., 119 R.I. 814, 383 A.2d 1024 (1978), for the proposition that claims made policies with limited retroactivity are not against public policy. KaMMCO does not analyze the difference between the facts of this case and the facts of each of those cases. KaMMCO cites these cases as the majority view and asserts that Sparks v. St. Paul Ins. Co., 100 N.J. 325, 495 A.2d 406 (1985), cited by Dr. Marshall and the Weisses, is the minority view.
Dr. Marshall and the Weisses, on the other hand, rely solely on Sparks for the proposition that claims made policies with limited retroactivity are void as against public policy. They acknowledge that the Sparks case is a minority viewpoint but assert that the Wong decision aligns Kansas with the minority viewpoint.
Both parties oversimplify their analyses of the cases from other jurisdictions and ignore other decisions. The cases cited do not establish the majority and minority opinions as suggested by the parties. Instead, those courts issued opinions based upon the unique factual situation presented in each case. Those conclusions, however, are not readily assimilated into two categories based on the final conclusions. A more detailed analysis is necessary to apply the results in those cases to new factual situations like the one in this case.
In resolving this, issue we must consider (1) the concept of insurance coverage that is simultaneous with the insured's legal liability, (2) the freedom to contract, and (3) prevention of fraud.
In Sparks, the New Jersey Supreme Court interpreted a claims made professional liability policy to be an occurrence policy because the limited retroactivity of the claims made coverage did not comport with the insured's reasonable expectations. 100 N.J. 338-39. Interestingly, the insurer did not deny coverage because the alleged negligence occurred after the retroactive date specified in the policy. Instead, the insurer denied coverage because the insured did not notify the insurer of the claim until after the policy had expired. Focusing on the public policy of simultaneous liability coverage, the Sparks court ignored the fact that simultaneous coverage was not at issue. 100 N.J. at 332. The Sparks court, however, noted that claims made policies with limited retroactive coverage may be appropriate when "offered at a reduced premium to the professional in his very first year of practice, or to the professional who changes from 'occurrence' to 'claims made' protection." 100 N.J. at 340 n.4.
The New Jersey Supreme Court decided Zuckerman v. National Union Fire Ins. Co., 100 N.J. 304, 495 A.2d 395 (1985), at the same time it decided Sparks. However, in Zuckerman, the court enforced the claims made policy as written because the insured had failed to notify the insurer of the claim during the term of the policy. 100 N.J. at 321-22. The difference between Sparks and Zuckerman was the retroactivity of the policy. In Zuckerman, the policy's retroactivity was limited only by claims that the insured should have reasonably known about when the policy was issued. Instead of looking at the policy for simultaneous liability coverage, the Zuckerman court focused on the parties' freedom to contract, stating that the "extension of the notice period in a 'claims made' policy constitutes an unbargained-for expansion of coverage, gratis, resulting in the insurance company's exposure to a risk substantially broader than that expressly insured against in the policy." 100 N.J. at 324.
In Merrill & Seeley, Inc., General Insur. Co., N.K.K., and Gereboff, the validity of the retroactive date was at issue because the alleged negligence occurred prior to the retroactive date. In upholding the limitation that retroactive dates impose on claims made policies, these courts focused on the insured's choices in purchasing insurance contracts rather than the insured's reasonable expectation of coverage. Merrill & Seeley, Inc., 225 Cal. App. 3d at 630; General Insur. Co., 272 Ill. App. 3d at 515; N.K.K., 555 N.W.2d at 26; Gereboff, 119 R.I. at 821-22. Finding the insurance policies unambiguous, two of the courts enforced them as written and refused to address the insured's reasonable expectations. Merrill & Seeley, Inc., 225 Cal. App. 3d at 630; General Insur. Co., 272 Ill. App. 3d at 513-14. The other two courts specifically found that the insured knowingly purchased insurance with limited retroactivity and refused to reform the unambiguous policies. N.K.K., 555 N.W.2d at 26; Gereboff, 119 R.I. at 822.
In Brander v. Nabors, 443 F. Supp. 764 (N.D. Miss. 1978), and Stine, 419 Mich. 89, the courts were not concerned with the application of the retroactive date. Instead, the insurers denied coverage because the insureds failed to assert a claim during the policy period. Noting the parties' right to freely contract, these courts refused to find the insurance policies ambiguous simply because they were hybrid policies rather than pure claims made or occurrence policies. Brander, 443 F. Supp. at 769-70; Stine, 419 Mich. at 114-16. The Brander court also noted that the freedom of insurance companies to offer hybrid policies serves the public interest because it deters insurance fraud. Without limited retroactivity, an insurer cannot protect itself from insureds who purchase insurance to cover a known claim while concealing the possibility of the claim from the insurer. Brander, 443 F. Supp. at 773.
In Truck Ins. Exchange, 951 F.2d 787, the insured purchased a claims made policy without the limitation of a retroactive date. The issue was whether the insured had knowledge of any circumstances that might lead to a claim at the effective date of the policy. Focusing on the possibility of fraud, the Truck court upheld the claims made policy, finding that the insured knew about the possible claim on the effective date of the policy. 951 F.2d at 791. The Truck court stated: "The language to which [the insured] objects merely protects the insurer against the form of fraud that consists of taking out claims-made insurance after you know or should know that a claim is about to be made against you." 951 F.2d at 791.
Two of the cases cited by both parties do not address the public policy concerns with claims made policies that have limited retroactivity. See Gaston Memorial Hosp., 80 F. Supp. 2d 549; Travelers Indemnity Co., 152 Ariz. 267. Both of these courts denied coverage because the alleged negligence occurred prior to the retroactive date in the claims made policies without addressing the merits of retroactive coverage. Gaston Memorial Hosp., 80 F. Supp. 2d at 557; Travelers Indemnity Co., 152 Ariz. at 268. Although these cases are not helpful for analyzing public policy concerns, they demonstrate other courts' willingness to accept claims made insurance with limitations on the retroactive coverage.
(a) Simultaneous Coverage
We conclude that by enacting the HCPIA, the Kansas Legislature has clearly established that Kansas public policy favors simultaneous coverage and liability. Indeed, the Kansas Legislature has already addressed this public policy by requiring basic liability insurance for all licensed health care providers. See K.S.A. 40-3402; K.S.A. 2002 Supp. 40-3403. The issue here is not whether Dr. Marshall had any insurance at all; he did. The issue is whether the excess limits liability coverage applies retroactively without limitation, notwithstanding the policy endorsement. Thus, the public policy of simultaneous coverage is not violated under the facts of this case.
(b) Freedom to Contract
Kansas recognizes the freedom to contract as a qualified and not an absolute right that is protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Manhattan Buildings, Inc. v. Hurley, 231 Kan. 20, 28, 643 P.2d 87 (1982). Freedom to contract, however, is limited by other public policy and legislation. 231 Kan. at 28. Nevertheless, "the paramount public policy is that freedom to contract is not to be interfered with lightly. [Citation omitted.]" Foltz v. Struxness, 168 Kan. 714, 721-22, 215 P.2d 133 (1950).
Dr. Marshall and the Weisses argue that Dr. Marshall did not freely contract with KaMMCO for the excess liability insurance because no one from KaMMCO spoke with Dr. Marshall about the policy before he purchased it. This argument, however, overlooks Dr. Marshall's choice to delegate the purchase of the policy to his secretary. In fact, the record on appeal discloses that Dr. Marshall did not read all of the application for the excess limits liability coverage before signing his name to the application. As a result, Dr. Marshall did not notice that the retroactive date on the application was left blank. In the disclosure statement before the signature line, the application specifically states: "As defined in the policy, claims made coverage provides coverage for claims occurring subsequent to the retroactive date and first made to the company during the policy period." Had Dr. Marshall read the excess limits application before signing it, perhaps he would have understood the need to specify a retroactive date on the application.
The record also discloses that Dr. Marshall never read the Medical Professional Liability Excess Limits Insuring Agreement (endorsement) that was attached to the application until the initiation of this litigation. The endorsement clearly explains the limitations of the excess limits coverage being added to the policy. A party to a contract has a duty to learn the contents of a written contract before signing it. Rosenbaum v. Texas Energies, Inc., 241 Kan. 295, 299, 736 P.2d 888 (1987). This duty has been interpreted to include a duty to secure a reading and explanation of the contract. 241 Kan. at 299. A party's negligent failure to do so estops the party from avoiding the terms of the contract on the grounds of ignorance of its contents. 241 Kan. at 299.
Accordingly, Dr. Marshall cannot avoid the terms of the excess limits coverage because he was ignorant about the limitations of the policy endorsement. Likewise, he cannot claim that the excess limits insurance violates his freedom to contract because he failed to adequately inform himself before entering into the contract.
The statutorily required minimum limits of professional liability coverage, as is evident from the facts of this case, are not necessarily sufficient to cover all of a health care provider's liability. To provide additional protection for Kansas residents and health care professionals, insurance companies should be free to contract for additional coverage, with premiums determined in accordance with the parties' needs and consistent with the risk factors disclosed to the insurance companies. Public policy supports this freedom to contract without unduly burdening either party to the transaction. Without this freedom to contract, it is likely that insurance companies might refuse to assume additional risk on behalf of health care providers.
The facts of this case are very similar to those in Merrill & Seeley, Inc.; General Insur. Co.; N.K.K.; and Gereboff, where the courts upheld the limited retroactivity of claims made insurance polices. The key difference between those cases and the case here is that those cases involved the only insurance available to the insured. In this case, the only insurance at issue is the $1,000,000 excess limits coverage over and above the statutorily required $1,000,000 of coverage already available from KaMMCO and the Fund. This distinction further supports the affirmation of KaMMCO's excess limits insurance under the public policy of freedom to contract.
(c) Fraud
Preventing insurance fraud positively affects the citizens of Kansas by making excess liability insurance available at a reasonable cost. If insurers are forced to sell excess limits coverage on a purely claims made basis with unlimited retroactivity, either the cost of such insurance will skyrocket or the insurers will discontinue offering excess coverage because it would become impossible to assess the exposure of the insurer.
The ramifications of possible insurance fraud are evident under the stipulated, uncontroverted facts of this case. Dr. Marshall admitted that he had never applied for excess limits insurance prior to December 1998. Dr. Marshall paid $3,017 for $1,000,000 in excess limits insurance coverage in December 1998. Dr. Marshall also paid $30,322 in December 1998 for his primary limits coverage of $1,000,000 from KaMMCO and the Fund. Before Dr. Marshall applied for excess limits insurance, the Weiss' attorney requested medical records from Dr. Marshall. Dr. Marshall did not purchase or attempt to purchase excess limits coverage when he renewed his primary insurance with KaMMCO for the calendar year 2000.
The factual situation presented in this case is precisely the factual situation the Truck court warned about. See Truck Ins. Exchange, 951 F.2d at 791. Dr. Marshall purchased the claims made excess limits coverage after he knew that a claim would be made against him. Although Dr. Marshall and the Weisses argue that KaMMCO was aware of a possible claim from the Weisses before the excess limits coverage was issued, KaMMCO was not concerned about the possibility of the Weiss' claim because the retroactive date excluded coverage for any claim that might be made.
While there is no suggestion of an overt attempt to defraud KaMMCO in this case, the public policy considerations of insurance fraud may be considered, given the record on appeal. After evaluating all of the public policy considerations implicated in this case, we hold that it is not against public policy for KaMMCO to offer excess limits insurance on a claims made basis with limited retroactivity. Indeed, public policy supports the availability of such insurance to health care providers.
(3) Is KaMMCO's Excess Limits Endorsement Ambiguous?
The interpretation of an insurance contract is a question of law over which an appellate court has de novo review. The appellate court is not bound by the district court's interpretation. First Financial Ins. Co. v. Bugg, 265 Kan. 690, 694, 962 P.2d 515 (1998).
KaMMCO contends that the trial court erred when it found that the KaMMCO policy was ambiguous and should be construed as Dr. Marshall has contended.
We agree with KaMMCO and reverse.
If the language in an insurance policy is clear and unambiguous, it must be construed in its plain, ordinary, and popular sense and according to the sense and meaning of the terms used. Bugg, 265 Kan. at 694. An insurance policy is ambiguous when it contains language of doubtful or conflicting meaning based on a reasonable construction of the policy's language. Jones v. Reliable Security, Inc., 29 Kan. App. 2d 617, 626-27, 28 P.3d 1051, rev. denied 272 Kan. ___ (2001). An ambiguity does not exist merely because the parties disagree on the interpretation of the language. 29 Kan. App. 2d at 627.
To determine whether an insurance contract is ambiguous, the court must not consider what the insurer intends the language to mean. Instead, the court must view the language as to what a reasonably prudent insured would understand the language to mean. Bugg, 265 Kan. at 694. This does not mean that the policy should be construed according to the insured's uninformed expectations of the policy's coverage. Jones, 29 Kan. App. 2d at 627.
Courts should not strain to find an ambiguity when common sense shows there is none. Bugg, 265 Kan. at 694. The court must consider the terms of an insurance policy as a whole, without fragmenting the various provisions and endorsements. 265 Kan. at 697.
As a general rule, exceptions, limitations, and exclusions to insurance policies are narrowly construed. The insurer assumes the duty to define limitations to an insured's coverage in clear and explicit terms. To restrict or limit coverage, an insurer must use clear and unambiguous language. Otherwise, the insurance policy will be construed in favor of the insured. Marquis v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., 265 Kan. 317, 327, 961 P.2d 1213 (1998).
Although the trial court found the excess limits endorsement to be ambiguous, its opinion does not address the precise ambiguity in the policy's language. Instead, the trial court's conclusion reiterates its conclusion regarding the application of K.S.A. 40-3402. The court stated:
"When the Court looked at the document in total, the Court came away with the same conclusion as advanced by Dr. Marshall's counsel, and that is, how do we have a policy that complies with the statute, if in fact [its] retroactive date is the same date as the date of [its] effective date. It just simply doesn't compute."
Nevertheless, this court can interpret the insurance policy without regard to the trial court's interpretation. See Bugg, 265 Kan. at 694.
The pertinent part of the policy endorsement states:
"MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL LIABILITY
EXCESS LIMITS
INSURING AGREEMENT
" Coverage
"This Endorsement extends the coverage afforded by the policy to cover claims arising from the performance of professional services, as defined in the policy, subsequent to the excess limits retroactive date as set forth in the Excess Limits Endorsement attached to the policy, and first made against the named insured while this Agreement is in force. All coverages, exclusions, terms, conditions, rights, duties and obligations contained in the policy shall apply with equal force to this Agreement unless specifically modified by this Agreement.
"Limits of Liability
"The coverage afforded by this Endorsement shall attach after the coverages and policy limits of all other policies for claims arising from the performance of professional services, including coverage extended by the Kansas Health Care Stabilization Fund, have been exhausted. The limits of liability, which are in excess of all other insurance as stated above, shall be those limits described in the Excess Limits Endorsement. Said limits of liability shall be available only for claims first made against the named insured during the policy period and occurring subsequent to the excess limits retroactive date, as set forth in the Declarations Page and Excess Limits Endorsement."
The "Excess Limits Endorsement" declarations page specifically provides:
"HEALTH CARE PROVIDER EFFECTIVE DATE EXCESS LIMITS EXCESS LIMITS
RETROACTIVE DATE EACH CLAIM/ANNUAG AGGREGATE
MARSHALL, MD, GEORGE W 01/01/99 01/01/99 1,000,000 1,000,000."
KaMMCO argues that the exclusions in the primary policy are included in the excess limits endorsement because they are incorporated by reference in the endorsement and do not conflict with the language in the endorsement. KaMMCO, however, misconstrues the language in the primary policy. By its very terms, the exclusions listed in the primary policy apply only to "Coverage A" and "Coverage B." The declarations page of the primary policy clearly identifies the excess limits liability coverage as "Coverage C."
Dr. Marshall and the Weisses argue that the entire policy is ambiguous for two reasons. First, the excess limits endorsement references two retroactive dates, July 6, 1977, and January 1, 1999. Second, the phrase, "subsequent to the retroactive date" in the "Coverage A" clause of the primary policy modifies "services" or "claim," thereby referring to the timing of the claim. Both of these arguments are in error.
The excess limits endorsement clearly states that the excess liability limits are "available only for claims first made against the named insured during the policy period and occurring subsequent to the excess limits retroactive date, as set forth in the Declarations Page and Excess Limits Endorsement." (Emphasis added.) The fact that the retroactive dates listed in the primary policy and in the excess limits endorsement are different does not make the policy ambiguous because they are joined by the conjunction "and" rather than "or." The use of the word "and" eliminates any doubtful or conflicting meaning. It is not confusing to determine whether an event occurs after the two different dates.
Dr. Marshall and the Weiss' second argument fails because the "Coverage A" clause in the primary policy does not apply to the excess limits coverage, which is designated as "Coverage C." Even if the clause applied, the appellees have misconstrued the language. The "Coverage A" clause in question states:
"To pay on behalf of the Insured or the Insured's estate all sums which the Insured shall become legally obligated to pay as damages because of any claim or claims first made against the Insured during the policy period arising out of the performance of professional services rendered or which should have been rendered, subsequent to the retroactive date, by the Insured . . . ." (Emphasis added.)
The phrase "subsequent to the retroactive date" modifies "rendered" and describes when the professional services had to occur before the coverage would apply.
When construed as a whole, the insurance policy is not ambiguous. The language clearly establishes that the excess limits coverage is only available when four conditions are met. Those conditions include: (1) The limits of all other policies must have been paid; (2) the limits of the Fund must have been paid; (3) the claim must be made during the policy period; (4) the professional services must have been performed after the excess limits retroactive date. When viewed in the eyes of a reasonably prudent insured, the policy clearly establishes the excess limits retroactive date on the excess limits endorsement as January 1, 1999. The language is not confusing, contradictory, or hidden amongst the text of the contract. Indeed, the retroactive date for the excess limits coverage appears on a page with little other information. Thus, the trial court erred when it found the insurance policy ambiguous.
As noted by other courts that have considered whether claims made policies with limited retroactive coverage are ambiguous, the fact that a policy cannot be classified as purely claims made or purely occurrence insurance does not in and of itself create an ambiguity. Brander, 443 F. Supp. at 769-70; Merrill & Seeley, Inc., 225 Cal. App. 3d at 630; General Insur. Co., 272 Ill. App. 3d at 513-14; Stine, 419 Mich. at 114; N.K.K., 555 N.W.2d at 25. The same holds true with the insurance policy in this case. This lack of ambiguity requires us to reverse.
(4) Did the Trial Court Properly Reform the Insurance Policy?
The trial court's ruling, which reformed the insurance policy to conform to Dr. Marshall's expectations, was dependent on the court's finding that it was an ambiguous contract.
KaMMCO argues that the trial court erroneously applied the reasonable expectations doctrine to reform the insurance policy.
If a contract is ambiguous, there are two methods that may be used to reform the contract: "(1) A liberal construction in a way most favorable to the insured and (2) an interpretation consistent with the reasonable expectations of the insured." Liggatt v. Employers Mutual Cas. Co., 273 Kan. ___, ___, 46 P.3d 1120 (2002). The doctrine of reasonable expectations, however, only applies when a contract is ambiguous. 273 Kan. at . When an insurance contract is not ambiguous, the court will enforce the contract as written. 273 Kan. at .
The insurance policy in this case is not ambiguous. Therefore, the doctrine of reasonable expectations does not apply. The trial court erred when it reformed the insurance policy to conform to Dr. Marshall's expectations.
ABBOTT and NUSS, JJ., not participating.
CHRISTEL E. MARQUARDT, J., and LARSON, S.J., assigned.1
1REPORTER'S NOTE: Judge Marquardt, of the Kansas Court of Appeals, was appointed to hear case No. 88,366 vice Justice Abbott pursuant to the authority vested in the Supreme Court by K.S.A. 20-3002(c). Judge Larson was appointed to hear case No. 88,366 vice Justice Nuss pursuant to the authority vested in the Supreme Court by K.S.A. 20-2616.
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CITY OF SALINA,
JOHN LEROY AMADOR,
1. Review of the district court's dismissal of a defendant's charges based upon double jeopardy is a question of law, and this court's review is unlimited.
2. The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and § 10 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights provide that no person shall be twice placed in jeopardy for the same offense.
3. The Double Jeopardy Clause of the United States Constitution provides three different types of protection for a person charged with a crime. Double jeopardy protection shields an accused from (1) a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal, (2) a second prosecution for the same offense after conviction, and (3) multiple punishments for the same offense.
4. When a criminal case is appealed from a municipal court to a district court, the case shall be tried de novo in the district court. Such an appeal results in a new trial on the convictions appealed from and is not limited to evidence and arguments raised at the municipal court level.
5. As an appeal from a municipal court conviction mandates a trial de novo in district court, the appealed conviction before the municipal court must be conditionally vacated. If the defendant does not dismiss his or her appeal, and the appeal is dismissed without prejudice, or the appealed case is actually heard de novo before the district court, the municipal court conviction appealed from is vacated.
6. Under the facts of this case, the defendant's municipal court conviction was stayed by his appeal to the district court, and the district court's dismissal of the appeal without prejudice vacated all proceedings in the municipal court. Jeopardy did not attach at the district court level, with the result that the defendant's prosecution on the same charges in the municipal court did not violate his double jeopardy rights under the Kansas or United States Constitutions.
7. The opportunity to appeal the dismissal of a complaint under K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3602(b), or to refile the complaint in the municipal court, are not mutually exclusive. The State may appeal but also may, as in this case, refile the charges in municipal court.
Review of the judgment of the Court of Appeals in 32 Kan. App. 2d 548, 85 P.3d 724 (2004). Appeal from Saline district court, JOHN WECKEL, judge. Judgment of the Court of Appeals reversing the district court is affirmed. Judgment of the district court is reversed and remanded with directions. Opinion filed March 4, 2005.
Jennifer L. Wyatt, city prosecutor, of Salina, argued the cause and was on the brief for appellant.
Julie A. McKenna, of McKenna and Trocheck, of Salina, argued the cause and was on the brief for appellee.
DAVIS, J.: John Leroy Amador was convicted in municipal court of battery and criminal damage to property. He appealed his convictions to the district court. The appeal was dismissed without prejudice for failure to prosecute. The City of Salina (City) refiled his case in municipal court and he was convicted again of the same charges. He appealed and the district court dismissed all charges on the basis of double jeopardy. The Court of Appeals in City of Salina v. Amador, 32 Kan. App. 2d 548, 85 P.3d 724 (2004), reversed, and we granted the defendant's petition for review.
The question before this court is whether the defendant's double jeopardy rights were violated by a subsequent prosecution of the same charges in municipal court following the district court's dismissal of his appeal without prejudice. The Court of Appeals answered no to this question. We agree and affirm the Court of Appeals' decision reversing the district court.
John Leroy Amador was convicted of battery and criminal damage to property in Salina Municipal Court. He perfected his appeal to the Saline County District Court. On the day the defendant's case was set for hearing before the district court, the City appeared by its attorney and the defendant appeared in person and by his attorney. The City requested a continuance of the hearing because some of its witnesses were not present. The district court denied the City's request and granted the defendant's motion to dismiss the charges without prejudice. The key to understanding the decision of this court is that the dismissal before the district court was granted without prejudice.
Following dismissal without prejudice, the City refiled the same charges in municipal court under a new case number, and the defendant was tried and again convicted of battery and criminal damage to property. The defendant again appealed to the district court; he moved to dismiss the charges on double jeopardy grounds.
The district court granted the motion after conducting a hearing. The court reasoned that the proper procedure would have been for the City to file an appeal from the district court order dismissing the case without prejudice. The court cited State v. Derusseau, 25 Kan. App. 2d 544, 966 P.2d 694 (1998), as setting precedent that jeopardy attaches after a hearing and a finding by a magistrate court. As such, the court concluded that prosecution of the defendant in municipal court following the dismissal of charges on appeal violated the defendant's double jeopardy rights.
The Court of Appeals reversed, concluding that the City was not required to pursue an appeal under 22-3602(b)(1) from the district court's initial dismissal of charges without prejudice. The court held that the defendant's initial appeal from his municipal court convictions vacated the defendant's municipal court convictions and provided for a trial de novo on the charges in the district court. When the defendant's case was called for hearing, the district court dismissed the City's charges against the defendant without prejudice. Such a dismissal does not implicate double jeopardy and allowed the City to refile the defendant's case again before the municipal court. 32 Kan. App. 2d at 550-53.
Review of the district court's dismissal of the refiled charges against the defendant based upon double jeopardy is a question of law, and this court's review is unlimited. See State v. Barnhart, 266 Kan. 541, 543, 972 P.2d 1106 (1999).
"The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and § 10 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights provide that no person shall be twice placed in jeopardy for the same offense." State v. Perry, 266 Kan. 224, 228, 968 P.2d 674 (1998).
"The Double Jeopardy Clause of the United States Constitution provides three different types of protection for a person charged with a crime. Double jeopardy protection shields an accused from: (1) a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal, (2) a second prosecution for the same offense after conviction, and (3) multiple punishments for the same offense." State v. Wittsell, 275 Kan. 442, Syl. ¶ 1, 66 P.3d 831 (2003).
K.S.A. 21-3108 codifies this double jeopardy protection. It provides in relevant part:
"(1) A prosecution is barred if the defendant was formerly prosecuted for the same crime, based upon the same facts, if such former prosecution:
(a) Resulted in either a conviction or an acquittal or in a determination that the evidence was insufficient to warrant a conviction."
We are able to answer the question posed by considering answers to the following three questions: (1) Were the defendant's original municipal court convictions vacated when the defendant appealed to district court for a trial de novo, (2) did jeopardy attach after the appeal and charges against the defendant were dismissed without prejudice by the district court, and (3) was the City's only remedy upon dismissal by the district court an appeal to the Court of Appeals?
(1) Effect of Appeal to the District Court
We first consider whether the defendant's appeal of his municipal court convictions to the district court vacated his municipal court convictions. If upon the defendant's initial appeal to the district court, the defendant's convictions were vacated, a second prosecution would not be barred under K.S.A. 21-3108(4)(c), which provides:
"(4) A prosecution is not barred under this section:
(c) If subsequent proceedings resulted in the invalidation, setting aside, reversal or vacating of the conviction, unless the defendant was adjudged not guilty."
K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609(1) provides:
"The defendant shall have the right to appeal to the district court of the county from any judgment of a municipal court which adjudges the defendant guilty of a violation of the ordinances of any municipality of Kansas. . . . The appeal shall stay all further proceedings upon the judgment appealed from." (Emphasis added.)
See also K.S.A. 12-4601.
The plain language of the statute provides that all proceedings are stayed on appeal. "Stay" is defined as "[t]he postponement or halting of a proceeding, judgment, or the like," or "[a]n order to suspend all or part of a judicial proceeding or a judgment resulting from that proceeding." Black's Law Dictionary 1453 (8th ed. 2004). In contrast, "vacate" is defined as "[t]o nullify or cancel; make void; invalidate." Black's Law Dictionary 1584 (8th ed. 2004).
K.S.A. 22-3610(a) provides: "When a case is appealed to the district court . . . [t]he case shall be tried de novo in the district court." De novo review of the municipal court convictions to the district court encompasses a new trial on the convictions appealed from and is not limited to evidence and arguments raised at the municipal court level. See Reddington v. Rank, 176 Kan. 484, 271 P.2d 807 (1954). An examination of the cases relied upon by the Court of Appeals and others supports the conclusion that the effect of an appeal of convictions from the municipal court to the district court is to stay and vacate, under certain conditions, the municipal court convictions.
In State v. Burkett, 231 Kan. 686, 687, 648 P.2d 716 (1982), this court considered whether the State could refile a felony charge in the de novo appeal proceeding to the district court that it had agreed to dismiss through plea bargaining in the proceedings before the magistrate judge. In ultimately concluding that the State was not precluded from asserting the original charges, we reasoned in part:
"The quoted statute, K.S.A. 22-3609a [providing for an appeal from judgment of magistrate judge], gives defendant this privilege as a matter of right. The effect of the appeal is to stay all further proceedings before the district magistrate judge. The case is to be tried de novo before the district judge or an associate district judge. The pleas entered before the district magistrate judge are automatically vacated; otherwise there would be no reason for a trial. The proceedings start afresh; arraignment must be held; new pleas must be entered; a jury may be demanded; and if conviction results, the judge must direct the disposition, whether by fine, sentence, suspension of sentence, probation or otherwise. The plea, conviction and disposition had before the district magistrate judge are subject to automatic vacation by the appeal; none remain." (Emphasis added.) 231 Kan. at 690.
In State v. Rose, 29 Kan. App. 2d 355, 28 P.3d 431, rev. denied 272 Kan. 1422 (2001), the magistrate judge suppressed the defendant's breath alcohol test at the hearing on his driving under the influence charge, and the State did not appeal this ruling. Nevertheless, the defendant was convicted and appealed his convictions to the district court. In a trial de novo, the district court admitted the results of the breath alcohol test and the defendant was again convicted. The defendant appealed, arguing that the State was bound by the magistrate's suppression order because it did not appeal the ruling pursuant to K.S.A. 2000 Supp. 22-3602 and K.S.A. 22-3603.
The Court of Appeals found that the right of appeal granted the prosecution under these statutes would be an important right if the suppressed evidence were essential to the case, however, when the evidence was not crucial, the prosecution could elect to proceed to trial without the evidence. The court reasoned that the fact "the State could have taken an interlocutory appeal from the suppression order of the magistrate judge is of no consequence under the facts of this case." 29 Kan. App. 2d at 359. The court found the appeal "automatically vacated all orders entered by the magistrate judge," and the district court had to determine both the facts and the law in a de novo trial. 29 Kan. App. 2d at 360.
Burkett and Rose are obviously distinguishable from this case in that they dealt with what is now K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a, appeals from proceedings before a magistrate judge, and this case deals with K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609, appeals from the municipal court. However, we have deemed the reasoning in Burkett regarding whether arraignment is necessary on appeal from the magistrate judge to be "instructive" in considering whether arraignment was necessary upon appeal from a municipal court conviction. See City of Wichita v. Maddox, 271 Kan. 445, 452, 24 P.3d 71 (2001); see also City of Halstead v. Mayfield, 19 Kan. App. 2d 186, 865 P.2d 222 (1993) (applying rationale used in determining when a judgment is appealable from magistrate judge to appeals from municipal court).
Further support for this conclusion is found in State v. Legero, 278 Kan. 109, 91 P.3d 1216 (2004), in which the majority concluded that a probation revocation order made by a magistrate judge was not appealable to the district court under K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a. In so finding, it cited with approval a Court of Appeals case which had found that an appeal to the district court from a municipal court order revoking probation was not authorized under K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609(1). Relevant to this case, we discussed the effect of appeals under both statutes:
"The appeal 22-3609a affords a defendant from a judgment does not operate as a review of the propriety of any judicial determination. Rather, the case is transferred to the district court where it will be tried de novo and guilt or innocence determined anew in the district court. On appeal, the case becomes a district court case as if filed there originally. The proceedings in the magistrate court have no bearing on the case as it comes before the district court. Unless the appeal is dismissed, the proceedings held in the magistrate court leave no footprint.
"This procedure set forth in K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a is virtually identical to the appeal afforded to a defendant who has been convicted in municipal court. . . .
"The difference in the wording of K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609, 'from any judgment of a municipal court which adjudges the defendant guilty of a violation of the ordinances of any municipality of Kansas,' and the 'any judgment' language of 22-3609a applicable herein was held to be a distinction without a difference in State v. Remlinger, 266 Kan. at 107. The procedures set forth in both statutes are virtual mirror images of each other. There is no appellate review of any prior order or judgment. For all practical purposes, the prosecution starts over." (Emphasis added.) 278 Kan. at 114.
While the dissenting opinion disagreed regarding the right to an appeal under K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a, it did not take issue with the practical effect of what happens when convictions are appealed to district court for a trial de novo under two similar statutes. Thus, Legero provides further support for the use of cases concerning K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a as persuasive authority in this case.
Additionally, we find the following cases concerning a similar appeal process in Kansas history from a justice of the peace or city court to the district court are instructive. In State v. Curtis, 29 Kan. 384 (1883), the defendant appealed his misdemeanor conviction before a justice of the peace to the district court for trial. In the district court, instead of asking leave to file an amended complaint, the State filed an information for the same offense and moved to dismiss the original appeal. The defendant argued that compelling him to go to trial on the second information, which was filed when a conviction for the same offense already existed, placed him in jeopardy for a second time. This court rejected that argument, reasoning in relevant part:
"It is insisted that the appeal from the judgment of the justice did not vacate such judgment, but only suspended it, and the case of State v. Volmer, 6 Kan. *379, is cited. But there is this difference between that case and the one at bar: there the appeal was from the district court to this [court] for review, and here from the justice to the district court for trial. Yet even in that case it was held that the appeal suspended the judgment for all purposes. A fortiori, the appeal in this case was equally potent. Further, while doubtless the appellant may dismiss his appeal, and thus reinstate and make final the judgment against him, yet the appeal conditionally vacates the judgment. [Citations omitted.] There is after the perfecting of the appeal only a pending prosecution. The case stands in the district court for trial as an original prosecution there. The state may dismiss the prosecution, and then there is no judgment or case in any court." (Emphasis added.) 29 Kan. at 386.
In Bankers Commercial Corp. v. Markl, 148 Kan. 789, 84 P.2d 896 (1938), the defendant prevailed in a civil suit in the city court, and the plaintiff appealed the assessment of costs to the district court. The district court dismissed the case without prejudice at the plaintiff's request, and then changed its mind and erroneously dismissed the appeal based on a defective notice of appeal. Regarding the status of the case, this court reasoned:
"'The dismissal of the case without prejudice entirely wipes the slate of the judgment in the city court against the plaintiff for costs and without an adjudication because an appeal from a judgment in the city court or court of a justice of the peace leaves nothing in the city court or court of a justice of the peace, but takes the whole matter to the district court for trial de novo. This is different from an appeal from a district court to the supreme court because the appeal in the latter case is only for a review of errors and not for a trial de novo. G.S. 1935, 61-1003, provides for the manner of taking an appeal from a court of a justice of the peace or city or county court, and further states:
'The district court shall try and determine the same as if originally filed therein. . . .'" 148 Kan. at 793.
As the procedure in K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a is "virtually identical" to that set forth in 22-3609(1), the above cases provide the same persuasive authority in resolving the question in this case. While we agree with the Court of Appeals' interpretation of the provisions of K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a as vacating the municipal court judgment in this case, we also find the Curtis court's characterization of the appeal as conditionally vacating the judgment the best description of the effect of appealing a municipal court conviction to the district court. This is because the defendant's voluntary dismissal of the appeal to the district court results in the reinstatement of the municipal court judgment. As an appeal from a municipal court conviction calls for a trial de novo, the appealed conviction before the municipal court must be conditionally vacated. If the defendant does not dismiss his or her appeal, and the case is dismissed by the district court with or without prejudice, or the case is actually heard de novo before the district court, the municipal court conviction appealed from is vacated.
In this case, the defendant did not dismiss his first appeal and the district court dismissed the case without prejudice prior to the commencement of a trial de novo. The phrase "without prejudice" generally means "'"there is no decision of the controversy on its merits, and leaves the whole subject in litigation as much open to another application as though no suit had ever been brought."''" State v. Heigele, 14 Kan. App. 2d 286, 288, 789 P.2d 218 (1990). The defendants and the district court's actions thus had the effect of wiping the slate clean of the judgment in municipal court. See Bankers Commercial Corp., 148 Kan. at 793. We conclude that the appeal for trial de novo under K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3609a, which was not dismissed by the defendant, coupled with the district court's dismissal of the case without prejudice, had the effect of vacating the municipal court conviction.
(2) Attachment of Jeopardy
In his petition for review, the defendant relies primarily upon City of Bonner Springs v. Bey, 236 Kan. 661, 694 P.2d 477 (1985), and State v. Derusseau, 25 Kan. App. 2d 544, 966 P.2d 694 (1998), in arguing that he was improperly prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced twice in municipal court in violation of double jeopardy rights. The defendant argues that jeopardy attached after his first municipal court conviction, prohibiting a second prosecution on the same charges in the municipal court.
In City of Bonner Springs, the defendant appealed his municipal court conviction and the district court dismissed the action because the City failed to introduce evidence that the defendant had been notified of an outstanding warrant. On appeal by the City on a question reserved, this court found that although the district court erred in dismissing the case, jeopardy had attached pursuant to K.S.A. 21-3108 (Ensley 1981) and further proceedings against the defendant were barred by double jeopardy. This was because the de novo case on appeal had commenced. See also City of Liberal v. Witherspoon, 28 Kan. App. 2d 649, 654, 20 P.3d 727 (2001) (double jeopardy prevented remand of case even though district court erroneously dismissed the case on appeal from municipal court for failure to present a prima facie case).
Likewise in Derusseau, the defendant was charged with driving under the influence and attempting to elude a police officer. He was convicted of only the DUI charge and acquitted of the eluding charge following a municipal court trial. The defendant appealed the DUI conviction and the district court required him to stand trial on both charges. Upon conviction of both charges, the defendant appealed the eluding conviction, claiming it violated his double jeopardy rights. The Court of Appeals held that constitutional and statutory prohibitions against double jeopardy precluded retrial on the eluding charge upon appeal for trial de novo on the DUI charge. 25 Kan. App. 2d at 544-51.
As noted by the Court of Appeals, City of Bonner Springs is distinguishable from this case because no evidence was presented at the district court level in the present case and the de novo trial in the district court had not commenced. See State v. Beerbower, 262 Kan. 248, Syl. ¶ 4, 936 P.2d 248 (1997) (defendant is not in jeopardy in a case tried to the court until the court begins to hear evidence). The district court dismissed this case without prejudice prior to any evidence being heard or witnesses being sworn.
Although Derusseau demonstrates that jeopardy can attach in municipal court, the distinguishing factor is that the defendant in Derusseau was acquitted of the charge in municipal court, while the defendant in this case was convicted of the charges in municipal court. The defendant in this case is not undergoing a second prosecution for the same offense after a conviction, because the appeal and dismissal without prejudice had the effect of vacating the municipal court conviction.
We additionally note that the United States Supreme Court has found that a defendant who chose to be tried de novo under Massachusetts' two-tiered system for trying minor crimes could be prosecuted a second time. The Court drew comparisons to a convicted defendant who successfully appealed and had his or her conviction reversed and remanded for new trial. Justices of Boston Municipal Court v. Lydon, 466 U.S. 294, 304-05, 80 L. Ed. 2d 311, 104 S. Ct. 1805 (1984).
Although this case is one step removed from Lydon because the City chose to prosecute the case again in municipal court after the dismissal, its reasoning can be carried through to the facts of this case. If the City was free to prosecute the defendant again in a trial de novo in district court under Lydon, it follows that a second prosecution in municipal court after a dismissal of the appeal by the district court without prejudice would not violate double jeopardy. A second prosecution at the district court level carries a much heavier consequence for a defendant who would not have the benefit of a de novo review on appeal, while the defendant in this case was still entitled to a de novo appeal after a second conviction in municipal court.
The defendant's municipal court conviction in this case was stayed by his appeal to the district court. The district court's dismissal of the appeal without prejudice vacated all proceedings in the municipal court. Since the dismissal by the district court was made prior to the court hearing any evidence or swearing any witnesses, jeopardy did not attach at the district court level. Thus, the defendant may be prosecuted again on the same charges in the municipal court without violating double jeopardy.
(3) Failure to Appeal to Court of Appeals
The defendant also argues that once the original case was dismissed, the City's only option was to appeal the district court's denial of its request for a continuance and dismissal of the charges pursuant to K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3602(b)(1), which provides in relevant part:
"(b) Appeals to the court of appeals may be taken by the prosecution from cases before a district judge as a matter of right in the following cases, and no others:
(1) From an order dismissing a complaint, information or indictment."
In his petition for review, the defendant relies primarily upon Ball v. United States, 163 U.S. 662, 41 L. Ed. 300, 16 S. Ct. 1192 (1896), in arguing that the prosecutor failed to follow proper appellate procedure by appealing the district court's dismissal of her case. In Ball, the defendant was acquitted of the murder charge and his codefendants were found guilty. The codefendants' convictions were overturned on appeal based on a fatally defective indictment, and on remand the defendant was convicted of murder based on the new indictment. The defendant's conviction was reversed on appeal on double jeopardy grounds. 163 U.S. at 669-71.
While the defendant does not provide this court with much argument, it appears he is trying to draw an analogy between the two municipal court trials in this case and the two district court trials in Ball. However, the Ball case does not provide any authority for the defendant's position as it involved a conviction after an earlier acquittal and did not involve municipal court convictions or require the State to appeal the charges dismissed in the district court. The fact that the codefendants in Ball appealed their convictions to this court does not suggest that the City in this case was required to appeal the district court's dismissal of the charges without prejudice.
As noted by the Court of Appeals, nothing in the language of the statute indicates that an appeal to the Court of Appeals was the City's only source of redress after the case was dismissed without prejudice. This is evidenced by the statute's use of the permissive directive "may" rather than a mandatory directive of "shall." Moreover, nothing in the plain language of the statute prohibits the City from refiling the charges in municipal court rather than appealing to the Court of Appeals.
This conclusion is supported by State v. Zimmerman & Schmidt, 233 Kan. 151, 660 P.2d 960 (1983). In that case, the State appealed the dismissal of the complaint after a preliminary hearing, and the defendant argued that the State should not be authorized to elect between either refiling the complaint and proceeding to a new preliminary hearing or appealing the dismissal under 22-3602(b). This court rejected this argument, reasoning in relevant part:
"This appeal from the order of the district court dismissing the burglary count in the complaint is expressly authorized by statute as a matter of right. The possibility that the State may choose not to appeal the district court's order and instead refile the complaint should additional witnesses or new evidence be procured does not alter the right to appeal clearly authorized by the statute. It neither contemplates nor requires, as the appellees contend, that an appeal may only be perfected where a complaint, dismissed during pretrial procedures, cannot be refiled. We are mindful of the rule of statutory construction that penal statutes must be strictly construed in favor of the persons sought to be subjected to their operations, which simply means that ordinary words are to be given their ordinary meaning. Such a statute should not be read to add that which is not readily found therein or to read out what as a matter of ordinary English language is in it. [Citations omitted.] The rule does not permit or justify a disregard of manifest legislative intention appearing from plain and unambiguous language." (Emphasis added.) 233 Kan. at 154-55.
Although Zimmerman is clearly distinguishable from this case because it dealt with a preliminary hearing rather than an appeal from a municipal court conviction, it demonstrates that this court has concluded that the opportunity to appeal the dismissal of a complaint under 22-3602(b) or to refile the complaint are not mutually exclusive. We conclude that both the plain language of the statute and Zimmerman provide that the City's remedy to the dismissal was not limited to an appeal but included refiling the charges in municipal court if the original municipal court conviction was vacated or set aside.
In this case, the defendant appealed his municipal court convictions to the district court for a trial de novo and at no time did the defendant voluntarily dismiss his appeal. The appeal coupled with the district court's dismissal of the defendant's case without prejudice vacated the municipal court convictions and had the same effect as if the original case had never been prosecuted. The district court dismissed the defendant's appeal before hearing any evidence or the swearing of any witnesses. Thus, jeopardy did not attach at the district court level.
The City was not required to appeal the dismissal without prejudice pursuant to K.S.A. 2003 Supp. 22-3602(d) and could refile the original charges in the municipal court. Since jeopardy did not attach at the district court level and the defendant's initial municipal court convictions and sentences were vacated based upon the defendant's appeal and the district court's dismissal without prejudice, the City's prosecution of the defendant on the same charges did not violate the defendant's jeopardy rights. Thus, we affirm the Court of Appeals' decision reversing the district court and remand the case to the district court with directions to set aside the order dismissing the case.
Judgment of the Court of Appeals reversing the district court is affirmed. Judgment of the district court is reversed, and the case is remanded with directions.
Updated: March 04, 2005.
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The Philadelphia Citizen
34th Street Magazine
The Daily Pennsylvanian
La Jeune Politique
Melanie Bavaria
Freelance multimedia journalist: videographer, photographer, and writer
Published on The Philadelphia Citizen (www.thephiladelphiacitizen.org)
The Play(ground)’s the Thing →
The Play(ground)’s the Thing: Landscape architect Lois Brink turned Denver school yards into community parks. Can she do the same in Philly?
Mayor Jim Kenney, along with other city and school officials, have announced their intention to create community schools—neighborhood centers that combine academic and social services to improve both classroom learning and the health of a neighborhood. Inherent in the idea is that a school community is more than just a building filled with students and teachers—it’s a neighborhood working together to learn, heal and grow. To landscape architect Lois Brink, creating a school community begins outside—by inviting the community into the schoolyard.
A Philadelphia native and a professor of Landscape Architecture at University of Colorado, Brink has spent the last 25 years turning Denver’s 96 public elementary schoolyards into “learning landscapes” that serve a dual purpose: During school hours, the yards provide students with a safe space for structured and unstructured play, allow them to learn by exploring nature, help increase physical activity. During off-hours, the schoolyards are open to local families. The new playgrounds, designed individually with and for neighborhoods, turned what used to be asphalt wastelands into green gathering spaces that have transformed the way neighbors interact with each other.
Now Brink has brought her project, called Big Sandbox, to Philadelphia—a city whose complicated school governance structure had until recently given it a reputation for being closed to new ideas.
“It was the behemoth that everyone said just couldn’t be done,” Brink says. “But we don't have the luxury anymore to say that schools are for school children and parks are for the general public . . . I think everyone realizes now, there aren't the dollars out there to do that.”
Brink first thought about schoolyards in 1992, when her daughter enrolled in Denver’s Bromwell Elementary School. She was horrified to see that the playground her child would use at recess was a dilapidated “sea of pea gravel and asphalt,” with a few pieces of 50 year-old equipment. As she learned, this was the norm at public elementary schools throughout Denver—and around the country, including Philly. “At some point 50 years ago, we just stopped investing in these spaces,” says Brink.
It took Brink six years to turn her daughter’s schoolyard into “an outdoor area that supports physical activity, learning and improved social interaction,” and three more years to finish a second Denver school. In 2001, she formed a public-private partnership called the Learning Landscapes Alliance, which over the next three years raised $10.6 million, allowing it to redevelop 22 additional schoolyards. (Brink took up the name The Big Sandbox when she moved her efforts to Philadelphia.) By 2003, every school in the district wanted one of Brink’s Learning Landscapes. And Denver voters complied, approving two separate bond measures in 2003 and 2008 that allowed Brink and the Denver Public Schools to renovate every single elementary schoolyard by 2012.
A former Denver Councilwoman noted that the success of the schoolyard remodels was Brink’s use of the community to design the parks. “To say ‘no’ to the 2008 bond measure to complete Learning Landscapes across the city would have been to say ‘no’ to citizen engagement,” she told the American Society of Landscape Architects.
One study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and another funded by the NIH found that students used Learning Landscape playgrounds significantly more often than older, unimproved playgrounds—sometimes by 300 percent more— with a sizable decrease in sedentary children. They also found that these differences were consistent for newly constructed Learning Landscape playgrounds, as well as ones that were built at the beginning of the process, proving that the new playgrounds provided lasting changes.
Other cities have followed suit. In 2013 Boston completed it’s city-wide redesign of every public school playground in the city. A similar initiative has been completed in Houston, and Chicago has started a similar program. Brink, who grew up in Mt. Airy, and went to Penn, started looking at her hometown at the urging of a former graduate student who lives here, just as she finished the last schoolyard in Denver.
In Philadelphia, Brink began working with a handful of schools that already have partnered with the Philadelphia Water Department to replace their asphalt with a green surface that reduces the amount of stormwater pollution entering the waterways. (The partnerships help PWD meet its goal of reducing stormwater runoff by 85 percent, and provide schools with soft play areas.)
Principal Todd Kimmel of Horatio B. Hackett in Kensington says he hopes to turn his schoolyard into a reflection of the good work going on inside the school and to be a welcoming beacon for neighbors. “When you look at it from the outside, it’s all concrete and blacktop and has very small windows,” Kimmel says. “It doesn't really convey what’s going on inside of the building. We have great teachers, great families that already go to this school, great kids. This project could be a transformational piece for people to see a beautiful space and also attach it with Hackett.”
In other words, improving the schoolyard—the most visible and public part of the school itself— reconnects communities with their schools, something desperately needed in this city.
At South Philly’s George W. Nebinger Elementary as at Hackett, creating a new schoolyard is a community effort. Over the last year, Brink and her “mighty but tiny group” have been working with the students, faculty, parents, and surrounding community to design a schoolyard that works for their particular needs. The principal wants a space that can be incorporated into the curriculum, using green areas to teach students about science and nature. But then there are other considerations, such as age-appropriate play equipment and areas for parents to sit while their kids use the playground during off-hours.
The school and the community together need to raise 2 to 6 percent (2 percent in cash and the rest can be in kind) of the more than $500,000 necessary to build these spaces. (The rest comes from grants, donors or—as in the case of Denver—the city.) This increases the sense of ownership that the local community feels towards the schoolyard, without which the continued upkeep of the schoolyard is unsustainable. (Similar to the way the Mural Arts Program uses community input to design a mural.) To raise excitement (and money) about the project, The Big Sandbox held a launch event at Nebinger where they invited the neighborhood and students to paint the aspects of the new plan on the existing space. These types of events are key to sustaining enthusiasm about a process that can take years to implement.
“We've already got this great geographic distribution of elementary schools,” Brink says. “They are this perfect patchwork within a city, that if they were redeveloped, would not only help children during the day, but would also help the children before school and after school, would help their community before school and after school and over the weekends.”
Just as in Denver, the first few schoolyards are going to take the most time, because Brink and her team have to not only change the play equipment, but a city-wide perception of schoolyards. Over time, Brink says Denverites grew to see playgrounds as part of their parks system, rather than school entities, and as economic development generators, like how a grocery store or a hotel increases neighborhood investment. That helped generate excitement about the projects citywide. “That change in perspective in terms of the capital improvements and their value, that piece hasn’t happened yet in Philadelphia,” Brink says.
What the Big Sandbox is trying to do in Philadelphia is not just build a schoolyard, but build a movement. “It’s about starting an avalanche and when you do that you are setting off charges here and there and here and there,” Brink says. “We are trying to get as many people excited about this as we can in different ways, and then try to provide support in any way, shape or form that we can.”
Original URL: http://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/big-sandbox/
← Selling the Seller
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Organ donation: Strangers become family for 22-year-old patient
By Surabhi Jagdish on September 12, 2018
Rehan, a 22-year-old, was diagnosed with Heart and Lungs failure in May 2018. The donated Heart and Lungs were transported to Fortis Hospital, Mulund from Apollo Hospital, Belapur covering a distance of 22KM in just 25 minutes
“I have witnessed a patient’s state of mind and what the family feels when the patient is about to enter the operation theatre. When my daughter underwent a heart transplant, I have experienced everything. While preparing for the surgery, we wanted that someone could come and talk to us, sit close by and support us, and encourage us. Rehan is not my blood relative, but, we have a connection from the heart,” says Azad Shaikh, Suhana’s father.
Azad and his daughter Suhana, who underwent heart transplant surgery a year ago, sat beside 22-year-old Rehan, the whole intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday. Both the father-daughter duo had a sleepless night, but now they are happy, as Rehan’s heart transplant was successful.
Through a press release, Fortis Hospital informed:
‘A team of cardiac specialists from Fortis Hospital, Mulund, led by Dr Anvay Mulay, director, cardiothoracic surgery and heart transplant, successfully transplanted heart and lungs into a single recipient, a 22-year-old man from Jalana, Maharashtra, on September 12.
It became possible after the wife and family of a 49-year-old man consented to donate the man’s organs. Perfect synchronisation between clinicians, medical social workers and nursing teams across both the hospitals.
Rehan was waitlisted in May 2018 for transplant, after being diagnosed with Heart and Lung failure. The donated heart and lungs were transported to Fortis Hospital, Mulund from Apollo Hospital, Belapur. The organs left Apollo Hospital at 08:08 am, reaching Fortis Hospital, Mulund at 08:20 am, covering a distance of 22 kms in 25 minutes.’
While speaking to My Medical Mantra, Azad Shaikh said, “Rehan’s family stays in Jalana. When he received a call from the hospital, he was alone, and his family members were not with him. Therefore, we decided to stay here in the hospital to complete the formalities and to boost his morale. Rehan was scared and under pressure. However, when I informed him that Suhana had also undergone the heart transplant, his pressure had reduced.”
Azad Shaikh concluded by saying, we need to spread awareness about Organ Transplant so that more and more people will come forward and donate their organs.
brain-dead organ donor, Fortis Hospital, Heart and Lung Transplant, organ donation, organ donation awareness, organ donor, organ recipient
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The art of healthy living
Source: NHE Mar/Apr 16
In the face of unprecedented challenges and changes in the health sector, the time has come to commission outside the box. NHE’s Luana Salles explores how art programmes can be used to treat physical and mental health conditions – with NHS-friendly budgets.
The major expectations from CCGs over the next five years were not understated in NHS England’s 2016-17 mandate. The document, which set out objectives until 2020, made crystal clear the role commissioners will have to play in reducing care quality variations and cutting costs while consistently improving their performance.
This time, however, they must think outside the box. The NHS is grappling with the largest deficit it has ever faced, while simultaneously looking inwards to develop local models of care. Some of the results of this are already bearing fruit, with trusts taking the opportunity to radically reform services they had grown used to – turning them into integrated systems instead.
Across CCGs, commissioners will also have to get more creative. While this usually means finding ways to deliver the same results for less money, they must also take advantage of the unprecedented amount of innovation happening across the health sector. Public Health England, for example, recently launched an evaluation framework listing ways through which art can significantly help commissioners, practitioners and managers improve health and wellbeing.
The framework’s launch was accompanied by a conference hosted by arts enterprise Aesop. The event was packed with presentations from arts bodies showing how techniques once dismissed as purely esoteric should now be adopted by trusts nationwide, including music, dance, theatre, visual arts and writing.
Breathe Magic
One of the most eye-catching presenters of the day, Breathe Magic, brought eight-year-old Ben to perform live tricks for the audience to illustrate how magic can double-up as a source of intensive therapy for children.
The organisation was founded by managing director Yvonne Farquharson in 2012 after a magician first approached Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, where she worked. It is a branch of the wider Breathe Arts Health Research, whose aim is to use the arts “not just for distraction and entertainment purposes, but for very real, deep clinical gains” – and as it turns out, magic could do just that.
“We brought together a whole group of clinicians, therapists and academics to explore what the role of magic might be,” she told NHE. During that brainstorm, occupational therapists (OTs) working with sufferers of hemiplegia, which affects one in every 1,000 children in the UK, said they should be developing young people’s fine motor skills – coincidentally one of the key areas magicians have to excel at to perform close-up tricks.
“We then started doing pilot programmes while we were training OTs in some of the magic tricks to see if they could replicate the traditional exercises required to teach young people,” said Farquharson. “And they were able to produce magic tricks that were the exact replications of the exercises needed.”
Magic as intensive therapy
Unsurprisingly, a home-based pilot programme found children were much happier to perform magic tricks than to practice traditional therapy exercises – and it worked. “When that small pilot showed an improvement trend within their motor skills and functions, we looked at what other evidence was out there for how long-lasting change could be made with motor skills development,” she said.
At the time, NICE had just produced guidance recommending intensive task-focused therapies, but the NHS didn’t have enough resources to deliver 60 to 90 hours of them to each child. “That’s when we developed the idea of a magic summer camp, where the young people could come along in their school holidays to become young magicians, in their eyes,” the Breathe Magic founder said. “But in our eyes, we were able to deliver 60 hours of intensive bimanual motor therapy.
“We’re developing their motor skills, but also, because of the performance aspect of magic, we’re working on their confidence, communication skills, and self-esteem, and those wider psychosocial skills which are very much affected in young people who have a disability.”
Mixed funding models
As a social enterprise, Breathe Magic has mixed funding: it currently has rolling contracts with three CCGs (including NHS Lambeth, NHS Wandsworth and NHS West Kent) and is looking to expand further after winning a £50,000 NHS England 2015-16 Rehabilitation Challenge Prize. “Our biggest problem is finding the contacts within the commissioners to get that up and running,” noted Farquharson.
The programme surely raises eyebrows at first – many at the Aesop conference were unconvinced until they watched first-hand accounts from the children involved. But its benefits to the NHS are huge: it allows it to deliver the NICE guidelines while ensuring children are more independent, which prevents them from coming back for repeat therapies.
Another award-winning example of a healthy arts programme is The Reader, which also presented on the main stage at the Aesop event. The project, created in 2001 with a small grant from the University of Liverpool, brings people together to read pieces of literature aloud in an effort to improve their mental and physical health conditions.
The programme’s first pilot, hosted in Birkenhead – one of the most deprived areas in the country – was originally designed to improve literacy. But evaluations showed people were also feeling more confident in themselves as a result, as well as more in control of their lives, less isolated and mentally at ease.
Chris Catterall, managing director of The Reader, told NHE that the project gradually developed from there, with its first commission coming in 2005 by Wirral PCT and, two years later, as a large-scale project in Mersey Care NHS Trust.
“Back then, the idea that a reading group could help someone who had physical or mental health difficulties was a new concept completely,” Catterall said. But this is slowly changing: the organisation is now commissioned by nine CCGs across the UK, seven mental health trusts, and seven public health departments, as well as a small number of acute hospital trusts.
Medically significant literature
The Reader programme has trained around 4,500 people so far, including English literature and medical students, GPs, OTs and psychiatrists. The training consists of 21 hours of initial core practice covering how to use literature in a group dynamic.
The choice of literature is also medically significant: during a study they are carrying out with Royal Liverpool Hospitals, for example, researchers found that the more ambiguous and serious the literature, the longer participants can forget about pain.
“The different types of literature will have different effects on people, but we really focus on core human stories – great literature that people can then connect to from their own lives,” added Catterall.
He cited an example where the medical director at Mersey Care, David Fearnley, read Wuthering Heights to patients in Ashworth Hospital and then discussed whether Heathcliff would have had a personality disorder if he was alive today. “He did that with a group of people who he indicated all had personality disorders,” Catterall explained. “And he said they had a really decent, free, open and honest conversation about personality disorders. He said he learned much more about some of them in that session than he had from the one-to-one medical interventions he provided.
“The focus on the book and the literature provides a safe space, whereby it’s not focused on the individual and people can control what they say and what they don’t say – and that creates an environment where people become more free to open up and talk about things.”
The Reader also comes packed with benefits for those actually carrying out the reading session. Emily Crawford, the organisation’s communications manager, explained: “When we first talking about reading, there’s very much a beneficiary focus, but actually, there are health outcomes for the staff – which is hugely important at the health sector at the minute.”
Finding Your Compass
Based in Brighton, Finding Your Compass is another example of an arts programme spurred from an experiment gone wrong: originally a dancing endeavour, the programme was meant to attract women going through cancer. But, after several sessions, there was no take up from cancer patients. It instead attracted several women with mental ill health, such as depression, anxiety and personality disorders, seeking an artistic refuge through which to express and alleviate their conditions.
Founded by a filmmaker and a researcher, the project is one of several art programmes sponsored by the Brighton Health and Wellbeing Centre, where most referrals come from. It targets people with mild to moderate depression and other mental health issues, although participants need to be at a point where they still have “some cushion around them”. In that sense, it is more of a preventative programme than reactive to crisis.
It explores mental health through writing, drawing, dancing and film. Participants create their own ‘landscapes’, based on extensive writing sessions, that act as backdrops to an animation film, with shadows of them dancing layered over it. The final result is a beautiful and emotional manifestation of their innermost feelings.
A refuge against stigma
After projects – which run in seven-week sessions – are finished, people report reducing their visits to the GP, with some of them stopping medication altogether. Rosaria Garcia, the group’s co-director, told NHE: “It’s a stepping stone to something else, and it’s not in a medical setting. We are just working in an environment where that label of mental health doesn’t really fulfil any purpose. It’s a refuge where people can explore their feelings in a non-judgemental environment where the stigma doesn’t really work, because everybody is there for a reason.”
The project includes thorough evaluation of participants at the beginning, middle and end, using Aesop guidance and the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. Although currently based in Brighton, its directors are in talks with Mind and often host presentations to the health navigators in GP practices. They have run on funding for the last 18 months, mostly from Arts Council England, but partly from public health budgets and the NHS.
At the forefront of change
There are countless other examples of programmes using arts in health around the country. Youth-led charity Raw Sounds takes instruments and DJ kits to hospital wards, for example, to get patients involved in jam sessions. Dance to Health prevents older people’s falls through a programme designed to improve their balance. Turtle Key Arts improves creativity and wellbeing for those suffering with dementia through songwriting.
So why are these projects still not a go-to solution to improve both staff and patient health? At the end of the day, these programmes can achieve large-scale results while cutting down on costs and improving our collective sense of wellbeing. It is time to let go of prejudices and give a chance to more unconventional methods of prevention in the NHS, and commissioners are best-placed to take the leap.
Tell us what you think – have your say below or email opinion@nationalhealthexecutive.com
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Report: Region can capture emerging industries
October 30, 2012 By Ben Brown
When it comes to workforce development, North Carolina’s southeastern counties should “skate to where the puck is going, not to where it currently is.”
That Wayne Gretzky analogy aired Tuesday from Steve Yost, chief of the regional economic development group North Carolina’s Southeast, which that morning unveiled a recently completed study that collaborators say should position the area to that effect.
“This is the most thorough and objective assessment ever done on our region’s greatest economic asset: its people,” Yost said in a statement about the study, titled “Workforce Needs Analysis & Strategic Plan for the N.C. Southeast Region.” A nonprofit called Regional Technology Strategies Inc. prepared it following 18 months of research.
The group examined the region’s target industries, its workforce and specialties, and its existing employers. The study ultimately found that the region could become a powerhouse by improving or developing partnerships focused on the area’s existing strengths, emerging industries and luring appropriate business that would invest in local economies, subsequently putting skilled residents to work.
“It encourages each community college, for example, to concentrate curricular resources into ‘centers of excellence’ that would support the region’s target industry clusters, designing programs with input from employers that would draw students, workers and trainees from outside its traditional service area,” a summary of the report stated.
A model for that is found at Fayetteville Technical Community College (FTCC), which is steering its workforce development efforts toward three key industry groups NCSE says the region should target: advanced manufacturers, logistics operations and military businesses.
“The net result of this is it gives us the ability to provide more talent more consistently that fits with the needs that are going to be out there,” said FTCC President Larry Keen in a statement.
Cape Fear Community College, according to the report, is positioning itself by offering new programs in the technologies of nuclear energy, industrial systems and sustainability.
And Brunswick Community College, though it offers a wide range of studies, has geared itself toward aquaculture, health sciences and turfgrass management.
“The target clusters represent 13 percent of the region’s employment today but innovative policy and program responses can increase that concentration,” the study said.
An emerging cluster regionally is the aerospace and aviation industry, researchers emphasized. While the industry employed 2,342 workers regionally in 2011, it is expected to grow nearly 28 percent by 2016.
Aerospace and aviation is “growing significantly within the state and is a key target for development, especially after the location of Spirit AeroSystems in the Global Transpark,” the report said. “In recent years the state has seen significant new and/or expanding aerospace firms like HondaJet (in Greensboro) and GE Engines (in Durham). The location of Boeing in Charleston and perhaps Gulfstream in Savannah, Georgia also provide significant supply chain opportunities for the region’s firms.”
The cluster’s industries range from parts manufacturing to flight training, researchers added. And while the state’s southeastern region isn’t a force yet in the field, there’s potential. New Hanover and Cumberland counties currently represent essentially all of the region’s related employment currently.
“The economic base in Wilmington with General Electric and the expanding aerospace presence at Fort Bragg provides solid footing for increases across the region–particularly if a well-trained workforce is available,” said the report. “The greatest potential lies in becoming part of the supply chain for the large manufacturers like Spirit and Boeing.”
Brunswick County Economic Development Corporation Director Jim Bradshaw said he’s trying to seize the opporunity. At the time of this story’s publication his department’s marketing staffer was in Orlando, Fla., at an airplane industry conference manning a booth with state officials to promote the Wilmington region for parts manufacturing related to Spirit and Boeing. “There are hundreds of distributors down there,” Bradshaw said of the conference, adding that private contributions to the Brunswick County Economic Development Foundation enabled the trip at no cost to taxpayers.
A related industry the region may want to grow is metalworking, though it has experienced a 27 percent employment decline since last year, with 650 jobs lost, the report showed. The state and nation experienced similar rates of loss.
Bradshaw’s office is trying for a rebound, at least within in Brunswick County. He’s currently courting 13 industrial prospects, several of which are metal fabricators. Bradshaw said he expects to know sometime after the presidential election whether at least one of those companies will pick Brunswick County for a new facility. He added that in two weeks he and officials from NCSE will attend a metalworking trade-show to promote the region’s industrial parks.
Manufacturing in general has crucial needs to meet, NCSE’s report said, noting a recent publication by consulting group Deloitte, in partnership with the Manufacturing Institute, found that more than 80 percent of manufacturers surveyed “have a moderate to severe shortage in finding skilled production workers: machinists, operators, technicians and distributors.”
Further, more than 70 percent of manufacturers said the shortage impairs their ability to expand. “Even with the country’s high unemployment rate, companies noted that nearly 5 percent of all jobs in manufacturing, which translates to approximately 600,000 jobs nationwide, go unfilled because they cannot get enough qualified workers.”
NCSE’s report said that should be a “wake-up call” to North Carolina, whose economy can give significant credit to the manufacturing industry.
According to a 2011 report from N.C. State University, manufacturing is the top-valued contributor to the state’s $398 billion gross domestic product. In 2009 it made up 18.2 percent of it, or $72 billion.
Economic developers like Yost and his group say the region’s schools should align themselves to meet the need.
But that can be challenging, officials say, as the economic slowdowns here and beyond have created funding shortfalls for technical schools while enrollment has increased with residents searching for new skills and well-paying careers.
To stay on the curve, community colleges, for instance, may have to expand their financial collaborations. Cape Fear Community College, for one, has the “largest single-county bond ever approved in North Carolina’s history” worth $164 million to cover renovations and build new facilities, according to NCSE.
The group summarized: “A well-trained, knowledgeable and innovative workforce is one of, if not the most important factor, needed to build a globally competitive economy. The development of a highly-integrated and collaborative workforce system in the region, one that provides cutting-edge education and training to prepare new workers and upgrade the skills of existing workers, will act as an economic development catalyst for the North Carolina’s southeast region.
“Implementation within the region is the next step.”
Click here to view the study in full.
Source: http://portcitydaily.com/2012/10/30/report-region-can-capture-emerging-industries/
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NCTO ENDORSES THE INTRODUCTION OF THE BIPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL TRADE PRIORITIES AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 2015
Apr 17, 2015 Comments (0) Press Releases, Recent News Like
Contact: Eliza Levy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) endorses the introduction of legislation to renew Trade Promotion Authority as introduced by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) and House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). The Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 (TPA-2015) would establish congressional negotiating objectives and consultation mechanisms involving international trade agreements currently being negotiated by the U.S. government.
“We are pleased to lend our support to this renewal of Trade Promotion Authority,” stated NCTO President Augustine Tantillo. “We look forward to working with both the Executive Branch and Congress as we advocate for trade agreements that fully incorporate the interests of U.S. textile manufacturers. It is critical that these trade agreements help to level the international playing field and boost American exports, create manufacturing jobs, and strengthen the U.S. economy.”
Among the various negotiating objectives included in the bill is textile-specific language addressing the need for fair market access in trade negotiations.
Subparagraph 2(b)(18) of the bill reads:
Textile Negotiations: The principal negotiating objectives with respect to trade in textiles and apparel are to obtain opportunities for U.S. exports of textiles and apparel in foreign markets substantially equivalent to the competitive opportunities afforded foreign exports in U.S. markets and to achieve fairer and more open conditions of trade in textiles and apparel.
Like Press Releases, Recent News NCTO ENDORSES THE INTRODUCTION OF THE BIPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL TRADE PRIORITIES AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 2015
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Oldbury on Severn Neighbourhood Development Plan
Helping deliver a better future for Oldbury
To learn more or to get involved with the plan please email :
oldburyndp2017@gmail.com
Progress to Date
Oldbury on Severn : The Future of our Parish!!
South Gloucestershire Council along with the other local unitary authorities are preparing a West of England Joint Spatial Plan (JSP). The JSP will be a statutory Development Plan Document that will provide the strategic overarching development framework for the area until 2036. Additionally the South Gloucestershire Local Plan is being reviewed this will on completion reflect many of the decisions made in the JSP and also cover the period until 2036.
There are potentially serious implications in these processes which could impact on our Parish and of which we should be aware . It is of some importance that we understand this and put in place a plan which reflects what the community wish to see to ensure the Parish remains sustainable but retains its character and ethos in the years to come .
In October 2016 Oldbury on Severn Parish Council(OPC) resolved to produce a Neighbourhood Development Plan (NDP) to address this. An application for the Parish to be designated as a Neighbourhood Area was made and accepted.
What is Neighbourhood Planning?
The Neighbourhood Planning (General) Regulations 2012 came into force on the 6th April 2012 and have subsequently been updated. These regulations provide for local communities to be able to produce Neighbourhood Plans (NDP) for their local area, putting in place planning policies for the future development and growth of the neighbourhood. These policies have material weight when planning decisions are being made, they can help to resist unwanted development and to promote the type of development the community wishes to see.
Once a NDP has passed independent examination to ensure it conforms with National Policy and does not contradict policies in the Local Plan a community referendum will be organised. If more than 50% of the votes are in favour of adopting the NDP it will become part of the Local Plan for planning related matters and will have the same legal status.
Copyright © 2019 Oldbury on Severn Neighbourhood Development Plan. All rights reserved.
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Trailer: Tolkien
Photo: Tolkien
Tolkien is a biopic based on the early life of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings novels.
Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult), a language-loving orphan living in England, finds friendship and inspiration in a group of fellow students who start referring to themselves as a "fellowship." He also meets and falls in love with Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), his future wife. But when England enters World War I and Tolkien's relationships are threatened by danger and distance, he's inspired more than ever to pen what will become his epic fantasy novels.
Lily Collins, Nicholas Hoult, Mimi Keene
Dome Karukoski
Biography, Drama
M, 112 mins
Mature themes and violence
Now Showing Rated M (Coarse language), 116 mins
Opening 25/07/2019
Rated M ( Coarse language and sexual references), 102 mins
Opening 8/08/2019
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300 million user data for leak marriott international by British and regulators fined 100 million pounds
Britain's information regulator, said in a statement in 2014 starwood hotel group data system by the invasion, the marriott in 2016 acquisition of starwood but customer information theft was found only in 2018.The agency believes that the marriott failed to fully investigation in the acquisition, also not doing enough to protect the data system.
British 9 information watchdog said in a statement, in violation of marriott international, inc., the general data protection ordinance, out of about 99 million pounds (us $123 million) fine.
The statement said the marriott in November 2018 to the reported information authority began in 2014 with data leak, the incident led to more than 300 million customer data is stolen.
The statement pointed out 2014 starwood hotels group data system by the invasion, the marriott in 2016 acquisition of starwood, but customer information theft was found only in 2018.The agency believes that the marriott failed to fully investigation in the acquisition, also not doing enough to protect the data system.
British information administration commissioner Elizabeth denham, said the general data protection ordinance stipulates that any organization must be responsible for their personal data held by.This includes is required for a company in the acquisition of due diligence, and take appropriate protective measures.
Information watchdog said at the same time, the marriott is the results and fines.
The European Union the general data protection regulations take effect on May 25, 2018, is widely considered to be the most strict network data management laws and regulations in the European Union.
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MLI Report: Debunking the myths of the Canada Health Act
Is it illegal under the Canada Health Act for provinces to allow private delivery of care, charge user fees or even allow private insurance? Not in the least, but readers would be forgiven for thinking so based on the rhetoric of politicians and vested interests.
In an important new paper, Michael Watts, a distinguished lawyer specializing in health care law, writes that provinces have much greater freedom to innovate in health care delivery than most people believe. It's a matter of separating myth from reality surrounding the CHA.
OTTAWA, Sept. 20, 2013 – Anyone who has correctly noted that there is room for provinces to experiment extensively with health care delivery under the Canada Health Act has been shouted down, charges Michael Watts, a partner at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. The Act "has taken on enormous proportions in the minds of Canadian citizens and their political representatives," he writes in "Debunking the Myths: A Broader Perspective of the Canada Health Act", a major paper released today by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Watts clearly lays out what the Act does and does not allow, and reveals that there is little that restricts provinces from innovating, particularly given the hands-off approach of today's federal government. Watts also establishes the importance of the case of Chaoulli v. Quebec in establishing the right to accessibility in all provinces as a condition of receipt of public funding.
To begin with, provinces have sole authority over their own health care programs. The federal government's power under the CHA is limited to its ability to withhold portions of the Canada Health Transfer. Watts quotes one public policy expert as saying the Act "neither has nor requires provincial consent and is not legally binding on either party."
And not only are the federal government's powers over the provinces with regard to issues such as user fees and extra billing weaker than most believe, Watts' research demonstrates that it is becoming less and less inclined to use them. Watts finds little evidence the federal government has ever imposed discretionary penalties on the provinces over failures to uphold the Act, mandatory penalties have declined dramatically over the years, and what few cases go to dispute resolution also tend not to result in reductions in health transfers.
"The most unfortunate result of the disingenuous, poisonous and hyper-partisan commentary around Canada's health care system is that innovative thinking has been stifled and the voices of well-intentioned and thoughtful politicians and experts have been silenced", says Watts. "In the process, many myths have taken deep root".
Among other things, Watts writes, the CHA does not dictate how insured health services must be provided; is silent on who may provide the services; takes no stance on whether a physician may work both inside and outside the provincial public insurance program; and does not discuss whether fees may be charged for non-insured health services.
Not only does the law allow for major reforms to how health care is delivered, it arguably requires them. The Chaoulli case "makes the powerful statement that if a vital health service is not provided by the government, an individual has the constitutional right to pay for the service either directly or through private health insurance", notes Watts.
Change is coming. The federal government's "take-it-or-leave-it" unilateral renewal of the Canada Health Transfer in 2011 will leave the provinces with less money to spend but signals an opportunity for them to experiment with reforms. They should not be allowed to hide behind the Canada Health Act.
Michael Watts is a partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP in Toronto and Chair of the firm's National Health Industry Group. Contact: Kwan Tse, 416-862-4915, ktse@osler.com
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute is the only non-partisan, independent national public policy think tank in Ottawa focusing on the full range of issues that fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government. For more information contact:
David Watson, managing editor and communications director, david.watson@macdonaldlaurier.ca
Phone: 613-482-8327, ext. 103
Health, Health care - papers, Latest News, Papers, Press Releases, Recent News
Watts in the Telegraph-Journal: Dispelling the myths about the Canada Health Act As part of the release of MLI’s "Debunking the Myths: A broader perspective of the...
Watts in the Telegraph-Journal: Efficiency from within the Canada Health Act possible As part of the release of MLI’s "Debunking the Myths: A broader perspective of the...
Watts presents MLI research on health care at Toronto event Lawyer Michael Watts is set to deliver a talk about research he conducted for the...
Michael Watts takes on our health care monopoly myth in the Post In the National Post, Michael Watts, a partner at Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt LLP and...
MLI Paper - Canada’s Health Act: Reform to Preserve MEDIA RELEASE OTTAWA, June 19, 2012 – Canada's provinces could experiment with better ways to...
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Man Pleads Guilty For His Role In Multi-Million Mortgage Fraud Scheme
Stephanie Abbott — December 21, 2018 — Leave a comment
Kevin Morgan, 42, Pittsford, New York, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit bank fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Between March 2011 and June 2017, the defendant, along with co-defendants Todd Morgan, Frank Giacobbe, Patrick Ogiony, and others, conspired to defraud financial institutions, including UBS Securities LLC, Arbor Commercial Mortgage LLC, and Berkadia Commercial Mortgage, LLC.
Kevin Morgan was employed as a Vice President at Morgan Management, LLC, a real estate management company that managed more than 100 multi-family properties. Todd Morgan also was employed by Morgan Management as a Project Manager. Kevin and Todd Morgan worked with Frank Giacobbe, who owned and operated Aurora Capital Advisors, LLC, a mortgage brokerage company, and Patrick Ogiony, an Aurora employee, to secure financing for properties managed by Morgan Management or certain principals of Morgan Management.
Kevin Morgan and his co-defendants provided false information to financial institutions and government sponsored enterprises that overstated incomes of properties managed by Morgan Management or certain principals of Morgan Management. This resulted in the financial institutions issuing loans for larger amounts than the financial institutions would have authorized had they been provided with truthful information.
The defendants misled the financial institutions regarding the occupancy of properties. For example, Kevin Morgan: conspired to provide false rent rolls to lenders and appraisers on a variety of dates, overstating either the number of renters in a property and/or the rent paid by occupants; conspired to provide false and inflated income statements for the properties; and worked with others to deceive inspectors into believing that unoccupied apartments were, in fact, occupied.
In one such instance, Kevin Morgan and his co-defendants provided false information to Berkadia Commercial Mortgage, LLC, in connection with Rochester Village Apartments at Park Place, a multi-family residential community owned by certain Morgan Management principals. The false information included inflated income derived from storage unit rentals, inflated reports of rental income, and reporting apartment units as occupied before certificates of occupancy were obtained for those units.
In addition, Kevin Morgan and his co-defendants made misrepresentations to conceal from the lending financial institutions that Morgan Management used a portion of the loan proceeds for purposes other than that disclosed in the loan application. Loan funding was used to maintain or improve other properties managed by Morgan Management, and to satisfy debts associated with other properties managed by Morgan Management. For example, the defendants included a fictitious $2.5 million debt in a loan application purportedly owed to a Morgan Management controlled entity and created a fabricated payoff letter for that debt to increase the amount of the loan in connection with a property known as Autumn Ridge.
U.S. Attorney James P. Kennedy, Jr. made the announcement.
“History has shown us the havoc that can be wrought when fraud takes place in the mortgage industry,” noted U.S. Attorney Kennedy. “This investigation, and today’s plea, protect that industry from fraud and those who invest in securities which are backed by mortgages.”
“From day one, our investigation has focused on protecting the residential and commercial financing industry,” said Gary Loeffert, Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI’s Buffalo Division. “With Kevin Morgan’s plea today, we have advanced our efforts to safeguard the tens of thousands of investors who own mortgage-backed securities.”
Robert Manchak, Acting Special Agent in Charge for the Northeast Region of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Office of Inspector General, said, “The financing of multifamily loans is a significant segment of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio. As our commitment to this case demonstrates, FHFA-OIG will work with our partners in law enforcement to investigate and hold accountable those who subject the entities regulated by FHFA to fraud, waste, or abuse.”
Charges are pending against defendants Frank Giacobbe, Patrick Ogiony, and Todd Morgan. The fact that a defendant has been charged with a crime is merely an accusation and the defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.
Today’s plea is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the direction of Special Agent-in-Charge Gary Loeffert, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Office of Inspector General, under the direction of Acting Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Manchak, Northeast Region.
Sentencing will be scheduled at a later date before Judge Wolford.
In Mortgage Fraud False Statement, Pennsylvania, Wire Fraud
Stephanie Abbott
Former CFO Sentenced in...
Ex-judge given 1 year in...
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Ready for an answer to this week's Mystery Monday puzzle? It's after the break!
This one ended up being a bit more difficult for you guys than I had anticipated. It probably didn't help that I made a mistake in the first image I posted... sorry about that!
So you were given two blocks of numbers. The hints on the page were the title (Signal to Noise) the repetition of the word signal in the description, and (very subtly) the circled number/letter string on the side, (6EQUJ5) and the word "Wow!" If you google those numbers and letters you'd quickly find links to what is known as the Wow Signal, a signal discovered by radio astronomers in the 70's. So, lots of references to "signals" and "noise."
In many ways this puzzle functions as a Cardan Grille (Page 173 in How To Puzzle Cache). By comparing the two sets of numbers you will see that there are places in the two sets where the numbers are different. The digits that appear in those locations form coords, the top set for North, the bottom set for West. The differences are marked in red here:
That gives you 0473700 and 12221068, or N 47 37.300, W 122 21.068. It's a bit unusual to start the North with a 0 but it was necessary in this puzzle to do so to balance the three digit West degrees, and the two digit North. The coordinates are the "signal" the repeated digits are the "noise."
So what do you find there? the roof of the Seattle Armory Center and.... Two giant spiders!!
In reality the two spiders are anamorphic paintings by an artist named Marlin Peterson.
The spiders are visible from the nearby tourist attraction, The Space Needle, and were done in conjunction with the Artist Trust of Washington. When the local TV station asked him what reaction he expected from the mural he said, "“The only thing I can really hope to shoot for is maybe some tears from a kid or something. Then I’ll know I did my job.” You'll find more pictures and timelapse videos of the murals being painted at that link.
So how did you do with the puzzle? This one seemed to stump a lot of you.
The Clarks April 27, 2016 at 12:15 PM
First thing I did was google the circled numbers/letters, then as I read about the Wow signal, I thought it could be a cipher and tried to find info on decoding it, then put it aside as I thought it would be too cumbersome...needed the hints to sort it out. The final GZ was kind of tricky to see, had to really zoom in close. Thanks for the help.
Robert and Janet April 27, 2016 at 5:53 PM
I didn't have time to solve this one but had spotted the differences between the 2 grids when I first looked, so writing the numbers down to see what I came up with would have been my next step. I was therefore on the right track to the solution without even exploring the signal/noise aspects. The important thing is that though I ignored the signal/noise references, I learnt something from the exercise ... and that's what this is all about! Thanks Cully.
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As you might have heard by now, the Rays have traded left-handed pitcher Scott Kazmir to the Angels for minor-leaguers Matthew Sweeney, Alexander Torres, and a PTBNL.
Sweeney is a first baseman masquerading as a third baseman. He was the Angels' 8th round pick out of a Maryland high school in 2006. He tore up the Arizona Rookie League and earned a promotion to full-season ball in 2007. In the Midwest League(a pitcher's league), he hit .260/.324/.458 as a 19-year old. His 2008 season was wiped out due to an ankle injury, and he returned in 2009 to hit .299/.379/.517 in the California League. Reports are he has some pretty good power potential, and his stats also show that he can draw a walk. His fielding at 3B is extremely rocky, and he'll almost certainly have to move to 1B or a corner outfield spot soon. He doesn't have great tools, and his future hinges on how his power develops.
Torres was an international signee out of Venezuela. He made his state-side debut in 2006 in the Arizona Rookie League. He evidently had an injury in 2007, as he pitched just 5 innings. He split time between the AZL and the Cal League in 2008, posting decent strikeout numbers with iffy control. That continued in 2009, where between the Cal(A+) and Texas(AA) leagues he's struck out 149 batters in 147 innings while walking 80. The left-hander has shown the ability to generate groundballs, but he needs to iron out the control issues before really emerging as a good prospect. He turns 22 in December.
There are a ton of other places to get analysis of the deal from, so I'll just say this, all with the full disclosure that Kazmir was my favorite player and basically the reason I became a Rays fan: The problem for me isn't so much that they actually traded Kazmir, it's that they traded him for a pretty unimpressive haul because his value was low, and they didn't really give him a chance to rebuild it. I would have at least let him pitch the rest of the season(he was fantastic against Toronto last time out) and see where his value is then. The Rays have the minor-league depth to absorb losing Kazmir(Wade Davis is the possible replacement), but it seems to me they really sold low on Kazmir.
At any rate, we'll see where the two new prospects are assigned to. Sweeney could join Charlotte for the playoff push, while Torres has thrown 147 innings already and it's possible the Rays shut him down for the rest of 2009.
-- By Riven G at 10:27 PM
The Rays are really starting to confuse me. They keep getting rid of their own "good" players. Kazmir must feel as though he got slapped by the Rays--traded for only 2 minor league players and both had injuries? (remember , also, that 1st few 2009 draftpicks had injuries,too)What's going on in the front office?
Kevin Gengler August 28, 2009 at 11:48 PM
That's the part that I don't get. Kazmir's "injury-prone" and a "ticking time bomb" but they 1) drafted a lot of injured guys and 2) the guys they traded Kazmir for both have injury concerns.
The Rays also get a player to be named in the deal. Now they have the money to be able to keep Carl Crawford. Good deal Rays!
Hopefully the PTNL turns out to be the rumored RHP Jordan Walden.He is very similar to Wade Davis in size,stuff,and ability.He may even throw harder, just he is younger and raw.He was shut down this summer with an elbow strain.Perhaps the Rays are checking him out physically.If healthy,this could turn out to be a really good trade for the Rays,getting there 3.
I dont really know the rules to this that much but is there a chance the player is Kevin Jepsen?I really like the kid and hoped we could have gotten him in a Kaz trade earlier
thomas jones August 29, 2009 at 2:13 PM
Wow...still looking forward to the end of the 09 season tho.
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Today in part 5 of our ongoing series on Hubbard’s dismal naval career, we examine the “Battle of Cape Lookout”, wherein he claims to have damaged and/or sunk two Japanese subs off the Oregon coast. It builds on the work of Chris Owen and Jeffrey Augustine and also draws on additional official US Navy records, and refutes some of the arguments of Hubbard’s apologists that attempt to shore up his Navy record. In doing so, we may have uncovered new evidence of Hubbard falsifying events beyond those previously exposed as fiction. The events here cross the line from normal incompetence to a Walter Mitty-like delusional fantasy, where, in the space of 55 hours at the helm of the USS PC-815, Hubbard attacked two Japanese submarines that existed only in his imagination. The narratives that emerge from this event provide a powerful foreshadowing of Hubbard’s pattern of lies, self aggrandizing fantasy and fraudulent conduct that would define so much of his later life, especially in regards to his military service.
In many ways, the events that occur over the roughly 80 days of Hubbard’s command of the USS PC-815, a PC-461 class patrol vessel and his subsequent spin on these events, provides more fodder in perpetuating all the myths, lies, half-truths and fraudulent misrepresentations Hubbard repeats ad nauseum about his previous 3 years in the Pacific. In our usual fashion, we’ll be providing additional analysis and historical context to the existing record in deconstructing and exposing the fantasy that was his fight off the Oregon coast over the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of May, 1943. We’ll also expose what we believe is an attempt to cover up specific incidents of Hubbard’s incompetence and his crew’s negligence that could have proved fatal. It makes for a rather interesting wartime tale, a tale rife with incompetence and as his after-action report demonstrates, a level of histrionics that reflects typical Hubbardian shirking and unconscionable scapegoating and badmouthing of his fellow officers.
The USS PC-815 Goes Forth
You’ll remember from Post 4, that after graduating 20th out of a class of 25 from the Submarine Chaser Training Center (SCTC) in Port Miami, FL, Hubbard was then assigned to the Albina Engine and Machinery Works in Portland, OR, to oversee the completion of the USS PC-815. Upon her commissioning, he was then to assume command. She was first laid down on October 10, 1942, with Lt. (jg) Hubbard assuming command on April 20, 1943. The 815’s beginnings were not auspicious, as on her way up the Columbia river to start her sea trials, she fouled her propeller somehow, causing a week’s delay to her arrival at the Naval shipyard located in the port of Astoria, OR on or around May 17th, 1943. The following photo on the top was taken by the Albina Works’ and shows the USS PC-815 prior to her final weapons fit, while the bottom photo shows a 461-class fully outfitted:
After a spell in drydock to repair her propeller, she returned to Astoria and received her initial depth charge and deck gun complement, along with ammunition and other warfighting stores. Chris Owen provides some context as to the USS PC-815’s commissioning and an entertaining bit of PR fluff from the time:
“At 10 a.m. on Tuesday April 20, 1943, the USS PC-815 was commissioned. Hubbard and the rest of the crew signed the logbook to register their reporting aboard for duty. Two days later, as the ship was being tested and readied for sea, the Albina Engine and Machine Works held a photo-opportunity for the Oregon Journal. Moulton and Hubbard were photographed in their sea jackets (below), Hubbard posing with a suitably nautical pipe rather than his usual Kool cigarettes. The article was certainly entertaining, if more than a little inaccurate:
OREGON JOURNAL, THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 1943
SUB CHASERS are these officers, Lieutenant Commander Rob [sic] Hubbard, former Portlander, at left, and Lieutenant Roy [sic] Moulton, who received the Hell
Howler from Albina shipyard.
Ex-Portlander Hunts U-Boats
Guides New 'Hell Howler'
Lieutenant Commander Ron (“Red”) Hubbard, former Portlander, veteran sub hunter of the battles of the Pacific and Atlantic has been given a birthday present for Herr Hitler by Albina Hellshipyard and instructed to deliver it with a nasty blast “right in Der Fuerher’s face”.Hubbard, an old hand at knocking tails off enemy subs, is typical of the high type naval officers commanding Albina subchasers, which have been nicknamed Hellships. Men like Hubbard and Lieutenant Roy [sic] Moulton, his executive officer are the ones instructed to defeat America’s greatest menace – the undersea craft.
Hubbard is an active member of the Explorers club, New York city. He has commanded three internationally important expeditions for that organization. In 1934 Hubbard had charge of the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition and took the first underwater films. He was the first to use the now famous bathosphere [sic] or diving ball [sic] for this work. In 1935 Hubbard headed a cartographic survey in West Indian waters and in 1939 and 1940, for the navy hydrographic office, led the noted Alaska Radio Experimental Expedition.
Hubbard comes from a long line of naval men. His father is Lieutenant H.R. Hubbard; his grandfather, Captain Lafayette Waterbury; his great grandfather, Captain I. C. De Wolfe, all of whom helped to make American naval history.Hubbard, although he spent his youth in Portland, has left little of the world’s 39 seas and seven oceans unexplored. Of Albina Hellships, he says:
“Those little sweethearts are tough. They could lick the pants off anything Nelson or Farragut ever sailed. They put up a sizzling fight and are the only answer to the submarine menace. I state emphatically that the future of America rests with just such escort vessels.”
Executive Officer Moulton said in taking over the Hell Howler, “We have a crew of 60 of the toughest, smartest sailors I ever saw. We may not end this war single-handed, but the Hell Howler will clip a few days off it. Our ship is a trim and deadly man-of-war.”
Moulton, like Hubbard, comes from a sea-faring family. Reared on the Gloucester Banks, his uncle was first mate on the Thomas Lawson, only seven-masted schooner ever built. Three of his uncles held master’s papers. His family at one time owned a fleet of seven vessels. Moulton also is a shipfitter. He learned the craft in the Bath iron works in Maine.
“There can be no doubt that the primary source of the personal information on Hubbard was Hubbard himself – there could have been no other source. Some strange inaccuracies appeared to have crept in, however.”
Owen goes on to expose all the various exaggerations and fibs Hubbard includes, of which here’s a sample:
“Hubbard was not even a full Lieutenant, let alone a Lieutenant Commander. Having only been temporarily promoted, his substantive rank at the time was still Lieutenant (junior grade). His father was a Lieutenant Commander but was demoted to lesser rank in the article. His grandfather “Captain” Waterbury had been a small-time vet and coal merchant and had never served afloat. “I.C. De Wolfe” was in fact the maiden name of Hubbard’s grandmother, Ida Corinne, not his great-grandfather, John DeWolfe, who had been a wealthy banker. Hubbard had not participated in either the Battle of the Atlantic or the Pacific. His youth was spent not in Portland, but mostly in Helena, Montana, Washington, D.C. and Bremerton, Washington State. He had, of course, never visited most of the world’s seas and oceans (nor did he in later life).”
The 343 461-class PCs built between 1941-1944 were among the many diverse utility, patrol, assault, and amphibious warfare vessels churned-out by the nation’s shipyards in WWII. Some were wooden-hulled, especially those used for mine warfare, as were the most famous of these patrol vessels, the patrol torpedo, or “PT” boats, one of which, PT-109, was heroically skippered by future president John F. Kennedy. The 461 PC class were steel-hulled and relatively robust ships, though their crews lived in cramped quarters surrounded by weapons and machinery. The PCs were purpose-built sub chasers with no frills, designed specifically for coastal anti-submarine (ASW) warfare; the Navy would also modify 56 hulls for different patrol duties, further demonstrating the utility of the design.
The USS PC-815’s war officially began when she was diverted during a trip from Astoria to Bremerton Naval shipyard, and tasked with searching for a downed Naval aircraft off the Oregon coast. Having spent a day looking for the downed flyers, she was then re-tasked with orders to proceed to San Diego, rather than returning to Bremerton to receive her final weapons and radar outfit. It was during this redeployment that Hubbard’s infamous “Battle of Cape Lookout” occured. Chris Owen has mapped her track on this voyage:
How Significant Was the Threat?
Japanese submarine activity early in the war was not unknown in US waters. They were especially aggressive around Hawaii, and active off the shores of Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) fleet operations in the greater Pacific Ocean against the Dutch, British, Australian and United States Navies was codenamed Kido Butai, (“Mobile Force”), as were the forces that were to execute the operation. The Kido Butai was comprised of two elements, the main, or “first force” was called the Advanced Force, which was tasked with destroying the main US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor before it could sortie to counter IJN operations in the Southwest Pacific. The attack element at Pearl Harbor included a significant component of two-man mini-submarines, and their mother subs and escort vessels. Submarine operations were considered a vital combat element in support of IJN surface operations and continued until the end of the war. Japanese submarine operations in the Northern Pacific were directed primarily from Kwajalein Island in the Central Pacific, as well as being logistically supported by submarine tenders at sea.
At the outbreak of the war, the Japanese had one of the largest and most varied operational submarine fleets among the major powers and represented a significant threat to the Western United States;, she had developed impressive long-range capability that was augmented with a unique aviation capability on certain classes of submarine, further extending the IJN’s reach in the Western Hemisphere. However, though a submarine power early in the war, by 1942, Germany’s far greater industrial capacity had eclipsed Japanese submarine construction, certainly in ocean-going classes of submarine. To give you an idea of the disparate industrial capacity between the two nations, through May of 1945, Germany had built over 1,000 ocean-going U-boats of various types, to Japan’s 150 ocean-going submarines; this equates to roughly 37 new hulls per year over the 4 years of the war against the United States. In spite of these industrial inefficiencies, the IJN submarine fleet represented a significant threat up until the end of the war. Indeed, Japanese subs shelled a refinery in southern California, a fort at the mouth of the Columbia River, and sank 10 merchants ships, as well as damaging 7 more, all along the Western seaboard.
The Japanese also attempted to mount two submarine-launched air strikes, a feat unmatched by either side in the war. The first, launched from the I-25, a B-1 Type, I-15 class sub on Sept. 9th, 1942, used a Yokosuka E-14Y “Glen” floatplane. Launched from a temporary forward mounted catapult, the Glen successfully dropped two 168 pound incendiary bombs in Oregon forest land near Brookings, causing minimal damage. The second was to be a strike on the Panama canal, using the largest subs built by any WWII combatant, the purpose-built I-400 class aircraft-carrying submarines. They could stow up to three Aichi M6A Seiran (“Clear Sky Storm”) floatplanes, capable of carrying a 1,800 lb bomb 620 miles at 295 mph. These were monster subs, over twice the size of contemporary American subs, with a length of 390-feet and displaced 5,900 tons. The aircraft hangar located amidships was 102-feet long and 11-feet in diameter. These subs were capable of incredible range, and were able to circle the globe one-and-a-half times on a single fueling; in the later, desperate stage of the war, several I-400 class subs made the round-trip to Germany to obtain jet technology, gold, and other vital war supplies for Japan.
Despite such technological innovations, the IJN submarine fleet was not a game-changer. The small lots in which Japanese submarine classes were constructed, as well as a doctrinal bias against submarines as a distinct class of offensive combatants, denied the IJN’s submariners the ability to hunt in “wolf packs” and to range independent of the surface fleet, as was the case with the Kriegsmarine and US Navy. Individual IJN captains enjoyed isolated individual successes during the early major surface engagements of the war, such as during the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and Santa Cruz islands. However, they never remotely approached the large tonnage claims of German submariners during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, and certainly never approached the tonnage sunk by US submarines in and around Japan’s home waters from late 1942 on.
Given the high attrition of IJN submarines throughout the war, their overall effect on US Pacific naval operations were minimal; by 1943, Japanese submarine operations were few and far between, and mostly undertaken closer to the home islands. This was due mainly to having lost operational bases to the American “island hopping”campaign in the Central Pacific, as well as US submarine successes in sinking their tenders, oilers and other support ships. More so, contrary to IJN doctrine, the US pursued aggressive, highly successful ASW operations in the Pacific, an outcome of the hard-learned lessons of the “happy time” during the Battle of the Atlantic. With this historical background in mind, let’s now take a look at the likelihood of one, let alone two relatively rare IJN mine-laying subs lurking off the Oregon coast in late May, 1943.
Hubbard Takes on the Imperial Japanese Navy
The Battle of Cape Lookout began early on the morning of May 19th, when one of the 815’s sonarmen reported a contact at 0340 hours. Hubbard immediately assumed this to be evidence of the presence of “an enemy submarine” and would have ordered “general quarters – man your battle stations.” With a loud klaxon sounding general quarters, her crew would have assumed their battle stations, including her depth charge racks, “K-gun” and Oerlikon 20 mm anti-aircraft mounts, main 3”/50 deck gun mount, damage control stations, and other vital posts. Hubbard would have most likely been on the bridge, with his “talker” (a seaman tasked with relaying his commands via internal telephone) relaying updates from the sonarmen and other vital areas of the ship.
Executive officer Lt. Thomas Moulton would have been responsible for ensuring the ship was ready for combat and updating Hubbard with the ship’s combat readiness throughout the upcoming “battle.” Given this period in the war, Hubbard’s 59-man crew was most likely comprised mostly of volunteers and some draftees, all supervised by 4-6 regular navy petty officers and four commissioned officers. We have no record of the performance of each individual enlisted man, though in retrospect, it seems collectively rather spotty in certain areas such as gunnery, sonar methods, and weapons maintenance as we’ll discuss further on. These contemporary photos give you an idea of what the PC-815’s crew would have looked like at general quarters:
Small boat operations presented their own unique challenges relative to destroyers, cruisers and larger ships, which were blessed with entire departments dedicated to what one or two sailors on the PC815 might be responsible for. A sailor who had gone through boot camp and then specialist “A” school training, was expected to have subject mastery in not only his “rate” or specialty, but also a sound working understanding of all the primary duties on his ship, regardless if he was a machinist’s mate, gunner’s mate or sonarman.
Arguably, given the ad hoc nature of Hubbard’s naval duties, training, and cumulative experience up until he was formally schooled at the SCTC, it’s more than likely his crew was far better prepared for the exigencies of small boat operations than he ever was. In additional to their ratings expertise, sailors were expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bluejackets’ Manual, the bible of all things naval for enlisted personnel as well as absorbing a huge body of unwritten knowledge from “the old salts.” I doubt that Hubbard, given his own exaggerated opinions about his nautical expertise, ever cracked the officer’s version of the Bluejacket’s Manual, entitled Seamanship. As we’ll see, the after-action narrative Hubbard supplied is true to form, and bore little resemblance to the events as reported by other participants. Not surprisingly, he was later officially sanctioned for not adhering to the proper ASW after-action reporting format by his superiors. However, that was the least of his many errors and omissions within a narrative that exposes a contempt for doctrine and poor tactical execution, inflexible decision making, and poor personal judgement.
In an earlier post, we noted the efficiency of the Navy’s personnel management system, that even in wartime, can determine with a great deal of certainty where a particular individual is or should be. The same thoroughness holds true in ensuring that a vast wealth of doctrinal publications, technical manuals, instructional pamphlets and other documentation are available to ensure everyone, from the CNO on down, knows their job and how to do it in any circumstance. As a former intelligence officer, Hubbard was certainly aware of all this knowledge, though it appears his only formal exposure to ASW doctrine and tactics was during his brief stay at SCTC and his performance bears this out. To fill any knowledge gaps, he could have referred to any of the 25 different publications concerning ASW weapons, tactics, and SONAR procedures for patrol craft and sub chasers, as well as the foundational materials relative to basic naval tactics, ship handling and relevant technical specifications.
Then there’s all the documentation regarding enemy tactics, equipment and personnel. Every week, in both the Pacific and European theatres, a small intelligence digest was provided to those in a combatant role across all the services. This concise format supplemented all the classified daily intel summaries, upcoming ship movements cables, and technical intelligence about new Japanese tactics and weapons that comprised the daily intelligence summary. For any skipper and his XO, this was in addition to managing the volume of day-to-day communications, log entries and other minutiae of life at sea in wartime. Despite all these intelligence, technical and doctrinal resources, it still comes as no surprise that Hubbard managed to make a mess of things; inexcusably, he looks to have been winging it the entire time, as he never was big on details nor did he ever acknowledge his ignorance on any matter. Thus sheer force of will does not a successful skipper make.
The Difficult Art of Anti-submarine Warfare
The heart of the matter lies in the validity of the 815’s alleged SONAR contact, coupled with Hubbard’s lack of tactical acumen, and the unavailability of any supporting evidence as to his after-action claims. We know that Hubbard had undergone basic SONAR training as part of his SCTC course, though ultimately, the accuracy of any contact was a function of the hardware’s reliability, the training of the 815’s sonarmen, along with Hubbard’s ability to analyze and process these variables into a reasoned command decision. Chris Owen has written a detailed overview of the events in question, the complete version of which can be found here. For our purposes, we’ll be selectively deconstructing the after-action report as well as the official investigation that occured at command level, and continuing to draw on Chris’ work at length in analysing Hubbard’s command decisions and behavior in action.
With those factors in mind, let’s first look at the state of SONAR and basic ASW tactics in 1943. The following examples are taken from the Chief of Naval Operations’ (CNO) after action report on ASW operations in WWII and provide a detailed description of just how difficult it is to detect, let alone sink a submarine. The information here helps to further expose the rather cavalier approach of Hubbard’s attack, given the challenges involved and the seriousness of the potential threat, knowing he was only some 10 miles off the coast of Oregon. Hunting subs involves a very deliberate calculus; had a legitimate threat existed, there’s a high probability that his incompetence could have resulted in the intra-coastal sea lanes along the Oregon coast being denied to merchant and military shipping, as a result of Japanese sea mines.
Let’s now look at just how difficult the detection process is:
“From the theoretical point of view we are interested primarily in attacks against submerged submarines, though an anti-submarine action often involves gunfire or ramming when the submarine is surfaced. The submarine may have been detected on the surface initially, or it may have been forced to the surface by previous attacks. In either case the ensuing action on the surface is little different from any other surface action and needs no consideration here.
FIGURE 1. Stern-dropped attack.
When the presence of a submerged submarine has been detected by sonar, the initial step in the attack is to “localize” the submarine, i.e., to determine its range and bearing from the attacking ship. On the basis of continuing range and bearing data, the submarine must then be “tracked” in order to determine its course and speed. Sometimes this is done explicitly by plotting positions, but more often it is done implicitly. Finally, the attacking ship must maneuver into a position such that when it launches its explosives they will reach a point beneath the surface at the same time as the submarine reaches that point. Figure 1 illustrates a typical attack in which the barrage is laid off the stern and to the quarters of the attacking ship, and Figure 2 illustrates an attack in which the explosives are thrown ahead of the attacking ship.
FIGURE 2. Ahead-thrown attack.
These explosives may be activated by contact fuzes as in the case of Mousetrap or Hedgehog projectiles; by proximity fuzes, as in the case of Mk 8 and Mk 14 depth charges; or by depth fuzes, as in the case of conventional depth charges or “Squid.” If the attacks illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 are to be successful, the charges must explode sufficiently close to the submarine either to rupture its pressure hull and cause immediate sinking or to damage the hull sufficiently to force it to the surface where it can be sunk by gunfire or ramming.The factors determining the probability of success in an attack can be grouped in two general categories: attack errors on the one hand and weapon lethality on the other. The first problem encountered in examining the attack errors in detail is the estimation of errors involved in localization. Ranges and bearings on the submarine are obtained by sonar, which is subject to certain disturbances and limitations.
In the first place, echoes are obtained not only from the submarine but from its wake, from water disturbances caused by previously exploded charges, from the wakes of surface vessels, from the ocean floor (in shallow water), and occasionally from the surface of the water. A good sonar operator is not easily led into thinking that these spurious echoes originate from the submarine itself, but it is inevitable that a certain amount of error and confusion creeps into range and bearing information. In addition, an inexperienced sonar operator may easily mistake a false target for the submarine and hence bring about an attack which is wholly futile. An indication of the importance of such mistakes is given by Table 1 which shows the frequency of errors in practice ahead-thrown attacks made at sea on “tame” submarines. It will be noted that the percentage of attacks on false targets is considerable even when an actual submarine is known to be in the immediate vicinity.
Even assuming the contact to be on the submarine (or on some wake disturbance near and moving with the submarine), errors in sonar data are by no means negligible. Figure 3 shows how errors in range and bearing may be introduced by the submarine’s wake, as an example. It has been estimated that the average overall bearing errors are about 2 degrees if BDI (bearing deviation indicator involving lobe comparison for accurate bearings) is used and 4 degrees and 5 degrees if cut-on bearing procedures are used. The probable range error under the same conditions has been taken as 11 yd. These estimates include a normal amount of wake echo and other errors usual in sonar operation. These errors are, of course, dependent on sonar conditions and sea state. When sound conditions are bad, the sonar operator is somewhat more likely to make errors. Roll and pitch of the ship in high seas introduce errors for several reasons.
Present sound gear is not stabilized, so that violent roll and pitch introduce errors in the bearing recorded and also make it difficult for the operator to keep the projector trained on the target. In addition, operator efficiency is reduced when the operator is training the gear with one hand, holding on to the bulkhead with the other, and combating seasickness at the same time. The importance of such factors can hardly be determined theoretically, but operational data on the overall effect of these variables will be presented in a later section.
FIGURE 3. Errors introduced by wake echo.
One of the most serious limitations on sonar information is the minimum range at which it can be obtained. Figure 4 illustrates the reasons for this minimum range with present United States sonar. Because of the limited depression angle of the sound beam, the submarine can pass under it. This causes the ship to conduct the final part of a stern-dropped attack after contact with the target has been lost.
FIGURE 4. Minimum range on a deep submarine.”
The Absence of Proof
As the photo on the left illustrates, a sonarman’s workstation was hardly an ergonomic paradise. Aside from a lack of creature comforts, it’s also abundantly clear from this technical discussion that sinking a submarine is a highly complex and deliberate, though problematic exercise comprised of a variety of technologies, sciences and individual competencies; it wasn’t really wasn’t as simple as winning a game of “Battleship” was it, LRH?
Nor was Hubbard operating in a vacuum. During his attack, he expressed frustration about the reliability of his detection gear, and eventually had to coordinate with the USN ASW K-class blimps that were called to the scene; he was further compelled to enlist the reluctant assistance of several US Coast Guard cutters and additional sub hunters. While the cutters and sub hunters all had similar SONAR to that of the 815, it was the blimp’s magnetic anomaly detection gear or MAD, that Hubbard would claim validated the presence of his targets. MAD uses variations in the earth’s magnetic field as a means to detect ferromagnetic objects such as submarines and was often a preferred alternative to SONAR and other acoustic methods:
“Magnetic anomaly detectors employed to detect submarines during World War II harnessed the fluxgate magnetometer, an inexpensive and easy to use technology developed in the 1930s by Victor Vacquier of Gulf Oil for finding ore deposits.MAD gear was used by both Japanese and U.S. anti-submarine forces, either towed by ship or mounted in aircraft to detect shallow submerged enemy submarines. The Japanese called the technology jikitanchiki (磁気探知機, “Magnetic Detector”). After the war, the U.S. Navy continued to develop MAD gear as a parallel development with sonar detection technologies.”
Into this tactical and technological uncertainty we now introduce Mother Nature. It was a well-known fact that the sea bed in the battle area contained magnetic deposits, which would have disrupted the MAD sensor on the ASW blimps as well as causing false or inaccurate SONAR readings on the cutters, PCs and SCs that responded. Furthermore, the sea off the coast of Oregon is quite deep and very cold, even in Spring, due to the Coriolis effect. Salinity, temperature, currents, and depth all influence modern SONAR, so these factors would have undoubtedly had a detrimental effect on the simpler systems of WWII. Chris Owen also notes that:
“Bizarrely, crustaceans such as snapping shrimps were a frequent cause of false alarms; the US Navy’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Bulletin had to publish articles on the distribution and habits of such underwater fauna to diminish the number of erroneous contacts.”
This naturally occurring magnetic deposit would later prove to be a key issue in the official command investigation into Hubbard’s claims.
So Just What the Heck Was Our Hero Shooting At?
We’ll now consider the alleged “target,” what Hubbard would initially describe as a Japanese mine-laying submarine. He states in his after-action report that:
“it is specifically claimed that one submarine, presumably Japanese, possibly a mine-layer, was damaged beyond ability to leave the scene and that one submarine, presumably Japanese, possibly a mine layer, was damaged beyond ability to return to its base …”
Later, in a 1957 lecture to Scientologists, he specifically states he sunk the IJN submarine I-76, only this time, somewhat correctly labeling it as a “trans-Pacific” submarine rather than as a mine-layer:
“I dropped the I-76 or the Imperial Japanese Navy Trans-Pacific Submarine down into the mouth of the Columbia River, dead duck. And it went down with a resounding furor. And that was that. I never thought about it again particularly except to get mad at all the admirals I had to make reports to because of this thing, see? This was one out of seventy-nine separate actions that I had to do with. And it had no significance, see?
But the other day I was kind of tired, and my dad suddenly sprung on me the fact that my submarine had been causing a tremendous amount of difficulty in the mouth of the Columbia River. Hadn’t thought about this thing for years. Of course, it’s all shot to ribbons, this thing. It’s got jagged steel sticking out at all ends and angles, and it’s a big submarine! It’s a — I don’t know, about the size of the first Narwhal that we built. And the fishermen coming in there and fishing are dragging their nets around in that area, and it’s just tearing their nets to ribbons — they’ve even hired a civilian contractor to try to blow the thing up and get it the devil out of there — and has evidently been raising bob with postwar fishing here for more years than I’d care to count.” Hubbard, “Auditing Techniques — Games Conditions”, lecture of 1 February 1957
We can begin by immediately debunking one of Hubbard’s most obvious lies, that of being near the mouth of the Columbia river when he engaged his mythical enemy; he was not even close, as Cape Lookout is some 70 miles south of the Columbia near Tillamook. As to getting “mad at all the admirals,” I doubt Admiral Frank “Jack” Fletcher, (more of whom later), would brook any sort of attitude from Hubbard.
The claim of “one out of seventy-nine separate actions…” is patently absurd on its face and this lie needs no further explanation. He’s actually spot-on when he says “his” submarine was “about the size of the first Narwhal that we built.” The USS Narwhal, (SS-167), built was launched in 1928 as a “V-boat,” a type that was not in a specific design class. It was exactly the same length as the I-76/176 at 346’ though slightly larger in diameter. The mention of the Narwhal is a classic example of Hubbard using a little bit of truth to validate a bigger lie, and there are many more like this to come in this story and later in his life.
The I-76/176 was an IJN Type KD7 Kadai (“Task”)-type long-range cruiser submarine, of which only 10 were built during the war. It sailed with a complement of 86 officers and men, had a surface range of 8,000 nautical miles (NM), could dive to a depth of 260 ft and were armed with 12 of the best sub-launched torpedoes of the war, the Type-95, a single 120mm deck gun, and two Type 96 25mm anti-aircraft cannons. It was NOT a mine-layer; the Japanese only built 4 dedicated mine-laying submarines, the Type KRS, numbered I-21 to I-24 (later I-121 to I-124). In reality, the I-124 was sunk off the coast of Darwin by the USS Edsall on January 20th, 1942 (9 days after Hubbard had arrived in Brisbane and long before he assumed his first command (but we digress…). As an aside, it would have been an incredible twist of fate, if the I-124 had not been sunk by the Edsall, only to then be sunk by Hubbard off the Oregon coast a year later!
Crucial to debunking Hubbard’s tale is the fact that the KD7’s never sailed East of Hawaii and operated primarily from the IJN base on Truk in the Caroline Islands, some 5,500 NM southwest of the Oregon coast. It would have been madness for a KD7 to roam that far northeast for so little benefit as there wasn’t that much merchant traffic to target. Only 10 KD7s were built, so the probability of one, let alone two, of these highly effective subs being off the Oregon coast at the same time would have been statistically remote if not impossible. Then there’s the fact that the I-76/I176s weren’t even minelayers, so once again, Hubbardian hyperbole rules the day in lieu of the truth.
Aside from the geospatial and tactical absurdities of his claim, let’s look at the physical composition and performance of the target from a SONAR and surface identification perspective: KD7’s were large submarines with prominent conning towers, complete with large hinomaru (“rising sun”) IJN insignia on either side. They displaced (weighed) 1,833 tons, were 346 ft long, had a beam (width) of 27 ft, and a draft (distance from waterline to bottom of hull/keel) of 15 ft. The KRS-class mine-layers were similar in size and configuration, the only considerable difference being in length, as they were 50 ft shorter than the KD7s. In either case, we’re talking about a significant underwater or surface mass as a SONAR target. Below are pictures of the I-176, a KD7-class sub (on the top) and a KRS class minelayer (on the bottom):
Lastly, as the final factor debunking Hubbard’s claims about submarine type, there’s the fact that postwar analysis by the British Admiralty and the US Navy of captured IJN records account for all of its vessels. There is no record of any Japanese submarine losses off the Western coast of the contiguous United States during the whole of the war. IJN records show that the I-176 was destroyed off Buka Island in the western Pacific by Fletcher-class destroyers USS Franks (DD-554), USS Haggard (DD-555), and USS Johnston (DD-557) on 16 May 1944. Let’s now return to the tale of the chase…
Naval ASW doctrine was evolving rapidly during the period that Hubbard assumed command of the PC-815. With his recent training at SCTC and with fleet bulletins arriving daily, he would have been exposed to the vast flow of ASW tactical and technical information emanating from the CNO. However, it’s clear that in his rush to prove himself in combat, he appears to have ignored much of the contemporary ASW doctrine then available as well as forgetting a host of fundamental leadership principles during those 3 days in May. His erratic behavior under duress confirms that Hubbard’s misreading of the initial SONAR returns, and his chaotic actions during his seemingly random series of attacks were no aberration. His poor grasp of command responsibilities, when combined with his lack of understanding environmental, tactical, and organizational factors, resulted in a recipe for disaster that is reflected in both the historical timeline of the attack and his own unauthorized, novel-like after-action report.
Counter to standard operating procedures (SOPs), Hubbard does not note the precise time of his first attack after the initial SONAR contact at 0340 hours, though he is more diligent in noting the time of subsequent attacks. Hubbard initially used a depth charge launcher known as a “K-gun” and three “rolling” (ie. rack-launched) depth charges. In his report he states that “structural charges were in the K-guns and did not explode” (structural charges are set with a safety proximity fuse that limits detonation if used too close to a ship’s hull). Here are illustrations of the primary weapons carried by a PC-461 class patrol craft:
3″/50 Fwd Main Deck Gun
Stern 40 mm Bofors AA gun
Bridge/amidships 20 mm AA gun
Stern Depth charge rack (one each side)
Stern “K-Gun” launcher
Hubbard goes on to state that “the three charges rolled exploded at their settings [sic] two were set to explode at 100 feet and one at 50 feet. The contact was lost at 100 yards indicating a target depth of 100 feet.” He notes yet another attack at 0357 hours, this time using both K-guns and depth charges, as “the target was found to be turning back towards the depth charge distance.”
The authorized ASW reporting format is illustrated below on the left, and the first page of Hubbard’s own format on the right:
Official USN ASW Report format
Hubbard’s unauthorized narrative format
Hubbard’s own 16 page narrative format, as Chris Owen notes, “reads more like one of his pulp-fiction stories”:
“Proceeding southward just inside the steamer track an echo-ranging contact was made by the soundman then on duty . . . The Commanding Officer had the conn and immediately slowed all engines to ahead one third to better echo-ranging conditions, and placed the contact dead ahead, 500 yards away.
The first contact was very good. The target was moving left and away. The bearing was clear. The night was moonlit and the sea was flat calm . . . The USS PC-815 closed in to 360 yards, meanwhile sounding general quarters . . . Contact was regained at 800 yards and was held on the starboard beam while further investigation was made. Screws were present and distinct as before. The bearing was still clear. Smoke signal identification was watched for closely and when none appeared it was concluded the target must not be a friendly submarine.
All engines were brought up to speed 15 knots and the target was brought dead ahead . . .”
Hubbard notes that “the night (or, given it was 0340, correctly noted in naval terms as astronomical twilight) was moonlit and the sea was flat calm.” It should be noted that submarines of the day used batteries for power while submerged, and valued such ideal conditions to surface and recharge their batteries as well as to ventilate their extremely hot, stuffy hulls. It was also a preferred hunting time to use their deck guns against merchant shipping as a means to conserve torpedoes, as well as for ocean transit; silhouetting a target against the moonlight almost guaranteed a hit.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the average maximum submerged duration for long-range subs like the KD7s, was around 48 hours at 2 knots, hence the importance of covert night-time surface operations for mobility. Thus the chances of Hubbard encountering a submerged submarine in the dark were far less than finding one on the surface at the time of the alleged encounter.
We now return to Chris’ narrative:
“At this point, Hubbard’s military terseness slipped completely:
The ship, sleepy and sceptical, had come to their guns swiftly and without error. No one, including the Commanding Officer, could readily credit the existence of an enemy submarine here on the steamer track and all soundmen, now on the bridge, were attempting to argue the echo-ranging equipment and chemical recorder out of such a fantastic idea …”
“The ship, sleepy and sceptical, had come to their guns swiftly and without error.”
Besides sounding like a quote from a badly navalized version of The Old Man and the Sea, it exposes a fundamental lack of discipline on the part of Hubbard’s sonarmen: why were they on the bridge “arguing” about the accuracy of the SONAR equipment, rather than at their battle stations monitoring the contact? After all, even allowing for a margin of error, this is a significant sized contact if “legitimate,“ especially at such short range. He says the guns were manned, but what about those manning the depth charge racks and K-guns, a far more crucial weapon at this early stage of the attack? A deck gun is only effective once the sub has surfaced, and while the gun team was most likely at general quarters, it seems an odd way to describe the ship’s combat readiness.
Owen continues:
“At 0450, a target on the surface was spotted and Hubbard gave the order to open fire on it. His crew responded with “astonishing accuracy, bursts and shells converging on the target.” It turned out to be no more than a floating log, but Hubbard thought it was good for the morale of the gunners to ensure that the newly-installed guns worked.
The USS PC-815 mounted four further attacks on the elusive submarine in the hope of forcing it to the surface, without success. At the end of the sixth attack the ship’s supply of depth charges was exhausted. Urgent signals requesting more ammunition at first met with no response.”
Hubbard doesn’t state who spotted the target; however, the bigger question is how do we go from a submerged contact to a surface contact without a plausible explanation, given that Hubbard, in his after-action report says the PC-815 lost contact after its last depth charge attack sometime after 0400?
Also, rather than staying submerged, why would a sub suddenly surface at 0450 if it weren’t damaged? Why unnecessarily expose itself to gunfire? The incongruities mount as we note in his report:
“At 0450, with dawn breaking over a glassy sea, a lookout sighted a dark object about 700 yards from the ship on the starboard beam. When inspected the object seemed to be moving. No definite conclusion could be reached as to the identity of the object and the range was closed. Although very probably this object was a floating log no chances were taken and the target was used to test the guns which had not been heretofore fired structurally.”
Remember it’s late May, so at 0450, the ambient light “with dawn breaking over a glassy sea” provides superb visibility conditions. In the days before night vision devices, naval binoculars were optimized for light gathering ability with observers trained to use their own keen vision in concert with these high-quality optics. (As an aside, the Japanese had the best quality night vision binoculars of the war, and when combined with the IJN’s superiority in night fighting tactics and world-beating “long-lance” torpedoes, constantly gave the Allies a bloody nose in night surface actions, particularly in the great naval battles around Guadalcanal). It would appear Hubbard couches incompetence with a “training opportunity;” yet given these ideal visibility conditions, it’s inconceivable a log could have been mistaken for the conning tower of a submarine at such short range.
As for citing the apparent motion of the object as proof that he correctly targeted a submarine, it appears that Hubbard forgot about ocean currents, which can move a log as well as they can move a ship. Then we have “the morale of the gunners;” I would think a fruitless exercise in arboreal slaughter would have had the opposite effect, especially as they apparently missed the “target.”
At this juncture in Hubbard’s combat narrative, it’s surprising that his buddy, XO (executive officer) Lt. Thomas Mouton, receives the praise he does, given the XO was responsible for the ship’s combat readiness. The PC-815’s gunnery appears to have been lacking, and her sonarmen appear to have been wanting in both detection skills and overall combat discipline, so Hubbard would have been justified in censuring Moulton. While Hubbard as skipper holds ultimate responsibility for her performance, Moulton was directly responsible for the tactical and weapons proficiency of the 815, yet Hubbard untypically makes no mention of his apparent failings.
Owen now introduces some new players into the timeline:
“At 0906, two US Navy blimps, K-39 and K-33, appeared on the scene to help with the search. By noon, Hubbard believed that the submarine was disabled in some way, or at least unable to launch its torpedoes, since the PC-815, lying to in a smooth sea, presented an easy target and had not been attacked. In the early afternoon a second subchaser, the USS SC-536, arrived but was unable to make contact with the target.”
The sun’s now up, further enhancing already superb visibility, and with the highly effective K-series blimps now on station, Hubbard’s target surveillance and acquisition abilities are enhanced by aerial observation. What more could a skipper want in hunting a sub?
These blimps had a variety of ways to communicate with surface vessels; the fact there’s no mention in their skipper’s after-action report of having radioed a sighting of a “disabled” sub to the PC-815 is telling. Somewhat spitefully, Hubbard takes the blimps to task in his after-action report for “errors in their concept of distance” though he does make reference to their communication in the “Radio log” addendum. Here’s a picture of a K-series ASW blimp in action:
Given the ideal sea and visibility conditions, and the fact a disabled (not destroyed) sub would most likely not have been at crash depth, had a sub actually existed, the blimp crew would have easily seen the outline of a 346-foot sub under the relatively clear, calm water. There’s also no doubt the skipper of the SC-536 would have interrogated the blimp crew for a read on the situation, as well as using its own SONAR to triangulate on the 815’s contact, so the fact the SC-536 comes up empty-handed further exposes the farce of Hubbard’s scenario. Owen now describes additional questionable tactics by Hubbard:
“On the bridge of PC-815, Hubbard led the other ship on an attack run, blowing a whistle to signal when to drop its depth charges. The results (per Hubbard) were encouraging:
The observation blimps began to sight oil and air bubbles in the vicinity of the last attack, and finally a periscope. This ship also sighted air bubbles . . . At 1606 oil was reported again and this ship saw oil. Great air boils were seen and the sound of blowing tanks was reported by the soundman . . . All guns were now manned with great attention as it was supposed that the sub was trying to surface. Everyone was very calm, gunners joking about who would get in the first shot.”
Hubbard’s use of a whistle to signal his depth charge crew is curious, as given the noise of combat, it would needed to have been quite the loud whistle to have been heard above the din. However, why use a whistle in the first place, when there would have been a talker on the depth charge crew relaying instructions to and from the bridge for this very reason?
Every weapon station has a talker (see photo on left), so the use of a whistle seems quaint and inefficient at best, massively unworkable at worst. As the forward 3”/50 and rear 40 mm Bofors guns were some distance from the bridge, how does he know everyone was “very calm” or for that matter, how does he hear his gunners “joking about who should get the first shot”? If such comic banter was present on the ship’s combat voice circuit, it indicates poor radio discipline and a serious lack of attentiveness.
All We Need is More Depth Charges!
Hubbard states that the blimps “began to sight oil and air bubbles…” yet the after-action reports of both blimp skippers make no mention of this. Outside the fact there was nothing to see, ASW blimps typically worked at an altitude anywhere from 500 to 1,000 ft when actively hunting a sub, so seeing bubbles while at altitude may have been problematic, though spotting an oil slick would have been very easy.
More’s the point that the unconfirmed trail of bubbles Hubbard describes is insufficient evidence of the sinking of a 346 ft sub with 86 men aboard and that contains some 300 tons of diesel oil. Much of the evidence that remains of a destroyed submarine depends on how it was attacked. Also, the effectiveness of depth charges varied, as the following overview from NavWeaps, a forum for naval history researchers, illustrates:
“In the first few months of the war only 5 percent of all depth charge attacks were successful. Normal combat conditions reduced that figure to 3 percent. Combat records showed that in early 1942 the lethal probability of a single depth charge pattern (barrage) was about 3 percent and five attacks would raise the chance of a kill to about 10 percent. The possibility of inflicting significant damage to a submarine was about 30 percent after five attacks. By the end of 1943, better weapons and tactics had improved these figures such that about 30 percent of all detected submarines suffered at least some damage and 20 percent were killed. By the last year of the war, at least 35 percent of all submarines attacked were being damaged while 30 percent were killed. In mid-1944, the USN was claiming an 8 percent kill rate with a single Hedgehog pattern. By the middle of 1945, that figure had risen to 10 percent.
In the Atlantic Theater, US surface ships sank 60 submarines, shore-based aircraft sank 54, ship-borne aircraft sank 32 and 40 were destroyed by bombing raids on yards and bases. In the Pacific Theater, surface ships sank 60 Japanese submarines, shore-based aircraft sank 3.5 and ship-borne aircraft sank another 9.5.”
Depth charges kill a sub via concussive as much as kinetic (explosive) force; depending on the contact depth, the use of any additional ordnance such as aerial bombs or surface shelling, and the resultant lethality of any secondary explosions, the evidence of a kill can vary. In Hubbard’s example, some 37 depth charges were dropped. If that barrage was effective, it would have undoubtedly split the sub’s hull, resulting in not only a significant oil slick, but also a large debris field. In our opinion, it’s clear that what was in Hubbard’s eyes was an oil slick and air bubbles was most likely either the result of reflected sunlight, marine debris from depth charge explosions, or a combination of the two.
His “periscope” is most likely a branch jutting off a submerged log, given that the Columbia River delivers a great deal of logging waste into the currents off the Oregon coast, and causes marine hazards far out to sea and down the coast.
Furthermore, a submarine in distress would hardly be undertaking a controlled surfacing to periscope depth; it would be crash-diving to escape the threat, or if unable to dive, it would most likely expose not only its periscope, but a good portion of its conning tower, given its partial ballast from a damaged hull, as shown in the following photos of partially submerged damaged U-boats:
Note crewmen on the conn
Note silhouette of the hull just under the surface
This U-boat’s guns still represent a threat
Having now engaged and supposedly sunk the first contact, his sonarman apparently locates yet another contact as Chris describes:
“The PC-815 now made a startling discovery: there was not just one submarine but two! The second one was discovered some 420 yards away, drawing away at about four knots.
Keep in mind that there are now two ships in the area with a third, a Coast Guard cutter, on the way, so it’s getting crowded on the surface. Sound is amplified underwater, thus more screw “noise” arrives in the form of a second Coast Guard cutter, so we now have four vessels in the immediate area of operation, along with the two blimps overhead. Between the MAD activity from the blimps and the SONAR activity of four (soon to be five) ships, there’s now considerable noise clutter at play amongst all the detection devices in use, let alone the interference from magnetic deposits in the sea bed that could cause all sorts of distortion:
“At 1646, a Coast Guard patrol boat brought in further supplies of ammunition. Manoeuvring alongside, twenty-seven depth charges were transferred on to the USS PC-815 and made ready for firing. Not long afterwards, a second Coast Guard patrol boat, the Bonham arrived, followed by another subchaser, the USS SC-537. There was now a total of five ships and two observation blimps involved in the search for the enemy submarines off the coast of Oregon. Not all of the ships seemed to be as keen as the PC-815, however, as Hubbard complained bitterly in his action report:
During the night of the 21st when this vessel was attempting to make a routine sweep and search in the standard sweep formation, neither the SC537 nor the USSCG Bonham showed any understanding whatever and refused by their actions to cooperate. It is later understood that the Bonham had a top speed of 9.2 although she reported her speed to us as 12 and that she was under the supposition that she would blow herself up if she dropped charges. The SC537 had one contact which she reported during the following day and failed to prosecute it. The SC537 left the scene with her racks full of charges although the SC536 and the PC815 had exhausted all theirs. Echo range was never more than about 900 yards in this shallow water and despite orders neither vessel would close in to this with one exception, as noted in the attacks as of the following morning.”
Hubbard had now been on this fruitless quest for two days running. His crew is most likely exhausted, hungry and operating less than optimally, most likely on coffee and benzedrine, a commonly issued stimulant used during the war. We can also assume that Hubbard is most likely wired to the gills too, as he never mentions standing down nor being party to any form of relief during the entire action. This would also account for his unreasoned attempts to continue his attack late on the second day, and could explain his churlishness towards his fellow skippers.
He also questions why “neither the SC537 nor the USSCG Bonham showed any understanding whatever and refused by their actions to cooperate.” Here we see classic Hubbard projection: it’s not a question of “showing understanding;“ it’s the objective outcome from having analyzed the tactical and logistical realities at hand. Such a statement simply reinforces the fact that Hubbard never grasped the selflessness of command nor the practical realities of battle.
The rest of his after-action is rife with this sort of editorializing and whining, so it’s easy to see why the other skippers involved were hesitant to engage in this fantasy fight. For example, the USS Bonham, WSC-129 was an Active-class Coast Guard patrol boat, that was repurposed in 1942 as a subchaser. With only a 3” gun and two depth charge racks, she lacked much of the PC-815’s ASW capabilities, thus Hubbard should have taken her limitations into account. Here are two photos comparing the PC-815 to the Bonham; note the limited space on the Bonham’s fantail for depth charge rack installation (though later in the war the Active-class PCs would be upgunned closer to that of a 461-class patrol craft):
USCG Active-class PC
461-class PC
He mentions earlier that the water where the PC-815 was echo ranging was “shallow,” yet as Owen quotes below, he also states “we considered from her (the sub’s) failure to surface that she had gone down in 90 fathoms,” which is 540 ft deep, hardly shallow water; so what’s it to be, shallow or deep water:
“The small fleet continued searching throughout the night and into the following day. The attacks continued, but still no there was no sign of either submarine having been damaged or destroyed. Hubbard was not discouraged, even after 34 fruitless hours:
Because we had three times found two sub targets on the previous day, we considered from her failure to surface that she had gone down in 90 fathoms. The other still had batteries well up for it made good speed in subsequent attacks (three to six knots).”
As it appears Hubbard can’t discern between shallow and deep water, how does he then determine his SONAR is ranging accurately or if his depth charges have been set for the appropriate detonation depth? It’s an amazing lapse in fundamentals considering what he’s been tasked with!
The 815 is then diverted north by a false report of a second submarine (which in reality was a fishing boat) and now “flying north,” the fruitless search continued, until Hubbard appears to spot a submarine attempting to surface at 0700 hours on the morning of May 21st:
“Suddenly a boil of orange colored oil, very thick, came to the surface immediately on our port bow . . . The Commanding Officer came forward on the double and saw a second boil of orange oil rising on the other side of the first. The soundman was loudly reporting that he heard tanks being blown on the port bow.
Every man on the bridge and flying bridge then saw the periscope, moving from right to left, rising up through the first oil boil to a height of about two feet. The barrel and lens of the instrument were unmistakable . . . On the appearance of the periscope, both gunners fired straight into the periscope, range about 50 yards. The periscope vanished in an explosion of 20mm bullets.”
What’s interesting is that Hubbard makes no distinction as to the source of this “boil of orange colored oil, very thick…” Is it from submarine number one, or submarine number two? What’s more suspect is that the fuel is orange. Bunker fuel oil is a very dark, sludgy brown in color, and not orangish:
This important detail casts further doubts about the accuracy of his novel-like narrative, more so when narcissistically describing himself in the third person: “the Commanding Officer came forward on the double and saw a second boil of orange rising on the other side of the first.” My immediate reaction when reading this is to think “why wasn’t he forward (i.e., on the bridge) in the first place? Perhaps he was arguing with his sonarman about the source of the ‘tanks being blown on the port bow…’.”
Then we have the lurid detail of a periscope moving through the oil, “rising to a height of two feet. The barrel and lens of the instrument were unmistakable.” Seen at a range of 50 yards, it supposedly vanishes “in an explosion of 20mm bullets.” Given the state of the crew’s earlier deck gunnery, hitting a moving cylinder that’s roughly 5” in diameter from a rolling platform with a large-caliber bucking weapon would be quite a feat, even with those large rounds from the reliable Oerlikon 20mm cannon and optical sights. Here’s a photo of a 20 mm Oerlikon cannon, its rounds, and its alleged target:
Standard Mk 4 20 mm Naval mount
20 mm round, each projo weighs .5 lbs.
Moving periscope; note wake that indicates speed
However, what’s more troubling is his use of the Oerlikon in the first place. Navy doctrine teaches that light caliber weapons like the Oerlikon are for use against aircraft, not surface ships; that’s what his 3”/50 main gun is for. Here again Hubbard violates tactical doctrine. He does later imply in his after-action report that his goal in excessive depth charging was to get the sub to the surface, so as to finish her with gunfire (with the 3”/50 we would hope, so he’s at least giving lip service to SOP).
Despite all the PC-815’s martial bravado, Hubbard’s fight was soon coming to an uneventful end. Owen details his last attack, his frustrations about a lack of support, and the general consensus among Hubbard’s fellow PC/SC skippers as to their hesitancy in continuing any further action. Let’s look at this final “shot” as it were:
“A last attack run was executed by the PC-815 and SC-536, exhausting their last depth charges. As the ships continued to search for the elusive submarine, another subchaser, the PC-788, was sighted and cajoled into joining the search, although her captain ‘protested very strongly against helping, … requesting continually to be allowed to be secured.’ Frustratingly for Hubbard, even after the PC-815 and SC-536 had dropped around a hundred depth charges, the sonar contact continued to be present but stationary on the sea bottom. The PC-536’s regular commanding officer arrived on the scene and, taking charge from his executive officer, promptly curtailed his ship’s involvement in Hubbard’s search.”
Given the reaction of the 788’s skipper, one can surmise there was back-channel communications going on among the other skippers as to the futility of Hubbard’s fight and questionable claims. The 788’s skipper’s hesitance is understandable, as he would have had to justify his ammunition expenditures as well as filing an after-action report that would have been embarrassing at best, given the results to date.
Hubbard’s obstinance in the matter is further demonstrated by his insistence on one final attack, as “the sonar contact continued to be present but stationary on the sea bottom.“ Another tool in the ASW bag is the hydrophone, which is basically an underwater microphone, and was one of the earliest means of detecting submarines, dating from late in WWI. It’s particularly useful in determining if a submarine is breaking up as a result of depth charging, etc. It would appear that the SONAR return in this instance may have in fact been the magnetic deposits on the seabed, rather than a submarine hull.
Hubbard makes no mention in his after-action report about hydrophone usage, yet it could have provided proof of his target’s destruction as it broke apart while sinking, despite the presence of a large magnetic anomaly. Given the amount of explosives expended on either one of the alleged submarines, it stands to reason that significant hull damage with the associated acoustic signature would have occurred at some point and thus been detectable by hydrophone, providing Hubbard some proof of his “kill.”.
Did Hubbard Cover-up A Crew Member’s Gross Negligence? The Oerlikon Lie Exposed
After this last gasp attempt to sink his elusive prey, Hubbard is ordered back to port. Owen details Hubbard’s less than enthusiastic reception at the Astoria naval station:
“At midnight the PC-815 received orders to return to Astoria Naval Station, having been in action for some 68 hours. Hubbard noted that they were welcomed ‘with considerable skepticism. Her records had not been examined, her crew had not been questioned and no qualified report had been made.’
His ship had expended 37 depth charges and had maintained ‘contact with submarines’ for over 55 hours. Three minor casualties were suffered, probably as a result of tiredness affecting the crew’s performance. Hubbard did not mention that he had very nearly suffered a fatality – his executive officer, Thomas Moulton, was nearly shot when the starboard 20mm gun accidentally fired off an entire magazine, without anyone being at the trigger. The gun had been assembled incorrectly by an exhausted gunner and a key part put in backwards.”
In analyzing the circumstances of Hubbard’s description of this “malfunction,” from my perspective as a school-trained armorer in the Marines and my comprehensive understanding of how weapons function in general, this is nonsense; he is covering-up for his own failings and the gross negligence of one of his crewmen. If true, this incident demonstrates a general lack of professionalism aboard the PC-815, reflective more of sincere amateurs and Hubbard’s dilettantish, often incompetent leadership than anything.
Thus I don’t buy his explanation whatsoever of how this weapon malfunctioned, nor the context he provides, nor that a mechanical fault caused the runaway gun that damaged his antenna mast and supposedly almost killed Moulton. In examining the record, let’s first look at the 20 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun in general, then we’ll dive into a deconstruction of yet another major lie from Hubbard.
The 20 mm Oerlikon automatic cannon was based on a WWI German design and one of WWII’s iconic weapons. It was licensed-built throughout the world, and in WWII, was used extensively by combatants on both sides at sea and on the ground primarily in the anti-aircraft role, and also equipped front line fighter aircraft. It was adopted by the US Navy in 1940, and as historian Kent G. Budge goes on to say:
“…production did not begin until late 1941, and only 379 weapons had been produced by the time war broke out in the Pacific. Manufacture ramped up rapidly thereafter, and by April 1942 there were sufficient weapons to rearm the entire U.S. Fleet, meet new construction requirements, and begin supplying the weapon to auxiliaries and merchant ships. Further production increases were ordered in early 1943 to equip landing craft. Production peaked at 4,693 mounts in September 1943, and total production was 124,734 mounts. Initially costing about $7000 per gun, improvements in mass production brought the price down to $1658 by the end of the war.”
Keep in mind that effective mass-produced weapons like the Oerlikon derive their success from a variety of factors: simple, reliable and robust design traits, excellent lethality proportional to logistical requirements, and most importantly, ease of maintenance, robust tolerances and the ability to quickly remedy simple mechanical faults in combat. All these considerations are what comprise a weapons “system” which is then integrated into the Navy’s fleet logistics chain, a key component of which is the use of “levels” for assigning maintenance duties. These levels are described as unit or Organizational (O-level), Intermediate level (I-level) and Depot level (D-level), with the majority of maintenance beyond daily tasks, such as limited and major repairs on ordnance being done at I- and D-levels. Major combat damage was repaired in dry docks in forward areas such as Ulithi Atoll or in yards such as Pearl Harbor, Mare Island, Bremerton or San Diego on the West Coast.
The complex trigger housing of the Oerlikon would be considered an I-level repair, as would its gyro-stabilized sight (if mounted at the time). Conversely, removing the barrel, action spring or bolt assembly would fall under authorized preventative maintenance tasks, given their simplicity. For example, the barrel only takes 30 seconds to remove, a rarity on a weapon of this size. In accessing the trigger housing group for whatever reason, this sailor was guilty of a serious violation of ordnance handling regulations, as well putting the lives of his shipmates in danger with his actions. Had a superior authorized his actions, it still would have been grossly negligent, and should never have happened. Even if the sailor in question was a qualified armorer, on a small craft, these types of repairs are meant to be undertaken ashore in a armorer’s workshop with specialist tools such as jigs and custom punches.
That’s not to say that these rules weren’t often broken in the more loosely-regulated war zones, though there’s no way this could be argued as necessary off the Oregon coast, especially so close to a well-stocked port facility like the Astoria Naval shipyard. What makes this all the more egregious in Hubbard’s case, is that he’s not marooned on the edge of civilization in some Pacific atoll and forced to improvise. Thus the close proximity of a major repair facility, reinforces the fact there was little or no reason for anyone on his crew to undertake anything but preventative or daily O-level maintenance, such as rust prevention, oiling and servicing of the ship’s power plants and weaponry, or calibrating her radio and sonar gear.
Therefore, given the well-known reliability of the Oerlikon, along with the fact that these weapons had not been fired with any great regularity over the previous two days, why then is this sailor attempting to disassemble a critical component that is never mentioned as faulty, rather than simply cleaning, oiling, and securing the weapon until the PC-815 reached port? It just makes no sense.
Hubbard conveniently does not state how many rounds of 3”/50 or 20 mm ammunition were fired in the “Gunnery Report” section of his after action report, stating only that on Friday, May 21, 1943 at 0704 PC-815:
“Opened fire from all guns at periscope in the center of oil boil. Continued firing until the periscope disappeared.”
This explanation is far more terse than the narrative prose he uses earlier in the operational narrative, wherein he states “the periscope vanished in an explosion of 20mm bullets.” He leaves no hint as to what constitutes an “explosion” as a means to quantify how many rounds were expended or the effect on the target, nor which gun or guns were fired.
The ammo mix in a 60-round Oerlikon magazine (see photo to left) consists of high explosive, high explosive-incendiary, tracer, and ball (copper jacketed lead) in repeat order, so what caused his “explosion” is anyone’s guess. He does however, list in great detail the amount of depth charges he uses, so it’s left to the reader to try and extrapolate his 3”/50 and Oerlikon ammunition usage and its effectiveness, an omission that must have thrilled Admiral Fletcher when he read this fiction. Let’s now return to this mysterious malfunction.
Owen notes that “the gun had been assembled incorrectly by an exhausted gunner and a key part put in backwards;” while Hubbard states in his after-action report that:
“Failure on the part of a gunner to properly assemble the parallelogram of the starboard 20MM (he reversed it) caused this gun to go off when pointed at the zenith and expend a full magazine, cutting away our antennaes [sic]. The gun was not at the time manned.”
As before, we’ll dissect this statement sentence by sentence, as it’s quite revealing on several levels. In doing so, let’s start with the weapon. In consulting USN Ordnance Pamphlet No. 911, “20 mm. A.A. GUN,” Hubbard’s explanation of a “failure on the part of a gunner to properly assemble the parallelogram of the starboard 20MM (he reversed it) caused this gun to go off…” appears highly unlikely on the surface, given his vague description of the failure.
We’ve already established the provenance and reliability of the Oerlikon, which makes this explanation all the more suspect. As we previously established, the Navy is diligent in documenting the use and care of weapons, a great deal of which includes a constant stream of technical updates and reports from the field. I consulted a variety of sources in locating contemporary maintenance bulletins, from the US Navy, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), and Royal Navy (RN), all of whom used the Oerlikon extensively, and nowhere could I find any mention of a “reversed parallelogram,” let alone it having caused what’s more properly known as a “runaway gun.”
The lack of any reference to a reversed parallelogram is not surprising, as there are actually four discrete parts with “parallelogram” in their respective nomenclature, which are in turn considered part of the trigger mechanism contained in the trigger housing box:
The parallelogram assys are located in the trigger housing, the large box to rear of the receiver
Recoiling mass about to be released to fire gun, parallelogram being moved by trigger crank
Reversed parallelograms would not be able to engage sear (cam-like part in black, lower right)
Recoiling mass released to fire gun; note four different parallelograms all in irreversible configuration; bolt is now moving forward
Action of spring plungers against parallelogram top lever (N); again, note specific irreversible orientation of N
Counter-recoil cycle has begun, note relationships that would have been impossible to reverse as well as to fire gun
The operator’s manual contains three pages of examples of malfunctions and their causes, only a few of which even refer to one of the various parallelogram parts, nor does not list improper assembly of the “parallelogram” as a known cause for an Oerlikon malfunction. A detailed examination of the functions of the 4 parallelogram parts shows that none of the parts can be “reversed,” given their relationship within the trigger housing. Aside from their physical configuration preventing such an error, even if that had indeed occurred, the gun would not have been able to function at all, let along cycling an entire magazine while unattended. Here’s an example where one of the parallelogram parts in the trigger assembly caused a fault as reported by one of the many training centers throughout the Navy:
“Rear parallelogram lever plunger (OE-1212) sticking so that when top lever (OE-1204) is lifted by the trigger crank (OE-1223), rear lever (OE-1203) is not forced off trigger hook (OE-1216).”
A sticky part is easily remedied through lubrication or filing, unlike a human-induced fault such as the gunners mate supposedly reversing the “parallelogram.” Significantly, the most common cause of Oerlikon misfires are “the result of bent or broken strikers (similar to a firing pin), or by carbon fouling and powder residue clogging the central hole in the breech face piece under the stress of many rounds being fired.”Having now established there are not grounds for a mechanical cause for this mishap, let’s now look at how the Oerlikon itself was configured and positioned when it allegedly started firing all by itself.
It’s important to note that you don’t just waltz up to an Oerlikon, pull the hammer back and fire the thing. The action spring of an Oerlikon takes 500 foot pounds to cock and requires the gunner to use a rope and pulley mechanism or a lever attached to the rear of the barrel to cock the gun before firing; there is no “charging handle” or the like as found on modern sporting rifles. It is also equipped with an effective safety that mechanically prohibits the trigger from engaging the sear which in turn releases the bolt, thus initiating the firing sequence. The Oerlikon is blowback-operated, which means it obtains energy from the motion of the cartridge case as it’s pushed to the rear of the receiver by the expanding gas created by the ignition of the propellant charge. There’s more involved, but for our purposes, the fact that it fires from an open bolt as a result of its design is an important consideration, as it allows the weapon to be combat ready in a reasonably safe configuration. Note the cocking rope and pulley in this photo:
My first question is that SOP says weapons are to be rendered safe when not at General Quarters, so why was this weapon even loaded and the safety not on in the first place?
My next question is hypothetical: having incorrectly reassembled the weapon as Hubbard claims, how could the sailor have not noticed that he was unable to cock the weapon, let alone leave it in a condition where it could somehow fire on its own?
Crucially, there’s no way the bolt would have been able to seat properly nor would it have correctly engaged the trigger assembly. Even with a magazine in place, as a blowback operated weapon, the inability of the bolt to lock to the rear as the first step in the firing sequence, would have prevented the weapon from cycling a round, as it needs the combustion energy from firing to complete a firing cycle. Again, how could a properly trained gunner not notice any of these faults?
So supposing it did fire by itself somehow?
Hubbard says the gun “(was) pointed at the zenith and expended a full magazine, cutting away our antennaes [sic].” which means the barrel was pointing straight up when it started firing; he’s rather pretentious here and also incorrect in his use of”zenith” to describe the gun’s position, as proper naval form would have him use degrees/angle/declination, depending on the context.
According to Chris Owen, on May 24th, 1984, former Lt. (jg) Thomas Mouton testified during the Church of Scientology v. Armstrong trial:
“that he was on the mast of the PC-815 when the gun went off, firing until its entire ammunition drum was empty, missing him by a few inches and shooting off the ship’s radio antennae. He later recalled: ‘I was making love to the mast and was almost out to the other side. Looking down the barrel, it looked like it was coming right toward me.’”
The Oerlikon has a muzzle velocity of 2,725 feet per second (FPS), with a projectile weight of 0.5 pounds pushed by a standard charge; thus it is not considered a high velocity weapon, in that its rounds do not maintain a relatively flat trajectory for the duration of their flight.
Depending on the elevation of the muzzle (the end of the barrel), relatively slow projectiles like those of the Oerlikon travel in an ever-increasing parabolic arc. That said, it would have been a straight (flat) shot between the muzzle of Hubbard’s suspect gun and his mast and antenna array; thus given it’s flat trajectory, what could it have hit? Here’s a photo that shows the relationship between the bridge, the platform-mounted Oerlikons to its rear, the ship’s mast, and the main antennas (tall whips just in front of funnel):
Note that the black coverings on the vertical Oerlikons on the platform just behind the bridge on either side of the main mast and how the barrels run parallel to the mast as well as the tall whip antennas on the same platform. Moulton says that he was on the mast, but where? In the small crow’s nest seen in the photo? Or was he climbing on the hand-holds along the back of the mast towards the radar array? His statement that “he was looking down the barrel” is open to interpretation. If he was indeed “making love to the mast,” that would imply he was at the base of the mast or perhaps a little higher.
However, any of those locations would put him a position that was roughly below or parallel to the path of the rounds and not “looking down the barrel.” To realistically do so, he would have needed to be higher on the mast, either in or above the crow’s nest (box-like structure in front of flag jib) to get this perspective. There’s no way a fully elevated Oerlikon, (i.e., at zenith) could hit the main search radar or the main whip antennas, (located on the same platform as the Oerlikons), unless the guns were fully depressed, not at zenith.; There’s also the question of how the gun comes to be horizontal and in motion enough to hit the base section of an antenna that’s 3-4” in diameter. It’s the periscope challenge all over again… Crucially, the mass of an Oerlikon is located to the rear, so even if it were firing by itself, it more than likely would not autonomously assumed a horizontal position. Neither Moulton nor Hubbard are clear on which antennas they’re referring to either, as there are numerous high frequency (HF), low frequency (LF), FM, and ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore radio antennas located all over the ship.
Returning to the runaway gun, what if the gun had become horizontal? An Oerlikon has a +87 to -5 degree range of elevation, and thus has a safety zone under this horizontal plane. With this in mind, why didn’t a crew man approach the gun and either take control of the weapon, or at least hit the magazine release, which would have then immediately stopped the gun from firing due to lack of ammunition? This procedure is referenced in several technical bulletins as a method to stop a malfunctioning or runaway gun. It does involve a degree of competence and courage on a confined platform like those on the 815. Such an action is certainly in keeping with preventing serious injury or death to a shipmate, or to minimize damage to one’s ship.
What’s curious about Hubbard’s story is why he chose the antennas. Why not the back of the bridge or the funnel, or the main mast for that matter? I would argue it’s because the damage would have been minimal or easily remedied, and thus the whole story is a lie.
It’s my belief that the three minor casualties he mentions in his report were the result of negligence on part of his gunners during the chaos on day one of his wild goose chase. I can see his gunners firing wildly at the periscope, caught-up in Hubbard’s maniacal insistence and as a result, inadvertently traversing their gun and striking a fellow crewman, or accidently shooting up the antennas and causing minor injuries on the gun platform from bullet fragments or ricochets. Negligence such as this is directly attributable to poor training, discipline, and leadership.
While Hubbard makes several claims as to the preparedness of his crew throughout his after-action report, I see his revisionist narrative as the result of wanting to mask his fears, insecurities and errors over those 55+ hours. The false bravado within his report reflects his fear of dying, his fear of embarrassing himself in front of his men, and significantly, his fear of failure in general.
He was deliberate in avoiding the highly structured format of the official ASW after-action report, because it wouldn’t allow the embellishment he used in his narrative format to justify his actions, nor the spin he puts both his crew’s and his mediocre performance. The inquiry that convenes as a result of his actions off Cape Lookout is the direct result of what’s contained in this report; though he attempted to spread praise around, what comes through is Hubbard’s narcissism rather than his effectiveness as a combat leader.
The Ignominious Aftermath
Let’s return to Chris Owen’s work to set the stage for the inquiry into Hubbard’s actions off Cape Lookout, as well as providing additional context the events as he describes them:
“Despite the scepticism with which Hubbard had been met on arrival at Astoria, his claims were taken seriously. Only three months previously a lone enemy submarine had surfaced about a mile offshore north of Santa Barbara, California, and fired 25 shells at an oil refinery. The incident – the first foreign attack on the continental US since 1814 – had caused great alarm on the US West Coast. Was it possible that Hubbard had intercepted a Japanese attempt to raid Oregon’s naval facilities?
The Commander Northwest Sea Frontier, Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, took charge of the investigation. He ordered Hubbard to report to him for an interview and examined the hundred-page-plus Battle Report which Hubbard submitted. The Commanding Officers of the SC-536 and -537, CGCs Bonham and 78302, and blimps K-33 and K-39 were also ordered to report; Lieutenant Commander E. J. Sullivan U.S.N., Commander Airship Squadron 33, submitted an oral report after having visited the area during the search on one of the blimps.”
The attack Owen refers to actually occured on February 23, 1942, a year and a month prior to Hubbard’s alleged contact, which may have changed the dynamics of why the Cape Lookout incident was investigated at such a high level in mid-1943. We noted earlier Japanese submarine activity off the Western US seaboard was a regular occurrence early in 1942. However, by the beginning of 1943, Japanese submarine activity along the Western US seaboard was a fleeting concern for the most part, given US ASW superiority and ongoing intelligence confirming the depletion of the IJN’s submarine fleet and its inability to operate beyond the reaches of the Central Pacific.
It’s important to note that Hubbard’s parent command, Headquarters, Northwest Sea Frontier (HQNWSF), in addition to dealing with the submarine threat, would have been increasingly concerned with the unopposed Japanese landings on Attu Island in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on June 7th of 1942, thus creating a serious strategic threat. ASW reports during this time would have been included in an ever-expanding list of tactical, personnel, and logistics communications, thus it’s questionable that Hubbard’s after-action report would have been of interest to anyone above the normal operational level or be of personal interest to Commander, Northwest Sea Frontier during this period. On the 11th of May, 1943, Operation Landcrab began, when units of Maj. Gen Albert Brown’s 7th Infantry Division, invaded Attu to begin a large-scale amphibious campaign to retake the Aleutians from the Japanese Imperial Army.
The highpoint of this campaign occurs right around the same time Hubbard submits his after-action report, which then begs the question that why, in a significant battle so close to home, does the ASW after-action report of a lowly Lt.(jg) become of interest to Fleet Admiral Frank “Jack” Fletcher?
In mid-1943, a report detailing an engagement involving one and potentially two IJN subs off the Oregon coast would have certainly been alarming, given what was then know about IJN sub operations at the time. However, I believe this is not the reason Fletcher (above) became involved, as even then, it most likely would have still been dealt with lower in the chain of command; the reason lies in the serious deficiencies demonstrated by Hubbard as well as wanting to understand why so many crucial resources may have been wasted on such folly.
Let’s return to Hubbard’s narrative and how it describes a rather disjointed, indeed almost lackadaisical and uncoordinated series of attacks, contravening contemporary ASW tactics. ASW doctrine called for attacks in a type of revolving wave, wherein a ship depleted of depth charges is replaced by those fully armed as the attack progresses. Hubbard’s narrative reflects both an aggressive (“we started attack XVI”) and apathetic (“we were motionless in the water”) attack posture and when mentioning the other ships involved, Hubbard laments he was “not supported” and is vague in much of his tactical description, rather than acknowledging the efforts and competence of his peers in a positive light.
I would again argue that his fellow skippers began to message among each other as the situation deteriorated, and more importantly, relayed their concerns back to their command that all was not right with this action; this anecdotal record was then relayed up the chain of command, hence Fletcher’s interest. As Jeffrey Augustine notes:
“Admiral Fletcher played a major leadership role at (the battle of ) Midway where four Japanese carriers were destroyed in two days of battle that broke the back of Japanese naval superiority in the South and Central Pacific. Fletcher knew all about naval battle and ship-killing.”
Fletcher’s specific leadership role at Midway was that of Tactical Commander, which involved coordinating the air and surface assets of two carrier task forces. Not only did Fletcher know a thing or two about killing ships, he also knew about the fog of war and the fear one experiences when in combat for the first time, as well as how the mental state of a highly stressed and fatigued commander during battle can later distort his perceptions as to the outcome of an action.
More so, having been in the Navy for some 35 years prior to assuming command of the Northwest Sea Frontier, he was well-aware of how the record could be altered to shed favorable light on what in reality may have been less-than valorous behavior. Couple this experience with those reports independent of Hubbard’s, such as he onsite report from LtCdr Sullivan of ZP-33, and it was clear Fletcher smelled bullshit, hence his personal intervention in the matter. Fletcher goes on to say as much in his report on the Cape Lookout action, as submitted on June 8th, 1943 to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet (CincPac):
“An analysis of all reports convinces me that there was no submarine in the area. Lieutenant Commander Sullivan states that he was unable to obtain any evidence of a submarine except one bubble of air which is unexplained except by turbulence of water due to a depth charge explosion. The Commanding Officers of all ships except the PC-815 state they had no evidence of a submarine and do not think a submarine was in the area.”
Owen aptly sums-up what Fletcher really says:
“Fletcher added that there was ‘a known magnetic deposit in the area in which depth charges were dropped’. The implication was obvious: the PC-815 had fought a two-day battle with a magnetic deposit.”
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, including Hubbard’s own failure to collect any physical evidence of a sinking, such as an oil sample as required by regulations, Hubbard persists in his belief that he did engage with the enemy. He does state that on the morning of May 21, he located and took aboard “a strange object, a small round ball laced with a line netting, which was floating here”.
Given the jetsam carried by currents in the North Pacific, this was most likely a float for a fishing net, rather than a submarine’s distress marker as claimed by Hubbard. In a further breach of regulations, he makes no mention of having officially submitted this find to his unit’s intelligence officer, so it’s anyone’s guess as to what became of the “marker.”
Long after the events of May 21-23, 1943, both he and his crew would continue to believe they had engaged and sunk a Japanese sub. In reviewing the evidence regarding Hubbard’s personal conduct both during and after Cape Lookout, certainly in regards to both the documented fact that no IJN subs were present in the area at the time of his “contact,” as well as my own deconstruction as to his obvious lies about what happened with the Oerlikon and Moulton, it’s clear his version of the events are far more fiction than fact. Absent all the exaggerations and vague claims, there might be a case for Hubbard having made a series of honest mistakes, rather than the entire exercise being a demonstration of incompetence, negligence, deceit, and duplicity.
Had Hubbard had a better grasp of the nuances of SONAR, and more importantly, drilled his crew to a higher standard, the PC-815’s combined tactical acumen might have prevented this comedy of errors in the first place, allowing Hubbard a more favorable reception. After all, the initial contact looked promising, his men had aggressively ventured into a potentially lethal situation and had taken the initiative, and yet it all fell apart. However, in reappraising Owens’ narrative and Hubbard’s own after-action report, what sabotaged Hubbard was not his crew’s failings, nor the lack of a Japanese sub, it was his own inflated sense of self and inability to admit fault that resulted in this debacle.
His disenchantment with the other skippers was not so much because they wouldn’t assist him, it was because they wouldn’t do things his way. Had he backed-off on his insistence that there was indeed a target and then regrouped and reappraised the situation with his fellow skippers after the first attacks, the situation may have resulted in a more favorable outcome. Instead, he obstinately attacks yet again and again well into the second day, squandering resources and good will in effort that was nothing more than an irrational, vainglorious exercise in futility.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to second-guess Hubbard’s and his crew’s mental state as they prepared to attack, as everyone reacts differently in anticipating combat; they had no idea that there wasn’t any danger lurking beneath them so I’m sure their fear was real. In retrospect, the stresses, fears, and risks they experienced were unnecessarily self-inflicted to a degree, as the result of one man’s narcissistic fantasy.
Not surprisingly, Hubbard, Moulton and later the Church of Scientology, would all claim the lack of any formal acknowledgement of Hubbard’s martial prowess off the Oregon coast was the result of some vast conspiracy on the part of the US Navy. Reasons range from not wanting to panic the coastal population into thinking a Japanese invasion was imminent, or that, laughably, that somehow Admiral Fletcher had sinister ulterior motives in wanting to sabotage Hubbard, as this quote from Chris Owen explains:
“This (the false panic & Fletcher narrative) has been accepted and reiterated by the Church of Scientology in recent years. In a 1998 briefing document distributed to its members, it explained that [Vice Admiral] Fletcher had recently lost two fully loaded carriers at the Battle of Midway and had assured his superiors that the waters within his command were submarine-free. He could not afford an incident such as an encounter with Japanese submarines as it would have sounded the death-knell to his hopes of regaining a decisive command. Consequently Fletcher tried to bury the whole affair. Nevertheless, the crew members all received combat honors after the war. (Source: ‘Correction of False Reports in ‘Scientology Unmasked’, Boston Sunday Herald March 1, 1998’)
This highly speculative explanation does not stand up to scrutiny, however: it is hard to see how either Scientology or Moulton could have had any knowledge of the Admiral’s private motives, and no documentary evidence has ever been presented to support this theory. It is also counterfactual, in that Fletcher was a member of a distinguished Naval family – military aristocracy, one might say – and was officially regarded by the US Navy as having distinguished himself at the battles of Midway and Wake Islands. Consequently he would have had no need to salvage a damaged career.”
That Fletcher never remotely needed to “salvage a damaged career” as compared to Hubbard, provides delicious irony. The church provides another blatant lie, in that Fletcher only lost one carrier at Midway, the USS Yorktown (CV-5) and one destroyer, the USS Hammann (DD-412); contrast this with Japanese losses of 4 fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, and a heavily damaged destroyer along with the cream of the IJN’s aviation strength, and you have the absurdity of the church’s claims laid bare. The church further pads the Cape Lookout farce by stating the PC-815 and it’s crew were awarded battle stars and decorations respectively; along with this fiction, Hubbard’s later false claims of a variety of personal decorations for valor and injuries simply discredits the church’s narrative even more. All this alternative history would play out long after the events of May 21-23 had occurred, and though Hubbard’s performance is scrutinized by Fletcher, he somehow evades any formal reprimand and more amazingly, is not relieved of command.
In our next segment, we’ll look at the last two years of the PC-815’s short life and Hubbard’s next adventure, “The Coronados Islands Incident.”
Author Jeff Wasel, Ph. D.Posted on June 14, 2018 June 14, 2018 Format QuoteCategories Historical, Scientology
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Ilustration of a classic tricorne (three corner) hat of the colonial period...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Sept. 7, 1785 Pages 1 & 4 are taken up with ads including 9 illus. ship ads on the ftpg. and a a nice bkpg. illustrated ad for a "Hat Manufacturer" which shows the classic tricorne (three corner) hat of the colonial period. European & American news items on pgs. 2 & 3.
Four pages, nice condition.
George Washington becomes a benefactor to the Alexandria Academy... A tricorne hat advertisement...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1786 An issue from the brief period between the end of the Revolutionary War and before the creation of the Constitution & the new federal government.
Page 3 has a report: "Amongst the respectable patrons of the Alexandria Academy, a new & promising institution, appears the name of the illustrious General ... See More
Item from Catalog 284 (released for July, 2019)...
News from the future...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Aug. 2, 1788
* 18th century America
Page 2 has an items concerning the frustration of Rhode Island concerning the Constitution, beginning: "...cannot help lamenting the neglect which the virtuous & oppressed minority of Rhode Island now experience from the federalists of the other states...". An interesting article... See More
Constitutional Convention begins & Washington is elected its President...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, May 28, 1787
* Constitutional Convention begins
* George Washington elected 1st president
An exceedingly historic issue as this newspaper reports the formal beginning of the Constitutional Convention--terrific to have in a newspaper from the city where these notable proceedings were held. As such, this is likely the first newsp... See More
A Proclamation from the infamous "Queen" Margaret Nicholson...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISE, Philadelphia, Jan. 19, 1787 The ftpg. has a fascinating: "Proclamation - By the Queen Margaret" who was actually the infamous Margaret Nicholson, who the previous year attempted to assassinate King George III some months prior. She was ultimately determined to be inside and was committed to the asylum at Bedlam, England. She had claimed--a... See More
Between the end of the war & the formal treaty of peace...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, Philadelphia, Dec. 21, 1782
* Closing events - post Revolutionary War
Note the very ornate lettering in the masthead. The top of the front page has a "Proclamation" by the Philadelphia sheriff. Pages 2 & 3 contains a letter from South Carolina concerning: "...a minute detail of barbarities exercised in this state by his Britannic Majesty's fo... See More
Handsome colonial issue... The tea bill...
THE PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, Philadelphia, Nov. 11, 1771
* Nice Colonial Pa issue for display
* Tea tensions build w/ England
I have always contended that this title had one of the more beautiful mastheads of the 18th century, with very ornate lettering and a rather large engraving of a sailing ship (see photos). The front page is mostly taken up with ads while page 2 has reports from Pet... See More
Mention of John Paul Jones, and more...
THE PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, Philadelphia, May 30, 1780
* Revolutionary War
* Great masthead
On the front page under "London" is part of a letter from Amsterdam stating: "...that several English gentlemen have been in company with the celebrated Paul Jones, who relate that he is proud & haughty, and can talk nothing of sea affairs; however, he has the good manners not t... See More
1790 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, June 7, 1790
* Early United States Congress
Page 3 has a lengthy letter concerning the character of America & the new federal government (see). There are also reports from the "House of Representatives of the United States".
Four pages, a few small archival mends at inside margins, nice condition.... See More
Incredibly historic!
Announcement that the Constitution has been created...
THE PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, September 18, 1787
* First announcement that the Constitution of the United States has been finalized
* In regards to historic announcements in U.S. history, this is rivaled only by the announcement that the Declaration of Independence had been signed
A singularly historic newspaper and the first time this issue has been ... See More
Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, OR THE GENERAL ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, September 2, 1780
The front page has: "A Short Vindication of the Religious Society Called Quakers, against the aspersions of a nameless writer in the Pennsylvania Packet of the 12th instant", signed in type: John Drinker. Also: "Doctor Morgan's Appeal to the Free Citi... See More
Georgians are 'the most lawless & licentious people in America'...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Nov. 30, 1785 Page 2 has an item: "The request of the United States to their great and good alley [France] to furnish them with $400,000 in order to bribe the Algerines to a peace meets, it is said, with a very cool reception at Paris...how far that measure may be consistent with the safety & independence of the United States... See More
Electing representatives for the new Congress...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Dec. 27, 1788
* United States House of Representatives elections
Page 2 has a lengthy: "Account of the Pelew Islands", now the Palau Islands, in the Western Pacific. Page 3 has an item from New Hampshire: "...our fellow citizens are to assemble for the choice of 3 suitable persons to serve as representatives from ... See More
Reports on the Shays' Rebellion...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, March 16, 1787
* Shays' Rebellion
* Post Revolutionary War
Page 2 has a report concerning the Shays' Rebellion with: "...hear from Berkshire county that the spirit of opposition to government is far from being subdued in that quarter; that the insurgents are frequently collecting in small parties & making priso... See More
Philadelphia is the only place for the new seat of government...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Sept. 16, 1788
* Anglican minister John Wesley
* Government to be in Philly ?
Page 2 has an item from London noting: "Mr. John Wesley preached in the parish church of Bradford on Sunday...to the most numerous and respectable congregation that ever appeared in that place..." with a bit more. Another item notes in part:... See More
Letters from America...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Nov. 7, 1785
* Government close
* Post war era
Printed during the brief period between the end of the Revolutionary War & the creation of the federal government. Page 2 includes letters written from Boston and Virginia. Page 3 has three ads for runaways & the back page has a nice illustrated ad for a "Hat Manufactu... See More
Essay on free trade... From during the Revolutionary War...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET OR THE GENERAL ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Jan. 6, 1780 A famous title that has very ornate lettering and an engraving of a ship in the masthead. Notable content includes, on the ftpg: "A Third ESSAY on FREE TRADE and FINANCES , humbly offered to the consideration of the Public. By a CITIZEN OF Philadelphia". It continues on pg. 2 and is to be concluded in a futur... See More
Oration on the new Constitution...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Oct. 23, 1788 The front page is filled with ads including 16 illustrated ship ads. Page 2 has an item: "On Tuesday last an oration on the adoption of the Federal constitution was spoken at Mr. Brown's English school...large number of ladies & gentlemen were present...". Much other news of the day.
Four pages, never-... See More
Handsome issue from the midst of the Revolutionary War...
THE PENNSYLVANIA PACKET OR THE GENERAL ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, May 8, 1779
* Great masthead engraving for display
* Rare Revolutionary War title
The front page has an "Act" and "A Supplement to an Act", passed by the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, each signed in type: John Bayard & John Morris.
Page 2 has three letters that appeared in London papers, each discu... See More
Proclamation from Dominica...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Sept. 12, 1788 Page 2 is taken up with much news from Europe, and pg. 2 has a "Proclamation" from the governor of the island of Dominica. The bkpg. has an ad: "To be Sold into the Country, For Five Years, A Negro Man..." and also an ad: "Ten Dollars Reward" for a runaway Negro lad, with details (see).
Fo... See More
Decorative masthead... Runaway reward ad...
THE PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, Philadelphia February 1, 1783
* Nice masthead
* Rare title
The front page is entirely taken up with ads including an: "Eight Dollars Reward" ad for "...a likely Negro Wench..." with details, and a "Ten Dollars Reward" for a runaway "...Negro Man named Adam...".
Page 2 has a small bit noting: "From the known p... See More
Ben Franklin's donation...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Oct. 25, 1788
* Benjamin Franklin makes donation
* Post Revolutionary War era
Page 3 has an item noting: "We learn that Dr. Franklin a few days ago presented the Hon. Vice President Redick with 50 pounds as a donation to the Academy lately erected in Washington...". Other news reports from Boston, New York & Peter... See More
18th century Philadelphia...
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, May 6, 1788 Although mostly filled ads with news on pages 2 & 3 including datelines from Philadelphia, Wilmington, Providence, Dublin, London and elsewhere.
Four pages, never-trimmed margins, very nice condition.
18th century Philladelphia....
PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Jan. 14, 1788 Page 3 has reports from the Journal of the House of Delegates of Virginia (see). Other news items are datelined Philadelphia, Wilmington, New York, Kingston, Jamaica; & Bermuda.
Four pages, never-trimmed margins, a few small & very discrete archival mends at margins, nice condition.
Isaac Franks... Jewish...
THE PENNSYLVANIA PACKET & DAILY ADVERTISER, Philadelphia, Dec. 24, 1790 The ftpg. is taken up with ads. Pages 2 & 3 are mostly taken up with reports from the House of Representatives carrying over to page 3, which also has: "A Proclamation" by the governor of Pennsylvania.
The back page is filled with ads including one for noted Jewish financier Isaac Franks (see). Four pa... See More
The Traveler… death comes to Teddy…
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MATILDE BAND
@MATILDEBAND
Matilde Band was formed in September 2013 in Mexico City. Within a short time span, the group has managed to position itself as one of the most powerful and fastest growing bands in the history of independent Mexican groups. Playing at every bar, forum, festival and some private events, the group has created a base of very loyal fans in Mexico City and surrounding areas. Released in 2016, their first album entitled, “No Makeup” is a work of 11 songs that are sang in Spanish, French, and English. The band released their first music video “Corazones” shot in a little restaurant in Mexico City. The music video’s public response was greater than expected, which lead the band to plan and start their #WarmUpTour, playing on more than 50 shows in 35 different cities in Mexico and the United States over a period of three months (late May to early September 2016) ending the tour with their sold out #NoMakeUpShow in Mexico City at Sala Corona.
The band’s unique sound has allowed them to play with different recognized groups like Capital Cities, Mon Laferte, La Gusana Ciega, OV7,The Risin’ Sun, Little Jesus, Big Big Love, Paulino Monrroy, Guacamole, Apolo, Los Santisimos Snorkels, Mollinet Cinema,Rebel Cats, Felipe el Hombre and many other national and international artists. French-Mexican Vocalist Mad Rapsodia will leave you in shock with her extensive vocal range that allows her to deliver a truly impactful performance while she creates soulful and dynamically original melodies. On the bass is Alonso Rodriguez, expanding your senses with his low frequency and funky rhythms. On the lead Guitar is Jose Carlos de la Parra, one of the most creative guitarists out there. On the acoustic guitar, Pavel Acevedo lays down the rhythm foundation where the band can explore and play with improvisation. Ulises Court is the MD for Matilde band’s horn section; consisting of baritone, tenor, alto and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet, alto clarinet and transverse flute. On the piano Omar Escorza creates jazz harmonies filling the air with melodic tensions. Holding everything together and keeping impeccable time is Jorge Samperio on drums.
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How can we improve the mental health of veterinary patients? Interview with Dr Sarah Heath
Dr Sarah Heath with her non-human companions, including the late Timbit. Dr Heath is a well respected advocate for the mental health of companion animals.
How seriously do we take the mental health of our patients? What are the links between physical and mental health in animals?
Dr Sarah Heath is a veterinary specialist in the behavioural medicine of companion animals who is renowned for her advocacy in animal welfare, and shared some of her wisdom with us.
Dr Heath qualified from Bristol University and spent four years in mixed general practice before setting up Behavioural Referrals Veterinary Practice in 1992. She is an RCVS and European Veterinary Specialist in Behavioural Medicine, and an External Lecturer in small animal behavioural medicine at Liverpool University and a Certified Clinical Animal Behaviourist under the ASAB accreditation scheme.
She sees clinical cases across North West England. In 2002 she became a Founding Diplomate of the European College of Animal Welfare and Behavioural Medicine (formerly the ECVBM-CA) and served as President from 2002 to 2008.
She has a special interest in the interplay between behaviour and physical illness in dogs and cats and particularly in the role of pain. She lectures extensively at home and abroad on behavioural topics and is an author, co-author and editor of several books including Behavioural Medicine for Small Animals and Feline Behavioural Health and Welfare, both published by Elsevier. And she’s got some great advice for vets.
What’s your day job?
I am a veterinary surgeon in full time in behavioural medicine referral work. I run a private referral practice based in Chester in the North West of England where we have three vets and three rehabilitation trainers seeing clinical behavioural medicine cases. I also teach undergraduate vet students at Liverpool University and do a lot of lecturing to vets and nurses in CPD events. In addition, I write articles and books and book chapters on behavioural medicine in cats and dogs.
How are behaviour problems and poor welfare related?
There is a very strong link between welfare and behaviour and one of the five needs of companion animals in the UK’s Animal Welfare Act 2006 is the “need to be able to exhibit normal behaviour patterns”. In order for this need to be fulfilled owners need to be educated about species specific behaviours and behavioural needs in their pets.
Puppies and kittens also need to be prepared for life in a human environment through appropriate socialisation and habituation. Veterinary surgeons are the guardians of animal welfare and they therefore have a duty to ensure that owners and young pets have access to the education that they require.
One of the other needs in the Animal Welfare Act is the “need to be protected from pain, suffering, injury and disease”. This is highly relevant to behavioural medicine as suffering and disease can be mental or emotional as well physical. Mental health has traditionally been neglected in the human context and, sadly, the same is true for companion animals. It is the responsibility of the veterinary profession to protect animals from pain, suffering, injury and disease and emotional health is part of that responsibility.
In your upcoming lecture series, you focus a lot on what happens in the vet clinic – the vet visit from the dog’s point of view, or feline handling. Why is this so important?
Your next question asks about the challenge of behavioural issues within a veterinary context and the answer to this question is inextricably linked to that issue. In order to optimise the emotional health of our patients it is essential that handling techniques within veterinary practice are based on sound scientific principles and respect for species specific behaviour is vital. Visits to the veterinary practice can be challenging for pets and their owners and we need to do everything possible to minimise the stress through making the visits as positive as possible from a feline or canine perspective.
Why do many veterinarians find behavioural issues challenging?
A lack of appropriate education at undergraduate veterinary level is the problem for many vets. They often feel that they do not have the knowledge to deal with these cases and are concerned about the time consuming nature of fully investigating a behavioural case. The education situation is thankfully changing and in many countries behavioural medicine is being incorporated into the curriculum, but the time element is still a concern. The important thing to remember is that every veterinary surgeon is working in behavioural medicine every day because mental or emotional health cannot be divorced from physical health. Learning to acknowledge this link is a challenge that the veterinary profession needs to embrace.
Veterinary practices can provide a preventative behavioural service by offering appropriate advice to new owners and can help to optimise the veterinary visit experience in terms of the emotional health of their patients. If animals have already developed emotional health issues then referral to a veterinary surgeon working in behavioural medicine may be needed. If the veterinary practice feels that they are able to deal with the emotional health element then there may still be the need to refer the case to a non-veterinary colleague who can offer support in the form of potentially time consuming behavioural and environmental modification.
What non-humans do you share your life with and how did you meet?
I share my life with a ten and half year old Flat Coated Retriever called Quaver, who has lived with me since she was 7 weeks of age. She was bred by a veterinary nurse at a local practice and I first met her when she was 3 weeks old. At the time I had another FCR called Cira but she sadly died from hepatic carcinoma in 2010, when she was ten years old. I also share my life with a fourteen year old ginger and white domestic shorthair cat called Muffin. She was diagnosed with chronic renal failure following an acute renal episode in January 2012. She has subsequently been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism but she is a very strong personality and is defying all predictions in terms of survival times. Sadly I had to put her litter brother Timbit to sleep in November 2016 due to pulmonary carcinoma. He was my best friend and I miss him terribly.
What are three things that veterinarians in general practice can do to improve their interactions with patients?
Consider the emotional health of patients to be equally important as physical health
Adjust protocols and procedures according to the emotional needs of the individual patient
Act on behavioural concerns as soon as possible and refer to a colleague if necessary. Do not delay in the hope that the issue will resolve.
Thank you so much for your time, Dr Heath. Dr Heath is a keynote speaker at the Centre for Veterinary Education’s Small Animal Behavioural Medicine Conference from February 20 to 23.
For more information, visit http://www.cve.edu.au/conference/small-animal-behavioural-medicine-conference
You can also visit Dr Heath's website http://www.behaviouralreferrals.co.uk or follow her on facebook here.
Labels: animal behaviour, animal welfare, mental health
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Bothalia - African Biodiversity & Conservation
Bothalia (Online) vol.49 n.1 Pretoria 2019
http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/abc.v49i1.2387
Double trouble: Description of an attack on a nesting Delta sp. (Vespidae) by two Stilbum cyanurum (Chrysididae) cuckoo wasps
Adam Shuttleworth
School of Life Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Cuckoo wasps (Chrysididae) are well known for their habit of laying eggs in other insects' nests, but the strategies by which they sneak their eggs into hosts' nests have seldom been described. I report observations of an attack by two Stilbum cyanurum (Chrysididae) individuals on a nesting Delta sp. (Vespidae: Eumeninae). The attack lasted over 1h 30 min and involved both S. cyanurum wasps simultaneously mobbing the Delta sp. in attempts to gain access to her nest. The mode of attack and oviposition are described, and details are compared with observations of attacks by S. cyanurum in other parts of its range.
Cuckoo wasps (Hymenoptera: Chrysididae) are well known for their parasitic (and typically cleptoparasitic) life history, in which, like the eponymous avian cuckoos, eggs are laid into the nests of other insects. The developing cuckoo wasp larva then consumes the host's eggs or larva and the provisions laid down for the host larva (Gess & Gess 2014). Hosts are mainly aculeate Hymenoptera for members of the subfamily Chrysidinae, but also include sawflies, moths or stick insects for members of the subfamilies Amiseginae, Loboscelidinae and Cleptinae (Kimsey & Bohart 1990). Hosts are well established for many species, but these have mainly been deduced from the collection of cuckoo wasps emerging from the nests of other insects (Gess & Gess 2014; Kimsey & Bohart 1990). Although cuckoo wasps are often observed around the nests of potential hosts, the strategies used to sneak their eggs into the nests of other insects remain poorly known, and direct observations of oviposition have seldom been reported.
In some cuckoo wasp species, the female oviposits on the prey insects of her host species and the eggs are then inadvertently transported back to the host nest inside the prey items which are being laid down as provisions for the host's own larva. This strategy has been established for Pseudolopyga taylori (Bodenstein) and Omalus biaccinctus (Buysson) (both Chrysididae), which oviposit, respectively, on Nysius raphanus Howard (Lygaeidae) bugs or Macrosiphum euphorbiae (Thomas) and Myzus persicae Blackman (both Aphididae) aphids (José, Carrillo & Caltagirone 1970; Winterhagen 2015). This strategy is also suspected for Holopyga generosa (Förster) (Chrysididae), which has been found to oviposit on Palomena prasina Linnaeus (Pentatomidae) bugs (Veenendaal 2012). A different mechanism relying on chemical crypsis has been described for Hedychrum rutilans Dahlbom (Chrysididae). This species mimics the cuticular compounds of its host, Philanthus triangulum (Fabricius) (Crabronidae), to avoid detection within the host nest (Strohm et al. 2008). These mechanisms avoid confrontation with host species, but this may not be the case for all cuckoo wasps. Most chrysidids (particularly in the subfamily Chrysidinae) have a highly sclerotised integument and a concave abdomen which allows individuals to roll into a ball. This is assumed to offer protection from attacks by angry hosts, and suggests a degree of confrontation in the mechanisms of oviposition into host's nests for most species (Kimsey & Bohart 1990). Deliberate attacks on the adult hosts, however, have seldom been reported. Here I describe an opportunistic observation of an attack on a nesting Delta sp. (Vespidae: Eumeninae) by two Stilbum cyanurum (Förster) (Chrysididae: Chrysidinae) individuals.
Stilbum cyanurum has a wide distribution throughout the warmer parts of the Old World (Kimsey & Bohart 1990). Hosts of this species are quite varied across its range and include species of Afreumenes Lepeletier, Delta de Saussure, Eumenes Letreille, Pseudabispa van der Vecht (all Vespidae: Eumeninae), Megachile Latreille (Megachilidae) and Sceliphron Klug (Sphecidae) (Berland & Bernard 1938 cited in Gess & Gess 2014; Kimsey & Bohart 1990; Matthews & Matthews 2009; Móczár 1961; Weaving 1995). Although phylogenetically diverse, these hosts all exhibit similar nest architecture (Kimsey & Bohart 1990). In South Africa, this species has been reported to use species of Delta and Afreumenes as hosts (Gess & Gess 2014; Weaving 1995).
The attack reported here took place at the lodge of Balule Private Game Reserve on 30 November 2008. This site is approximately 21 km north of Hoedspruit, Limpopo province, South Africa (coordinates and altitude: 24°09′21.18″S; 30°57′16.62″E. 354 metres above sea level). The lodge is situated on the banks of the Oliphants River in lowveld savannah. A Delta sp. wasp had built a nest on the steps leading up to the lodge patio. During the course of the morning, it was noticed that the Delta sp. was active on the nest and at approximately noon, two cuckoo wasps (subsequently identified as S. cyanurum) were observed close to the nest. I observed (and photographed) the behaviour of the cuckoo wasps from 12:30 to 12:47 and again from 14:00 to 14:14. Photographs were taken with a Nikon D70s digital SLR camera fitted with a Tamron DiII 90 mm macro lens. I did not have permits to collect insects so I was unable to collect voucher specimens. Wasps were identified from photographs by Professor Denis Brothers (University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg).
No insects were collected during the course of this study.
When first observed, the Delta sp. was adding mud to the top left of the nest and the two S. cyanurum individuals were both perched on the wall approximately 10 cm from the nest (Figure 1a and 1b). An incomplete cell (clearly not yet provisioned) was apparent on the right-hand end of the nest (Figures 1 and 2). While busy on the nest, the Delta sp. was attacked by both S. cyanurum individuals, which proceeded to simultaneously dive-bomb and repeatedly mob her (Figure 1c-h). The Delta sp. exhibited defensive behaviour, trying to face the attackers with raised wings, periodically flying at one or other of them, and sometimes striking them in mid-air (Figure 1i and 1j). While the Delta sp. was thus preoccupied with one S. cyanurum individual, the other would sneak onto the nest. However, the Delta sp. would usually return quickly to the nest before the second individual was able to commence oviposition. On three occasions during my observation times, however, the Delta sp. left the nest for several minutes to collect mud, presumably from the banks of the river approximately 100 m away. During these periods when the Delta sp. was absent, both S. cyanurum individuals landed on the nest and one of them would proceed to oviposit (Figure 2). Only one individual was observed actually ovipositing at any given time, although the second individual would perch on the nest, often quite close to the ovipositing individual (Figure 2e).
The three instances of actual oviposition that were observed (at 12:35, 12:44 and 14:07; Figure 2), all lasted less than 2 min and were each terminated by the return of the Delta sp. who immediately attacked the intruder on her nest. In each instance (including the third instance which was approximately 1h 30 min after the first observed instances), the S. cyanurum wasps targeted the same cell at the top left of the nest. Oviposition was achieved by first chewing a hole in the mud (or perhaps just moistening the mud as described by Móczár 1961; Figure 2a) and then turning around and inserting her ovipositor (Figure 2b). The S. cyanurum individual sometimes rotated around her ovipositor as she strained to get it through the mud wall (Figure 2c).
On her return to the nest, the Delta sp. proceeded to refill the hole made by the ovipositing S. cyanurum, but also built this part of the wall up (note the wet mud in Figure 2d). The Delta sp. was only concerned with repairing and building up this part of the nest during my observations, and was still attending to the same area on the nest when I returned approximately 1h 30 min after the first observation period. The Delta sp. was never observed bringing provisions to the nest, despite the presence of an open (unprovisioned) cell on the nest.
Several aspects of this attack are unusual. The simultaneous attack by two S. cyanurum individuals has not previously been reported. It is not clear if these were deliberately working together or competing for access to the nest. However, they did not display competitive behaviour when the Delta sp. was absent, and only one attempted to oviposit at any given time, sometimes with the second individual perched close by on the nest (Figure 2e). It was not possible to distinguish between the individuals, so it is not clear if both oviposited at different times, although this seems likely. Alternatively, the second individual may have been a male, although this would be extremely unusual in Hymenoptera (Brockmann & Grafen 1989; Hamilton 1964). However, there are various groups of Sphecidae in which the males guard the nest during provisioning (reviewed by Brockmann & Grafen 1989), so it is not entirely inconceivable for a male cuckoo wasp to assist a female in gaining access to a nest. It is also not clear how beneficial the dual attack was in terms of achieving oviposition: although attacking simultaneously appeared to apply more pressure on the Delta sp., she was still able to prevent either of the intruders from accessing her nest for long enough to oviposit while she was present.
The brazen physical confrontation and harassing of the host are also unusual and have not previously been reported for this species. Móczár (1961) describes observations of oviposition by S. cyanurum in a Sceliphron destillatorium (Illiger) (Sphecidae) nest in Hungary. In this instance, the S. cyanurum inspected, but rejected, a nest that was partially constructed and contained a cell that was still in the process of being provisioned. She then selected a completed nest where the host had already departed. Matthews and Matthews (2009) describe observations in Australia of a different behaviour by an S. cyanurum ovipositing in a nest built by an Abispa ephippium (Fabricius) (Vespidae: Eumeninae) female, but which had been usurped by a female Pseudabispa paragioides (Meade-Waldo) (Vespidae: Eumeninae). Here, the S. cyanurum attacked the nest when the resident P. paragioides was away on a provisioning trip, but she was chased away by the returning host shortly after completing oviposition. The S. cyanurum then waited for the host to depart again before returning to refill her oviposition hole. In both these instances, the S. cyanurum avoided confrontation with the host. In the observations reported in this article, in contrast, the two S. cyanurum individuals were clearly trying to gain access to the nest despite the presence of the host (Delta sp.) on the nest. It is not clear why they did this, however, as they were never able to oviposit in her presence and still had to wait for her to leave the nest before being able to oviposit. One possibility is that they needed to attack the nest before the host had fully completed the construction of the nest. The nests of wasps in the genus Delta are typically completed by an outer envelope of mud of varying thickness (Gess & Gess 2014). If the species of Delta observed here applies a particularly thick outer envelope, then it is possible that S. cyanurum needs to attack before the outer envelope has been completed.
Finally, the observation that the host Delta sp. actively repaired the oviposition holes of the S. cyanurum wasps is unusual. In the attack reported by Móczár (1961), the moistened mud around the oviposition site closed passively without active repair by either the S. cyanurum or the host. In contrast, the S. cyanurum observed by Matthews and Matthews (2009) actively repaired her own oviposition hole with mud chips. In the observations reported here, the host Delta sp. repeatedly repaired the holes made by the ovipositing S. cyanurum wasps (Figure 2d) and was solely occupied with this task, and the defence of her nest, during both observation periods.
The S. cyanurum attack described here, combined with the two previous reports for this species (Matthews & Matthews 2009; Móczár 1961), reveal varied strategies across its range. This may either reflect local differences across the species range or plasticity with respect to the mode of attack for different hosts and their particular nests. It would be interesting to confirm if the behaviour described here is exhibited for attacks on other southern African host species, or if strategies are adapted to particular hosts and their specific nests.
The author would like to thank Denis Brothers for identification of the wasps and discussions of chrysidid behaviours, and the National Research Foundation of South Africa for funding this study.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
Berland, L. & Bernard, F., 1938, Hyménoptères vespiformes. 3, Cleptidae, Chrysidae, Trigonalidae, Faune de France 34, P. Lechevalier, Paris. [ Links ]
Brockmann, H.J. & Grafen, A., 1989, 'Mate conflict and male behaviour in a solitary wasp, Trypoxylon (Trypargilum) politum (Hymenoptera: Sphecidae)', Animal Behaviour 37, 232-255. https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-3472(89)90113-9 [ Links ]
Gess, S.K. & Gess, F.W., 2014, Wasps and bees in southern Africa, SANBI Biodiversity ser. 24, South African National Biodiversity Institute, Pretoria. [ Links ]
Hamilton, W.D., 1964, 'The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II', Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, 17-52. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(64)90039-6 [ Links ]
José, L., Carrillo, S. & Caltagirone, L.E., 1970, 'Observations on the biology of Solierella peckhami, S. blaisdelli (Sphecidae), and two species of Chrysididae (Hymenoptera)', Annals of the Entomological Society of America 63, 672-681. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesa/63.3.672 [ Links ]
Kimsey, L.S. &. Bohart, R.M., 1990, The chrysidid wasps of the world, Oxford University Press, Oxford. [ Links ]
Matthews, R.W. & Matthews, J.R., 2009, 'Nesting behavior of Abispa ephippium (Fabricius) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Eumeninae): Extended parental care in an Australian mason wasp', Psyche 2009, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1155/2009/851694 [ Links ]
Móczár, L., 1961, 'On the habits of Stilbum cyanurum cyanurum Forst. (Hymenoptera, Chrysididae)', Annales Historico-naturales Musei Nationalis Hungarici 53, 463-466. [ Links ]
Strohm, E., Kroiss, J., Herzner, G., Laurien-Kehnen, C., Boland, W., Schreier, P. et al., 2008, 'A cuckoo in wolves' clothing? Chemical mimicry in a specialized cuckoo wasp of the European beewolf (Hymenoptera, Chrysididae and Crabronidae)', Frontiers in Zoology 5, 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-5-2 [ Links ]
Veenendaal, R., 2012, 'De biologie van de goudwesp Holopyga generosa (Hymenoptera: Chrysididae)', Nedelandse Faunische Mededelingen 37, 39-43. [ Links ]
Weaving, A.J.S., 1995, 'A comparison of nesting success and nesting habits in some Afrotropical aculeate wasps, with particular reference to nest parasites (Hymenoptera: Sphecidae, Eumenidae)', Annals of the Cape Provincial Museums (Natural History) 19, 181-224. [ Links ]
Winterhagen, P., 2015, 'Strategy for sneaking into a host's home: The cuckoo wasp Omalus biaccinctus (Hymenoptera: Chrysididae) inserts its eggs into living aphids that are the prey of its host', European Journal of Entomology 112, 557-559. https://doi.org/10.14411/eje.2015.064 [ Links ]
shuttleworthadam@gmail.com
Accepted: 10 Sept. 2018
Published: 25 Feb. 2019
Postnet Suite #110, Private Bag X19, Durbanville, Cape Town, Western Cape, ZA, 7551,
Tel: +27 21 975 2602, Tel: 086 1000 381
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Home TV What Does the Success of Pokemon: Let’s Go Mean for the Future?
What Does the Success of Pokemon: Let’s Go Mean for the Future?
The Spin-Off's Sales Take Off
Matt Crofts
Pokemon: Let’s Go has proven to be a very successful. Despite a lukewarm reception from some fans the game has boasted impressive initial sales. The game has shifted a lot of copies, and a lot of Switch consoles to go with it. Unsurprisingly, this news has not sat well with some fans who have taken to ‘review bombing’ the game in an effort to show their dissatisfaction with the direction of the series. But does the success, or failure, or Let’s Go really have any bearing on the ‘main’ Pokemon games? (It is being positioned as a spin-off, after all). Here’s a quick overview of some of the main criticisms of Let’s Go and whether they’re anything to worry about.
Kanto Again?
Pokemon: Let’s Go leans heavily on nostalgia. The game is at least partly aimed at lapsed Pokemon fans. This includes older players who remember the first series of the anime and are only familiar with the first Pokemon generation. This is most apparent in one of the game’s trailers which set footage to the original theme tune.
The Kanto region is pretty familiar to longtime Pokemaniacs. It was the setting for the original releases of Red and Blue, the original Yellow, the remakes Fire Red and Leaf Green – not to mention being present in Gold and Silver and their DS remakes. Its never looked this good before, though. For many younger players Let’s Go is likely to be their first trip into the Kanto region – and its the natural starting point. With 7 generations there are an overwhelming amount of Pokemon these days – for newer trainers the halcyon days when there were only 151(ish) to memorize only makes sense.
The lack of new Pokemon, give or take Meltan, is an unfortunate downside of this. The Pokemon series has a habit of releasing ports, updates and remakes as far back as the Gameboy Colour though – this is not something to hold against Let’s Go. The accessibility of older titles, as well as diving back into older regions, is a part of the series that many love. If every Pokemon game added a wave of new creatures we’d either have a lot less Pokemon games or a heck of a lot more forgettable Pokemon.
Too Easy?
The other major, highly visible, influence is clearly Pokemon Go. The mobile game’s mechanics have been inserted into the standard Pokemon formula – the most obvious being a simplified catching mechanic. Instead of whittling down a beasts health (hoping you don’t kill it outright) you now … just throw balls at them. Its perhaps not so much a difficulty issue as it is oversimplifying things. Catching Pokemon in the old manner was a major part of the game and the game’s lore. Pokemon Go continues to be a success in its own right, with this tie in title positioned to reinvigorate it further. A newly announced community day seems similarly aimed at lapsed players, and the game regularly receives updates. The aligning of a full handheld title to Go is certainly disappointing – but its not necessarily a bad thing. Pokemon Sun & Moon already attracted criticism for being too easy with its concessions towards newer, younger players. It seems like if that demographic can be satiated with a spin-off that can only be a good thing for veteran trainers.
An assortment of items Pokemon can hold
A Pokemon’s ability in action in Pokemon X
The game retains some of its complexities – chiefly IVs and EVs. Almost hidden statistics that determine your Pokemon’s potential to be a contender at the higher levels of play. The series has been slowly making this numbers easier to deal with, making them more visible, and easier to train and breed. So does this mean Let’s Go balances the complexity just right? Absolutely not. Two of the main game-play additions in the second and third generations have been entirely stripped out: held items and abilities. Both of these not only added variety to game play and strategy, but also Pokemon in general. They were also a lot easier to understand than EVs and IVs. Its hard to imagine a core Pokemon game without these so presumably they will make a return.
Ruining the Main Series?
Pokemon is a series that is far from a stranger to spin-offs, even ones that are still RPGs. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Pokemon Ranger even went on to have series in their own right without infringing upon the territory of the core games. And there have been spin-offs way worse than those. The Pokemon company was quick to announce another Pokemon game would be appearing next year, 2019. Presumably in an effort to curtail the backlash against Let’s Go from “hardcore” players – if that’s even a term we can use to describe the Pokemon fan base. Its not hard to imagine that if Pokemon Let’s Go proves to be a huge earner that it will impact the core series – the video game industry is fuelled by imitating the popular, and giving gamers more of what they’re already buying. Why divide sales, though? If you can sell Switch owners and Pokemon fans two games that seems a better move than putting all your Pokeballs in one basket.
Pokemon Lets Go
Matt is the SFFN's Retro Editor, focusing on all things old but interesting, including (but not limited to!) books, movies and video games. As a researcher in Gothic literature Matt also has an affinity for black cats, Hammer horror, and all things Dracula.
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A romance with wine and La Jolla’s ambiance
by Charles Iyoho San Diego Community News Group
Shira Wiseman, owner and co-director of La Jolla Wine Tours, stands outside Vigilucci’s Ristorante, a main stop on the charming wine circuit. Photo By Charles Iyoho
Shira Wiseman has taken her passion for food and wine and turned it into a burgeoning business.
The local entrepreneur is the owner of the trendy new company La Jolla Wine Tours — a venture that offers wine connoisseurs a chance to tour some of La Jolla’s most fascinating restaurants and wineries while tasting fine beverages and sampling savory food.
The business, which is run by Wiseman and the tour’s co-director Paul Anthony Vild, conducted its first wine tour July 12.
“I’ve lived here in the Village for 10 years wanting to promote the businesses here,” said Wiseman. “So I thought I’d put together my love of La Jolla, walking, food and wine.”
The tour, which includes six stops and lasts about three hours, costs $55 per person, Wiseman said. Guests get to try different wine and food pairings at each location.
“I’m really 100 percent behind making this beautiful experience,” said Wiseman. “All of my time is being put into that.”
Wiseman was born in Belfast, Ireland, located in the country’s northern part. She received her education in the culinary arts in England. In addition to her efforts with La Jolla Wine Tours, Wiseman works as a freelance writer for several area publications.
“The goal of this business is to share our love of food and fine wine with others while promoting local restaurants and merchants in an entertaining and fabulous fashion,” she said. “I am very fond of my Village … I have a passion for wine.”
La Jolla Wine Tours works with 12 different merchants, including Vigilucci’s Ristorante, one of the tour’s main stops.
For those who want to explore the area’s wineries beyond La Jolla, the business also offers a five-hour van tour of local wineries for service costs $140 per person.
Wiseman said in the future, she hopes to hire at least two additional tour directors, two office workers and purchase a tour van. At the moment, the company is renting a vehicle.
Tours are conducted throughout the year, Wiseman said. They run daily by appointment at 3:30 p.m., starting at Empress Hotel, 7766 Fay Ave.
For more information, call (858) 551-5115 or e-mail info@LaJollaWineTours.com, or visit www.lajollawinetours.com.
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There Is No Miami Zombie Apocalypse, Just Mentally Ill People With No Safety Net
June 2, 2012 / Klint Finley
Lindy West writes for Jezebel about all the gruesome stories ricocheting around social media lately, and how they marginalize the real issue: lack resources for the mentally ill.
I don’t mean that the people who latched on to this particular meme are bad people (though I would say they’re a bit thoughtless), or that it’s never appropriate to respond to unthinkable tragedy with macabre humor. But I’m not feeling particularly charitable toward wacky zombie jokes today. There’s no such thing as undead people, only dead people. And sad people. No one deserves to be publicly ridiculed for their identity — gay people, fat people, black people, poor people — but when we ridicule and marginalize mentally ill people, actual innocent people get killed.
Jezebel: There Is No Miami Zombie Apocalypse, Just Mentally Ill People With No Safety Net
See also: It’s Bigger Than “Bath Salts” and “Zombie Apocalypses” by Subhash Kateel, who writes:
-Florida is the second to worst state in the country when it comes to funding mental health services. Of the 325,000 people with persistent and severe mental illness, only 42 percent receive treatment.
-In 2010, the State Legislature cut adult community mental health funding, children’s mental health funding and adult substance abuse services by more than $18 million. This year, the state legislature tried to make Florida the worst state in the nation at funding mental health, and almost succeeded.
-Prescription drug overdoses and the prescription drug death rate are up in Florida by 61 percent and 84 percent respectively. That didn’t stop state politicians from trying to cut funding for drug treatment by 20 percent, which would have kicked 37,000 people out of services while they were trying to kick a habit.
– First responders across the state say that they are seeing mental health cases that they have never seen before, such as a Palm Beach man that was held in custody 50 times in one year under the state’s Baker Act because he was a threat to himself and others.
It’s much easier to place the blame on some weird new designer drugs (that the perpetrators might not have even been using) than it is to talk seriously about complex issues like lack of funding and access to social programs and deep rooted problems with mental health institutions.
(via Lupa)
Update: Rob Arthur notes that both mental illness and drug abuse are lower predictors for violence many other factors.
Tags: drugs, homelessness, mental illness, poverty, violence, zombies
« Lockpicker Makes Open Source Police Handcuff Keys with 3D Printer Murakami Bingo »
While I understand that with the sheer volume of social network memes and comments that it may appear that the entire world is having a heartless laugh at the expense of (probably) a seriously drugged out and/or mentally ill man and his victim, it is also a fact that these kinds of jokes are not new and they actually serve a psychological function. This psychological relief is especially beneficial for the same people that the article claims to be so concerned about. Sure, there are hundreds of trolls who take the nastiness too far and lulz all over the place about unfortunate people simply because they enjoy misery–however there is also a significant amount of people who are cracking creepy jokes because we spend most of the day worried about food, shelter, and the future of a world that increasingly resembles a George Romero film. We laugh so do not to cry. Not to put too fine a point on it, the people I grew up with (a working class background) almost always use humor to get through abuse, rape, beatings, death and poverty and, conversely, the only people that I ever met who were shocked and felt a need to scold people for their “inappropriate” laughter are well-meaning, socially aware, and definitively middle to upper class activists. An anecdotal and personal observation, yes, but I know plenty of people who would back me up. The writer Paul Lewis talks about the importance of joke context very well in several of his books better than I can here. All I know is finding the funny is what humans do-it is a cathartic release so they can continue. If everyone treated every atrocity with the seriousness it deserved we would all be hiding under our beds–so we laugh and then we move on.
I’ll venture a bit of a Pope Bob approach to these cases of manic cannibalism:
Mental illness is in some cases a blanket term for psychological aberrations that we don’t yet fully understand. Some are obviously quite dangerous or deadly, while others tend towards more petty compulsions, obsessions, etc. In the case of the face-eater and the brain-eater, I get a sense that their behavior is a result of the brain resorting to a lower mammalian/reptilian circuit after intense trauma or stress. Their social imprints and environs which shaped them may never have allowed room for higher states of logic and reasoning beyond bio-survival. Left on the razor’s edge of anxiety, a single event or imbalance could be responsible for tipping them toward such brutal, macabre action.
Looking around at the world today and every anxiety and stress we face, it’s quite apparent that those who aren’t equipped to transmute damaging psychological stressors may be more prone to this aggravated, primal behavior.
Jesse Walker
Articles like these bring to mind Ivan Illich’s great opening to Deschooling Society. Especially this part: “Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”
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Dallas Returns Francis Wathier to Texas Stars
Stars Veteran Forward Back After First NHL Recall of 2012-13 Season
CEDAR PARK, TX – The Texas Stars, proud American Hockey League affiliate of the Dallas Stars, announced today that Dallas has returned left wing Francis Wathier (pronounced WAH-tee-ay) on loan to Texas.
Wathier, 28, was recalled to Dallas on March 6thand spent the last four days with the NHL’s Stars on their West Coast road trip to Los Angeles and Phoenix. The St. Isidore, Ontario native has played in 44 games for Texas this season, where he has 14 points (2 goals, 12 assists) and ranks third on the team with 64 penalty minutes. Over the course of his AHL career, he has 170 points (80 goals, 90 assists) and 585 penalty minutes in 427 games. Wathier has skated in nine NHL contests, most recently on Jan. 16, 2012 against the St. Louis Blues. The 6-foot-4, 210-pound forward was Dallas' sixth-round selection (185th overall) at the 2003 NHL Entry Draft.
The Dallas Stars begin a four-game home stand this Tuesday against the Nashville Predators at 7:30 pm CT (TV: FOX Sports Southwest PLUS; Radio: 1310 The Ticket).
The Texas Stars conclude their five-game home stand on Wednesday, March 13th when they square off against the Abbotsford Heat at 7:30 p.m. at Cedar Park Center for an H-E-B Night and the last Winning Wednesday of the regular season. Pro-rated full and partial 2012-13 season seat packages are on sale now. For more information on Texas Stars season tickets call (512) GO-STARS (467-8277) or visitwww.TexasStarsHockey.com.
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Region I. Region I 10 municipalities, has a population of 100,695 inhabitants and systems of water supply with machinery of the Government of the year 2002 to 2009 have been built. In total 258 deep wells that have benefited a productive surface of 691 hectares and 693 producers have been drilled. See more detailed opinions by reading what Hikmet Ersek offers on the topic.. It is important to note that although it is a region of high marginalization, has not attended the town of Celestun, most of the municipalities does not exceed the average of drilled wells and only in the case of Maxcanu (78), Halacho (56) and Hunucma (44) are among the most attended. In the construction of infrastructure hydro currently has 110 irrigation units that correspond to 3 thousand 374 hectares of productive area. Region II. The Region II with 1,041,295 inhabitants, has 19 municipalities, including those that make up the metropolitan area of Merida by this and composed of Conkal, Kanasin, Progreso, Tixpehual, Uman and Ucu, have been built systems of water supply with machinery of Government from 2002 to 2009. Learn more about this topic with the insights from Macy’s. In total 565 deep wells that have benefited a productive surface of 2,355 hectares and 1,391 producers have been drilled.
Two very important aspects are highlighted in this region. First 12 municipality belonging to the metropolitan area have received broad support that exceeds the average State general greatly. Drilled deep wells in Merida (173), Uman (63), Tixpehual (75), ixil (68) and Acanceh (40) among those who benefit most. The second aspect is that the other 7 municipalities were little attended: Chicxulub village (0), Ucu (0), Abala (4), Baca (10), progress (4), Tahmek (1) and Timucuy (3). Also has 2 nurseries in the town of X matkuil, 3 shredders in the municipalities of Seye, Tahmek and Yaxkukul. Region III. Region III has 15 municipalities, considered high marginality and 77,099 inhabitants, have built systems of water supply with machinery of State Government from 2002 to 2009.
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Ty Segall ‘Manipulator’
LP Review
Words by Nadia Dar
It’s been just about a year since we heard from Ty Segall, but with the release of his new album, Manipulator, it seems he’s finally ready to revamp the over-distorted, psych-rock sound that he’s become so famous for. The album manages to capture Segall’s signature lo-fi vibes without all of the 70’s space rock that usually comes with it. In my opinion, it’s his best record yet.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that Segall gets major inspiration from genres of psych-rock, glam rock and of course space rock, but with influences as big as David Bowie and Hawkwind, who could blame him? However Manipulator has provided a refreshing change of pace from the typical Segall sound; it offers more structure.
Tracks like ‘It’s Over’ and ‘Feel’ have an immediate fast-paced flow that create a burst of excitement from start to finish. Then you have much more mellow songs like ‘The Singer’ that generate this incredible sinking feeling that just hits your soul like a ton of bricks. It’s a beautiful contrast that normally would’ve been lost under distortion had he completely stuck to his original style.
On the other hand, if you are worried that Segall has completely lost his lo-fi, garage rock roots, never fear! Songs like ‘The Connection Man’, ‘Tall Man, Skinny Lady’ and even the title track all point to the conclusion that the man’s still got it, he’s just trying out some new sounds along the way.
Ultimately, if you were going to listen to one Ty Segall record in your lifetime, let it be Manipulator. Each song manages to incorporate his signature sound in a different light which initially saves the record from becoming repetitive. It was a good move on Segall’s part, and if he keeps it up I can see him staying relevant for a long time.
© August 26th, 2014
www.ty-segall.com
TheWaster.com | Feel
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Twins 512688872
From misfits to All-Stars: Some of baseball's top relief pitchers are late bloomers
Some of the game's top relievers are late bloomers.
By twins insider | Phil Miller
Ryan Pressly honestly wasn’t trying to be a smart aleck, had no trace of spite in his voice. But intentional or not, his question during Monday’s All-Star media session couldn’t help but drip with irony. “I hear the Twins are looking for relief pitching right now,” Pressly said. “That true?”
Yes, it is. They’d like to pick up a pitcher with shut-down stuff, a hard thrower who’s not afraid of game-in-the-balance situations. You know, a Ryan Pressly type.
But the Twins’ dilemma, as the trade deadline approaches in another 17 days, could hardly be illustrated better than at last week’s All-Star Game.
On the National League roster were Kirby Yates of the Padres and Will Smith of the Giants, a pair of veteran relievers who have pitched in 10 different organizations between them but who have transformed into two of the league’s most dominant closers over the past couple of seasons. Minnesota has been linked to both pitchers as teams shop around for potential fits.
On the American League roster were Pressly of the Astros and Liam Hendriks, the closer in Oakland, both of whom also endured plenty of ups and downs before emerging as All-Star relievers with upper-90s velocity. Both of whom, Twins fans don’t need to be reminded, once made Target Field their home.
“I enjoyed my time in Minnesota. They were the first team to give me a chance. I met my wife while with the Twins,” Hendriks said. “But I’m not the same pitcher I was then.”
Nope, and that’s the problem. The minor leagues are an excellent mechanism for identifying the best hitters, the elite defenders, the most promising starting pitchers. “With relievers, though, it can take a while, years and years, to figure out who you are and what you’re capable of,” said Yates, who leads the majors with 30 saves and owns a 1.15 ERA.
The 32-year-old righthander has been let go by five different organizations during his career, “so I was constantly hoping, please somebody claim me just so I can stay in the big leagues,” he said. “But when the Padres signed me, I felt like I was ready to be a big leaguer. I was ready to have success.”
The difference? Yates said it’s many things, including conditioning, experience and a better understanding of what works in the majors. “I needed to find an out pitch. In the bullpen, all the guys who are good have a swing-and-miss pitch,” he said. “I wanted to find that, so I started throwing a splitter. It kept getting better. Two or three years later, here I am. It’s my best pitch.”
Similarly, Smith got to the majors as a starter, was traded three times, missed a season after Tommy John surgery — and suddenly blossomed into a relief ace with a devastating slider. He was 23-for-23 in save situations through Friday and reportedly is being bid upon by at least a half-dozen teams.
“Nobody ever has a perfectly smooth road,” Smith said. “I always had confidence, but sometimes it takes a while for opportunity to come along.”
Hendriks said that after washing out as a starter on the Twins, and switching teams six times, he considered playing in Japan or South Korea but kept believing he could get MLB hitters out.
“My mentality changed. I became aggressive, stopped pitching hesitantly. I have a bullpen mentality,” he said. “I took a personality test in Australia, and it summed me up as a mosquito — just flying around, always buzzing, annoying you. It’s kind of a good thing for a relief pitcher.”
So is failure, Yates believes, at least for a while. But it makes it incredibly difficult to identify the next great reliever.
“The scuffling put me into the position I am now. I don’t care if I fail, I’ve been through it. I’ve been through all the sleepless nights,” he said. “I’m not afraid to challenge hitters, make them hit my pitch. You can’t do that if you’re afraid to fail. But it takes a while to get to this point, I guess.”
Phil Miller covers the Twins for the Star Tribune. Twitter: @MillerStrib
E-mail: phil.miller@startribune.com
After reshuffling, did Wild gain in talent or flexibility?
Barring anything dramatic, the Wild’s offseason activity might be drawing to a close.
On the final day of practice for the final major of the year, Rory McIlroy ripped a shot out of the light rough and began walking toward the green when he stopped in the middle of the fairway for a quick interview with Sky Sports.
Serena among 13 Grand Slam champs in US Open women's field
Serena Williams will try again for a record-equaling 24th major title as one of 13 Grand Slam women's champions who gained direct entry into the U.S. Open.
Tour de France debutant Caleb Ewan sprinted to victory on Stage 11 of the Tour de France on Wednesday, while Frenchman Julian Alaphilippe kept the race leader's yellow jersey a day before the race enters the high mountains.
Twins home run tracker
Twins stat of the week
Twins farm report
Kepler's home run binge vs. Bauer continues, Twins top Cleveland
Twins try to stay perfect after back-to-back losses in finale with Mets • Twins
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Worship Calendar
From the Rector
Outreach & Stewardship
Saint Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church
1 St. Francis Drive - Gulf Breeze, Florida 32561
www.stfrancisgulfbreeze.org
ST. FRANCIS REPRESENTS AT
2019 BANDS ON THE BEACH - JULY 23
Grab your lawn chairs and blankets as St. Francis’ own Jack Grimley takes the stage with his band, Memory Lane, for Bands on the Beach on July 23.
Bands on the Beach is a popular outdoor summer concert series on Pensacola Beach organized by the Santa Rosa Island Authority and sponsored by local radio station Cat Country 98.7. Concerts are held under the Gulfside Pavilion every Tuesday night from 7:00 p.m.– 9:00 p.m. and feature many of popular local bands such as Reunion Band, Not Quite Fab, and the Modern El Dorados.
Jack’s band, Memory Lane, consists of a 5-piece rhythm section and 3-piece horn section and specializes in the dynamic soul and funk music developed by James Brown and popularized in the late 1960’s and early to mid-1970’s by such iconic acts as Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Tower of Power, and Earth Wind & Fire. Like our beloved St. Francis Adult Choir, Jack and the band have been hard at work for the past several months rehearsing and refining their show to ensure the best possible performance.
We hope that you are able to come out and show your support for the invaluable exposure opportunity that awaits
Jack and his band.
ST. FRANCIS DAY BLESSING OF THE ANIMALS,
FAMILY FESTIVAL & BAZAAR
Our St. Francis Day Celebration is still three months away but the marketing efforts are already well advanced. The same applies to our music and entertainment program. Thanks to parishioner donations we have sufficient funds to rent a stage and sound system which will be erected on church property for the day. John Griffing has a number of commitments from entertainers and will be announcing the full program soon.
As you may remember from previous articles, St. Francis Day 2019 will have the first ever “Arts & Crafts” Bazaar as part of our Celebration. The cost for a booth is only $25. Our 13 inside booths have already been rented and a waiting list exists. We also have 21 outside 10’X10’ exhibit booths located at different points around the property. Four of these booths have also been rented. We have 17 booths (all outside) remaining. If you have a friend or family member who is an artist or crafts person, please feel free to tell them about this exceptional opportunity.
Please call Beth Cyr at 850-449-1444 if interested.
Your support for ECW’s Collectibles & More has been wonderful. Thank you so much for your generosity. Your donations have been many and varied. It looks as if we will have another record Collectibles & More event from August 16-18, 2019.
A number of parishioners have asked if there are any specific donations needed. Yes, we need more jewelry, both fine and costume. We also need yard tools and flower pots. However, the greatest need is for small appliances such as: hand mixers; toasters; microwaves; slow cookers; coffeemakers; food choppers; and blenders. All donations are tax deductible and the proceeds from are vital to church maintenance projects.
Tickets for the Pre-Sale Event on August 16 are on sale in the church Atrium every Sunday until Collectibles & More. Tickets are $10 each or two for $15. A number of tickets have already been sold. A Pre-Sale ticket affords the holder an opportunity to be among the first to see and purchase their choices from among the hundreds of collectibles on display. The background music, wine and hors d’oeuvres make for a pleasant, unhurried shopping experience you will enjoy.
While buying your Pre-Sale tickets you may also wish to purchase your 50-50 raffle tickets for a drawing to be held at our St. Francis Day Celebration & Bazaar on October 5. The raffle tickets are available for a suggested donation of $5 each or 5 for $20. The winning ticket holder will receive 50% of the pot from the ticket sales over the next three months. The drawing for the winner will be Saturday afternoon, October 5. You need not be present to win.
The Circle of Care is being expanded to include individual sessions, free of charge. Anyone who feels they could benefit from a supportive therapist is encouraged to call the office to make an appointment or call St. Francis parishioner Kim Giryluk directly at 856-305-2946. Kim is a clinical social worker and is currently offering counseling at Pathways for Change. If you feel you could use some extra help with emotional support in the areas of family, trauma, grief,
or care giver support please schedule some time to talk
to Kim.
At St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church, our Sunday mornings begin at 9:00 a.m. with Adult Christian Education in the Conference Room.
Nursery and Children's Christian Education (K-5)
is available at 9:45 a.m. The children follow a junior acolyte from the service on Sunday before the Sequence Hymn and return before Communion.
Worship is at 10 a.m.
We utilize both Rite One and Rite Two Holy Eucharist, with organ and choir. Refreshments and conversation take place after the service in the Parish Hall.
The service of the Holy Eucharist is celebrated two times every week – Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. and Wednesdays at noon. The Wednesday Eucharist is a wonderful, intimate opportunity to refill our spiritual cup in worship with one another for our Lord.
ST. FRANCIS ACTIVITIES
Tuesday Women's Bible Study
All women are encouraged to come Tuesday
mornings at 9:45 a.m. in the Conference Room.
Episcopal Church Women (ECW)
The ECW's Monthly Business Meeting is on the
second Saturday of each month at 9 a.m.
in the Parish Hall. All St. Francis women are welcome.
Women of St. Francis (WOSF) Luncheon
Takes place the second Tuesday of each month
at 11:30 a.m. All ladies are invited.
Please bring a little something to share.
Hospice Card Crafters
Meet the first Wednesday of each month at
10:00 a.m. in the Conference Room.
No experience needed.
Monthly Parish Supper
There will be no parish supper this month.
Adult Choir Rehearsal
Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. in the Choir Loft.
Tai Chi for Seniors
Free Tai Chi classes are on Mondays and Wednesdays
in the Atrium from 9:15 - 10:15 a.m.
Senior Moment Café
Fridays in the Great Room from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
First Fridays with the Father
Meets 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. in the Great Room
(in conjunction with Senior Moment Café)
St. Francis Readers
Meets the 3rd Monday of each month
at 11:15 p.m. in the Library.
Our St Francis readers have selected LILAC GIRLS, A NOVEL by Martha Hall Kelly for our July 15th meeting. We meet at 11:15 a.m. in the library.
Prayer Shawl Guild
Meets at 1:30 in the Great Room.
To find out about AA and other groups,
please call the Parish Office at
850-932-2861 weekdays, 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Schedule Release: 2019-2020
St. Francis Parish Supper Programs
Shipwrecks of Pensacola
Dr. Judith A. Bense, Professor of Anthropology,
Past UWF President
St. Francis Choir Annual Gospel Music Concert
The Future of Health Care
Dr. Cynde Gamache,
System Chief Nursing Officer and V.P. Ancillary & Patient Care Services, Baptist Health Care
Gulf Breeze Annual Update
Mayor Cherry Fitch & City Manager Samantha Abell
“The Role of the Dairy Industry in the U.S. Economy”
Dr. Flash Gordon
Security in Gulf Breeze
Chief of Police Rick Hawthorne,
Gulf Breeze Police Department
Beth Cyr & Cathy Griffing
Questions? Contact Leo at
leo@leomcyr.com
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS WE CAN DO FOR ONE ANOTHER IS OFFER OUR PRAYERS
Over time, our Rector has been considering how we offer our prayers of the people aloud on Sunday mornings as well as how we handle various upcoming announcements. Beginning July 7, we are adding an insert to the Sunday bulletin which will include the prayers of the people and the announcements. We strongly encourage everyone to take the insert home so you can pray for each other on a daily basis and have a reminder of upcoming events close at hand. For comments, questions or concerns,
please contact Fr. Tim.
Copyright St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church 2019. Stfrancisgulfbreeze.org. All rights reserved.
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Friday Night Five – November 11, 2016
This week has been a particularly challenging week. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, all sides have been affected by the recent contentious election in the United States. Almost always for me, music is the best panacea. It allows me to step back, dive into another world and spend some time reflecting. Oddly enough after I assembled the tracks I was going to feature tonight, I realized that 80% of the bands I am showcasing released their first album before 1982. I guess, some people have comfort food, I have comfort music.
Crispy Ambulance is one of my very favorite post-punk bands. Emerging out of the punk scene in Manchester in 1977 they released several albums under the Factory, Aural Assault and Factory Benelux labels. Developing a distinctive style that was forceful, tenebrous, and incomparable, the group intitally disbanded in 1982. Going on to other projects, they released a four-single EP under the name Ram Ram Kino in 1985 and parted ways again. After almost seventeen years, the group reformed in 1999 for a one-off gig to promote an re-issue of their stellar album The Plateau Phase. Since then, the band have played one off gigs, curated multimedia events and in 2016, released their first studio album since 1985. A two-CD set, the first CD entitled Compulsion, which was originally issued in a limited edition of 500 vinyl copies to mark Record Store Day in 2015. Written around the time of The Plateau Phase, seven of the ten tracks were written and performed live at the time, the additional tracks are out-takes and remixes. The second CD, Random Textures, consists of new instrumental material that was written by the band for a series of multi-media events in Manchester during 2015/16 and billed as the Subliminal Impulse Review. It’s got a washing soundtrack feel, throaty synths, powerful percussion and effected guitars. It’s a definite departure from their early work, but, nonetheless stunning, profound and richly layered. Tracks featured tonight include “Integra,” “Allegro,” and “Four Line Whip (Remix).”
Black Swan Lane is an indie-rock group that was founded in 2007 by Jack Sobel and John Kolbeck of The Messengers, and Mark Burgess (The Chameleon UK and the Sun and the Moon) along with contributions by other artists such as Andy Clegg, Andy Whitaker, Kwasi Asante, Yves Altana and Achim Faerber. Their music is fill with tender, melancholy, bittersweet and somber tunes. Drawing a line somewhere between shoegaze, dreampop, and post-punk, the sound is minimalist, authentic and luscious. This is music that is a perfectly soothing for an aching heart. Tracks featured tonight include “Dead,” “Home,” and “Relax and Breathe.”
Dear Deer is an electronic duo from France that plays a smoking hot, visceral combination of post-punk, industrial and nowave. Cacophonic, gurgling synths are layered under dissonant vocals, angular percussion and reverbed guitars. It’s challenging, abrasive, gritty, and totally cathartic listening. Comprised of Federico Iovino (Popoi Sdioh) and Sabatel (Cheshire Cat), they formed in 2015 and released their debut album on Manic Depression records in October. Combing the intensity of Alien Sex Fiend with the cool detachment of Adult, Dear Deer’s utterly nihilistic sound is the perfect accompaniment to bitter times. Tracks featured tonight include “Statement,” “Dear Deer,” and “Arnolfini.”
Modern English is a band that has such a breathtaking back catalog and yet, they are mostly known for one single, “I Melt With You,” a fairly apocalyptic song about a couple having sex as a nuclear bombs fall around them. What is now somewhat of a new wave confection, much of their early material is darkly tinged, and not as pop-accessible, but, in Strawberry Tongue’s opinion, some of the tastiest morsels to be devoured. Their history is scattered. Releasing albums on the seminal 4AD label, then on Sire, breaking up, reforming with various members, and releasing new material on TVT, and breaking up again. The band has mostly consisted of Robbie Grey with various incarnations of three original members including Gary McDowell, Michael Conroy and Stephen Walker. The band reunited in 2010 and has been touring ever since. This year, they recorded new material with the help of crowdfunding via Pledgemusic and released the MP3s this past summer. The new material has a chill vibe, more indiepop than new wave, more dreampop than post-punk, the songs are melodic, with groovy ringing guitars and sparkling synths. Tracks featured tonight from the new album “Take Me To The Trees” include the Bowie Hero-esque track “Trees,” the Mesh and Lace sounding “Dark Cloud,” and “It Don’t Seem Right.”
Ski Patrol was a band that in its short lifespan of two years achieved a devoted following around their unique sound. Comprised of singer and poet extraordinaire Ian Lowery, and guitarist Nick Clift, the duo recruited several other musicians to help round out their explosive squad. Pairing dub reggae, funk-inflected bass, angular guitars, and Lowery’s witty, paranoid gutter poetry and wild stage antics, they caught the attention of a newly formed label and management company called Malicious Damage, who also released the early work of Killing Joke. Soon after, they also caught the attention of the legendary John Peel, who invited them to play a studio session. The group only recorded three singles, in addition to the Peel session. Lowrey and Clift went on to form Folk Devils. After Folk Devils folded, Lowrey would continue on in two projects, King Blank and Ian Lowrey Group with Nigel Pulsford (Bush), while Clift went on to work for Rough Trade and Astralwerks. In 2014, 13 years after the untimely death of Lowrey, Clift released a retrospective of all the material of Ski Patrol included band’s first two singles, previously unreleased mixes of their third single and three unreleased songs from their last studio session. Tracks featured tonight are from that release and include “Agent Orange,” “Concrete Eternal,” and “Extinguish (Dub Mix).”
Devastatingly, we lost another beloved artist this week. Leonard Cohen passed away at the age of 82. A prolific and profound songwriter, he has been cited by thousands and thousands of artists as a source of inspiration. It is only befitting that we feature a Leonard Cohen cover from some of our favorite bands we play on Strawberry Tongue. Tonight each playlist will featured a track from either Schonwald – “Who by Fire,” The Flying Lizards – “Susanne,” or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Avalanche.”
That’s it for this week’s edition of the Friday Night Five. Be sure to tune in to Strawberry Tongue Radio at 19:00, 21:00 and 23:00 EDT to hear selected tracks from each of these bands and be sure to visit their websites for more information about their latest work and to purchase their tracks. Also, be sure to listen to Strawberry Tongue Radio to hear our unique playlist featuring current and classic artists playing post punk, new wave, indie, electronic and experimental music.
Friday Night Five - December 16, 2016
Friday Night Five - December 2, 2016
Friday Night Five - November 25, 2016
Friday Night Five - September 16, 2016
Friday Night Five - November 4, 2016
This entry was posted in friday night faves and tagged in black swan lane, crispy ambulance, dear deer, modern english, ski patrol.
« New Music Monday: Vorderhaus – Faintly
Strawberry Spotlight with Morgane Lhote of Hologram Teen »
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Strong East Ramapo
We Are StrongER
The School Board
We Are StrongER/
The Basics/
In Depth/
The School Board/
Pledge/
Petition/
State Intervention Now
Read the facts and educate yourself on the situation facing East Ramapo public school students.
This bill (http://open.nysenate.gov/legislation/bill/A5355-2015), introduced by Ellen Jaffee, Ken Zebrowski, and David Carlucci on February 18, 2015, provides for a monitor to oversee the East Ramapo Central School District, develop a strategic improvement plan for the district, supervise the fiscal and operational management and academic programming of the district, and override problematic decisions of the school board.
The Facts*
Demographics:
According to the 2010 Census, there were 31,116 school-aged children (5 – 19 years old) in the East Ramapo Central School District.
Henry Greenberg’s November 2014 report on the district, titled “East Ramapo: A School District In Crisis” estimates 33,000 school-age children
9,000 students attend public schools, of which 91% are from African American, Latino and Haitian backgrounds and 78% qualify for free or reduced lunch
24,000 students attend private schools, of which 23,778 are believed to attend Yeshivas
According to a 2013 Trulia.com survey, the Hamlet of Monsey (located in the East Ramapo Central School District) has as many as 86% of its school-aged children enrolled in private schools.
Public School Ratings and Test Results:
According to real estate site, Zillow.com, East Ramapo, once a thriving school district, receives a Great Schools rating of 4, while the nearby Nanuet, Clarkstown and Pearl River school districts receive ratings of 9. Ramapo Central, which is also part of the Town of Ramapo, received a rating of 8. Driving down the average for East Ramapo are the high schools, which both receive ratings of 3, or “Below Average.”
Hank Greenberg’s November 2014 report on the district, titled “East Ramapo: A School District In Crisis” identifies the following test results for East Ramapo and surrounding schools for the school year 2013 - 2014:
The number of students testing below or well below proficiency in ELA and Math since the school year 2010 – 2011 has risen substantially. In 2010 – 2011, 61.7% of students tested below or well-below proficient in ELA and 55.7% of students tested below or well-below proficient in Math.
Budget, Budget Cuts and Allocations Provided to Private School Students:
School districts nationwide receive funding for budgets from three sources – Federal, State and Local. According to the National Center for Education Statistics , in school year 2010 – 2011, the breakdown for the National and New York State averages, respectively, were as follows:
As you can see, New York State relies less on State and Federal funding than the national average.
For school year 2013 – 2014, Mr. Greenberg’s report found that the East Ramapo Central School District relied more heavily on local revenue (see below). In 2013 – 2014, the average district in New York State received 40.4% from state revenue. It is likely that the state gives East Ramapo less money, at least in part, because it determines funding based on many formulas, including property values (which are high in East Ramapo) and public school enrollment, which is low relative to the entire school-going population. Essentially, the money is allocated for ~8,000 public school students, but certain line items that benefit private school students are being split over 33,000 students.
Non-public school students are entitled to some publicly funded services, including Health Services, Homebound Instruction, Textbook Loan Program, Computer Software Loan Program, School Library Materials Loan Program, Transportation (students must reside within 15 miles of the nonpublic school), Special Education Services, Dual Enrollment Programs, and Mandated Services Reimbursement.
The Budget Allocation numbers below were provided in Henry Greenberg’s November 2014 report on the district, titled “East Ramapo: A School District In Crisis.” The 2013/2014 Budget is split accordingly:
From school year 2006-2007 to 2013 – 2014, transportation costs in East Ramapo increased by 48.1%, while the state costs increased by 21.9% during the same period of time.
Specifically, transportation costs for public school students increased by 76.6%, while the statewide average increase was 24.1%. Such increases are due in large part to the fact that there are:
No mileage limitations on transportation for K-12 students. Although the state caps transportation provisions at 15 miles, it is possible to provide transportation beyond specified limits by voter approval.
Over 300 active bus routes to 14 public schools and more than 140 private schools where students are enrolled. The district provides gender-segregated bus routes to private school students, despite the fact that at least some of the Yeshivas in the district are co-ed.
Given the projected increases in the public school population, transportation will likely consume an even larger portion of the budget in coming years.
Special Education:
Special education costs have increased by 33% from school year 2010 – 2011 to 2013 – 2014, when Mr. Greenberg found $60MM was being spent on special education services for 2,423 students.
Federal and state law requires that special education students are served in the “least restrictive” environment, preferring to mainstream students as much as possible as long as there exists “Free and Appropriate Public Education” (FAPE)
Many members of the private school community would prefer their special-needs children be educated with other students from the community so that everyone speaks the same language, eats kosher food and shares the same values and points of reference.
In June 2014, the State Education Department said that East Ramapo lost out on state reimbursements for 63 cases over the past two years, for placing special education students in private schools when FAPE placements were available. According to Mr. Greenberg’s report, the statewide average for reimbursements for special education students was 36.8%. East Ramapo received only 27.9%. Mr. Greenberg remarked, “My hypothesis is that one reason why the district receives less is because they are not seeking reimbursement for claims that they at least believe the department won’t reimburse.”
An Education Department spokesperson has said that East Ramapo has a pattern of placing students in private schools without properly documenting the decision making process. The board prefers settling with parents rather than litigating against them. As legal discussions, the board is empowered to handle such matters themselves.
Although the majority of special education students come from the public school population , private school students received special education services, paid for by the district, from ~40 different Yeshivas and the Kiryas Joel Union Free School District.
While we have not been able to pinpoint exactly how much is spent on private placements for the ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic community, students who attend Kiryas Joel Union Free School District do so at a cost of $72,500/year . Busing to Kiryas Joel occurs at a cost of $30,000/student. Students that attend Rockland Institute for Special Education (RISE), do so at a cost of $26,000/year. There are 62 students enrolled in RISE.
A pilot program is underway to educate special education students in a separate area within Elmwood Elementary school, one of the district’s public schools. Next year, enrollment will grow from 14 to 36 students.
In school year 2009 – 2010, the East Ramapo School District had $12.5MM in an “unreserved” fund, to be used for unforeseen expenses. Today, there is a deficit of -$7MM. Mr. Greenberg, in his remarks, stated “The heart of the academic program in this district suffered a grievous blow. At the same time, however, programs that benefited the private school community increased.”
Cuts to Public Education:
Beginning in 2009, the board has made significant spending cuts to public school programs in order to balance its budgets. These include, but are not limited to:
Elimination of 400 positions, including 168 teaching positions (93 at the secondary level), all social workers, and all deans
Cuts to programs and academics, including the reduction of kindergarten to a half-day, elimination of summer school, elimination of gifted and talented programs, reduction in Advanced Placement classes, reduction of high school electives, athletics and extra curricular activities reduced by 50%, and the elimination of transportation for field trips.
Other cuts, including supplies and materials
Cuts are so substantial, that in Ramapo High School, former principal Jean Fields indicated there were conversations about letting seniors go halfway through the day. A student activist at Spring Valley High School, Olivia Castor, collected schedules from classmates, illustrating that students were spending more than half of the school day in non-academic classes like lunch and study hall. New York State does not require how many hours of instruction a student must receive throughout the day.
Questionable Conduct by the School Board and Constituents:
The East Ramapo public school community has a number of grievances with the school board for their treatment of parents and students, stemming from when the board was overtaken by a Hasidic/Ultra-Orthodox majority in 2005. Mr. Greenberg’s report Among them:
Violation of the open meetings law
According to the Committee on Open Government, “It is essential to the maintenance of a democratic society that the public business be performed in an open and public manner and that the citizens of this state be fully aware of and able to observe the performance of public officials and attend and listen to the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy. The people must be able to remain informed if they are to retain control over those who are their public servants. It is the only climate under which the commonweal (sic) will prosper and enable the governmental process to operate for the benefit of those who created it.”
Openness in public meetings is supposed to be the rule, not the exception. Mr. Greenberg’s report estimate that 60 – 70% of East Ramapo school board meetings take place in executive session. With regard to executive session, the Committee on Open Government states that “Every meeting of a public body shall be open to the general public, except that an executive session of such body may be called and business transacted thereat in accordance with section one hundred five of this article.”
In fact, executive session may only be conducted upon majority vote of its total membership AND only for the below purposes:
Matters which will imperil the public safety if disclosed;
Any matter which may disclose the identity of a law enforcement agent or informer;
Information relating to current or future investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense which would imperil effective law enforcement if disclosed;
Discussions regarding proposed, pending or current litigation;
Collective negotiations pursuant to article fourteen of the civil service law;
The medical, financial, credit or employment history of a particular person or corporation, or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline, suspension, dismissal or removal of a particular person or corporation;
The preparation, grading or administration of examinations; and
The proposed acquisition, sale or lease of real property or the proposed acquisition of securities, or sale or exchange of securities held by such public body, but only when publicity would substantially affect the value thereof.
Further compounding the lack of transparency is that public participation is limited to comments at the end of meetings, which routinely occurs after 10 or 11 pm.
On November 18, 2009, the School Board, in executive session, abruptly dismissed their legal counsel, Stephen Fromson – a local attorney and district graduate – for Albert D’Agostino, an attorney from Long Island. D’Agostino’s firm charged fees of $250/hour to Fromson’s $120/hour.
Since that time, legal fees incurred by the school district ballooned 668%, from $383K to $2.9MM. Over that time, $7.3MM was paid to 13 law firms.
D’Agostino was known for his work in Lawrence, LI, where among other things, he helped the school district place ultra-orthodox and Hasidic students in private schools and arranged the sale of public school buildings to Yeshivas. East Ramapo parents were warned against D’Agostino’s firm by the Lawrence school district parents.
Mistreatment of parents/students
Parents and students are routinely mistreated by the Board’s legal counsel.
In 2013, after a widely-publicized incident where an attorney from D’Agostino’s law firm verbally abused a public school parent, the Board announced it would seek to replace the firm. After a rigorous search, the Board reversed this decision in the summer of 2014.
D’Agostino himself has also repeatedly attacked students and alumni, calling one “ignorant” and another a “piece of shit.”
District officials resort to name-calling and attacking the integrity of parents and students, often branding their critics as anti-semitic. Former School Board Chairman, Daniel Schwartz, likened a student’s criticism of the board to that of Saint Augustine, which ultimately “paved the road to Auschwitz and the crematory at Treblinka.” He went on to tell the audience, “Let me tell you right now, you don’t like it, find yourself another place to live.
Reaction of School Board to State intervention:
In June of 2014, Governor Cuomo appointed a Fiscal Monitor, Henry Greenberg, to report on the district. Yehuda Weissmandl, president of the School Board, responded by writing, “They assume – based on our religion alone – that we have stolen from the very children we have been elected to serve. This is nothing but hateful bigotry.”
Also in June of 2014, the School Board elected to reject a $3.5MM state aid advance because of a condition that an advisory committee would direct how the money would be spent. Superintendent Joel Klein stated, “The board feels – and I agree with them – that this is the responsibility of the Board of Education and they are both affronted and insulted … that an outside group of people could determine how the money is used.”
Closing and Selling of Public School Buildings to Yeshivas:
The East Ramapo School Board commissioned the Western Suffolk BOCES’ Office of School Planning and Research to conduct a study of enrollment projections. Three reports were generated and results were presented publicly in November 2008. The study concluded that enrollment was declining and would continue to decline.
In May of 2008, the Board Superintendent formed a Long Range Planning Committee on Restructuring and Reorganization, which was expanded to include parents, teachers and community members. The group reviewed demographic data, transportation simulations, building capacities and Special Education/ESL needs. Three public forums were also held for input.
After all of these activities, the Superintendent recommended closing Colton Elementary School on April 1, 2009. About a year later, the Superintendent recommended also closing Hillcrest Elementary School.
According to the New York State Education Department, enrollment between 2008 and 2012 actually increased +3%.
Regarding the schools specifically:
The sale of Colton elementary school was announced on July 24, 2014 for $6.6MM, less $1.5MM of rent already paid on the property. The school was appraised for $6.8MM on March 17, 2010. A second appraisal was obtained by the same appraiser, estimating its value at $6.6M. The sale was originally halted for a year and a half due to a petition by a parent, who claimed the school was actually worth $11.9MM, based on an appraisal by the Town of Ramapo. The petition was dismissed for a number of reasons, including an acknowledgement that there was a lack of information indicating that the Town’s appraisal was an accurate assessment of the fair market value of the school.
The sale of Hillcrest elementary school was completed on November 21, 2014 for $4.9MM. Hillcrest was also the subject of several appeals and controversy.. The original sale, for $3.1MM was annulled in 2010. The school was originally appraised for $5.9MM in May 2010, but a second appraisal for $3.1MM was submitted on July 26th, just two days before the attempted sale. Education Commissioner Steiner annulled the sale, finding that the board acted hastily and questioning the dismissal of the first appraisal. Separately, but related to the original appraisal, the board’s appraiser plead guilty to fraud for taking a $5,000 bribe to falsify his appraisal. The school board has not been charged related to the deal.
*All data, information and quotes were collected through public sources. For information on the facts as presented, please contact strongeastramapo@gmail.com.
FEBRUARY 2, 2017 -- Governor Cuomo signs a bill restoring the full term of school board member Sabrina Charles-Pierre.
JANUARY 18, 2017 -- Governor Cuomo includes special state oversight and aid provisions for East Ramapo in his 2017-18 budget, which will now be subject to negotiations with Assembly and Senate leaders.
JANUARY 18, 2017 -- The New York State Assembly joins the New York State Senate to pass a bill restoring the full term of school board member Sabrina Charles-Pierre, who was in danger of losing her seat because she had not been sworn in properly. Governor Cuomo must now sign it.
DECEMBER 6, 2016 -- With Commissioner MaryEllen Elia pledging to ensure state monitors watch the entire spending process of major renovations to East Ramapo, a small but decisive number of voters pass a $58 million bond.
THROUGHOUT NOVEMBER -- The district holds forums to educate the public about the $58 million bond vote for major building improvements, to be held December 6. In response to concerns about potential financial mismanagement, Monitor Chuck Szuberla assures the NAACP in writing that he and the state will be monitoring "every step of the process." The Journal News also covers the upcoming vote.
NOVEMBER 9 -- Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee and Senator David Carlucci are re-elected to their seats in Albany.
SEPTEMBER 26, 2016 -- The State Education Department officially approves the $3 million proposal, and restored programs (full-day kindergarten, elementary arts) are slated to begin the week of October 3 through the end of the school year. Commissioner Elia will host a public forum about East Ramapo at Rockland Community College on Wednesday, September 28 at 6 p.m.
SEPTEMBER 7 -- Monitor Chuck Szuberla presides over the long-awaited public hearing for the $3 million in state aid, indicating that full-day kindergarten for all students, plus a slew of elementary arts programming, should be reenstated by September 26.
SEPTEMBER 1 -- Because the board has not yet held a hearing to spend the $3 million in state aid, the superintendent holds a sudden lottery for 156 full-day kindergarten seats, the amount provided by the May budget. At the lottery, the district announces the date for the long-awaited public hearing (Wednesday, September 7), which could result in full-day kindergarten for all by the end of the month.
AUGUST 26 -- NYCLU joins the defense of Sabrina Charles-Pierre, filing an appeal to the State Education Commissioner that asserts that the East Ramapo board used arbitrary rules when deciding that her election was invalid.
AUGUST 25 -- Critics call upon new school board member Joe Chajmovicz to verify his residence after protesters reported that others are currently renting the house where Chajmovicz has claimed to live.
AUGUST 24 -- The East Ramapo School Board has still not held a public hearing to solicit comments for how to spend the $3 million in state aid, risking a delay in the start of full-day kindergarten.
AUGUST 15 -- Respected former deputy commissioner of education Charles Szuberla has been named to lead the latest monitor team for East Ramapo.
AUGUST 8 -- Strong East Ramapo hosts a large protest at the school board meeting and presents a petition of over 1,250 signatures, calling for the restoration of Sabrina Charles-Pierre's full term or the resignation of Board President Yehuda Weissmandl. At the end of the meeting, the school board passes a resolution to appeal to the State Commissioner of Education about Sabrina's invalidated election.
JULY 26 -- The East Ramapo School Board announces that, due to an "administrative oversight," public school advocate Sabrina Charles-Pierre will not be permitted to serve the two-year term to which she was elected. The board also announces the appointment of Joe Chajmovicz, a private school parent with no history of running for school board, to the district's open seat over Jean Fields, the former principal of Ramapo High School who garnered 4,000 votes in the last election. Community members demand justice.
JUNE 30 -- Governor Cuomo signs East Ramapo oversight bill into law.
JUNE 16 -- The Legislature -- both the Senate (60-2) and the Assembly (unanimously) -- approves the proposal for East Ramapo oversight and aid. The bill must now be signed by the Governor.
JUNE 14 -- Lawmakers officially introduced Assembly Bill 10723 and Senate Bill 8131 after the Senate leader, the Assembly speaker and the Governor came to an agreement that would provide East Ramapo with three million dollars in additional aid, plus the Commissioner's oversight of the entire district budget.
JUNE 7 -- East Ramapo advocates continue push for oversight plan, visiting Albany and urging Governor Cuomo to intervene before the legislative session ends.
MAY 21 -- Students from Spring Valley and Ramapo High Schools host a rally demanding better for themselves and their peers.
MAY 2 -- Padres Unidos, Strong East Ramapo, the NAACP, the Rockland Clergy for Social Justice, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Rockland Board of Rabbis and Uri L'Tzedek urges Albany to approve a proposal that would empower the State Commissioner of Education to oversee the budget of the East Ramapo School District.
APRIL 5 -- The East Ramapo School Board seeks to intervene in a lawsuit filed by parents against the State Education Department.
MARCH 31 -- Seeking options to bring change to East Ramapo this year, Rockland's representatives to Albany tried unsuccessfully to introduce a measure inside the New York State budget that would have brought oversight and funds to the district. Assemblyman Ken Zebrowski announced his intention for the approach, which is endorsed by the school board, to become a standalone bill.
MARCH 24 -- For the second year in a row, tensions flare in East Ramapo when a family celebrating the demise of the villain Haman during the holiday of Purim hanged a life-sized doll with black skin, dreadlocks and a hoodie from a window in Spring Valley. The family responsible told the news that they did not realize the lynching of a dark-skinned effigy would be considered abominable. Rockland's Jewish leaders condemned the act.
MARCH 21 -- Regent Betty Rosa, a consistently staunch supporter of public education in East Ramapo, is named Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.
MARCH 17 -- Rockland County Executive Ed Day blasts Senator Marcellino's remarks from March 10, saying, "A comment like this from the head of the Senate Education Committee is an outrage. I wonder how such an opinion could be formed by an elected official who has never stepped foot in an East Ramapo school building." Day invites Senators Flanagan and Marcellino on a tour of East Ramapo.
THROUGHOUT MARCH -- Strong East Ramapo announces that seven Long Island School Boards (North Shore CSD, Three Village CSD, West Babylon UFSD, Fire Island UFSD, Oceanside UFSD and Brentwood UFSD, New Hyde Park-Garden City Park UFSD), including those in both Senator Flanagan and Senator Marcellino's districts, have all passed resolutions in favor of East Ramapo oversight with veto power.
MARCH 15 -- The Rockland County Legislature unanimously passes a resolution endorsing the state oversight bill for East Ramapo.
MARCH 10 -- In a shift from a previous refusal to accept state money that contained stipulations, school board president Yehuda Weissmandl says he would accept funds "with strings attached" in order to finance full-day kindergarten, art and music and other line-items for public school use.
MARCH 10 -- Senate Education Chair Carl Marcellino from Long Island tells the Gannett news bureau that East Ramapo should "resolve the issues on their own, without the state getting involved; without the state putting in a monitor."
MARCH 8 -- Lobbying group Agudath Israel has an audience with Senator Flanagan in Albany and emphasizes their opposition to an East Ramapo oversight monitor with veto power and an independent election monitor, calling both "unprecedented and unwarranted."
FEBRUARY 10 -- State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia tours East Ramapo schools, surveys the conditions of the dilapidated Ramapo High School roof, meets students and teachers, and reiterates her support for a monitor with veto power.
JANUARY 13 -- Press reports cite support for East Ramapo oversight as one of the top two issues represented at the State of the State Address in Albany.
JANUARY 12 -- After tabling the issue and going into executive session until 11 p.m., the East Ramapo School Board votes to spend $42,000 of the schools' funds to hire lobbyist Pat Lynch in order to kill the oversight bill.
JANUARY 2016 -- Rockland County School Boards Association, Rockland Business Association, Reform Jewish Voice of New York, T'ruah: Rabbinic Call for Justice, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Bend the Arc, the Ecuadorean Association of Spring Valley, and The Journal News are among the latest supporters of the New York State Board of Regents' renewed recommendation for oversight with veto power in East Ramapo.
DECEMBER 14, 2015 -- Dennis Walcott and his team call for a monitor with veto power, echoing Hank Greenberg's report from a year ago. (Full report here.) The Board of Regents supports the recommendation, saying increased funding is needed but must be accompanied by strict oversight. In the meantime, the current monitoring team will continue indefinitely.
DECEMBER 8 - Strong East Ramapo sends a petition with over 600 signatures to Dennis Walcott and his team, requesting that they reaffirm the recommendations of Hank Greenberg to bring a monitor with veto power to the district.
DECEMBER 7 - LatinoJustice, a New York-based civil rights organization, writes a five-page letter calling upon the monitoring team and Commissioner Elia to endorse comprehensive oversight in East Ramapo given the severe neglect of English language learners.
DECEMBER 2 - The East Ramapo board introduces School Leadership LLC, a search firm hired to identify a permanent superintendent.
DECEMBER 1 - The Wall Street Journal reports that the district has seen some initial changes since the beginning of Walcott's tenure, but the problems "run deep."
NOVEMBER 25 - Interim Superintendent Deborah Wortham lays out priorities and strategies, including more frequent assessment of students to inform instructional decisions, at a board meeting.
OCTOBER 27 - The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has outlined discriminatory decisions by the East Ramapo Central School District against students of color. This document from the OCR outlines the findings, and this is the resolution agreement signed by the district.
OCTOBER 19 -- East Ramapo alumna and parent Sabrina Charles-Pierre is named to fill the open seat on the school board.
OCTOBER 7 -- Superintendent Joel Klein, the subject of persistent community protests for over a year after his offensive attitude toward students from immigrant families, resigned. Dr. Deborah Wortham, most recently the head of the Roosevelt School District on Long Island, is named as the interim replacement.
OCTOBER 1 -- The monitoring team held a tense community forum in which attendees said they left with few answers.
SEPTEMBER 16 -- The monitoring team presents its initial findings to the Board of Regents. Dr. Monica George-Fields notes that the board has not operated with urgency around the district's academic under-performance.
SEPTEMBER 2 -- DropoutNation, a leading website on education reform, sounds a national clarion call for action in East Ramapo.
AUGUST 31 -- Parents demand swift changes to the East Ramapo School District, or they will begin legal action against the state with the help of the Education Law Center and O'Melveny and Myers LLP.
AUGUST 13 -- Dennis Walcott is named as the lead monitor for East Ramapo, joined by experts Dr. Monica George-Fields and Dr. John Sipple. The New York Times, Education Week, Wall Street Journal, WNYC's Schoolbook, the Albany Times Union, WCBS NewsRadio 88, the Journal News, Hamodia, the Associated Press, the Daily News, CBS and NBC all covered the story. The Journal News also penned a strong editorial.
AUGUST 11 -- News reports indicate that, on Thursday, August 13 at Rockland Community College, Commissioner Elia and Chancellor Tisch will announce the appointment of a temporary monitor to observe and advise the East Ramapo School Board, hold public hearings and write a report for Albany. The monitor will not have the right to reverse board decisions, given that New York State does not pass this year's legislation that would have authorized veto power.
AUGUST 11 -- The board holds a special meeting without alerting the public in accordance with Open Meetings Law.
AUGUST 4 -- Students take to the podium at a board meeting to demand better for themselves and their peers. In addition, President Yehuda Weissmandl refuses requests from the public to use the results from the last election to fill the board seat vacated by Juan Pablo Ramirez.
JULY -- The district is found failing in all areas, according to a State Education Department report.
JULY 28 -- With an extra-large, over-capacity audience waiting for the board meeting to begin, the clerk abruptly announces a lack of quorum for at least the fourth time this year and cancels its meeting.
JULY 27 -- The New York State Supreme Court determines that the East Ramapo School District overpaid its defense attorneys by $2,000,000.
JULY 23 -- Board member Juan Pablo Ramirez resigns his post six weeks into office, paving the way for the board to appoint his successor. Community members demand that one of the candidates that garnered the next number of votes should be installed instead.
JULY 20 -- New State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia indicates that the state will soon release plans for further intervention in East Ramapo.
JULY 7 -- Two years after the district promised to replace the infamously disrespectful and expensive Long Island law firm Minerva and D'Agostino, East Ramapo hires new counsel, Harris Beach.
JUNE 28 -- Dozens of parents and community members have the first of several protests calling for Superintendent Klein's resignation outside his home in New City.
JUNE 26 -- Statement by Strong East Ramapo: "NEW YORK STATE SENATE UTTERLY FAILS THE CHILDREN OF EAST RAMAPO. It is unconscionable that Senate Leader Flanagan would turn his back on the children of East Ramapo by not even conducting a vote for the oversight bill, S. 3821. The legislation had the support of dozens of prominent organizations, including the Rockland County School Boards Association, which clearly would have objected if it felt the bill had jeopardized the concept of local control. Speaker Heastie emerged as a real champion for East Ramapo today, disagreeing with Senator Flanagan, noting that the Assembly approved the oversight bill, and saying, "I think that's what government is here for." We expect that the government will act regardless. The State Education Department released new evidence this week of the district's gross neglect of students, and Assembly Zebrowski is calling on the department to impose sanctions, controls and oversight on the district. Chancellor Tisch just called for the resignation of Superintendent Klein. We are also not done protesting and advocating. As we said and demonstrated on on June 22, we will march on."
JUNE 23 -- The State Education Department releases three new studies that detail the district's profound neglect of East Ramapo students, including denying English language learners a path to graduation.
JUNE 22 -- Joined by Assembly Members Jaffee and Zebrowski, County Executive Ed Day, Regents Judith Johnson and Betty Rosa, hundreds gathered in Spring Valley to call on Senator Flanagan to bring S. 3821, the original East Ramapo oversight bill that passed the Assembly, to a vote. The crowd then walked a mile to the East Ramapo District Headquarters, sang "We Shall Overcome" hand-in-hand in English and Spanish, and committed to march on until victory is won.
JUNE 17 -- Assembly Members Jaffee and Zebrowski announced that they are not supporting the amended bill and indicate that there may still be room for negotiation for the end of session. The community hoped for the best, but prepared for the struggle ahead.
JUNE 16 -- After hearing public opinion and receiving amendments from Assembly Members Jaffee and Zebrowski, Senator Carlucci went back to the table with Republicans and emerged with a few of the requested changes in a revised Senate Bill 5974(A). The new bill now authorizes the governor to appoint the monitor and set a clearer timeline and a process for appealing the board's decisions. Yet the bill still only enables the monitor to object to board actions that violate state or federal law, a provision that many believe would prevent the monitor from addressing the historic pattern of technically legal, but clearly unsound decisions made by the board.
JUNE 14, 11:59 p.m. -- After negotiations with Senate Republicans, Senator David Carlucci introduced Senate Bill 5974, a new bill that removed veto power from the monitor. Instead, a monitor could issue an objection to board actions that violate state or federal law, which the commissioner of education or the comptroller would review. It still mandated the creation of a long-term strategic plan, but added a $5 million/year grant for the district to use to expand academic programs that have been cut. The bill reduced the monitor's term to two and a half years with a provision for renewal, empowered the comptroller, in consultation with the governor, to appoint the monitor, and added oversight responsibilities for the comptroller.
JUNE 11 -- The Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Caucus of the New York State Legislatiure has issued a statement urging the Senate to pass S. 3821.
JUNE 11 -- The New York State Assembly passes A. 5355, 80-56. The Journal News reports that Senator Carlucci is working toward a vote in the Senate.
JUNE 10 -- The bill's co-authors join with supporters, including Assemblyman Jeff Aubry, Rockland County Executive Ed Day, former Assemblyman Alex Gromack, recent Spring Valley High School graduate Olivia Castor, current parent Romel Alvarez, Reform Jewish Voice's Rabbi Michael Churgel, NAACP's Willie Trotman, and AQE's Jasmine Tripper, for a press conference in Albany, advocating for the legislation,
JUNE 10 -- The Assembly Rules Committee votes to support A. 5355. The Journal News reports that the bill is expected to pass the Assembly.
JUNE 9 -- The Assembly Ways and Means Committee votes to support A. 5355.
JUNE 8 -- New York State Education Department deems East Ramapo's Spring Valley High School ineffective (the lowest possible rating) in four different areas in new report.
JUNE 5 -- New York State Appeals Court becomes second court to reject East Ramapo School Board's attempt to use public monies for out-of-code special education placements.
JUNE 5 -- Anti-Defamation League issues press release in support of East Ramapo oversight legislation and tweets support of A. 5355 and S. 3821.
JUNE 4 -- Jewish groups unite to support A. 5355 and S. 3821, refuting claims that the bill is anti-Semitic. Bend the Arc: A Jewish Social Partnership for Justice, the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Jewish Labor Committee, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College all join the American Jewish Committee, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and Uri L'Tzedek as supporters. of East Ramapo oversight.
JUNE 3 -- Governor Cuomo reiterated his advocacy for East Ramapo in the Assembly and Senate.
JUNE 3 -- The Assembly Education Committee has passed the bill, and it now moves to Ways and Means.
JUNE 3 -- The New York Times has published a definitive op-ed titled "When A School Board Victimizes Kids" (http://nyti.ms/1SV8RhY) by the New York State Schools Chancellor, Merryl Tisch, and the Executive Director of the Education Law Center, David Sciarra.
JUNE 2 -- New York Civil Liberties Union issues official legislative position in support of A. 5355 and S. 3821.
JUNE 2 -- The Jewish Daily Forward publishes Rabbi Ari Hart's outstanding commentary, "An Immoral Use of Jewish Power in Upstate New York" (http://forward.com/opinion/national/309145/in-east-ramapo-an-immoral-use-of-jewish-power/).
JUNE 1 -- Rockland County School Boards Association, of which East Ramapo is a member, endorses A. 5355 and S. 3821, noting that "the public school students of the East Ramapo School District would greatly benefit from the much needed and overdue oversight."
MAY 28, 2015 -- The New York Civil Liberties Union announces their support of A. 5355 and S. 3821. The Lower Hudson Valley branch plans to honor long-time East Ramapo activists Steve White, Oscar Cohen and Willie Trotman at their annual dinner in June.
MAY 14, 2015 -- The American Jewish Committee endorses the East Ramapo oversight legislation. A-5355/S-3821 “is an important step in healing the rifts that divide the community by requiring the monitor to attend to the needs of all students residing in the district and will also guarantee that the East Ramapo School District will provide its students with the education to which they are entitled by law,” said Marc Stern, the General Counsel for the American Jewish Committee.
MAY 12, 2015 -- The New York City Bar Association issued a legislative report in support of East Ramapo oversight, indicating that students in East Ramapo have not received a sound and basic education, that the board has neglected its fiduciary responsibilities, and that oversight legislation is appropriately scoped.
MAY 11, 2015 -- The New York State School Boards Association announces that it is "encouraged by the fact that the legislation respects the democratic process" and will not oppose the bill.
FEBRUARY 2015 -- Rockland County's legislators introduce a bill to the New York State Legislature, calling for state oversight of the East Ramapo Central School District.
We are a growing coalition of East Ramapo alumni and allies advocating an excellent education for public school students.
Help get out the vote across East Ramapo. Your simple donation would allow us to buy mailers, lawn signs, doorknockers and other critical supplies to communicate with the public.
Donate here today: https://eastramapotogether.wordpress.com/donate-to-the-cause/
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Bánffy Katalin Lyceum, the predecessor of Varga Katalin Grammar School was founded in 1930, and originally constituted an eight-grade secondary school for girls. It acquired its present name at the beginning of the fifties, and became co-educational in the sixties.
Varga Katalin Grammar School is for students of 14-19 and our prime aim is to prepare them for higher education in any field of knowledge. Our institution has a long-established reputation based on its open and colourful atmosphere and the students’ achievements.
The independent selective subject experiment has become the programme of the development of different skills and talents since 1971.
In 1977-1978 the school – uniquely in Hungary – served as a venue of a UNESCO research.
In 1986 the school was charged with the task of helping the post-graduate training of the teachers in the county as a base-school and with this we have provided an opportunity for the experts who have been interested to get to know our special school system.
The English-Hungarian Bilingual Programme started in 1988 is a unique programme of our school, to the national acknowledgement of which the achievements of our students have contributed greatly. The objective of the programme is the acquisition of a high level of English. For this sake students acquire professional vocabulary in Mathematics, Physics, Biology and History by being taught these subjects in English by Hungarian teachers who have received an American teaching experience with the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Scholarship.
The Mathematics – English Programme has a double objective: the acquisition of safe mathematics and foreign language basic knowledge during the first two years of education, and preparation for higher education in the field of the choice of students during the last two years of education.
The Arany János Talent Development Programme was started int he year 2000. With this the school system of the existing talent and personality development was extended and a chance was given to the young people living in small settlements to get admitted to our school, where after the special development programme of the first preparation year they can meet the ’Varga’ requirements of continuing their studies at universities and colleges.
In the 2008/2009 academic year a new educational programme is started: the general talent development programme in 4 modules. Besides the compulsory subject lessons there is an offer of
4 modules for students to choose from in 2 lessons per week: arts and practical communication, international relations, mathematics-physics and biology-chemistry. Students learn the modules for
4 terms based on their choice. There is an opportunity to change their decision at the end of every term.
In Varga Katalin Grammar School students can choose from 5 foreign languages. Besides learning English, German and French there is an opportunity to learn Russian and Spanish, the latter one within the framework of a course organised by the foundation of our school.
Special opportunities of talent development are provided by extra-curricular activities including the drama club, the poem reading circle, the arts club, the choir, the ’Vargánya’ student magazine,the film club or the talent show. We strongly believe that participation in such activities enhance our students’ academic achievements.
Sports and being fit have a great role in our school life. We have excellent athletes in table tennis, foot-minton, tennis, mini golf, kayaking, canoing, rowing, athletics, swimming, fitness but we are successful in team games such as basketball, handball, football and volleyball as well. Skiing camps, boating tours and the natural science field trips are very popular.
The international student exchange programmes have a long tradition in our school. Hosting foreign guests, travelling abroad provides a special opportunity for our students and teachers to discover other cultures and to become the ambassadors of our school and home town as well.
Our main objective is preparation for higher education and during this process we focus on the students’ personality development.
Our achievements are related to the performance of the above-mentioned objectives. That is why the ’Secondary School League Table’ and some prominent achievements on the national level shown by other surveys are important for us.
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Sponsored By: SVA Plumb Financial
Below is a brief history of the Verona Lacrosse Club including the number of teams at each age level by year. The club was loosly founded in 2001 with almost no competition in the area or statewide. Since then, the club growth has been increasing steadily every year with kids flocking to the sport due to the compelling play of the game. The Verona Lacrosse Club has been a leader in the promotion of the sport locally and statewide, with club members having a hand in the creation of MALA (Madison Area Lacrosse Association), WLF (Wisconsin Lacrosse Federation) and the addition of Girls lacrosse in the state. The club will continue to grow and foster new and high quality programs due in part to the many volunteer parents who have helped the club build facilities, participated and guided the club by serving on the Board, Coach our youth or simply volunteering to make the game fun and interesting for all who participate.
The table below shows regstration data back as far as we have it, showing the total number of registered players by year:
Club Player Registrations by Year
Number of teams by age level by year
2001 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
2004 1 1** 0 0 0 0 0 0
2007 1 1 1 1* 0 1 1 0 0
* - 4 graders included
** - 5th and 6th graders included
Year Boys
JV Girls
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The God Delusion By Richard Dawkins
On this page... (hide)
FROM CHAPTER 7: The "Good" Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist
FROM CHAPTER EIGHT: What's wrong with religion? Why be so hostile?
The God Delusion
Also see Main/WhatUseIsReligionByRichardDawkins.
NEWSNIGHT BOOK CLUB
In The God Delusion, the scientist Richard Dawkins sets out to attack God "in all his forms".
He believes that the rise of religious fundamentalism is dividing people around the world, while the dispute between "intelligent design" and Darwinism "is seriously undermining and restricting the teaching of science".
by Richard Dawkins
There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America's boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as - to use the contemporary jargon - a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through religiously (the adverb is used in its metaphoric sense but with an eye to its origin), encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find - I can put it no more gently - obnoxious.
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed. Bishop Spong, by the way, is a nice example of a liberal bishop whose beliefs are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable to the majority of those who call themselves Christians. A British counterpart is Richard Holloway, recently retired as Bishop of Edinburgh. Bishop Holloway even describes himself as a 'recovering Christian'. I had a public discussion with him in Edinburgh, which was one of the most stimulating and interesting encounters I have had.
Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.
Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don't take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is 'morality flying by the seat of its pants', so is the other. In any case, despite the good intentions of the sophisticated theologian, a frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures, including the story of Noah, literally. According to Gallup, they include approximately 50 per cent of the US electorate. Also, no doubt, many of those Asian holy men who blamed the 2004 tsunami not on a plate tectonic shift but on human sins, ranging from drinking and dancing in bars to breaking some footling sabbath rule. Steeped in the story of Noah, and ignorant of all except biblical learning, who can blame them? Their whole education has led them to view natural disasters as bound up with human affairs, paybacks for human misdemeanours rather than anything so impersonal as plate tectonics. By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance!
When I interviewed for television the Reverend Michael Bray, a prominent American anti-abortion activist, I asked him why evangelical Christians were so obsessed with private sexual inclinations such as homosexuality, which didn't interfere with anybody else's life. His reply invoked something like self-defence. Innocent citizens are at risk of becoming collateral damage when God chooses to strike a town with a natural disaster because it houses sinners. In 2005, the fine city of New Orleans was catastrophically flooded in the aftermath of a hurricane, Katrina. The Reverend Pat Robertson, one of America's best-known televangelists and a former presidential candidate, was reported as blaming the hurricane on a lesbian comedian who happened to live in New Orleans.* You'd think an omnipotent God would adopt a slightly more targeted approach to zapping sinners: a judicious heart attack, perhaps, rather than the wholesale destruction of an entire city just because it happened to be the domicile of one lesbian comedian.
In November 2005, the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania voted off their local school board the entire slate of fundamentalists who had brought the town notoriety, not to say ridicule, by attempting to enforce the teaching of 'intelligent design'. When Pat Robertson heard that the fundamentalists had been democratically defeated at the ballot, he offered a stern warning to Dover:
I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city, and don't wonder why he hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin, and I'm not saying they will. But if they do, just remember you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, then don't ask for his help, because he might not be there.
Pat Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who today hold power and influence in the United States. In the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Noah equivalent, chosen to be spared with his family because he was uniquely righteous, was Abraham's nephew Lot. Two male angels were sent to Sodom to warn Lot to leave the city before the brimstone arrived. Lot hospitably welcomed the angels into his house, whereupon all the men of Sodom gathered around and demanded that Lot should hand the angels over so that they could (what else?) sodomize them: 'Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them' (Genesis 19: 5).
Yes, 'know' has the Authorized Version's usual euphemistic meaning, which is very funny in the context. Lot's gallantry in refusing the demand suggests that God might have been onto something when he singled him out as the only good man in Sodom. But Lot's halo is tarnished by the terms of his refusal: 'I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof' (Genesis 19: 7-8).
Whatever else this strange story might mean, it surely tells us something about the respect accorded to women in this intensely religious culture. As it happened, Lot's bargaining away of his daughters' virginity proved unnecessary, for the angels succeeded in repelling the marauders by miraculously striking them blind. They then warned Lot to decamp immediately with his family and his animals, because the city was about to be destroyed. The whole household escaped, with the exception of Lot's unfortunate wife, whom the Lord turned into a pillar of salt because she committed the offence - comparatively mild, one might have thought - of looking over her shoulder at the fireworks display.
Lot's two daughters make a brief reappearance in the story. After their mother was turned into a pillar of salt, they lived with their father in a cave up a mountain. Starved of male company, they decided to make their father drunk and copulate with him. Lot was beyond noticing when his elder daughter arrived in his bed or when she left, but he was not too drunk to impregnate her. The next night the two daughters agreed it was the younger one's turn. Again Lot was too drunk to notice, and he impregnated her too (Genesis 19: 31-6). If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
It is unclear whether the story, which originated at DateLineHollywood.comis true. Whether true or not, it is widely believed, no doubt because it is entirely typical of utterances by evangelical clergy, including Robertson, on disasters such as Katrina. See, for example, www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/9/emw281940.htm. The website that says the Katrina story is untrue (www.snopes.com/katrina/ satire/robertson.asp) also quotes Robertson as saying, of an earlier Gay Pride march in Orlando, Florida, 'I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you.'
In July 2005, London was the victim of a concerted suicide bomb attack: three bombs in the subway and one in a bus. Not as bad as the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and certainly not as unexpected (indeed, London had been braced for just such an event ever since Blair volunteered us as unwilling side-kicks in Bush's invasion of Iraq), nevertheless the London explosions horrified Britain. The newspapers were filled with agonized appraisals of what drove four young men to blow themselves up and take a lot of innocent people with them. The murderers were British citizens, cricket-loving, well-mannered, just the sort of young men whose company one might have enjoyed.
Why did these cricket-loving young men do it? Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, or their kamikaze counterparts in Japan, or their Tamil Tiger counterparts in Sri Lanka, these human bombs had no expectation that their bereaved families would be lionized, looked after or supported on martyrs' pensions. On the contrary, their relatives in some cases had to go into hiding. One of the men wantonly widowed his pregnant wife and orphaned his toddler. The action of these four young men has been nothing short of a disaster not just for themselves and their victims, but for their families and for the whole Muslim community in Britain, which now faces a backlash. Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people. Once again, Sam Harris put the point with percipient bluntness, taking the example of the Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (who had nothing to do with the London bombings, by the way). Why would anyone want to destroy the World Trade Center and everybody in it? To call bin Laden 'evil' is to evade our rec...
What Use Is Religion? by Richard Dawkins
Value of a Library - In Its Read or Unread Books?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Interview by Russ Roberts
Tags: Atheism | Books | Philosophy | Psychology | Richard Dawkins
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Frost & Sullivan Names Manhattan Associates as Asia Pacific WMS Provider of the Year 2009
Success in new and existing markets across Asia Pacific pay off with second regional accolade this year
Leading consulting company Frost & Sullivan has named Manhattan Associates 'Warehouse Management Systems Provider of the Year in Asia Pacific for 2009'. The announcement was made at The Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific Transportation & Logistics Awards banquet. The event is held annually to recognise outstanding performance by companies in the transportation & logistics industry in Asia Pacific.
The accolade is further recognition of the progress Manhattan Associates has made in the region over recent years having been declared 'Asia's leading WMS supplier' by leading industry analyst firm ARC Advisory Group in May this year.
Short-listed companies are evaluated based on actual market performance indicators including revenue growth, market share and growth in market share, leadership in product innovation, breadth of products and solutions, major customer acquisitions, and business and market strategy. Benchmarked against the highest standards of measurement criteria, the recipients of the awards represent the best-in-class in Asia Pacific.
Mr. Kavan Mukhtyar, Partner at Frost & Sullivan, said, "The awards seek to recognise companies for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance."
Jeff Baum, Manhattan Associates' senior vice president, International (Asia Pacific), commented. "We are proud of the commitment that our employees, partners and customers have all shown in helping us to be successful in the Asia Pacific region and we have them to thank for winning this prestigious award. Over the last five years, we've made significant investments in building our team and partner network, localising our solutions and ensuring customers are successful with our distribution management applications across this very diverse region. With 150 associates, a growing partner community and 200 distribution sites managed by our solutions, we offer a scale advantage for our global and local customers across the region. We look forward to continuing to work closely with existing clients and welcoming new ones as we look to expand our customer community in the future and help optimise their supply chains."
Aberle Software GmbH
»The meeting provides a good mixture of the sharing of experiences and the latest trends so that participants can examine their own business strategy and also look to the future.«
Dr. Jochen Fuhrmann, AEB GmbH
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Ford Finalizes Financing Package
Friday, December 15, 2006; 11:08 AM
DEARBORN, Mich. -- Ford Motor Co. finalized a $23.4 billion financing package on Friday to fuel its restructuring and cover expected losses in its automotive operations during the next two years.
Ford, under pressure from rising costs and competition, expects to burn through $17 billion in cash from 2007 to 2009. The automaker lost $7 billion during the first nine months of the year and has said it does not expect to return to profitability until 2009.
Save & Share Article What's This?
Ford said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the financing included a $7 billion term loan, $4.95 billion in convertible notes and a credit line of nearly $11.5 billion.
Ford said last month that it would get about $18 billion in financing, using its domestic plants and other automotive assets as collateral, to protect itself against a recession or other unanticipated events. The No. 2 U.S. automaker last week raised its new borrowing capacity to as much as $23 billion.
It marked the first time the company has used assets such as plants to secure financing.
About 38,000 of the company's hourly workers have signed up for buyouts and early retirement packages as part of its "Way Forward" restructuring plan that includes plans to shutter 16 plants.
Ford Motor Co.: http://www.ford.com
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Obama issues Pride proclamation
From a White House news release
THE WHITE HOUSE, Office of the Press Secretary, For Immediate Release June 1, 2012
LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PRIDE MONTH, 2012
From generation to generation, ordinary Americans have led a proud and inexorable march toward freedom, fairness, and full equality under the law -- not just for some, but for all. Ours is a heritage forged by those who organized, agitated, and advocated for change; who wielded love stronger than hate and hope more powerful than insult or injury; who fought to build for themselves and their families a Nation where no one is a second-class citizen, no one is denied basic rights, and all of us are free to live and love as we see fit.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT ) community has written a proud chapter in this fundamentally American story. From brave men and women who came out and spoke out, to union and faith leaders who rallied for equality, to activists and advocates who challenged unjust laws and marched on Washington, LGBT Americans and allies have achieved what once seemed inconceivable. This month, we reflect on their enduring legacy, celebrate the movement that has made progress possible, and recommit to securing the fullest blessings of freedom for all Americans.
Since I took office, my Administration has worked to broaden opportunity, advance equality, and level the playing field for LGBT people and communities. We have fought to secure justice for all under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and we have taken action to end housing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. We expanded hospital visitation rights for LGBT patients and their loved ones, and under the Affordable Care Act, we ensured that insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage to someone just because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Because we understand that LGBT rights are human rights, we continue to engage with the international community in promoting and protecting the rights of LGBT persons around the world. Because we repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans can serve their country openly, honestly, and without fear of losing their jobs because of whom they love. And because we must treat others the way we want to be treated, I personally believe in marriage equality for same-sex couples.
More remains to be done to ensure every single American is treated equally, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Moving forward, my Administration will continue its work to advance the rights of LGBT Americans. This month, as we reflect on how far we have come and how far we have yet to go, let us recall that the progress we have made is built on the words and deeds of ordinary Americans. Let us pay tribute to those who came before us, and those who continue their work today; and let us rededicate ourselves to a task that is unending -- the pursuit of a Nation where all are equal, and all have the full and unfettered opportunity to pursue happiness and live openly and freely.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2012 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon the people of the United States to eliminate prejudice everywhere it exists, and to celebrate the great diversity of the American people.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this
first day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand twelve, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-sixth.
WorldPride crowds estimated at 5M 2019-07-10 - New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that approximately 5 million people attended WorldPride in New York City over the June 29-30 ...
PRIDE 2019 Esteem Awards honor local, national Black LGBTQ communities 2019-07-10 - The 12th Annual Esteem Awards paid tribute to 11 individuals and organizations Sunday for their contributions to the LGBTQ community. Held in conjunction ...
PRIDE 2019 Prince Poppycock entertains at Pride event 2019-07-10 - Chicago's Pride celebration began June 28 at the Center on Halsted with a performance by Prince Poppycock, the opera-singing entertainer known for his ...
WORLD Canadian school law, Mexico City parade, Indian rape statute 2019-07-10 - The United Conservative government of new Alberta Premier Jason Kenneypromoted by some on the Canadian right as a model for the nationhas passed ...
Small Illinois town holds inaugural Pride parade 2019-07-03 - In Ford County, Illinois, the small town of Paxton recently held its inaugural Pride parade, The Ford County Record noted. More than 150 ...
WORLD Librarian's death, Baja OKs marriage equality, parade news 2019-07-02 - The National Human Rights Commission of Myanmar will investigate the death of gay librarian Kyaw Zin Win, Gay Star News noted. The librarian, ...
NATIONAL Parade protests, trans billboards, 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' 2019-07-02 - Protesters brought the San Francisco Pride Parade to a halt for 50 minutes shortly after it started June 30, lying down in Market ...
Shedd premieres 'LGBTQ+ Pride Night' 2019-07-01 - On June 14, Shedd Aquarium host a special Pride Night after hours. The evening included pop-up animal encounters, a live set from Slo ...
Pride South Side debuts over Pride weekend 2019-07-01 - The first Pride South Side was held the weekend of June 28-30 at various locations, giving residents and visitors an alternative or additional ...
Progress Bar owner agrees to activist demands 2019-07-01 - The owner of Progress Bar in Boystown has agreed to a number of demands issued by a coalition of community activists following accusations ...
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Tag: 上海419论坛桑拿
After a half-month visit to China, a team from the IMFled by
Asia and Pacific Department Deputy Director Kenneth Kang, summarized that “China can play an important role and wou
ld benefit from further opening up and other structural reforms that enhance competition.”
The previously issued policy is sufficient to stabilize growth by 2020, desp
ite the recent US tariff hike, according to the fund’s report. “No additional policy ea
sing is needed, provided there are no further increases in tariffs or a significant slowdown in growth.”
Only if the trade tensions further escalate and threatChina’s Dragon Boat Fes
tival, or Duanwu, is just around the corner. Also called the Double Fifth Festival, the hol
iday, which falls on June 7 this year, is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar.en economic and
financial stability, additional policy easing, such as fiscal expansion, could be used to stabilize the economy, it said.
www.7893396.cn
All-women quartet gives Peking Opera a unique touch
For the first time in the history of Peking Opera, four women recently performed a
piece in the China National Peking Opera Company production, Stories of the Red Army.
The Peking Opera performance was one of the 51 productions showcased at the 12th China Art Festival in Shanghai.
Two performances took place at Shanghai’s Majestic Theater on May 27 and 28.
For the show, the CNPOC brought together three stories based on events during the Red Army’s epi
c Long March (1934-36), to create the modern Peking Opera, which premiered in Beijing on Aug 1, 2018.
“They are stories about the resilience and bravery of the Red Army during the Long March,” says Song Chen, head of the CNPOC.
www.102xe.cn
ale Zhang, managing director of Shanghai-based con
nsultancy Automotive Foresight, said SEAT’s smaller cars will help its parent company to reach custo
mers in China’s smaller cities, where electric cars built on Volkswagen’s own platforms would be less affordable.
Volkswagen, as well as its subsidiaries from Audi to Porsche, plan to deliver aro
und 1.5 million electrified vehicles, most of them pure electric cars, in China by 2025.
It also expects global sales of electrified vehicles will total 22 million by 2028, and half of them will be produced in China.
China overtook the United States as the largest producer and market of new energy vehicles in 2015.
The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers expected sales of su
ch vehicles to reach at least 1.6 million this year, up from 1.2 million in 2018.
qianpadaf.com
Before his retirement, Wang irrigated farmland for de
nd for decades and witnessed local farmers’ continuous battles against sandstorms.
“It didn’t just feel like a black storm, it was as if the whole desert was approachi
ng,” recalls Liu Conghui, a writer who was born, and still lives, near the farm Wang once worked.
As the menacing sandstorms made the area increasingly inhospitable, Liu’s whole community planned to up sticks.
To restore the local ecosystem, the Chinese government launched
a 10.7 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) project in 2001. A set of measures were adopted such as sav
ing water, converting farmland into grassland, providing treatment for dry riverways and building dams. In addition to t
hose measures, industrial and agricultural use of water in cities and counties along the river was limited.
Over the past two decades, Xinjiang has infused 7.7 billion cubic meters of water into
the dry trunk stream of the lower reaches of the Tarim River in 19 rounds of water diversion.
shidaikangfuyiyuan.cn
Xi calls for co-existence of various civilizationselivered a key
President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote speech at the opening of the Conference on Dialogue of Asia
n Civilizations. With the theme of “Exchanges and mutual learning among Asian civilizations and a com
munity with a shared future,” the conference aims to deepen cooperation among Asian countries. Here are the highlights:
Humanity needs cultural strength to address challenges ahead
Humanity needs cultural strength, besides economic and techn
ological strength, to cope with common challenges and head toward a bright future.
The intensifying global challenges humanity is facing now require concerted effort from countries across the world.
Asian civilizations write ‘brilliant chapter’ in human civilization
Asian civilizations have written a brilliant chapter in human civilization.
Being one of the earliest human settlements and a major birthp
lace of human civilization, Asia takes up one third of the total land on Earth, has two th
irds of the global population, and consists of 47 countries and more than 1,000 ethnic groups.
xpwaod.cn
Santarita said a similar concept can also be found in other
Asian countries, citing the Philippines’ compadrazgo and Indonesia’s bapakism as examples.
Compadrazgo, a Spanish word that literally translates to “co-fatherhood”, is based
on a kinship ritual that is formed after a child gets baptized into the Roman Catholic faith.
For the predominantly Catholic and close-knit Philippine society, t
he godfather (known as the padrino) is part of one’s extended family and is expected to he
lp and protect his godchild. The godchild is expected to respect and be loyal to the padrino.
Bapakism is derived from the Indonesian word for “father”. When us
ed in Indonesian business, bapakism demands great respect and obedience to one’s su
perior. The manager in his role as the company’s bapak is expected to look after and care for his employees.
Although Asian values are steeped in an ancient culture and tradition, it was only in t
he 1990s that this concept drew global attention. This was partly due to Asian leaders like the la
ashtvt.com
Through 10 years of dedication to quality journalism and
technological innovation, the app now is a market leader with over 20 million downloads.W
ith eight propellers stirring in the air and the motor roaring, a flying vehicle successfully carried its inventor Zhao
Deli, who was dressed in a black suit complete with a helmet, goggles and elbow and knee protectors, into the air.
Over 500 news media industry executives, journalists, sponsors and suppliers attended the 2019 event.
The Guardian walked away with the top prize.
Besides its accurate, timely and engaging news reporting, the app also
provides the go-to source for foreigners interested in travel, study or work in China.
“One judge particularly enjoyed the intelligent algorithm basis of the newsfe
ed. The China Daily app has enormous scale, is easy to use and is very reader friendly,” said the judging panel.
But no Australian government has used such kind
of talk since 1972. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said his government is “ab
solutely committed to the long-term constructive partnership with China based on shared values, esp
ecially mutual respect”. And Labor Party leader Bill Shorten has said: “Preemptively framing China as a stra
tegic threat isn’t a sufficient response to its role and increasing influence in our region…”
But Hamilton and his supporters such as retired academic John Fitz
gerald insist on seeing China as Australia’s “enemy”. See China as “our enemy” and the next step i
s that Australians with family links to China can be seen as potential traitors. That is what Hamilton does by saying th
ey are ready to “rise up”. His only evidence? Two friends of his with Chinese backgrounds told him so.
jswrh.cn
© 2019 Tara
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Sylvester Stallone Accused of Sexually Assaulting Teen Girl in 1980s
Britt Hayes
Dimitrios Kambouris, Getty Images
Allegations of sexual misconduct and assault continue to mount against Hollywood men and politicians in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Following this morning’s allegations against Senator Al Franken, another prominent and beloved figure has been accused of sexual assault: Sylvester Stallone. According to a recently unearthed police report, the iconic action star and his bodyguard allegedly raped a 16-year-old girl in the 1980s.
The Daily Mail obtained a copy of the report, filed by an unnamed teenage girl in Las Vegas in the late ’80s. Stallone was in town to film Over the Top when he met the 16-year-old and invited her back to his room at the former Las Vegas Hilton hotel in July 1986. According to the report, the victim proceeded to engage in consensual sex with Stallone, but when the then-40-year-old actor urged his bodyguard Michael “Mike” De Luca to join them, she became “very uncomfortable.”
Feeling “intimidated” and as if she had “no choice,” the girl relented and says that she was forced to perform sex acts with Stallone and De Luca. Las Vegas police reveal that the victim ultimately dropped the charges because she felt “humiliated and ashamed” and “scared” about the traumatic experience. After the incident, Stallone threatened the victim by saying that if she told anyone about the alleged assault, “they would have to beat her head in.” Both men were married at the time.
John Samolovitch, a retired Las Vegas detective sergeant, was the head of the sexual assault unit when the report was filed in 1986. Samolovitch confirmed the authenticity of the document as a “true copy of the original report.”
About a year after the report was filed in Las Vegas, Stallone’s half-sister, Toni-Ann Filiti, threatened to sue the actor. Filiti claimed the actor sexually assaulted and raped her multiple times over the course of several years. Despite denying his half-sister’s allegations, Stallone reached a settlement with Filiti, the terms of which required him to pay a lump sum of $2 million and a monthly stipend of $16,666 for the remainder of her life. Filiti passed away in 2012.
Update: Stallone’s representative has denied the allegation of assault involving the 16-year-old girl. In a statement to TMZ, the actor’s spokesperson said:
This is a ridiculous, categorically false story. No one was ever aware of this story until it was published today, including Mr. Stallone. At no time was Mr. Stallone ever contacted by authorities or anyone else regarding this matter.
Articles About Bryan Singer’s Alleged Assaults Disappear Along With His Twitter Account
Source: Sylvester Stallone Accused of Sexually Assaulting Teen Girl in 1980s
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Texas Tech Baseball Wins First Two Games Against Michigan [PHOTOS]
Rob Snyder
Kylee Morris Photography, KKAM.com
#13 Texas Tech Baseball started a three-game series against the Michigan Wolverines on Thursday at Rip Griffin Park, and the Red Raiders have won the first two games.
Thursday's game started out slowly, with neither team plating a run before the fourth inning. Michigan took a 1-0 lead into the fifth inning and that's when Texas Tech was able to bust the game open.
The Red Raiders scored six runs in the fifth inning en route to a 11-2 win over Michigan.
Brian Klein, Cole Stilwell and Max Marusak all went 2-for-4 from the plate, driving in a total of five runs between the trio.
On the mound, Micha Dallas (2-0) pitched five innings, struck out seven and only gave up one earned run to earn his second win of the season.
Friday's game was moved up to 4pm due to the chance of severe weather in the Lubbock area, and the early start didn't hamper the Red Raiders. Texas Tech jumped out to a 1-0 lead after the first inning, and then used five runs in the sixth, and three runs in the seventh to beat Michigan 10-3.
Saturday's game starts at 2pm at Rip Griffin Park, and then Texas Tech will play Stetson on Sunday at 2pm and Monday at 1pm. Also, Michigan and Stetson will play against each other Saturday evening at 6:30pm at Rip Griffin Park.
Texas Tech Baseball vs Michigan March 21, 2019
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2001-02Top 16Round 2
Scavolini Pesaro 87
FC Barcelona 88
March 06, 2002 CET: 00:00
Local time: 00:00 BPA PALAS
A Sarunas Jasikevicius jump shot on the run at the buzzer lifted Barcelona to a thrilling, and possibly life-preserving, 87-88 Group E road win over Scavolini in Pesaro on Wednesday. After having trailed by up to 10 points during most of the game, a slow fourth-quarter comeback put the visitors in a position to decide the game and their immediate future in Group E. Jasikevicius did not flinch in taking that chance, as he raced the length of the court with the final possession, stopped inside the three-point arc and popped in the winner. The shot raised Barcelona's record to 1-1, while Scavolini drops to 0-2. The frontcourt duo of Arturas Karnisovas and Efthimios Rentzias led the winners with 15 points each. Jasikevicius added 11, Roberto Dueñas and J.C. Navarro 10 each. For the losers, Melvin Booker netted 28 points. Joseph Blair contributed 14 in his Euroleague re-appearance, and both Marko Tusek and Larry Middleton had 13 points.
Scavolini started with Silvio Gigena at small forward and Middleton scored the opening three-pointer at 4-1. The hosts played aggressively on defense and tried to open the court using long-distance shots. After just 3 minutes, Roberto Dueñas had already picked up two fouls and had to take a seat. Barcelona arrived early at the bonus and Scavolini took advantage of this opportunity but found themselves in foul trouble as well before the midpoint of the period. The first Spanish advantage came on an Efthimios Rentzias three to bring it to 12-13. The game was fast and the offensive talent outshined that of the defenses, which made for a great show for the fans. The period ended in a 23-23 tie with Booker and Karnisovas both posting 7 points.
The second quarter opened with Navarro on fire while Andrea Pecile committed his third foul, but the duo of Booker-Middleton sparked a 5-0 run that gave a 32-27 lead to the hosts. Blair was dominant in the paint and Barcelona brought Dueñas back on the floor because young Anderson Varejao was just not ready for this kind of fight inside. Michele Maggioli slam dunked the ball off a pass by Blair which gave Scavolini a 10-point, 39-29 advantage. The game highlighted the best of the two offenses and every defensive mistake was punished with a basket. Barcelona came back to within 46-41 but Scavolini managed to distance itself a little further before the halftime buzzer as they entered the locker rooms with a nine-point lead, 50-41. Scavolini had three players already in double figures, led by Booker's 14. Blair and Middleton each had 10. Barcelona was led in scoring by Karnisovas's 10 and followed by 6 from Navarro.
The third period started at full speed with both teams on fire. Booker and Karnisovas were the protagonists of the opening minutes with the latter well supported by Dueñas. Middleton stopped short the Spaniards' first run with a three-pointer that gave Scavolini a 61-52 lead. Booker scored his 19th point of the game as he extended his team's margin to 11 points, 65-54, midway through the period. Barcelona aligned in a box-and-one so that Booker was guarded by Navarro, but Scavolini broke through the box and took a 68-54 advantage. Barcelona replied with bombs from behind the arc but Scavolini matched them as the home team managed to mantain their double-figure advantage. Barcelona in the last minute used a zone-press to break the home team fastbreak and immediately stole the ball. After a timeout, Scavolini showed good organization and finished the period up 74-64.
Barcelona started the final period tougher on defense and made an 0-4 run, but Maggioli, again assisted by Blair, made a three-point play to keep the 11-point advantage at 79-68. But Barcelona stayed in the game and forced Middleton into committing his fifth foul with 5:22 to go. Two consecutive three-pointers by Rentzias gave Barcelona their smallest deficit since very early in the game at 81-76. Scavolini then missed four free throws (two by Gigena and two by Tusek) and Barcelona arrived at 81-78 on a Navarro alley-oop. Suddenly, it was a game again. Barcelona continued to use its zone press and Scavolini had Booker working to draw fouls and earn opportunities from the line. He converted 6 for 6 for an 87-82 lead. Rentzias then scored on an alley-oop and Pecile was called for a charge which allowed Jasikevicius to bring it within one at 87-86. Immeidately following, Rentzias missed the go-ahead shot. With just 8.7 seconds to go, Jasikevicius hauled in a loose ball at the Barcelona defensive end and flew down the length of the court. He pulled up a couple of feet inside the arc on the right side and released, at the buzzer, the game-winning shot that sealed the come from behind, 87-88 victory.
Romano Petitti, Pesaro
Referees: REMS, IZTOK; JUNGEBRAND, CARL; MPOTITSIS, NIKOS
Scavolini Pesaro 23 27 24 13
FC Barcelona 23 18 23 24
End of Quarter
Scavolini Pesaro
4 BERIC, MIROSLAV 17:00 5 1/3 1/3 1 1 2 1
5 BOOKER, MELVIN 37:00 28 3/7 3/8 13/14 3 3 3 1 4 1 1 9 28
8 GIGENA, SILVIO 23:00 7 1/1 1/2 2/4 3 4 7 1 5 2 7
10 MIDDLETON, LARRY 26:00 13 1/2 3/7 2/2 3 3 1 2 1 5 3 13
11 PECILE, ANDREA 17:00 0/2 0/2 2 2 2 3 4 -7
13 TUSEK, MARKO 30:00 13 2/5 2/4 3/6 2 3 5 1 1 1 1 3 4 11
14 MAGGIOLI, MICHELE 17:00 7 3/3 0/1 1/1 2 5 7 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 15
15 BLAIR, JOSEPH 33:00 14 5/10 4/4 2 7 9 3 1 1 2 3 4 24
Team 1 2 3 3 6
Totals 200:00 87 16/33 10/27 25/31 12 27 39 12 9 11 4 4 23 25 98
Head coach: PILLASTRINI, STEFANO
Min: Minutes played; Pts: Points; 2FG M-A: 2-point Field Goals (Made-Attempted); 3FG M-A: 3-point Field Goals (Made-Attempted); FT M-A: Free Throws (Made-Attempted); Rebounds: O (Offensive), D (Defensive), T (Total); As: Assists; St: Steals; To: Turnovers; Bl: Blocks (Fv: In Favor / Ag: Against); Fouls: Cm (Commited), Rv (Received); PIR: Performance Index Rating
5 RODRIGUEZ, NACHO 20:00 8 2/4 1/1 1/2 1 1 3 2 2 9
7 DE LA FUENTE, RODRIGO 21:00 4 1/2 2/2 2 2 2 1 2 2 6
9 OKULAJA, ADEMOLA 28:00 8 1/4 2/6 1 6 7 2 1 1 3 2 9
10 DIGBEU, ALAIN 19:00 3 0/1 3/4 2 2 3 1 1 5 4 5
11 NAVARRO, JUAN CARLOS 19:00 10 4/5 0/3 2/2 1 3 2 7 15
12 DUENAS, ROBERTO 13:00 10 5/8 1 3 4 1 1 2 7
13 JASIKEVICIUS, SARUNAS 14:00 11 3/4 1/3 2/3 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 3 12
14 RENTZIAS, EFTHYMIOS 26:00 15 3/8 3/8 2 2 1 1 1 2 4 2
16 VAREJAO, ANDERSON 13:00 4 2/4 1 1 2 1 1 2 3 3
19 KARNISOVAS, ARTURAS 27:00 15 3/4 2/2 3/4 2 3 5 1 1 2 3 19
Totals 200:00 88 24/44 9/23 13/17 10 24 34 11 12 9 4 4 25 23 96
Head coach: GARCIA RENESES, AITO
This game has no play by play yet
Head Coaches
PILLASTRINI, STEFANO
"It's the first time this season that we are not able to win a tight game. But tonight we didn't have the tranquility we had some weeks ago and the 0 of 4 from the free throw line in a decisive moment is a sign of this. We were really close to an amazing achievement. We are playing at the top European level and most of us are debuting at this level and I'm happy for what are doing. We are in the Top 16 and tonight we deserved to win the game for our quality."
GARCIA RENESES, AITO
"We were very lucky because we didn't trust in the victory. Scavolini dominated the game and played great, especially Booker, but we had the luck to stay in the game until the end, to find the final shot of Jasikevicius."
GIGENA, SILVIO
"We played very well but the last basket damned us. It was an unexpected loss, as we played an incredible game for 38 minutes. Then, missing shots and stupid turnovers gave Barcelona the opporunity to come back and find the morale to trust in the victory."
2019-20 2018-19 2017-18 2016-17 2015-16 2014-15 2013-14 2012-13 2011-12 2010-11 2009-10 2008-09 2007-08 2006-07 2005-06 2004-05 2003-04 2002-03 2001-02 2000-01
REGULAR SEASON TOP 16 FINAL FOUR
Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4 Round 5 Round 6
March 6 00:00 CET LIVE FINAL
Benetton Basket 96
Skipper Bologna 90
Efes Pilsen 63
Real Madrid 67
Kinder Bologna 72
Ural Great 61
Olympiacos 75
AEK Athens 69
Panathinaikos 85
Union Olimpija 67
CSKA Moscow 86
Ulker 80
Maccabi Elite 77
Tau Ceramica 78
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November 23, 2010 / 4:26 PM / 9 years ago
Ethiopian PM eyes Chinese, Indian investment boost
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia is hoping to attract more investment from Chinese, Indian and Turkish companies as part of efforts to industrialise its largely agriculture-based economy, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said.
Though still one of the world’s poorest countries, Ethiopia says it has posted double-digit growth rates for six years in a row making it Africa’s fastest growing non-oil producer.
“Our hope is that industry will grow faster than agriculture over the next five years,” Meles told Reuters in an interview. “We will maintain an export-led industrialisation strategy. The main approach will be to try to attract investment.”
Meles said his government would target Chinese, Indian and Turkish firms who wanted to invest in the country’s fledgling textile and leather industries.
“We expect more investment from Turkey,” Meles said. “We also expect more investment in the textile sector from Indian companies. In the leather industry, a lot of Chinese companies have shown an interest. Some Europeans, too.”
Ethiopia’s new five-year plan, unveiled in August, predicts a “base-case” scenario of 11 percent average annual growth and a “high-case scenario” of 14.9 percent growth for the period.
Meles said the economy would grow this year at between the 11 percent predicted by his finance ministry and a more ambitious 15 percent.
Ethiopia is Africa’s biggest coffee exporter and the world’s fourth largest exporter of sesame. It is also one of Africa’s biggest potential markets — with a population of 80 million — and most of its people have no telephones or bank accounts.
But Meles stood firm on his long-held position that there would be no liberalisation of telecommunications or banking.
Despite that, the 55-year-old said he hoped talks for Ethiopia to enter the World Trade Organisation, would finish soon: “The negotiations are beginning to pick up momentum now.”
The former rebel said foreign reserves, which fell to $850 million earlier in 2009, had recovered on booming exports.
POWER PLANS
He dismissed concerns that a 16.7 percent devaluation of the Ethiopian birr, the fourth since January 2009, could spur inflation. The year-on-year inflation rate hit 10.6 percent in October — way over the government’s target of single figures.
“The impact of the devaluation programme is going to be a one-off affair because the massive devaluation was a one-off affair. So we believe the average yearly inflation rate will be in the range of 6-7 percent this year,” Meles said.
Inflation in Ethiopia hit a high of 64.2 percent in July 2008. After that peak, the government halted state borrowing and increased bank reserves to drive down the rate and it had been in single digits this year until after the devaluation.
Meles said that power shedding — which the government says cost the Ethiopian economy 1.1 percent of gross domestic product last year — should end when a hydroelectric dam that suffered a tunnel collapse is repaired in three months.
Ethiopia, with ambitions to generate 10,000MW, is building Africa’s biggest hydropower dam and Meles said the country could become a power exporter within two years.
“I think by the end of the five-year plan we’ll be very significant exporters but we should start exporting in a year or two,” he said. “Djibouti will probably the first country to get power supply from Ethiopia.”
Meles rejected claims from the opposition and some foreign analysts that his government inflates growth figures to attract investment.
“Our economic growth is evaluated very carefully by the IMF and they have never said that we have cooked the outturn figures,” Meles said. “They have accepted them as facts. And cooking figures is a very dangerous thing to do.”
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AIM Corporate
FROM HUMBLE BEGININGS TO A MULTINATIONAL GROUP
American Iron & Metal (AIM) is a family-owned, Canada-based company founded in 1936 in Montreal, Quebec. Recognized as one of North America’s most sophisticated metal recyclers, specializing in the recovery and recycling of scrap metal by-products, AIM has evolved into a successful and multifaceted company with a global footprint. The primary reason? An effective and thorough development strategy.
10 MILESTONES IN OUR HISTORY
/ 1936: AIM is founded by Peter Black on Notre-Dame Street East, in Montreal, Quebec.
/ 1963: The company becomes one of the first metal recyclers in the world to build a heated facility, a game changer for improving the working conditions and productivity of the employees.
/ 1973: AIM enters the solder business with the creation of AIM Solder, today known as a leading manufacturer of tin-lead and lead-free solder assembly materials.
/ 1988: The global headquarters are moved to Henri-Bourassa East, in Montreal, to a new site with 100+ acres of land.
/ 1994: Delsan AIM is created through a new partnership that allows AIM to combine its recycling capabilities with decommissioning and demolition expertise.
/ 1999 & 2005: AIM Solder opens an office in Hong Kong and a factory in China, giving the company full coverage in the largest solder-consuming areas of the world.
/ 2000: With its first shredder deployed in Montreal, AIM becomes more competitive on the domestic market and greatly expands its international client base.
/ 2008: AIM purchases SNF Inc. and Pièces d’Autos Kenny Inc. This transaction brings Quebec’s two largest scrap metal recyclers under AIM family umbrella.
/ 2014: Opening of AIM Éco-Centre. After major investments in high-tech machinery, AIM now offers turn-key solutions for construction and demolition waste management.
At American Iron & Metal, we strive to be the industry leader in all our lines of business. How? By providing our customers with top-quality products and services, by being environmentally and socially responsible, and by fostering strong relationships with our employees and business partners while giving back to the community.
/ Community. AIM is proud to support more than 40 different causes and charities each year via partnerships, donations and fundraising events. Whether they involve employee initiatives through local events or larger causes that rally international support, AIM family responds generously.
/ Environment. AIM operates with strict adherence to local and international standards. We recycle all your materials in a responsible and efficient way and ensure the sustainability of the sites. Indeed, AIM boasts a proven track record in environmental waste management that is second to none .
/ Employees. At AIM, we understands that the well-being of our employees is the key factor for our international success. Accordingly, we promote a safe, fair and dynamic work environment that provides excellent training programs and career advancement plans, and maintains the highest safety standards.
Employees company-wide
Locations Around the Globe
years in the business
continents in our footprint
AIM FAMILY
Founder of American Iron & Metal (AIM), Peter Black humbly began his small scrap business on Notre-dame street East in Montreal, back in 1936. Carrying on that proud tradition, his successors Herbert, Ronald and Richard Black have made a commitment to uphold the company’s long-established standards for excellence. Over the years, the Black family and its employees have taken the company to new heights, endowing it with an international footprint and a steady growth in sales revenue.
Herbert Black, Owner & CEO
Ronald Black, Owner & Executive VP
Richard Black, Owner & President, AIM Solder
AIM PHILOSOPHY
At AIM, we are driven by one principle: our commitment to excellence in every aspect of our business. This principle is put into practice by our employees and applied through all our lines of business. The result : our clients know their expectations will not only be met, but quite often exceeded, on every level.
WHY CHOSE US
AIM is a global leader in the metal recycling industry and has evolved into a multifaceted company.
Eco-Centre
Demolition & Decommissioning
Solder Assembly
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Book Review – Defending Morgan by Susan Stoker – 5 Action Packed, Beautiful Heart-Breaking Stars!!!
Posted on 5th March 2019 5th March 2019 by Alison
Defending Morgan by Susan Stoker
5 Action Packed, Beautiful Heart-Breaking Stars!!!
When Arrow and his team are sent on their latest mission, they discover more than they had anticipated. No mission is without it’s surprises and Arrow wasn’t prepared for the strong, intense feelings of protection he’d feel towards Morgan. When they return home, it’s clear Morgan’s life is still in danger. Arrow will risk everything to protect his woman.
Susan Stoker takes us straight into the action with Defending Morgan, no slow and easy start to Arrow and Morgan’s story, she kicks off right in the thick of it and the action in this story does not end there. Susan Stoker truly puts these characters through the wringer, when you think Morgan couldn’t possibly go through more hell, Susan proves us wrong.
Morgan is a strong character, and although she had gone through hell and torture, she still thankfully had a spark of determination about her to not let them win and destroy her completely. She also showed a heart of love, compassion, and kindness towards others, even if it meant risking her own life in the process.
Arrow was amazing, he wasn’t one to shy away from the way he felt, or to put himself out there, he also wasn’t one to push. He was a patient, caring, loving, protective man, who would do anything in his power to protect those he loved and cared for, and he wasn’t without his adorable quirks.
I’m really enjoying the Mountain Mercenaries series from Susan Stoker, she has a talent of thinking up a new and unique trait to each of her characters and plotlines, giving her stories an intriguing twist, that has them standing out from other books.
Defending Morgan can be read as a standalone; however, to fully enjoy this series I’d recommend reading them in order.
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Friday I met with the journalist …
|Published on: Mar 25, 2019|Categories: In The News, Vaccines|
“I believe in vaccination. I trust doctors.”
He was upfront from the beginning of the interview that he was reporting with a pre-existing bias. When I asked him what vaccines his children were injected with, he ummed and ahed , mentioned measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough, saying they may have had some travel vaccines like yellow fever and cholera, but mostly, he couldn’t remember and had no idea. He had NEVER read a vaccine insert, but he “believed” in vaccines.
Over the course of 2.5 hours he repeated he “believed” in vaccination over and over again. He had “faith and trust” in the doctors, the system and vaccines without knowing IF doctors even study vaccines or for how long. He didn’t know the schedule, or that pregnant women were now vaccinated; he had no idea which vaccines he or his children had been injected with, the ingredients, how they were manufactured or that the schedule had trebled in 40 years. He was aware that some will be injured, disabled or die from vaccines, but he still “believes” and was willing to defend and promote injecting diseases and toxins due to his vaccine religion, regardless of the outcome.
He was a strong vaccine worshipper without even knowing the basics, and at the end of the interview, he was still justifying and defending vaccination, acknowledging his article will be biased. What saddens me is people will read his article with the cherry picked comments and information, reflecting his pre-existing bias and vaccine religious views, and believe him. His peers will pat him on the back and he will be rewarded and paid for sharing his “beliefs”.
As I shook his hand and thanked his for his time, I looked him in the eye and said, “I trust that you will represent me with honesty and truth?” I added that, by writing this pro vaccine article, he is endorsing unsafe, untried drugs and pushing an agenda to mass drug everyone from womb to tomb heading towards the slippery slope of mandatory vaccination and the erosion of bodily autonomy and freedom of choice.
I hope he has thought about the future and exactly where we are heading. Exactly where do people think where we are heading?
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ShotSpotter gunshot detector microphones are always on and spying on what you say
Posted by Eldon J. Brown on December 25, 2014
Posted in: Gangstalking, Government Tyranny, Police & Law Enforcement. Tagged: conversations, gunshot, microphones, Police Department, San Pablo, San Pablo Police Department, security cameras, ShotSpotter, surveillance, Surveillance Cameras, technology. Leave a comment
Click to go to the City Of San Pablo’s website
From the above City of San Pablo, California Facebook page;
Public Safety with New Technology
July 22, 2013 at 8:27am
The Critical Step in Public Safety: Surveillance Cameras
After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, images of the Tsarnaev brothers captured on security cameras quickly circulated, ultimately leading to their demise. San Pablo, just like most modern day cities, implemented a new crime fighting plan based on using new technology to prevent crimes from happening and to solve criminal cases.
In 2010, the San Pablo Police Department developed a City-wide Surveillance Plan as a means of using technological advancements to support existing police services and to promote public safety. New technology has not only been of great assistance to the department in solving crimes, it has also lead to a reduction in crime, improvement of public areas and parks, and an increase in people’s sense of safety.
The City-wide Surveillance Plan that has been designed includes the use of three (3) different types of cameras:
1) Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) Cameras
2) Pan, Tilt, Zoom (PTZ) Cameras
3) Fixed Resolution Cameras
All of these types of cameras are located along the City’s major roadways and intersections. Police officers are alerted immediately when a vehicle is wanted or stolen since license plate numbers are captured by the ALPR cameras are crosschecked (in real time) with “hot lists” or stolen vehicle lists. With the aid of ALPR notifications, arrests of criminals in stolen vehicles have increased by 50%.
To complement the video surveillance, an acoustic surveillance system has also been added called “ShotSpotter.” ShotSpotter technology is activated when the sound of gunfire or explosives occurs outdoors, then ShotSpotter Flex sensors and software pinpoint the precise location of each round fired within seconds. Police officers are then alerted and are able to respond to the scene immediately. To further enhance this technology, PTZ cameras located in proximity to the ShotSpotter system, are set to swivel automatically to the location where gunshots are detected, giving a visual of the crime scene to police officers.
In 2011, the City of San Pablo received federal funding to deploy most of the technology the San Pablo Police Department uses today including: the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system, surveillance cameras at Downer and Dover elementary schools, and the installation of mobile ALPR cameras in patrol vehicles. By 2012, these systems had shown much success in apprehending suspects and solving crimes in the community.
The cameras at the schools virtually eliminated gang graffiti within the cameras range of view and provided a crucial lead in solving two gang-related shootings, one of which resulted in a homicide.
Among the successes, is one recent incident where the ShotSpotter system detected gunshots and alerted officers to the scene of a robbery – homicide long before anyone called the police station to report it. This enabled the officers to respond quickly, and they were able to catch the suspects as they were leaving the scene.
In November 2013, because public safety is listed as a major priority spending area of the community at-large, the San Pablo City Council authorized the Police Department to enter into a $961,672 contract with Odin Systems, Inc. to install additional surveillance cameras over the next three (3) year period as part of the City’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP) Budget. The first year, cameras will be installed in the Old Town area of San Pablo, along Rumrill Boulevard between Sanford Avenue and Market Avenue. The second year, cameras will be installed along 23rd Street, and at Davis Park, including coverage of the Wildcat Creek Trail from Rumrill Boulevard to 23rd Street. The third year will focus on the installation of the northern half of the city, including Wanlass Park.
Eventually, the entire City-wide Surveillance Plan will encompass the entire community with this new technology network of cameras which will make it increasingly difficult for crimes to be committed, and acts as a visual deterrent to criminals looking for opportunities in San Pablo.
Gunshot Detection Systems Need To Be Closely Monitored
Tue, 06/05/2012 – 2:45pm — Edward
Last week, the New York Times wrote about a gunshot detection technology called ShotSpotter. Similar to video camera monitoring technology, audio detection devices are set up throughout a city. These devices pick up the sound of a gunshot and triangulate the location. Back at a control room, a technician notifies the police. Within minutes of the initial gunshot, police arrive on the scene often before a 911 call is even placed.According to the Times:
Many police officials say the system has significantly improved response time for crimes involving firearms and has increased community confidence and helped deter gun crime by demonstrating that the police can show up quickly at the right place.
The technology, they say, has given officers critical information about what to expect upon arriving at a crime scene — like whether a gun was fired from a car and if so, how fast and in what direction the car was traveling — and has offered a level of precision in locating gunfire rarely afforded by 911 calls.
As long as the audio devices only listen and record gunshots, it’s a promising tool for law enforcement to improve their response times to gun crimes and their chances of apprehending the perpetrators.
The downside is when the microphones start recording private conversations. As the Times article points out, they already are doing this in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project weighs in with the ACLU’s view:
It is not generally legal for law enforcement (or anyone else) to make audio recordings of conversations in which they are not a participant without a warrant. In addition to the apparently accidental eavesdropping reported by the Times, an important question is whether microphones can be remotely activated by police who want to listen to nearby conversations.
We’ll be watching closely to ensure that these systems don’t become the latest way for police to get around the Fourth Amendment. In New Bedford, the district attorney told the Times he thought the recording could be admissible as evidence. If the courts start allowing recordings of conversations picked up by these devices to be admitted as evidence, then it will provide an additional incentive to the police to install microphones in our public spaces, over and above what is justified by the level of effectiveness the technology proves to have in pinpointing gun shots. It will also reduce the incentive of the manufacturers to design these systems so that they only pick up gunshots and not the conversations of people walking down the street.
– See more at: http://www.aclumaine.org/gunshot-detection-systems-need-be-closely-monitored#sthash.pMmmwrJz.dpuf
allstaractivist note: Unfortunately, I have discovered the below site to be a disinformation site. Let the reader continue with caution.
Blogs, websites and personalities that I’ve discovered to be disinformation shills
Feds Deploy National Spy System of Microphones Capable of Recording Conversations
Hidden in plain sight: The next level of NSA snooping will detect dissent via ubiquitous audio sensors
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
The revelations of Edward Snowden shone fresh light on NSA spying targeting the American people, but what has gone largely unnoticed is the fact that a network of different spy systems which can record real time conversations are already in place throughout many urban areas of the United States, as well as in the technology products we buy and use on a regular basis.
These systems are no secret – they are hiding in plain view – and yet concerns about the monolithic potential for their abuse have been muted.
That lack of discussion represents a massive lost opportunity for the privacy community because whereas polls have shown apathy, indifference, or even support for NSA spying, anecdotal evidence suggests that people would be up in arms if they knew the content of their daily conversations were under surveillance.
The dystopian movie V for Vendetta features a scene in which goons working for the totalitarian government drive down residential streets with spy technology listening to people’s conversations to detect the vehemence of criticism against the state.
Such technology already exists or is rapidly being introduced through a number of different guises in America and numerous other developed countries.
The Washington Post recently published a feature length article on gunshot detectors, known as ShotSpotter, which detailed how in Washington DC there are now, “at least 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city,” microphones wrapped in a weather-proof shell that can detect the location of a sound down to a few yards and analyze the audio using a computer program.
While the systems are touted as “gunshot detectors,” as the New York Times reported in May 2012, similar technology is already installed in over 70 cities around the country, and in some cases it is being used to listen to conversations.
“In at least one city, New Bedford, Mass., where sensors recorded a loud street argument that accompanied a fatal shooting in December, the system has raised questions about privacy and the reach of police surveillance, even in the service of reducing gun violence,” states the report.
Frank Camera, the lawyer for Jonathan Flores, a man charged with murder, complained that the technology is “opening up a whole can of worms.”
“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said.
This led the ACLU to warn that the technology could represent a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment if misused.
The ACLU’s Jay Stanley asked, “whether microphones can be remotely activated by police who want to listen to nearby conversations,” noting that it was illegal for police “to make audio recordings of conversations in which they are not a participant without a warrant.”
“If the courts start allowing recordings of conversations picked up by these devices to be admitted as evidence, then it will provide an additional incentive to the police to install microphones in our public spaces, over and above what is justified by the level of effectiveness the technology proves to have in pinpointing gun shots,” wrote Stanley.
Eventually, if indeed it is not already happening in some major metropolitan areas, voices will be linked to biometric facial profiles via the Trapwire system, which allows the government to monitor citizens via public and private CCTV networks.
As we have also previously highlighted, numerous major cities in the Unites States are currently being fitted with Intellistreets ‘smart’ street lighting systems that also have the capability of recording conversations and sending them directly to authorities via wi-fi.
As we reported on Sunday, the Las Vegas Public Works Department has begun testing the devices, which act as surveillance cameras, Minority Report-style advertising hubs, and Homeland Security alert systems. As ABC 7 reported in 2011, they are “also capable of recording conversations.”
Televisions, computers and cellphones are already utilizing technology that records conversations in order to bombard users with invasive targeted advertising. Last year, Verizon followed Google’s lead and officially filed a patent for a set-top box that will actively spy on Americans in their own homes by turning TVs into wiretaps.
The patent application says that the technology will be capable of detecting “ambient action” including “cuddling, fighting and talking” in people’s living rooms.
The box will even listen to your conversations, according to the communication giant’s patent.
“If detection facility detects one or more words spoken by a user (e.g., while talking to another user within the same room or on the telephone), advertising facility may utilize the one or more words spoken by the user to search for and/or select an advertisement associated with the one or more words,” the document states.
In an article we published back in 2006, we highlighted the fact that, “Digital cable TV boxes, such as Scientific Atlanta, have had secret in-built microphones inside them since their inception in the late 1990′s.”
This technology is now commonplace, with products like the Xbox utilizing in-built microphones to allow voice control. Microsoft promises that it won’t use the microphones to record your conversations, which is a fairly hollow guarantee given that Microsoft collaborated with the NSA to allow the federal agency to bypass its encryption services in order to spy on people.
App providers on the Android network also now require users to agree to a condition that, “Allows the app to record audio with the microphone,” on cellphones and other ‘smart’ devices. “This permission allows the app to record audio at any time without your confirmation,” states the text of the agreement.
Image: David Petraeus welcomes the ‘smart’ spy grid.
Virtually every new technological device now being manufactured that is linked to the Internet has the capability to record conversations and send them back to a central hub. Is it really any wonder therefore that former CIA director David Petraeus heralded the arrival of the “smart home” as a boon for “clandestine statecraft”?
Whistleblowers such as William Binney have warned that the NSA has virtually every US citizen under surveillance, with the ability to record all of their communications. The agency recently completed construction of a monolithic heavily fortified $2 billion facility deep in the Utah desert to process and analyze all of the information collected.
If the revelations of Edward Snowden taught us one thing then it’s that if the NSA has the capability to use a technology to spy on its primary target – the American people – then it is already doing so.
The state has already had blanket access to phone records since at least 1987 under the Hemisphere program, under which AT&T gave the Drug Enforcement Agency access to call logs.
This network of computer programs, urban wi-fi infrastructure and technological products inside our homes that all have the capability of recording our conversations represents an even more invasive and Orwellian prospect than anything Edward Snowden brought to light, and yet discussion of its threat to fundamental privacy has been virtually non-existent.
← What does it mean to do something “like a girl”?
I like to exercise at St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery in San Pablo, California →
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Back to Our Alumni
Alex Holmes
Subject: Public Services
"Most of my competitions are during the summer which involves me travelling around the country most weekends to get the scores I need to qualify for England and GB."
About Alex Holmes
Studied: Public Services
Now a member of the GB Youth Development Squad and East Midlands Archery Squad
Alex shoots in the compound bow discipline for Derwent Bowme and is a member of the GB Youth Development Squad and East Midlands Archery Squad.
He is currently the international junior champion, East Midlands champion and Derbyshire Champion. He is also a member of the Derbyshire Sport ICON supported athlete programme and is currently training for a competition in France in the New Year ahead of the world trials in Romania next summer.
Alex combines his course at Derby College’s Broomfield Hall campus with around 20 hours training a week and his ultimate goal is to join the RAF. He said: “I started shooting when I was nine and moved to compound bow nearly two years ago.”
“During a competition I can shoot up to 288 arrows which requires a lot of muscular endurance and strength.”
“Part of my training involves strength and conditioning and I am able to do much of this at College as part of my Uniformed Public Services course which involves a lot of physical activity.
Find out about studying Public Services at Derby College.
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What Happened in Vegas: An STIer's Quest Towards Success
Get to know Edward Czar V. Aquino one of the awardees of the 2015 STI Distinguished Alumni and now CEO/Founder of Saint Therese Learning Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.Read more about his awe-inspiring deeds and thriving career below.
Growing up, Edward Czar V. Aquino (or Poy as he prefers to be called) has always been very passionate about caring for people, according to him it’s a trait he inherited from his parents – to think of others first before yourself. Who would have thought that someone with burning enthusiasm and drive to help and serve would make it real big in the healthcare industry abroad?
Tracing his roots at STI College – Global City, he belonged to the pioneer batch of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program in his campus. Edward embraced his career choice and made the most out of his endeavour in college. He was an outstanding student, a leader, and an active participant of both academic and extra-curricular activities.Recalling his experiences as fulfilling, he shares “The institution helped me reach my potential and I can definitely say that what I learned from them is world-class. It made me more competitive.” After four years of hard work, he made his family proud and reaped the fruits of his labor in 2008 when he graduated with the second highest grade point average (GPA) in his class.
In the midst of his thriving career after graduation, Poy faced great adversity when his father, who was stationed in America, suffered from a heart attack. Equipped with a BSN Degree and the heart of a compassionate son, he volunteered to fly to the US to help his dad recover. To be able to qualify and reach the US Nursing standards, Edward took his sudden migration as an opportunity to take the State Test, along with a series of examinations to measure his language proficiency and clinical expertise. Attesting that an STIer will stop at nothing to reach his goals, Poy became a Registered Nurse in Nevada, New Jersey, and Maryland. He also became a certified Nursing Instructor which fuelled the jumpstart of his career as an educator in the healthcare industry.
In 2014, his unwavering dedication was acknowledged by the US Department of Health’s Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services when he was given a US National Recognition Award for his team’s significant efforts in providing top-notch healthcare that reduces and prevents critical patients’ conditions. At present, aside from being the CEO of his own Nursing School, Poy is also the Assistant Director of Silver Ridge Healthcare Center, a five-star nursing facility in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In spite of his success, Poy remains grateful of the world-class education and personal values instilled in him by his alma mater. He wishes to inspire his fellow STIers to be brave, take risks, be humble, and to never forget to give back to the community.
“I believe in fate and I think if I didn’t study in STI, my life wouldn’t turn out the way it is now. It’s a very humbling experience to have graduated in STI and I’ll always be grateful to the team that helped me.” – Edward Czar V. Aquino
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MUST SEE! WAR VETERAN WHO LOST BOTH LEGS IN IED ATTACK FLUNG FROM ROLLER COASTER AT 50 MPH!!!
If roller coasters freak you out, then this story will definitely give you nightmares. Sergeant James Hackemer, 29, an Iraq War veteran who lost both of his legs in an IED attack, died after being flung from a roller coaster at 50 mph. It happened on the Ride of Steel coaster at Darien Lake Theme Park in Syracuse, NY. He was at the park for a day of fun with his whole family, but no one could have predicted the tragedy that would occur.
Hackemer was on the ride with his nephew, Ashton, when the horrible accident played out. He was seated in the very first row when he was flung from the ride. Ironically, the brave soldier had technically died twice as a result of his war injuries, only to return home and meet his tragic fate after a 3 year long recovery process at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
His heart-broken mother told a local news outlet:
“It’s going to help a little bit that he was happy. We shouldn’t have had him for these last three years and four months. After he was hit by the IED, he died once in the field and once on the operating table. He was assisted on to the ride. He was doing what he wanted to do.”
The theme park claims to have no liability in the incident, as the ride was working properly and Hackemer was buckled in. But his having been flung from the ride would indicate that he was not properly restrained. Furthermore, this is not the first incident to occur on the Ride of Steel. Another man fell from the ride previously, however, he was lucky enough to survive. Witnesses of Hackemer’s accident also pointed out that the theme park employees appeared unconcerned about what had just happened. Others remarked that the ride’s restraints seemed very unsafe.
In recent news, another veteran amputee was turned away from riding a roller coaster at Six Flags. He was not given a refund from the theme park and left pretty perturbed, but maybe it was for the best, as he is still alive today.
Does this story change your perception on the safety of theme park rides? Will you be more careful about the ones you choose to partake in, or is this a super rare occurrence that we shouldn’t be too worried about? Let us know your opinion in the comments section below!
via TELL ME NOW
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10A.5
Modeling the West African Monsoon using the Superparameterized CAM
Wednesday, 26 January 2011: 5:00 PM
608 (Washington State Convention Center)
Rachel McCrary, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO; and D. A. Randall
The West African Monsoon (WAM) is the term commonly used to describe the seasonal rains that occur in West Africa from May to October. Since rain-fed agriculture is one of the main sources of food and income for the people in West Africa, societies in this region are highly vulnerable to variability in monsoon rains. As our planet warms due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, it is probable that we can expect changes in the monsoon system which will impact water resources in West Africa. Unfortunately, conventional global circulation models (GCMs) are unable to represent the complex multi-scale interactions known to be associated with the monsoon and so are unable to represent the timing, spatial patterns and magnitude of the WAM. The inability of these models to capture the observed monsoon system, greatly undermines their ability to represent potential changes to the monsoon in a warmer climate. It is possible however, that GCMs which have implemented the multi-scale modeling framework (MMF) are better equipped to represent the changes in the monsoon circulation over West Africa. The MMF is an innovative computational strategy that investigates the interactions between clouds and the global circulation of the atmosphere. MMFs have been uniquely designed to examine the interactions between small-scale circulations and large-scale dynamics. In an MMF, the cloud parameterizations of a GCM are replaced by embedding a 2D cloud resolving model within each grid box. This modeling approach has been pioneered by CMMAP in the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), commonly referred to as the Superparameterized-CAM (SP-CAM). When compared to the standard CAM, the SP-CAM has been shown to improve the representation of many aspect of the global climate including the diurnal variability of convection over land and oceans, intraseasonal variability of tropical convection and the MJO. In this study we have performed a 10 year AMIP style run covering the years 1997-2006 using the SP-CAM version 3.5. With this simulation we have investigated the ability of the SP-CAM to represent both the seasonal cycle and the diurnal cycle of convection over West Africa during the monsoon season. To understand the seasonal cycle of convection during the monsoon season we have examined many important dynamical features associated with the monsoon including the African Easterly Jet, the Saharan heat low, the low-level monsoon winds, and the Harmattan winds. To examine the diurnal cycle over the Sahel, we have tried to understand how convection can propagate from East to West across West Africa and how this influences when and where it will rain over the region. Results from this study will help us to determine if the MMF and the SP-CAM are suitable for use in future climate change assessments involving the West African region.
See more of: NCAR Community Modeling Session III: Atmosphere
See more of: 23rd Conference on Climate Variability and Change
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AMTD Calvin Choi in Institutional Investor’s 2016 “Fintech Finance 35”
AMTD Group (“AMTD” or the “Group”) is pleased to announce that Mr. Calvin Choi, Chairman & President of the Group, was recently named by world-renowned financial magazine “Institutional Investor” as this year’s “Fintech Finance 35”. It is also the first time for AMTD to be selected and as the only Hong Kong financial institution in the list. The inclusion reflected the recognition of AMTD‘s endless efforts in promoting Fintech investment and development from international capital markets and investor communities. In the future, AMTD will deploy more resources in global Fintech and new economy field, and promote the healthy and dynamic development of the global internet and Fintech space.
(Institutional Investor published an in-depth article on AMTD’s investment in the Fintech industry)
On 2 December, the iiFintech Symposium & Awards, the award ceremony and Fintech summit organized by Institutional Investor was held in New York. Participated in this event were key players specializing in the development of Fintech investment. This included internationally renowned financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, UBS AG; private equity and investment firms such as General Atlantic, Bain Capital Ventures and Citi Ventures, as well as regulatory bodies and industry organizations such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Innovate Finance from London. AMTD Group Chairman & President Mr. Calvin Choi and his team were invited to attend the summit and the award ceremony, and exchanged views with leaders, well-known institutions and corporates as well as regulatory bodies in the Fintech industry.
(Mr. Calvin Choi named by Institutional Investor as one of the “Fintech Finance 35”)
Institutional Investor is a world-renowned financial magazine with great influence in the capital markets. Since its establishment in 1967, it has built a good reputation among institutional investors ranging from Wall Street in US to the world. In 2015, Institutional Investor launched the “Fintech Finance 35” list, with an aim to award those playing a key role in promoting the development of the financial sector and technology innovation. Each year, a total of 35 leaders who has contributed to the development of global Fintech industry will be selected through thorough consideration and research.
(“The 2016 Fintech Finance 35” by Institutional Investor )
Mr. Calvin Choi, Chairman & President of AMTD, ranked as one of the 2016 “Fintech Finance 35”, alongside with Mr. Sopnendu Mohanty, the Chief Fintech Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Mr. Fabian Vandenreydt, the Global Head of Securities of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), Mr. Darren Cohen, the Global Head of Principal Strategic Investments of Goldman Sachs, as well as Mr. Jonathan Korngold, Head of Global Financial Services Sector of General Atlantic, etc. It is also the first time for AMTD to be selected and as the only Hong Kong financial institution in the list, together with other world-famous financial institutions, industry organizations and regulatory bodies.
(AMTD Team attended the 2016 iiFintech Symposium and Award Ceremony held by Institutional Investor)
Mr. Calvin Choi commented in the interview with Institutional Investor that he “expects to see accelerated growth in Fintech investing following the increased scrutiny by regulators and attention from institutional players globally”, and “expects more global Fintech players to establish partnerships with local players and alliances with institutions regional to expand beyond their local markets”.
“In AMTD, we will continue to introduce more outstanding Greater China Fintech companies to the international market and assist more Global Fintech pioneers to extend its footprint to China, ultimately facilitate the connectivity between Asia/ Global capital with top internet companies and Fintech universe”, Mr. Choi continued.
As an integrated non-bank financial institution headquartered in Hong Kong with broad business coverage and network across Asia, AMTD has focused on the transformative power of technological innovation and is dedicated to enabling a highly efficient channel of communication and cooperation between the top global Fintech companies, internet companies and Asian capital. AMTD is keen to promote the healthy and dynamic development of the global internet and innovative technology universe, deepening cross-border, cross-regional and cross-sectoral linkage of capital and technology and forming a pioneering platform with global strategic vision, top local capability and insights with in-depth industry resources. On October, AMTD joined force with LendIt, the world’s largest and most influential Fintech summit organization to establish the AMTD-LendIt Joint Global Office. The collaboration aims to create a premier conduit for optimal and seamless exchange between Asian/global capital and the leading global internet/Fintech universe. In addition, AMTD and LendIt co-organized the LendIt-AMTD Global Fintech Investment Summit in Hong Kong, which was the first ever global-scale summit of Fintech sector in the city, with over 40 top Fintech enterprises globally, as well as over 300 investment institutions and academic representatives from different countries and regions attended. Over the years, AMTD continues to invest in the “New Economy” related space. Recently, AMTD supported the successful listing of the leading mobile internet company Meitu, Inc.’s US$630mm IPO on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Not only is Meitu the largest technology company IPO in Hong Kong in the last decade, it is also one of the largest listed technology companies in Hong Kong. AMTD Strategic Capital Group (尚乘策略资本), a unit of AMTD Group specializing in asset management, private equity investments and insurance brokerage businesses, is a strategic shareholder of Dianrong.com, a leading Fintech company in China. Other investments made by AMTD Strategic Capital Group include: UCAR, China’s leading auto rental firm; Youche.com, a leading used car sales platform in China; Credible.com, an online student loan platform from US and Peachjar, a US-headquartered internet education services provider etc.
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FICTION BY ANTONIO
Antonio Ramblés travels
All text and images © 2009-2019
Hey there! Thanks for dropping by Antonio Ramblés travels! Take a look around and grab the RSS feed to stay updated. See you around!
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Tag Archive: Lima Peru surfing
Bohemian Barranco
Filed under: Lima, Perú, Perú — 2 Comments
Bajada de los Baños, Barranco, Lima
Barranco is the Spanish word for “ravine”, and Lima’s Barranco District takes its name from a ravine that was once a riverbed, but is now the site of a pedestrian walkway – the Bajada de los Baños – a ramp that connects it to the beach below.
The forest of glittering high rises that has sprouted in neighboring Miraflores has not yet crept this far down the coast, and it still has the feeling of a village.
Puente de los Suspiros Bridge of Sighs, Barranco, Lima, Peru
The ravine, though, is not the only unique feature of Barranco’s geography or its appeal.
Cliffs extending out from the shoreline to the south shield it from cold and damp southern winds to create a comfortable micro-climate.
La Ermita church, Barranco, Lima, Peru
On a side street, a hostel sign proclaims “backpackers welcome,” and through its open lobby door well-worn surfboards stand stacked against a wall.
Lima has been ranked Number 6 among the World’s 50 Best Surf Spots, and Barranco still boasts a marina and yacht club.
Barranco was originally a fishing village, and its maritime heritage is celebrated by the Eglesia de la Ermita.
Legend has it that a group of fishermen lost in the sea mist at last saw a distant light and rowed toward it. When they came ashore, they found that in the spot where they had seen the light was nothing but a wooden cross in the sand, and built the church in thanksgiving.
Cupola of La Ermita church, Barranco, Lima, Peru
La Ermita is now abandoned, its fractured ceiling a exposing earthquake-proof construction techniques that date back to pre-Columbian times that substitute light and flexible bamboo and stucco for heavy brick or stone.
Late 1800’s, the District became a fashionable beach resort where well-to-do Limeños built casonas – their summer homes.
Electric trolley museum, Barranco, Lima, Peru
It was so popular that an electric trolley line once connected it to downtown Lima, and one of the trolley cars is now on display here as a permanent museum.
There’s more to Barranco, though, than its connection to the ocean
The District is also considered to be Lima’s most romantic and bohemian neighborhoods.
Cafe mural, Barranco, Lima, Peru
Peru’s leading writers, artists and musicians have lived and worked here for more than a century, and there are more than a dozen galleries here, including the first permanent exhibition of internationally known Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino.
Restaurants and gardens, Barranco, Lima, Peru
The heart of the District covers a dozen or so square blocks.
It’s easy to cover on foot and very secure to walk.
The central plaza retains its original Spanish colonial flavor, and parks and streets are flower-filled.
Shops sell artisan goods tapestries and ceramics.
Street art adorns walls and homes. Facades of casonas built in the Republican style retain all of their elegance and charm.
Bajada de los Baños (Bridge of Sighs), Barranco, Lima, Peru
The walkway to the sea, the Bajada de los Baños, is spanned by the Puente de los Suspiros foot bridge.
Its name translates into Bridge of Sighs, so called because it is a frequent meeting place for lovers.
Dining car restaurant, Barranco, Lima, Peru
Here you’ll find no chain restaurants, but only owner-operated establishments, each brimming with its own unique charm.
Peruvian restaurant, Barranco, Lima, Peru
If Barranco is a pleasant way to pass the day, it comes even more alive in the evenings, when the bistros, bars, and cafes are crowded with young adults.
Restaurant at night, Barranco, Lima, Peru
I settle over a latte to watch passers-by stop to play a piano that sits beneath an outdoor canopy.
“Play Me” piano, Barranco, Lima, Peru
It’s only one of dozens placed in city parks and other public spaces by the city, and I sit nearby as a young man plays a flawless rendition of a work by Debussy.
It’s a perfect end to a perfect day, but I’m still looking forward to tomorrow’s culinary tour of Lima! Click here to come along!
Tags: Bajada de los Baños Barranco Lima Peru, Barranco Lima Peru, Bridge of Sighs Barranco Lima Peru, Church of La Ermita Lima Peru, electric trolley car, expat blog Mexico, Lima Peru surfing, Lima, Perú, Mario Testino, Peru tourism, Peruvian artisans, Puente de los Suspiros Barranco Lima Peru
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Jim & Carole's Mexico adventure
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← NIS America Reveals Another Eight New Ultimate’s from Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
In This Corner of the World UK Cinema Tickets Now Available →
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Complete Series Blu-ray & Samurai Warriors DVD Collection Spotted Online
Updated product listings on Anime-On-Line, as pointed out by Shiroi Hane on Twitter, reveal that Manga Entertainment UK are planning to release a ‘Complete Series Blu-ray collection‘ of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, as well as a ‘Season 1 DVD Collection‘ of Samurai Warriors, during July of this year.
Manga Entertainment UK have not yet formally announced the release of these two sets, which is a surprise considering that their Q3 release schedule was confirmed last month; but both sets were ‘previously planned’ for release until they were ultimately cancelled (for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) and put on hold (for Samurai Warriors). Samurai Warriors was ‘previously noted’ for a release of the 10th July 2017, as seen in our article, but it is the first time – in a lengthy period of time – that it has appeared online for pre-order.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood on the other-hand is an interesting story; originally the series was being released simultaneously on DVD and Blu-ray in part instalments however the Blu-ray releases were cancelled with the series being demoted to DVD only. After three years Manga Entertainment UK then released the remaining parts on Blu-ray with the news that the series would then be released as a Complete Series collection; however the Blu-ray set was then ‘seperated’ into two collection sets at request of the licensor while the DVD remained as a complete series box set.
Now, after seven years from its original release, Manga Entertainment UK will be able to release Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood as a ‘Complete Series’ collection on Blu-ray. Although packaging details have not been show its expected, judging from past complete season re-releases, such as Attack on Titan and Blue Exorcist, that it will simply be the two collection sets packaged inside a thin carded sleeve. The product listing confirms this theory as it states that 10 Blu-ray discs will be contained, which is the same number as the original release(s) of the series.
In any event it is interesting news indeed but as it stands the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Complete Series Blu-ray is scheduled to be released on the 27th July 2017 where as the Samurai Warriors Season 1& OVA Collection is still listed for 10th July 2017. Of course treat these as ‘speculative’ dates for now but its expected MangaUK will confirm the details shortly.
Filed under Anime News, MangaUK, News Tagged with Blu-ray, Complete Series, DVD, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Manga Entertainment, Manga UK, News, Samurai Warriors, Season 1
One Response to Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Complete Series Blu-ray & Samurai Warriors DVD Collection Spotted Online
Shiroi Hane says:
Samurai Warriors now has a really weird history, having originally been solicited as separate BD and DVD SKUs, then for the DVD to be cancelled and the BD upgraded to a combo. This new DVD listing is the original reactivated, down to the SKU and EAN and even the ASIN on Amazon.
The Brotherhood BD also has the same SKU number as the release that was solicited in 2013, but it hasn’t reappeared on Amazon yet, and it might get a new ASIN anyway since the price has gone up £10.
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Brazil at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Artists: Sophie T. Lvoff, Lou Masduraud, Irène Mélix, Georgia René-Worms, Maha Yammine
Exhibition title: Brazil
Curated by: Bernardo Follini
Venue: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
Date: September 13 – October 21, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
On the seventh year of its collaboration with ENSBA Lyon – École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Artes, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents the collective exhibition “Brazil”. On view are works by Sophie T. Lvoff, Lou Masduraud, Irène Mélix, Georgia René-Worms and Maha Yammine, the artists who attended the 2018 Post-Diplome program promoted by ENSBA.
The exhibition explores different strategies and approaches for individual and collective emancipation in the contemporary age, drawing narrative inspiration from Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film. The movie describes a dystopian world in which bureaucracy, as the central organ of society, organizes the life of citizens, while filing, control and repression subject them to a tyranny of norms and procedures. “Aquarela do Brasil”, a famous Brazilian song composed in 1939 by Ary Barroso, is heard in many scenes of the film and, along with the title, acquires the role of a paradoxical, ironic counterpart to the gloomy, postmodern atmospheres of the city.
Starting from this dystopian image, the exhibition “Brazil” is conceived as a space in which emancipation from a condition is no longer circumscribed to the realm of imagination, but enters the domain of real experience and critical thinking. In this perspective, each artist draws up “other Brazils”, in which they appropriate their own awareness. Through an apparently reassuring, familiar, at times almost ornamental, visual language, their works examine mechanisms that are still in place in today’s society, through references to historical episodes of resistance or contemporary disobedience. The issue of emancipation in contemporary society is read and analyzed from different angles: from criticism to official historiography through a feminist approach to the critique of authority, from thoughts on the forms of addiction induced by our system to reflections on the condition of minorities.
The work of Sophie T. Lvoff focuses on the paragon of cultural heritage, while deconstructing political backgrounds making apparent the contradictions. Lou Masduraud looks into sectors of the dominant culture of wellness, and the alterations society causee in individuals, revealing the effects of capitalism on our bodies. Irène Mélix studies the literature of the lesbian community in 1920s Germany, expressing their demands and sense of togetherness, rewriting their recognition code and their fight against discrimination; Georgia René-Worms condenses the research she carried out in Italy on militant feminist groups and the female art scene of the 1960s and 1970s into intimate settings, committing herself to rewrite what is a biased, partial history. Finally, Maha Yammine moves from traditional Lebanese culture to imagine short, but intense, episodes of everyday transgression.
The exhibition “Brazil” was produced with the support of ENSBA Lyon – École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Artes.
Sophie T. Lvoff (1986, New York, USA), Lou Masduraud (1990, Montpellier, France), Irène Mélix (1988, Stuttgart, Germany), Georgia René-Worms (1988, Boulogne-Billancourt, France), Maha Yammine (1986, Beirut, Lebanon).
View of the exhibition “Brazil” (2018), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia.
Georgia René-Worms, Office, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia
Irène Mélix, Diamond Splinter, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia
Sophie T. Lvoff, Pastoral Vista (Philip Johnson and the American Fascist Party), 2018. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia.
View of the exhibition “Brazil” (2018), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia
Lou Masduraud, Active Substance Fountain, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia
Maha Yammine, Fady had a canary, 2018, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia
Maha Yammine, Smoking, 2018, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo: Paolo Saglia
Categories ExhibitionsTags Bernardo Follini, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Georgia René-Worms, Irène Mélix, Italy, Lou Masduraud, Maha Yammine, Sophie T. Lvoff, Turin Post navigation
Julie Béna at Polansky Gallery
Paulo Monteiro at Zeno X Gallery
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Air Canada flight slides off Halifax runway, 23 injured
Kashif Imran On Mar 29, 2015
The airline said the incident happened shortly after midnight, and 18 of the 23 admitted to hospitals for observation and treatment of minor injuries had been released.
Air Canada said the Airbus A320 flying from Toronto was carrying 133 passengers and five crew members. The airline did not give the cause of the accident but said it was cooperating fully with investigators.
It was snowing heavily at the airport at the time of the accident. Passengers interviewed by local media described a “big flash” before landing and speculated the flight may have struck a power line, but this was not confirmed by the authorities.
Peter Spurway, a spokesman for the Halifax Stanfield International Airport, told local media that two people from the plane required “urgent care”. He also confirmed power was out at the airport around the time of the crash but did not give the cause. Power has since been restored.
Photos posted online by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada showed the nose of the airline broken off and one wing badly damaged. (here)
The federal agency said it was deploying a team to investigate the crash.
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Los Angeles Celebrates Aqueduct Centennial with Interactive Garden
By Anna Bergren Miller • November 15, 2013
THE LOS ANGELES AQUEDUCT CENTENNIAL GARDEN IN GRIFFITH PARK WAS DEDICATED ON OCTOBER 23 (LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER)
The Los Angeles Aqueduct turned 100 on November 5, and the city has been partying hard. In a performance-art piece designed by Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studios, 100 mules plus their handlers walked along the 240 miles of the aqueduct from the Eastern Sierras to its terminus at The Cascades. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County staged a special exhibit to honor the centennial. And Department of Water and Power (LADWP) employees reenacted the opening of the Cascades’ spill gates, accompanied by descendants of Los Angeles Aqueduct Engineer William Mulholland.
THE GARDEN WAS DESIGNED AROUND THE EXISTING MULHOLLAND FOUNTAIN (LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER)
The LADWP also unveiled a more lasting tribute to the aqueduct and Mulholland. The Los Angeles Aqueduct Centennial Garden, built around the existing Mulholland Fountain in Griffith Park, was the brainchild of staff in the LADWP operations and maintenance office. According to Richard Harasick, Manager of Operations and Maintenance at LADWP, the project started with a plan to replaster and rededicate the fountain. “We were working on that, spending time [at Mulholland Fountain], and we thought: maybe we can do this one better,” he explained. Harasick and his staff came up with the idea for the garden as an interpretive monument to the aqueduct.
The Los Angeles Aqueduct Centennial Garden, Harasick said, has a two-fold purpose. First, it memorializes the aqueduct by recreating its journey from the northeast. A walking path beginning in the far corner of the garden mimics the course of the aqueduct. To one side of the path, a trapezoidal concrete curb, embedded with blue glass to evoke running, recalls the shape of the original aqueduct channels. Elements along the path, including mile markers and signs for the cities through which the aqueduct travels, are built of Corten steel, metal flanges, and other materials used by the LADWP in its water projects. The path terminates at a replica of The Cascades, which in turn leads to the Mulholland Memorial Compass, a concrete circle ten feet in diameter, with aluminum letters forming Mulholland’s famous declaration: “There it is. Take it!”
THE GARDEN’S PRIMARY WALKING TRAIL MIMICS THE COURSE OF THE AQUEDUCT (LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF POWER AND WATER)
Near the compass is a section of the original aqueduct pipe, large enough for visitors to stand in or climb through. “We were strategic with where we placed the pipe,” Harasick said. “The idea is that when you stand in the pipe, behind you is the remembrance of Mulholland. Looking forward, you see what he accomplished. Looking forward is what we will continue to do in the future with bringing water to Los Angeles.”
The garden, which was planned by Pamela Burton & Company in cooperation with the LADWP, also demonstrates water-wise landscaping. The LADWP planted the garden with approximately 20 different climate-appropriate species, including Red Marin Agave, Red Yucca, Waverly Sage, and California Native Sedge. In the process, it removed 75 percent of the grass around Mullholland Fountain, thus significantly reducing the garden’s water needs. Harasick hopes that the combination of the garden’s message about the source of their water and the drought-tolerant landscaping will inspire visitors to practice conservation at home.
THE AQUEDUCT PATH TERMINATES IN A COMPASS PRINTED WITH MULHOLLAND’S FAMOUS STATEMENT (LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF POWER AND WATER)
LADWP STAFF GATHER AT THE NEW MONUMENT TO THE AQUEDUCT, A SECTION OF ORIGINAL PIPE (LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER)
LADWP Landscape Architecture Los Angeles Aqueduct Water Conservation
June 7, 2019 Three big-name studios shortlisted for La Brea Tar Pits master plan competition
June 3, 2019 Johnson Favaro reimagines Beverly Hills' La Cienega Park
May 23, 2019 The Eiffel Tower’s landscape will be redesigned before the 2024 Olympics
April 22, 2019 SHoP’s Pier 35 folds industrial materials into an East River habitat
New report details what went wrong the night of the Notre-Dame fire
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Home Technology Microsoft places its bets on quantum computing
Microsoft places its bets on quantum computing
At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines.
There’s a lot to untangle here, and few people will claim that they understand the details of quantum computing. What Microsoft has done, though, is focus on a different aspect of how quantum computing can work — and that may just allow it to get a jump on IBM, Google and other competitors that are also looking at this space. The main difference between what Microsoft is doing is that its system is based on advances in topology that the company previously discussed. Most of the theoretical work behind this comes from Fields Medal-recipient Michael Freedman, who joined Microsoft Research in 1997, and his team.
“What topology does is that it gives you this ability to have much better fidelity,” Microsoft’s corporate vice president for quantum research Todd Holmdahl told me. “If you look at our competitors, some of them have three nines of fidelity and we could be at a thousand or ten thousand times that. That means a logical qubit, we could potentially implement it with 10 physical qubits.” What the team essentially did is use Freedman’s theories to implement the error correction that’s so central to quantum computing at the physical level. I’m not going to pretend I really understand what topological qubits are, but it’s essentially harder to disturb than classical qubits (and in quantum computing, even at at the lowest currently achievable temperatures, you always need to account for some noise that can disturb the system’s state).
With Station Q, Microsoft now runs its own quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, and Holmdahl tells me the team tripled in size over the course of the last year. The idea here is clearly to build a commercial quantum computer. Whether Microsoft plans to sell the device itself or whether it will simply make it available through Azure remains to be seen. Holmdahl believes that while Microsoft hasn’t figured out the business model yet, the most natural place for a quantum computer would be in the cloud. Every quantum computer, after all, also needs a classical computer to control it, and, in the data center, you could attach a quantum computer as an auxiliary processing unit to a regular machine.
For now, though, that’s still a far way into the future. What developers will soon be able to do, though, is run Microsoft’s simulator on their own machines (those machines need to be rather powerful, though). The company decided to not just release this simulator, though. In addition, the company developed a new programming language for writing these quantum applications, too. As Microsoft’s Krysta Svore told me, the idea here is to offer a comprehensive full-stack solution for controlling the quantum computer and writing applications for it. “We like to talk about co-development,” she said. “We are developing those [the hardware and software stack] together so that you’re really feeding back information between the software and the hardware as we learn, and this means that we can really develop a very optimized solution.”
The programming language takes its key concepts for C#, F#, Python and other languages, but with the addition of new features for accessing the features of a quantum computer, too. The simulator will allow developers to figure out if their algorithms are actually feasible and can run on a quantum computer, and where there’s surely a barrier of entry here, both Svore and Holmdahl argue that getting started with this shouldn’t be all that different from learning how to program an FPGA, for example. “If you have a decent computer science background, I believe the delta is smaller than you think,” Holmdahl said.
All of these software tools will be available by the end of the year. Don’t expect them to be open source, though. Svore argues that the internals of the compiler aren’t what you really need to write your quantum applications anyway, but you could say the same about .NET apps, and Microsoft did open source the .NET compiler platform.
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