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Inside the Planned Highrise CCRC at Arizona State University
By Tim Regan | January 5, 2018
One non-profit developer and provider of continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) is hoping to entice more aging baby boomers to move into senior housing by sending them back to school. The idea has uncorked a torrent of demand, leading to the fastest-selling community the provider has ever built.
Medford, Oregon-based Pacific Retirement Services (PRS) last month closed on a $250 million bond for the construction of Mirabella at ASU, a 20-story life plan community located on Arizona State University’s main campus in Tempe, Arizona. PRS has 10 life plan communities in its portfolio, plus three that it manages.
Pacific Retirement Services
As planned, the 620,000-square-foot entry-fee community will have 304 units across the continuum of care, with apartment and penthouse dwellings that range from 751 square feet to 2,665 square feet in size. Amenities include four dining venues—three of which are located on the penthouse level—an indoor pool and wellness center, an event center, a library and underground parking.
Ankrom Moissan Architects is the architect for the community, with McCarthy Construction Company slated to build it.
The development is the third entry in the nonprofit’s urban CCRC concept called Mirabella, which is focused on spacious, upscale living. Monthly rents will hover around $4,000 to $5,000, with buy-ins for residents ranging between about $300,000 to around $1.8 million—price tags similar to what you might find in an upscale downtown condominium building, said Brian McLemore, CEO and president of PRS.
“We’ve found in these highrise urban models, to get people out of a home in the suburbs and into a walkable downtown lifestyle, we can’t build units that are too small,” McLemore told Senior Housing News. “We’ve gone up to bigger units.”
University appeal
Spacious layouts and luxurious amenities aren’t the community’s only selling points, however. Mirabella at ASU also comes with a host of university-specific perks geared toward seniors and made possible through a proposed partnership with Arizona State University.
For instance, each resident of Mirabella at ASU will get a student ID card, which will let them sit in on ASU classes, attend university lectures and browse the university’s library system. The community will also have a university event space, an art gallery and regular performances from ASU School of Music students in the dining venues.
Though PRS has worked with universities before, this is the first time it’s worked with one so closely—and that has worked out very much to the nonprofit’s benefit. Similarly, many other senior living providers have found success in the university-based retirement community, or “URBC” concept.
“The concept of taking a high-end urban highrise and plopping it on an active college campus is attractive to folks,” McLemore said. “We’ve collected, in three months, [more than] 170 10% deposits, which is the fastest-selling one we’ve ever seen in our work, and I’ve done this for 30 years.”
The community could sell out as early as spring of this year, a full two years before construction is scheduled to wrap up, he added.
Keeping up with the times
Mirabella at ASU’s university focus is part of PRS’ overall push to keep its communities up-to-date with the latest trends.
The nonprofit invests $30 million to $40 million per year in repositioning its existing properties to keep them appealing to prospective residents. Those repositioning projects have helped keep all of the provider’s communities above 90% occupancy, with both Mirabella CCRCs running close to full with long waitlists, McLemore said.
PRS also has four expansion projects totaling over $100 million in the works in California and Oregon.
“We’re constantly having our ear to the ground on what our customers are going to demand from us in the future,” McLemore added.
And with economic tailwinds at non-profit CCRC providers’ backs, PRS feels that now is the right time to invest in expansion and development projects.
“Because of the cost and scope of these life plan communities, not a lot of them have been built over the last seven or eight years,” McLemore said. “We see lots of pent-up demand.”
Want to learn more about partnerships between senior living providers and universities? Check out the new Senior Housing News report “Inside The Future of University Partnerships in Senior Living.”
Click here to access the complete report, which takes a deep dive into the topic of university partnerships in senior living—from the successes to the failures—and reveals why creating strong ties with a university is one of the smartest moves a senior housing provider can make.
Written by Tim Regan
Ankrom Moissan Architects, McCarthy Construction Company, Pacific Retirement Services Inc.
Tim Regan
Tim is a lover of bad jokes and good beer. When he's not hunched over his work computer, Tim can usually be found hunched over his personal computer.
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HomeCampaign FinanceCourtesy Notice – July 31, 2014 – Reminder about Changes to Campaign Finance Laws and Regulations, the July 31, 2014 Semi-Annual Filing Deadline, Terminating Committees, Preparing Campaign Statements, Additional Filing Requirements
Courtesy Notice – July 31, 2014 – Reminder about Changes to Campaign Finance Laws and Regulations, the July 31, 2014 Semi-Annual Filing Deadline, Terminating Committees, Preparing Campaign Statements, Additional Filing Requirements
Recipient committees (Including Candidates and Officeholders)
Candidates for the November 4, 2014 election who do not have a committee
Major donor and independent expenditure committees
Reminder about changes to campaign finance laws and regulations
Courtesy notice regarding the July 31, 2014 semi-annual filing deadline
Information on terminating committees
Guidance on preparing and filing campaign statements
Additional Filing Requirements
1. Reminder about changes to campaign finance laws and regulations
2. Courtesy notice regarding the July 31, 2014 filing deadline
This section provides important information about the upcoming July 31, 2014 filing deadline. Please review the information below to determine your filing obligation.
The following filers must file a semi-annual statement with the Ethics Commission:
a. Non-candidate recipient committees must file:
FPPC Form 460 Recipient Committee Campaign Statement.
Committees that made independent expenditures of $1,000 or more to support or oppose a single candidate or measure must also file a Form 465 Supplemental Independent Expenditure Report.
b. Candidate/Officeholder committees must file:
c. Candidates for the November 2014 election who filed a Form 501 Candidate Intention Statement by 6/30/2014, DID NOT have a committee in the year 2014 and WILL NOT raise or spend $1,000 or more in 2014 must file a Form 470 Officeholder and Candidate Campaign Statement-Short Form for the 2014 calendar year.
d. Major donor and independent expenditure committees must file:
FPPC Form 461 Major Donor and Independent Expenditure Committee Campaign Statement if there was any activity during the reporting period covering through 6/30/2014. However, if you already filed a Pre-Election statement, you must file a Semi Annual statement covering through 6/30/2014 even if you did NOT have any activity after your Pre-Election filing.
e. For statements that are NOT electronically filed, the Commission requires an original and one copy of each statement signed and dated by the treasurer and/or candidate. You may obtain FPPC forms at the Fair Political Practices Commission website: http:www.fppc.ca.gov. You may obtain local SFEC forms at the SF Ethics Commission website: https://www.sfethics.org.
The statement covers the period between: either (a) the day after the closing date of the previous statement filed through June 30, 2014; or (b) if no statement was filed in 2014, January 1, 2014 through June 30, 2014.
C. What records do you need to keep?
State law requires committees to keep all campaign records for a period of four years from the date the related campaign statement was filed. The candidate and treasurer are responsible for maintaining the records and for the accuracy of the records. In general, you must keep a record of all receipts and expenditures. For more detail on the types of records that you must maintain, please refer to the recordkeeping section of the relevant FPPC Campaign Disclosure Manual. FPPC Manuals may be obtained from the Commission’s office or from the FPPC’s website at www.fppc.ca.gov.
D. Do you need to file electronically?
All major donor committees, recipient committees and independent expenditures committees must file the following FPPC forms electronically: 460, 461, 465, 496 and 497. A committee that files electronic campaign statements must continue to file electronically until it terminates. You do not need to file a paper statement if it was already filed electronically. There are two ways to comply with this requirement:
a. Internet Filing. Committees may use the Commission’s free San Francisco Electronic Disclosure System (SFEDS). A registration form and a user guide are available on the Commission’s web site at www.sfethics.org.
b. Political Reporting Services. Campaigns may wish to purchase political software or reporting services. You may obtain a list of qualified third-party software vendors at http://www.ss.ca.gov/prd/approved_vendors.htm. (Please note that these are listed for informational purposes and that the Commission does not endorse these services.)
E. What is the fee for the late filing of paper and/or electronic reports?
Filing deadlines will be strictly enforced. Late filings are subject to a $10-per-day late fee for paper reports and a $25-per-day late fee for electronic reports.
3. Information on terminating committees
If no funds are left in the campaign bank account and you will not raise additional funds, you should close the account and campaign committee by filing Form 460 Termination (covering through 6/30/2014) indicating a zero-ending cash balance and Form 410 (mark the termination box). Before terminating, you must have filed all required campaign statements, disclosing all reportable transactions, including the disposition of leftover funds and elimination of all debts.
If you do not terminate your committee, you must continue to file Form 460. Please call Commission staff at 415-252-3100 for information on your future filing obligations (if you do not terminate) and what you can do with the money remaining in your campaign bank account.
4. Guidance on preparing campaign statements
If you need guidance in preparing your campaign statements, you may schedule an appointment to meet with staff by calling 415-252-3100. Due to the high volume of filings received around the filing deadline, staff encourages you to address your filing concerns several days before the July 31 filing deadline.
5. Additional Filing Requirements
A. Notification by candidates for the Board of Supervisors of reaching activity thresholds
A candidate for the Board of Supervisors must file Form SFEC-152a-1 within 24 hours of receiving or spending $10,000 or more.
In a supervisorial race where at least one candidate has been certified as eligible to receive public funds, all candidates involved in such race must file Form SFEC-152(a)-2 with the Ethics Commission within 24 hours of receiving contributions, or making expenditures that equal or exceed $100,000. Thereafter, the candidate must file an additional supplemental statement within 24 hours of every time the candidate receives additional contributions, or makes additional expenditures that in the aggregate equal or exceed $10,000. The Ethics Commission will update its website and notify candidates when it certifies a candidate as eligible to receive public funds.
B. Notification by candidates for the Board of Education, Community College District, Public Defender or Assessor
A candidate who wishes to accept the voluntary expenditure ceiling (VEC) must file Form SFEC-128 no later than the August 8, 2014 deadline for filing nomination papers.
In a race where at least one candidate has accepted the VEC, all candidates running for office in the same race must file Form SFEC-134(b) within 24 hours of receiving contributions, making expenditures, or having funds that exceed 100 percent of the applicable VEC. The Ethics Commission will update its website and notify candidates when at least one candidate in a race has accepted the VEC.
C. Notification by persons (other than candidates) who make expenditures related to candidates
In a publicly funded supervisorial race or a race where the voluntary expenditure ceiling (VEC) is in place, any person other than a candidate committee who makes or incurs expenditures for the purpose of distributing independent expenditures, electioneering communications, or member communications that clearly identify any candidate that equals or exceeds $5,000 per candidate, must within 24 hours of each time it reaches the $5,000 threshold file Part IV of the Third Party Disclosure Form. The costs of a communication that supports or opposes more than one candidate or measure must be apportioned among each candidate and measure in the communication.
In addition, the Third Party Disclosure Form is also required to be filed in the situations described below, which are not limited to publicly funded races or races where the VEC is in place. Please refer to the Third Party Disclosure Form for detailed instructions.
When independent expenditures of $1,000 or more are made for a mass mailing that supports or opposes a candidate for City elective office
When payments are made for an electioneering communication that is distributed 90 days before an election and that totals $1,000 or more in a calendar year for a candidate for City elective office or a City elective officer who is the subject of a recall election
When a person authorizes, administers or pays for a persuasion poll.
D. Public financing program for the November 4, 2014 election
In the November 4, 2014 election, public funding is available to eligible candidates running for the Board of Supervisors. To receive public funds, a candidate must demonstrate, among other things, that he/she has raised at least $10,000 ($15,000 for incumbents) in qualifying contributions ($10-$100) from at least 100 (150 for incumbents) residents of the City (from 5/4/13-8/25/14). Prior to applying for public funds, a candidate must have filed SFEC-Form 142a by June 10, 2014 indicating an intent to apply for public funds. A candidate may apply for public funds beginning February 4 through August 26, 2014. For more information about the public financing program, refer to the Supplement for Candidates for the Board of Supervisors.
S:\CAMPAIGN\2014\07.31.2014\Courtesy Notice\1st Semi Annual sent 7.16.2014.docx
https://sfethics.org/ethics/2014/07/courtesy-notice-july-31-2014-reminder-about-changes-to-campaign-finance-laws-and-regulations-the-jul.html
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Sunday's Obituary - Albert Eugene Shackford (1857-1905), was 29 when he Patented a Poultry Incubator (Blog 100)
Vermont Phoenix, 23 June 1905
A. E. Shackford, formerly of Brattleboro, died Saturday night at his home in Waterville, Maine, after an illness of two months with cancer of the stomach. Mr. Shackford was a carpenter by trade, and for some years was foreman in the S. A. Smith Co. factory. He went from here to Rutland where he was engaged in the insurance business several years. He was a past grand in the Odd Fellows. He leaves a wife and five children.
ALBERT EUGENE SHACKFORD (1857-1905)
Albert Eugene Shackford was born about April 1857 in Groton, Massachusetts to Nathaniel and Emeline (Lovering) Shackford[i]. A custody hearing of which we don't know the details was held regarding Albert in Worcestor County in 1858.[ii] We find Albert living with Nathaniel and Emeline two years later in 1860[iii], . with his parents and a brother Elmer E Shackford in 1865[iv], and with a 2nd brother Charles E Shackford in 1870.[v] By 1880, Albert had married Betsey Jane "Jennie" Sparks, the daughter of Sylvester Wentworth Sparks and Elivira Gould and they were living in Windham, Vermont[vi] while he worked in a bobbin mill.
During his short life (he died at age 48), Albert had a variety of careers(farmer[vii], carpenter[viii], inspector for City of Rutland[ix], superintendent of a toy store,[x] and sold life insurance[xi]) and a lot of hobbies (bred Wyndottes, a poultry specialty[xii] and was active in the town fair).[xiii] Albert also won an award for his photography[xiv] and invented and patented a poultry incubator[xv].
He moved the family to Waterville at the age of 44 and was only 48 when he died in 1905 from stomach cancer. His wife Jennie stayed in Waterville, Maine, while her girls Margaret and Meverett helped out by working as a bookkeeper and an office girl in a doctor's office while she keep the home[xvi]. Jennie died at the age of 84 in 1946 at her home.
Albert was involved in many activities both in his work life and his hobbies. We wonder what else he might have been able to accomplish if he hadn't died at such a young age!
Roy Frank Shackford (1881 - 1948) - married Alice Francis Savage
Harold F Shackford (1883-1883) - died young
Helen Arla May Shackford (1884 - 1967) - married William Albert Cowing
Margaret Elvira Shackford (1886-1974) - married William Joseph Burns
Meverett A Shackford (1891-1972) - married Pearl George Butler and John Pearl Goodrich
Ruth M Shackford (1892-1938) - married Hiram Weston Ricker
[i] Vermont, Vermont, Vital Records, 1720-1908, , Albert Shackford m. Jennie Sparkes, 19 March 1879; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 18 August 2013)
[ii] Massachusetts, Worcester, , "Worcester County, Massachusetts, Probate Index, Vol. 1 & 2 A - Z, July 1731-1881," ancestry.com, http://ancestry.com (: accessed 17 August 2013), Albert E Shackford
[iii] 1860 United States Federal Census, Middlesex, Massachusetts, population schedule, Groton, Page 70, Dwelling 541, Family 541, Nathaniel Shackford; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 18 August 2013
[iv] 1865 Massachusetts State Census, Fitchburg, Worcester, population schedule, , Dwelling 350, Family 413, N H Shackford; digital image, Family Search (http://www.familysearch.org : accessed 17 June 2013)
[v] 1870 United States Census, Fitchburg, Worcester, Massachusetts, population schedule, , Page No 119, Dwelling 769, Family 1036, Nathaniel Shackford; digital images, FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org : accessed 17 June 2013
[vi] 1880 United States Federal Census, Windham, Vermont, population schedule, Townshend, Page 10, Dwelling 117, Family 131, Albert Shackford; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www;ancestry.com : accessed 17 August 2013
[vii] Vermont, Vermont Vital Records, 1760-1954, Image 2472 p 1299, Shackford Albert and Sparkes Jessie, 19 March 1879; database, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 29 April 2013)
[viii] Vermont, Vermont Vital Records, 1760-1954, Image 2476 referring to p. 1208, Shackford, Harold F, 17 March 1883; database, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 29 April 2013).
[ix] City of Rutland, Second Annual Report of the City of Rutland Vermont for the Year Ending December 31, 1894 (Rutland: James Carruthers, 1895), Page 17; digital images, Google eBooks (http://books.google.com : accessed 18 August 2013
[x] The Rutland Directory (N.p.:n.p.n.d.), p. 237, Shackford, A. E.; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 8 June 2013)
[xi] Maine Insurance Commissioner, Thirty-Sixth Annual Report of the Insurance Commissioner of the State of Maine For the Year Ending December 31, 1903 (Augusta: Kennebec Journal Print, 1904), Page 623; digital images, Google eBooks (http://books.google.com : accessed 18 August 2013
[xii] "List of Awards at the Exibition of the Connecticut River Valley Poultry and Pet Stock Association, held at Bellows Falls, Dec. 14, 15, 16, 1886," Poultry Monthly, vol 9 (15 February 1887), digital images (books.google.com : accessed 20 October 2013)
[xiii] "It is particularly requested by those who have the poultry department," Vermont (Brattleboro, Vermont) Phoenix, 16 September 1887; digital images, Library of Congress Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov : accessed 20 October 2013
[xiv] "July number of Paine's Photographic Magazine," Vermont (Brattleboro, Vermont) Phoenix, 17 August 1900; digital images, Library of Congress Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov : accessed 20 October 2013).
[xv] Commissioner of Patents, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1887 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888), Page 520; digital images, Google eBook (http://books.google.com : accessed 18 August 2013
[xvi] 1910 United States Federal Census, Kennebec County, Maine, population schedule, Waterville, Ward 4, enumeration district (ED) Enumeration District No 12-, Sheet No 8B, No 51 1/2, dwelling 107, family 142, Jennie B Shackford; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 20 October 2013
Copyright 2018 Joanne Shackford Parkes (sharing a link to this post is appreciated but please do not copy this material and paste it elsewhere)
Harold Shackford, March 17, 1883 - April 16-1883 (Blog 29)
This week I'm spending time reviewing FamilySearch's records titled Vermont, Vital Records, 1760-1954. These indexed records include copies of transcriptions of Vermont vital records and include 63 records that mention Shackfords. I'm adding or updating each of these Vermont Shackfords to the new FamilySearch Family Tree and ensuring they are only entered once (there are some duplicates that have to be merged so we have an easy to see Shackford genealogy tree). I also am adding the source information to each person so someone else looking at this tree can see what information is sourced.
I've reviewed eight records today and have already found and added missing marriage dates, verified some birth dates, added death dates, and learned about occupations of some of the Shackfords who live in Vermont. If I make the time to extract each piece of information from each record, enter the source data thoroughly, and file a copy of the original record in my computer I don't duplicate the recearch of these records later while writing a biography.
This afternoon I found the death record of little Harold F Shackford who only lived a month. There probably isn't a picture of him and there may not be any other formal records of him than the birth and death record listed below. Since there are no Shackford descendents in his family (only the daughters and granddaughters had children who lived to bear more children), I thought I'd make time to recognize his month long life as seen from the Vermont Vital Records records.
Harold F Shackford (1883-1883)
Harold was the second son of Albert Eugene Shackford (1857-1905), a carpenter born in Ayer, Massachusetts and Jennie B Sparkes (or Sparks) (1861-????) born in Dover. His mother's residence was Brattleboro Vermont when he was born but he may have been born in Greenfield, Mass, about 20 miles south of Brattleboro.
His grandparents were Nathaniel Shackford (1802-???), Emeline L Lovering (1861 - ), Sylvester Sparkes (or Sparks), and Elvira Gould.
I don't know if we'll ever know why little Harold died at such a young age. His family and neighbors probably cherished his short life and now he's known and remembered in this article.
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City united over Somme Anniversary
Plaque to be unveiled to Sheffielders who died in First World War
Commemorations in Sheffield and Sheffield Memorial Park in France
Weston Park to become a centenary field
The 4,898 members of Sheffield City Battalion who died during the First World War are to be honoured in France and their home city as the world remembers the “big push” – the first day of the Battle Of The Somme.
In Sheffield there will be a service and march starting at 11am on Friday 1 July at Weston Park, while 370 miles away in northern France, Sheffield Memorial Park will be the venue for a moving service featuring Her Worshipful the Lord Mayor and several city councillors.
After the commemorations for Sheffield’s Women of Steel, who worked in Sheffield’s munitions factories during the Second World War, these services put the spotlight on the so-called ‘Sheffield Pals’ from the York and Lancaster regiment who lost their lives in the First World War.
Sheffield City Council has nominated Weston Park as a ‘Centenary Field’, as part of a national initiative being led by the Fields in Trust and the Royal British Legion, and a new plaque will be unveiled at the park during the service.
Councillor Tony Damms, Sheffield City Council’s Armed Forces Champion, said: “After the wonderful celebrations and statue for our Women of Steel, these commemorations remember the brave and heroic Sheffielders who gave their lives in the 1914-1918 war.
“Dedicating a Centenary Field is a fitting way to commemorate the sacrifice of those who lost their lives in the conflict and ensures that their communities benefit now and in the future from protected green spaces.”
Pals Battalions began to be formed in August 1914. Following the outbreak of the First World War. Pals were usually recruited from a local area and were nicknamed because Lord Kitchener believed more men would enlist if they could serve alongside their, friends, relatives or work mates.
Sheffield Pals comprised mainly of businessmen, clerics, journalists, school teachers and students from across the city. They were called the “coffee and bun boys” by the Barnsley Pals because of their middle-class backgrounds.
Recruitment took place in September at Sheffield’s now-demolished Corn Exchange and about 1,000 men signed up within two days. The Sheffield Pals became part of The York and Lancaster Regiment as the 12th (Service) Battalion. The Hallamshire Battalion and the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry also included Sheffield men.
The Centenary Fields programme 2014 to 2018 aims to protect at least one green space in every local authority area across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to commemorate the centenary of the First World War.
Weston Park has been selected because of its local heritage and significance. The York & Lancaster Memorial within the park commemorates the loss of more than 8,800 soldiers during the First World War, including the Sheffield Pals.
Meanwhile, a group from Sheffield will be paying its respects at the Somme in Sheffield Memorial Park, where some 500 members of the Sheffield City Battalion were casualties on the first day of battle. Guests in France include Her Right Worshipful Lord Mayor of Sheffield Denise Fox and the Lord Mayor’s Consort, Cllr Terry Fox.
The service of commemoration will be taken by the Bishop of Sheffield in the presence of the High Sheriff of South Yorkshire, the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, the Mayors of Barnsley and Rotherham and local French Mayors.
The City of Sheffield Pipe Band will be in attendance together with buglers from the Yorkshire Volunteers and representatives of the Royal British Legion and other military associations.
Centenary Fields
Cllr Tony Dams
Somme Anniversary
Accomplished marching band to mark Armed Forces Day
Centenary Field for Stocksbridge Clock Tower and Gardens
D-Day Memorial at heart of 75th Anniversary ceremony
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Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park races to the top of the class
Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park has received a glowing report for its work to engage hundreds of children and young people in education from the local communities of Darnall and Attercliffe and the wider Sheffield City Region.
By Olympic Legacy Park
UTC Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park students are celebrating achieving a top set of GCSE and technical results. They are part of the first cohort to celebrate that milestone given that the facility opened two-years-ago.
Latest figures show almost 900 students are currently studying on Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park learning, developing new skills and accessing new opportunities.
Oasis Academy Don Valley, which opened with its first classes in 2015, is now home to 420 children following the opening of the Academy’s Secondary Phase this September.
The all-through inclusive Academy will grow year-on-year until it reaches full capacity in 2022 and will then educate 1,200 pupils between the ages of 2 and 16 years old.
Following its first Ofsted inspection this year the Academy was recognised as ‘good’ in all areas and has also seen extremely positive results in its first Y6 SATS assessments.
At UTC Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, which opened in September 2016, a total of 425 13 to 19-year olds now study high quality technical and academic qualifications.
Sheffield’s second University Technical College specialises in Computing, Health Sciences and Sport Science. Students can start in Year 9, Year 10 or Year 12 to study a combination of GCSEs and A Levels alongside a technical specialism.
The first cohort of 50 students to graduate from UTC Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park this summer celebrated a 100 per cent technical qualification pass rate for Computing, Health Sciences and Sport Science with 70 per cent of students securing university places.
68 students completed GSCEs this year, also gaining a 100 per cent technical qualification pass rate for all 3 specialisms.
Sarah Clark, Principal at UTC Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, commented: “Working with employer partners at Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park provides our students with a valuable insight into the jobs of the future in health, technology and sport science as well as opportunities to volunteer and contribute to the local community.”
Jayne Dunn, Sheffield City Council’s Cabinet Member for Education and Skills, said: “It’s great to see so many young people developing new skills at the Oasis Academy Don Valley and the UTC, with fantastic results in computing, health and sport science.
“Sharing a space with the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre as well as daily use of a world class sport pitch, and the English Institute of Sport, used by the likes of Jessica Ennis-Hill and Nicola Adams, mean that the school and college are able to offer the young people so much more than just academic qualifications.”
The next major development on Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park will be the opening of Sheffield Hallam University’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) next summer.
Building work is underway on the AWRC – designed to be the most advanced research and development centre for health and physical activity in the world, creating ‘innovations to improve health’ with a focus on those that help people move.
The Rt Hon Richard Caborn, Project Lead for Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, said: “There is so much to be proud of on Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, but engaging almost 900 children of all ages from Attercliffe, Darnall and further afield in education in just three years is an achievement worth celebrating.
“Oasis Academy Don Valley and UTC Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park are providing local young people with new skills and the chance to access new opportunities which, in the future, will include employment at the AWRC and other research centres, sports facilities and companies located in and around the Park.
PHOTO: Mark Harvey
SourceOlympic Legacy Park
Cllr Jayne Dunn
School Places
2018 a picture of good health for Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park
Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park is set for further significant development on the back of its most successful year so far. International recognition, a national design...
Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park recognised with prestigious national design award
The Olympic legacy project won Landscape Architecture of the Year category at the 2018 AJ Architecture Awards. The Awards, held on 4 November at The...
Olympic Legacy Parkhttps://olympiclegacypark.co.uk/
The Olympic Legacy Park forms an important part of Sheffield's Innovation District. The 35 acre Health Innovation Campus includes an Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC), 100,000 sq ft of offices/laboratories, 3,000 seater Arena, University Technical College (UTC) for 600 students and Academy for 1,200 pupils.
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Tag Archives: FURD
RASAG is currently working on several initiatives to expand the group and to take it to the next level. we are working with a BBC journalist on a feature about the City of Sanctuary, where she will be using case studies to dispel the myth that asylum seekers and refugees come to England for an easy ride… One of the RASAG members who has agreed to talk to the journalist is Lemlem Hussein Abdu, the Eritrean lady who was detained and had a flight booked to a country that she does not originate from, but was given a last minute reprieve in the form of an injunction that halted her flight. The Manchester court granted the injunction at the last minute because a document was located and faxed from Saudi Arabia that proved that Lemlem was from Ertitrea, not Ethiopia, despite the fact that she had been issued with an Ethiopian passport (which is far from unusual as Eritrea was historically possessed by Ethiopia – the root of all of the war and troubles there in the first place). With the help of key RASAG member and co-founder, Firas Sharefy, Lemlem will tell her story to the journalist in the hope that it will help give a greater understanding to the Sheffield community about the violence and persecution that people are subjected to before they take that enormous decision to flee their own country and seek asylum elsewhere. Lemlem is yet to be granted leave to remain in the UK so the campaign continues. Please go to Sheffield CDAS at http://www.sheffieldcdas.org.uk/, or contact SYMAAC at dignitynotdetention@yahoo.co.uk for more information, or write to Home Secretary Teresa May at Rt Hon Theresa May MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA to make your views known.
Another project involving people’s own stories that RASAG is assisting with is one mentioned earlier in this blog, Chris Stone at FURD’s “Shared Sense of Belonging” project. Firas has joined the steering team for this project to help to guide the direction of the research that will take place. This project promises to be very exciting. as it explores the sociological implications of what creates a sense of home, ownership or belonging for someone who has been driven from their own place of origin to a distant place that often does not welcome them, persecutes them and plunges them into a world of misinformation and uncertainty. This project will particularly focus on how playing, watching and talking about football play a part in creating a sense of belonging and home in people from disparate backgrounds, but it will also examine the role of other sports and activities by way of comparison. Several RASAG members are also interested in forming a five a side team to play football at FURD, which would be very exciting as it would be one of the few city teams that would be made up of people from different nationalities, rather than being a “DRC team”, and “Iraqi team” etc… This unity between refugees and asylum seekers of different nationalities is one of RASAG’s great strengths.
More exciting plans in the offing include the creation of a RASAG identity card which would aim to give members a sense of belonging and ownership and could be used to enable them to interact with other community groups on an official level. This idea came from the group when RASAG member Spag was asked to help with interpreting for an asylum case by Sheffield CDAS and was asked to show his RASAG ID – we had not considered the fact that members would be offered opportunities based on their RASAG membership status before this point but it is a positive development. We would also like to buy a laptop and some software so that we can start to create a database of our members and activities.
RASAG’s next event is planned to be a post Eid community meal where we will tell stories, perform music and provide attendees with food from around the world… This event will be used to create a space for the group to meet with the wider community and to promote our activities and ethos. We are all also looking forward to the end of Summer of Sanctuary celebrations planned to take place later this month – Summer of sanctuary funded our Legends project and in fact RASAG was formed to take part in this unique three month event.
Finally I am very pleased to announce that I have been offered the role of Communications and Administration Worker for Sheffield City of Sanctuary. As the only member of RASAG who is not an asylum seeker or refugee I am keenly aware that this prospect is a real privilege and an opportunity that is sadly not available to many of the group members who have hitherto been denied the right to work. However, following the court judgment that asylum seekers who do not receive a decision within a set time should be given the right to work, I hope that this will be the start of many RASAG members finding gainful employment within the sector. In my role at the City of Sanctuary I will be supporting a groundbreaking grassroots organisation key to the sector of people seeking asylum in Sheffield. I will be helping to advance the aim to promote a positive image of refugees and asylum seekers in the city and provide spaces for encounters between the community and the wider Sheffield population, which is also embedded in RASAG’s constitution. Of course the work with RASAG will also continue.
As always, RASAG can be contacted of katelyn_mckeown@yahoo.co.uk, or at Learn For Life Enterprise on 0114 2559080.
Katelyn 🙂
Tags: asylum seekers, City of Sanctuary, football, FURD, legends, Lemlem, refugees, summer of sanctuary
Categories asylum seeker, City of Sanctuary, FURD, Let them work
Together at Devonshire Green
The launch of the Summer of Sanctuary got a good old British summer soaking, but was a success nonetheless. The quality of the acts was immense and we were treated to break dancing, flamenco and Temple music inspired Indian dance among other things. Cool Runnings were there doling out tasty plates of curried mutton, chicken and ackee and saltfish, and FURD were in full effect with a TV showing the match and a much coveted football. When the kids had finished decorrating the FURD gazebo with their rice and peas and I’d decided we were wet and muddy enough for one day, we set off leaving the die hards and volunteers to enjoy a kick about and some energetic rain dancing. Unlike the sunshine, the Lord Mayor did put in an appearance, which I took as my cue to distribute the measley remains of the Legends flyers, with ubiquitous explanation of who RASAG are and what we are trying to do.
Although the Legends leaflet is now finished, to be revamped and reprinted tomorrow, I received in return a juicy stack of glossy flyers of the type RASAG can only dream of, for the Assist World Over Concert 2010, at which we are very proud to be performing, 19th June, Montgomory Hall, Surry Street Sheffield (http://www.cityofsanctuary.org/node/689) Assist and Summer of Sanctuary’s Dan Stanley also gave me 15 free tickets for Legend’s non-performers to be able to attend the concert, which is really great. The all-new Legend’s flyer is going to look great paired up with the World Over’s sleek number!
Togther was a positive event with a diverse mix of volunteers and attendees, all of whom came together to celebrate the Summer of Sanctuary’s ethos “Different Pasts, Shared Futures”. Unfortunately, today’s typically British summer weather meant that it was more of a case of “Differents Pasts, Soggy Present”… However, the Summer of Sanctuary and Refugee Week 2010 are now underway – so here we go, RASAG’s Legends coming soon!
Tags: Assist, asylum seekers, City of Sanctuary, community, event, FURD, legends, refugee week, Sheffield, summer of sanctuary
Categories Summer of Sanctuary
“Football, a shared sense of belonging?”
RASAG were out in force last night to support FURD at the launch of their 3 year research project into whether football and other cultural devices provide a mutual sense of belonging for refugees and asylum seekers. The project, led by FURD’s Chris Stone, will provide a platform for refugees and asylum seekers to discuss their thoughts through football. Chris says “Many football fans see the game as a way of bridging communities, bringing individuals closer together and as a brilliant tool for social change.” (copyright FURD http://www.furd.org/default.asp?intPageID=498)
Yesterday’s event was hosted at City College and despite power cuts and rain was a great success! Attendees ranged from City of Sanctuary and Northern Refugee Centre representatives, to the Lord and Lady Mayor, to players in FURD’s annual All Nations tournament (20th June, Goodwin building, Sheffield Hallam University) and of course, team RASAG! A sub-Saharan feast was laid on and a panel of experts including ex-Blade Brian Deane and FURD’s own Desbon talked guests through their own and our (gathered by survey) predictions for South Africa 2010, thus removing the need for any of us to watch the games – Phew! On the whole the panel and audience were in agreement in our predictions, although the audience didn’t note Serbia as a contender in group D and there was a whisper of controversy when the panel put through the Ivory Coast over Portugal in group G. The eventual winners were, or should I say will be, (look away now if you want to wait til the final) – Brazil – no surprises there then! Fear not though, England put in a sterling performance and make it all the way to the semi-finals (or was it quarters?), but are eventually knocked out, possibly due to the arrival of team WAG and Wayne Rooney’s filthy language….
All in all, the launch party marked the start of what will be a very exciting project and an excellent opportunity for refugees and asylum seekers in Sheffield to get involved in research, share their experiences and get skilled up at the same time. On our way to the event I was talking up the party element of the evening and, most likely, getting very excited over the prospect of some nice food! I was brought back to Earth and reminded of the level of committment to self improvement and education the RASAG group have when a member named Fuad turned to me very seriously and said “We must learn something this evening.” Well, we certainly did and I am sure we are all very excited and very much looking forward to being involved in this project and contributing to it in any way we can.
Tags: asylum seekers, City of Sanctuary, community, event, football, FURD, Northern Refugee Centre, refugee week, refugees, Sheffield City College
Categories asylum seeker, football, FURD, refugee, Sheffield, Summer of Sanctuary
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New Developments with India - PulsePoint
The Canadian pulse industry continues to work with India on market access restrictions
by Delaney Seiferling
As Saskatchewan growers contemplate their seeding options for another year, market access issues for pulses are surely top of mind.
In the past couple of years growers have faced severe export restrictions for pulses to India, Canada’s largest market. This includes tariffs on peas, chickpeas, and lentils, and ongoing regulations that require Canadian pulse exports to be fumigated with methyl-bromide.
Some progress has been made in addressing and mitigating these restrictions, says Mac Ross, Pulse Canada’s Manager, Market Access and Trade Policy.
Pulse Canada has long been working to alleviate these issues on behalf of Canadian growers, but recently they have seen several new developments.
Pulse Canada has been working with the Canadian government for more than a decade to address India’s requirement to have Canadian pulse exports fumigated with methyl-bromide, but the issue became more urgent as of late last year, Ross says.
While Canada had historically been granted a series of exemptions to this regulation since it was issued in 2003, it expired last year and Canada has been forced to comply or face a penalty fee ever since.
“Fumigation is an unworkable requirement in Canada due to various regulatory and product label restrictions,” Ross says.
In response to this, the Canadian pulse industry has been working with the Federal government to effectively make the case to the Indian government that Canada’s safety systems ensure that pulse shipments to India comply with import requirements, and mitigate the risk of introducing regulated pests to India, without the need for mandatory fumigation.
“Canada continues to strive for a bilateral agreement with India on plant protection,” Ross says.
“It is important that we continue to drive this issue forward with the Canadian and Indian governments as it is critical that we have science and risk-based phytosanitary conditions for Canadian product when India eventually resumes importing pulses.”
After the Federal Government visited India this past February, Prime Ministers Trudeau and Modi agreed to work together to finalize an arrangement to enable the export of Canadian pulses to India, free from pests of quarantine importance, with mutually acceptable technological protocols. Both parties committed to finalizing the arrangement by the end of 2018, but as of early December, a resolution had not been reached.
As part of this agreement, India sent a delegation to Canada this past September to review Canada’s systems-based approach to handling grain throughout the supply chain, to ensure that the exported product meets the phytosanitary requirements of the importing country.
Pulse Canada was one of the hosts for the delegation, which included government officials and scientists from the Government of India’s plant quarantine group.
The overall goal of the tour was to demonstrate to the delegation how Canadian pulses do not pose a phytosanitary risk to India, but it included a very thorough look at the Canadian safety system. Delegates learned how Canadian pulses are prepared for export to India, with
presentations and technical meetings with members of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the Canadian Grain Commission (CGC), and the national pulse industry.
The tour also included stops at two pulse farms in Saskatchewan, where the delegation was able to see first-hand how crops are produced, and how on-farm tools and technology are used to control threats such as weed seed, insects, and diseases.
“Farm visits are an important aspect of the review,” Ross says. “It is a chance to showcase the various methodologies and technologies used on Canadian farms for grain storage and pest control prior to the grain entering the supply chain, even though the delegation did not come in the winter when the Canadian prairies experience their best pest control management tool, the extreme cold weather.”
The tour also visited pulse processing plants and an inland grain terminal in Saskatchewan, as well as CFIA plant health labs, CGC inspection offices, and a Vancouver port terminal.
“It was a very thorough review and examination of Canada’s systems-based approach to handling grain prior to export,” Ross says.
The next steps for Pulse Canada will be to continue to push for progress on a final agreement.
“We will continue to work with the Federal government, as they engage with their Indian counterparts following the delegation’s review, to work towards finalizing an arrangement on plant protection by the end of 2018,” Ross says.
Pulse exporting nations, including Canada, are also addressing the challenge of working with India to improve the predictability and transparency of pulse import policy, including both the quantitative restrictions and import tariffs that have impeded access for pulses into the India market. This work is being led by the Global Pulse Confederation (GPC) in partnership with Geneva-based trade officials from many pulse exporting nations. This international co-operation includes multi-lateral advocacy for predictability and transparency in all policy decisions.
However, these trade issues have also highlighted the importance of other work being done by Pulse Canada and Saskatchewan Pulse Growers to diversify markets for Canadian pulses, Ross says.
“These access issues have caused a virtual halt of the marketplace in India, which underscores the importance of our efforts to diversify and expand exports into new uses and markets.”
The Canadian pulse industry has set a mandate to have 25 per cent of Canadian pulse production diversified into new market opportunities by 2025, by growing the use of pulses in food products, feed and pet food, and foodservice operations.
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Home Earth, Energy & Environment Earthquake observatory in Northern Chile to monitor the last seismic gap
Earthquake observatory in Northern Chile to monitor the last seismic gap
The high-magnitude earthquake of 27.2.2010 in southern Central Chile closed one of the two remaining seismic gaps at the South American plate boundary. After the quake of Concepción, the remaining gap in the north of Chile now holds potential for a comparable strong quake and is, thus, moving more and more into the focus of attention. The GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, has been monitoring this gap with the Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory (IPOC) in Chile since 2006. In a festive ceremony on March 15, the Chairman of the Board of the GFZ, Professor Reinhard Huettl, is handing over this Observatory to the Universidad de Chile with the seismological service of Chile and to the Universidad Catolica del Norte.
“Together with our Chilean colleagues and other partners we have developed and operated the IPOC. The transfer to the Chilean Earthquake Service will further strengthen this cooperation” explained Reinhard Huettl in Santiago de Chile. “The observatory will continue to be jointly operated, GFZ will finance the German share. The location for this observatory has obviously been very well selected, as the quake of 27 February shows. This last non-ruptured segment of the Earth’s crust off the Chilean west coast is highly interesting for geosciences in the whole world”. It is, however, not simply a question of earthquakes. The aim is to continuously measure all processes in connection with the dynamics of this plate boundary.
Approximately one-third of the world-wide seismic energy has discharged during the last century in earthquakes with magnitudes of over M = 8 along the South American-Pacific plate boundary. The repeat-time between two large earthquakes is shorter here than almost anywhere else on our planet.
The IPOC project investigates the area around Iquique on the South American Nazca Plate Boundary. One expects that within the next years a strong to devastating earthquake will occur in this area. Within the framework of investigations, deformation, seismicity, and magnetotelluric fields in the subduction zone will be monitored, i.e. in the periods before, between and possibly also during a quake.
The equipping of the observatory began in close collaboration with the Universidad de Chile (Santiago), the Universidad Católica del Norte (Antofagasta), the IPGP (Paris) and the GFZ (Potsdam). Professor Onno Oncken, Director of the Department “Geodynamics and Geomaterials” at the GFZ (Helmholtz Association) is coordinator of the IPOC activities and explains the construction of the observatory: “Currently the monitoring network consists of 20 seismological stations, equipped with broadband seismometers and acceleration sensors”. In order to do justice to the requirements for dissolution and efficiency of the sensors and data capture, special care was given to choosing the exact location. Thus, at each station a lug of approx. 5 m deep was blown into the rock bed, in order to ensure stable site conditions for the monitoring instruments. All seismic installations are equipped with the new-generation GPS-instruments. Seven measuring points were furthermore equipped beyond that with magnetotelluric measuring instruments and serve for the measurement of electric current in the Earth’s crust.
Professor Oncken has been leading research on geodynamics in the Andes since 1994. These investigations are not only of geoscientific interest. “Due to the numerous expeditions and measuring campaigns over the years in this subduction zone, the GFZ now holds the densest data set world-wide for such an area” says Onno Oncken. “When we monitor the conditions before, during and after a large quake this serves to help develop a hazard model for this and similar regions.
A strong quake in this region can have consequences for the global economy: the earthquakes here develop through the subduction of the Pacific-floor under South America. The same process also leads to the formation of ore deposits in the Earth’s crust. Thus, the largest copper deposit of the world is to be found on the western boundary of the Central Andes. A strong quake could interrupt or even endanger the global supply of copper and lithium.
Illustrations in printable resolution can be found under:
http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/gfz/Public+Relations/M40-Bildarchiv/Bildergalerie+Chile-Erdbeben
Further information about the IPOC-Observatory is available under:
http://www.ipoc-network.org
Plant probe could help estimate bee exposure to neonicotinoid insecticides
Joshua trees facing extinction
New solar material could lead to cheaper, more widespread use of panels
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World Bank orders Pakistan pay $5.8 bn damages to Chilean-Canadian miner
Dave Sherwood | Reuters/Santiago 13 Jul 19 | 08:56 PM
A World Bank arbitration court has ordered the Pakistani government pay damages of $5.8 billion to Tethyan Copper, a joint venture between Chile's Antofagasta Plc and Canada's Barrick Gold, the Chilean miner said late on Friday.
Tethyan Copper discovered vast mineral wealth more than a decade ago in Reko Diq, at the foot of an extinct volcano near Pakistan's frontier with Iran and Afghanistan. The deposit was set to rank among the world's biggest untapped copper and gold mines.
The company said it had invested more than $220 million by the time Pakistan's government, in 2011, unexpectedly refused to grant them the mining lease needed to keep operating.
The World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ruled against Pakistan in 2017, but until now had yet to determine the damages owed to Tethyan.
Tethyan board chair William Hayes said in a statement the company was still "willing to strike a deal with Pakistan," but added that "it would continue protecting its commercial and legal interests until the dispute was over." The Reko Diq mine has become a test case for Prime Minister Imran Khan's ability to attract serious foreign investment to Pakistan as it struggles to stave off an economic crisis that has forced it to seek an International Monetary Fund bailout.
Pakistan's military sees Reko Diq as a strategic national asset and had taken a key role in its development amid the dispute with Antofagasta and Barrick, sources familiar with the situation told Reuters earlier this year.
Billionaire Azim Premji helps create India's ..
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Sally’s Cafe and Bookstore – New on the Shelves – A Roman Death by Joan O’Hagan
Posted on November 8, 2017 by Smorgasbord - Variety is the Spice of Life.
Today I am featuring the work of Joan O’Hagan who passed away in 2014. However, her work lives on in the books that she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s and a new novel published in October. Here is her daughter Denise to introduce us to her work.
Hi, I’m Denise, editor and daughter of the author. I’ve edited many books, but tackling my mother’s manuscripts was the most challenging of all, not least because of her temperamental nature. Her first book was published when I was a teenager and, used to the persistent click-clack of typewriter keys, I thought nothing of it. It was only later, wearing my ‘editorial’ hat, that I came to appreciate her accomplishments. The writing process was harder and less forgiving then – no cut-and-paste or control ‘z’, so if you made a mistake you had to retype the page, or chapter. I sometimes wonder if the rigour involved in this style of writing obliges us to think more clearly in the first place…
A Roman Death is a historical thriller set in Ancient Rome at the time of Caesar’s assassination. First published by Macmillan in 1988, and translated into Japanese and Swedish, it was her most acclaimed novel. This new edition contains her latest amendments and includes a Foreword by Steven Saylor.
Details: https://blackquillpress.com/independent-publishing/a-roman-death/
Jerome & His Women is an historical fiction about the irascible St Jerome, the man behind the creation of the Latin Bible. Controversial even in his day, my mother was endlessly fascinated by this man, as I came to be also. I edited this with her during her last years under difficult circumstances, and was honoured to be short-listed for the inaugural Rosie Award.
Details: https://blackquillpress.com/independent-publishing/jerome/ ;
Let’s take a look at the books and one or two of the reviews.
About A Roman Death
Historical thriller set in Ancient Rome. In 45 BC, Julius Caesar is at the height of his power. Lucius Scaurus, the young, good-looking fiancé of a high-society girl is poisoned at the couple’s own pre-wedding banquet. In the trial that follows, Roman society is shocked when the girl’s mother, Helvia, is accused of not only of murder, but of incest. Cicero comes to Helvia’s defence, but the killer’s identity remains a mystery until the final twist – or two.
‘Poison, poetry (both high-minded and salacious), marriage for money, marriage for love, gang-rape, cowardice in battle, scheming slaves, conniving aristocrats, malicious matrons casting magical curses, and (as if all this were not enough) a previously unknown oration by Cicero – there’s so much going on, so expertly conveyed ...’ — Steven Saylor
‘An absorbing story, with fully drawn characters, a fascinating place and period, all given vibrant life in the author’s best work so far.’ — Kirkus Review
‘An original setting, carefully researched and vividly portrayed.’ — The Times Literary Supplement
‘Religious beliefs and superstition in the ancient world play a key part in Joan O’Hagan’s novel about mayhem in Rome … The identity of the killer, in this excellent classical puzzle that is also a classic whodunit, is revealed in a splendidly contrived shock ending.’ — Gerald Kaufman, The Listener
‘Who put the poison in Lucius’s wine, what truth in the scabrous accusations? Cicero for the defence; an unusual treat, don’t miss it.’ — Christopher Wordsworth, The Observer
One of the early reviews for the new edition.
Richard Blake –Excellent Novel Set in Late-Republican Rome November 5, 2017
If you are upset by discussions of poisoning by aconite, or by descriptions of multiple anal rape, or by sympathetic portrayals of incest, this is probably not a book for your reading list. I, on the other hand, greatly enjoyed it.
It is 44BC, and we are in Rome. The Republic has been suspended. Caesar is Dictator for Life. The streets know at best a fragile peace – a peace maintained only by keeping the proles from doing anything by themselves. This aside, life goes on as normal. Lucius Scaurus is an aristocratic bag of scum. His main achievement in the Civil War was to stay alive by running away from battle. He is beautiful. He is amoral. He is not terribly bright. He and his family are short of cash. So a marriage contract is negotiated with the upstart Fufidius clan. It is the usual matter of trading social prestige for money.
Then Scaurus falls dead. The doctor swears it is aconite poisoning, and that he must have been fed the poison at a dinner given by his prospective father-in-law. The young man’s father goes into a rage of grief and anger. He has Helvia, the wife of the girl’s father, charged with murder.
It all looks rather grim for Helvia. She is known to have opposed the marriage. There is evidence that she tried magic spells against the young man. She was at the dinner. She had means, motive and opportunity.
Cicero is brought in to handle the defence. He has no doubt his client is guilty, but does his usual job in court of making the worse sound the better reason.
How the trial ends I leave to you to find out. Equally the matter of who did poison Lucius Scaurus. All I will add is that this novel puts you in late-Republican Rome. You are dropped straight into an alien moral environment – or perhaps it is not so alien. You can see and smell the streets. You are given a seat at the counsels of a ruthless and cynical ruling class. You do not see the murder of Caesar – this gets one sentence at the end of a chapter. But you do see how the murder is used to advance a family feud.
So I give the novel five out of five. My only regret is that it was first published in 1988, and I wholly missed it until the present republication by Black Quill Press. But I will certainly now look out more by Joan O’Hagan. Author Richard Blake Amazon
Read more of the reviews and buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/Roman-Death-Joan-OHagan-ebook/dp/B075KRVVYG
And Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roman-Death-Joan-OHagan-ebook/dp/B075KRVVYG
Jerome & His women
About Jerome & His Women
Rome, 382 AD. The Empire is fragile, the pagan beliefs that sustained it are fading. One man stirs up controversy like no other – Jerome.
When the Pontiff, Damasus I, commissions Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin, it is a political masterstroke. Jerome’s Vulgate displaces the many alternative biblical texts and is the quintessence of Christianity as a world religion, with Rome at its centre. He is assisted by a circle of aristocratic, educated women who risk their lives in the pursuit of their ideals. Chief among them is the attractive young widow Paula, who is as devoted to Jerome as she is to his cause. Rumours soon circulate as his enemies try to dispose of him once and for all…
Joan O’Hagan was a crime writer, and author of the internationally acclaimed A Roman Death. Thanks to meticulous research, a wicked imagination, and over thirty years of living in Rome, she breathes new life into an ancient saint and his world, drawing us irresistibly into a highly-charged life of danger and intrigue, while reminding us to question our own values.
One of the reviews for Jerome & His Women.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
‘Our Jerome is a moralist, the most eloquent of moralists.’ January 29, 2017
Who was Jerome? Saint Jerome was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus about 347 BCE in Stridon, Dalmatia (in what is now known as Croatia) and died in 420 CE in Bethlehem. Jerome was commissioned by Bishop Damasus I of Rome to undertake a new and definitive Latin translation of the Bible from Greek by 390 CE. The focus of this novel is on Jerome’s relationships with the Christian community in Rome, specifically his patron Paula and a number of other Roman women.
The setting of this novel, the fourth century CE, was a time of upheaval for the Roman Empire. In addition to a series of internal riots and external threats, the spread of Christianity with the worship of a monotheistic God was replacing pagan beliefs and gods. In Rome, Jerome was surrounded by ‘his women’: a circle of well-born and well-educated women. These women included the patrician widows Lea, Marcella and Paula, together with their daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. By concentrating on these women and Jerome’s dealings with them, Ms O’Hagan paints a picture of a complicated man: at times introspective and at other times argumentative. Jerome was critical of the secular clergy of Rome and, shortly after the death of Damasus I, he was forced to leave his position. It was alleged that he had an improper relationship with the widow Paula. Eventually he and Paula travelled to the Holy Land where they built two monasteries and a hospice.
I found this novel fascinating, partly because I know so little about this particular aspect of Christian history. Ms O’Hagan brings to life Jerome’s women, with her descriptions of how they chose to turn their back on luxurious Roman life, instead selling off their property and possessions to donate to the poor and to the Church. These women then chose, with varying degrees of success, to live celibate lives of prayer in poverty.
Ms O’Hagan started work on this novel in the 1990s, and completed it shortly before her death in 2014. I think it is a tribute to her writing skills that the research she undertook to write this novel never weighs the narrative down.
I am always on the lookout for books by Australian women, and when Joan O’Hagan’s name was mentioned, I added her to my list. Now I’ve read ‘Jerome and His Women’, I’ll be looking for her other novels.
Read the reviews and buy the books: https://www.amazon.com/Joan-OHagan/e/B001KDEZXE
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Joan-OHagan/e/B001KDEZXE
About Joan O’Hagan
Joan O’Hagan (1926−2014) was a published author of crime fiction, and author of the critically acclaimed ‘A Roman Death’ (1988). Her last work, ‘Jerome & His Women’, released in 2015, brings to life the life and times of St Jerome, and is a testament to her enduring fascination with the ancient world as well as her imagination.
Born in Australia, she lived in New Caledonia, England and Italy before returning to Australia in 1997. Her publications include:
‘Incline and Fall: The Death of Geoffrey Stretton’ (Angus & Robertson, 1976).
‘Death and a Madonna’ (Macmillan 1986, Doubleday 1987)
‘Against the Grain’ (Macmillan 1987, Doubleday 1988, Mondadori 1988)
As well as the two books featured today.
‘A Roman Death’ (Macmillan 1988, Doubleday 1989, Tokyo Hawakawa Publishing 1990, Legenda 1990).
‘Jerome & His Women’ (Black Quill Press, 2015).
Author website and social media contacts.
Author website: https://www.joanohagan.com/
BQP website: https://blackquillpress.com/
Author Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Joan-OHagan-602676883093459/?ref=bookmarks
BQP Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackquillpress
BQP Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/blackquillpress
Thank you for dropping by today and please leave a comment before you go.. thanks Sally
This entry was posted in Book Promotion, Sally's Cafe and Bookstore New on the Shelves and tagged A Roman Death, Black Quill Press, Joan O'Hagan by Smorgasbord - Variety is the Spice of Life.. Bookmark the permalink.
20 thoughts on “Sally’s Cafe and Bookstore – New on the Shelves – A Roman Death by Joan O’Hagan”
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jenanita01 on November 8, 2017 at 9:25 am said:
Smorgasbord - Variety is the Spice of Life. on November 8, 2017 at 9:31 am said:
Thank you for sharing.. appreciated as always hugs xx
blackquillpress on November 8, 2017 at 12:29 pm said:
Thank you, Sally, for presenting these books so beautifully!
Smorgasbord - Variety is the Spice of Life. on November 8, 2017 at 12:34 pm said:
Pleasure Denise.. happy to share such stunning books.
dgkaye on November 9, 2017 at 3:53 am said:
This was fascinating! Lovely to learn a little about Denise and Joan’s book look quite intriguing as I enjoy historical fiction. I’ll be checking out the books, and welcome them to your bookshelves Sal. 🙂 ❤
Thanks Debby… they do sound fascinating. x
dgkaye on November 9, 2017 at 12:46 pm said:
blackquillpress on November 9, 2017 at 4:21 am said:
Thank you so much, kgkaye! Yes, historical fiction is a very special genre to many of us – some aspects of ancient history are well publicised (like displays of power and pomp by Roman emperors) but others less so (like the different types of marriage for wealthy women, or details about the practice of exorcism). I hope you enjoy the books! 🙂
Don Massenzio on November 10, 2017 at 1:12 am said:
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio.
blackquillpress on November 10, 2017 at 2:54 am said:
Thank you, Don Massenzio! Just subscribed to your newsletter and look forward to knowing more about your own books 🙂
Thank you for sharing Don..
Don Massenzio on November 10, 2017 at 12:08 pm said:
Micki Peluso on November 19, 2017 at 1:17 am said:
Welcome to Joan and Denise. Wonderful selection of books which I hope to get to read.
Thank you, Micki! Anything you’d like to know about them, just drop me a line and I’m happy to oblige 🙂
Thank you Micki..hugs xxx
Many thanks, Sally, for kindly inviting me to be part of your Smorgasbord. I appreciate your skill in presentation, the comments, the support. I look forward to reading future posts about your next guests and to supporting other writers in turn! 🙂
Thank you Denise.. appreciate your comment.
I would be delighted to receive your feedback (by commenting, you agree to Wordpress collecting your name, email address and URL) Thanks Sally Cancel reply
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What is L1A Intracompany Transferee Executive or Manager?
The L-1A nonimmigrant classification enables a U.S. employer to transfer an executive or manager from its foreign affiliate to the United States. This classification also enables a foreign company which does not yet have an affiliated U.S. office to send an executive or manager to the United States with the purpose of establishing one.
What is L1B Intracompany Transferee Specialized Knowledge?
The L-1B nonimmigrant classification enables a U.S. employer to transfer a professional employee with specialized knowledge relating to the organization’s interests from one of its affiliated foreign offices to one of its offices in the United States.
Employer Qualification
To qualify for L-1 classification in this category, the employer must:
Have a “qualifying relationship” with a foreign company (parent company, branch, subsidiary, or affiliate, collectively referred to as qualifying organizations); and
Currently be, or will be, doing business as an employer in the United States and in at least one other country directly or through a qualifying organization for the duration of the beneficiary’s stay in the United States as an L-1. While the business must be viable, there is no requirement that it be engaged in international trade.
Doing business means the regular, systematic, and continuous provision of goods and/or services by a qualifying organization and does not include the mere presence of an agent or office of the qualifying organization in the United States and abroad.
Employee Qualification
To qualify, the employee must:
Generally have been working for a qualifying organization abroad for one continuous year within the three years immediately preceding his or her admission to the United States; and
Be seeking to enter the United States to provide service in an executive or managerial capacity for a branch of the same employer or one of its qualifying organizations.
What is Executive or Managerial Capacity?
Executive capacity generally refers to the employee’s ability to make decisions of wide latitude without much oversight. It is defined as an assignment within an organization in which the employee primarily:
Directs the management of the organization or a major component or function of the organization;
Establishes the goals and policies of the organization, component, or function;
Exercises wide latitude in discretionary decision-making; and
Receives only general supervision or direction from higher-level executives, the board of directors, or stockholders of the organization.
Managerial capacity generally refers to the ability of the employee to supervise and control the work of professional employees and to manage the organization, or a department, subdivision, function, or component of the organization. It may also refer to the employee’s ability to manage an essential function of the organization at a high level, without direct supervision of others. It is defined as an assignment within an organization in which the employee primarily:
Manages the organization, or a department, subdivision, function, or component of the organization;
Supervises and controls the work of other supervisory, professional, or managerial employees, or manages an essential function within the organization, or a department or subdivision of the organization;
If another employee or other employees are directly supervised, has the authority to hire and fire or recommend those as well as other personnel actions (such as promotion and leave authorization), or if no other employee is directly supervised, functions at a senior level within the organizational hierarchy or with respect to the function managed; and
Exercises discretion over the day-to-day operations of the activity or function for which the employee has authority. A first-line supervisor is not considered to be acting in a managerial capacity merely by virtue of the supervisor’s supervisory duties unless the employees supervised are professional.
What is Specialized Knowledge?
A petitioner can demonstrate “specialized knowledge” by establishing either one of two statutory criteria. Under the statute, a beneficiary is deemed to have specialized knowledge if he or she has: (1) a “special” knowledge of the company product and its application in international markets; or (2) an “advanced” level of knowledge of the processes and procedures of the company.
Special knowledge, which is knowledge of the petitioning organization’s product, service, research, equipment, techniques, management, or other interests and its application in international markets that is distinct or uncommon in comparison to that generally found in the particular industry; or
Advanced knowledge, which is knowledge of or expertise in the petitioning organization’s specific processes and procedures that is not commonly found in the relevant industry and is greatly developed or further along in progress, complexity and understanding than that generally found within the employer.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of factors that USCIS may consider when determining whether a beneficiary’s knowledge is specialized:
The beneficiary possesses knowledge of foreign operating conditions that is of significant value to the petitioning organization’s U.S. operations.
The beneficiary has been employed abroad in a capacity involving assignments that have significantly enhanced the employer’s productivity, competitiveness, image, or financial position.
The beneficiary’s claimed specialized knowledge normally can be gained only through prior experience with the petitioning organization.
The beneficiary possesses knowledge of a product or process that cannot be easily transferred or taught to another individual without significant economic cost or inconvenience (because, for example, such knowledge may require substantial training, work experience, or education).
The beneficiary has knowledge of a process or a product that either is sophisticated or complex, or of a highly technical nature, although not necessarily unique to the petitioning organization.
The beneficiary possesses knowledge that is particularly beneficial to the petitioning organization’s competitiveness in the marketplace.
For foreign employers seeking to send an employee to the United States as an executive or manager to establish a new office, the employer must also show that:
The employer has secured sufficient physical premises to house the new office;
The employee has been employed as an executive or manager for one continuous year in the three years preceding the filing of the petition; and
The intended U.S. office will support an executive or managerial position within one year of the approval of the petition.
Period of Stay
Qualified employees entering the United States to establish a new office will be allowed a maximum initial stay of one year. All other qualified employees will be allowed a maximum initial stay of three years. For all L-1A employees, requests for extension of stay may be granted in increments of up to an additional two years, until the employee has reached the maximum limit of seven years.
Understanding L-1 Requirements
L-1 Visa Overview
USCIS L1B Policy Memorandum (August 17, 2015)
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Bad first songs
OK, “bad” is hyperbole in most cases here, but go with me.
A bad opener is a much rarer beast than the bad last song, at least among albums that are any good. Most artists seem to be better at recognising the best place to start than the best place to end. Nonetheless, missteps happen; some of the records I’d count among my very favourite have opening tracks that don’t quite get things rolling.
Asked to name a favourite band, I’d plump for the Beatles. Asked to pick some favourite songs, or albums, the Beatles would figure highly. But – controversial opinion alert – they weren’t always the best judges of how to get start their albums off.
Revolver has been the consensus “best” Beatles album for about 20 years, and it’s probably true that it contains the highest concentration of fantastic songs on any Beatles record. While the album is such a monolith in the history of rock ‘n’ roll that I can’t imagine any other song plausibly taking its place, Taxman has always felt like one of its weakest tracks for me. It’s full of interesting bits – the jerky, stop-start rhythm, McCartney’s bass playing and guitar solo – yet it never quite coheres into a song I find myself compelled to listen to. And while acknowledging that a 95% top rate of tax is pretty eye-watering, it’s not like the Beatles were short of cash at the time, so I can’t bring myself to care all that much for Harrison’s plight.
It wasn’t just Revolver, though. Sure, the title track of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band does important work in establishing the concept of the album as a whole, but it doesn’t much flatter the band. By the middle of their career, the Beatles had lost some of the dynamism and power captured in their early recordings (I’m talking strictly as players here), and there is, as Ian MacDonald observed, something about their attempts at heavy rock in the second half of their career that calls to mind a middleweight puffing themselves up in an attempt to pass for a heavyweight. Magical Mystery Tour‘s opening title song, meanwhile, is similarly unsatisfying, partly because its lyrical idea is so shopworn, and partly because there’s not much melodic development.
But let’s leave the Beatles so I can put the boot into another one of my very favourites, Joni Mitchell.
For the Roses is a pivotal and somewhat underrated album, one that is very close to my heart. It’s certainly a transitional piece (it came out between Blue and Court and Spark and shares characteristics with both), but it has a character of its own, and four or five songs that are genuine career high points. Yet its opener, Banquet, is one of Mitchell’s least successful songs: a shrill, irritating melody and a series of overwrought metaphors. I nearly always skip it. Like Taxman, which feels weak as soon as Eleanor Rigby starts, Banquet is shown up by the brilliant second track, Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire
Many people would argue that Rainy Day Women gets Blonde on Blonde off to a shaky start. Me, I’m always happy to hear it. For me, the weakest Dylan openers are Desire‘s misbegotten and botched Hurricane and Nashville Skyline‘s godawful version of Girl from the North Country, a duet with Johnny Cash that brings out the worst in both singers. I’d actually prefer the album to start with Nashville Skyline Rag, which is hardly earth-shattering, but is a great deal of fun. Mel nominated Oh Mercy‘s Political World, too – I don’t know the album that well but it’s sure no Where Teardrops Fall.
Any discussion of good albums with bad first songs has to include R.E.M.’s Out of Time and its opener, Radio Song, which features a cameo from KRS One. While it has a certain goofy charm, I don’t think I could argue with anyone who suggested that the album would be better if it started with its second track, Losing My Religion. I asked my colleagues Sara and Nick to give me a couple of suggestions for bad opening songs on good albums: they both said Radio Song. So there you go. It’s unanimous.
Steely Dan’s seventies records have maybe five lacklustre songs between them, but would anyone object too strenuously if I cited Katy Lied‘s opener Black Friday as probably the album’s weakest track? Its shuffle groove is just a bit pedestrian. I almost always start listening from track two, the wonderful Bad Sneakers.
Among lesser known but, to me, very important albums, the two albums that Belly released in the 1990s, Star and King, both start with tracks I’ve never much cared for. Puberty, which begins King, just sounds messy and unfinished, and Someone to Die For, from Star, while explicable from the point of view of having what’s ultimately a slightly weird and creepy album begin with something weird and creepy, has always felt too obvious an attempt at spookiness to me; what’s so compelling about Star is that even its pop songs are a bit off-kilter. Track two, Angel, just sounds like a much more natural opener, and more representative of the band generally.
Of course, some bands have a knack of aceing it. But that’s another post.
While you’re here, can I trouble you to listen to this? It’s my new EP, available now (that’s NOW) from Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, Google Play, Apple Music, and wherever you stream/download your music.
This entry was posted in Music and tagged Banquet, Belly, Black Friday, Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire, For the Roses, Joni Mitchell, Katy Lied, King, Magical Mystery Tour, Nashville Skyline, Oh Mercy, Out of Time, Politival World, Puberty, R.E.M., Radio Song, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Someone to Die For, Star, Taxman, The Beatles on August 17, 2018 by rossjpalmer.
Home at Last – Yo Zushi
My friend and long-time musical compadre (seriously, we’ve got something like 18 years behind us now) Yo Zushi has released a new single, Home at Last, with a new album (King of the Road) to follow shortly.
Home at Last was recorded around two years ago, I think, at One Cat in Camberwell, with Jon Clayton engineering. It was the last song we cut during that day at the studio, but at this point I can’t remember what else we did during that session. I can remember that I played drums on the live take, and that Dan McKean played piano. I then took the basic tracks home and did what I do, adding electric, acoustic and bass guitars, while Yo worked up a vocal arrangement.
It’s a great song (one of the best Yo’s ever written, I think, and he’s written some doozies) and I absolutely love the way the recording turned out. There’s a bandcamp link at the bottom of the post, and it’s also available on iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music and all the other usuals. The cover features Yo and his friend Jazzman John Clarke, a performance poet well known in London, who sadly passed away last week. I only met Jazzman a few times, but he was a lovely man with music and rhythm inside him.
Yo will be playing at the Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston on Sunday 16th September, and I’ll be supporting, in what is for me a rare solo show. Nowadays I mainly play as part of a duo with Melanie (something we’ve been doing increasingly often, and dare I say, are now getting pretty good at), so this will be something different, by virtue of being something old-school.
This entry was posted in Music, Uncategorized and tagged Home at Last, Jazzman John Clarke, new single, Servant Jazz Quarters, Yo Zushi on August 11, 2018 by rossjpalmer.
Under the Boardwalk – Tom Tom Club
Still hot. Here’s a song for a summer’s day.
The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense may be the greatest concert movie ever made. It’s just so much fun. I don’t think I’ve seen any band have such an obviously brilliant time on stage as the late-period expanded line-up of Talking Heads – a 9-person group, black and white, male and female. Not even Sly & the Family Stone before Sly’s drug use got heavy. When, at the end of Burning Down the House, David Byrne and Alex Weir begin running on the spot together while playing their guitars, it’s such a perfect little moment of childlike enthusiasm that it makes me a little misty. It’s so great that music can feel so good, be so uplifting. The joy is infectious; unlikely fans of band and film included the 65-year-old Pauline Kael, grande dame of American film critics, who called it “close to perfection”.
By the time of Stop Making Sense, Tom Tom Club – the band formed by Talking Heads’ husband-and-wife rhythm section Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth to tap into the same kind playful joy as Stop Making Sense – had already put out their first two albums, including their beloved debut, with its even more beloved singles, Wordy Rappinghood and Genius of Love.
As great as both of those are, though, I’d never heard the rest of the album until a couple of summers ago when Mel and I were having breakfast in the Soul Café in Liverpool. They were playing some really cool music (I mean, really cool) – great disco and soul and rare-groove stuff – and then they started playing what sounded like Tom Tom Club covering Under the Boardwalk.
It was Tom Tom Club covering Under the Boardwalk, and really, this band and this song are a very good match. Tom Tom Club were founded on the idea of music as an inclusive exercise (that’s why they called themselves Tom Tom Club, says Weymouth – the idea being that anyone could join), and music doesn’t get more inclusive or more fun than Under the Boardwalk.
The drum sound from that first Tom Tom Club album (and that of Genius of Love specifically) is so frequently sampled that it’s now just an ever-present part of pop culture; whenever you hear Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack or Ice Cube’s Bop Gun, you’re hearing Chris Frantz. It’s an instantly addictive combination of sound and groove. Under the Boardwalk marries that loping beat and Tina Weymouth’s unaffectedly childlike vocal to even a better song than Wordy Rappinghood or Genius of Love. No wonder this became the first version of Under the Boardwalk to reach the UK Top 40 singles chart.
This entry was posted in Music and tagged Alex Weir, Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Genius of Love, Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads, Tina Weymouth, Tom Tom Club, Under the Boardwalk, Wordy Rappinghood on August 4, 2018 by rossjpalmer.
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Last paragraph reads: "The 43-year old woman was taken to Benefis. She was taking anti-depressants and had been drinking before the incident."
http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=10198835&nav=menu227_5
Great Falls police officers save woman from jumping off bridge
Posted: April 16, 2009 06:45 PM CDT
Updated: April 16, 2009 07:35 PM CDT
Two Great Falls police officers were in the right place at the right time last night, and saved a woman from jumping off the 10th Street bridge.
Lieutenant John Sowell and Sergeant Scott Van Every were working after shift on alcohol prevention inspection last night. They happened to see a woman dangling her feet over the east guard rail on the 10th Street bridge.
The two plain-clothed officers parked their unmarked car in the southbound lane and approached the woman.
Sergeant Van Every talked to the woman and managed to get within a few feet of her by saying he couldn't hear her responses; as he spoke, Lieutenant Sowell circled behind, telling the woman he was going to stop traffic.
Van Every then stuck his hand out to greet the woman, and at that moment Sowell grabbed her from behind as Van Every grabbed her hand. They then explained they were police officers and she did not resist.
The 43-year old woman was taken to Benefis. She was taking anti-depressants and had been drinking before the incident.
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Danny McGinlay a la carte
“I really want to be in musical theatre, but I can’t sing,” insists stand-up comic Joel Creasey. “But I only want the leading lady roles, because they’re better roles. So even if I could sing, I still wouldn’t be able to play the roles I wanted. I want to be Miss Saigon; I want to be Elphaba in Wicked. Unless I have a sex change, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
I’m talking to Joel not long after his touching down in Sydney on a Tuesday afternoon, in that brief respite between the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which has just ended, and the Sydney Comedy Festival, whose opening gala will be taking place in a matter of hours. Joel’s show Naked is featuring at both festivals this year. According to Joel, the Melbourne run was “definitely my favourite season so far”.
“I really like the show,” he says. “Normally, by this stage, I’d be sick of it. But I’m not – I’m still enjoying it.”
At the ripe old age of 21, Joel Creasey is a veteran of two Raw Comedy competitions – “I made the State Final two years in a row in Perth but then lost two years in a row” – and three festival shows, with Naked marking a clear progression in the comic’s development.
“It’s definitely a better show and a better structured show,” he insists. “And it has more to it than my other shows have had.” Part of what gives it more substance is the fact that Naked is all about Joel, whereas his first show, Joel Creasey’s Slumber Party – earning him a nomination for ‘Best Newcomer’ at the 2010 Melbourne Comedy Festival – dealt with celebrities. And the subsequent year’s Party Animals was about politics.
The reason the focus of his scathing wit has been turned inwards, Joel says, is because “I’ve bagged out a lot of other people and I figured it was my turn.”
Joel’s first forays into self-expressive arts were theatrical, tinged with comedy. Over time, the theatricality has fallen away to the point where it’s the pure stand-up of a comic not even making observations about the stuff around him, but about his own life experiences. And it may seem a bit premature to be doing that at age 21, but you have to remember, Joel’s been doing this since he was 17. Though comedy wasn’t the grand plan, so much as it was an escape route:
“I couldn’t be bothered studying and realised you don’t have to study for comedy, so I thought, ‘I’ll just do that!’”
But it’s not as clear-cut as that. Because after finishing high school, there was a cursory attempt at tertiary education – a good three months pursuing a degree in political science. “I pulled out because I was hating that and loving comedy,” Joel insists.
At school, Joel’s major passion – and strongest subject – was drama. Indeed, having gone to drama school, Joel reckons he would have stayed in theatre had comedy not “come along”. But I doubt that, because even when he was doing theatre, he could never stay in it without turning to comedy.
Consider Joel’s final Grade 12 drama piece: he was one of the few Year 12 drama students in his state – or perhaps the country – who opted to deliver a comedic piece. “Grade 12 kids aren’t funny,” he argues. “Their pieces are always serious – about suicide or something heavy like that.” Not Joel’s. He chose to write a funny piece about a character of his own invention – flight attendant Glen Suavé, “hell-bent on taking over the world”.
The character was disgusting, racist, offensive, and – according to Joel – “based on many Qantas flight attendants I’ve had the joy of meeting”. Naturally, Joel’s peers failed to understand what Joel was doing. Thankfully, his examiners did.
“I got amazing marks!” says Joel. “That was the thing that got me through Grade 12; it evened out my bad marks in maths and science and every other subject.”
It was also the thing that got Joel into stand-up comedy – since that monologue formed the basis of his first routine. “I was actually doing character comedy when I started,” Joel admits. “Now, obviously, I wouldn’t touch that, but I spent my first six months doing characters.”
Character comedy isn’t for everyone. As with all the various comedic subgenres, there are the truly talented who do characters very well. And chances are, had he stuck with it, Joel would have become such a comic. Instead, he found himself jealous of other comics who could “just get up and chat about their lives”. Realising that was the sort of comedy he wanted to be able to do, he soon realised he had to “drop the character”.
Which is why Naked serves as a marker in Joel’s career trajectory: he’s gone from being a character to being himself talking about other people, to being himself talking about himself. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Particularly in the first year after Joel jettisoned the character, there was the fear that nobody particularly wants to hear about his life. “And still, sometimes I’ll get halfway through a story and think, ‘oh god, do people really want to know about me?’”
Clearly, they do. Particularly when Joel can make it sound so funny. But right now, I mostly want to know about his relationship with his parents. Clearly, they’re cool about his career choice in showbiz, if they had sent him to drama school!
“My parents are actors themselves, so they’re cool,” Joel confirms. Now that he’s based in Melbourne, Joel’s folks travel from Perth every year to check out the show. “They’re pretty into it. They’ve never tried to dissuade me in any way.” How could they? As Joel points out, having started at age 17, he actually needed his parents to attend all of his performances as they took place in pubs.
“I had to go with them to get in. That was fun! I’m sure that that’s how all the big-name comics do it…”
So Joel didn’t have the usual comedian’s story of “my parents disowned me when I started doing comedy”; perhaps he might have has a “my parents disowned me when I started doing musical theatre taking on the leading lady roles” but that’s just as unlikely. However, he still has the basic tale of overcoming adversity that so many comics have. The disbelievers, against whom every one of Joel’s successes is a victory, are “everyone I went to school with!”
“They were horrible to me because I was the Drama Captain – Surprise! There were just so many arseholes I went to school with. I just want to stick it in their face.”
Consider it stuck. One of my fonder moments in Melbourne took place in the shopping centre, Melbourne Central. On one level, every pillar is a poster board, meaning that on that level, literally hundreds of posters are Blu-Tacked to be viewed by the multitude of passing shoppers. I regret not having taken a photograph of the poster for Joel’s Naked, in which he’s depicted pretty much as the title suggests. Because someone had gone to the trouble of fashioning a cock-and-balls and adorning his poster with it.
“I’m hoping they used a lot of Blu-Tack,” Joel says.
I’m not in a position to confirm the anatomical accuracy of it, but anyone can graffiti a poster with texta, and Joel concurs that it is “a very impressive effort” that someone has gone to. “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “That took time and effort. I’m flattered. I hope they bought a ticket to the show as well…”
Speaking of the show, it’s worth chasing down what it is actually about.
“People say Naked is a ‘gay show’,” Joel says, “but it’s not. It’s relatable to everyone. It’s just that I’m so camp, people are always going to assume that. Which sometimes annoys me, because reviewers come to my show and call me ‘really gay’, and I don’t think they would go and see a woman comic and call her ‘really feminine’.”
That Joel’s camp persona is larger than life should come as no surprise. That’s what a camp persona essentially is. And while it will always be part of Joel’s comedic style – “I have very limp wrists throughout the entire performance, and my gay nasal twang is out in full force” – it doesn’t dictate the substance of the material. Party Animal, for example, was more ‘gay’, insofar as, since it was dealing with politics, it had to address the issue of single-sex marriage.
Naked – a title devised “years ago” – is all about Joel. It consists of stories stretching from primary school to high school and involves “getting drunk and things that everyone does, not just gay guys.” Although, he adds, “we probably do get drunk more than most people…”
Furthermore, in the more pat description, Naked is “all about fears, secrets, nudity and Xena the Warrior Princess”. Since one of the secrets is that Joel’s “a mad fan of Xena the Warrior Princess – and not ashamed!” it’s easy to see why some reviewers will consider the show a bit ‘gay’.
Thing is, as with many gay comics, the audience, paradoxically, will consist mostly of ‘straights’. Forgive the generalisation – or at least, hear me out first – but it seems that gay men usually have such a biting sense of humour that, usually, nobody else can be as funny as them and their mates, or at least, systematically amuse them as much as their mates. So they don’t go out and see comedy as readily as ‘straight’ audiences. And it’s the straight audiences who dig the gay comics most, because they’re getting access to insights and observations they wouldn’t usually hear.
Don’t freak out at the last paragraph. Particularly, don’t freak out just because it contains the adjectives ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. It’s just a more specific example of the greater truism, that comics are like prophets: appreciated less in their own land, they have to go off and preach to other people who have not been brought up in the same environment/class/belief system.
“We are very good at taking people apart, piece-by-piece,” says Joel, agreeing initially that he doesn’t have “a massively gay audience”. Then he corrects himself:
“I do: I would have more of a gay audience than, say, Dave Hughes.”
However, he says, his “dream audience” are the ones found in regional towns and “rough clubs” because of the challenge they pose: “you can win them over; they’re easier to shock. Whereas, while gay guys generally seem to have a great sense of humour, they’re very hard to shock. There’s always that weird element of competition there.”
But there are a lot of gay people in his audience, Joel realises, because when he was playing in Melbourne, the women playing in the venue before him noticed how fabulously attired his audience was. “They said they loved walking out and seeing my crowd queuing to come in because they’d all be so well dressed. They’d see what sort of looks were in season and take notes!”
The major demographic a good looking, young gay guy naturally plays to is present and accounted for in significant numbers in Joel’s audiences: teeny-bopper girls.
“I love them because they are great laughers,” Joel says. “But sometimes they bring their parents, and I think, ‘Oh god, you don’t know what you’re in for…’” Not that there are awkward moments during the show, so much. More likely, there are “many awkward car rides home”.
This is particularly true given some of the fears Joel addresses in Naked. One of them is, indeed, of being naked. Hence the show’s title. And poster.
“The show’s about me getting my kit of metaphorically,” Joel says. “And physically…”
There is a point in the show when the comic strips.
“So, yeah, when the young girls bring their parents it’s like, ‘oh god… I’ve got to take my clothes off at some point…”
In addition to his fear of being naked, Joel also has podophobia: “a weird fear of feet”.
“I’ve never liked them,” he says. “I hate them. They freak me out…”
Although he can deal with his own, Joel loathes other people’s. “I just don’t want to see feet. I hate thongs and sandals and crocs and things like that.”
Initially, Joel’s foot fear was not part of this show. Not until he happened to mention it to fellow comic Adam Richard while at a dinner party.
Adam’s immediate reaction?
“He put his feet in my potato salad, of course!”
The following day, Adam told his multitude of Twitter followers that Joel Creasey has a foot fetish, asking people to send Joel pictures of their feet.
“It was awful!” Joel says. “He’s got ten thousand followers, so I got a lot of pictures of feet.” And, being “very OCD”, Joel was forced to open every single attachment, “just in case one of them was a gift voucher for a million dollars.”
Oh, that reminds me of a horrible photo I saw online, of someone who had been shot in the foot.
“If I can find the image, I’ll send it to you,” I promise.
“Please don’t,” Joel says. “That’ll haunt me!”
See Joel Creasey's Naked at the Sydney Comedy Festival at Seymour Centre Sound Lounge at 7:30pm, Thurs 26 April to Sat 28 April.
Posted at 01:50 PM in Comedy, Joel Creasey, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sydney Comedy Festival | Permalink | 0 comments
Tags: Joel Creasey, Naked, Sydney Comedy Festival
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PREVIEW: Michigan State, Minnesota for three-game series starting Friday
By Lauren DeMay
Sophomore pitcher Alli Walker (19) winds up during the game against Oakland on April 3, 2019 at Secchia Stadium. The Spartans beat the Golden Grizzlies, 11-3.
Sylvia Jarrus | The State News
Currently on a three-win streak, the Spartans (15-22, 3-6 Big Ten) are looking to continue their success as they go into the weekend.
The Golden Gophers have an overall record of 27-10 and a Big Ten record of 8-1. Both teams have faced Maryland this season in three game series, with Minnesota winning all three games and Michigan State winning two out of the three. With both teams being in the midwest, each have had similar situations when it comes to weather and practice.
Only one of Minnesota’s games has been cut short due to weather, however they have not had to postpone or cancel a game so far this season. MSU has had to cancel three games so far this season, with one of them being in The Purple Classic Tournament. Minnesota has only had three home games so far this season, as MSU has hosted eight games at Secchia Stadium.
When the teams last met in 2018, each team won one game against each other in their double header on April 8. The Spartans won the first game 3-2, and the Golden Gophers won the second game 6-2. Michigan State is hoping to gain redemption after last season from Minnesota.
The games will be broadcasted via webcast on BTN2Go and are available to listen to on The Spartan Sports Network via radio broadcast. Live stats will be available on msuspartans.com.
MSU will face No. 19/12 Minnesota for a three game series starting Friday, April 12. They will play at 7 p.m. EDT Friday, then 2.p.m EDT Saturday and 1 p.m. EDT Sunday.
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Lauren DeMay
City council considers pilot programs, sets hearing for dispensary
The East Lansing City Council set a public hearing for a multi-use hotel and dispensary and heard presentations on July 30-minute, free parking and a ...
East Lansing gives update on income tax revenue
Tuesday’s East Lansing City Council meeting will have an update on income tax revenue scheduled at 7:00 p.m. in Courtroom 2 of the East Lansing 54B ...
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Reports can be presented to the States Assembly on a wide range of subjects and may include annual reports, consultations, proposed property sales and purchases and delegations of functions.
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R.12/1999 States Rental Waiting List
Presented by: Housing Committee
R.13/1999 Dwelling Houses Loan Fund: Accounts for 1998
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Empowering Puna Through Music
by Tiffany Jentsch – April 21, 2014
Photo Credit: Jessica Scranton
How does a community change its reputation? Transform negative perceptions into a renewed sense of appreciation and value? This is a question that faces many communities around the world, including the most economically-challenged region in Hawaii, the District of Puna.
Located on Hawaiʻi Island, Puna has been isolated by its geography, Kilauea’s recent lava flows - and by negative perceptions of the region. However, while Puna’s remoteness keeps it under the radar of many Hawaiians and travelers, alike, it is quickly becoming a haven for sustainable, off-the-grid living and cutting-edge permaculture practices.
Home to the newest land on the planet, Puna has a powerful energetic presence personified by volcano goddess, Pele, and has been compared to Sedona, Arizona, and other power spots around the world. This secluded district has drawn eco-conscious, forward-thinking residents and visitors to its affordable shores, and has given birth to the Yoga Coast, a stretch of coastline with the highest density of yoga teachers in the United States. Puna also contains many sacred Hawaiian cultural sites, is where the sun first rises on the Hawaiian Islands, and has been made famous through Hawaiian chants and stories.
Although changing the perception of a district seems like a daunting task, a group of community leaders from KAPONO (the Kalapana-Pohoiki Neighborhood Organization) and Kalani, Hawaii’s largest retreat center, have set out to do just that. Their innovation tool? Festivals.
Puna’s annual festivals have created a sense of purpose in the community, and have presented an opportunity to invite the world to join in celebrating the Puna’s rich cultural gifts. Creatively rich, agriculturally profound, and visually stunning, it turns out there are many gifts to share. And so, with founding support from the County of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Tourism Authority, the district now celebrates three major festivals annually: the Puna Music Festival, the Puna Culinary Festival, and the Hawaii Yoga Festival.
The first of these in 2014, the Fourth Annual Puna Music Festival, is just around the corner, from May 4th through May 11th. This nonprofit event draws thousands of people to Pohoiki, the local surf beach, and to the streets of the town of Pahoa, where the Kanikapila (jam session) brings live music to balconies, windows, and storefronts around town.
Throughout the festival, keiki (Hawaiian children) can be seen playing to the sounds of local musical artists, while others enjoy sampling some of the region’s fresh, local street food. Brilliant green foliage hangs over the stark black cliffs, effortlessly enduring the pulse of the mighty Pacific waves, while the festivities roll on. However, this rugged and pristine Hawaiian landscape is just a bonus. The real magic to life in Puna happens when this colorful community joins together.
Each year, the Puna Music Festival has attracted more and more visitors and performers. The attention the region has received is steadily growing, and the innovative, out-of-the-box approach the festival has taken is helping Puna get the widespread positive recognition it deserves. The festival has quickly grown to become the second largest multi-day festival in East Hawaiʻi, a respected event on the island’s cultural calendar.
Exactly how do Puna’s festivals like the Puna Music Festival empower the people of Puna? Attracting visitors to one of Hawaii’s best kept secrets boosts spending and economic growth; however, the true hope of the festival is to showcase the people who live here in their true light – as vibrant, beautiful, and culturally rich individuals, building community pride and connectedness.
Puna is home to some of the most creative and renowned talent in Hawaii. Local musicians and artists enjoy the opportunity to share with the community their unique and diverse talents. The diversity of music ranges from the stirring sounds of Hawaiian music, to the deeply soulful music from the Sacred Music Festival, which brings kirtan and other forms of sacred music to the forefront.
In addition to showcasing musical talent, the week has incorporated opportunities for educational and cultural immersion, in order to deepen the connection with Hawaiian culture. Artists step forward to share their gifts, teaching song-writing, slack key guitar, drum making, hula, and how to make and play the ohe hano ihu, the Hawaiian nose flute.
Hawaiian elders and kumu (teachers) have highlighted how important the festival has become within the community. They recognize that when the community joins together to honor each other and this ever-changing land, the power felt amidst the celebration is indescribable.
Visitors looking for a truly magical cultural and sacred experience - without the traffic, giant resorts and big businesses - increasingly find it in Puna. Those lucky enough to find themselves in this inspiring district have access to a deeply authentic, meaningful and life-changing experience – and when they leave, they know that their presence has helped to transform and empower this beautiful community.
For more information about the Puna Music Festival, visit www.punamusicfestival.com.
• Meditation Music • Festivals • Music
Music Review: Magical Ascension
Our Community Journal: The Light of the Moon
"Threading the Ether: A Cantata in 9 Movements"
Reviews: January/February 2011
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Thomas Tusser
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HomeArchivesEmerson Post-Mortem Tries to Dissect Stunning Election Results
Emerson Post-Mortem Tries to Dissect Stunning Election Results
A group of academics, journalists, and campaign strategists gathered at Emerson College the evening after Republican Donald Trump was elected to the highest office in the nation in an upset to try to understand what happened.
The panelists at the post-mortem hosted by the Communication Studies Department and held Wednesday, November 9, in the Bright Family Screening Room, varied in political stripe, but all had similar ideas and thoughts on what went on in Tuesday’s presidential election Tuesday night.
None of them had believed before Tuesday night that Donald Trump would win. Yet here they were, the day after, with a Trump victory, and no definite answers how it happened.
The discussion began with six Nepali journalists who had come to Emerson for three weeks to observe the presidential election. During their time here, they attended rallies in New Hampshire, and visited Washington D.C. and Virginia. They spent election night in New York City, where both candidates awaited the results.
At the panel, they each took turns getting up and sharing their views on the election process, how it worked, what it looked like, and how it compared to what they had in Nepal.
“If Hillary Clinton had won… it could have been an example for the whole world,” said Sunita Pahari, an assistant reporter at Ujyaalo Online. Pahari was not the only Nepali journalist that brought up the issue of gender in the election.
“I used to think the U.S had equal rights between men and women, but when I got here the election was [divided] between gender,” said Nabin Khatiwada, a reporter at My Republica.
A series of six panelists from various backgrounds offered their theories of what happened. The panel was made up of photojournalist David Burnett and Democratic political strategist Iris Burnett ’68; Communication Studies Chair Gregory Payne; Enric Ordeix, a visiting professor from Blanquerna University in Barcelona; Gloria Boone, a professor of advertising, public relations, and digital media at Suffolk University; and GOP consultant Kat Grosso ‘05.
Grosso said she started out the night believing that Hillary Clinton had a 70 percent chance of winning. She said she didn’t vote for Trump, and while she wasn’t thrilled with Clinton potentially winning, she was accepting of it.
But after Trump won, she said she felt uneasy, something that hadn’t happened to the Republican when Democrats had won in the past.
“The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” she said of her feelings about Trump’s victory.
Boone said she believed there was not one singular reason Trump won, but attributed part of it to the simple fact that “Democrats simply did not have enough people come to the polls.”
She said she also believes that more rural areas of the country were going for Trump, and the polls weren’t taking that into account.
The calm discussion inside the Paramount Center was in stark contrast to the anti-Trump protests taking place at the nearby Boston Common. There, chants of “Not my president” could be heard, echoing the frustration of many younger voters who feel Trump will simply fail to represent a large portion of the country.
Bright Lights Celebrates Trans Awareness Week with "Real Boy" Doc
Emerson Hosts First Round of D3 Women’s Volleyball ECAC Championship
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Ferrari 812 Superfast to Debut at Geneva International Motor Show
by TrackWorthy, February 27, 2017
Ferrari has selected the 87th Geneva International Motor Show for the world premiere of the new 12-cylinder berlinetta, the Ferrari 812 Superfast, the most powerful and fastest Ferrari in the marque’s history. This new car not only introduces innovative features but also marks the 70th anniversary of the Prancing Horse’s first V12 in 1947.
The 812 Superfast ushers in a new era in Ferrari 12-cylinder history, building on the legacies of the F12berlinetta and F12tdf. It is aimed at clients demanding the most powerful and exclusive Ferrari in the range: an uncompromising sports car that will deliver exhilarating driving both on road and track yet also be comfortable enough to allow its owners enjoy it as an all-round experience.
The Ferrari 812 Superfast is super-fast. It accelerates from 0-100 km/h in just 2.9 seconds and can achieve a top speed of 340 km/h. It is powered by a new 6.5-litre V12 engine that unleashes 788 hp achieving maximum power output at 8,500 rpm, which translates to a specific power output of 121 hp/l. Figures that no other front-engined production car has ever even come close to achieving. The engine’s power is underscored by a full, rich exhaust sound that exploits the acoustic clout delivered by its increased displacement. Maximum torque is 529 lb-ft @ 7,000 rpm, a significant 80% of which is already available at 3,500 rpm, improving both driveability and acceleration even at low revs.
The 812 Superfast’s dual-clutch transmission has specific gear ratios which, combined with shorter up and down-shifting times between gears, sharpen throttle response still further. It is the first Ferrari to sport EPS (Electric Power Steering) which is used to fully exploit the potential of the car’s performance and, through the complete integration with all the electronic vehicle dynamics controls – including the latest 5.0 version of Ferrari’s patented Side Slip Control (SSC) – make its powerful performance easier to handle and even more thrilling to exploit.
The vehicle controls also feature, for the first time, the Virtual Short Wheelbase 2.0 system (PCV) which, following the experience gained with the F12tdf, features a further evolution of the software that improves the nimbleness of the handling and reduces the vehicle response times even further.
Seen in silhouette, the 812 Superfast has a fastback sleekness: a two-box design with a high tail reminiscent of the 1969 365 GTB4. Full-LED headlights integrated into the design of the sculpted air intakes on the hood also emphasise that front muscle, integrating with, and wrapping around the front wheelarch. At the rear, four round tail-lights inspired by Ferrari tradition emphasise a design crafted around horizontal lines and give the 812 Superfast a broad, imposing stance, visually lowering both spoiler and cabin. The car is being launched in a special new colour, Rosso Settanta, which marks the company’s 70th anniversary.
The interior of the 812 Superfast has been revisited in line with the more extreme exterior whilst maintaining unaltered the exceptional on-board comfort and space that Ferrari’s front-engined V12 berlinettas have always offered. The cabin has been given a sportier, more radical look with the main elements seeming to float, creating an effect of both thoroughbred racing eagerness and lean elegance. The horizontal dash loops stylishly around the central air vents for a sophisticated, sculptural look. New, more sporty and ergonomic seats feature alongside the new HMI, including new steering wheel and instrument clusters and the latest infotainment and air-conditioning units.
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TrackWorthy Cars
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Originally from Manitoulin Island, Jennifer Farquhar has lived in France, Japan, and Montreal, and currently resides in southwestern Ontario. She is an elementary school teacher and mother of two young children. Her short fiction has won awards in the Manitoulin Expositor and the Toronto Star. WATERMARK is her debut novel and will be on offer in North America in September 2016, pitch follows: The Gathering meets The Cure for Death by Lightning. Opening on an island in Lake Huron in the mid-1970s, WATERMARK tells the story of Mina McInnis, a responsible girl whose affections are torn between her younger brother David and the fiery Rhonda Doyle, a summer resident whose family owns a private island across the bay. In a moment of weakness and inattention, Mina makes a mistake with tragic consequences. Soon, rumors are circulating among the local Ojibway about an ancient evil in the Great Lake, forcing Mina to flee in fear to Chicago. Twenty-five years later, Mina returns with her son to the island where her family disintegrated, determined to uncover the truth about the Doyles and the tragedy from her past, and the creature that dwells in the cold, dark waters of Lake Huron. WATERMARK is upmarket nostalgia horror that combines a chilling ghost story with a seventies summer cottage vibe, and examines how one bad choice reverberates across multiple generations. Contact: samantha@transatlanticagency.com
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Michelle Parise has been a producer for CBC Radio and Television for over two decades. Born and raised in Toronto in a gigantic Italian immigrant family, Michelle was surrounded by storytellers, and as a child she wrote hundreds of short stories about her life. When she was 11-years-old she wrote a feminist novella in response to a book she’d taken issue with on the Grade 7 reading list. The teacher made it part of the curriculum in the years following. Her commitment to honest storytelling started early, is what we’re getting at, and is part of everything she creates, continually striving to make connection through shared experience.
Photo Credit: Pascal Chiarello
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Daily Ratings & News for Precision Drilling
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Precision Drilling (NYSE:PDS) Shares Gap Up to $1.65
Posted by Joseph Casey on Jun 15th, 2019
Precision Drilling Corp (NYSE:PDS) (TSE:PD) shares gapped up prior to trading on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $1.58, but opened at $1.65. Precision Drilling shares last traded at $1.72, with a volume of 2,240,297 shares traded.
Several brokerages have commented on PDS. BMO Capital Markets reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Precision Drilling in a report on Friday, April 26th. Raymond James reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Precision Drilling in a report on Friday, April 26th. ValuEngine upgraded shares of Precision Drilling from a “sell” rating to a “hold” rating in a report on Monday, April 1st. Scotiabank reiterated a “sell” rating on shares of Precision Drilling in a report on Tuesday, March 19th. Finally, Zacks Investment Research upgraded shares of Precision Drilling from a “sell” rating to a “hold” rating in a report on Saturday, February 16th. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, three have given a hold rating and ten have given a buy rating to the company’s stock. Precision Drilling presently has an average rating of “Buy” and an average target price of $3.92.
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The firm has a market capitalization of $505.30 million, a P/E ratio of -6.35 and a beta of 2.35. The company has a current ratio of 2.11, a quick ratio of 1.99 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.08.
Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. FMR LLC lifted its position in shares of Precision Drilling by 10.9% in the fourth quarter. FMR LLC now owns 22,033,635 shares of the oil and gas company’s stock worth $38,250,000 after purchasing an additional 2,158,932 shares in the last quarter. Letko Brosseau & Associates Inc. lifted its position in shares of Precision Drilling by 0.5% in the first quarter. Letko Brosseau & Associates Inc. now owns 13,804,245 shares of the oil and gas company’s stock worth $32,755,000 after purchasing an additional 67,810 shares in the last quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp lifted its position in shares of Precision Drilling by 10.8% in the fourth quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp now owns 10,121,690 shares of the oil and gas company’s stock worth $17,612,000 after purchasing an additional 985,422 shares in the last quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. lifted its position in shares of Precision Drilling by 3.1% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 7,265,717 shares of the oil and gas company’s stock worth $25,139,000 after purchasing an additional 220,935 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Fiera Capital Corp lifted its position in shares of Precision Drilling by 1.3% in the first quarter. Fiera Capital Corp now owns 6,203,750 shares of the oil and gas company’s stock worth $14,712,000 after purchasing an additional 80,300 shares in the last quarter. 43.37% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
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About Precision Drilling (NYSE:PDS)
Precision Drilling Corporation, an oilfield services company, provides oil and natural gas drilling and related services and products. The company operates in two segments, Contract Drilling Services, and Completion and Production Services. The Contract Drilling Services segment offers onshore well drilling services to exploration and production companies in the oil and natural gas industry.
Further Reading: Sell-Side Analysts
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Insider Buying: Guess?, Inc. (NYSE:GES) CEO Purchases 347,353 Shares of Stock
Red Pulse Phoenix (PHX) Hits 24 Hour Trading Volume of $3.11 Million
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Bharat Hotels Unlisted Shares
A) Overview of the Bharat Hotels
(i) They are one of the leading privately-owned domestic hotel brands in India, according to the CRISIL Report, engaged in the business of operating and managing hotels, palaces, and resorts, with a focus on the luxury segment. As at March 31, 2018, they operated 12 luxury hotels, palaces and resorts under The Lalit brand and two mid-market segment hotels under The Lalit Traveller brand across India‘s key business and leisure travel destinations, offering 2,261 rooms.
(ii) In addition, they hold the exclusive rights to provide management consultancy services in connection with the operation and management of a hotel in London, The Lalit London, which offered 70 rooms as at March 31, 2018.
(iii) The luxury hotels operating across India under The Lalit brand are grouped into the following three categories:
a) City hotels: The LaLiT New Delhi, The LaLiT Mumbai, The LaLiT Ashok Bangalore, The LaLiT Great Eastern Kolkata, The LaLiT Jaipur and The LaLiT Chandigarh.
b) Palaces: The Lalit Laxmi Vilas Palace Udaipur and The LaLiT Grand Palace Srinagar.
c) Resorts: The LaLiT Golf & Spa Resort Goa, The LaLiT Resort & Spa Bekal (Kerala), The LaLiT Mangar and The LaLiT Temple View Khajuraho.
B) Future Plans of Bharat Hotels
i)Going forward, they intend to develop three new hotels under The LaLiT brand in Ahmedabad, Mangalore and Dehradun which will, in aggregate, offer 290 rooms and 115 cottages, when completed.
(ii) They also intend to develop 50 additional rooms at The LaLiT Laxmi Vilas Palace Udaipur.
(iii) They also operate two hotels in the mid-market segment under The LaLiT Traveller brand, which are The LaLiT Traveller Jaipur and The LaLiT Traveller Khajuraho. They intend to develop four new hotels under The LaLiT
Traveller brand in Ahmedabad, Pune, Amritsar and Chitrakoot which will, in the aggregate, offer 308 rooms, when completed.
(iv) Further, in the F&B segment, they operat 45 restaurants, bars and bakery outlets as of March 31, 2018 across our hotels in India. They have developed their own brands, such as 24/7, Baluchi, OKO, The LaLiT Boulangerie, Kitty Su and The LaLiT Food Truck Company.
Bharat Hotels Unlisted Shares Details:
Total Available Shares: Not Available
ISIN: INE466A01015
Lot Size: 100 Shares
(i) Dr. Jyotsna Suri is the Chairperson and Managing Director of the Company. She has been on our Board since January 11, 1989. She was appointed as the Joint Managing Director of the Company with effect from December 1, 1989 and as the Chairperson and Managing Director of our Company with effect from October 16, 2006. Qualification and Experience: a) She has a bachelor‘s degree in English from Miranda House College, Delhi University and has been conferred an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Warwick, U.K. b) She was the President of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 2015 and has been the Chairperson of the FICCI Creative Industries Committee since 2015 and the Chairperson of the FICCI Tourism Committee since 2006. c)She has received various awards such as Outstanding Business Woman Award‘ at the PHD Annual Awards for Excellence in 2016, the InWENA trophy for Women Entrepreneur(s)/Intrapreneur(s) of the Decade at the InWENA Awards in 2016 and the BEST CEO – Hospitality Sector‘ at the Global Women Achievers Awards in 2015. (ii) Ms. Divya Suri Singh is an Executive Director of our Company. She has been a Director of our Company since August 26, 2009 and has been associated with our Company as legal advisor since 2001. Qualification and Experience: a) She holds a bachelor‘s degree in commerce from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University and a bachelor‘s degree in law from King‘s College London. She is enrolled as an advocate with the Bar Council of Delhi. b) She was the Chairperson of the Young FICCI Ladies Organization in 2012-2013. Since 2014, she has been a member of the Young Presidents‘ Organization. (iii) Ms. Deeksha Suri is an Executive Director of our Company. She has been a Director of our Company since August 26, 2009 and is responsible for manpower planning, human resource development and general administration functions of our Company. Qualification and Experience: She holds a diploma in business studies from The London School of Economics and Political Science. She has included in Power Rangers a list of the 25 most influential women professionals in India, by India Today in 2012.
Financials of Bharat Hotels Unlisted Shares:
Sr.no 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014
Number of available rooms 2261 2206 2207 2207 2046
Number of hotels 14 13 13 13 12
ARR (₹) 6388 6306 6320 6613 7346
Average Occupancy Rate (%) 62 55 51 45 38
Average RevPAR (₹) 3974 3494 3200 2973 2813
Average TRevPAR (₹) 9143 8256 7679 6949 6461
Average expense per room (₹ million) 2.35 2.13 2.01 1.86 1.77
Average staff per room ratio 1.69 1.68 1.66 1.57 1.69
EBITDA (₹ million) 2242 1954 1777 1227 781
EBITDA margin (%) 29.71% 29.42% 28.66% 23.04% 17.78%
Key Financials Parameters 1. The Revenue is growing at a CAGR of 9.91% in the last 5 Years. 2. The PAT is growing at a CAGR of 17.98% in the last 5 Years. 3. Debt( Long-term and Short-term)= 1135.5 Cr. 4. Equity= 1101.2 Cr 5. D/E= 1.03 6. ROCE= 6% based on FY18 Financials.
Bharat Hotels Limited Barakhamba Avenue, Connaught Place, New Delhi - 110 001, India Phone: +91 11 4444 7777 Email: corporate@thelalit.com
Click Here to Buy or Sell Bharat Hotels Unlisted Shares
Discussion on Bharat Hotels Unlisted Shares:
History of Dividends
1. 2015-16= The Board has recommended a dividend of 7.5% per share i.e. Rs.0.75 per equity share of Rs. 10/- each.
2. 2016-17= The Board has recommended a dividend of 10% per share i.e. Rs.1.00 per equity share of Rs. 10/- each.
3. 2017-18= The Board has recommended a dividend of 10% per share i.e. Rs. 1 (Previous Year: Rs. 1) per equity share of Rs. 10/- each
********Bharat Hotel and Sphoorty Financial Received SEBI Approval *****************
Bharat Hotels, which runs five-star properties under The LaLiT brand, and micro-finance lender Spandana Sphoorty Financial have received the Securities and Exchange Board of India nod for IPO. With this, the total number of companies getting SEBI approval for initial share sale has reached 60 so far this year.
Bharat Hotels and Spandana Sphoorty had obtained the regulator’s “observations” on October 12. Both the companies had approached SEBI in June with their respective IPO papers. The capital market regulator’s observations are necessary for any company to launch public issues like initial public offer (IPO), follow-on public offer (FPO) and rights issue.
Going by the draft papers, Bharat Hotels’ IPO comprises sale of fresh equity shares to the tune of Rs 1,200 crore. Proceeds of the issue will be utilised towards repayment of certain loans availed by the company and for other general corporate purposes. HDFC Bank Ltd, Edelweiss Financial Services and YES Securities (India) will manage the company’s public issue.
As of March 2018, the company had operated 12 luxury hotels, palaces and resorts under The LaLiT brand and two mid-market segment hotels under The LaLiT Traveller brand across the country’s key businesses and leisure travel destinations.
Spandana Sphoorty IPO consists of fresh issue of shares worth up to Rs 400 crore, and an offer for sale of up to 13,146,595 equity stocks by existing shareholders, including Kedaara Capital Alternative Investment, Helion Venture Partners and Valiant Mauritius Partners, as per the draft papers.
Net proceeds of the fresh issue will be utilised for augmenting capital base and general corporate purposes. Axis Capital, ICICI Securities, IIFL Holdings and JM Financial are the book running lead managers to the issue.
A) The following table sets forth a comparison of operating performance across India for the fiscal year 2016:
Parameter —Avg. Across India’s four-star hotels—-Avg. Across India’s three—–Avg. Across India’s two star
(i) Occupancy (%)— 63.4—————————————— 61.7—————————————– 61.4
(ii) ADR (₹) ————– 4,173 —————————————3,023————————————– 2,058
(iii) RevPAR (₹) ————-2,646 ———————————–1,865 —————————————–1,264
B) The following table sets forth the revenue composition of the average of all chain-affiliated hotels across India for the fiscal the year 2016:
Hotel Category ———-Four-star hotels (%) —————-Three-star hotels (%) ———Two-star hotels (%)
(i) Rooms ————————–54.2 ————————————–50.8————————————- 53.0
(ii) Food and Beverages ——–40.7 —————————————43.6————————————– 42.2
(iii) Banquets———————- 13.7 —————————————9.6—————————————— 6.7
Hotel Industry Analysis, Key Barriers and Future Prospect
(i) Market size of the organized and branded hotels industry!!!
a) CRISIL estimates the market size of the organized Indian hospitality industry comprising of only starred hotels to be approximately ₹ 55000 Cr during Fiscal 2018.
b) The industry has expanded at a CAGR of approximately 13.00% over the last four years between Fiscals 2014 and 2018.
(ii) Luxury hotel industry to grow at a CAGR of approximately 10.50-11.50% between Fiscals 2019 and 2022.
(iii) RevPAR for mid-market hotels to grow at a CAGR of approximately 5.00%
(iv) Key barriers to entry in the Indian hotel industry
The hotel industry faces several challenges to entry at key locations, principal among which include the availability of land, regulatory approvals, project delays and capital-intensive nature of the industry, as well as the availability of skilled manpower.
(Source: CRISIL Report.)
The LaLiT New Delhi and The LaLiT Mumbai have historically contributed a significant proportion to the EBITDA. The LaLiT New Delhi and The LaLiT Mumbai together accounted for approximately 66.62%, 66.09% and 58.25% of our EBITDA during Fiscals 2018, 2017 and 2016.
How to value Hotel Companies:
(i) Occupancy Rates.- The occupancy rate at a hotel is the number of available rooms that are occupied over a period of time.
(ii) ARR– It is a hotel KPI which measures the average rate per available room – similarly to ADR. Both of them can be used for the same purpose which is to calculate the average rate of the room.
(iii) RevPAR.- It is calculated by multiplying a hotel’s average daily room rate (ADR) by its occupancy rate. It may also be calculated by dividing a hotel’s total room revenue by the total number of available rooms in the period being measured.
(iv) TRevPAR– total revenue per available room, is a performance metric in the hotel industry. … TRevPAR is the preferred metric for accountants and hotel owners because it effectively determines the overall financial performance of a property, while RevPAR only takes into account revenue from rooms.
The consolidated revenue of Bharat Hotel is 737 Cr and the consolidated EPS stands at 9.88. The recently listed Lemon tree is having a Revenue of 484 Cr with an EPS of 0.18. The Lemon tree is available at staggering P/E of 417. However, the hotel industry is not valued in terms of P/E but rather based on Average Revenue per Room, and the value of the property the hotel chain own.
Experts from Annual Report 2018
(i) The Board has recommended a dividend of 10% per share i.e. Rs. 1 (Previous Year: Rs. 1) per equity share of Rs. 10/- each.
(ii) The Company has clocked a Revenue of 645 Cr in FY18 as compared to 538 Cr last year showing growth of 20%.
(iii) The Company has issued ESOPs at Rs. 383 in FY18.
Bharat Hotels was started in 1981 by the Founder Chairman Lalit Suri and his wife Jyotsna Suri through bank loan and personal savings. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, Jyotsna always wanted to do something which would take the country forward and also caters to people. Initially they had a franchise with international chains like Holiday Inn, Hilton and Inter Continental. It was in 2008 when the group carved out a new identity and rebranded all hotels in the name of its Founder Chairman, Lalit Suri.
On charting a new vision of the group, Jyotsna says, “Though I was working as the Joint Managing Director, it was daunting to step in Lalit’s shoes. I had to establish my credibility internally and with the external world as well. The major transition came when we rebranded the company as Lalit. Carving a new identity for an already existing brand with fresh ideologies was most challenging.” Describing itself as traditionally modern, subtly luxurious and distinct, the Lalit Suri hospitality Group is India’s largest privately owned hotel chain.
Talking about her next big goal, she shares, “Right now, I am focused on opening of The Lalit Ahmedabad. We also plan to open more hotels in mid segment.” The group believes in developing destinations and not just hotels’. Therefore, its initiatives involve the local population, their handicrafts, culture and food.
Average Revenue Per Room of Lemon Tree the listed entity is:
1) Mid Scale = Rs. 2716 against an Industry Average of 1835
2) Upper Mid Scale=Rs. 3075 against an Industry Average of 2863
3) Economy Class=Rs. 1877 against an Industry Average of 1454
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Editorial, News, Trending
Rihanna Snagged Record 12th No. 1 SIngle With “Diamonds”
by Urban Islandz Staff November 21, 2012
Rihanna is shining bright like a diamond on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
The Bajan pop star’s new single “Diamonds” rose to the top of the chart to make it her 12th number one single.
The single has been steadily climbing the charts since its release last month. This week the Benny Blanco and Stargate-produced single jumps 2-1 this week based on a compilation of digital sales and airplay.
Rihanna To Make Biggest Chart Debut With Latest Album “Unapologetic”
Rihanna also debut a stunning music video for the single last week, which further pushed it to the top of the chart.
“‘Diamonds’ is @Rihanna’s 12th number one, at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 Single chart this week!” Def Jam tweeted yesterday.
Rihanna ties with Madonna in second place as the female with the most number one singles, only behind Mariah Carey who has 18 number ones. Whitney Houston has 11 and Janet Jackson has 10 number one singles each.
Rihanna released her highly anticipated album Unapologetic earlier this week. The album is on track to debut at the top of the Billboard 200 chart.
Godfrey Morris
Rihanna is shining bright like a diamond.
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Monthly update from Warwickshire's Police and Crime Commissioner
The latest news from the Warwickshire Police and Crime Commissioner
As your Police and Crime Commissioner, I want to create a safer, more secure Warwickshire for all residents and businesses. To that end, I need to ensure our police are properly resourced, with equipment, training and motivation to make them more effective.
A key part in enabling this is having the right finances in place and this week saw a significant landmark achieved with the agreement of the police budget for 2017/18. Earlier today (February 3), Warwickshire's Police and Crime Panel backed my proposal to increase investment in policing by £1.1 million pounds, while at the same time freezing the amount you as taxpayers contribute through your Council Tax.
While that may sound like an impossible task, I have been able to do this by using a portion of Warwickshire Police's financial reserves to make up the difference an increase of up to 1.1% would have made - plus a little extra on top. It means that I can continue to invest in frontline services, including additional specialist support for victims of crime and vulnerable people, enhanced restorative justice programmes and an extra 22 officers to investigate child sexual abuse.
This will also come alongside other investments in new technology to reduce bureaucracy and enable police officers to work remotely ans spend more time out in communities, as well as continued development of initiatives to combat business, rural and cyber crime.
All of this means that when Council Tax notices arrive on your doorstep later this year, the average Band D taxpayer will continue to pay £191.98 next year for policing services.
Taxpayers deserve to know that their money is being well spent and I will continue to scrutinise budgets and hold the Chief Constable to account to ensure this is the case. Overall, I will ensure that frontline policing is both protected and enhanced, that the most vulnerable in society are protected and that the issues that matter most to local communities continue to be addressed.
Philip Seccombe TD
Warwickshire Police and Crime Commissioner
Unauthorised traveller encampments in focus
In January, I organised a meeting in Nuneaton to discuss the situation in the county of unauthorised traveller encampments - an issue that I know from my mailbox is one that continues to frustrate local residents and businesses.
The meeting at Nuneaton Town Hall involved all of the agencies with powers to deal with unauthorised traveller encampments on public land, including the police, county, district and borough councils. Also in attendance were county MPs Marcus Jones and Craig Tracey, along with representatives of other county Members of Parliament, parish councils, Coventry City Council and the Office of the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner.
The group examined in detail the current legislative powers available to the agencies, as well as discussing recent case studies. Examples of alternative legal approaches, such as the use of injunctions against individuals, were also considered, drawing on experiences from elsewhere in the country.
I have been concerned for some time that, while the agencies responsible for dealing with unauthorised traveller encampments do work well together already, this is often on a case-by-case basis in each district, with no overall strategy to look at the issue on a county-wide basis, which could mean solving an issue in one part of the county only serves to create another elsewhere in Warwickshire. Equally, there could well be learning from each incident that is missed if it is not shared more widely.
The meeting was productive and gave all agencies the opportunity to share their perspective. To move matters further forward, my office is setting up a working group for representatives at each authority, which will look at drafting a framework to provide for better co-ordination in dealing with unauthorised encampments, in order to solve problems in the quickest possible time for residents and local businesses. It will also consider if existing legislation needs tightening and will make suggestions as to how it could be amended, which I will then follow up with our county MPs and the Government.
The West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson is organising a similar meeting this month, which I will be attending and speaking at, as it is also important to work closely across the region. I will keep you updated on our progress.
Rural crime training
Tackling rural crime remains one of my priorities and last month police officers, special sonstables and PCSOs from across the county were given an insight into how best to tackle it on special courses organised by my Rural Crime Co-ordinators Carol Cotterill, Lucy Lambert and Robert Church.
Two training days have been held – one at Pailton, near Rugby and another at Moreton Morrell College – with officers from Safer Neighbourhood Teams attending for a day of practical learning, .
At Pailton speakers included representatives from the farming community and the National Farmers Union, who discussed how best to work with farmers when dealing with incidents and what the impact of rural crime can be; an input from Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service’s Large Animal Rescue Team on how to safely deal with horses, other large animals and livestock at incidents; as well as an overview of the legislation covering the use of agricultural and plant equipment on the roads.
At Moreton Morrell, officers had demonstrations of crime prevention which can be passed onto the public and a live forensics learning exercise around the farm, giving officers the know-how of what to look for and how and when to bring in scenes of crimes officers.
Both courses featured further inputs from the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service and NFU Mutual, giving practical information on how to spot stolen plant and agricultural machinery, an overview of the Construction & Agricultural Equipment Security and Registration Scheme (CESAR) and a ‘hands on’ session examining tractors, quad bikes, trailers and other equipment that is often targeted by criminals.
In addition to learning about rural crime, the attendees of the Moreton Morrell course also had a training session on dementia awareness, enabling them to spot those who are vulnerable and know how to deal with people who may have dementia. All Safer Neighbourhood Teams in Stratford District and the Warwick rural teams have now become official ‘Dementia Friends’ as a result.
Police numbers on the increase
Last week saw the publication of new data by the Home Office on police officer numbers, which drew national headlines as it showed that across England and Wales as a whole, police officer numbers had fallen.
I am happy to be able to report that this is not the case here in Warwickshire - in fact, in the six months to September 2016, the numbers of police officers, PCSOs and special constables in the county had increased across the board.
In detail, the number of police officers increased by 2.1 percent, with an additional 17 officers recruited to the force. Similarly, there was a 12% increase in PCSOs and an almost 16% increase in the number of Special Constables, when compared with the end of March 2106. Overall, the total workforce is up by 5%, compared to the national average decrease of 1.3%.
Encouragingly, West Mercia Police was also among the handful of forces to show increases, showing the great benefits that working in alliance has had for both of the forces.
I am delighted that in the first six months of my term as Commissioner we have been able to not only maintain the previous good progress but also to build further upon it. Together with the considerable investments which I am making in new mobile technology to assist officers in their jobs, a refreshed recruitment process for the Special Constabulary and a renewed focus on protecting people from harm, I am confident that we can continue to maintain these gains and ensure that we create a safer and more secure Warwickshire for the benefit of all residents.
Alex and Sam can help you get Cyber Safe
Next week sees Safer Internet Day (Tuesday, 7 February) and it provides a timely reminder that, as recent crime figures have shown, cyber crime is on the rise and something were all vulnerable to.
To help tackle the problem, I have provided funding for two Cyber Crime Advisors, who are employed by Warwickshire County Council to deliver advice and key messages to communities across the county.
Alex Gloster (left) was appointed in April last year and was joined in December by Sam Slemensek (bottom right). Together, they are helping people to prevent, prepare and protect themselves against cyber crime through education, targeted awareness campaigns and through the support and creation of projects in Warwickshire.
Sam and Alex work with a wide range of partners in delivering their projects and are always looking for opportunities to come and talk about cyber crime and online safety. If you would be interested in receiving a talk for your group or organisation, email samslemensek@warwickshire.gov.uk.
It is estimated 80% of fraud and cyber crime is preventable if individuals and businesses take basic precautions - so below are Sam and Alex's top five tips to help keep you safe online:
Always be wary of opening links and attachments in email - check that the email is really from who it says it is from.
Have strong and unique passwords for each of your online accounts - and update them regularly.
Look for 'https' in the address bar and a padlock symbol in your internet browser when visiting sites - these give an indication that the website is secure.
Get anti-virus software for your computer, phone and other devices.
Remember to keep your software updated to reduce your chances of hackers being able to exploit security weaknesses to take over your device.
You can find out more information about staying safe online at: https://www.warwickshire.police.uk/article/3745/Online-crime
The month ahead
Here are some of the key events in my diary for the month ahead:
February 7: National Crime Agency meeting, London
February 8: Speaking at Stratford-on-Avon District Council's Overview and Scrutiny meeting
February 10: Attending the West Midlands PCC's Unauthorised Traveller Encampments Summit
February 16: Coleshill Community Forum
February 21: Conference on emergency services collaboration, London
February 22: Alliance Governance Group meeting, Leek Wootton.
February 23: Visit to the force Hate Crime Unit
February 24: Association of Police and Crime Commissioners Emergency Services Collaboration Working Group.
In addition, I have a weekly meeting with the Chief Constable to hold the force to account and discuss any arising issues. You can find details of these meetings here.
A full schedule of my key meetings and events is kept up-to date online at www.warwickshire-pcc.gov.uk/event/
The next newsletter will be published on Friday, 3 March.
Keep up to date with the latest news from the Warwickshire PCC
Copyright © 2017 Warwickshire PCC, All rights reserved.
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DestinationsFunInterests
The Most Stunning Yet Underrated Places to go in 2019
written by Viola December 6, 2018
Doesn’t it sometimes feel like every beautiful corner of the world has already been ruined discovered by tourists? We keep seeing the same places on Instagram again and again. The great pyramids in Giza, the Empire State Building in New York, the temples in Kyoto…while these destinations are wonderful, they are often overcrowded. I mean, have you seen this video showing all the cliché tourists photos people take? Everyone does the “fake push” pose in front of the leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a little embarrassing. So, where are some stunning yet underrated places you can visit in 2019? I asked travel bloggers to share with me their favourite secret spots around the globe and learned about so many destinations I never knew! Check out this list and let us know which country intrigues you.
Doesn't it sometimes feel like every beautiful corner of the world has already been ruined, I mean, discovered by tourists? Click To Tweet
“Poland is still one of the most underrated places to visit in Europe, and one of the continent’s best kept secrets. We too were in the dark until we completely fell in love with the country during our Erasmus in Warsaw.
Poland is an incredibly unique country due to the sheer diversity of scenery, as you’ll find something to explore no matter where you are in the country, from the bustling cities, to the serene nature escapes. From the beaches in the North, to the stunning mountains in the South, there is a whole country to explore, and you’re sure to find something that suits your preferences when it comes to travel. Warsaw has become one of Europe’s coolest capitals, a reconstructed rising phoenix filled with history lessons, great architecture, and a thriving food scene. If you love architecture, plan a road trip through the castles of the Lower Silesian Region (you can even sleep in one for less than 30€/night). Nature blooms all around, as Poland counts with more than twenty National Parks in the country, including one of the last remaining example of primary forest in Europe, the Białowieża Forest. We keep going back to Poland and finding new gems to fall in love with!”
Maria & Rui, Two Find A Way, Follow Maria & Rui on Instagram
“The South Pacific country of Tonga is home to some of the most beautiful beaches on the planet, and yet so few people have even heard of these islands. That’s part of what makes it so special.
One of the most exciting activities you can do while you’re there is swim with humpback whales — it’s one of only two countries in the world where you can do so! Between July and October, humpback whales migrate from Antarctica to Tonga to give birth, and if you happen to be there when this happens, you can slide in the water and float alongside them. Sometimes they even swim up to the beaches beside local guesthouses! If you’re not in Tonga during the popular whale-swimming season, you’ll feel as though you have the entire country to yourself. In low season, for example, I found myself on the most spectacular stretch of sand I’d ever seen, on the Ha’apai island chain, and I couldn’t believe I was the only person there.
When I wasn’t sunbathing in paradise, I was hiking on the isolated island of ‘Eua, learning about the island’s heritage on Tongatapu, and falling in love with the scenery and clear waters in beautiful Ha’apai. There’s plenty to do in Tonga, and it’s so worth visiting.”
Lauren, Never Ending Footsteps, Follow Lauren on Instagram
“If ever there was a country which has reached its moment to shine, it is Bosnia & Herzegovina.
This small European country, tucked away in the Balkan region and part of the former Yugoslavia, emerged from decades of socialism in a bloody hail of shells and bullets. Best known, perhaps, from TV news reports of the 1990s, Bosnia today is a very different place, but one that combines outstanding natural beauty with a recent history which is a valuable reminder that ethnic conflict need not be so very far from home.
Modern-day Bosnia is peaceful, however, and home to some of the friendliest people in Europe. A largely mountainous country, there is skiing in the winter months and beautiful hiking in summer; or you may prefer to explored the quaint villages and historic cities from the valley floor. Bosnia has been quick to restore the historic sites which were destroyed in the war; a visit to Mostar or Sarajevo will transport you deep into the Ottoman heritage of this region, where mosques sit alongside churches and Turkish-style bazaars tempt the senses.
Bosnia & Herzegovina is beautiful, safe and currently very affordable. Head there in 2019 before the rest of the world finds out!”
Jill, Reading the Book Travel, Follow Jill on Facebook
You may also like: 30 Incredible Places To Put On Your Bucket List
“For those who have drooled over dreamy Instagram photos of Iceland or Norway, I’ve got an even more wild and untouched destination for you to consider: Greenland!
You might just picture ice and cold when you think of Greenland, but the world’s largest island isn’t as desolate as you might think. In fact, 56,000 people call Greenland home, and the autonomous Danish region is more prepared for tourism than most people realize.
With iceberg tours, whale watching, glacier viewing, and hiking in the summer and snow shoeing, snowmobiling, and Northern Lights hunting in the winter, there’s a lot to do in Greenland!
I recommend Ilulissat, Greenland’s third-largest city, for first-time visitors. This city above the Arctic Circle sits at the mouth of the UNESCO-recognized Ilulissat Icefjord (meaning lots of icebergs!), and also gives a glimpse into traditional life in Greenland. Here, dogs are still working animals that the locals rely on in the winter months, and the diet still consists of mostly fish and seal meat. It’s a fascinating destination that is definitely underrated.”
Amanda, Dangerous Business, Follow Amanda on Instagram
“Many people have never heard of Vanuatu or only know it from seeing it on the news when the devastating Pam cyclone hit the country in 2015. But this beautiful archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, between Australia and Fiji, has a lot to offer to its visitors. Whether you want to relax on a stunning beach, have a dip in the bluest blue holes, explore the magnificent underwater world or watch lava at the top of an active volcano, you’ll find plenty of things to do in Vanuatu. Once occupied by the British and the French, Vanuatu has been independent since 1980. They have a strong traditional culture, or more accurately various fascinating cultures across the islands and the villages. Tourists can easily meet locals and discover their way of life. While you can still find comfortable resorts if you wish, Vanuatu is a fantastic place to disconnect from our modern life and embrace nature and simplicity. You will surely learn a few things just by visiting a village and seeing their strong link to nature. And a trip to the market or a garden will introduce you to fruits you didn’t know existed!”
Eloise, My Favourite Escapes, Follow Eloise on Instagram
“The Kingdom of Bhutan is a small country located in the eastern Himalayas with India to its south and sharing a border with China in the north. Though Bhutan has been open for tourism for more than 40 years, planning a trip there can be confusing and there’s a lot of misinformation out there, so many people give up altogether because they’re not sure where to start. In reality, planning a trip to Bhutan is not that difficult, and once you arrive you will understand why people refer to this magical land as “The Last Shangri-La”.
Bhutan is a prime example of how to show off the best of what the country has to offer while balancing local development and sustainability in every way, and offers something special for different kinds of travelers – a deep cultural travel experience for people wanting a spiritual journey, amazing architectural landmarks for sightseeing, a range of hiking trails for trekkers of all levels and vivid landscapes for photography junkies.
Bhutan is, without a doubt, one of the most uncrowded, untouched and pristine destinations I have ever had the privilege of traveling to, and offers an immersive cultural experience that you don’t find in many places around the world anymore. If you are looking to visit a country that hasn’t been completely overrun with tourists, then you need to add Bhutan to your list of places to visit in 2019!”
Flo, Yoga Wine Travel, Follow Flo on Instagram
“Located in Central Europe, Hungary is still a land of mysteries. While Budapest has been popping up on many articles as a great place to party, not much else is said about the city and especially about the country.
Yes, Budapest is great if you like to party. But it is also great to visit if you enjoy the urban architecture, the hot springs, the wine, and the food. And the Danube ads more charm to it.
But venture out of the capital and you’ll find the many medieval cities and castles, the amazing wines near Eger, and the full of history Szeged. Want to go swimming? Lake Balaton is a great choice! Feeling adventurous and on the lookout to explore some caves? Add Aggtelek to your itinerary.
Plan to visit the country in spring or fall, unless you want to come for the Christmas Markets in Budapest. The weather can be brutally cold during winter and very hot during summer. April, May, October, and November, however, are great months to visit.
And while you can pay with the card almost everywhere, you should always have Forints (HUF) ready. Exchange them before you head to the airport.”
Cris, LooknWalk, Follow Cris on Facebook
“Often overlooked by travellers, laid back Uruguay, one of South America’s smallest countries, is usually overshadowed by its gigantic neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. However, this small underexplored gem holds many surprises that will surely captivate you. From wildlife-watching on the Atlantic Coast to stepping back in time in the lovely town of Colonia and exploring its cosmopolitan capital Montevideo, Uruguay has something to please everyone.
In contrast with other countries in South America, getting around Uruguay is quite straightforward and manageable. Since the country is small, you are usually never further than 2 -3 hours away from your next destination. Most travellers arrive into Uruguay via Argentina because crossing from Buenos Aires to Colonia is just a quick ferry ride away. From there, you can go on to Montevideo and then on to Punta del Este and other highlights on the Atlantic coast, such as Punta del Diablo and Cabo Polonio. Another site you might find interesting is the Museo de la Revolución in the old meat-packing factory at Fray Bentos, which has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.”
Bianca, Nomadbiba, Follow Bianca on Facebook
“Romania often gets overlooked, yet it is a budget-friendly European destination that offers a wide variety of things to do and see.
For hikers and nature lovers, the area of the Carpathian Mountains includes more than twenty national and natural parks. In this area you can travel through vast green landscapes, glacial lakes and caves, engage in outdoor activities like rock climbing and wildlife watching, or hike and trek.
If you want to see Romania’s more traditional side, you can visit cities like Brasov and Sibiu, traditional small villages in Transylvania and Maramures regions, and old castles, churches, and monasteries. Romania is so good at preserving its local heritage, that many of these places make you feel like you’re stepping back in time. You’ll probably also be surprised to know that Romania is a major ski destination. With more than 90 ski resorts throughout the country, it is a great option for anyone looking for an active winter vacation.
Last but not least, Romania offers some pretty delicious food. Hearty soups, cheesy mamaliga (similar to polenta) and desserts like papanash (a cheese donut served with jam) are a good enough reason to give this surprising destination a visit.”
– Or, My Path In The World. Follow Or on Instagram
“Mongolia offers a totally unique, mysterious, and diverse landscape that makes for a truly unique travel experience. It was a destination that really blew us away and surpassed all of our expectations.
It is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world and is home to one of the last surviving nomadic cultures. If you’re looking to go off the beaten track and have an authentic travel experience, then you won’t get much more ‘untouched’ than Mongolia.
Before you leave the comfort of civilization, make sure you stock up on any essentials or extra provisions in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. The food you’ll find in the wilderness is rather bland and limited, but the experience is worth the tough mutton stew.
Rural Mongolia is a nature lover’s paradise that offers every type of terrain. Northern Mongolia is covered by thick forest and beautiful lakes like the Khövsgöl Nuur, known as the ‘blue pearl of Mongolia’. In the south, there is the Gobi Desert, the largest desert in the world with impressive sand dunes, expansive gorges, cliffs, and caves.”
Oksana & Max, Drink Tea & Travel, Follow their adventures around the world on Facebook
“Oman is undoubtedly one of the most stunning yet underrated countries in the world. Unlike its ‘more happening and famous’ neighbor Dubai, Oman has stuck to its traditional heritage and cultural values. The country is the most naturally diverse destinations in the Middle East. Oman has a vast 3000km coastline linking it to the Arabian Sea in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south along with the highest mountain peak of the Arabian Peninsula and long stretches of unexplored golden sand desert. The north of Oman is particularly famous for water activities and sports due to its extremely healthy and well preserved marine life. The unwater life of Oman consists of vibrant coral reefs and diverse species of fishes and sharks which are not to be found anywhere in the Middle Eastern waters. It is also very easy to spot a green turtle in the Omani waters, which are found in abundance. Oman has all sorts of natural beauty to offer to the travelers and give them an unforgettable Arabian experience to cherish.”
Rahma, The Sane Adventurer, Follow Rahma on Instagram
According to the Lonely Planet, 2018’s #1 travel destination of the year was the county of Georgia. Oddly, though, there was little mention of Georgia’s southern neighbor: enchanting Armenia. Like Georgia, Armenia is situated at a significant cultural crossroads and relatively untouched by mass tourism. However, Armenia is distinctly different from Georgia, and its rich historical attractions are highlights of any Caucasus journey.
Although Yerevan is a vibrant, exciting city in its own right, travelers with a passion for history will want to use it primarily as a home base and point of arrival as they travel around the rest of the country. In my opinion, the absolute highlight of Armenia is the ninth-century Tatev monastery, breathtakingly perched on the edge of a cliff at the far end of the world’s longest dual-track cable car. Equally fascinating, the Noratus cemetery is home to almost one thousand khachkars (traditional Armenian gravestones) dating back to the tenth century. If that’s not enough, Armenia is also home to the only Greco-Roman columned building in the entire former USSR, which was reconstructed in the 1970s as the Temple of Garni.
Carly, Fearless Female Travels, Follow Carly on Instagram
Which of these underrated places are you dying to visit? Let us know in the comments below.
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Eloise December 6, 2018 - 3:06 am
Wow! So many countries to add to my to-do list! Thanks for sharing 🙂
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Funk Legend Jimmy Castor Passes Away At 64
Legendary funk musician Jimmy Castor passed away yesterday morning (January 16) in Las Vegas at age 64. The cause of death for the influential saxophonist whose music has been sampled by everyone from Kanye West to N.W.A is still unknown causes, reports PrefixMag.
As the lead member of the Jimmy Castor Bunch, Castor is most famous for the group’s hit “Troglodyte (Cave Man)” which peaked at No. 4 on the R&B charts in 1972. Known to fans as “The Everything Man,” Castor broke into the music industry when he joined the doo-wop group The Teenagers as storied singer Frankie Lymon’s replacement in 1957.
died , Jimmy Castor
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Home » Major League Baseball » Yankees acquires Mariners’ Edwin Encarnación
Yankees acquires Mariners’ Edwin Encarnación
The New York Yankees acquired a slugger on Saturday night. The team reached an agreement with the Seattle Mariners to acquire Edwin Encarnación.
Besides receiving Encarnación, the Yankees are receiving $8.4 million, according to New York Post’s Joel Sherman. The money will offset the luxury tax that New York will have to pay with this addition.
Edwin Encarnación walks back to the dugout after striking out against the San Diego Padres (Getty Images)
The Mariners rebuild has begun, as the Encarnación experiment lasted a hand total of seven months. The slugger missed the past three games with back soreness.
He was part of a three-team deal on Dec. 13, 2018 that featured the Mariners, Cleveland Indians, and Tampa Bay Rays. The Indians acquired Carlos Santana, Jake Bauers, and cash.
The Mariners acquired Encarnación, a competitive balance draft pick from the Indians, along with cash. The Rays acquired Yandy Díaz, Cole Sulser, and a player to be named later.
The 36-year-old Dominican Republic native leads the American League with 21 home runs. Now, the Yankees get another bat to add with Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge, who can hit the ball out of the park at any time.
Encarnación and his new teammate Gary Sánchez are the two home run leaders, as they combine for 41 home runs. Sánchez has 20 home runs.
This season, he has a .241 batting average with 21 home runs and 49 RBIs in 65 games. He has seven doubles on 58 hits, including 48 runs.
With this trade, Encarnación is joining his fifth MLB team. Besides the Mariners, he previously played for the Toronto Blue Jays, Cincinnati Reds, and the Cleveland Indians.
In his career, he has a .263 batting average with 401 home runs and 1,205 RBIs in 1,872 games. He has 354 doubles and 10 triples on 1,763 hits, while scoring 1,047 runs.
MLB Trade
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Not joining PPP, says Amjad Sabri’s mother
The Frontier Post / April 30, 2018
F.P. Report
KARACHI: Amjad Sabri’s mother has dispelled the impression that she was going to join PPP and said her family has nothing to do with any political party.
“I like Benazir and Bilawal from the beginning,” said Asghari Begum, while speaking about her family’s presence in PPP’s Liaquatabad rally on Sunday. “We were invited to attend the jalsa.”
Amjad Sabri’s mother and brother in PPP’s Liaquatabad rally.
Sabri’s brother said he was fond of MQM but will vote for PTI in the forthcoming elections.
Amjad Sabri, a renowned Pakistani Qawwal was assassinated in Karachi on June 22, 2016 when he was on his way to participate in a Ramzan show.
Muhammad Ishaq and Muhammad Asim, the two members of a proscribed organization were found involved in his murder and were handed over death sentence by a military court.
On April 3, army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa had confirmed the death sentences of ten ‘hardcore’ terrorists, including Ishaq and Asim.
Posted in Pakistan
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Parish Church of St Peter & St Paul, Northleach
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Alberta’s Pipeline Regulation a ‘Facade’: Experts
Mar 23, 2017 10 min read
The Alberta Energy Regulator — responsible for regulating more than 430,000 kilometres of pipelines in the province — has finally started to try to clean up its image.
In the last two weeks of February, the agency launched a “pipeline performance report” that graphs recent pipeline incidents, it levelled a $172,500 fine against Murphy Oil for a 2015 spill that went undetected for 45 days and it shut down all operations by the notoriously uncooperative Lexin Resources, including 201 pipelines.*
But critics suggest there are major systemic flaws in the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) that still need to be addressed if pipeline safety is to be taken seriously.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Mike Hudema, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada. “You’re talking about a spill that went undetected for 45 days. And the company was fined an amount that they could likely make in less than an hour. That doesn’t send any message to the company. It definitely doesn’t send any message to the industry. And it doesn’t reform company behaviour.”
Ecojustice lawyer Fraser Thomson agrees there are major gaps in oversight.
“There are still significant, significant issues with transparency and accountability on what the AER calls ‘incidents’ within the oil and gas sector,” Thomson said.
AER Accused of Mixed Mandate, Industry-Friendly Structure
The AER was formed in late 2012 with the merging of the Energy Resources Conservation Board and some duties of the ministry of environment and sustainable development.
It’s been under fire from critics ever since.
For one, it’s often accused of having a mixed mandate. Only a month-and-a-half after forming government in 2015, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley suggested the AER can’t do the job of environmental protection and monitoring when its “overarching mandate is to promote energy development.”
Notley reported the government would review the AER’s mandate and potentially split it into two agencies: one for monitoring, another for approvals. But only six months later, the AER received a letter confirming the current organizational structure would be maintained.
“We haven’t really seen much sea change,” Hudema said. “Until that happens, unfortunately Alberta will be plagued with the pipeline problems that has plagued it for decades.”
It hasn’t helped matters that the AER’s chair Gerry Protti was a former Encana executive and founding member of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or that the AER is entirely funded by industry.
In 2013, Notley — then serving as the NDP’s environment critic — called on AER CEO Jim Ellis to resign due to his involvement in a scandal about the suppression of anti-oilsands dissent by government, describing the situation as “banana republic stuff.”
It’s a sentiment reflected by renowned ecologist Kevin Timoney, who recently reported that the AER has vastly underestimated spill volumes and recovery efforts between 1975 and 2013.
“There was some movement towards improving monitoring [in recent years] but those efforts have been undermined by senior management,” he writes in an e-mail. “Enforcement is still little more than a facade.”
Online Database An Improvement, But "Pretty Frail"
Duncan Kenyon, director of the Pembina Institute's responsible fossil fuels program, says the AER first made it a serious priority to deal with pipeline spills following the 2012 release of 461,000 litres of sour crude oil into the Red Deer River by Plains Midstream.
That same year, the provincial government ordered a pipeline safety review, which ended up being itself criticized by Notley and others for failure to consult or actually consider incidents (instead opting to simply compare regulations to other jurisdictions).
Recent spills haven’t exactly bolstered the regulator’s reputation.
The aforementioned Murphy Oil spill in 2015 resulted in 9,000 barrels of condensate spilling onto public land near Peace River. A spill at Nexen Energy’s Long Lake facility that same year released 31,000 barrels of emulsion between June 11 and July 15, despite being a brand new pipeline.
Around 1,500 barrels of oil emulsion was also spilled by Trilogy Energy near Fox Creek in October 2016.
Thomson notes that an incident first reported in 2013 involves a Canadian Natural Resources Limited in-situ project near Cold Lake in which bitumen started bubbling to the top over the period of months and years. The AER’s compliance dashboard lists the incident as “ongoing” with the “emergency phase over July 17, 2013.”
He says that he still can’t get an answer to whether the spill is happening or not.
“When it comes to the information that people want to know — what’s the risk here, is it safe, is there a safety risk to humans, wildlife environment and treaty rights — the compliance dashboard is a pretty frail tool to access it,” Thomson said.
In addition, he notes that language used by the AER often confuses things for the public: for instance, the regulator will use “produced water” in reference to “toxic water” with a high concentration of salts that are dangerous to local environments and often have oil residue in them.
Similarly, he says the AER will report “no recorded impacts” as opposed to “impacts unknown.”
“I think it would be reasonable for the public to read that and assume there weren’t impacts, when it’s really a turn of phrase,” Thomson says.
#Alberta’s Pipeline Oversight a ‘Facade’: Experts https://t.co/4942NmkdkM @james_m_wilt @HuffPostAlberta @ProgressAlberta #ableg #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/nq8N7xd0CJ
— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 23, 2017
Self-Reporting Only Works If Regulator Ensures Compliance
The AER claims that the length of pipelines in Alberta has grown by 11 per cent over the last decade, with “incidents” dropping by 44 per cent.
But Timoney’s recent report complicates the matter even further, suggesting that many spills weren’t recorded, and that many former oil spill sites that have reportedly been reclaimed are still contaminated from pipeline leaks.
“According to the data that I have received from the regulator, the number of spills has declined in recent years,” he explains in an e-mail. “However, it is important to remember that those data are based on industry self-reporting; they are not independently verified. Incidents occur that are not reported, but the frequency of unreported incidents is not known.”
Kenyon agrees: “If you don’t have a regulator who’s going out and actually seeing if people are complying — going out there and doing audits and seeing if what they said in their self-report is accurate — then none of that data is worth anything.”
Alberta’s Fines Well Below National Average
That’s why many point to the lack of enforcement as a key problem.
That starts with fine limits, which is established by the province. Alberta has fairly low caps on penalties compared to other provinces, Thomson says.
Data compiled by Ecojustice and shared with DeSmog Canada indicates a clear trend: the provisions that are most often used — Section 108(2) and 109(2) of the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, concerning the “release of substance causing adverse effect to environment” — has a cap of $500,000 in Alberta, compared to a cap of $1 million in B.C., Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
In Ontario and Quebec, the maximum limit for first conviction is $6 million. The only provinces that have an equal or lower cap are Manitoba ($500,000) and Prince Edward Island ($50,000).
Cheaper to Pay Fines Than Maintain Pipelines
But the “administrative penalties” issued by the AER often fall well below that $500,000 mark.
The largest fine issued yet by the regulator was $250,000 against Pengrowth Energy for the 48-day spill of 537,000 litres of oil emulsion in late 2013. The recent fine against Murphy Oil was also one of the highest penalties in the AER’s history; Thomson says it was calculated based on every day the company failed to report it, which is a “positive development.”
The strange reality is that many pipeline companies do have leak detection systems in place. It’s just that companies often don’t direct resources into maintaining them, following what Kenyon calls a standard compliance versus non-compliance cost comparison model; in other words, it’s cheaper to ignore and risk the fine than pay for annual maintenance.
In the case of the Murphy Oil spill, the company failed to check for internal corrosion and perform maintenance on the leak detection system for three straight years even though it was required to check annually.
“You can put a management system in and then have it down in paper, but not everything is operating the way it’s supposed to,” he says. “And then you can claim when there’s a foul up that it just wasn’t operating as it was supposed to. But you never turned it on the way it was supposed to.”
More Boots on the Ground Needed
An AER spokesperson emphasized in an e-mail that the agency is working on addressing data collection issues and improving reporting spill clean-up.
In addition, the spokesperson said the regulator requires operators to implement “comprehensive integrity management programs and safety and loss management systems,” conducts “pipeline inspections on a regular basis” and provides “education on pipeline integrity.”
However, changing the trajectory of the AER ultimately requires new “marching orders” from the provincial government via an expansion of mandate, pressures to prioritize compliance and an increased limit on fines. It’s something the NDP has appeared reluctant to do; Kenyon says there “might have been more pressure coming on pipelines under the previous government.”
The press secretary for energy minister Margaret McCuaig-Boyd says via e-mail there are no plans to revisit the government’s decision to keep the AER as is.
Thomson says he’s not convinced that splitting up the regulator would address some of the systemic problems, which ultimately require more boots on the ground: “Industry needs to know that if they submit data and monitoring to the AER, that there’s a good chance it will be checked.”
Meantime, the Alberta government continues to push for any and all new pipelines, from Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain to Trans Canada’s Keystone XL and Energy East.
“I really feel like the government should get its own pipeline problems in order before it’s pushing for new pipelines to new jurisdictions,” Hudema concludes.
“When you’re averaging over one spill a day, it’s not something that you should be bragging about or pushing into new communities.”
*Correction: The article originally stated that the AER had recently launched its compliance dashboard. The dashboard has in fact been available for a few years. The regulator recently launched a “pipeline performance report” that graphs recent pipeline incidents
James Wilt is a freelance journalist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He holds a journalism degree from Mount Royal University in…
alberta energy regulator
Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain
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Jan 29, 2019 Feb 2, 2019 The Solo Meeple2 Comments on A Solo Player’s Mindset
A Solo Player’s Mindset
Playing solo isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; it takes a certain mentality to play games on your own, and I think you’ve either got it, or you haven’t.
Many people play to enjoy the experience of sharing something with others; getting together with friends and family with plenty of chat, banter, and laughs. Others like the competitiveness of trying to beat a fellow human being, knowing that, unlike an A.I, their opponent can think on their feet, changing playing styles to suit the situation, and offer a far more involving tactical game.
But for those of us who, by choice or necessity, choose to play alone then a certain mental approach is required.
My approach depends very much on the game I’m going to play. Games like Pandemic, Tiny Epic Galaxies, Steamrollers, and Viticulture, which in my mind are nicely dressed up complex puzzles to solve, I play wanting to win. I play wanting to understand how the mechanisms work and how to use them to best advantage. I want to discover the games nuances and eventually be able to beat the game on every level, every time.
On a side note here – when playing these games against other people I rarely play ‘hard-core’, out to win at all costs. Don’t get me wrong, I like to win, and always play to win, but it’s much more fun for everyone involved to play at a level that will give a close and exciting game. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see my daughter’s face light up when she beats me, because she knows I was playing to win and she’s earned it. It’s getting to the point where I do have to put everything in to it to beat her – there’s even the odd game that no matter what I do, she wins!
Playing games along the lines of Gloomhaven, Mice & Mystics, Arkham Horror: The Card game, and any of the many others in the Arkham Files collection, I play to immerse my self in the story. It can be akin to reading a book, only you, the star of the show, are creating the story as you play. Again, I like to win, but with these games, as long as the thematic experience is an exciting and rollercoaster ride, I don’t mind losing, especially if it turns out to be a close run thing.
Playing the puzzle-based games is probably easier for a non-solo player to understand, after-all, most people enjoy solving puzzles. These puzzles are just hidden within a game and can often prove to be quite complex, but usually it’s just a case of working out how the game mechanisms interplay with one another, and how the A.I. of the game operates. These two things can be a fairly simple problem, such as that posed by Forbidden Island, or something more complex like Viticulture, which requires multiple run throughs to grasp its idiosyncrasies!
I personally love puzzles like this, and I’ll put in repeated plays until I understand how the game works – then it becomes a battle between the game and myself, as I aim to try and beat it consistently. Once I do, I tend to move on to another game as the solo fun then diminishes. Of course there are many games out there that defeat me, and I really don’t mind, as I’ll keep coming back to them every now and again to do battle once more – that is if I feel the game is giving me a fair shot at winning!
There are games that just don’t work for me in this manner, and they are the ones with too much randomness, making it nigh on impossible to form a strategy to beat the game, at least one that my little brain can come up with – I prefer problems with more logical solutions.
Thematic games though, are much more my preference when solo gaming. Creating stories has always been something I enjoy doing, and what better way than combining it with a puzzle, because at the end of the day the majority of games we play are puzzles of one sort or another, but these come buried within an absorbing and entertaining (hopefully) plot.
Mansions of Madness – A great thematic game to play solo.
Even though these games contain a puzzle, and often very complex, intertwining puzzles, it isn’t that that I focus on, it’s the story. Playing games like Arkham Horror: The Card Game, I hardly give any thought to the games mechanisms in terms of how to beat the game. I build my decks thematically, and I make the choices of the characters like that too – thinking, ‘what would they do in this situation?’ This usually leads to very exciting and close games, ones I really don’t care if I win or lose.
I approach Gloomhaven in a slightly different manner. Again I try to make the choices for the characters thematically – would the character who needs to collect lots of gold to retire go and help the Brute, or collects all this lovely loot that’s just lying around? (Loot, loot, loot!) But I also love the puzzle the game presents when in combat, so I’m always analysing the best way to use the cards for the current situation. It’s games like these that are a solo players Eden – a garden full of delights to explore, wondering what will happen if you just take a bite out of this here apple!
Many non-solo players question how you can play a thematic game without others to bounce the story around; each player making their own decisions and evolving the story in ways a soloist never would. When playing alone the story tends to take a fairly narrow, predetermined path – the player has an idea how to progress and thematically plays the characters in a manner to walk that path. Multiple players however, often have their own agendas and ideas, and though each may play their character realistically, they may all be pulling the overall story in different directions, and the game can play quite differently.
This is one of the joys of playing thematic games solo, you have control of the story, it is all your own, individual creation and experience.
So, how does someone become a solo player? Often it isn’t a conscious decision, and is something drifted towards through lack of time or available participants to play with. In this case they tend to start with the games they already own, either multi-player games with inclusive solo rules, or co-operative games where one player can control everything.
From here it really depends upon what type of person they are – playing thematic games solo, requires imagination, whilst the puzzle type needs more focus and patience, though most games fall between the two and require a little of everything!
I know a lot of people who state that a lack of imagination keeps them from playing solo – they need others to bring out their creative spirit, and they often approach thematic games with the mindset that it’s just another puzzle to solve.
I have been blessed (cursed?) with a very active imagination, far too active, as I often find it difficult to stay fixed on one thing before my mind wanders off onto something else! I started playing games like Monopoly and Risk on my own when I was probably around 8, playing against myself just to see what would happen, but then I am a little odd!
The pure solitaire game is often the domain of those who choose to play alone; maybe they prefer their own company, or just like to be in control all the time, the reasons are many and varied, but you can bet they are very good at solving complex problems. Solitaire only games tend towards being a challenging proposition, they have to be to retain any form of replayability, though it is a fine line between too easy and too difficult – the best ones have some sort of difficulty scaling built in, gradually increasing as you progress through the game. These games require a certain amount of determination to play over and over again, as you often have to go through the same procedures to again and again to get to know and understand the game.
So, can anyone play solo games? Well, obviously yes! Maybe I should rephrase that – can anyone play solo games, and enjoy them?
I would say no, not repeatedly anyway. A person may play a solo game once or twice, and think, ‘Yeah, that was okay,’ and then never play again. Certainly there’s a higher chance of someone getting into the ‘puzzle’ type games, as these can often prove to be a pleasant distraction, especially the ones that are quick to set up and play. Thematic games though, you really have to have imagination, and that’s something I think you’ve either got, or you haven’t – I mean, how would you try and teach someone to have an imagination? Sure, you can teach them to use it, but if they haven’t got one, they haven’t got one!
Tiny Epic Galaxies – Quick to set up and play and provides hours of solo fun
I know several people who, at the mention of even playing a thematic game, go running to hide in a corner until I’ve gone. And I know for a fact they have no imagination at all, plus they all have similarities – They pretty much only read factual books, they dislike Sci-fi and fantasy films, but they do enjoy games of skill.
In conclusion then: A solo player, especially one who plays by choice, has certain characteristics depending upon what they play.
Puzzle type games, which are often abstract in nature, and present a problem whose solution is hidden within the way the mechanisms and A.I. of the game play out, are the domain of the thinker – the ones who like to experiment with game mechanisms through logical thought, determination and patience.
Thematic games, the ones where the puzzle is hidden beneath an intriguing and absorbing storyline, draw those who have an active imagination to them like moths to a light bulb. They don’t need to be good at logical puzzle solving because, by playing thematically they actually unravel the puzzle until they reach the goal. A really good thematic game should never make the player even think that what is going on underneath the storyline is just a load of maths and clever game mechanisms!
I have a little of all these traits, and hence play all types of games solo, though sometimes I can’t help myself examining the mechanisms that propel a thematic game along, often to the detriment of the game.
Take a moment to think about yourself, do you have any of these traits? If you do, but have never tried playing a game solo, then give it a go. You never know what you might be missing out on!
Categories Solo playTags Puzzle, Solo, Thematic
2 thoughts on “A Solo Player’s Mindset”
Martin Feb 5, 2019 — 19:29
Most, or more accurately all, of my solo games have been far more towards the puzzle solving side of the scale. Partly because I like that type of game and because the games tend to be themes I’d struggle to convince anyone else to play.
“Come on gang, let’s re-enact the Battle of the Atlantic from 1939 to 1943 by taking the role of BdU Karl Dönitz. It’s got seperate pots for UK, US and French task forces (until the leave the war or once they join). You can even use political favours to ask the Luftwaffe for air support and send the Monsun boats to the Indian Ocean later on. Guys?…”
I find that playing puzzle type games is something I enjoy more on my own, I know that I’m taking it as seriously (or not) as everyone else in the game and I won’t be taking the fun out of the experience for anyone else by being more (or less) serious than someone else.
The Solo Meeple Feb 6, 2019 — 15:36
Lol, you make a good point.
Certain games require a certain type of person – it actually sounds quite appealing to me – but sometimes it’s a lot more rewarding just to sit down by yourself and play your ‘own’ game; no worries other than where the next beer is coming from!
Previous Picking Up The Brush Part VI: Varnishing and Basing
Next TSM Geek – January 2019
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Review of Cypress Grove by James Sallis (2003, No Exit Press)
Turner is hiding out in the woods somewhere between Memphis and nowhere. He keeps to himself, letting life drift by until Sheriff Lonnie Bates turns up on his porch seeking help with a murder. Following a stint in Vietnam, Turner became a Memphis detective, but after shooting his partner was sent to prison. There he hit the books and studied for a degree and on release built a new life for himself, before abandoning that too for the woods. Bates cares little for Turner’s past; unused to investigating a violent death he needs his skills. And deep down Turner needs Bates’ compassion and friendship. Accepting the challenge, Turner starts on the trail of identifying the dead drifter and who killed him, and of slipping back into society.
Cypress Grove is oddly captivating. It’s not a page-turner in the sense of a high powered thriller, but rather it hooks the reader in a quiet, understated way. Sallis’ storytelling kind of just drifts along regardless of dramatic moments, sketching out a portrait of an essentially good man whose life has been punctuated by terrible moments: being drafted to Vietnam, killing his partner, killing a prison inmate just prior to being released; all of them somehow beyond his control. Sallis’ is a noted poet and essayist as well as novelist and it shows in his writing, which has a lyrical cadence and some lovely turns of phrase. The story is told through two intersecting plotlines that alternate across chapters; one in the present; the other Turner’s back story. It’s an effective structure, providing a series of interesting counterpoints. The plot itself is relatively straightforward and Turner solves the case quite easily, but the puzzle is hardly the main focus of the story, rather it's Turner’s journey and the unfolding of his re-integration into life and law enforcement.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 8:29 AM 3 comments:
Labels: 2003, Cypress Grove, James Sallis, Review, United States
Another grant crosses the line
I had confirmation yesterday of the awarding of another research grant, this one for €1.1 million, which is to be shared between a couple of partners. Our part concerns cross-border planning, shared services, all-island datasets and mapping/analysis tools, and training courses. The team put in a great effort to get this across the line. This November has been pretty kind to me: the ERC grant, the new grant; and signing a novel contract with Snubnose Press. And by this time next year I will no longer be director of NIRSA (or NCG). Not often one gets a million euro grant; two in one month is unlikely to ever happen again.
Scoop It! Crime novel reviews
I came across a new social media platform - Scoop It! - a couple of days ago. I liked the idea and format - curating your own 'online magazine' by pulling in content from and linking across the internet. Yesterday I created my own account and set up three curations:
Blue House and Co Crime Novel Reviews
The Programmable City
Planning Ireland
I've populated each with some content which I'll update on a rolling basis. I'm using the Crime Novel Reviews page to link to reviews that catch my personal interest (rather than trying to capture as many reviews as possible) and also to link to my own reviews. In all three curations I see the primary purpose as twofold: a kind of visual/text summary of and links to pieces I'm interested in; a useful resource for others interested in the topic. Worth checking out, I think.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 10:05 AM No comments:
Review of A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller (Headline, 2012)
Bell Elkins is the prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, deep in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. A native of Acker’s Gap, she grew up in a series of foster homes but escaped to Washington DC before returning to the poverty-stricken area, blighted by a growing drugs problems, bringing her daughter, Carla, in tow. Carla, who has turned into a surly, resentful teenager is waiting in a diner for her mother when a gunman enters and shoots dead three elderly men. Sheriff Nick Fogelsong and his team start to investigate, with Bell tagging along seeking evidence that will enable a successful prosecution once the killer is caught. But Bell’s attention is being diverted by the well-being of her daughter, another case that is coming to trial, and the upcoming parole hearing for her sister. Unwittingly, however, she has become the target of the killer’s ire.
A Killing in the Hills has a number of strengths: a strong and vivid sense of place; good contextualisation with respect to society in West Virginia and the problem of prescription drugs addiction; and an interesting pair of lead characters in Bell and Nick. These are countered by some notable weaknesses: a tendency to melodrama, often too much tell rather than show, and credibility with respect to the main plotline. With respect to the latter, I just simply didn’t believe certain elements of the story such as Bell’s daughter not telling the police what she knows for fear of being grounded; that Bell’s sister was still in prison given the circumstances underpinning her crime, nor that her sister, a lawyer, had not tried to get her out; the resolution with killer (who was little more than a caricature) made little sense to me, nor did the ‘criminal mastermind’ behind the whole episode. In contrast, the plotline with respect to the child’s death was very nicely done. In sum, whilst the story had its merits it gradually became less and less plausible and I became more and more disengaged. Overall then, Bell and Acker’s Gap have quite a bit of promise, but I found this initial outing hard going at times.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 5:01 PM No comments:
Labels: 2012, A Killing in the Hills, Julia Keller, Review, United States
A cow jumped the dry stone wall into garden on Friday night. As the farmer went to open gate to let it back out it jumped back across the wall onto the road again. One crazy cow! I spent part of yesterday morning out in the freezing fog rebuilding the wall whilst the offending cow stood in the field opposite supervising my efforts through a gap in the hedge. It didn't seem very impressed.
My posts this week:
"Developers need to be judged fairly now"?
Review of The Great Crash 1929 by JK Galbraith
Review of The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg
Big data, Obama's campaign, and social and political analysis
We need an ark
Harry stood at the window and stared at the lashing rain, the water in the street rising slowly. Another inch and it would reach the front door.
‘This is unbelievable, we need an ark not a house.’
‘Don’t just stand there like a spare part!’ Emma snapped. ‘We need to get what we can upstairs.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like everything! The television, the books, the knick-knacks, the crap in the kitchen cabinets.’
‘We don’t have time.’
‘Harry!’
‘What we need is a big boat; the river’s burst its banks.’
‘Just do it, Harry. Or you’ll need more than a new home.’
A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 12:38 PM 1 comment:
Labels: Drabble
Big data, Obama’s campaign, and social and political analysis
There have been a few news stories over the past couple of weeks with respect to President Obama’s use of big data in his election campaign (references linked in the text below). Having just finished Sasha Issenberg’s recent book, The Victory Lab, I’ve been reflecting on the use and potential of big data for social and political analysis, and in particular what it might mean if the Obama campaign’s database was made available for social scientists and policy makers to analyze. Rather than simply being used to help a candidate get elected, could the data be put to other productive uses? Here’s my initial thoughts.
The use of very large datasets to underpin social and political analysis is nothing new. Censuses are enormous undertakings, involving the surveying of whole populations with respect to a diverse range of factual information. The data produced typically consists of dozens of large tables consisting of hundreds of variables relating to millions of people and thousands of locations. Similarly, other social research instruments, such as household surveys and political polls, generate data with respect to a large, representative sample of the population and typically ask the respondent a range of topical questions. Such datasets provide valuable, detailed and representative data with respect to people and places. In the case of censuses, such data are used to underpin a wide variety of studies, to create other derived data and information, and to guide the formulation of public policy and shape company marketing and expansion strategies. Given their size, complexity and cost, such surveys are only conducted on a periodic basis. For example, censuses are typically held every ten years. Political polls are usually only conducted prior to and during elections.
The difference between these kind of surveys and their resulting data, and so-called big data, is not principally volume, but rather being able to conduct such surveys on a rolling basis, coping with issues of velocity (the speed at which data are generated) and variety (diverse kinds of data). A good example of the production and use of big data which is political and social in nature is by Barack Obama’s campaign team in the 2008 and 2012 US elections.
As detailed by Issenberg (2012), Obama’s team sought to quantify and track all aspects of their campaigns in 2008 and 2012, devising a whole series of metrics that were continuously mined for useful information, patterns and trends. This included monitoring their own actions, such as placing ads across different media, undertaking mail shots, ringing up potential voters, knocking on doors and canvassing areas, organising meetings and rallies, tracking who they’d spoken to or attended and what they had said or committed to, as well as trying to quantify the more ineffable elements, such as the relative value or effect of being approached by a neighbour, stranger or automated system, or the extent to which potential voters were undecided, or the ways in which members of the populace could be persuaded to change their mind on an issue or candidate or be motivated to get out and vote. They supplemented this information with hundreds of randomized, large-scale experiments designed to test the effectiveness of different ways of persuading voters to back Obama, such as comparing the effectiveness of different modes of contact and how the message was phrased. This experimentation also included tests of the layout and design of websites such as BarackObama.com and how effective different tweaks to the site were for increasing engagement, volunteering and donations. For example, one test evaluated the effects of changing the ‘sign up’ button to ‘learn more’, ‘join us now’, ‘sign up now’; over the course of 300,000 visits it became clear that ‘join us now’ led to a twenty percent increase in people registering with the site (Issenberg 2012).
Obama’s team combined all the information they generated with respect to voters with registration data, census and other government data, polling surveys, and data bought from a whole range of suppliers, including general, commercial data aggregators, credit ratings agencies, and cable TV companies. The result was a set massive databases about every voter in the country consisting of a minimum of eighty variables (Crovitz 2012), and often many more, relating to a potential voter’s demographic characteristics, their voting history, every instance in which they had been approached by the Obama campaign and their reaction, their social and economic history, their patterns of behaviour and consumption, and expressed views and opinions, with the databases updated daily during the campaign as new data was produced or bought. The resulting databases ended up containing billions of pieces of data. In cases where Obama’s analysts did not know the political affiliation of a voter, and they could not access this through direct contact, they used a sophisticated algorithm to use what variables they did have to predict a person’s likely voting preference, much in the same way that Amazon.com predicts what books people might like based on what other people who have a similar purchasing profile bought (Issenberg 2012). In this way they could individually profile voters, assess if they were likely to vote and how, and how they might react to different policies and stories. This was complemented by a highly detailed knowledge of what forms of communication worked best for different kinds of voters.
For the 2012 election, Obama’s data analytics group was five times larger than in 2008 and included leading technologists hired from industry (Scherer 2012). The team improved the relationality of data collected through different sources and residing in different databases so that they could be more effectively linked together. They developed campaign apps and used social media such as Facebook to encourage peer pressure to register and to get out the vote, and dropped their own and third-party cookies onto the computers that visited their websites to track online habits (Crovitz 2012; Kaye 2012). They also improved their profiling and predictive modelling and how the information from their analytics were used to direct the campaign, as well as testing and honing ways to raise finance to fund the campaign (Scherer 2012). And they continuously added and processed new data and ran simulations to predict outcomes and the best responses. As one campaign official stated: “We ran the election 66,000 times every night” to determine the odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources” (quoted in Scherer 2012).
By continuously running their evolving datasets through sophisticated algorithms, Obama’s team gained significant advantages over their rivals both in gaining the nomination in 2008 and winning the elections in 2008 and 2012. First, they were able to micro-manage the running of their campaign across all states, directing resources to where they were needed and analytically assessing the effectiveness of those resources. If outside agencies were used, such as phone vendors, the services they offered were monitored against agreed targets and let go if they were not performing sufficiently well (half of the ten companies were dropped in the 2008 campaign: Issenberg 2012). Second, they could monitor unfolding events and conditions in particular locales and respond quickly if necessary. Third, they could micro-target approaches to individuals and general advertising. With respect to the latter, they could tailor adverts to specific demographics and places. For example, in several cities Obama’s campaign bought advertising on selected bus routes based on the profile of who travelled those specific routes, or for particular sporting events, or for specific non-primetime television slots, or online sites popular with certain youth segments. Such micro-targeting of individuals, locales and events was unheard of a decade earlier when advertising consisted of mass-broadcast on radio and TV in peak slots or mass mail shots. Fourth, they could use their resources efficiently, directing attention at floating and new voters, minimising the effects of alienating or annoying the electorate who were committed to Obama and other candidates or who had already voted (taking advantage of early voting), and on election day tracking who had voted and making sure the remaining likely Obama voters got to the polls. As Issenberg (2012: 246) argues, Obama’s 2008 campaign was the “the perfect political corporation: a well-funded, data-driven, empirically rigorous institution”. It was no different in 2012.
What is noteworthy is that the Obama team’s use of big data is highly resource intensive involving the work of thousands of people in a huge crowdsourcing effort, bought databases, sophisticated software, networked infrastructure, and a lot of organisational skill and finance capital to make it all happen. Indeed, the estimated bill for the 2008 presidential campaign across all parties was $2.8bn and for 2012 $2.6bn (Center for Responsive Politics 2012). It is perhaps no surprise therefore that such a big data project only arises in such a well resourced campaign, or with respect to nationwide, large-scale, profitable commercial endeavours such as credit ratings.
Given the political value of the data assembled by Obama’s team, and the commercial origins of much of it, as far as I am aware it has not been made available, in part or full, as open data in aggregated form (to avoid issues of privacy infringement) for others to mine and analyze. This is a shame as it is no doubt one of the richest social and political datasets in the world given the diverse and rich range of individual variables included from a variety of sources. Rather than simply being used to help get a candidate elected, the data could be put to productive use for analysing a range of social, demographic and economic issues, and be used to underpin and evaluate data-driven policy analysis and formulation at local, state and national scales. I’ve little doubt that it could keep an army of social scientists occupied for a number of years and lead to detailed secondary analysis that to date have been difficult to undertake, fresh empirical and theoretical insights, and new policy suggestions across a diverse set of issues.
Despite Obama’s success at harnessing big data, at present, the use of big data for social and political analysis is limited for a number of reasons, the prime ones being resourcing and focus. There is no doubt that if academics could afford to buy access to commercially generated data, and to combine them in different ways with public and other commercial datasets, they could tackle a whole range of interesting and valuable questions about contemporary society. The same could be said if they were able to run very large-scale, rolling experiments, as Obama’s team were able to do. Social science research budgets are, however, small - much smaller than Obama’s campaign budget - spread across thousands of academics and research teams, and under increasing pressure with cutbacks in public sector spend. Moreover, the data available through social media APIs, whilst useful, was never designed to answer social science questions, are riddled with anonymous and dirty data, and at best provide proxy data. Nevertheless, there is much emerging potential in crowdsourcing, open data, and mining new social media to reveal insights into social and political phenomena, and such research looks set to expand rapidly over the next decade or so. It would certainly be given a significant boost if Obama’s big data machine could be made available to social scientists and policy makers and not just used for electioneering.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 9:35 AM 1 comment:
Labels: Barack Obama, Big data, campaign, election, political analysis, President, social analysis
Review of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns by Sasha Issenberg (Crown, 2012)
In The Victory Lab, Issenberg charts the use of scientific methods in the practice of electioneering in US politics. What’s fascinating about his account is that up until very recently there was very little science behind how elections were conducted, and there’s been a noticeable disconnect between political science and the electioneers. The strategy was simply one of blanket advertising across different media, mail shots, debates, mudslinging and rallies. There was little attempt to scientifically measure and evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches, or to segment and target populations. Drawing on his own experience of a journalist covering elections and interviews with a number of key players, Issenberg provides an account of the rise of data and statistically-driven campaigning in the US, culminating in Obama’s election in 2008. Because the chapters are arranged by chronology and by particular groups/campaigns, the structure tends to move to-and-fro a little. That said, the narrative it easy enough to follow, and the text is lively, engaging and informative. Somewhat oddly, there seems to have been no attempt to learn anything from elections outside of the US, and Issenberg’s narrative barely strays beyond US shores. Overall, what the book demonstrates is the US elections are now being run like lab-experiments, underpinned by big data and statistical algorithms, and they’re set to follow this approach for the foreseeable future.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 11:15 AM 1 comment:
Labels: 2012, elections, Review, Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab, US
Review of The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith (Penguin, 1954)
The Great Crash 1929 is considered by many to the classic account of the 1929 stock market crash that sent the US and much of the world into deep economic depression. Written by JK Galbraith, one of the leading economic historians of the twentieth century, it is a surprisingly thin volume, split into ten chapters. Galbraith’s analysis very much focuses on the stock market, financiers and government in the immediate lead up to the crash, the crash itself and its aftermath with respect to Wall Street. How the crash played out in other locales or countries is barely touched upon. Nor is the Great Depression that follows, except in cursory terms. This is a pity, because it would have more explained the role of the great crash in the development and unfolding of the depression and crises domestically and around the globe and given a wider appreciation of the crash’s long-term, deep consequences. His analysis also relies heavily on reports, newspaper accounts and other secondary sources rather than primary research, such as interviewing key players. The overall effect is a narrowly focused, rather dry account of the crash. Nonetheless, the narrative does highlight that many of the factors that were important in the global financial collapse of 2008 replicated those of the Great Crash, and the crash itself unfolded in a similar fashion. Whilst many lessons were learnt and policy changes implemented post The Great Crash, over the past couple of decades those regulations and practices were systematically undone in the belief that history would not repeat itself. Unfortunately, there are sound reasons why strong financial regulation is a good idea as Galbraith’s book and recent history demonstrate.
Labels: 1954, John Kenneth Galbraith, Review, The Great Crash 1929
I've been working my way through The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg about the evolution of electioneering and political science in the US over the past hundred years; the art and science of reaching and persuading voters and getting them to the polls. What is interesting has been the disconnect between political science and political parties, their machinery and political consultants, with neither academics or practioners really fully understanding voters and voting, with few attempts to scientifically test the veracity of newspaper and tv ads, mail shots, phone calls, doorstepping, personal appearances, political rallies, and so on. I suspect it's going to end with a discussion of Obama's data machine. A good read so far.
Review of A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton
Review of Cadaver Blues by J.E. Fishman
Landed the 'big one'
Review of Money Shot by Christa Faust
A front seat view across the valley
The car jolted forward, pitching towards the barrier and the drop down the mountain.
‘Fuck,’ Mac spluttered, coffee dribbling down his chin, a stain blossoming on his white shirt. He yanked the steering wheel left and glanced up at the rear view mirror.
A white van filled the back window.
The car shuddered again, metal groaning.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Mac jammed on the brake, fighting for control.
The road started to veer left.
He tried to follow, but the weight and speed of the van slid the car onwards.
And then he was flying.
Then plummeting and spinning.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 3:08 PM 1 comment:
Review of Money Shot by Christa Faust (Hard Case Crime, 2008)
Angel Dare spent ten years in front of the camera in the porn industry in LA before setting up her own adult modelling agency, Daring Angels. When she’s rung up by a long time friend and asked to do a scene at short notice with a rising male star almost half her age she agrees to step in front of the camera for one last time. Only things don’t go to plan when she arrives, with her being beaten, raped, thrown in the trunk of a car and shot. Left for dead she manages to escape only to find she’s the main suspect in a murder investigation. Rather than handing herself in, she decides to seek vengeance against those who have framed her, joining forces with an ex-cop turned security guard. Her attackers might have gotten the better of her when she was unawares, but as a woman wronged she’s a different proposition, prepared to enact her own brand of justice.
In Money Shot Christa Faust pulls few punches; the story is noir to its core. Set in the porn industry the narrative could have slipped into a moral sermon of sorts or sensationalism, instead Faust portrays the various aspects of the trade in a matter of fact way, including some of its criminal elements such as sex trafficking. The telling is engaging, with a strong voice and a quick pace. The characterisation is a little thin beyond Angel Dare, but this is very much her story and she’s a complex lead character: vulnerable and resilient, worldly-wise and naive, forward but self-conscious. The plot is relatively straightforward with a couple of nice tension moments and the ending is pure noir. The only thing that didn’t quite sit right was the set-up: the person who is meant to kill her is totally inept and given her own treatment and injuries going on the run rather than to the police didn’t seem to add up and it felt like a plot device. Other than that, Money Shot was bang on the money.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 9:36 AM No comments:
Labels: 2008, Christa Faust, Money Shot, Review
Landed the ‘big one’
I’m delighted to say I’ve been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator award for my project ‘The Programmable City’, receiving €2.3m over 5 years. The awards are tagged ‘Europe’s most prestigious grants’ and they’re highly competitive - only 3 or 4 awards per year have been made to date with respect to the SH3 panel (Environment and Society, to which I applied) across the 39 eligible countries. Since 2008 only 6 such awards have been made across all disciplines/panels to researchers in Ireland. In other words, I’m really fortunate to be receiving one of the awards. It will buy me out on a 0.5 basis from my present duties as well as funding two 5 year postdocs, two 4 year postdocs, four 4 year PhD students, one replacement lecturer, and 0.5 admin. The research institute I run has now secured two such grants: a starting award to Sean O’Riain and an advanced award for myself, which is a great achievement. The two grants are complementary to an extent so hopefully we can build a really strong team of researchers in the coming years. I’m now hoping to step to the side from my head of department duties from next August (which I’ll have done for 11 years) to concentrate on delivering the new project as well as continuing my work on existing funded projects. Really looking forward to it.
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 10:18 AM 8 comments:
Review of Cadaver Blues by J.E. Fishman (Stonegate Ink, 2012)
Phouc Goldberg runs his own business conducting debt relief negotiation - for a fee he’ll argue on behalf of his poverty-stricken customers with their creditors over outstanding debts that cannot be repaid and help consolidate debts. Used to being treated like the ‘little Asian guy’ he has anger management issues and little sympathy for his clients. When Mindy Eider asks him to intervene in the foreclosure on her uncle’s house, he agrees despite his reservations. His efforts quickly run into a brick wall, but beguiled by Mindy’s beauty and innocence he agrees to play detective. Mindy’s uncle has vanished, the bank is in a hurry to foreclose, and several parties seem interested in the property. Something fishy is going on, but getting answers is proving difficult, though there are definite signs of foul play. Moreover, Mindy acts of kindness to strangers are wearing down his cynicism. He’s soon out of his depth, but determined to solve the case and get the girl.
Cadaver Blues is a competently written, mildly amusing crime novel. The narrative is all show an no tell, with the story told through short, snappy scenes. The characterisation is well realised, with Phouc Goldberg being particularly engaging as a hardnosed cynic - written as a kind of love to hate figure but with a decent, kindness very well buried under his abrasive exterior, and he’s accompanied by some nicely penned supporting actors. The story is well plotted and unfolds at a brisk pace. My only reservation is it all felt a bit formulaic, with the story lacking real spark and a captivating hook that raised it up out of the pack, and I never really believed the premise underpinning why the house was being foreclosed or who was behind the mystery. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining read and the Phouc holds much promise as the lead character in a new series.
Labels: 2012, Cadaver Blues, J.E. Fishman, Review, US
Review of A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton (Arrow, 2012)
When Stevie White returns to Liverpool, the city where he was born shortly before his mother emigrated to Australia, he never expected to be tied to a scaffold pole, tortured and burned alive on Crosby beach, a new addition to Antony Gormley’s art work ‘Another Place’. DI Frank Keane is first to the scene, quickly joined by the ambitious DI Emily Harris. Somewhat awkward collaborators, they both sense the murder is the work of one of the city’s notorious drugs gangs but have little evidence to go on. As they slowly try to solve the case on the other side of the world Keane’s former boss, Menno Koopman, is enjoying retirement with his partner, Zoe, running a coffee business on Australia’s east coast. He has no desire to return to Liverpool, but Stevie is Koopman’s son, the product of a teenage fling and he feels compelled to travel back and seek justice. Keane is conflicted between helping his former boss and keeping him at arm’s length, but Koopman’s presence in the city has started a chain-reaction he can’t control both there and in Australia.
A Dark Place to Die has four standout strengths. First, the characterization is excellent, with even the minor characters having a well-defined persona. Second, there is a vivid sense of place both with respect to Liverpool and the various locations in Australia. Third, Chatterton provides realistic and compelling contextualisation with respect to the drug gangs and trade in both locales. Fourth, the story is for the most part nicely plotted and well paced, managing to keep two parallel but intertwined plotlines unfolding in sync throughout the book. As a result, even though the tale is complex and layered it is straightforward to follow. There is some graphic violence in the telling, but it is necessary to the story. Despite the positives, the story does start to unravel a little toward the end, with at least one too many plot twists for my liking (in a tale full of twists). Nevertheless, A Dark Place to Die is a strong start to a new series. As a final aside: I have no idea why the cover shows a dungeon, or why the tag line is ‘no escape, no rescue, no mercy’; they totally fail to capture the essence of the book. The Australian cover which uses a Gormley statue, with the tagline ‘killing the messenger was only the beginning’ is much more appropriate.
Labels: 2012, A Dark Place to Die, Australia, Ed Chatterton, England
It's been quite a while since I've spent part of a weekend writing a lecture, but this week coming is jam-packed so I've spent a couple of hours putting together some slides on the rural economy pre- and post-crash Ireland. I'm now going to get back to reading Money Shot by Christa Faust, which is way more interesting than agricultural policy and zombie hotels, being an entertaining, pacy, racy noir.
Review of Slaughter's Hound by Declan Burke
Stiffed to be published by Snubnose Press
Review of Even Flow by Darragh McManus
Google Scholar and finding useful stuff
The captain has switched on the seatbelt sign
‘Are you okay?’
‘Never been better.’
‘Why do you insist on having a window seat if you hate flying?’
‘So I can see what the hell’s going on.’
‘As if that’s going to make a difference. If this baby hits the ground from 35,000 feet none of us are getting out alive.’
‘You’re not helping, Ross.’
‘The only thing between us and certain death is a couple of millimetres of aluminium and the laws of physics.’
The plane dropped violently in the turbulence.
‘Oh god.’
‘There should be a sick bag in the seat pocket ... shit, not over me!’
A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words
I have a healthy scepticism for 'key performance indicators' and seem to spend half my life trying to work against the neoliberalizing processes reshaping the higher education landscape. And I understand all the various issues concerning the interpretation of citation scores, etc. Nevertheless, passing the 5,000 mark on Google Scholar earlier this week gave me a little smile. It seems that some folk find some of the stuff I write useful (or at least cite it) and that total has the feel of some kind of landmark number even if it is completely arbitary. I created the profile because I had to supply citation data in sum and for individual papers for a grant application I was writing and it was straightforward to use.
Where I'm finding it most useful, however, is with respect to the recommedations that it provides about papers it thinks I will find interesting based on my publication profile (what I'm writing about and who I cite). Just this morning I discovered Jeremy Crampton et al's 'Beyond the geotag?' paper, that I now plan to read in the next couple of weeks (you just click on the 'My Updates' to see the latest suggestions). I'm now discovering a whole rake of useful material in a timely fashion that I probably wouldn't have come across otherwise. Might be worth checking out if, like me, you don't get to browse the literature as much as you'd like.
Review of Even Flow by Darragh McManus (2012, Roundfire Books)
Wilde, Whitman and Waters are the three members of the 3W gang in New York City. Inspired by feminism, resistance and art movements, they have turn vigilante, administering justice to misogynists and homophobes - what they call ‘enforced karma’. The gang video their exploits and send them to a local TV station. They pass the first tape on to the police and the case is assigned to Detective Sergeant Danny Everard, a gay cop who is going through a messy break-up. As Danny tries to track the gang members, they become more daring, and their exploits start to gain notoriety as they’re leaked on to the internet and to other media stations. Whilst he has sympathy with the their message, Danny can’t condone their approach, and a cat-and-mouse chase ensues.
Even Flow is difficult to categorise - it’s kind of a political, screwball noir. It took me a chapter or so to get into the story, but once it clicked into place the pages just flew-by. The second half of the story is especially strong as the action, dialogue and politics all get ratcheted-up, and it has a very nice noir ending. It helped that the cultural references were of my generation and that the gender and sexual politics of the gang are ones that I share. Interestingly, the text is broken up by photo-dialogue pieces, newspaper articles, emails and art. The characterisation is a little thin, but what makes this a fun and engaging read is the plot and politics. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes their noir to have a deeper message.
Labels: 2012, Darragh McManus, Even Flow, Review, US
I spent part of the weekend taking a look at the family tree. My dad has been working on it for a few years and has made a lot of progress. There’s now 1,447 people in the tree. He’s got back 13 generations on one line to 1660 and most others to early 1700s. On my direct descendent line (excluding all the sibling lines - aunts, uncles, cousins, etc) there are 136 folk. This part of the tree is complete back to my 4th great-grandparents.
The thing I find interesting about both elements of the tree (my direct line and in general) is the lack of mobility and mixing. On my paternal side my grandfather’s line is from west Cumberland and grandmother’s line from Bucks/Northants. On my maternal side my grandmother and grandfather’s lines are from the West Midlands. There are only a handful of people not who were not born or died in those areas, including the few that emigrated to Australia or the US. On my direct descendent line there's only one person not born in England: Francis Higgins, born in 1785 in Ireland, who moved to Cumberland and married Ann from Gosforth, and whose granddaughter, Isabella, married John Kitchin in 1860 (my 2nd great-grandfather). With the exception of the small number born/lived overseas, there are very few people born elsewhere out of the 1,331 other people in the tree - 6 in Ireland, 3 in Scotland, 2 in Wales, 1 in Germany. Pretty much everyone married someone from within a few miles of where they grew up and lived there their whole lives. Seems stasis is something of a family trait.
Labels: family tree
Yesterday I received the countersigned contract from Snubnose Press for the publication of my novel, Stiffed. I'm delighted to be joining a great set of writers at an up-and-coming press run by the good folk who produce Spinetingler Magazine.
Stiffed is a fast paced screwball noir set in a small town in New England. Here's the tagline and working back cover blurb.
Friends help you move … true friends help you move bodies
Tadhg Maguire wakes to find himself spooning a dead man. The stiff is Tony Marino, lieutenant to mobster Aldo Pirelli. It doesn't matter how the local enforcer ended up between Tadhg’s sheets, Pirelli is liable to leap to the wrong conclusion and demand rough justice.
The right thing to do would be to call the cops.
The sensible thing to do would be to disappear. Forever.
The only other option is to get rid of the body and pretend it was never there. No body, no crime.
What he needs is a couple of friends to help dispose of the heavy corpse. Little do Tadhg’s friends know what kind of reward they’ll receive for their selfless act – threatened, chased, shot at, and kidnapped with demands to return a million dollars they don’t possess.
By mid-afternoon Tadhg is the most wanted man in America. Not bad for someone who’d never previously had so much as parking ticket.
If he survives the day he’s resigned to serving time, but not before he saves his friends from the same fate.
Now onto editing, tweaking, proofing, etc. as the book moves toward publication.
Review of Slaughter’s Hound by Declan Burke (Liberties Press, 2012)
After a spell in mental health unit after killing his brother, Harry Rigby, one time private investigator, is now driving a taxi and making ends meet shipping drugs round Sligo town on the Northwest coast of Ireland. Finn Hamilton, his independently wealthy former room-mate, runs a pirate radio station, broadcasting from the top of the old Port Authority tower. After a late night run to drop off some weed, Harry watches Finn dive from his studio, landing head first on his cab. Rather than wait for the police to arrive he heads to Finn’s mother to tell her of her son’s death. It's the early hours of the morning, but Harry’s day is about to get a whole lot worse as everything he does leads to more woes - tangling with an ambitious cop, ex-paramilitaries turned drug dealers, the warring Hamilton family, a dodgy solicitor and his bodyguard, and his former partner and teenage son. Harry is on a downward spiral, but he’s resourceful and fighter, and he’s determined to get to the bottom of Finn’s supposed suicide dive - especially since if he didn't dive, he's the prime suspect for pushing him to his death.
Slaughter’s Hound is the sequel to Eight Ball Boogie, Burke’s first novel published in 2004. In the intervening time he’s published three other novels, the last of which, Absolute Zero Cool, was my read of 2011. Burke’s trademark as a wordsmith is in strong evidence in Slaughter’s Hound, the sense of place and characterisation is strong throughout, and the noir plot was nicely constructed. However, for me it was a book of two halves. After an excellent opening scene, the first half I found quite slow and ponderous and I struggled to get into the story. It lacked the pace, wit and action of his other work, sacrificed to in-depth characterisation and observational asides. The second half, in contrast, was excellent with dark humour, pathos, and twists and turns aplenty as it hurtled to its sinister, action-packed resolution. If the first half had been compressed into a third, then this would have been a really great read. As it stands, Slaughter’s Hound is a good, solid, noir tale, firmly rooted in North West Ireland.
Labels: 2012, Declan Burke, Ireland, Salughter’s Hound
For anyone living in and around Dublin, or fancy trip to the city, there are two crime writing events at this year's Dublin Book Festival. On Thursday 15th November, 6.30-7.30pm, Niamh O'Connor, Conor Brady, Sam Millar and Louise Philips will discuss their inspirations. Later that same evening, 8.00-9.15pm, Sean Moncrieff and Michael Clifford will discuss writing in the shadows of the recession with Niamh O'Connor. I have Louise Phillips' new book Red Ribbons on the TBR - I must give it a read.
Review of The Untouchables by Shane Ross and Nick Webb
The UK seeks to emulate the Irish model of development, planning and construction?
Manchester side-bar
Review of HHhH by Laurent Binet
October reads
The makings of a grouch
Posted by Rob Kitchin at 12:32 PM No comments:
‘What are you doing?’
‘Go back to sleep.’
‘You’re watching a video on your phone?’
‘I’m too tired to read.’
‘So go to sleep then.’
‘I can’t, that’s why I’m watching a video.’
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘No. I just can’t sleep, that’s all.’
‘You’re working too hard. You’re head’s so stuffed full of nonsense it can’t slow to a rest. You need to stop doing so much.’
‘Like that’s my choice. Go back to sleep, you’ll be tired in the morning.’
‘And you won’t be?’
‘I’m used to it. You’ll be a grouch.’
‘That’ll make two of us then.’
I'm somewhat surprised that I read and reviewed ten books in October. It didn't feel like a ten book month. It was a bit of a mixed bag. The standout book was Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, a crime thriller set in the Turkish city in the months after the Second World War. I've already bought another his books, The Good German, which I hope to read soon.
HHhH by Laurent Binet ***
The Untouchables by Shane Ross and Nick Ross ***
Dust Devils by James Reasoner ***
A Death in Tuscany by Michele Giuttari ***
Restless by William Boyd ****
Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon ******
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin ****
Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie ***.5
The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman ****.5
The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal ***.5
Review of Cypress Grove by James Sallis (2003, No ...
Review of A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller (...
Big data, Obama’s campaign, and social and politic...
Review of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of W...
Review of The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Gal...
Review of Money Shot by Christa Faust (Hard Case C...
Review of Cadaver Blues by J.E. Fishman (Stonegate...
Review of A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton (Ar...
Review of Even Flow by Darragh McManus (2012, Roun...
Review of Slaughter’s Hound by Declan Burke (Liber...
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Using MATLAB® Functions in Your COMSOL Multiphysics® Models
Fanny Griesmer April 18, 2014
Did you know that you can use MATLAB® functions in your COMSOL Multiphysics® models? Well, you can, and in this video tutorial we will show you how, using LiveLink™ for MATLAB®.
Video: LiveLink™ for MATLAB® Demonstration
Model Downloads
Shown in the video: MEMS Heating Circuit
Another example for using MATLAB functions: Temperature Distribution in a Vacuum Flask
In this tutorial, we will learn how to model the joule heating and thermal expansion in a MEMS heating circuit. The device consists of a thin, nichrome layer pattern on a thicker glass layer. Electric current conduction through the nichrome layer produces joule heating. Most of the material properties are assumed to be constant, except the thermal conductivity of glass.
A MATLAB® function is created that reads in temperature-dependent thermal conductivity data and interpolates to provide the conductivity value as a function of temperature at any point within the glass layer. The effect of spatial inhomogeneity in the material property is incorporated by adding a random component to the conductivity, which varies as a function of the Y-coordinate of the glass layer.
In order to set up the model in COMSOL Desktop®, we will create the geometry, set up the physics, assign material properties, mesh, and run the model.
Once we have run the basic model in the COMSOL Desktop, we will start the LiveLink™ for MATLAB® and load the COMSOL® model. We will then perform data fitting to obtain the parameters for temperature-dependent electrical conductivity and specify the limits of thickness of glass and nichrome layers. These parameters will be updated in the model. The model will be solved within a nested for-loop that will allow us to investigate the design space.
So, let’s create the model in COMSOL Desktop.
We will start by selecting a 3D space dimension and then, from the Add Physics menu, we’re going to select our three different physics interfaces of interest.
We will go to “Structural Mechanics”, select and add “Thermal Stress”. Then, we’ll go to “AC/DC” and select and add “Electric Currents, Shell”.
Then, we’ll go back to “Structural Mechanics” once again and we will add the Shell or the Structural Shell interface.
Let us go ahead and get into the geometry building steps to save some time. I’m going to get it from a file where these steps are already available, and let’s go ahead and build the geometry.
Now, we can go back to the global definitions and create a MATLAB function.
The name of the function will be thermal_conductivity and the arguments that we are going to send to this MATLAB function will be the temperature and the Y-coordinate.
The simulation will actually start with the Structural Shell interface. This will be assigned only to the nichrome layer, which is what we are modeling as a shell.
Now let’s go to the Electric Currents, Shell interface. Very similarly, we will assign the nichrome layer as the shell or the boundary of interest.
We will go ahead and then add a Boundary Heat Source boundary condition to the same surface and here we will basically connect the Thermal Stress interface to the surface losses produced by the Electric Currents, Shell interface.
So this is how we are telling the model that there’s some heat being generated on this boundary.
Let’s go to the Materials branch.
We’ll first go to the Material Browser, go to the built-in library and select “Silica glass”. This gets assigned to the glass layer.
Here, among all the material properties listed for silica glass, all these numbers are constant, and we’ll go ahead and change the value of “thermal conductivity”.
So, instead of that being a number, it will now be the MATLAB function thermal_conductivity and its value will be evaluated at temperature, T, and at any y-coordinate.
Once we’re done with setting up the material properties, let’s customize the mesh.
Once we are done with setting up the mesh, it is time to select “Compute”.
Once we have solved the model, we can create several plots to look at some of the quantities of interest. Let’s also look at the thermal conductivity of glass, which we obtain from the MATLAB function, thermal_conductivity. I mention that there is a randomness that we added to incorporate the effect of spatial inhomogeneity. We can see that randomness when we compare the conductivity distribution over space with the color map, here.
So, now that we have solved the basic model in COMSOL Desktop, let’s switch gears and take a look at the MATLAB graphical user interface that you get to see when you start LiveLink™ for MATLAB®.
We have a little script here and the first step that we perform is to load our model file that we created in COMSOL Desktop into the MATLAB workspace using the mphload command.
Once you do that, you get to see the model structure in the workspace.
Finally, let’s take a look at the main component in this script, where we use a nested for-loop to update the values of the glass layer thickness and the nichrome layer thickness, and solve the model repeatedly within this nested for-loop. We also create custom plots, which will only plot the temperature for the extreme design points.
We would also use a few specific functions, such as mphglobal and mphmean to obtain information such as the values of global quantities, like the “Maximum Interface Stress” and efficiency, and the average value of temperature on the bottom surface of the glass layer.
Once we obtain these values, we can assign them and store them in MATLAB variables.
We can also combine native MATLAB® functions with LiveLink™ functions. For example, mphinterp is a LiveLink™ for MATLAB® function that you can combine with the std, or standard deviation, function in MATLAB to obtain the standard deviation of temperature on the bottom surface of the glass layer, evaluated at a set of arbitrary coordinate points.
Once we have solved the problem for all these design cases, we can also create plots of interest. Such as the average temperature on the lower surface, the standard deviation of temperature on the lower surface, and surface plots of the Maximum Interface Stress and Heat Transfer Efficiency. All of these as functions of the thickness of the glass layer as well as the nichrome layer.
So, let’s go ahead and take a look at these plots. Here is our first plot, bunch of subplots actually, which shows the temperature at the different extremes of our design space. Minimum and maximum value of the glass thickness, and also minimum and maximum value of the nichrome layer thickness.
Let’s take a look at the plot of the average temperature on the lower surface of glass as a function of both glass layer thickness and the nichrome layer thickness. We see that the effect of changing the glass thickness is not so much on the average temperature, but there is some significant effect when we change the thickness of the nichrome layer. The thicker it is, the higher the temperature.
In the next figure, we are looking at the standard deviation of temperature as a function of, again, the glass thickness and the nichrome thickness — and we definitely see some nonlinear behavior here.
Let’s take a look at the surface plot where we can see the Maximum Interface Stress as a function of the two different layered thicknesses — and once again we see some nonlinearities. We see that the Maximum Interface Stress is obtained when we have a thicker glass layer and a much thinner nichrome layer.
MATLAB is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.
LiveLink for MATLAB
Tips for Using the Wall Distance Interface
Electroplating: How the U.S. Mint Makes a Penny
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Denmark bans six 'hate preachers' from entering the country
Teis Jensen
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Denmark on Tuesday banned five Islamic clerics and an American evangelical Christian pastor from entering the country, calling them “hate preachers” who posed threats to public order.
The move came amidst a public backlash in Denmark against Islam in the wake of Islamist violence a decade ago over Danish newspaper cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammad, a series of deadly militant attacks in Europe including one in Denmark, and a large influx of mainly Muslim migrants in 2015.
The blacklist, the first of its kind in Denmark, arose from legislation passed last year allowing bans on foreign religious figures the government deems to be a danger to public security.
“The government will not accept that hate preachers come to Denmark to preach hatred against Danish society and indoctrinate others to commit violence against women and children, spread ideas about an (Islamic) caliphate and in general undermine our fundamental values,” Immigration Minister Inger Stojberg said.
The blacklist includes Islamic cleric Kamal El-Mekki from the United States; Jamaican-born Canadian Bilal Philips, who lives in Qatar; Mohamad al-Arifi and Salman al-Ouda from Saudi Arabia; and Mohammad Rateb al-Nabulsi from Syria.
The sixth person on the list is Terry Jones, a Florida evangelical Christian pastor who in 2010 raised an international outcry when he threatened to burn copies of the Koran.
Stojberg’s statement on the ban did not say whether any of the named preachers had been in Denmark. But the law enacted last year said it applied to those for whom there was a “reasonable likelihood” they would enter the country.
It also said behaviour deemed to be hateful could arise from statements or actions whether in Denmark or abroad.
Denmark became a target of radical Islamists in 2005 after the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammad, which led to sometimes deadly protests in the Muslim world.
In 2015, a Danish-born Muslim gunman killed two people in an attack on a debating event and a Copenhagen synagogue before being shot dead by police.
Public sentiment towards Islam and Muslim migrants has soured in long liberal and tolerant Denmark. The European Union country has imposed strict limits on immigration, citing security and cultural concerns.
Anti-Muslim populist parties have gained strength throughout the Nordic region, and elsewhere in Europe, since record numbers of mainly Muslim migrants arrived in 2015. The anti-immigrant Danish Peoples Party is now the second largest in parliament.
Editing by Mark Heinrich
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Tag: dolphins
Miami Street Names
A Brief Guide to Miami’s Street Names
Collins Avenue
John Collins was a farmer and land developer who built the first wooden bridge from Miami to Miami Beach in 1913
Flagler Street
Miami Beach Celebrated its 100th Birthday this year (2015)
Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway made connections to Miami a reality. Before 1896 there was no easy way to move goods or people out of Miami. The railroad arrived in April of that year. Henry Flagler is known as the “father” of Miami and his name pops up in many places in South Florida.
Biscayne Blvd
This street takes it name from the Biscayne Bay
No longer connected – a section of the old railway bridge going to Key West, FL. Henry Flagler’s East Coast Railway made connections possible. It’s a shame it has long since disappeared.
Brickell Avenue
William and Mary Brickell owned a trading post on the south side of the Miami River. In the late 1800’s everything south of the river was called Brickell for many years.
Julia Tuttle Causeway
If Henry Flager is considered the “father” of Miami then Julia Tuttle is the “mother” of Miami. She gave Henry Flagler a hard time and persuaded him to extend his rail line 65 miles south from Palm Beach to Miami.
Rickenbacker Causeway
If you’re feeling fit you can cycle across the Rickenbacker Causeway and visit Key Biscayne and Bill Baggs State Florida Park
This name comes from the WW1 ace pilot, Eddie Rickenbacker who then became the president of Eastern Airlines which had its base in Miami.
Killian Drive
Dan Killian had a country store south of what is now called Coral Gables and was responsible for the first schools, streetlights and churches in the area
Don Shula Expressway
Don Shula was the Miami Dolphins coach. He retired in 1997 and holds the coaching record for the most wins in the NFL (347). He coached the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only team in the NFL history to play a perfect 16-0 season and win the Super Bowl.
Ives Dairy Road and Milam Dairy Road
Ives Dairy Road – no longer the home of the dairy!
Once upon time these roads went to actual Dairy Farms. Now Ives Dairy Road leads to the Sun Life Stadium where the Miami Dolphins play. Milam Dairy Road goes to the city of Miami Lakes. The Milam family chain of grocery stores can still be found in the area.
I think it is a shame that the Dairy Farms are no longer there and have been replaced by a stadium – what do you think?
Do you know any other origins of Miami street names?
Posted on October 9, 2015 October 7, 2015 Categories Learning, Miami Beach, TravelTags biscayne, brickell, causeway, collins, dolphins, flagler, julia, names, nfl, rickenbacker, roads, streetsLeave a comment on Miami Street Names
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The Dictator's Playbook
Manuel Noriega
Watch Manuel Noriega rise through the Panamanian military to become chief of intelligence – and then, military dictator. He spied for the United States, but in the end, money laundering, drug trafficking and political crimes led to his downfall.
A Cream Production in association with Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. and PBS.
Idi Amin
See how Idi Amin used military force to seize power and build a dictatorship in Uganda.
Learn how Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War and became the dictator of Spain.
Watch Manuel Noriega rise to power in Panama, and witness his sudden downfall.
Meet the man who created fascism, an ideology that plunged most of Europe into darkness.
Learn how Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq and maintained it for almost 30 years.
Kim Il Sung
Kim Il Sung created a North Korean dictatorship that has lasted for three generations.
Ep 4: Manuel Noriega | Prologue
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Rain can't dampen Blues' championship parade
Blues superfan Laila lifts Cup at celebration (1:18)
Laila Anderson comments on the Blues' Stanley Cup title and lifts the trophy with the team at its championship celebration. (1:18)
It rained on the St. Louis Blues' parade, but nobody seemed to mind.
Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of downtown St. Louis and braved the rain Saturday to cheer on the Stanley Cup champs, who concluded the festivities with a packed rally beneath the Gateway Arch.
The Blues ended one of sports' longest championship droughts Wednesday by beating the Boston Bruins 4-1 in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, the first title for a franchise that joined the NHL 52 years ago.
The long-awaited championship stirred strong emotions in St. Louis, a city still smarting from the departure of the NFL's Rams in 2016. The loss of the football team seemed to strengthen fans' bonds to the Blues and their beloved baseball team, the Cardinals.
"I'm so happy for the city and the fans here,'' Blues interim coach Craig Berube said. "They deserve it. But more than anything I'm so happy for our players, because of how hard they've played, the character and leadership coming through, winning that Cup.''
Among the masses were NHL Hall of Famer Brett Hull, actor Jon Hamm and superfan Laila Anderson, who is battling a life-threatening autoimmune disease and served as a good-luck charm during the postseason run.
How the Blues hit reset, then beat the game
"I'm just glad I could help them," Anderson said. "I don't know what I do, but I'm just glad the whole city supports me so much."
Ryan Korte, a 56-year-old letter carrier from the St. Louis suburb of Belleville, Illinois, said he wasn't sure he would ever get to see the Blues win the Cup.
"I was starting to wonder," Korte said as he waved a towel while standing on a ledge, straining to see the parade. "A lot of disappointments. They've had some good teams, and they always let us down."
Not this time.
"This is bigger than the World Series," Korte said.
That may sound strange in St. Louis, which has long been considered a baseball haven thanks to the Cardinals' 11 World Series titles. It sure looked like a hockey town on Saturday, though, as fans shouted, "Let's Go Blues!" and danced to "Gloria," the 1982 Laura Branigan hit that became the Blues' unofficial victory song.
"These guys won the Stanley Cup for this city!" Hull said. "There is nothing more they have to do! So instead of saying, 'Let's Go Blues,' we're gonna say, 'We Went Blues! We Went Blues! We Went Blues!'"
O'Reilly: Winning title 'still hasn't sunk in'
Ryan O'Reilly reflects on winning the Stanley Cup title with the Blues during their championship celebration.
Forward Ryan O'Reilly, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff MVP, carried the Stanley Cup to fans lining Market Street to let them touch it.
"I was saying this earlier during the parade ... I said this is a city of amazing hockey fans, amazingly nice people, and amazing drinkers as well," O'Reilly said. "They can handle their stuff. It's awesome; I love it."
"The Blues have an amazing fan base," said Michael DeHeer, 52, of St. Louis. "This place is ready to explode."
It has been quite a journey since the Blues joined the NHL in 1967 as one of six expansion teams that year that doubled the size of the league. The original six teams were kept in one division, and the six new teams in another, ensuring that an expansion team would play for the Stanley Cup.
The Blues loaded their roster with aging veterans, and it paid off: They played for the Stanley Cup in each of their first three seasons. They didn't win a game, though, going a combined 0-12 in those three series.
What followed was a 49-year stretch in which the Blues didn't make the Final -- a drought made even more remarkable because the team missed the playoffs only nine times during that span.
This year's season didn't start out promising, as a sluggish start got coach Mike Yeo fired in November.
Berube took over as interim coach -- a title he still holds, though the interim tag is expected to be lifted soon. Improvement didn't come immediately; the Blues were last in the standings on Jan. 3, the middle of the season. Days later, an unheralded rookie goaltender named Jordan Binnington was called up. He won his first game in a shutout.
Soon, with Binnington taking over as the lead goalie, the Blues went on a franchise-record 11-game winning streak and stayed hot through their playoff run.
Binnington, known for his calm demeanor, finally let loose Saturday.
"You want to see some f---ing emotion?'' he asked the rally crowd. "We're Stanley Cup champions, baby!
"This has been an incredible day. There's thousands of people out here -- and you guys have waited a long time, so this is incredible. Thank you for sharing this with us."
The Blues joined a list of other sports franchises to recently end long championship droughts. The Chicago Cubs' win in the 2016 World Series ended a 108-year run of futility. The Philadelphia Eagles won the 2018 Super Bowl, their first championship in 58 years. Last year's Stanley Cup winners, the Washington Capitals, won for the first time since joining the NHL in 1974.
"It's awesome; I've never seen anything like it in my life," Berube said. "Best fans in the league, for sure. I mean, what an incredible experience to be down here today in the parade; it's unbelievable. I'm so happy for the city and the fans here; they deserve it. But more than anything, I'm so happy for our players, because [of] how hard they played, [the] character and leadership coming through, winning us a Cup."
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Valley Fever Task Force
Co-Chair Biographies
McCarthy and Schweikert Introduce Historic Valley Fever Legislation
Today, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Co-Chairman of the Congressional Valley Fever Task Force, introduced H.R. 6562, the bipartisan FORWARD Act with fellow Co-Chairman Congressman David Schweikert (AZ-6) and Task Force Members Congresswoman Martha McSally (AZ-2), Congresswoman Karen Bass (CA-37), and Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9). This legislation would strengthen research and help advance treatment and vaccine development for Coccidioidomycosis, commonly known as Valley Fever, as well as other orphan endemic fungal diseases.
Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the primary sponsor of the bipartisan FORWARD Act, released the following statement:
“Valley fever is an endemic fungal disease that impacts many of our Central Valley communities. In the first six months of 2018, there have been twice as many reported cases of Valley Fever in Kern County compared to last year during this same period. With cases on the rise, we must redouble our efforts to develop a vaccine for this disease, as well as improve the diagnostic tools and treatment options available to those who suffer from it. This legislation is designed to do just that.
"Since coming to Congress, stamping out Valley Fever has been a top priority of mine. From focusing Federal and local efforts on this disease at the 2013 Valley Fever Symposium in Bakersfield to working with the NIH and CDC leadership to prioritize research efforts to introducing the FORWARD Act, my hope is that one day, Valley Fever will join the ranks of polio or smallpox – a relic of the past that has been eradicated through the ingenuity and hard work of the men and women who are dedicated to finding better treatments and ultimately, a vaccine.”
Congressman David Schweikert released the following statement:
“Arizona has been home to 68.3% of diagnosed Valley Fever cases over the last ten years. This legislation represents a breakthrough for researchers of this orphan disease. Our design for collecting critical clinical data, while protecting patient privacy through the use of blockchain, should become the future of medical research.”
Congresswoman Martha McSally released the following statement:
“There are more Valley Fever infections in Arizona than anywhere else in the world. Last year, nearly 7,000 cases were reported to the Arizona Department of Health Services. Valley Fever is on the rise in Southern Arizona when it should be on the decline. I was pleased to work with Leader McCarthy and the Congressional Valley Fever Task Force on this legislation. The FORWARD Act will tackle Arizona’s public health crisis head on and focus on eradicating this infectious disease once and for all.”
Congresswoman Karen Bass released the following statement:
“I’m proud to join my colleagues on this bipartisan effort to combat Valley Fever. The impact this disease has had on communities in Southern California and the greater Southwest region of the country will be significantly mitigated by advancing treatment and vaccine development. As a former health professional, I’ve seen lives saved by scientific research, which is why I hope Congress can come together to pass this good piece of legislation.”
Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema released the following statement:
“Whether it’s a neighbor, family member, or coworker, most Arizonans know someone who’s been affected by Valley Fever. The illness can leave someone unable to work, care for their kids, attend school, or worse. Our bill helps Arizonans by advancing research and moving us closer to finding effective treatments.”
Valley Fever experts and advocates issued the following statements:
“Congressman Kevin McCarthy has been tireless in his efforts to increase awareness of Valley Fever and bring critical funding to Kern County - where it is needed the most. As Medical Director for the Valley Fever Institute at Kern Medical, I am proud to lead our clinical team as we continue our mission to increase education and awareness for the public, patients and health care providers; provide the best patient care available and promote research that includes epidemiology, clinical drug development, prevention, immunology and immunizations. I fully support the FORWARD Act and think this is a critical step forward in combatting this disease.”
-Royce Johnson, M.D., Medical Director of the Kern Medical Valley Fever Institute and Chief of Infectious Diseases at Kern Medical
“For decades, there has been an obvious public health need and an economic benefit for better treatments, better diagnostic tests, and vaccines to prevent Valley Fever. There are opportunities to advance solutions in all three of these areas. This new initiative is a big step in the right direction. I am very encouraged by the leadership that Congressmen McCarthy and Schweikert have taken to give Valley Fever the visibility and the resources that it needs for progress to be made. The University of Arizona’s Valley Fever Center for Excellence is ready to help in this effort.”
- Dr. John Galgiani, Director of the University of Arizona Valley Fever Center for Excellence
“The FORWARD Act is a tremendous milestone in the efforts to treat Valley Fever and I am excited to support this smart, focused legislation from Congressman McCarthy and the Congressional Valley Fever Task Force. Valley Fever touches the lives of all of us living in the endemic regions. The amount of hope this bill holds for patients like myself and the families of patients like mine is beyond expression. The Valley Fever Americas Foundation has been working to prevent and cure Valley Fever for nearly 20 years and the amount of promise this bill holds is immeasurable. We look forward to continuing to work with Congressman McCarthy and the Congressional Valley Fever Task force to cure and prevent Valley Fever.”
- Rob Purdie, Vice President, Valley Fever Americas Foundation and Patient, Valley Fever Institute at Kern Medical
· The full bill text of H.R. 6562 can be read here.
· Coccidioidomycosis, commonly referred to as Valley Fever, is a disease caused by fungal spores found in the soil in arid regions primarily in the American southwest. Symptoms can range from flu-like to being so severe that bones, skin, eyes, and even the brain can be affected. While most individuals infected with Valley Fever will never experience symptoms, for those who do, they are often serious and sometimes life-threatening. To learn more about Valley Fever, click here.
· According to Valley Fever experts, there currently is no vaccine or cure for this disease and existing treatments vary in efficacy.
· The Finding Orphan-disease Remedies With Antifungal Research and Development (FORWARD) Act is designed to advance sustained efforts to combat Valley Fever in the short, medium and long-term. Specifically, the FORWARD Act would in the:
o Short-Term: Immediately support and prioritize basic research for Valley Fever and other fungal diseases, establish a blockchain pilot program so that medical researchers can more easily access clinical data for research while preserving patient privacy, and create a Federal working group to coordinate research efforts on Valley Fever;
o Medium-Term: Streamline the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process to get new antifungal diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines approved for use in humans and add antifungal diagnostic tool and treatment development to the successful public-private partnership CARB-X program within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and,
o Long-Term: Encourage the development of a Valley Fever vaccine by extending Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now (GAIN) Act market incentives to antifungal vaccines and create a FDA priority review voucher program for endemic orphan fungal diseases, similar to the existing voucher program for rare pediatric and tropical diseases, to further incentivize the development of new treatments, cures, and vaccines for diseases, such as Valley Fever.
Office Location Information
Hours: M-F 9:00am-6:00pm
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Of magnets and bacteria: Filtering the blood of patients with sepsis
Posted on April 12, 2013 April 12, 2013 by Tom Ulrich
More On: critical care medicine, magnets, nanoparticles, nanotechnology, sepsis
(Ryan Somma/Flickr)
There’s no other way to say it: sepsis is a horrible disease. It typically starts with a runaway bacterial infection in the blood, followed by a runaway immune response that severely damages the body it’s trying to save. The results: shock, multiple organ failure and—in between 210,000 and 375,000 people in the United States alone every year—death.
Part of the problem is that the methods available for treating sepsis aren’t particularly good. Antibiotics can kill the bacteria, but that still leaves bacterial debris floating in the bloodstream, fueling the already over-excited inflammatory response.
Removing the bacteria altogether—as fast as possible—would be the better solution. At least that’s what Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, thinks. His lab at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Division of Critical Care Medicine has developed a new approach that combines magnetic nanoparticles, a synthetic molecule (called bis-Zn-DPA) that binds to the bacteria, and magnetized microfluidic devices to pull bacteria from the blood quickly and efficiently.
A magnetic attraction for bacteria
Kohane envisions the system working like this. The microfluidic devices would be incorporated into heart-lung (aka extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO) machines, which intensive care units often use to help keep the blood of severely ill patients circulating and full of oxygen; plasmapheresis or dialysis machines would work as well.
“We would add the nanoparticles with bis-Zn-DPA to a patient’s blood when it is already outside the body,” explains Kohane, who runs the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Boston Children’s. “We would then turn on the magnets, pull out the bacteria and nanoparticles, and put their blood back in.
“The nanoparticles have a high ratio of surface area to volume, so you could get a lot of binding,” he continues. “The bis-Zn-DPA molecule binds to bacteria quickly, so, unlike the antibody-based systems, you don’t need to incubate the nanoparticles with the bacteria for a long time. And the particles are easy to separate from the blood.”
Imagine these magnetic buckyballs a million times smaller, coated in a molecular glue, pulling bacteria out of someone's blood. (sparr0/Flickr)
Filtering bacteria isn’t a new idea in the world of sepsis research. But what makes this approach stand out from those based on antibodies or other removal methods is the bis-Zn-DPA.
This synthetic molecule attaches itself tightly to molecules that are found in all kinds of bacterial cell walls but are absent from the membranes of human cells, thus ensuring that only bacterial cells get filtered from the blood. It also has a longer shelf life than antibodies and binds to members of both major bacterial families (Gram-positive and Gram-negative).
“With a small molecule like bis-Zn-DPA, it’s also easier to control which end of the molecule is facing the nanoparticles and which is available to bind bacteria,” Kohane adds. “It helps keep the binding activity high relative to antibody-based approaches.”
First steps toward filtration
This work isn’t Kohane’s first foray into magnetism; a few years ago, he started working on a magnet-based system for consistent triggered delivery of drugs for chronic pain. But it is his first attempt at addressing sepsis and its consequences.
So far the attempt looks promising. To date his team has only tested the approach on the lab bench. But as documented in the journal Nano Letters, the team has been able to pull E. coli (a frequent cause of bacterial sepsis) out of cow blood at 100 percent efficiency after just two cycles of filtration.
“We need to fine-tune the microfluidic system for optimal filtration,” says Kohane, “but if we get there, this could be a lifesaver for anyone with sepsis, regardless of whether they’re a child or adult.”
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Forensic Veterinarian Fights Animal Cruelty
Forensic Veterinarian Fights Animal Cruelty | Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine
By day, Dr. Evans is a veterinarian at Georgia Veterinary Associates in Lawrenceville. But by night—and afternoons, and weekends—she works with local law enforcement to solve animal cruelty cases. Dr. Evans has worked in veterinary forensics for more than a decade, and in 2014 was named Medical Director of Gwinnett County Animal Welfare and Enforcement. She consults on cases involving animals, assists with crime scene investigation, examines victims, and serves as a witness in court cases—all in the name of protecting animals.
Dr. Evans got her start in this unique field in 2006, when she encountered a cruelty case at the veterinary practice where she worked. Once the case had been resolved, the animal control officers asked if any of the vets would be interested in doing further case work with them. Dr. Evans jumped at the opportunity.
“Animal cruelty is such a horrible thing,” said Dr. Evans. “There’s nothing better than saving the lives of the animal victims and then being able to go to court and get justice for these animals.”
So began Dr. Evans’ second career and lifelong passion. She trained under Dr. Melinda Merck, one of the leading authorities in the field and the owner of Veterinary Forensics Consulting, LLC. In addition to working directly with Dr. Merck, Dr. Evans earned her graduate certificate in veterinary forensics from the University of Florida.
While the number of cases varies, Dr. Evans works on at least one new case per month, if not more. In 2016 she estimates that she had about 50 cases of animal cruelty, about half as many as in 2015.
A new case for Dr. Evans typically starts with a call from an animal control officer about suspected abuse. Sadly, sometimes the animal is already deceased, so Dr. Evans will perform a necropsy and try to understand what happened.
While she finds her work deeply rewarding, Dr. Evans stresses that veterinary forensics is not for everybody. In order to best do her job, Dr. Evans has to not only come face-to-face with inhumanity, but also put herself in the shoes of an abuser, which requires an incredible mental toughness.
“As veterinarians, we would never do anything to hurt an animal,” said Dr. Evans. “So in order to figure out how someone would do this, and get closer to solving the case—you have to make your brain go in a direction it normally would never go.”
In one such case, Dr. Evans was working with her mentor, Dr. Merck, along with animal control officer Joey Brooks, on an injured dog, but they could not figure out what had caused the dog’s wound. So Dr. Merck went to Home Depot and walked up and down the aisles, looking for something that could have resulted in the dog’s particular injury. That’s how they realized the dog had been hit with the end of a crowbar.
These kinds of experiences take an emotional toll on even the most seasoned veterinarians. The key to coping with it, says Dr. Evans, is self-care.
“I joke that I have a little tiny box in my brain and all the bad stuff goes in there,” said Dr. Evans. “When it gets full, I take time and empty it all out. Maybe I sit down and have a big old cry, or I go out and play with my four-legged babies. And when the box is empty, that’s when I go back to work.”
And there are happy endings, too. One such case was a boxer mix named Link that Dr. Evans fostered. Link had an embedded collar, a condition in which the dog’s collar was too small and as the dog grew, the collar became embedded in the neck. This causes constriction of the underlying tissue, which was so severely damaged that extensive surgery was require to repair the wound. After a great deal of care and rehab, Dr. Evans was able to get Link adopted out to a great home through a local rescue.
“Of course, the ultimate goal is always to get the animal healthy and happy, and to find them a good home where they don’t have to suffer through abuse,” said Dr. Evans.
Fighting for Their Rights
In addition to investigative work and caring for victims of abuse, Dr. Evans goes to court when needed. Cases can go on for months or years, and the animals have to stay in the shelter in the meantime if the owner hasn’t released them. So Dr. Evans and the state prosecutor will go to court to ask for a disposition hearing, which could allow a court order for the custody of the animals to be turned over to animal control. This allows the animals to be adopted out to good homes as soon as possible.
“A great thing about my job is that we have a fantastic team here in Gwinnett County,” said Dr. Evans. “The judges, prosecutors, and animal control officers truly have the animals’ best interests at heart.”
One of her first cruelty cases was a group of 14 Dobermans and a pit bull who were victims of starvation. Two sadly didn’t make it and were found deceased at the scene. After a few months, Dr. Evans and her team got disposition to find homes for the remaining 13 dogs. All went to a Doberman rescue except for one—a girl named Reno, who was adopted and lives right across the street from Dr. Evans.
“By the time that case went to court, it was three to four years later,” said Dr. Evans. “Can you imagine if an animal had to sit in a shelter for all that time? Luckily, the court system has ways to help with that.”
But beyond custody situations like these, Dr. Evans doesn’t have to spend much time physically testifying in the courtroom.
“I’m not in court that much because I write very good, thorough reports,” said Dr. Evans.
She credits her education at Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine (RUSVM) on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, with teaching her this crucial skill.
“Being able to write a great report goes back to really good record-keeping, which is what we learned in school,” she said. “When your foundation is strong, it makes things easier in the long run.”
Vet School Redemption
Dr. Evans’ career success is a testament to her lifelong determination and passion for animals. She earned her bachelor’s degree in animal science from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo in 1995. Then, she applied to several U.S. veterinary schools—but wasn’t accepted. Adding insult to injury, an admissions representative at North Carolina State University dismissed her application and told Dr. Evans, “You will never go to NC State.”
Then, a colleague recommended that she apply to RUSVM. Although Dr. Evans worried that attending vet school in the Caribbean would be too far from home, she decided it would be worth it if it meant achieving her dream.
The verdict? “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” said Dr. Evans.
Perhaps the best feeling of all was when she entered her third year—the time when RUSVM students choose a U.S. vet school where they’ll complete the clinical portion of their education.
“When it came time to choose my clinical year location, where do you think I went?” said Dr. Evans.
The first thing she did when she arrived on the NC State campus was walk back into that same admissions office where she had been rejected years ago.
“I said, ‘I know you don’t remember me, but you said I’d never go to NC State, and here I am now,’” said Dr. Evans. “Just because I didn’t have a 4.0 didn’t mean that I couldn’t go to vet school and do an awesome job.”
Not only did Dr. Evans prove the naysayers wrong, she pursued her dream and has dedicated her life to saving animals and preventing animal cruelty. It can be hectic at times, but she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“It’s busy, but I’m not willing to give it up because it means so much to me,” she said. “This is my passion.”
Interested in veterinary forensics? To learn more, check out these resources that Dr. Evans recommends:
University of Florida Veterinary Forensics program
VeterinaryForensics.com
ASPCApro.org
AnimalLawSource.org
Fri, 10 Feb 2017, 12:00:00
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Home » Government prepares to legitimize Dole Lanka’s illegitimate endeavors company allowed to retain forest land illegally encroached?
Government prepares to legitimize Dole Lanka’s illegitimate endeavors company allowed to retain forest land illegally encroached?
19 January 2018 Food Sovereignty, Land, Water and Territories, South Asia, Transnational Companies and Agribusiness
Movement for Land and Agriculture Reform (Monlar)
The current United National Front for Good Governance (UNFGG) administration seems to be continuing the support given to Dole Lanka Private Limited, which has illegally cleared protected forests, which acted as catchment areas and destroyed farm lands owned by small holders, given by the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration. The Department of Forest Conservation has obtained court orders to remove farm lands operated by Dole Lanka Private Limited, scattered in various lands owned by the department in the Sri Lankan dry zone. However the government has halted the implementation of these court orders and is attempting to hand over the land to the controversial company.
The first step of this legitimization of Dole was the cabinet paper (CP 16/1934/752/023) regularizing the land used for banana cultivation by Dole Lanka Private Limited in Kuda Oya and Demodara in Moneragala district’ on September 15, 2016 by Malik Samarawickrama, Minister of Development Strategies and International Trade. President Maithripala Sirisena, as the minister of Mahaweli and Environment as well as the ministers of Lands and Finance has also noted their observations to the cabinet paper. The note to the cabinet by President Maithripala Sirisena clearly states that Dole Lanka Private Limited has not obtained the permission of the Department of Forest Conservation to establish these banana plantations. The note also states that the Dole Lanka Private Limited has admitted before court that it is using the lands in Kuda Oya and Demodara without permission or approval. However the cabinet memorandum has recommended to seek the advice of the Attorney General to come into an agreement with Dole Lanka Private Limited, so that the company can continue to use the lands. Thus the Attorney General is studying how Dole Lanka Private Limited can keep on using these lands.
However according to the laws of the land, it is not possible to transfer the ownership of land that belong to the Department of Forest Conservation to Dole Lanka Private Limited, or any other private entity. The Commissioner of Lands can release lands for any investment, only if approval is granted by relevant agencies after conducting the necessary feasibility studies. The government can release the land, on long term lease, to a private entity, according to the Section 199 (G) of the land Ordinance, only after that requirement has been completed. For this the approval of the Minister of lands is needed and the land can be released after recommendations by the President.
Although this is the standard procedure when it comes to releasing land for an investment, a number of factors prevent Dole Lanka Private Limited from accessing state owned land. Chief among them is the fact that Dole Lanka Private Limited has encroached the land that belongs to the Department of Forest Conservation and has used these lands for several years illegally and the fact that they have used the land without any feasibility studies prior to the commencement of the project. Moreover the Forest Conservation Department has taken legal action against Dole Lanka Private Limited, for illegally maintaining farm lands in Kuda Oya and Demodara at the Wellawaya Magistrates’ Court (case numbers MC 215 and 216.) Given this context the attempts by the Cabinet to handover these illegally encroached lands to Dole Lanka Private Limited is a bad example.
There is plenty of evidence to prove that Dole Lanka Private Limited is using these lands, at the borer of Lunugamwehera National Park, illegally. The banana cultivations at Kuda Oya and Demodara, adjoining Lunugamwehera National Park, have been established violating section 09 of the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance (FFPO), no 2 of 1937 amended last by no 22 of 2009. According to section 09, to establish any development activity within a mile of a national park one needs to obtain prior written approval based on an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report. Lunugamwehera National Park has established these banana cultivations ignoring this.
Moreover Dole Lanka Private Limited has violated section 20 of the Forest Conservation Ordinance, no 06 of 1907 amended by act no 65 of 2009. According to section 20, a person who cuts, saws, removes and transport of trees and timber, build houses or huts, paves roads or established farms or anyone who encourages such acts are guilty. Any person who is found carrying out such activities can be arrested without a warrant and be presented to a magistrates’ court. The magistrate can either fine that person, between Rs 5000 – 50 000, or imprison such a person for a period no more than two years. He can also levy a fine to compensate for the damage caused to the forest. Given this context any attempt to handover these lands to Dole Lanka Private Limited is not only a violation of the FFPO and land Ordinance but also a challenge to the authority of the courts of law. This bad precedent will only encourage such activities in the future.
According to gazette notification no 772/22 of June 24, 1993 published under the national Environment Act, no 47 of 1980, to carry out any development project that requires the clearing of a forest land over one hectare of forest land or over 50 hectares of non-forest land, one must obtain a prior written environmental approval. Dole Lanka Private Limited has also violated that gazette.
In addition gazette Notification 1152/14 of 4 October, 2000 issued under the Antiquities Ordinance, No. 9of 1940; states that an archaeological impact assessment must be made to determine the impact on archaeological sites prior to the development of land over 2 hectares. However Dole Lanka Private Limited has not carried out an archaeological impact assessment prior to commencing operations.
Thus it is obvious that Dole Lanka Private Limited has violated the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance (FFPO), Forest Conservation Ordinance (FCO), National Environmental Act, Antiquities Ordinance as well as the land Ordinance to establish these two banana farms. Thus neither the Cabinet of Minister nor the Attorney General’s Department can’t take steps to hand over these lands, illegally taken, back to ole Lanka Private Limited. We are also dismayed to see that the ‘good governance’ administration is blatantly violating the rule of law which is an important aspect of good governance.
Moreover in the election manifesto of President Maithripala Sirisena, he guarantees that he will protect the environment as well as take action against those destroy our ecologically sensitive forest areas, regardless of their social; position. However it seems that with the assistance given to Dole Lanka Private Limited the President has breached his agreement with the people o this country.
The manifesto adds that the provisions of the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance (FFPO) will be implemented thoroughly. However Dole Lanka Private Limited has established the two farms at Kuda Oya and Demodara by blatantly violating the fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance (FFPO). The company has not obtained permission to use these lands and it is not clear as to how the President will increase the forest cover of the country to 32% of the total land area, when he keeps on allowing companies like Dole Lanka Private Limited to destroy forest areas.
Japan has taken ownership of Dole Company which has destroyed large swaths of forests across the world and destroying livelihoods of millions of small farmers. In 2011 the Dole Company took over 11600 acres of Kandakadu, which is a part of the Somawathi National Park in 2011. Although we were able to intervene and stop this initiative, Dole Lanka Private Company has now taken over 4600 acres near Lunugamwehera National Park to plant Cavendish bananas, which they export. The Mahinda Rajapaksa administration also handed over 1400 acres from Meegaswewa, Nikawewa grama niladari area in Thanamalwila divisional secretariat area to the company. There was also an initiative to hand over 5000 acres in Kotiyagala, Moneragala to Dole Lanka during the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration and we fear that the current administration is also considering this proposal.
Moreover several ministers of the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration ensured that Dole Lanka receives 1800 acres at Kuda Oya, Wellawaya Divisional Secretariat area, 1600 acres in Demodara, Wandama and 1200 acres in Wekada, Buttala to plant bananas. These land transfers were also conducted illegally ignoring the laws of the land. The former range officer for Moneragala handed over land which was under the control of the forest conservation department to Dole Lanka violating all procedure and the company has expanded its farmlands by illegally procuring land used by small scale farmers who were operating using annual licenses.
During the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, it was the powerful Basil Rajapaksa who was the power behind Dole Lanka at a national level. At the regional level former chief minister for Uva, Shashendra Rajapaksa and former minister Jagath Pushpakumara assisted Dole Lank to procure land illegally and intimidated those who dared to protest these illegal transactions. For their services Dole Lanka made generous campaign contributions. Their legacy is being carried forward by the current Chief Minister of Uva, Chamara Sampath Dasanayake, who is trying his best to delay the eviction of Dole Lanka from the lands they illegally use.
During Prime Minister Ranil Wickreesinghe’s visit to Japan in 2016, the Japanese Prime Minister had requested Wickremesinghe to ensure that Dole Lanka could operate in the country without interference and to ensure that they can keep the land which they hold now. Wickreesinghe has been trying his best to keep the promise he made to his Japanese counterpart and buoyed by this Dole Lanka is spreading its tentacles in the Sri Lankan dry zone, displacing small scale farmers and destroying Sri Lanka’s forests.
Not only is the company displacing small scale farmers and destroying Sri Lanka’s forests, it is also exporting Cavendish produced by other planters, under the Dole name. Browns Company, which had illegally bought off a 1000 acre land for a 33 year lease from the army, is exporting the bananas it produces under Dole brand name. The two companies have signed a MoU. Moreover the bananas produced by the EAP Group in Wanathawilluwa, Puttalam are also exported by Dole Lanka. The forests which were cleared by Dole Lanka were the catchment areas for Kirindi Oya and Menik Ganga and those two rivers, which were vital for thousands of farmers, depend on these forests. However these forests are no more and the impact of this un-thoughtful action will be felt by the people in these areas.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that these farmlands operated by Dole consumes large quantities of water and the required water is taken by the rivers and using ground water. The farm in Kuda Oya uses water from Kirindi Oya and the Wandama and Wekada farms takes water from the Menik River. This has ensured that farmers and animals that depend on the water downstream face severe water shortages. Thus a large number of small scale farmers have been forced out of agriculture and most likely they will be recruited as farm hands by Dole Lanka. Moreover the animals living in Lunugamwehera and Yala, including elephants, are now facing a severe water crisis as a large quantity is water is being taken from the Menik and Kirindi Oya.
When the water levels of the two rivers dwindle the company uses the ground water and this will have devastating consequences as a large number of people also depend on wells and farm wells during the dry season. Due to this the government has been compelled to provide water to those affected using water bowsers using tax payers’ money. Thus the people of this country have to pay to address the negative externalities caused by Dole Lanka. Unsatisfied with the water available from Kirindi Oya and Menik Ganga, Dole Lanka is now attempting to take water from Weheragala tank inside Lunugamwehera National Park. For this the Dole Lanka is constructing an elaborate network of pipes to transport water. When the FFPO dictates that one needs to buy a ticket to enter a national park, it is surprising that Dole Lanka is allowed to conduct such actions.
Dole Lanka is also known for their excessive use of agro-chemicals, which is being sprayed after midnight mechanically. Machines that can spray these agro-chemicals for over 75 metres are mounted on water bowsers. This system ensures that large quantities of agro-chemicals are released to the environment affecting the Lunugamwehera national Park and the nearby communities. These agro-chemicals also contaminate the water from Kirindi Oya and Menik Ganga and end up in Lunugamwehera and Weheragala tanks. Those who use water from these tanks will be adversely affected and we have noted an increase of kidney diseases among the people in the area. Moreover a large number of people who work at these farms are affected by a series of diseases.
Moreover Dole Company used chemicals which helps keep the bananas fresh for a long time, around a month, and to ensure that they are not affected by fungus or insects. Those who work in the farms are not provided with protective clothing and are directly exposed to these chemicals.
Moreover a large number of cans in which agro chemicals were stored can be found inside the Weheragala tank as the company has no systematic method of disposing these storage units. As mentioned earlier no one has been provided with special clothing which minimizes the impact of exposure to agro chemicals. These are clear indications that Dole does not care about the environment or the health of its work force.
The company has also established an electric fence cordoning off its farms from elephants and other wild animals. However as these fences disrupt the migratory patterns of elephants, a large number of elephants now maraud nearby villages. We have identified 21 villages that have been adversely affected by the human elephant conflict. Among these are villages like Maha Aragama, Pubudugama, Ulkanda, Aanapallama, Weliara, Dambe Ara, Balaharuwa, Hambegamuwa and Thanamalwila, which had hitherto not been affected by the human elephant conflict. This can also directly attributed to the actions of the company and as small scale farmers are unable to bear the damages caused by wild elephants and the severe water shortages caused by Dole, as they take in increasing amounts of water from the existing water sources in the area, these farmers are slowly moving away from agriculture.
Most of these small scale farmers, who had been forced out of their traditional livelihoods, often have no option but to start working at banana plantations operated by Dole. These farmers have to go through man power agencies, as this relegates any responsibility the company has, and are paid Rs 525 per day. They have to work from 3 am to 4 pm continuously and are exposed to toxic agro chemicals for extended periods. Since these workers are contracted by Man power agencies, they are not entitled to any labour rights.
Dole violates the labour laws set by the International Labour Organization – ILO and none of the workers that work with harmful agro chemicals have been given any protective clothing and often workers are employed only for a few years as they often fall sick after being exposed to the agro chemicals. Workers who contract chronic diseases receive no compensation and neither do they receive EPF or ETF payments.
Dole is a company that has a notorious reputation throughout the world and has been the subject to numourous contraversies. The company produces around 300 fruits and vegetables in 90 countries. In 2006 the US Drug Administration (FDA) announced that a nationwide E. coli outbreak had been associated with the consumption of bagged baby spinach by Dole Company. The FDA reported that due to this outbreak thirty-one cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, 104 hospitalizations, and four deaths were reported. Victims of the E. coli outbreak were identified in 26 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
In addition in 2011 Dole agreed to settle 38 lawsuits from farm workers in Latin America who alleged injury from exposure to the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP ). The farmers allege that they were exposed to dibromochloropropane (DBCP) on the job and were not given any protection. DBCP is banned in the United States for causing cancer and sterility. Most domestic uses of DBCP were banned in 1977, but despite strong warnings about its health impact, Dole continued to use the chemical. Dole even threatened to sue Dow Chemical if it stopped sending shipments of DBCP to its banana plantations in Latin America. In 1983, six of the Occidental plant workers won a $4.9 million judgment against Dow, which paved the way for the EPA to ban all uses of the substance in the United States. However the company has been attempting to sidestep many similar allegations.
They have also attempted to prevent justice from being served by targeting the attorneys who have tried to seek justice for the affected workers. In 2009 Attorney Juan Dominguez who represented six Nicaraguan plaintiffs who had alleged that they were exposed to DBCP, which was used in Nicaraguan banana plantation after it was banned in the US, had to face criminal investigations after Dole managed to convince a US judge that fraudulent efforts were made by American and Nicaraguan attorneys to recruit bogus plantation workers to serve as plaintiffs. Dominguez was also investigated by the State Bar of California, however no criminal charges were filed against Dominguez, and according to media ‘on March 1, 2011, the State Bar of California wrote to him, stating that the “allegations of professional misconduct” do not “warrant further action.
Not only that, but the organization has attempted to silence documentaries and reporting on such issues. For example they have attempted to prevent the screening of Fredrik Gertten’s documentary on the legal fight between Dole and Nicaraguan banana plantation workers called Bananas!. After a screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2009, Gertten was sued for defamation by Dole and the lawsuit was preceded by threats of legal action from Dole aimed against the LA Film Festival, which resulted in sponsors pulling support and the film being removed from competition. Dole dropped their lawsuit against Fredrik Gertten and Bananas!* on 15 October 2009 and in late 2010 a court in Los Angeles decided in favor of the movie crew, making it possible to release the film in the USA. A judge awarded the filmmakers nearly $200,000 in fees and costs.
There are many other horror stories about Dole from across the world and we are disheartened to see that such an infamous company has been invited to Sri Lanka and to see successive governments bending over backwards to satisfy their demands. During the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration minister Jagath Pushpakumara, chief minister of Uva Province, Shashindra Rajapaksa, a number of provincial and local councilors and several regional businessmen assisted Dole to acquire land and exploit workers. They assisted Dole to take over land in Moneragala which belonged to the state, commence projects violating environmental laws, building electric fences leading to human elephant conflict and diverting water for their banana plantations.
For their efforts, these men received significant kickbacks. It is reported that some ministers of the Rajapaksa administration received a sum for each kilo of bananas exported by Dole. Others received contracts to transport the bananas and to supply workers.
Moreover Rajapaksa received significant donations from Dole Company during the 2014 Uva Provincial Council elections and even allowed him to use the Dole office at Moneragala as a campaign office. This indicates that Dole has been able to blatantly violate Sri Lankan laws because it has been able to buy off powerful politicians. Several ministers of the current administration is now attempting to court Dole expecting similar kickbacks.
These politicians that represent the people of Uva, don’t care about various inconveniences faced by the people due to the activities of Dole. These politicians only care about the kickbacks from large multinationals. The people must understand this truth and must rise against these injustices.
The people must unite and pressure the government to reclaim the land which Dole uses and redistribute them among the rightful owners. However we have seen the government attempting to liberalize several laws that deal with land in a bid to make it easy for the multinationals to procure land in the country.
If the government is successful not only will small farmers lose their land rights but also it will have an impact on the way we cultivate. The end result will be the dispossession of small scale farmers and the establishment of export oriented farms which will abuse agro chemicals. The dispossessed small scale farmers will have no alternative to become slaves of these companies.
All these will ensure that we will lose our food sovereignty and the only way out of this is for people to unite and prevent the government from implementing disastrous policies.
By Sajeewa Chamikara
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VII CLOC Congress – Via Campesina
25 -30 June 2019 The VII Continental Congress of CLOC – LVC will be held… Read more →
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Kidapawan City celebrates its 11th Charter Anniversary
Posted in Municipalities by Erineus on February 12, 2009
KIDAPAWAN used to be a district of Pikit, Cotabato. It was converted into a Municipality on August 18, 1947, by virtue of Executive Order No. 82 signed by then President Manuel A. Roxas, making it the fourth town of the then Empire Province of Cotabato.
The name Kidapawan was taken from the Ubo-Manobo words “tida’’ which means “spring’’ and “pawan’’ which means “highland.’’ From “Tidapawan,’’ the “Highland Spring,’’ the name evolved into Kidapawan. Through Presidential Decree No. 341, Kidapawan became the provincial capital of North Cotabato on November 22, 1973. After more than 10 years, North Cotabato was renamed Cotabato.
Kidapawan is located at the base of majestic Mt. Apo. It is bounded at the southeastern section by Cotabato province and situated in between Davao, Cotabato, General Santos, and Koronadal City. On February 12, 1998, it was legally created into a component city of Cotabato by virtue of Republic Act No. 8500 signed by then President Fidel V. Ramos. Through a plebiscite on March 21, 1998, the Act was ratified.
Kidapawan City belongs to the Soccksargen Region (Region XII). It is composed of 40 barangays and had a population of 101,205 as of the 2000 Census. It is considered the industrial center of Cotabato. It is also one of the tourist destinations in the country. The city’s attractions include Mt. Apo, the tallest mountain in the Philippines, Lake Venado, Kawayan Falls, Marbel Falls, Steaming Blue Lake Agco, and the home of the endangered Philippine Eagle.
The Charter Anniversary is highlighted with parades, beauty contests, trade fairs, and traditional non-lethal horse fights.
We greet the officials and residents of Kidapawan City led by its Mayor, Rodolfo Y. Gantuangco, on the occasion of its 11th Charter Anniversary and wish them success in all their endeavors.
Tagged with: Charter Anniversary, Kidapawan
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Roger Daltrey Blasts Fans for Smoking Weed at The Who Show
The frontman continues to struggle with an allergy
Michael Cerio
Ethan Miller / Staff
Roger Daltrey of The Who can see for miles, and miles, but one whiff of marijuana and it's over for the iconic frontman.
The group brought their Moving On! Tour to Madison Square Garden in New York City on Monday night, and the singer had some words for the fans smoking weed before saying goodbye. “All the ones smoking grass down in the front there, I’m totally allergic to it” Daltrey lectured the crowd. “I’m not kidding, whoever it is down there, you f***ed my night."
"I’m allergic to that **** and my voice just goes (slurping noise). So f*** you.”
Related: Mick Jagger Shows Off Dance Moves Just Months After Heart Surgery
This is not the first time that Daltrey has expressed concerns over his allergy. He has previously threaten to stop shows after suffering a reaction to the smoke.
During 2015's The Who Hits 50! Tour, Daltrey similarly explained that, "my voice is shutting down", after one particularly bad experience. The band has also employed signs on the screen before performances, warning the crowd about the seriousness of Daltrey's condition.
The Moving On! Tour finds Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend performing alongside a full orchestra. The tour continues across the US in October. You can find a full list of dates here.
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Two new golf games are rolling to market
For most dads, playing an entire round of golf, or watching the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach this Father's Day weekend might take way too much time. There's always mini-golf or a couple of new golf games you can add to your repertoire.
One was created by two fraternity brothers from the University at Buffalo – Chip Down. The other was created by a family from Selkirk – Bumper Golf.
"Our goal behind creating it is to get more people involved in the game of golf," said Joseph Ricciardi, CEO of Chip Down on the golf-inspired backyard game. "Here we bring this to the backyard in different party settings, tail-gating, things along that nature."
It combines golf, badminton, darts and horse. The golf ball is replaced with a shuttlecock and the idea is to aim for concentric circles.
"It allows the user not to worry about shanking a golf ball or curving it in the wrong direction, whatever the direction the feathers are pointing in is the direction the projectile's going to go into," said Ricciardi. "So it makes it easy for everyone playing to actually have a fair shot at the game."
Ricciardi and Bernard Cohen were fraternity brothers at SUNY Buffalo and got the entrepreneurial spirit, making prototypes and earning $50,000 in seed funding through several competitions. It sells for $59.99.
We went "through five different product iterations and perfect it, work with manufacturers overseas and get this thing to become an actual product in real life," said Ricciardi.
As for Bumper Golf, Gary Krueger of Selkirk made custom golf clubs through Golfsmith for 20 years, but wanted to find a new way to market a game. Man's best friend helped.
"One day, we were dog-sitting and I forgot to close the basement door and the dog went and sort of tore up my putting green," he told us. So born was a new design that included another favorite game of his, bumper pool. It took about a year to design.
"It's amazing how hard it is to get a golf ball to bounce," Krueger said. "When you golf and hit it off a tree, that's pretty easy to bounce, but when you're hitting it slow," it's another story.
It took two years to patent it. He's sold one to Saratoga Golf & Polo.
"It can help you spot putt and also it goes against golfing etiquette where you can play defense so you can knock the ball away," Krueger said.
His daughter Alaina, who just earned a degree in Physical Therapy from Sage College, is also part of the company whose mission statement includes a key word: "fun."
"It can kind of be a training aid or it can be a fun game for people who might not otherwise be interested in putting and golfing," Alaina said. "And that's been what he said the whole time was we want this to be fun and the minute it doesn't become fun - that's when we're doing something wrong."
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Nashua Road Rage Incident Caught on Video
Credit Think Stock
A shocking end to a road rage incident was caught on video this week. As you'll see from the video below obtained by WCVB-Boston, a woman is pushed to the ground by a man. This happened Sunday on Amherst Street in Nashua.
Jennifer Needham, who captured the video was a passenger in a nearby car. Needham told reporters that just before she started recording, the man was at the woman’s car window and walked away. Her video begins as the woman gets out of her car and approaches his. Needham admits she has no idea what led up to what she saw.
Police said this all could have been avoided.
“You don't know who you're dealing with,” said Lt. Carlos Camacho, of Nashua police. “You don't know what people are going through. It's better to give us a call, let us talk to everybody involved, and try to find out what happened.”
Police in Nashua said they've spoken to several witnesses and both parties involved, and the incident remains under investigation.
Filed Under: 2k, amherst, caught on video, Karen Kiley, Nashua road rage caught on video, New Hampshire, New Hampshire road rage on video, road rage, road rage caught on video
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'Virginity testing': a human rights violation, with no scientific basis - UN
17 October 2018UN News Centre
A group of United Nations agencies has issued a joint statement calling for a ban on tests meant to assess the virginity of a girl or a woman, which is a common practice in at least 20 countries. The statement, which was issued during the World Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) in Rio de Janeiro, stresses that such tests are both unscientific, and a violation of human rights.
UNAIDS and PEPFAR announce dramatic reductions in new HIV infections
8 June 2016UNAIDS
Concerted global efforts have led to a 60% drop in new infections among children, which has averted 1.2 million new HIV infections among children in 21 priority countries since 2009.
Girl child (1) Apply Girl child filter
HIV & AIDS (1) Apply HIV & AIDS filter
OHCHR (1) Apply OHCHR filter
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6202.0 - Labour Force, Australia, Feb 2004
February Key Figures
Jan 04 to Feb 04
Feb 03 to Feb 04
Employed persons ('000)
Unemployed persons ('000)
Unemployment rate (%)
Participation rate (%)
Seasonally Adjusted
February Key Points
TREND ESTIMATES (Monthly Change)
EMPLOYMENT increased to 9,580,900.
UNEMPLOYMENT increased to 585,800.
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE remained at 5.8%.
PARTICIPATION RATE remained at 63.5%.
SEASONALLY ADJUSTED ESTIMATES (Monthly Change)
increased by 1,300 to 9,572,700. Full-time employment decreased by 13,100 to 6,848,300 and part-time employment increased by 14,400 to 2,724,500.
increased by 11,100 to 595,400. The number of persons looking for full-time work increased by 5,700 to 431,200 and the number of persons looking for part-time work increased by 5,400 to 164,200.
increased by 0.1 percentage point to 5.9%. The male unemployment rate increased by 0.1 percentage point to 5.6% and the female rate increased by 0.1 percentage point to 6.2%.
remained at 63.5%.
CHANGES THIS MONTH
Estimates for prior periods have been revised using updated population benchmarks based on results from the 2001 Census of Population and Housing, and incorporating a minor change to the definition of unemployed persons. See page 3 for more details.
CAI IMPLEMENTATION
In October 2003, the ABS began the progressive implementation of computer assisted interviewing (CAI) into the LFS. Under CAI, interviewers record responses directly onto an electronic questionnaire in a laptop computer.
For the period October 2003 to January 2004 the CAI method was used on a random 10% sub-sample of survey interviews. The remaining 90% of interviews each month were conducted using the traditional 'pen and paper' method.
The ABS had planned to increase the sub-sample of survey interviews conducted using the CAI method from 10% to 40% in February 2004. However, a number of technical problems has prevented this. The CAI sub-sample was increased from 10% to 40% in February 2004 in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory only. Nationally this represents an increase in CAI interviews from 10% to about 28%. The effects of these technical problems may delay the full implementation of CAI.
The change in the interviewing method is not expected to affect published estimates in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, the ABS is monitoring the situation carefully and has conducted a range of analyses on each month's data. These analyses have confirmed that any effect that the change in interview method may have had on survey responses to date has not materially affected the aggregate estimates for any month.
Subject to further analysis continuing to confirm that the change in method is not having a significant impact on survey estimates, the ABS intends to progressively increase the use of CAI. Users will continue to be informed of the progress of CAI implementation, including the results of further analyses, through updates in this publication.
For further information about these and related statistics, contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070 or Michael Johnson on Canberra (02) 6252 6525.
LFS estimates of persons employed, unemployed and not in the labour force are calculated in such a way as to add up to independent estimates of the civilian population aged 15 years and over (population benchmarks). These population benchmarks are updated every five years following the Census of Population and Housing. From February 2004, LFS estimates are being compiled using revised population benchmarks based on results from the 2001 census. LFS estimates for the period January 1999 to January 2004 have been revised based on the updated population benchmarks.
At the same time, the ABS has taken the opportunity to make several other changes to detailed original data at the unit record level. These changes include:
introduction of regional population benchmarks
revision of historical unit record data for definitional changes introduced in April 2001
implementation of a minor change to the definition of unemployment involving the treatment of future starters not actively looking for work
a change to coding of industry and occupation.
This note provides a summary of the main changes and their impact on LFS estimates. Further information can be found in Information Paper: Forthcoming Changes to Labour Force Statistics (cat. no. 6292.0), released on 16 December 2003.
Implementation of Revised Population Benchmarks
The civilian population aged 15 years and over has been revised downward, by no more than 0.5% in any month, for the period January 1999 to January 2004. The largest revision to the civilian population (-74,800) was in January 2004, as shown in the following graph.
Benchmark Revisions by sex
Male population benchmarks have been revised downward for the entire period (to a maximum of 0.9%), the largest revision being -67,100 in January 2004. In contrast, female population benchmarks have been predominantly revised upward (to a maximum of 0.3%), with the largest revision being +27,400 in March 2002.
Changes to civilian population benchmarks are not uniform across age groups. Benchmarks for age groups in the 20-29 year range have decreased significantly, with the largest decrease being 162,800 in January 2004. People in the 20-29 year age group have relatively high labour force participation rates. Benchmarks for older age groups have generally increased, but these increases only partly offset the falls in the younger age groups. The largest increase in the older age groups is for persons aged 65 years and over, an age group with a very low labour force participation rate.
As a result of the benchmark changes, over the period January 1999 to January 2004:
employed persons have been revised down by an average of 66,300;
unemployed persons have been revised down by an average of 8,100;
the unemployment rate has been revised down by an average of 0.03 percentage points; and
the participation rate has been revised down by an average of 0.32 percentage points.
Unemployed persons, the unemployment rate, and the participation rate are also affected by the definitional change involving future starters. See the relevant section below.
Because of age compositional effects, the downward revision to employment estimates is larger than the downward revision to the civilian population, with the largest revision being -100,200 for the January 2004 estimate. The graph below compares trend estimates for the period January 1999 to January 2004 before and after the revisions.
Regional Benchmarks
Prior to the current benchmark revision, population benchmarks used in the LFS were classified by state/territory of usual residence, capital city/rest of state, age and sex. In addition to these population benchmarks, from February 2004 the LFS uses population benchmarks for labour force region by sex. There are currently 68 labour force regions across Australia. The introduction of regional benchmarks improves the quality of estimates for labour force regions without compromising the quality of estimates at national, state and territory levels.
LFS estimates for labour force regions (available each month in electronic products) have been revised back to January 1999.
Definitional Change for Future Starters
A minor change has been made to the definition of unemployed persons. The change relates to a small group of persons ('future starters') who had not actively looked for work because they were waiting to start a new job within four weeks from the end of the survey reference week, and could have started in the reference week if the job had been available then. These persons were previously classified as 'not in the labour force'. From February 2004 they are classified as unemployed, in line with International Labour Organisation guidelines.
Data to support this change has been available since the new LFS questionnaire was introduced in April 2001. However, the ABS announced then that, due to concerns that such a change could result in a break in some core labour force series, implementation of the change would be deferred until February 2004. LFS estimates have been revised back to April 2001 to reflect this change. Around 15,000 persons per month (on average) have been reclassified from 'not in the labour force' to unemployed. This revision creates a small trend break at April 2001 in unemployed persons and unemployment rate series.
The effect of the definitional change on the unemployment rate is to revise it upwards by an average of 0.15 percentage points over the period from April 2001. When combined with the downward effects of the revised population benchmarks, the unemployment rate has been revised upwards over this period by an average of 0.11 percentage points. The graph below compares trend estimates of the unemployment rate for the period January 1999 to January 2004 before and after both sets of revisions.
The effect of the definitional change on the participation rate is to revise it upwards by an average of 0.10 percentage points over the period from April 2001. When combined with the downward effects of the revised population benchmarks, the participation rate has been revised downwards over this period by an average of 0.27 percentage points.
Seasonal reanalysis
As a result of the revisions outlined above a reanalysis has been conducted on all seasonally adjusted LFS series. This reanalysis examines series for trend breaks, seasonal breaks, and outliers, and in this instance coincides with the normal annual reanalysis conducted at this time.
Electronic products (cat. no. 6202.0.55.001) associated with this publication also contain revised data. In addition, more detailed products associated with the second release of LFS data (cat. no. 6291.0.55.001) have been re-issued today containing revised data up to, and including, January 2004. Second release products, including February 2004 estimates, will be released on 18 March 2004, in accordance with the standard timetable.
If users have any queries regarding the implementation of any of these changes to the LFS, they should contact Peter Bradbury on Canberra (02) 6252 6565, or via email at <peter.bradbury@abs.gov.au>.
This page last updated 20 June 2006
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Addleshaw Goddard expands its London Corporate Crime and Investigations offering with hire of leading specialist Michelle de Kluyver from Allen & Overy
AG hires leading Corporate Crime Investigations specialist Michelle de Kluyver from Allen & Overy
Addleshaw Goddard has announced the appointment of corporate crime and investigations expert, Michelle de Kluyver, as a partner in its London based litigation team, demonstrating its commitment to the continued development of its Corporate Crime and Investigations team and capitalising on Michelle's investigations experience in several sectors.
Michelle joins leading individuals Nichola Peters partner and head of the practice, Chris Brennan (partner) and Erin Shoesmith (legal director), who each lead the financial services regulatory and health and safety teams (respectively).
Nichola Peters, head of the Corporate Crime team at AG, commented that "This is a fantastic hire for the team and greatly increases our bandwidth in this space and builds on the great work that the team has been doing. With our multi-disciplinary team, including forensic accounting and data analysis expertise, we believe that we are well positioned to tackle the most complex and challenging investigations."
Michelle, who will join the firm on 11 December, has built up considerable expertise and industry recognition whilst at Allen & Overy, where she was Counsel, and is known for leading high value, complex cross border investigations for corporates, including investigations relating to bribery and corruption, money laundering and economic sanctions. Her work has also included advising financial institutions on financial crime risks and she has also handled contractual and company law disputes, as well as parallel litigation arising out of investigations.
Michelle is listed in Global Investigations Review as one of 100 "remarkable" women investigation specialists operating globally, as well as being named by Legal Week's 2016 'Rising Stars in Litigation' report as one to watch. In 2017 Michelle was named a leading individual in Who's Who Legal Business Crime: Defence and as a Next Generation Lawyer in Legal 500 Regulatory Investigation and Corporate Crime.
Nichola Peters said: "The complexity and number of investigations has grown exponentially in most of the key jurisdictions increasing the need for bigger and multi -disciplinary teams. Michelle has a holistic approach in dealing with the wider context of an investigation. She is adept at dealing with regulators and law enforcement, as well as managing reputational risks and other commercial and legal risks. We are delighted to welcome her to the team."
Michelle, commenting on her appointment, said: "This role marries my own skill set with that of a team with an excellent market reputation, and creates opportunities in how we service clients and work together to grow the business in this area. Addleshaws has a fantastic client base in sectors where this expertise is key. I am attracted by the multi-disciplinary and client-centric approach of the team which means we can service clients on all aspects of corporate investigations - investigation, defence, compliance, remediation, directors’ duties and governance. I am excited to join Nichola and the energetic and innovative team she has built."
Our Corporate Crime practice is a multi-disciplinary team, made up of both lawyers and a forensic accountant. We advise on corporate and financial crime investigations, compliance, mitigation and corporate crime defence.
The team provides a global perspective and frequently advises on issues of bribery and corruption, market abuse, cartels, trade and economic sanctions, money laundering and other internal regulatory investigations and prosecutions.
The team has experience in a range of industries and advises clients from top-tier organisations, senior executives and employees in criminal prosecutions and enforcement actions. Its client base ranges from major financial institutions, energy companies, utility companies and manufacturing companies.
The Corporate Crime and Investigations team has become a market leader in the world of financial sanctions and the team is considered the "go-to" team for sanctions advice for a number of the firm's FTSE 100 clients.
We publish all our news, awards and recognition on LinkedIn. Follow Addleshaw Goddard for all the latest news.
Follow AG now
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Antonio Cassano
Cassano playing for Italy at the UEFA Euro 2012
Bari 48 (6)
Roma 118 (39)
Real Madrid 19 (2)
→ Sampdoria (loan) 22 (10)
Sampdoria 74 (25)
Milan 33 (7)
Internazionale 28 (7)
Parma 53 (17)
Sampdoria 24 (2)
Verona 0 (0)
National team‡
Italy U15 9 (2)
Italy 39 (10)
Representing Italy
Runner-up Poland & Ukraine 2012
* Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league onlyand correct as of 8 May 2016
‡ National team caps and goals correct as of 24 June 2014
Antonio Cassano (Italian pronunciation: [anˈtɔːnjo kasˈsaːno] ; [1] [2] born 12 July 1982) is an Italian former professional footballer who played as a forward. A talented and technically gifted player, he was usually deployed in a creative role, as a supporting forward throughout his career, [3] although he was also capable of playing in more of a playmaking role, as an attacking midfielder, [4] as well as on the wing, [5] or as a striker. [6] Nicknamed Il Gioiello di Bari Vecchia ("the jewel of Old Bari"), and Fantantonio ("fantastic Antonio"), he was known for his short temper as much as his skill and ability on the pitch, [7] which led to the coining of the neologism Cassanata by his former Roma and Real Madrid coach, Fabio Capello, in November 2002, due to their disputes over his actions. The word is regularly used by Italian journalists as a euphemism for any behavior incompatible with team spirit in football. [8]
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played with a spherical ball between two teams of eleven players. It is played by 250 million players in over 200 countries and dependencies, making it the world's most popular sport. The game is played on a rectangular field called a pitch with a goal at each end. The object of the game is to score by moving the ball beyond the goal line into the opposing goal.
Forwards are the players on an association football team who play nearest to the opposing team's goal, and are therefore most responsible for scoring goals.
In association football, an assist is a contribution by a player which helps to score a goal. Statistics for assists made by players may be kept officially by the organisers of a competition, or unofficially by, for example, journalists or organisers of fantasy football competitions. Recording assists is not part of the official Laws of the Game and the criteria for an assist to be awarded may vary. Record of assists was virtually not kept at all until the end of the 20th century, although reports of matches commonly described a player as having "made" one or more goals. Since the 1990s, some leagues have kept official record of assists and based awards on them.
Club career
Return to Sampdoria
Hellas Verona, Entella trial and retirement
International career
Style of play
International goals
Cassano began his professional club career with hometown club Bari, where he made a reputation for himself as one of the most promising, yet troublesome young players in Italy; his talent and performances earned him a transfer to defending Serie A champions Roma in 2001, where he immediately won the Supercoppa Italiana, and was named Serie A Young Footballer of the Year in 2001 and 2003. In 2006, he moved to La Liga club Real Madrid, where he gained further notoriety for his poor behaviour, inconsistent performances, and poor work-rate. After an unsuccessful spell in the Spanish capital, he returned to Italy in 2007, and was sent on loan to Sampdoria, where he refound his form playing alongside Giampaolo Pazzini, and was subsequently signed by the club on a permanent basis. In 2011, he was acquired by Milan, where he won his first Serie A title and his second Supercoppa Italiana, and remained at the club until 2012, when he transferred to cross-city rivals Inter Milan for a season. He later spent two seasons at Parma, before terminating his contract in January 2015, due to the club's financial difficulties; later that year, he returned to Sampdoria for the following season although his contract with the club was terminated in 2017. He subsequently signed with Verona that summer. He later announced his retirement from professional football in July 2017, but retracted it afterwards. [9] After a year on the sidelines, he had a trial with Serie C side Virtus Entella, but subsequently confirmed his official retirement from professional football in October 2018.
The Supercoppa Italiana is an annual football competition usually held the week before the season begins in Italy. It is contested by the winners of the Serie A and the Coppa Italia in the previous season, as a curtain raiser to the new season. If the same team wins both the Serie A and Coppa Italia titles in the previous season, the Supercoppa is contested by the Serie A winner and the Coppa Italia runner-up, in essence becoming a rematch of the previous year's Coppa Italia final.
The Serie A Young Footballer of the Year was a yearly award organized by the Italian Footballers' Association (AIC) given to the footballer to the under-24 footballer who has been considered to have performed the best over the previous Serie A season. It was organised by the Italian Footballers' Association (AIC) and is part of the Oscar del Calcio awards event.
The Campeonato Nacional de Liga de Primera División, commonly known as La Liga, is the men's top professional football division of the Spanish football league system. Administered by the Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, also known as the Liga de Fútbol Profesional (LFP), La Liga is contested by 20 teams, with the three lowest-placed teams at the end of each season relegated to the Segunda División and replaced by the top three teams in that division.
At international level, Cassano represented the Italy national football team on 39 occasions between 2003 and 2014, scoring 10 goals; he took part at three UEFA European Championships, and one FIFA World Cup, winning a runners-up medal at UEFA Euro 2012. Along with Mario Balotelli, he is Italy's top-scorer in the UEFA European Championships, with three goals. [10]
The Italy national football team has officially represented Italy in association football since their first match in 1910. The squad is under the global jurisdiction of FIFA and is governed in Europe by UEFA—the latter of which was co-founded by the Italian team's supervising body, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC). Italy's home matches are played at various stadiums throughout Italy, and their primary training ground, Centro Tecnico Federale di Coverciano, is located at the FIGC technical headquarters in Coverciano, Florence.
The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the inaugural tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when it was not held because of the Second World War. The current champion is France, which won its second title at the 2018 tournament in Russia.
The 2012 UEFA European Championship, commonly referred to as UEFA Euro 2012 or simply Euro 2012, was the 14th European Championship for men's national football teams organised by UEFA. The final tournament, held between 8 June and 1 July 2012, was co-hosted for the first time by Poland and Ukraine, and was won by Spain, who beat Italy 4–0 in the final at the Olympic Stadium, Kiev, Ukraine.
Cassano was born in Bari [11] and his father left the family shortly thereafter. [12] He was raised in poverty by his mother in the San Nicola district of the Bari Vecchia neighbourhood, and began playing football on the streets at an early age. [13] Cassano was spotted by a Bari scout and brought up through the team's youth system, and he made his Serie A debut for Bari against local rivals Lecce on 11 December 1999. [14] During his time with Bari, he soon emerged as one of Serie A's most promising young Italian players, drawing particular attention to himself after scoring a notable, individual, match-winning goal (his first ever Serie A goal) in a 2–1 home win over Italian giants Inter Milan, on 18 December 1999, at the age of 17: in the 88th minute, after controlling a 40-yard lobbed pass on the run with his backheel, he subsequently dribbled past veteran defenders Christian Panucci and Laurent Blanc, wrong-footing goalkeeper Fabrizio Ferron with a dummy, before finishing at the near post. [15] [16] [17] Cassano's technical skill, precocious talent and impressive performances earned him the nicknames "Fantantonio", due to his flair and creativity, [18] and "El Pibe de Bari" ("The Kid from Bari"), a reference to the legendary Diego Maradona's nickname, "El Pibe de Oro". [19] During his two seasons with Bari, he scored a total of 6 goals in 48 Serie A matches, scoring 3 goals in 21 appearances during his first season, and 3 goals in 27 league matches during his second season with the club. [14]
Bari is the capital city of the Metropolitan City of Bari and of the Apulia region, on the Adriatic Sea, in southern Italy. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland Southern Italy after Naples and Palermo, a port and university city, as well as the city of Saint Nicholas. The city itself has a population of 326,799, as of 2015, over 116 square kilometres (45 sq mi), while the urban area has 750,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area has 1.3 million inhabitants.
Unione Sportiva Lecce, commonly referred to as Lecce, is an Italian football club based in Lecce, Apulia. It currently plays in Serie B, the second tier of the Italian football pyramid, and plays its home games at Stadio Via del Mare which has a capacity of 40,670 spectators.
The 1999–2000 season of Serie A, the major Italian professional football league, was contested by 18 teams.
In 2001, at the age of 19, Cassano signed with reigning Serie A champions Roma for a transfer fee of 60 billion Italian lire (about €30 million); at the time, this was the most expensive teenage signing ever. [13] [20] His first season produced five goals, as well as a 2001 Supercoppa Italiana victory, and he attracted media attention after openly clashing with coach Fabio Capello after he was left out of a practice match a few days after his international debut. [21] In the 2003 Italian Cup final against Milan, Cassano was sent off after protesting an official's decision, and he flashed the sign of the horns at the referee while leaving the pitch. During his time with Roma, he won the Serie A Young Footballer of the Year Award in 2001 and in 2003.
The 2000–01 season of Serie A, the major professional football league in Italy, was contested by 18 teams, for the 13th consecutive season since 1988–89.
Associazione Sportiva Roma, commonly referred to as Roma[ˈroːma], is an Italian professional football club based in Rome. Founded by a merger in 1927, Roma have participated in the top-tier of Italian football for all of their existence except for 1951–52.
The euro is the official currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union. This group of states is known as the eurozone or euro area, and counts about 343 million citizens as of 2019. The euro is the second largest and second most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar. The euro is divided into 100 cents.
He was omitted from the squad during Roma's tumultuous 2004–05 campaign while Luigi Delneri, Roma's third coach of the season (after Cesare Prandelli and Rudi Völler), was in charge. After Delneri himself resigned during the season, his replacement, Bruno Conti, returned Cassano to the starting lineup, with Cassano captaining the team in the absence of incumbent Francesco Totti, who was serving a five-match suspension.
Luigi "Gigi" Delneri, often incorrectly written as Del Neri is an Italian football manager, who was last in charge of Udinese.
Cesare Claudio Prandelli is an Italian football coach and former player. He is currently managing Genoa.
Rudolf "Rudi" Völler, nicknamed "Tante Käthe", is a German former professional footballer and a former manager of the Germany national team. A forward, he won the FIFA World Cup in 1990 as a player. He also scored an equalizing goal to make it 2–2 in the 81st minute of the 1986 FIFA World Cup Final vs Argentina, but it ended up with a 3-2 victory for Argentina.
During the 2005–06 pre-season, Cassano was in constant conflict with club management over the renewal of his contract, which was due to expire on 30 June 2006. [22] In January 2006, he acrimoniously parted ways with Roma and signed with Real Madrid. [23] for just €5M. [24]
Cassano became the second ever Italian player to sign for Real Madrid after former Roma teammate Christian Panucci. His debut came on 18 January 2006 in a Spanish Cup match against Real Betis, and scored his first goal just three minutes after entering the match in the second half. [11] Just four months into his tenure with the club, however, he began gaining weight due to poor eating habits, which resulted in Madrid fining him for every gram he remained over his playing weight, [25] and earned him the nickname "Gordito". [26]
On 30 October, Real Madrid's official website announced that Cassano had been suspended due to his "disrespect" of Capello, who had joined the club at the beginning of 2006–07 season, following a dressing room argument arising from his omission from the team after a game against Gimnàstic de Tarragona, [27] and was subsequently benched along with David Beckham and Ronaldo. In an interview with a Roman radio station, Cassano said he would "walk all the way back" to rejoin Roma, and indicated his eagerness to make peace with Totti, with whom Cassano had conflicted with before his departure from Roma. Cassano, however, remained with Madrid after the January 2007 transfer window had closed, and the rest of his season was cut short by an ankle injury. Despite winning the 2006–07 La Liga title with Real Madrid, Cassano only made seven league appearances, scoring just a single goal. [28]
In an interview with Spanish radio in July 2007, Real Madrid president Ramón Calderón described Cassano's attitude as "unsustainable in the last couple of months" and indicated that he would be leaving the club. [29]
On 13 August 2007, Sampdoria took Cassano on a one-year loan, agreeing to pay €1.2 million of his €4.2 million salary. [11] He was presented to approximately 2,500 fans five days later.[ citation needed ] In his first press conference, Cassano said that he had chosen to wear the shirt number 99 for several reasons: firstly, as his first-choice, the number 18, was already taken by teammate Vladimir Koman, and because 9 plus 9 equals 18, secondly, because his other teammate Francesco Flachi was already wearing the number 10 shirt, which was his second choice, and thirdly, as he intended the number to be an homage to Brazilian striker Ronaldo, who was wearing the same number at Milan. [30]
He made his Sampdoria début that season in the Derby della Lanterna against Genoa on 23 September, in which he was substituted by former Roma teammate Vincenzo Montella in the final minutes of the match. Cassano scored his first league goal upon his return against Atalanta a week later, in a 3–0 victory. He scored in three consecutive games in January, and helped end league leaders Inter's winning league run with a goal in a 1–1 draw. Cassano, however, was sent off in a 2–2 draw with Torino on 2 March 2008, which he compounded by hurling his shirt at the referee as he left the pitch, [31] and was punished with a five-match ban. Sampdoria ended the season with an UEFA Cup berth, while Cassano was acquired on a permanent basis by the club on free transfer (plus bonus) from Madrid. [32]
Cassano as Sampdoria captain
In his second season, Cassano confirmed to have temperamentally improved, also becoming vice-captain for the team behind Angelo Palombo. [33] After the January signing of Giampaolo Pazzini from Fiorentina, Cassano managed to form a fruitful striking partnership with the former Viola forward, that was praised by both media and Sampdoria supporters, and led club chairman Riccardo Garrone to compare it with striking duo of Gianluca Vialli and Roberto Mancini that led Sampdoria to win their only Scudetto to date, [34] an opinion that was later shared also by both Vialli and Mancini. [35] [36] Cassano scored 12 goals in Serie A and helped Sampdoria to reach the Coppa Italia final that season, scoring a goal in the semi-final against the Serie A Champions, Inter. [37] In the final, Sampdoria were defeated by Lazio in a penalty shoot-out, with Cassano missing the first penalty. [38]
His third season with Sampdoria again began very well, as he continued his prolific partnership with Pazzini, and was instrumental in the club's impressive seasonal start, that led them up to first place after a 1–0 home win to Inter. However, a result crisis, including a 3–0 defeat in the local derby against crosstown rivals Genoa, left Sampdoria down to mid-table on January, leading head coach Luigi Delneri to put Cassano off the team for "technical and tactical reasons", casting doubts about the player's future at the club.
In the final days of the January transfer window, he was linked with a move on loan to Fiorentina, that was however denied with an official statement from the club, [39] but was described by the media as Cassano's own refusal to leave Sampdoria. [40] This was confirmed by Cassano himself through an official statement published on Sampdoria's website, citing his relationship with club chairman Riccardo Garrone, his teammates and the team supporters as the main reason for his choice. [41] He soon came back into the starting line-up, and eventually helped Sampdoria to a fourth-place finish UEFA Champions League qualifying spot in Serie A. Sampdoria were defeated by Werder Bremen in the play-off round, however, and were to enter into the Europa League that season. [42] Del Neri left Sampdoria at the end of the season. [43]
Cassano's final season with the club was more difficult. In October 2010, Cassano was excluded from the first team squad with immediate effect after he had a heated row with chairman Riccardo Garrone following the player's refusal to attend an award ceremony. [44] Following such events, Sampdoria formally applied for a contract termination to a league arbitration panel, a position that was confirmed even after Cassano apologised to Garrone and the club. [45] On 16 December, the arbitration panel ordered Sampdoria to reinclude Cassano into the first team from 1 January 2011, rejecting the Blucerchiati's request for a contract termination, but also concluding Cassano will be paid only 50% of his salary for the remainder of his contract. [46]
On 20 December 2010, it was reported that Milan, Sampdoria and the player agreed the installment plan to pay a €5 million to Real Madrid which was indicated in Cassano's buy-out clause when he left the Spanish club. Eventually Sampdoria paid €5 million to Real Madrid; [47] Milan paid €3.33 million to Sampdoria, [47] while Cassano had a wage cut with Milan. Cassano then signed a three-and-a-half-year contract with Milan, [48] which was later confirmed by Milan's owner Silvio Berlusconi, [49] replacing the gap left by Ronaldinho's departure. His former strike partner at Sampdoria, Giampaolo Pazzini, also left the club in January to move to Milan's city rivals, Inter. Cassano made his debut for his new club in a 1–0 win against Cagliari where he came on as a substitute for Alexander Merkel in the latter stages of the game. He scored his first goal for Milan in a 4–0 win against Parma. He went on to score three more goals that season, as Milan claimed the 2010–11 Serie A title that season, Cassano's first Scudetto of his career; two of these goals came against former clubs Bari and Sampdoria, and the other one from a penalty against fierce rivals Inter on 2 April 2011, after coming on as a substitute; he was later sent off during the same match after being booked twice. [50] In the meantime, Sampdoria struggled without Cassano and Pazzini, and were relegated to Serie B at the end of the season.
As Cassano faced competition for a spot in the Milan starting XI from the likes of forwards Zlatan Ibrahimović, Alexandre Pato and Robinho, a lot of speculation formed over his future for the following season, as Cassano wanted to gain more playing time, due to his wish to keep his spot in the Italian national side. Although he was initially linked to other clubs, he stayed with Milan, and after a good pre-season, he won the 2011 Supercoppa Italiana with Milan over Inter, and he scored in the first Serie A game of the 2011–12 season against Lazio. On 29 October 2011, following Milan's match against Roma in Rome, Cassano was hospitalised after suffering a stroke upon arriving in Milan, and was operated on 4 November. [51] [52] [53] He returned to the first team on 7 April 2012, after almost six months on the side-lines, featuring as a substitute in Milan's 2–1 home defeat to Fiorentina in Serie A, and received a standing ovation from the crowd as he entered the pitch for Gianluca Zambrotta in the 79th minute. [54] [55] [56] [57] He also appeared as a substitute in a 1–0 home win against Genoa on 25 April, [58] and on 29 April, he scored his first goal since his operation, in a 4–1 win over Siena, also setting up both of Ibrahimović's goals during the match. [59] [60] [61] Milan finished the Serie A season in second place behind Juventus, also reaching the semi-finals of the Coppa Italia, and the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
After reportedly being upset over the sale of Milan's key players, particularly Zlatan Ibrahimović and Thiago Silva, Cassano requested a transfer. [62] On 21 August 2012, Milan and Inter reached an agreement over an exchange deal involving Giampaolo Pazzini and Cassano, with a compensatory sum of €7.5 million in favor of the Nerazzurri. (Pazzini tagged for €13 million and Cassano for €5.5 million.) [63] [64] He officially joined the team the next day. [65] Cassano signed a two-year contract with the club. Cassano's season at Inter was negative, as the club struggled in the league, while Cassano only scored five league goals and often argued with manager Andrea Stramaccioni, although he provided nine assists in Serie A. [7] [66] [67] The club finished the 2012–13 Serie A season in ninth place. In total, he scored 9 goals in 39 games for Inter in all competitions, providing 15 assists. [68]
After only one season at Inter, Cassano joined Parma on 4 July 2013 on a temporary deal, and was given the number 99 shirt that he had also worn at previous clubs. [69] Cassano's work-rate, fitness and discipline improved at Parma, as he managed to keep control of his weight through a stricter diet and training regime, losing 10 kg. [70] On 30 November, he scored his 100th Serie A goal in a 1–1 home draw against Bologna. [15] He refound his form with the club and had a successful 2013–14 season at Parma, [7] as he helped the club to a sixth-place finish in the league, achieving a Europa League qualifying spot, also scoring 13 goals and managing 8 assists in 36 appearances in all competitions, with 12 goals and 7 assists coming in Serie A. [71] [72] [73] [74] In February 2014, he signed a pre-contract agreement with Parma for the 2014–15 season. [7]
In the first half of the 2014–15 season, Cassano managed 5 goals in 20 appearances as Parma were rooted to the bottom of the table and battling serious financial difficulties. On 26 January 2015, Parma allowed Cassano to terminate his contract with the club in advance, which made him a free agent; due to the club's financial struggles, he had reportedly not been paid his wages since June 2014. [75] [76] Following the termination of his contract, he was initially linked with a return to Inter. [68]
Following his release from Parma back in January of the same year, Cassano re-joined former club Sampdoria for a third time on 9 August 2015. He agreed a two-year deal with the club, lasting until 30 June 2017. [77] He scored his first goal since his return to the club on 10 January 2016, in the 64th minute of a 2–1 home defeat to Juventus. [78]
During the 2016–17 pre-season, the club's president Massimo Ferrero communicated that Cassano was not a part of his plans, and was excluded from the Sampdoria first team. Cassano rejected offers from several clubs and obtained permission to train with the Sampdoria youth side, in particular with the Primavera team's goalkeeper. [79] [80]
On 25 January 2017, Cassano terminated his contract with Sampdoria by mutual consent. [81]
On 10 July 2017, Cassano was signed by Verona. [82] He appeared in two summer friendlies for the club the next week; however, on 18 July, he was involved in a curious incident, which gained much publicity in the media: he initially communicated that he would be retiring from football, as he missed his family too much, before holding a press conference later the same day, in which he announced that he had reversed his decision, and stated that he was looking forward to "having a fun season" with Verona. [83] However, on 24 July, he overturned his decision once again, stating that he would be leaving the club and retiring from football, commenting: "As opposed to what appeared on my wife’s official social profiles, I would like to clarify the following. Carolina was wrong, after thinking and reflecting in the end I decided. Antonio Cassano will not play football anymore. I apologise to the city of Verona, to all the fans, to the president. For a 35-year-old man I need to be motivated and at this moment I feel that my priority is represented by being close to my children and my wife." [84] [85] On 27 July, Cassano's contract with Verona was officially terminated by mutual consent, [86] before he had played any official matches for the club; regarding his reasons for parting ways with Verona so suddenly, he later stated in an interview with Tiki Taka that "[t]here was no spark there", adding: "It's like when you’re seeing a woman and she no longer attracts you, so you leave. I took a big risk 12 years ago leaving Real Madrid for Sampdoria. I didn't feel like making a similar choice this time. I knew this would be a season of suffering for Verona, but I didn't know if I could give 100 per cent to avoid relegation. I gave up a lot of money, which not everyone would do. I left things on good terms with them, we have a good rapport." [87] In spite of his previous comments, on 31 July, however, he stated that he would not be retiring, and that he was looking for a new club closer to home, [88] but added that he would retire if he did not sign with a club by September. [89] Although he received no other offers from Italian clubs, and was ultimately unable to sign for a team prior to the end of the summer transfer window, in September Cassano stated that he would be following a fitness training schedule given to him by his former Sampdoria fitness coach Agostino Tibaudi, and that he was hoping to sign for a club in the January transfer window. [90] In spite of rumours in the media of Cassano being linked with several clubs for January, towards the end of September, he once again stated that he was "done" with football. [91] [92]
After a year of inactivity, in August 2018, Cassano announced that he was looking to return to football. [9] In October 2018, it was confirmed he was about to start training with Serie C team Virtus Entella, a club he was already linked to in the past. [93] In a prior interview a few days earlier, he had rejected reports linking him to Monza after Berlusconi's acquisition of the club, stating Virtus Entella would be the only club from outside of Serie A he would be willing to join. [94] A few days later, however, he confirmed that he had officially retired from football. [95]
Cassano with the Italian team
Cassano has made 39 appearances for the Italy national team, scoring ten goals. [96] He made his senior international debut on 12 November 2003, aged 21, in a 3–1 friendly defeat against Poland in Warsaw, in which he also scored his first goal. [97] [98]
Cassano was part of Italy's UEFA Euro 2004 squad as a reserve, but after Francesco Totti was suspended following a spitting incident with Christian Poulsen in a group match against Denmark, Cassano was inserted into the starting lineup for a 1–1 draw with Sweden in which he scored. [99] In Italy's final group match, which ended in a 2–1 victory over Bulgaria, he was named man of the match, as he was involved in Simone Perrotta's equaliser, and also netted the last-minute winner, but Italy were eliminated in the group stage on direct encounters after a three-way, five-point tie with Denmark and Sweden. [100]
After a poor season with Real Madrid, Cassano was left off coach Marcello Lippi's final roster for the 2006 FIFA World Cup. [101] The Azzurri went on to lift the trophy in Berlin, beating France in a penalty shootout. [102]
In September 2006, Cassano was called up by new manager Roberto Donadoni for Euro 2008 qualifiers against Lithuania and France. However, he was not selected again until surprisingly being included in the Euro 2008 squad. [103] He went scoreless in the tournament as Italy were eliminated in the quarter-finals by eventual champions Spain after a penalty shootout. [104]
Cassano (left) at UEFA Euro 2012.
Lippi returned as coach for the 2010 World Cup qualification campaign and did not select Cassano during the qualifying matches or the 2010 World Cup finals. [101] [105] After a two-year absence from the Azzurri, and following widespread criticism from the media towards Lippi about his exclusion from the World Cup squad, Cassano was readmitted into the squad on 6 August 2010 by new head coach Cesare Prandelli for his first game in charge of the team, a friendly match against the Ivory Coast played on 10 August at Upton Park, London. [106] Almost a month later, in Italy's Euro 2012 qualifier played in Estonia, Cassano scored the tying goal in a 1–2 away victory and also assisted Leonardo Bonucci's second goal with a back-heel. Cassano scored a long-range goal from just outside the box in Italy's 5–0 qualifying win over the Faroe Islands. He scored again against Estonia helping Italy secure a 3–0 win.
Cassano played in all six of Italy's matches and scored one goal against the Republic of Ireland during Euro 2012, [107] where the Italians reached the final, losing 4–0 against Spain. [108] In the semi-final against Germany, Cassano set up Mario Balotelli's first goal of the match. [109] Cassano wore the number 10 shirt for Italy throughout the tournament. In July 2012, he was fined by UEFA for making a homophobic comment at a press conference during Euro 2012. At the conference, when asked if he thought there were any homosexual players in the Italian team, he replied, "I hope there are none." He later issued a statement saying he had been misinterpreted. [110]
Despite not featuring during the qualification campaign, Cassano was selected in Italy's squad for the 2014 World Cup. [111] On 20 June 2014, at the age of 31, Cassano made his World Cup debut as a substitute in a 1–0 loss to Costa Rica. [112] He also appeared as a substitute in Italy's 1–0 defeat to Uruguay, in their final group match on 24 June, which resulted in Italy's elimination in the first round of the tournament for the second consecutive time. [113] Cassano was criticised by the press for his poor performances and lack of fitness, as he failed to improve his team's results and did not provide pace and creativity to the team's attacking plays. [17] This would be his final appearance for Italy, as he was no longer called up by Italy's new manager, Antonio Conte, after the tournament.
A creative forward, or fantasista, in Italian, [114] [115] who usually functioned as an assist provider in his teams, due to his ability to create chances for teammates [115] [116] [117] (Cassano himself once stated that he preferred creating goals to scoring them), [118] Cassano was capable of playing anywhere along or behind the front-line, on either flank or through the centre of the pitch; in addition to his usual role as a second striker, he was able to act as an advanced playmaker, and was also deployed in a central role as a main striker, as a false-9, or even as a winger on occasion. [115] [119] [120] Cassano has been described as a player who was "skillful and intelligent on the ball" who possessed "excellent vision and also impresses with his eye for goal". [121] [122] His best technical qualities were his trapping skills, control, dribbling, crossing ability and passing accuracy; [121] [123] although naturally right-footed, he can also strike well with both feet. [122] In addition to his skills, touch and excellent technique, Cassano also possessed considerable upper-body strength and balance, which aided him in defending the ball with his back to goal despite his diminutive stature, and allowed him to retain possession in tight spaces, while his technical ability and acceleration enabled him to beat defenders in one on one situations, or when dribbling at speed. [122] [124] [125] He was also effective from set-pieces and penalties. [126]
Despite his flair, ability and talent, throughout his career, Cassano was also criticsed for his behaviour and lack of discipline, both on and off the pitch, which often led him to pick up unnecessary cards; [127] he was also condemned for his poor work-rate and lack of fitness throughout different intervals of his career, [128] [129] which led him to gain weight, [130] and lose some of his speed, stamina, and agility. [131] [132] Although he was initially regarded as one of the most promising young players of his generation, [16] even being described as Roberto Baggio's heir, [133] due to his inconsistency, difficult character, and unpredictabliity, many in the sport, including his former manager Fabio Capello, have argued that he did not live up to the potential he demonstrated in his youth, and that his personality affected his career. [134]
Cassano got engaged to water polo player Carolina Marcialis in 2008, then married on 19 June 2010 at a church, Chiesa di San Martino, in Portofino. [135] The couple have two sons, Christopher and Lionel (named after Lionel Messi). [136]
On 30 October 2011, it was reported that Cassano complained of finding it difficult to speak or move on the team plane when the team returned to Milan. [137] On 2 November 2011, his club Milan announced and confirmed that he was suffering from ischemic-based cerebral damage, though it should be temporary. [138] Cassano underwent minor heart surgery soon after. [137]
In addition to his skill, Cassano is known for his temper, poor behaviour and lack of discipline; these have led to several controversial incidents both on and off the pitch throughout his career, which have thus been dubbed Cassanate by the press and his former manager Capello. [8] [13] [127]
During a Euro 2012 press conference, Cassano stated his preference for there to be no gay players on the squad and used a derogatory descriptor; he was subsequently fined by UEFA for making homophobic comments. [110] [139]
On 1 February 2013, Cassano had a locker room brawl with his then coach at Inter, Andrea Stramaccioni. It occurred following Friday's training session and had started off as a relatively normal discussion before the pair got into a heated slanging match, then degenerated into pushing and shoving before the other players intervened to pull them apart. [140]
Cassano is a brand ambassador for Diadora, and wore their Evoluzione K Pro GX 14 football boots in black and fluorescent yellow throughout his career. [141]
Reference: [142] [143] [144]
As of 8 May 2016.
Bari 1999–2000 21 3 0 – – – – – – 21 3 0
2000–01 27 3 2 2 0 0 – – – 29 3 2
Roma 2001–02 22 5 0 3 1 0 5 0 0 30 6 0
2002–03 27 9 2 5 1 0 11 4 1 43 14 3
2003–04 33 14 4 – – – 6 4 0 39 18 4
2004–05 31 9 1 8 1 0 3 1 0 42 11 1
2005–06 5 2 1 – – – 2 1 1 7 3 2
Real Madrid 2005–06 12 1 1 4 1 0 1 0 0 17 2 1
2006–07 7 1 2 1 1 0 4 0 0 12 2 2
Sampdoria 2007–08 22 10 6 2 0 0 1 0 0 25 10 6
2008–09 35 12 15 4 1 0 6 2 3 45 15 18
2009–10 32 9 10 1 2 0 – – – 33 11 10
2010–11 7 4 2 – – – 3 1 2 10 5 4
Milan 2010–11 17 4 6 4 0 0 – – – 21 4 6
2011–12 16 3 10 0 0 0 3 1 0 19 4 10
Inter Milan 2012–13 28 7 9 2 1 2 9 1 4 39 9 15
Parma 2013–14 34 12 8 2 1 0 – – – 36 13 8
Sampdoria 2015–16 24 2 5 1 0 0 – – – 25 2 5
2016–17 0 0 0 0 0 0 – – – 0 0 0
[142] [143] [145] [146]
Italy national team
2007 – –
Scores list Italy's tally first. [142] [143] [145] [146]
1 12 November 2003 Warsaw, Poland Poland 3–1 Lost Friendly
2 18 June 2004 Lisbon, Portugal Sweden 1–1 Draw UEFA Euro 2004
3 22 June 2004 Guimarães, Portugal Bulgaria 2–1 Win UEFA Euro 2004
4 3 September 2010 Tallinn, Estonia Estonia 1–2 Win UEFA Euro 2012 Qualification
5 7 September 2010 Florence, Italy Faroe Islands 5–0 Win UEFA Euro 2012 Qualification
6 3 June 2011 Modena, Italy Estonia 3–0 Win UEFA Euro 2012 Qualification
7 2 September 2011 Tórshavn, Faroe Islands Faroe Islands 1–0 Win UEFA Euro 2012 Qualification
8 11 October 2011 Pescara, Italy Northern Ireland 3–0 Win UEFA Euro 2012 Qualification
10 18 June 2012 Gdańsk, Poland Republic of Ireland 2–0 Win UEFA Euro 2012
Roma [142]
Supercoppa Italiana: 2001
Real Madrid [142]
La Liga: 2006–07
Milan [142]
Serie A: 2010–11
Serie A Young Footballer of the Year: 2001, 2003 [147]
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↑ "UEFA Euro 2012 – Italy Face Trequartista Conundrum" . Retrieved 2 February 2015.
↑ "Cassano show, la Samp va Bologna alla sesta sconfitta" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. 26 October 2008. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
↑ "Marchegiani: "Cassano può fare la prima e la seconda punta. Pazzini al Milan..."" (in Italian). F.C. Inter.it. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
1 2 3 4 Adam Digby (14 February 2014). "Rejuvenated Cassano shifting bad-boy image with Parma". FourFourTwo. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
1 2 "Antonio il terribile" [Antonio the terrible)] (in Italian). Gazzetta dello Sport. 1 January 2006. Retrieved 30 July 2007.
1 2 "Cassano looking for a new club after a year out of the game". AS.com English. 3 August 2018. Retrieved 6 October 2018.
↑ Paolo Menicucci (15 April 2016). "Stars of UEFA EURO 2016: Gianluigi Buffon". UEFA.com. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
1 2 3 "Sampdoria complete Cassano swoop". UEFA.com. 14 August 2007. Archived from the original on 7 January 2016. Retrieved 2 November 2010.
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1 2 3 Duncan White (10 June 2012). "Euro 2012: whole-hearted Antonio Cassano no longer Italy's rebel". The Telegraph. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
1 2 "BARI IN THE BLOOD". A.C. Milan. 9 August 2011. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
1 2 "Cassano, il suo gol numero 100 in serie A" (in Italian). Il Corriere della Sera. 30 November 2013. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
1 2 "Le nuove stelle" [The new stars] (in Italian). Rai Sport.it. Archived from the original on 22 December 2015. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
1 2 Paolo Bandini (21 June 2014). "Italy disappointed by new Antonio Cassano". ESPN FC. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "Fantantonio Cassano, the best Italian player that never was". Archived from the original on 6 February 2015. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "99, "El Pibe de Bari"" (in Italian). Canale Milan.it. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
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↑ "Cassano in new bust-up with Capello". The Star. 22 November 2003. Retrieved 13 September 2017.
↑ Training accident keeps Cassano out; UEFA.com 14 October 2005
↑ "Madrid unveil Cassano". UEFA.com. 4 January 2006. Archived from the original on 7 January 2016. Retrieved 2 November 2010.
↑ http://bo.asroma.it/UserFiles/755.pdf%5B%5D
↑ "Antonio Cassano". The Telegraph. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Angelo Alfonso Centrone (7 January 2011). "Cassano, da Peter Pan a Cappellaio matto Pellegatti sdogana il nuovo soprannome" (in Italian). Il Corriere del Mezzogiorno. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ "Cassano cast out at Madrid". UEFA.com. 30 October 2006. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "La lunga storia di un fuoriclasse di nome Cassano" [The long history of a champion named Cassano] (in Italian). Sampdoria.it. Archived from the original on 9 February 2015. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ ""Después de este primer año en la presidencia, mantengo la ilusión del primer día" ("After this first year as president, i have the illusion of the first day")" (in Spanish). Real Madrid CF. 3 July 2007. Archived from the original on 15 July 2007. Retrieved 30 July 2007.
↑ Filippo Grimaldi (18 August 2007). "Cassano si prende la Samp" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Cassano red card, 3/2/08; YouTube
↑ "Ufficiale: Antonio Cassano è tutto della Sampdoria". UC Sampdoria (in Italian). 30 May 2008. Retrieved 2 November 2010.
↑ Harrison Mead (12 August 2015). "Former Sampdoria XI: Can Cassano find a place in the lineup?" . Retrieved 6 January 2016.
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↑ "Sampdoria legend Vialli big fan of Cassano, Pazzini". tribalfootball.com. 9 March 2009. Archived from the original on 3 September 2009. Retrieved 29 March 2009.
↑ "Mancini: "Pazzini e Cassano come me e Vialli? Ci può stare" (Mancini: "Pazzini and Cassano like me and Vialli? It can be"" (in Italian). TuttoMercatoWeb. 28 March 2009. Retrieved 29 March 2009.
↑ "Coppa Italia, la Samp stende l'Inter. Paura per Balotelli" (in Italian). Sky.it. 4 March 2009. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "La Lazio conquista la Coppa Italia Sampdoria piegata ai calci di rigore" . Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Comunicato Stampa: nota ufficiale società" (in Italian). UC Sampdoria. 31 January 2010. Archived from the original on 3 February 2010. Retrieved 31 January 2010.
↑ "Cassano niente Fiorentina, resta alla Sampdoria" (in Italian). Corriere dello Sport – Stadio. 31 January 2010. Retrieved 31 January 2010. [ dead link ]
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↑ "Sampdoria - Werder Brema 3-2" . Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Sampdoria: Comunicato Stampa" (PDF). Retrieved 6 February 2015. [ permanent dead link ]
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↑ "Sampdoria wait for review of Cassano case". ESPN Soccernet. 2 November 2010. Retrieved 5 November 2010.
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1 2 Relazione sulla Gestione of UC Sampdoria Report and Accounts on 31 December 2010
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↑ "A.C. MILAN COMUNICATO UFFICIALE" (in Italian). A.C. Milan. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
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↑ "CASSANO: IL GRANDE RITORNO" (in Italian). A.C. Milan. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Milan 1-2 Fiorentina". www.eurosport.com. 7 April 2012. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ Gaetano De Stefano (7 April 2012). "Amauri fa un regalo alla Juve Il Milan crolla con la Fiorentina" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ "Cassano and Gattuso, partners in bravery". FIFA. 28 April 2012. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ "AC Milan 1-0 Genoa". www.eurosport.com. 25 April 2012. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ "Il Milan non molla Poker al Siena" (in Italian). La Repubblica. 29 April 2012. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Cassano torna al gol dopo 206 giorni" (in Italian). www.milannews.it. Archived from the original on 6 February 2015. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "La rinascita di Cassano, torna al gol sei mesi dopo l'intervento al cuore" (in Italian). Il Messaggero. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Official: Inter and AC Milan finalize Cassano-Pazzini swap". 22 August 2012. Retrieved 2 September 2012.
↑ "AC Milan and Inter agree terms over Pazzini-Cassano swap". 21 August 2012. Retrieved 22 August 2012.
↑ "RELAZIONE E BILANCIO AL 31 DICEMBRE 2012" (PDF) (in Italian). AC Milan. 5 June 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 May 2015. Retrieved 29 April 2014.
↑ "Transfers: Antonio Cassano signs for Inter". 22 August 2012. Retrieved 23 August 2012.
↑ Giancarlo Rinaldi (4 March 2013). "Strama 1 Cassano 0". Football Italia. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ "Italian Serie A Assists Leaders – 2012–13". ESPN. Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
1 2 "Cassano-Inter reports intensify". Football Italia. 31 January 2015. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ "Cassano leaves Inter for Parma". Goal.com. 4 July 2013. Retrieved 3 July 2013.
↑ "World Cup 2014: Antonio Cassano wants Italy recall after losing 10kg". BBC. 17 March 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ "Giuseppe Rossi named in Italy's preliminary World Cup squad". Fox Sports. 13 May 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ Paolo Bandini (19 May 2014). "Serie A season signs off with ding-dong battle for Europa League berth". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ Lorenzo Vicini. "From laborious to victorious". Football Italia. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ Vanni Zagnoli (4 May 2014). "Parma-Samp 2-0 nel segno di Cassano: un gol e tanti assist nel suo derby del cuore" (in Italian). Il Messaggero. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
↑ "Antonio Cassano leaves Parma, could sign with Bari". ESPN FC. 26 January 2015. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
↑ Ben Gladwell (22 July 2015). "Antonio Cassano could still seal Sampdoria return - sporting director". ESPN FC. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ "CASSANO È BLUCERCHIATO: "SONO FELICE, SEMPRE FORZA SAMP!"" (in Italian). U.C. Sampdoria. 9 August 2015. Retrieved 9 August 2015.
↑ "Sampdoria 1 Juventus 2: Pogba, Khedira on target as champions march on". FourFourTwo. 10 January 2016. Retrieved 21 March 2016.
↑ "Ferrero shelves Cassano". Football Italia. 13 November 2016. Retrieved 14 November 2016.
↑ Lorenzo Montaldo; Steve Mitchell (2 November 2016). "Sampdoria: Cassano granted shooting practice despite uncertain future". CalcioMercato.com. Retrieved 14 November 2016.
↑ "Official: Cassano-Sampdoria contract terminated". Football Italia. 25 January 2017. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
↑ "Official: Cassano joins Verona". Football Italia. 10 July 2017. Retrieved 10 July 2017.
↑ Marcus Christenson (18 July 2017). "Antonio Cassano retires, then un-retires and vows to 'have fun' with Verona". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
↑ "'His head isn't right': Antonio Cassano retires (again) after leaving Verona". The Guardian. 24 July 2017. Retrieved 24 July 2017.
↑ "Cassano ci ripensa: "Smetto col calcio. Mia moglie non aveva capito"" (in Italian). 24 July 2017.
↑ "Official: Cassano contract terminated". Football Italia. 27 July 2017.
↑ "Cassano: 'Inter will win the Scudetto'". Football Italia. 19 September 2017. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
↑ "Cassano: "Non mi ritiro, cercatemi entro settembre. Verona? La verità è..."" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. 31 July 2017. Retrieved 19 August 2017.
↑ "Cassano: "Non smetto, chi mi vuole mi chiami"" (in Italian). Sky.it. 31 July 2017. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
↑ "Cassano: 'Zero Italian offers'". Football Italia. 16 September 2017. Retrieved 18 September 2017.
↑ "Cassano fa calare il sipario: "Con il calcio ho finito, ho finito"" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. 27 September 2017. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
↑ "Cassano: Done with football". Football Italia. 27 September 2017. Retrieved 27 September 2017.
↑ "Antonio Cassano: Former Italy international to train with Serie C side". BBC Sports. 6 October 2018. Retrieved 6 October 2018.
↑ "Cassano rifiuta il Monza: "Posso ancora giocare in Serie A, in categorie più basse solo all'Entella"" (in Italian). Eurosport. 1 October 2018. Retrieved 6 October 2018.
↑ "Cassano: 'This time it's really over'". Football Italia. 13 October 2018. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ "Cassano, Antonio" (in Italian). FIGC. Archived from the original on 16 March 2016. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
↑ "Cassano non evita il naufragio degli azzurri" (in Italian). Il Corriere della Sera. 13 November 2003. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Trap k.o., ma trova Cassano" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. 12 November 2003. Retrieved 20 January 2017.
↑ "Italy 1-1 Sweden". BBC. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ "Cassano's last-gasp winner all for nought as Trapattoni pays price for early exit". The Guardian. 23 June 2004. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
1 2 "World Cup 2014: Antonio Cassano wants Italy recall after losing 10kg". BBC. 17 March 2014. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
↑ "Italy 1 – 1 France (5–3 pens)". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 June 2014.
↑ "Cassano choice shocks some in Italy". UEFA. 20 May 2008. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
↑ "Spain 0 – 0 Italy". ESPNsoccernet . ESPN. 22 June 2008. Retrieved 15 June 2010.
↑ "World Cup 2010: Italy's Antonio Cassano refuses to postpone June wedding". The Telegraph. 26 April 2010. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
↑ "Italy turn to Balotelli, Cassano". FIFA.com. 6 August 2010. Archived from the original on 23 August 2010. Retrieved 6 August 2010.
↑ "Euro 2012: Mario Balotelli secures Italy's passage against Ireland". The Guardian. 18 June 2012. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
↑ Phil McNulty (1 July 2012). "Spain 4–0 Italy". BBC Sport. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
↑ "Euro 2012: Mario Balotelli scores twice as Italy stuns Germany". The National Post. 28 June 2012. Retrieved 6 February 2015.
1 2 "Antonio Cassano fined for Euro 2012 homosexual remark". BBC. Retrieved 21 July 2012.
↑ "World Cup 2014: Italy omit Giuseppe Rossi from final squad". BBC. 1 June 2014. Retrieved 15 June 2014.
↑ "Italy 0-1 Costa Rica". BBC. 20 June 2014. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
↑ "Godin, Uruguay dump Italy out of World Cup". Sportsnet.ca. 24 June 2014. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "The end for Cassano?". Football Italia. 4 September 2012. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
1 2 3 Marco Lignana (12 August 2015). "Tridente o fantasista Zenga adesso studia la Samp per Cassano" (in Italian). La Repubblica. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "Cassano vs Coutinho: la fantasia al potere" (in Italian). www.fcinter1908.it. 25 October 2010. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ Guglielmo Trupo (28 November 2013). "Parma, è derby fantasia: Cassano contro Diamanti, un duello da favola" (in Italian). www.parmatoday.it. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ "Inter, Cassano: "Venire qui era il mio sogno. Gol? Preferisco l'assist"" (in Italian). www.calcionews24.com. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
↑ Anthony Lopopolo (5 June 2014). "World Cup-Bound Antonio Cassano Never More Important to the Azzurri". Bleacher Report. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "AC Milan striker Antonio Cassano has heart surgery". BBC. 4 November 2011. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
1 2 "Player Profile". ESPN Soccernet. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
1 2 3 James Eve (6 June 2004). "'The future of Italian football'". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "Roma - Squad profiles". ESPN. 13 February 2003. Retrieved 22 February 2017.
↑ "Antonio Cassano" (in Italian). Archived from the original on 25 December 2013. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Filippo Grassia (20 August 2009). "Cassano? Qualcuno gli vuole male..." (in Italian). Il Giornale. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Maurizio Mosca (4 December 2009). "Dinho-Cassano, chi è il migliore?" (in Italian). Mediaset. Retrieved 21 July 2016.
1 2 "Dalle corna a Rosetti alla lite con Stramaccioni, ecco tutte le 'cassanate'" (in Italian). La Repubblica. 2 March 2013. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ James Horncastle (4 March 2014). "World Cup 100 days: England's Group D opponents assessed". BBC. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "Cassano: This is my last chance". 15 January 2011. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ "Cassano needs to cut down". Football Italia. 28 December 2010. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Brian Homewood (17 March 2014). "Slimline Cassano still hoping for World Cup call up". Reuters. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Emanuele Gamba (3 November 2013). "Barzagli inappuntabile, Cassano lento" (in Italian). La Repubblica. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
↑ Paolo Bandini (18 December 2007). "Sampdoria's Peter Pan refuses to grow up". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 March 2016.
↑ "Capello on Cassano and Totti". Football Italia. 4 March 2013. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
↑ "Cassano si è sposato (Cassano has been married)" (in Italian). Corriere dello Sport. 19 June 2010. Archived from the original on 29 February 2012. Retrieved 21 June 2010.
↑ "Cassano names son after Messi". theworldgame.sbs.com.au. Agence France Presse. 20 March 2013. Retrieved 29 August 2014.
1 2 "Milan's Cassano has heart surgery". BBC News. 4 November 2011.
↑ Milan's Cassano out for months, to have surgery. Rediff.com. 3 November 2011. Retrieved 4 November 2011.
↑ "Italy's Cassano hopes there are no gay players on Euro team". Sports Illustrated. 12 June 2012. Retrieved 20 June 2014.
↑ Staff, Football Italia (1 February 2013). "Strama-Cassano in locker room brawl!". Football Italia. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
↑ "Cassano in the Diadora Evoluzione K Pro GX 14". FootballBoots.co.uk. Retrieved 1 May 2012.
1 2 3 4 5 6 "A. Cassano". Soccerway. Retrieved 20 December 2015.
1 2 3 "Antonio Cassano – Goals". ESPN FC. Retrieved 12 October 2011.
↑ "Antonio Cassano" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
1 2 "Antonio Cassano – Goals in International Matches". National Football Teams. Benjamin Strack-Zimmerman. Retrieved 12 October 2011.
1 2 "Cassano, Antonio" (in Italian). FIGC. Archived from the original on 16 March 2016. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
↑ "Antonio Cassano". Vivo Azzurro. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Antonio Cassano .
Profile at AIC (in Italian)
National team data (in Italian)
Antonio Cassano at Soccerbase (in English)
Serie A Young Footballer of the Year
1997: Inzaghi
1998: Nesta
1999: Totti
2000: Baronio
2001: Cassano
2002: Brighi
2004: Gilardino
2005: Pazzini
2006: De Rossi
2007: Montolivo
2008: Hamšík
2009: Pato
2010: Pastore
Italy squads
Italy squad – UEFA Euro 2004
1 Buffon
2 Panucci
3 Oddo
4 Zanetti
5 Cannavaro (c)
7 Del Piero
8 Gattuso
9 Vieri
10 Totti
11 Corradi
12 Toldo
13 Nesta
14 Fiore
15 Favalli
16 Camoranesi
17 Di Vaio
18 Cassano
19 Zambrotta
20 Perrotta
21 Pirlo
22 Peruzzi
23 Materazzi
Coach: Trapattoni
3 Grosso
4 Chiellini
5 Gamberini
6 Barzagli
7 Del Piero (c)
9 Toni
10 De Rossi
11 Di Natale
12 Borriello
13 Ambrosini
14 Amelia
15 Quagliarella
17 De Sanctis
22 Aquilani
Coach: Donadoni
Italy squad – UEFA Euro 2012 runners-up
1 Buffon (c)
4 Ogbonna
6 Balzaretti
7 Abate
8 Marchisio
9 Balotelli
12 Sirigu
13 Giaccherini
15 Barzagli
17 Borini
18 Montolivo
19 Bonucci
20 Giovinco
22 Diamanti
23 Nocerino
Coach: Prandelli
Italy squad – 2014 FIFA World Cup
2 De Sciglio
4 Darmian
6 Candreva
11 Cerci
13 Perin
17 Immobile
18 Parolo
20 Paletta
22 Insigne
23 Verratti
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Robert Henri
Not to be confused with Henri Robert.
Robert Earle Henri
Robert Henri, 1897
Robert Henry Cozad
July 12, 1929(1929-07-12) (aged 64)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Académie Julian,
École des Beaux Arts
Ashcan School
Robert Henri ( /ˈhɛnraɪ/ ; June 24, 1865 – July 12, 1929) was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School of American realism and an organizer of the group known as "The Eight," a loose association of artists who protested the restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design.
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic movement in the United States during the early 20th century that is best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition."
The Eight
Ireland and Santa Fe
Death and burial
Influence and legacy
Robert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio to Theresa Gatewood Cozad and John Jackson Cozad, a gambler and real estate developer. [1] [2] Henri was a distant cousin of the painter Mary Cassatt. [3] In 1871, Henri's father founded the town of Cozaddale, Ohio. In 1873, the family moved west to Nebraska, where John J. Cozad founded the town of Cozad. [3] [4]
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, but lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
Cozaddale is an unincorporated community in southeastern Hamilton Township, Warren County, Ohio, United States. It is about one mile south of Comargo, one mile southeast of Hickory Corner, and two miles west of Pleasant Plain, and three miles north of Goshen, Ohio.
Nebraska is a state that lies in both the Great Plains and the Midwestern United States. It is bordered by South Dakota to the north; Iowa to the east and Missouri to the southeast, both across the Missouri River; Kansas to the south; Colorado to the southwest; and Wyoming to the west. It is the only triply landlocked U.S. state.
In October 1882, Henri's father became embroiled in a dispute with a rancher, Alfred Pearson, over the right to pasture cattle on land claimed by the family. When the dispute turned physical, Cozad shot Pearson fatally with a pistol. Cozad was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, but the mood of the town turned against him. He fled to Denver, Colorado, and the rest of the family followed shortly afterwards. In order to disassociate themselves from the scandal, family members changed their names. The father became known as Richard Henry Lee, and his sons posed as adopted children under the names Frank Southern and Robert Earl Henri (pronounced "hen rye"). In 1883, the family moved to New York City, then to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the young artist completed his first paintings. [5]
Atlantic City is a resort city in Atlantic County, New Jersey, United States, known for its casinos, boardwalk, and beaches. In 2010, the city had a population of 39,558. It was incorporated on May 1, 1854, from portions of Egg Harbor Township and Galloway Township. It borders Absecon, Brigantine, Pleasantville, Ventnor City, Egg Harbor Township, and the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1886, Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, a protege of Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Hovenden. [6] In 1888, he traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, [7] where he studied under the academic realist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, came to admire greatly the work of Francois Millet, and embraced Impressionism. "His European study had helped Henri develop rather catholic tastes in art." [8] He was admitted into the École des Beaux Arts. He visited Brittany and Italy during this period. At the end of 1891, he returned to Philadelphia, studying under Robert Vonnoh at the Pennsylvania Academy. In 1892, he began teaching at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. "A born teacher, Henry enjoyed immediate success at the school." [9]
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th- and 20th-century American paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Its archives house important materials for the study of American art history, museums, and art training.
Philadelphia, known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U.S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the sixth-most populous U.S. city, with a 2018 census-estimated population of 1,584,138. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U.S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is also the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis. The Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.
Thomas Pollock Anshutz was an American painter and teacher. Co-founder of The Darby School and leader at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Anshutz was known for his award-winning portraiture work and working friendship with Thomas Eakins.
In Philadelphia, Henri began to attract a group of followers who met in his studio to discuss art and culture, including several illustrators for the Philadelphia Press who would become known as the "Philadelphia Four": William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. They called themselves the Charcoal Club. Their gatherings featured life drawing, raucous socializing, and readings and discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Émile Zola, Henry David Thoreau, William Morris Hunt, and George Moore.
William James Glackens was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of American art. He is also known for his work in helping Albert C. Barnes to acquire the European paintings that form the nucleus of the famed Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. His dark-hued, vibrantly painted street scenes and depictions of daily life in pre-WW I New York and Paris first established his reputation as a major artist. His later work was brighter in tone and showed the strong influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.
George Benjamin Luks was an American realist artist, painter, comics artist and illustrator. His vigorously painted genre paintings of urban subjects are examples of the Ashcan School of American art.
Everett Shinn was an American realist painter and member of the Ashcan School. He also exhibited with the short-lived group known as "The Eight," who protested the restrictive exhibition policies of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design. He is best known for his robust paintings of urban life in New York and London, a hallmark of Ashcan art, and for his theater and residential murals and interior-design projects. His style varied considerably over the years, from gritty and realistic to decorative and rococo.
Main article: Ashcan School
By 1895, Henri had come to reconsider his earlier love of Impressionism, calling it a "new academicism." He was urging his friends and proteges to create a new, more realistic art that would speak directly to their own time and experience. He believed that it was the right moment for American painters to seek out fresh, less genteel subjects in the modern American city. The paintings by Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, Shinn, and others of their acquaintance that were inspired by this outlook eventually came to be called the Ashcan School of American art. They spurned academic painting and Impressionism as an art of mere surfaces. Art critic Robert Hughes declared that, "Henri wanted art to be akin to journalism. He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter, as real a human product as sweat, carrying the unsurpressed smell of human life." [10] Ashcan painters began to attract public attention in the same decade in which the realist fiction of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris was finding its audience and the muckraking journalists were calling attention to slum conditions. [11]
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. His best seller The Fatal Shore (1986) is a study of the British penal colonies and early history of Australia. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."
Broadway is a road in the U.S. state of New York. Broadway runs from State Street at Bowling Green for 13 mi (21 km) through the borough of Manhattan and 2 mi (3.2 km) through the Bronx, exiting north from the city to run an additional 18 mi (29 km) through the municipalities of Yonkers, Hastings-On-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington, and Tarrytown, and terminating north of Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County.
Snow in New York, 1902, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
For several years, Henri divided his time between Philadelphia and Paris, where he met the Canadian artist James Wilson Morrice. [12] Morrice introduced Henri to the practice of painting pochades on tiny wood panels that could be carried in a coat pocket along with a small kit of brushes and oil. This method facilitated the kind of spontaneous depictions of urban scenes which would come to be associated with his mature style.
In 1898, Henri married Linda Craige, a student from his private art class. The couple spent the next two years on an extended honeymoon in France, during which time Henri prepared canvases to submit to the Salon. [13] In 1899 he exhibited "Woman in Manteau" and La Neige ("The Snow"), which was purchased by the French government for display in the Musée du Luxembourg . [14] He taught at the Veltin School for Girls beginning in 1900 [15] and at the New York School of Art in 1902, where his students included Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Norman Raeben, Louis D. Fancher, and Stuart Davis. In 1905, Linda, long in poor health, died. [14] Three years later, Henri remarried; his new wife, Marjorie Organ, was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist for the New York Journal. [16] (Henri's 1911 portrait of Marjorie, The Masquerade Dress, is one of his most famous paintings and hangs in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
In 1906, Henri was elected to the National Academy of Design, but when painters in his circle were rejected for the Academy's 1907 exhibition, he accused fellow jurors of bias and walked off the jury, resolving to organize a show of his own. He would later refer to the Academy as "a cemetery of art."
Salome, 1909, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida
In 1908, Henri was one of the organizers of a landmark show entitled "The Eight" (after the eight painters displaying their works) at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. Besides his own works and those produced by the "Philadelphia Four" (who had followed Henri to New York by this time), three other artists who painted in a different, less realistic style—Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies—were included. The exhibition was intended as a protest against the exhibition policies and narrowness of taste of the National Academy of Design. The show later traveled to several cities from Newark to Chicago, prompting further discussion in the press about the revolt against academic art and the new ideas about acceptable subject matter in painting.
Henri was, by this point, at the heart of the group who argued for the depiction of urban life at its toughest and most exuberant. Conservative tastes were necessarily affronted. About Henri's Salome of 1909, critic Hughes observed: "Her long legs thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and glint through the over-brushed back veil. It has far more oomph than hundreds of virginal, genteel muses, painted by American academics. He has given it urgency with slashing brush marks and strong tonal contrasts. He's learned from Winslow Homer, from Édouard Manet, and from the vulgarity of Frans Hals". [17]
In 1910, with the help of John Sloan and Walt Kuhn, Henri organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists, the first nonjuried, no-prize show in the U.S., which he modeled after the Salon des Indépendants in France. Works were hung alphabetically to emphasize an egalitarian philosophy. The exhibition was very well-attended but resulted in few sales. [18] The relationship between Henri and Sloan, both believers in Ashcan realism, was a close and productive one at this time; Kuhn would play a key role in the 1913 Armory Show. Biographer William Innes Homer writes: "Henri's emphasis on freedom and independence in art [as demonstrated in the Exhibition of Independent Artists], his rebuttal of everything the National Academy stood for, makes him the ideological father of the Armory Show." [19]
The Armory Show, American's first large-scale introduction to European Modernism, was a mixed experience for Henri. He exhibited five paintings but, as a representational artist, he naturally understood that Cubism, Fauvism, and Futurism implied a challenge to his style of picture-making. In fact, he had cause to be worried. A man, not yet fifty, who saw himself in a vanguard was about to be relegated to the position of a conservative whose day had passed. Arthur B. Davies, an organizer of the show and a member of The Eight, was particularly disdainful of Henri's concern that the new European art would overshadow the work of American artists. On the other hand, some Henri scholars have insisted that the reputation Henri earned in later histories as an opponent of the Armory Show and of Modernism in general is unfair and vastly overstates his objections. [20] They point out that he had a keen interest in new art and recommended that his students avail themselves of opportunities to study it. [21] Art historian Sarah Vure notes that "[as] early as 1910, Henri advised students to attend an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse and two years later he urged them to see the work of Max Weber, one of the most avant-garde of American moderns." He urged painter Charles Sheeler to visit the Albert C. Barnes collection of modern art in Pennsylvania. [22]
Never a conservative politically, Henri admired anarchist and Mother Earth publisher Emma Goldman and taught from 1911 at the Modern School. Goldman, who later sat for a portrait by Henri, described him as "an anarchist in his conception of art and its relation to life." [23]
Mary Agnes, one of the children of Dooagh (1924)
Henri made several trips to Ireland's western coast and rented Corrymore House near Dooagh, a small village on Achill Island, in 1913. Every spring and summer for the following years he would paint the children of Dooagh. Henri's portraits of children, seen today as the most sentimental aspect of his body of work, were popular at the time and sold well. In 1924, he purchased Corrymore House. [24] During the summers of 1916, 1917 and 1922, Henri went to Santa Fe, New Mexico to paint. He found that locale as inspirational as the countryside of Ireland had been. He became an important figure in the Santa Fe art scene and persuaded the director of the state art museum to adopt an open-door exhibition policy. He also persuaded fellow artists George Bellows, Leon Kroll, John Sloan and Randall Davey to come to Santa Fe. [25] In 1918 he was elected as an associate member of the Taos Society of Artists. [26]
While traveling to the United States after visiting his summer home in Ireland in November 1928, Robert Henri suffered an attack of neuritis, which crippled his leg. (The underlying cause was metastatic prostate cancer.) [27] He was hospitalized at St. Luke's Hospital in New York. Gradually he became weaker, until he died of cardiac arrest early in the morning of July 12, 1929. His illness was not generally known, and came as a surprise in art circles. [28] Upon his death, artist and pupil Eugene Speicher said "not only was he a great painter, but ... I don't think it too much to call him the father of independent painting in this country." [28] At his death, it was reported that he was cremated, and his ashes buried in the family vault in Philadelphia. [29] [lower-alpha 1]
From 1915 to 1927, Henri was a popular and influential teacher at the Art Students League of New York. "He gave his students, not a style (though some imitated him), but an attitude, an approach, [to art]." [32] He also lectured frequently about the theories of Hardesty Maratta, Denham Waldo Ross, and Jay Hambidge. [33] (Henri's interest in these men, whose ideas were in fashion at the time but were not taken seriously later, has proved to be "the most misunderstood aspect of [Henri's] pedagogy"). [34] Maratta and Ross were color theorists (Maratta manufactured his own system of synthetic pigments), while Hambidge was the author of an elaborate treatise, Dynamic Symmetry, that argued for a scientific basis for composition. Henri's philosophical and practical musings were collected by former pupil Margery Ryerson and published as The Art Spirit (1923), a book that remained in print for several decades. Henri's other students include George Bellows, Arnold Franz Brasz, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Henry Ives Cobb, Jr., Lillian Cotton, John Sloan, Minerva Teichert [35] [36] and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
The significance and often formative influence of Henri as a teacher and mentor to women artists was acknowledged in American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri (2005). Comparing the work of Henri's female students to their male Ashcan School contemporaries, Marion Wardle asserts, "An examination of their experiments in many media illuminates a much broader application of Henri's modernist ideals. ...Henri's women students contributed significantly to the structure of American modernism. They produced a large body of work, exhibited widely, won major art awards, belonged to and administered arts organizations, and taught art classes across America." [37]
In the spring of 1929, Henri was named as one of the top three living American artists by the Arts Council of New York. Henri died of cancer that summer at the age of sixty-four. He was eulogized by colleagues and former students and was honored with a memorial exhibition of seventy-eight paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Forbes Watson, editor of The Arts magazine wrote, "Henri, quite aside from his extraordinary personal charm, was an epoch-making man in the development of American art." [38]
Fittingly, among Henri's most enduring works are his portraits of his fellow painters. His 1904 full-length portrait of George Luks (in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa) and his 1904 portrait of John Sloan (in the collection of The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), for example, exhibit all the classic elements of his style: forceful brushwork, intense (if dark) color effects, evocation of personality (his and the sitter's), and generosity of spirit.
The Robert Henri Museum in Cozad, Nebraska occupies one of Henri's former homes and focuses on his work.
Portrait of Carl Gustav Waldeck, 1896, Saint Louis Art Museum
Woman in Manteau, 1898, Brooklyn Museum
The Blue Kimono, 1909, New Orleans Museum of Art
The Dancer, 1910
Dutch Girl, 1910 (photograph from 1910)
Figure in Motion, 1913
Mildred Clarke von Kienbusch, 1914, Princeton University Art Museum
Tam Gan, 1914, Albright-Knox Art Gallery
The Beach Hat, 1914, oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of Arts
Edna Smith in a Japanese Wrap, 1915, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916, Whitney Museum of American Art
Portrait of Fay Bainter , 1918
Mata Moana, 1920
Bernardita, 1922
Henri, Robert (2007) [1923]. The Art Spirit. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-06-430138-9.
↑ There is also a listing for Robert Henri (along with Richard and Theresa Lee) in the database of Providence, Rhode Island's Swan Point Cemetery. [30] A 1957 AP news story suggests that Henri's father John Cozad/Richard Lee was disinterred and reburied in Rhode Island. [31]
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
The Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was a show organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories.
Stuart Davis, was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz-influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures in the early years of the 20th century. With the belief that his work could influence the sociopolitical environment of America, Davis' political message was apparent in all of his pieces from the most abstract to the clearest. Contrary to most modernist artists, Davis was aware of his political objectives and allegiances and did not waver in loyalty via artwork during the course of his career. By the 1930s, Davis was already a famous American painter, but that did not save him from feeling the negative effects of the Great Depression, which led to his being one of the first artists to apply for the Federal Art Project. Under the project, Davis created some seemingly Marxist works; however, he was too independent to fully support Marxist ideals and philosophies. Despite several works that appear to reflect the class struggle, Davis' roots in American optimism is apparent throughout his lifetime.
John French Sloan was an American painter and etcher. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known for his urban genre scenes and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often observed through his Chelsea studio window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century" and an "early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of Socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs."
Jerome Myers was an American artist and writer associated with the Ashcan School, particularly known for his sympathetic depictions of the urban landscape and its people. He was one of the main organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modernism to America.
Arthur Bowen Davies was an avant-garde American artist and influential advocate of modern art in the United States c. 1910–1928.
Ernest Lawson was a Canadian-American painter and a member of The Eight, a group of artists who formed a loose association in 1908 to protest the narrowness of taste and restrictive exhibition policies of the conservative, powerful National Academy of Design. Though Lawson was primarily a landscape painter, he also painted a small number of realistic urban scenes. His painting style is heavily influenced by the art of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and Alfred Sisley. Though considered an American Impressionist, Lawson falls stylistically between Impressionism and realism.
American Realism was a style in art, music and literature that depicted contemporary social realities and the lives and everyday activities of ordinary people. The movement began in literature in the mid-19th century, and became an important tendency in visual art in the early 20th century. Whether a cultural portrayal or a scenic view of downtown New York City, American realist works attempted to define what was real.
Moses Soyer was an American social realist painter.
Edith Dimock was an American painter. Her work was exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. She married fellow artist, William Glackens, but continued to use her maiden name professionally after the marriage.
Edith Haworth (1878-1953) was an American painter, who studied art in New York and showed her work in New York City and Detroit, Michigan, particularly at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1903 she was co-founder and treasurer of the Detroit Society of Women Painters.
Marjorie Organ Henri was an Irish-born American illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist.
Mary (May) Wilson Watkins Preston was an American illustrator of books and magazines and an impressionist painter. She had an interest in art beginning in her teenage years, but her parents sent her to Oberlin College hoping that she would develop another interest. After three years, and at the urging of one of her teachers, Preston's parents allowed her to return to New York and attend the Art Students League. She then studied in Paris with James Whistler and next at the New York School of Art with William Merritt Chase.
James Moore Preston (1873–1962) was an American painter and illustrator, married to fellow artist May Wilson Preston. He was one of the Ashcan School, along with his friend, William Glackens.
Louise Josephine Pope was an American painter. She studied at the New York School of Art, and then went abroad to study in Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid with Robert Henri. She exhibited work in the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912. In the United States, she exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists, the 1913 New York Armory Show, and the 1915 Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Woman Suffrage Campaign, among others, contributing to the introduction of European Modernism to the United States.
The Robert Henri Museum is located in Cozad, Nebraska in a building that was once the home of Robert Henri, a prominent figure of the Ashcan School of art and one of “The Eight”. The Robert Henri Museum houses works by Robert Henri, including sketches, drawings, and paintings by the artist.
↑ Homer (1969).
↑ Perlman (1991).
1 2 Perlman (1991), p. 1.
↑ Henshaw (1957): "Cozad, Nebraska, finally has found its founder after, lo, these many moons."
↑ Homer (1969), p. 7.
↑ Homer (1969), pp. 25–27.
↑ oxfordindex.oup.com
↑ Homer (1969), p. 65.
↑ Hughes, Robert (February 5, 2002). "The Wave from the Atlantic". American Visions. Episode 5 of 8. BBC.
↑ Hunter (1959), pp. 28–40.
1 2 Homer (1969), p. 119.
↑ Bennard B. Perlman; Arthur Bowen Davies (1998). The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies. SUNY Press. pp. 113–114. ISBN 978-0-7914-3835-0.
↑ Homer (1969), p. 146.
↑ Hughes (1997), p. 325.
↑ Homer (1969), pp. 152–156.
↑ Rose (1975) refers to Henri as "blind and hostile" to Picasso and Matisse (p. 30).
↑ Vure (2009), p. 57.
↑ Goldman, Emma (1931). "Chapter 40". Living My Life. Volume two. New York: Alfred A Knopf Inc. Retrieved April 17, 2015.
↑ Perlman (1991), p. 133.
↑ Leeds, Valerie Anne (1998). Robert Henri in Santa Fe : His Work and Influence. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Gerald Peters Gallery. ISBN 0935037837.
↑ White, Robert R. (1998). The Taos Society of Artists. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. ISBN 0826319467.
1 2 "Robert Henri Dies; Ill Eight Months" (PDF). The New York Times . July 13, 1929. Retrieved April 17, 2015. Robert Henri, eminent American artist, died early yesterday morning at St. Luke's Hospital. Although he had been a patient at the institution since November, his illness was not generally known and his death came as a surprise to art circles.
↑ "Robert Henri's Funeral" (PDF). The New York Times . July 14, 1929. Retrieved April 17, 2015. The ashes will be buried in the family vault at Philadelphia this week.
↑ "Burial Information". Swan Point Cemetery. Retrieved April 16, 2015.
↑ Henshaw (1957): "Lee-Cozad died (with his boots off of pneumonia) in New York City in 1906. He was buried in Pleasantville, NJ. Later his remains were disinterred and reburied in Providence, RI."
↑ Jan Underwood Pinborough, Minerva Kohlhepp Teichert: With a Bold Brush
↑ Wardle (2005), p. 206.
↑ Wardle (2005), p. 4.
Goodman, Helen. "Robert Henri, Teacher." Arts Magazine, September 1979, pp. 158–160.
Henshaw, Tom (April 28, 1957). "Man Behind the Name: Mystery of Cozad is Finally Broken". The Lincoln Star . Lincoln, Nebraska. Associated Press. p. 35.
Homer, William Innes (1969). Robert Henri and his Circle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0878173269.
Hughes, Robert (1997). American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0676527841.
Hunter, Sam (1959). Modern American Painting and Sculpture. New York: Dell.
Perlman, Bennard (1991). Robert Henri: His Life and Art. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0486267229.
Rose, Barbara (1975). American Art Since 1900. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 050020067X.
Vure, Sarah (2009). "After the Armory: Robert Henri, Individualism and American Modernisms". In Kennedy Elizabeth (ed.). The Eight and American Modernisms. Chicago: Terra Foundation For American Art. ISBN 0932171567.
Wardle, Marian, ed. (2005). American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910–1945. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0813536839.
Brown, Milton W. (1955). American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press. OCLC 2310948.
Leeds, Valerie Ann (1994). My People: The Portraits of Robert Henri. Orlando, FL: Orlando Museum of Art. ISBN 1-880699-03-6.
Leeds, Valerie Ann (2005). Robert Henri: The Painted Spirit. New York: Gerald Peters Gallery. ISBN 1-931717-15-X.
Leeds, Valerie Ann; Stuhlman, Jonathan (2011). From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland. Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-9762300-9-0.
Leeds, Valerie Ann (2013). Spanish Sojourns: Robert Henri and the Spirit of Spain. Savannah, GA: Telfair Museums. ISBN 978-0-933075-20-7.
Nicoll, Jessica F. (1995). The Allure of the Maine Coast: Robert Henri and His Circle, 1903–1918. Portland, ME: Portland Museum of Art. ISBN 0-916857-07-7.
Perlman, Bennard, ed. (1997). Revolutionaries of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691044132.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Robert Henri .
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Robert Henri
Robert Henri exhibition catalogs (full pdf) from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries
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Explore Palm Springs
Marissa Willman: Palm Springs Local Expert
Marissa says, Don't leave Palm Springs without riding the world's largest aerial tramway. The views at the top are the best in the city!
More About Marissa
10 Best Museums in Palm Springs for Art Lovers, History Buffs and Families
From History Museums to Cable Cars, Palm Springs Offers Something for Everyone
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Top Ten Outdoor Activities to Enjoy in Palm Springs
Great Things to Do with Kids in Palm Springs
Palm Springs Travel Guide
Attraction Slideshow: Parks in Palm Springs
Moorten Botanical Garden
Photo courtesy of MeganEHansen/Flickr
Coachella Valley Preserve
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Mount San Jacinto State Park
Photo courtesy of California Department of Parks and Recreation
Indian Canyons
Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Willows/flickr
Knott's Soak City Water Park Palm Springs
Sunnylands
Photo courtesy of Sunnylands
Desert Adventures
Photo courtesy of Desert Adventures
Living Desert Zoo and Gardens
Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Willows
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
Photo courtesy of bossco
Outdoors in Palm Springs: Best Parks and Attractions to Enjoy Outside
BY Marissa Willman
If the thought of visiting a hyped up, crowded tourist attraction makes you cringe with anxiety, this list of parks and attractions will help you plan an enjoyable trip to Palm Springs. The desert is filled with museums and landmarks that draw throngs of visitors, but there are also a number of parks and attractions that focus on a slower way of doing things.
To the north of Palm Springs, you'll find Joshua Tree National Park, which boasts two different deserts, larger than life rock formations and, of course, fields of joshua trees. You can spend a day hiking, rock climbing or sightseeing, and for unmatched views of the night sky, you can even camp overnight. If you're looking for a cooler escape, Mount San Jacinto State Park at the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway offers nature walks and hiking trails that stretch as far as Idyllwild.
If you'd rather explore the desert with a guide, Desert Adventures offers several jeep tours to Joshua Tree National Park and the San Andreas fault. And for an afternoon stroll in a garden setting, don't miss the Sunnylands Center and Gardens, which recently opened in Rancho Mirage, or Moorten Botanical Gardens in Palm Springs.
At this gorgeous labor of love just off of Palm Canyon Drive, more than 3000 varieties of desert plants can be viewed and marveled at, including prickly pears, agaves, and cacti. In addition, visitors can check out Indian artifacts and rock, crystal, and wood forms. Moorten Botanical Garden was established in 1938 by Patricia and Chester "Cactus Slim" Moorten, a biologist, and contortionist, respectively, and remains a family-owned and operated botanical garden. The intimate garden also features a nursery that sells plants similar to those featured throughout, so you can pick up a souvenir to remember your Palm Springs vacation.
Sparkling springs set amid 20,000 acres of lush greenery provide a haven for a myriad desert creatures, just five miles outside of Palm Springs. In the center is a 1000-acre, idyllic palm oasis that served as the backdrop for Cecil De Mille's epic film, King of Kings. Self-guided nature trails, horse trails, and picnic facilities are available. You can also opt for a guided tour along McCallum Trail, one of the flattest and easiest trails in the preserve. Experienced hikers may want to try their hand at the Herman's Hike Loop, Pushwalla Trail or Hidden Palms Trail, some of the more difficult trails at the Coachella Valley Preserve.
If you're an outdoorsy type, you'll be delighted by this high-altitude park's 54 miles of hiking trails, camping and picnic areas, and guided wilderness mule rides during snow-free months. Nestled between the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and the mountain town of Idyllwild, this state park often sees snow in the winter, making it a surprising escape just above the desert. Cross-country ski equipment rentals can be arranged during the winter months, though many just like to build snowmen or have a snowball fight. The state park is only accessible by hiking or by taking the Palm Springs Tramway. Permits are required for overnight camping.
Once a community center for the native Cahuilla people, the Agua Caliente Indian Canyons are a recreational oasis for hikers, horseback riders and nature lovers. Protected by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the area's hiking trails include Andreas Canyon, Murray Canyon and the popular Palm Canyon. Stop by the Trading Post near the entrance for a trail recommendation, a hiking map and water, if you forgot to bring it. For a relaxing experience in the canyons, pack a picnic and make a day of exploring Palm Springs in its natural state. Streams, natural palm oases and canyon formations are just a few of the natural wonders awaiting canyon visitors.
With 360 days of sunshine in Palm Springs each year, it's no wonder locals and tourists alike have flocked to Knott's Soak City to beat the heat since 2001. This 16-acre water park is generally open from March through October and offers 20 water attractions, including more than a dozen water slides, a 600-foot lazy river and an 800,000 gallon wave pool, a popular spot for children and adults alike. Plenty of food and drink options are available onsite, including Hodad's, which serves theme park classics like hamburgers and chicken strips, and the All American Dog House, which serves hot dogs, turkey dogs and footlongs.
The Best Free Things to Do in Palm Springs
Sweep Your Sweetie Away with These 10 Romantic Attractions in Palm Springs
Sunnylands is a historic, 200-acre estate in Rancho Mirage. Once the winter home of Ambassadors Walter and Leonore Annenberg, this A Quincy Jones-designed estate has hosted a number of high-powered retreats for politics, education and the arts. In fact, Sunnylands is nicknamed the "Camp David of the West." In 2012, the estate opened to the public, allowing visitors to tour the historic estate and see where high-level political meetings occur. Tickets to the estate are limited, and tours are only available when retreats are not in session. Even if you can't visit the Sunnylands Estate on your trip, you can always visit the Sunnylands Center and Garden, an educational center open to visitors year-round. Here, you can check out educational kiosks and films, as well as selected pieces from the Sunnylands art collection.
Discover the outdoors from the open bed of a red jeep on a Desert Adventures tour. The tour company specializes in eco tours of the Coachella Valley, including tours of Joshua Tree National Park, the Agua Caliente Indian Canyons, Mecca Hills and the San Andreas Fault Line. Many of the guides have been with the company for years and know the desert's wildlife, environment and history better than most locals. The fault line tours are always a popular choice for visitors, offering a rare glimpse into the heart of the San Andreas Fault. Desert Adventures has exclusive access to parts of the fault line through Metate Ranch, a 840-acre site that includes a recreated Cahuilla village and mining camp.
Ever wonder what a roadrunner and coyote really look like? At The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, you can meet the real life inspiration for these desert-dwelling "Looney Tunes" characters. This Palm Desert zoo focuses on educating visitors about animals from deserts in North America and Africa, including giraffes, warthogs, jaguars and bighorn sheep, to name a few. The Living Desert also has a number of gardens showcasing the various cacti and other plants native to the desert. Hikers, be sure to bring your gear. The Living Desert has 1,080 acres of undisturbed desert land and a number of nature trails through the preserve are open seasonally to the public.
Joshua Tree National Park is about a 45-minute drive from Palm Springs, but it feels like a world away. Filled with hiking trails, scenic vistas and larger-than-life rock formations, Joshua Tree is the perfect destination for those looking to get back to nature. The alien-like boulders and twisted joshua trees make for popular photo ops, whether you decide to hike the trails or drive through the park. The preserve is actually the result of two great deserts, the low Colorado and the high Mojave, which come together at Joshua Tree to create a 794,000-acre geological and floral wonderland. A Visitor's Center, art gallery, and cafe-deli welcome you at the park's entrance.
There's no better way to view the Coachella Valley than from above. Don't settle for the view from your airplane window, though. For the best views of the desert, take a cable car into the mountains at the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. A 12.5 minute ride in the world's largest rotating aerial tramway will offer 360-degree views of the greater Palm Springs area as you climb two-and-a-half miles to Mountain Station in Mount San Jacinto State Park. Once you get to the top of the tram, enjoy a nature walk, a backcountry hike or a meal overlooking the Coachella Valley at Peaks Restaurant. In the winter, swap your hiking gear and pack your scarves and mittens to play in the snow.
Meet Marissa Willman
Marissa Willman moved to the Coachella Valley in 2001 and loves discovering the best that the desert has to offer. As a Palm Springs local, Marissa enjoys sharing her knowledge of this desert... More About Marissa
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Atlanta Public Schools will hold most of its high school graduation ceremonies inside Georgia Tech's McCamish Pavilion, and the new venue means new rules for attendees. File photo STEVE SCHAEFER / SPECIAL TO THE AJC
Photo: Steve Schaefer
Shorter ceremonies, new rules for Atlanta's 2019 high school graduations
Vanessa McCray, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta Public Schools moved the 2019 high school graduation ceremonies to the McCamish Pavilion at Georgia Tech. With the new venue comes new rules and shorter ceremonies.
Because the university runs the facility, attendees must follow rules that basketball fans are accustomed to when they go to games. That means leaving big purses at home and planning plenty of time to find parking.
“Treat it like a concert,” advised superintendent Meria Carstarphen.
Dates, times for 2019 Atlanta high school graduation ceremonies
The school district had to find a different location to host this year’s commencement events after the Georgia World Congress Center informed APS and other districts it would be unavailable to rent in late May because of other events.
The school district will condense its graduation schedule into fewer days, meaning that ceremonies will be shorter than previous ones. Carstarphen said that means speeches and remarks will be edited, and there won’t be as many student musical and dance performances.
“It’s going to be a beautiful venue, but it is going to be different to previous years so please adjust your expectations accordingly,” she told the public at a board meeting this week.
Attendees will go through a security check before entering.
Backpacks and big bags are prohibited. Instead, bring a clear tote bag that measures no bigger than 12-inches by 6-inches by 12-inches, a one-gallon clear plastic freezer bag or a small purse no larger than 4.5-inches by 6-inches.
Also not permitted: Beverages, food, laser pointers, video cameras, selfie sticks, umbrellas, inflated balls, and strollers, among other items.
Parking also is limited on the college campus, and APS created a map of suggested parking places posted online here.
The district also plans to run a shuttle bus from the Midtown MARTA station to the venue.
The following high schools will hold their ceremonies at Georgia Tech’s basketball arena:
Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy and the B.E.S.T. Academy: 4 p.m. on May 21.
KIPP Atlanta Collegiate: 7 p.m. on May 21.
Carver High School: 1 p.m. on May 22.
South Atlanta High School: 4 p.m. on May 22.
Douglass High School: 7 p.m. on May 22.
Grady High School: 1 p.m. on May 23.
Therrell High School: 4 p.m. on May 23.
Washington High School: 7 p.m. on May 23.
Crim Open Campus High School: 10 a.m. on May 24.
Mays High School: 1 p.m. on May 24.
Maynard Jackson High School: 4 p.m. on May 24.
North Atlanta High School: 7 p.m. on May 24.
Two high schools will hold their commencement ceremonies elsewhere.
Atlanta Classical Academy will hold its graduation at 11 a.m. May 18 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, 3003 Howell Mill Road N.W.
Drew Charter School will hold its graduation at 4 p.m. May 18 at the school’s gymnasium, 300 E. Lake Blvd., S.E.
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Home / Money / Amended Exchange Rate of Foreign Currency Relating to Imported and Export Goods Notified
Amended Exchange Rate of Foreign Currency Relating to Imported and Export Goods Notified
8:06 PM Money
In exercise of the powers conferred by Section 14 of the Customs Act, 1962 (52 of 1962), the Central Board of Excise & Customs(CBEC) hereby makes the following further amendments in the Notification of the Government of India, Ministry of Finance (Department of Revenue) No. 113/2014-CUSTOMS (N.T.) dated the 4th December, 2014 published in the Gazette Of India, Part-II, Section 3, Sub-Section (ii), Extraordinary vide number S.O.3066 (E) dated, the 4th December, 2014, namely:-
In the SCHEDULE-II of the said Notification, for Serial No. 1 and the entries relating thereto, the following shall be substituted, namely:-
SCHEDULE-II
Rate of exchange of one unit of foreign currency equivalent to Indian rupees
(For Imported Goods)
(For Export Goods)
These rates will be effective from 18th December, 2014
Government of India Signs Agreements with Germany worth Euro 625 Million for Financial Cooperation to Support “Green Energy Corridors (GEC)” Project under Indo German Bilateral Development Cooperation
The Government of India signed Note of Exchange with Government of Germany for financial cooperation to support “Green Energy Corridors (GEC)” project under Indo German bilateral Development Cooperation here yesterday evening. GEC project in power sector aims to create transmission infrastructure in the renewable energy potential rich states and facilitate evacuation of renewable energy (RE) into the national grid. Government of Germany in the year 2012 had indicated its willingness to support the GEC project with funds amounting to Euro 1 billion over a period of five years under the ambit of Indo-German bilateral development cooperation.
Government of Germany has committed funds amounting to Euro 500 million for GEC project this year. In this regard, the Note of Exchange, signed by the German Ambassador, was presented to Mr Rajiv Mehrishi, Finance Secretary, Government of India by Mr Heiko Warnken, Head of Development Cooperation, Embassy of Germany to India here yesterday. With this, the total commitment from Government of Germany for GEC project stands at Euro 750 million. In year 2013, Government of Germany had committed Euro 250 million.
On the occasion, three separate loan agreements were also signed for GEC project amounting to Euro 625 million. Mr Rajesh Khullar, Joint Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, signed loan agreements with German Government’s Development Bank KfW, for loan of Euro 76 million to the Government of Tamil Nadu and a loan of Euro 49 million to Government of Rajasthan for intra-state transmission schemes. Power Grid Corporation of India Limited signed loan agreement for Euro 500 million with KfW for inter-state transmission schemes.
During the ceremony, Agreements were also signed by the Department of Economic Affairs with KfW for a grant amount of Euro 2 million to provide technical assistance to “Himachal Pradesh Forest Ecosystems Climate Proofing project” and also for a grant amount of Euro 2 million for extending technical assistance for the ongoing “Tamil Nadu Urban Infrastructure Development Fund project”.
Germany and KfW are longstanding partners of India. Since the 1950s, sectors like Energy, Protection of the Environment and Natural Resources and Sustainable economic Development have received KfW support.
Harsimrat Badal Launches ‘Fruits and Vegetable Availability Maps of India’ Report
The Minister of Food Processing Industries Smt. Harsimrat Kaur Badal today launched the first ever report focusing on the availability of fruits and vegetables pan India at the Yes Bank-MoFPI National Conference on Spurring financing & Investments in the Food Processing Sector.
Highlighting the importance of nurturing the Food Processing Industry, Smt Badal said, “I commend Yes Bank for coming up with this report and Fruits and Vegetables map; it can be used as a handbook of some of the best available data today on Fruits and Vegetable availability across the nation. Agricultural land is reducing but mouths to be fed are increasing so we must grow more, from less, to feed more – that is where food processing comes in, and if there is more availability, there will be less inflation. We need to aim for higher standards in food processing to guard the population against inflation.”
Smt. Badal underscored the need to prepare a National Food Grid. She said that the first step towards this Grid is this “Fruits & Vegetables Availability Maps of India Booklet” which puts forth an overview of the production and availability scenario of key food commodities in the country. The content of this booklet gives an insight of what is grown where as well as the surplus and deficit status of various commodities at the national as well as state level.
The Minister of State Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti said that the food processing sector is growing at an annual rate of 8.4 per cent and also provides great opportunities FDI. She said that last year this sector attracted an investment of USD 4 billion. The MoS suggested that seminars should be held in each districts to apprise people about the activities under the food processing sector.
Sharing his thoughts at the conference, Shri Suresh Prabhu, Railways Minister said, “We must bring more investment and finance into the Food Processing industry to give the sector a fillip. There must be an integrated approach to boosting agri-growth. We are also working on developing a multi-modal transport system in India, which will help transportation of food produce across the country, thereby enabling better price discovery for farmers and agriculturists.”
Union Home Minister hopes for cancellation of bail granted to Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi
The Union Home Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh hoped that Pakistan government will appeal in a higher court so that the bail granted to Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi is cancelled. He said that there might have been some laxity on the part of the concerned prosecuting authorities. Shri Rajnath Singh termed the bail as ‘very unfortunate’.
Shri Rajnath Singh informed the media that India had provided all relevant evidence to Pakistan. He demanded that India’s most wanted terrorists including Hafiz Saeed should be handed over to India. Replying to a question on threat from Hafiz Saeed, the Home Minister said that India is not scared of any threats.
Shri Rajnath Singh said that not only the people of Pakistan, but Indians are equally hurt over the killings of so many innocent children in Peshawar.
Member of U.S. House of Representatives calls on Union Home Minister
The Visiting Member of the U.S. Congress Representative, Ms. Tulsi Gabbard called on the Union Home Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh here today. The sole Hindu member of the U.S. Congress and a Democrat from Hawaii, discussed broad range of issues with the Union Home Minister, including terrorism and cyber security. The two leaders jointly condemned the brutal killing of school children in Peshawar.
Ms. Tulsi Gabbard informed Shri Rajnath Singh about the positive environment in US for the new government in India and mentioned that the two countries have greater potential for mutual cooperation in the field of security.
Shri Bandaru Dattatreya Chairs Parliamentary Consultative Committee Meeting
The Minister of State for Labour and Employment (Independent Charge) Shri Bandaru Dattatreya has chaired Parliamentary Consultative Committee meeting attached to his Ministry here yesterday. The agenda of the meeting was “Discussion on ESIC”.
On the Occasion, the Minister said that the number of insured person covered under the ESI Scheme is 1.95 crores. The number of beneficiaries covered under the Scheme has gone upto 7.58 crores. He said that the ESIC has disbursed Rs. 598.69 crores as benefits in cash in the year 2013-14. The number of Cash Benefits payments has gone upto 30.94 lakhs during the year 2013-14. Almost all cases of cash payments are now being made through ECS in the field offices. Contribution income of ESIC during 2013-14 has increase to Rs. 9632.54 crores and revenue recovery of Rs. 186.07 crores has been made, the Minister added.
Shri Dattatreya informed that the medical care under the Scheme is administered by the State governments except in Delhi. The Corporation also directly runs 36 hospitals as on 31.10.2014. During the year 2013-14, an expenditure of Rs. 4859.90 crores was incurred on Medical Benefit. The ceiling on medical expenditure to be reimbursed to the States has been raised from Rs. 1500/- per year to Rs. 2000/- per IP per year, he said.
The Labour and Employment Minister informed that the Inspection Scheme of ESIC has been integrated with Shram Suvidha Portal of the Ministry of Labour and Employment wherein 13 Central Acts, DGMs and EPF Act are aligned. It aims to achieve the objective of simplifying business regulations and bringing in transparency and accountability in labour inspections.
The Director General of ESIC, Shri A.K. Agarwal gave a brief presentation covering all the aspects such as Medical Benefits, Cash Benefits, Contribution, Expenditure on Medical Care, Recovery of Arrears, Setting up of Model Hospitals & ESIC Hospitals, covering of more and more workers in the different States.
The Members of the Committee praised the steps taken by the ESIC for the benefits of the workers and discussed various issues concern ESIC including increasing the benefits to the workers in all areas. They suggested that the contributed money should be spent for the betterment of the workers health. Members also suggested that the good quality medicines and Super Speciality treatment should be given to Insured Persons.
Members of the Parliament, Shri N.K. Premachandran, Shri Sankar Prasad Datta, Shri Manohar Untwal, Shri Prahlad Singh Patel, Shri Dushyant Singh and Shri M.K. Raghavan from Lok Sabha were present on the occasion. The Secretary, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Ms. Gauri Kumar and other senior officers of Ministry and ESIC were also present in the meeting.
Amended Exchange Rate of Foreign Currency Relating to Imported and Export Goods Notified Reviewed by Ajit Kumar on 8:06 PM Rating: 5
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Home / Police / Two jailed ahead of booze cruise rape trial
Two jailed ahead of booze cruise rape trial
8:50 PM Police
Revellers on board Silja Galaxy for one of Fun Cruise's student parties. None of these people were involved in the alleged rape. Photo: Fun Cruises
Swedish prosecutors on Saturday afternoon jailed two young men pending their trial for allegedly gang-raping a girl on board a student booze cruise between Stockholm and Finland this week.
The men, both aged 19, were arrested after the M/S Galaxy docked in Stockholm on Wednesday, accused of gang-raping a girl during a drunken booze cruise across the Baltic.
A third man, aged 18, was released after the court ruled there was insufficient evidence to keep him behind bars.
Martin Beskow, defence lawyer for one of the 19-year-old men, told Aftonbladet that his client was disappointed that he had not been given a chance to give his side of the story.
“This was upsetting for my client. The court thought that there was reasonable grounds for suspicion. I did not,” he said.
Åke Broné, who was defending the released 18-year-old, told the newspaper that his client denied having sex with anyone during the cruise, forced or otherwise.
"He went back and forth to his cabin, but he didn't have any sex. Instead my client was just hanging around with other mates," he said.
Around 1,700 students were on the Fun Cruises party boat from Stockholm to the Finnish town of Turku, with police accompanying them on the Silja Line' ferry to maintain control.
Sweden-Finland ferry crossings are notorious for heavy drinking, as all passengers over the age of 18 are able to buy duty free alcohol, meaning a huge discount for Finnish and Swedish travellers used to some of the highest food and drink taxes in Europe.
Four men were arrested after the ferry docked on Wednesday and a fifth on Thursday, but two were released on Friday evening after the police judged there were no longer any grounds for suspicion.
Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper, which by chance interviewed two of the men as they departed on the cruise, reported last week that one had a previous conviction, while two were already under investigation for allegedly aiding and abetting a murder in Stockholm.
The rape case has been seized upon by Sweden’s fast-growing right-wing media as evidence of the dangers of immigration, with the Fria Tider newspaper reporting that the 19-year-old man interviewed by Aftonbladet was “a non-European immigrant”, while his companion was “an immigrant who is not a Swedish citizen”.
“We’re going to fuck around,” one of the men told Sara Cosar, an Aftonbladet reporter before the ship departed. “We’re graduating, so we just want to fuck around.”
Cosar, who was on the cruise, said that there had been “a great atmosphere” on board, as students let their hair down.
Fun Cruises, which organised the event, billed it as “a crazy action packed day at sea” on a “ship filled with students from all over the country”.
Two jailed ahead of booze cruise rape trial Reviewed by Ajit Kumar on 8:50 PM Rating: 5
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West Bank and Gaza gripped by fresh violence
Five Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in Palestinian territories, while settler dies of wounds in ramming attack.
20 Oct 2015 22:05 GMT
Rights groups have decried Israeli measures as the government continues to crack down on Palestinians [AP]
At least five Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, while an Israeli settler died of his wound in a ramming attack.
The fresh unrest on Tuesday brings the death toll to 50 Palestinians and nine Israelis.
Two Palestinians were shot dead on Tuesday evening by Israeli fire in the city of Hebron in the West Bank after they allegedly launched a stabbing attack against soldiers. One Israeli soldier was reportedly injured.
Inside Story: What's fuelling the recent wave of attacks in Israel?
Palestinian media said the pair were teenagers from the same family. It remained difficult for the Palestinian Red Crescent to reach the scene of the reported incident near the Ibrahimi Mosque to retreive the bodies due to the restrictions imposed on Palestinians at Israeli-manned checkpoints.
Earlier on Tuesday, A Palestinian man identified as 24-year-old Adi Hashem Masalmeh was killed by Israeli forces near the city of Hebron in the West Bank after he allegedly tried to stab an Israeli soldier.
Israeli fire on Tuesday also killed 27-year-old Ahmed al-Serhi during clashes in the Gaza Strip border with Israel, Gaza medics said, in the latest unrest to erupt in the coastal enclave.
Elsewhere, Hamzeh Mousa Al-Amleh was shot dead by Israeli forces after he allegedly rammed his car into two people in Gush Etzion settlement, south of Bethlehem, lightly injuring both of them.
In a separate incident on Tuesday, an Israeli settler died hours after he was reportedly run over by a Palestinian man near Hebron. Witnesses said the settler was attacking cars in the area before he was hit by one of the vehicles.
Meanwhile, violent clashes broke out between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces at a rally in Beit El near Ramallah, where Israeli forces used tear gas to disperse the crowds.
Triggered by Israeli incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound last month, violence and protests against Israel's occupation have increased in frequency across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
Hamas leader arrested
On Monday night, Israeli security forces arrested Hassan Yusef, one of Hamas' top figures in the West Bank, in an overnight raid near Ramallah.
"During the night, forces of the army and the Shin Bet [internal security service] arrested Hassan Yusef, a Hamas leader, in Beitunia, southwest of Ramallah," an army statement said on Tuesday.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from the Gaza Strip, Hamas spokesman Ghazi al-Hamad said Yusef's arrest was "part of Israel's oppression of Palestinians".
"It's designed to keep Palestinians from resisting its occupation. The Israeli government is trying to pressure Hamas and other Palestinians in an effort to end the Intifada in Palestine," Hamad said.
Yusef has been arrested by the Israeli authorities several times, starting from 1993, and became the visible leader of the second Intifada which started in 2000.
In 2005, he was nominated to represent Hamas during the elections as an absentee candidate as he was in jail.
Rights groups have decried Israeli measures as the government continues to crack down on Palestinians.
In one week, Israeli police arrested more than 100 demonstrators and activists during protests in Palestinian areas, according to Adalah, a Haifa-based legal centre for Palestinians in Israel.
SOURCE: Al Jazeera And Agencies
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Fouad Alemadi majored in Business Administration and Marketing but has always shown interest in art since childhood. Between lectures he dedicated his time to drawing surreal images. One of the artworks he created between lectures won him a golden medal from the University of Kuwait.
After graduating, he moved to Qatar to join his father’s factory and it was then that he managed to dedicate more time as an Artist. He began studying the classic school of Art. Fouad Alemadi does not consider himself as a traditional man, so even in his surrealistic artworks, he tries to move away from tradition and create his own form of surrealism.
Alemadi’s artwork depicts several symbols which are linked to each other and allow the viewer to understand them, no matter what his culture, educational or social background is. In his artworks he also likes to combine European and Middle Eastern cultures.
He states that Surrealism is one of the toughest schools in Art. It is like classic Arabic poetry, which is based on analogy and places the artist in a coma, as if he were living in a dream with all of its illogical details, which come from the subconscious mind. Cultural and social details are translated into lines and colours not belonging to any period of time.
Fouad Al Emadi
• Kuwait University Gallery (for which he won a gold medal)
• 2000 Qatari and non-Qatari Gallery
• National Qatari day Gallery
• Creative Art Center Gallery
• 2015 Calcutta Art Biennale
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Mr. Church
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
Oscar (R) winners Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth are joined by Patrick Dempsey for the next chapter of the world’s favorite singleton in Bridget Jones’s Baby. Directed by Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones’s Diary), the new film in the beloved comedy series based on creator Helen Fielding’s heroine finds Bridget unexpectedly expecting. After breaking up with Mark Darcy (Firth), Bridget Jones’s (Zellweger) “happily ever after” hasn’t quite gone according to plan. Fortysomething and single again, she decides to focus on her job as top news producer and surround herself with old friends and new. For once, Bridget has everything completely under control. What could possibly go wrong? Then her love life takes a turn and Bridget meets a dashing American named Jack (Dempsey), the suitor who is everything Mr. Darcy is not. In an unlikely twist she finds herself pregnant, but with one hitch…she can only be fifty percent sure of the identity of her baby’s father. The much-anticipated third installment of the Bridget Jones’s franchise welcomes fellow Academy Award (R) winner Emma Thompson to the cast. Longtime collaborators Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title Films produce alongside Debra Hayward. Universal Pictures will distribute Bridget Jones’s Baby in North America and select international territories.
Ghostbox Cowboy
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Bruce Willis is back in another 'Die Hard'
Ed Symkus
Interview with Bruce Willis about his new movie.
What a disappointment. What a letdown. Big tough-guy actor Bruce Willis, he-man hero of the “Die Hard” films, the boxer who beat his opponent to death in “Pulp Fiction,” the crazy renegade cab driver in “The Fifth Element” is, alas, just an actor who puts on an image for the screen. When he ambles his way into the interview room, he’s laid back, mellow, wearing a smile and a twinkle in his eyes. He’s soft-spoken, and the slight gruffness in his voice is actually soothing.
Yet when the action begins, right at the start of “Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth installment in the popular series, he’s right up there, rolling with the punches and blasting away the bad guys.
Yes, John McClane is back, a single father of an almost-adult daughter and, of course, the only man on the L.A. police force who can save the world. The twist this time is that he’s -- in the parlance -- an analog cop who’s confronted with a digital problem -- a technological attack on the main computer systems of the United States.
As any serious actor will tell you, the real challenge isn’t anything that’s on the page, it’s how to do something fresh, how not to repeat yourself, even though in this case, it’s territory that Willis has visited before.
“It’s a weird thing for me to now be able to look at all four films and see myself growing old on film and playing the same character,” Willis says. “It’s just the nature of him being older that’s different.”
Then he brings up the plotline, explaining that McClane’s kind of out of his element with all of the advanced technology around him in the new story — and he works himself into the explanation.
“I try to keep up with technology,” he says.
Then he asks, “Do you know how things work?”
He points to the tape recorder in front of him and asks, “Do you know how this works? I know the sound waves somehow go from my voice into that little thing with slots, and it gets recorded on a little strip of magnetic tape. And that’s where I get lost, right there. Past that, I don’t know how it works.”
He pauses, smiles, and adds, “But I do have a computer.”
It’s been 12 years since “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” and almost 20 years since the original film.
Reminded of this, Willis laughs softly and says, “It was a lot easier doing stunts then than it is now. But that made it all the more interesting and challenging. What’s that thing they say about women — if they remembered the pain of childbirth, they’d never have another child? Well, time goes by, and it’s almost a year since we shot this film, and the memory of my own blood being spilled on the set is starting to fade. I got banged up a little bit, but I’m fine now, I’ve recovered.”
He does candidly wonder, though, about “Live Free’s” potential to fail.
“This is not a new film,” he says. “It’s another episode in a film that you’ve already seen. And around the third or fourth episode, things can start to fall apart. Sometimes films get put out there just to capitalize on the name of the movie. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make an interesting story that I would be able to watch five years from now. And I think we’ve done that. I also think we’ve lived up to the mythology of “Die Hard.”
As always, Willis’ schedule is packed. Last year he acted in “Alpha Dog,” “Lucky Number Slevin,” “16 Blocks,” “Fast Food Nation” and “The Astronaut Farmer.” This year he’s already appeared in “Grindhouse,” “Perfect Stranger” and, for about two minutes, “Nancy Drew.” He stars in the upcoming “Black Water Transit.”
But, he insists, there’s been no rhyme or reason in his choices.
“I’m just trying to keep myself interested,” he says. “Every time I take on a new job, it really is a new job. It would be like, after you leave here today, you would start working as a plumber this afternoon. And tomorrow you’d be working as a politician. It’s a new job every time. I try to do things that are diverse so when I’m sick of it all and I’m done with acting, I’ll have a portfolio.”
He stops and shakes his head, then says, as if to himself, “That’s a big word. But I try to have fun while I’m doing it. I’m still getting a kick out of it because I get to reload every time and try to do something different.”
“Live Free or Die Hard” opens on June 27.
Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.
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Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in stable condition
Published in : 2015-01-02 | by euronews (in English)
The condition of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz has been described as stable. The elderly monarch was admitted to hospital on Wednesday after ...
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince laid to rest in Riyadh
http://www.euronews.net/ Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was buried in Riyadh on Tuesday. Prince Sultan died in a New York hospital from colon ...
New Saudi King Salman appoints half-brother Muqrin as crown prince and heir
The new Saudi Arabian King Salman has named his half-brother Muqrin as successor to the throne. Salman, who is believed to be 79, has already appeared on ...
Tributes paid to late Saudi King Abdullah
US President Barack Obama is among those paying tribute to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, who has died. He had been in hospital for several weeks suffering ...
King Abdullah death: World leaders gather in Riyadh to offer condolences
World leaders have been gathering in Saudi Arabia to pay their respects after the death of King Abdullah. The visiting officials met Abdullah's successor, King ...
Late Saudi King Abdullah receives simple, traditional burial
The body of Saudi Arabia's late King Abdullah, one of the richest men in the history of the world, was carried to his funeral in a simple shroud in keeping with ...
World leaders pay tribute to Saudi King Abdullah
Tributes have been paid around the world to Saudi King Abdullah who has died. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, many senior dignitaries praised his ...
Heir to Saudi Arabia throne dies in US
http://www.euronews.net/ Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the half-brother of the King of Saudi Arabia, has died after being treated for an undisclosed illness ...
Saudi's King on TV
http://www.euronews.com/ Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has appeared on television for the first time since a lengthy operation on his back earlier this month.
Conservative interior minister named as Saudi Crown Prince
http://www.euronews.net/ The next in line to the throne in Saudi Arabia has been named as Interior Minister Prince Nayef. It follows the death of the previous heir, ...
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Asphalt Green
Upper East Side ▾
Sports Performance School
Teen Fitness
Mini-Camps
World-Renowned Coach Milt Nelms Brings Cutting-Edge Technique to Swim Program
Asphalt Green | Nov 15, 2017
World-renowned swim coach Milt Nelms is changing the way people learn to swim. Milt has worked with some of the biggest names in swimming, including five-time Olympic gold medalist Ian Thorpe, three-time gold medalist Natalie Coughlin, four-time gold medalist Dana Vollmer, and four-time gold medalist Missy Franklin.
Today, he brings his expertise to Asphalt Green. All of our swim programs—classes, recreational leagues, competitive teams, and our learn-to-swim Waterproofing program—started implementing Milt’s teaching techniques in fall 2017. Known as the “horse whisperer” of the swimming world, he has a knack for helping athletes of all ages and abilities reach their potential.
“What I do is very practical,” Milt says. “It’s physics of movement in water. My teaching techniques and mechanics are based on how the nervous system responds to water.”
A competitive swimmer throughout his childhood, Milt transitioned into coaching because he wanted to help people improve. He viewed the role as his responsibility to help the next generation of swimmers achieve more than he did. Later, he became interested in why people drown and strategies to prevent it. He compares his approach to teaching to his life growing up on a ranch in Oregon.
“The ranch was a remote place, and you have to learn to solve problems of physics,” Milt says. “You’re using machinery, tools, and your body as a tool. You learn how to get from point A to point B efficiently, which is the goal when you are in the water.”
Milt applies the same principles to beginner swimmers and elite athletes, and it starts with eliminating humans’ instinctive fear of the water.
“In the process of developing a program to disable fear of the water, I discovered the strategy was also helping people learn to swim very well,” Milt says. “That’s the basis of the program I’m bringing to Asphalt Green. It’s designed to work with swimmers of all levels.”
Though practical, there have been doubters along the road. Swimming has a strong culture, and some are resistant to change. The challenge for Milt has been determining the best way to communicate his approach.
The results speak for themselves. The program has just recently been implemented at Asphalt Green, and the kids in our learn-to-swim Waterproofing program are already mastering the skill at a faster rate.
Like his approach to swimming, his love for what he does is practical.
“If you enable somebody who would normally never learn to swim to love being in the water, then you have statistically saved lives,” Milt says. “But more importantly, when you are able to teach one person to swim, he or she is more likely to teach the next generation. If you teach 6,000 lessons per week, that’s a lot of swimmers and future generations of swimmers. That’s one of the beautiful things about youth sport.”
Learn more about our swim programs at our Upper East Side and Battery Park City campuses.
Why Pilates Will Make You a Faster Swimmer
5 Tips to Improve Your Basketball Game This Summer
Get Splashin’! Sprinkler Day is Back With Two Summer Dates
Swim,
© Copyright 2007 – 2019
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The ATM at 50 – What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
It’s hard to believe that the venerable ATM machine is 50 years old. The now-ubiquitous ATM has certainly evolved from it modest roots. And with apologies to the Grateful Dead, it truly has been a long, strange trip. Latest-generation ATMs have evolved to become the foundation for self-service banking as part of an omnichannel banking deployment for many of today’s tech-savvy banks and credit unions.
From its roots as a basic cash withdrawal machine with limited note selection and withdrawal amount options, to a multi-faceted financial services e-commerce device, the ATM has come a long way. Depending on the regions of the world and markets, ATMs can now accommodate a wide range of transactions. Examples can include the sale of transit tickets, mobile phone top-offs, and prepaid cards, as well as utility and credit card bill payments, mini-statements, currency exchanges, payroll withdrawals, the setting and re-setting of card PINs, and the delivery of targeted marketing messages, to name just a few examples.
Still, cash remains important in our society, with many consumers choosing ATMs as their preferred way to access their money. Cash is available from more than 400,000 ATMs strategically located at financial institutions or through independent ATM deployers in the U.S.
This ubiquity is important to many consumers and businesses. For example, a 2014 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco noted that consumers choose cash for about half of all transactions valued at less than $50, and cash remains the payment method-of-choice in many spending categories.
The widespread use of intelligent ATMs that use image-deposit technology in banks and credit unions has spurred an increase in new features and functionality being offered to their customers and members. In addition to offering envelope-free deposits, these ATMs typically offer easy-to-use touch screens, an ability to offer a wide variety of deposit and withdrawal options, and in some cases, proximity locators and NFC capabilities.
The ATM at the half-century mark has certainly aged well. It is the foundation for self-service banking, and has become a vital tool for today’s connected banking customer. It is also critically important to the success of many banks’ and credit unions’ omnichannel banking efforts.
© ath Power Consulting. All rights reserved. Redistribution or commercial use without the express written permission of ath Power Consulting is prohibited.
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D-Backs finding their groove vs. losing teams
The Diamondbacks, who were struggling when this homestand began, won for the fourth time in five games on Saturday night.
D-Backs finding their groove vs. losing teams The Diamondbacks, who were struggling when this homestand began, won for the fourth time in five games on Saturday night. Check out this story on azcentral.com: https://azc.cc/2LOgpVv
Nick Piecoro, azcentral sports Published 11:32 p.m. MT June 2, 2018
Arizona Diamondbacks vs. Miami Marlins
Arizona Diamondbacks' Paul Goldschmidt (44), Jake Lamb (center) and David Peralta celebrate their 6-1 win, sweeping the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
Arizona Diamondbacks center fielder Jarrod Dyson (1) and right fielder Chris Owings (16) field a ball off the wall by Miami Marlins' Justin Bour (41) during the ninth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt (44) waits for a replay ruling during the ninth inning against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
Arizona Diamondbacks catcher John Ryan Murphy (36) waits for a replay ruling during the ninth inning against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
Arizona Diamondbacks relief pitcher Jake Barrett (33) throws against the Miami Marlins during the ninth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman Jake Lamb (22) fields a ground ball by Miami Marlins' J.T. Realmuto during the ninth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Daniel Descalso (3) is tagged out at home by Miami Marlins catcher J.T. Realmuto (11) during the seventh inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/azcentral sports
An Arizona Diamondbacks fan waves a flag in left field seats during the seventh inning against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks center fielder Jarrod Dyson (1) pulls up at third base on a double by Ketel Marte against the Miami Marlins during the seventh inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Ketel Marte (4) is waved around third base by third base coach Tony Perezchica against the Miami Marlins during the seventh inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks center fielder Jarrod Dyson (1) is congratulated by left fielder David Peralta (6) and manager Torey Lovullo after scoring against the Miami Marlins during the seventh inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks center fielder Chris Owings (16) scores on a wild pitch by Miami Marlins relief pitcher Tayron Guerrero (56) during the eighth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Miami Marlins starting pitcher Dan Straily (58) throws against the Arizona Diamondbacks during the first inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Matt Koch (55) throws against the Miami Marlins during the first inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Miami Marlins catcher J.T. Realmuto (11) forces out Arizona Diamondbacks center fielder Jarrod Dyson (1) at home on the front end of a double play during the fifth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman Jake Lamb (22) against against the Miami Marlins during the first inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman Jake Lamb (22) looks back Miami Marlins third baseman Brian Anderson (15) before showing to first base during the second inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Matt Koch (55) wets his fingers while pitching against the Miami Marlins during the second inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed (13) fields a ground ball by Miami Marlins Starlin Castro during the third inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Miami Marlins center fielder Lewis Brinson (9) jumps for a ball hit by Arizona Diamondbacks' David Peralta during the fourth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks catcher John Ryan Murphy (36) watches a pop foul ball against the Miami Marlins during the fourth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed (center) and second baseman Daniel Descalso run off the field after completing a double play against the Miami Marlins and Derek Dietrich (left) during the fifth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Daniel Descalso (3) drops his bat on a fielder's choice groundout RBI against the Miami Marlins during the fifth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Hopi dancers perform for fans arriving at Chase Field before a game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Miami Marlins in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Navajos Tanya King helps her husband Allen before dancing with other Indian tribes at Chase Field before the Arizona Diamondbacks play the Miami Marlins in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Navajo Allen King dances with other Indian tribes at Chase Field before the Arizona Diamondbacks play the Miami Marlins in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Miami Marlins starting pitcher Dan Straily (58) throws against the Arizona Diamondbacks during the fifth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed (13) throws out Miami Marlins' Brian Anderson during the seventh inning at Chase Field in Phoenix June 3, 2018. Michael Chow/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Zack Greinke (21) throws during a MLB game against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Miami Marlins starting pitcher Caleb Smith (31) throws during a MLB game against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt (44) rounds the bases after hitting a homer against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt (44) high fives Arizona Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo (17) after scoring a homer against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte (4) foul tips a ball during a MLB game against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks right fielder Chris Owings (16) runs home in the second inning of a game against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte (4) runs home in the second inning of a game against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte (4) high fives Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Zack Greinke (21) after scoring a run in second inning of a MLB game against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Zack Greinke (21) stretches during an at bat against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018. Cheryl Evans/The Republic
Diamondbacks Jake Lamb (22) comes into home after hitting a home run in the second inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks David Peralta (6) high-fives Jake Lamb (22) after Lamb hit a home run in the second inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks David Peralta (6) celebrates hitting a home run in the third inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks David Peralta (6) high-fives Ketel Marte (4) after hitting a home run against the Marlins during the third inning at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Jarrod Dyson safely slides into second past a tag from Marlins JT Riddle during the fourth inning at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Clay Buchholz pitches during the fifth inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks John Ryan Murphy (R) celebrates a home run with teammate Jake Lamb (22) during the fifth inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Ketel Marte (4) rounds third and celebrates after a home run during the fifth inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Ketel Marte (4) comes home to high-fives from David Peralta (6) and manager Torey Lovullo (17) after a home run during the fifth inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Daniel Descalso (3) throws to first after recording a force out on Marlins Starlin Castro (13) during the first inning at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Clay Buchholz (32) pitches during the first inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Paul Goldschmidt (44) catches a foul ball against the Marlins during the first inning at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Clay Buchholz (32) watches a pop foul during the first inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Marlins Elieser Hernandez (57) pitches during the first inning against the Diamondbacks at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks David Peralta (6) celebrates an RBI single during the first inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Paul Goldschmidt (44) takes to the plate during the first inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Daniel Descalso (3) high-fives teammate Ketel Marte after scoring during the first inning at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Diamondbacks Clay Buchholz (32) watches a pop foul during the second inning against the Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 1, 2018. Patrick Breen/The Republic, Patrick Breen/The Republic
Arizona Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte (4) high fives Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Zack Greinke (21) after scoring a run in second inning of a MLB game against the Miami Marlins at Chase Field in Phoenix on June 2, 2018.(Photo: Cheryl Evans/The Republic)
Whether the Diamondbacks make it back to the postseason for a second consecutive year remains to be seen, but they are following the lead of last year’s team in at least one meaningful way. They are beating up on the bad teams.
By beating the Miami Marlins 6-2 on Saturday night, the Diamondbacks won for the second consecutive night and for the fourth time in five games on a homestand that also included the lowly Cincinnati Reds. The Diamondbacks will go for a sweep of the gutted Marlins on Sunday afternoon.
With Saturday’s win, the Diamondbacks improved to 18-11 (.621) against clubs with losing records. En route to 93 wins last season, they went 54-34 (.614) against losing teams.
Perhaps overshadowed by the Diamondbacks’ offensive struggles in May was that it happened against mostly competent teams, not that that’s an excuse for hitting .193 and averaging a scant 2.9 runs per game for a full month.
Goldy joyful to hit home run on his bobblehead night The Republic | azcentral.com
But in facing the two worst pitching staffs in the league in the Reds and Marlins this past week, the Diamondbacks have looked like a different team. They’ve hit .276 with a .927 OPS (on-base-plus-slugging) and are averaging a whopping 7.2 runs over the past five games.
“We didn’t really have much farther down to go so it was bound to get better,” Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt said. “We have to keep it going. It’s still really early in the year. It’s been a good five games. There’s a long way to go.”
On Saturday, Goldschmidt homered for the second time in the past three games and David Peralta homered for the second night in a row. Ketel Marte, who went deep twice on Friday, lined an RBI triple into the left-center field gap. The Diamondbacks had only six hits, but they also drew five walks and reached via a hit by pitch.
“When the guys in front of you are having good at-bats, it puts more stress on the pitcher,” Goldschmidt said. “You’re not just counting on that one opportunity. You get three, four or five opportunities and hopefully you can come through in one or two of them.”
That it’s happened to come against the teams that rank 14th and 15th in the National League in team ERA didn’t seem to detract from manager Torey Lovullo’s enjoyment.
“I feel like any big leaguer pitcher, no matter what team they’re on and how they’re performing, has quality stuff,” Lovullo said. “You can evaluate it by staffs and I understand what you’re saying, but big league stuff is big league stuff and our guys are going out there and executing and squaring up the baseball.
Lovullo: (Winning) starts with pitching The Republic | azcentral.com
“At times during the little rut that we had, we were missing some pitches that were out over the plate. I’m seeing the same velocities and better results right now. It’s nice.”
Saturday’s win also meant a return to the top of the NL West. The Diamondbacks, who fell out of first on May 20, moved a half-game up on the Colorado Rockies, who lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers earlier in the evening.
When it comes to the schedule, the only thing the Diamondbacks can do is play it. But the good news for them is that for as difficult as it was in May it appears far less challenging in June, with numerous upcoming series against clubs hovering at .500 or well below it.
“It was going pretty bad,” said Diamondbacks right-hander Zack Greinke, who gave up one run in 6 2/3 innings. “We can’t do much better than we’ve done so far this homestand. Hopefully, we can continue it. We’re playing pretty good. We should be able to continue it if we just keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll continue winning games.”
Chase Field springs a leak during Friday's Diamondbacks-Marlins game
Clay Buchholz shuts down Marlins for 1st win since 2016
Shelby Miller, Robbie Ray working their way back from injuries
Reach Piecoro at (602) 444-8680 or nick.piecoro@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickpiecoro.
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4th Islamic Solidarity Games Baku
Baku 2017 Islamic Solidarity Games to involve thousands of volunteers
Next spring will be another significant sporting season for Azerbaijan, which is going to host the 4th Islamic Solidarity Games.
Organizing Committee, Karate Federation mull preparations for Islamic Games in Baku
The Organizing Committee of the 4th Islamic Solidarity Games scheduled for May 12-22, 2017 in Baku met with representatives of the Azerbaijani National Karate Federation.
ISSF Executive Committee convenes in Baku
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President Aliyev receives ISSF head
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Baku as the new world sports capital
Azerbaijan’s capital Baku has now been officially appointed host country for the IV Islamic Solidarity Games - to be held in Baku-2017- after an official signing ceremony on April 7.
President Aliyev: Sport in Azerbaijan has never been so powerful
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev received athletes who won medals at the third Islamic Solidarity Games in Palembang, Indonesia, as well as their coaches and sports experts, on October 4.
53 athletes to represent Azerbaijan at Islamic Solidarity Games
53 athletes competing in nine disciplines will represent Azerbaijan at the third Islamic Solidarity Games to be held in Indonesia from September 22 until October 2.
Azerbaijan to host Islamic Solidarity Games in 2017
The eighth elective general assembly of the Islamic Solidarity Sports Federation (ISSF) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia has decided to hold the fourth Islamic Solidarity Games in Azerbaijan in 2017, the Azerbaijani National Olympic Committee said on July 24.
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Is everybody API?
Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been a standard method of interconnecting system components for decades, but in the past few years they have been discussed in the context of financial services as ‘a game changer’. A number of factors are behind this, but a striking fact is that they are now always referred to as open APIs – publicly available services that allow anyone to connect to services.
The word open is important for both the main drivers of API development in financial services: the rise of financial technology companies and regulatory initiatives to open up the market to further innovation and competition.
APIs are at the heart of smartphone applications and service-driven websites because they allow the app to pull in data from multiple sources and manipulate it in different ways. Many of these come from the world of financial technology, but usually they are limited in their functionality compared to some more general applications.
Spend any amount of time with app developers and you will soon be pointed in the direction of Citymapper, a smartphone app and website for navigating around cities. The cleverness of the app is not simply that it uses geographical information services to plot routes – the smartphone has that built in – but how it pulls publicly available information together. This includes real-time data from transit authorities and search information from Google, allowing the app to calculate routes comparing different modes of transport between different locations, to suggest alternatives and to point the user in the direction of nearby stops and so on.
Originally developed for London in 2012 (the year of the summer Olympic Games), it is available in 29 cities (including Singapore). That level of expansion could not have happened if the company had had to build the data sets itself. “Citymapper was started on the back of the open data movement – the idea that if you make information accessible, someone will make good use of it and people will benefit. We couldn’t have done what we did without the work done by many over decades in pushing this agenda,” the company says.
In financial services, the nearest equivalent is arguably the Open Bank Project, which describes itself as “an open source, developer-friendly ‘API for banks’ that developers and companies can use to build innovative applications and services based on the account holders’ transaction data”.
Founded in 2010 by Simon Redfern, chief executive of Berlin-based software company Tesobe, the original catalyst came from his idea of creating a bank where all transactions were visible to everyone. He believed this would help to fight corruption. The idea then matured into the concept of an API that “exposes transaction data in a simple and consistent structure by abstracting away the peculiarities of each banking system”.
It has now been tested by several German banks, including Postbank, GLS Gemeinschaftsbank and Landesbank Berlin. There are around 20 apps and services that can take transaction data via the API.
This capability has, unsurprisingly, caught the attention of larger banks, all of which have set up incubators and accelerator programmes to try to harness APIs. Developments are under way in both retail banking and transaction banking. For example, Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS’) global transaction services business is exploring collaboration with a number of start-up companies as a way of combining its own services with the innovation provided by smaller companies, through API sharing.
“Fintech start-ups are often agile, lean and nimble,” says James Lynn, head of e-channels, global transaction services at RBS. “There are obvious advantages for RBS to partner with some of these firms. That’s where the APIs come in. The concept is to enable the services provided by global transaction services to be accessed directly and securely by players in the market, such as fintechs, software firms or other service providers.”
It is this account access by third parties that is at the heart of governmental and regulatory reforms, with competition and innovation the goal, but while the Open Bank Project and others are well down the road, different government initiatives are running at different speeds and are not necessarily aligned.
Last year a report commissioned by the UK Treasury came down heavily on the side of pushing for a standard Open Banking API, arguing that “deployment of APIs would offer substantial potential for increased competition in the UK banking market and would enable innovative, value-added tools”.
The report concluded that APIs would mean that banks could securely pass personal account data (with the account holder’s permission) to another entity, enabling a number of competitive scenarios. These include comparison websites that find the bank account provider whose charges are best suited to a specific individual’s transaction behaviour. Other scenarios could involve lenders being able to access more details of a borrower’s creditworthiness (and so offer better terms) and personal finance management tools that aggregate data from a number of accounts and make suggestions for appropriate products or changes in behaviour.
Making the case for forcing banks to agree on an open API standard for third party access, the report specifically points out that not being fully open with the deployment of external APIs would constrain competition, especially in the consumer and SME banking markets: “There is an information asymmetry which means that banks’ customers may not know what their bank accounts cost them, impeding their ability to shop around. Alternative lenders may not have access to the same information about a borrower’s creditworthiness, so are less able to compete with banks on the pricing of loans. Likewise, because consumers’ banks have privileged information and access, competing providers of other financial products may be unable to overcome the barriers of a bank account’s gateway product status.”
Work is now under way (and under wraps) to develop a UK API, which HM Treasury has tasked UK Payments and Innovate Finance to produce before the end of this year. As if this were not a tight enough deadline, the situation is complicated by a parallel development in Europe, where one of the main tenets of the Payment Services Directive II is a provision for open access by ‘trusted third parties’ (TTPs) to ‘payment service user’ accounts for payment initiation and account information services.
Details of how this access to accounts mechanism is to be implemented by institutions have yet to be finalised. Recommended technical standards from the European Banking Authority are not expected to be issued for a year after the statute is issued in around the final quarter of this year. Most people agree that APIs are the obvious route.
“Though at first glance the requirements of open access to account information may appear little more than a technical compliance overhead, not only will banks need to create TTP-facing, open access front ends, there clearly will be technical challenges in the back office integration of the existing (sometime legacy) core banking systems to provide the data requested,” says Neil Clarke, head of market engagement for standards evolution at Volante Technologies.
But there are benefits for banks taking the leap, though opening the vault doors to customers’ data appears to offer little value to banks. However, they “should embrace this technology-based evolution, considering how, with customer approval of course, they can leverage the rich source of customer data they hold [about] payment profiles, know your customer information, finance history and so forth,” says Clarke.
Jerry Norton, vice-president, financial services, at systems vendor CGI, agrees that there are many complications. “What goes into the API is effectively a set of services that provide the external parties with basic payments capabilities,” he says. “It might be something simple like ‘make this payment now’ or ‘make this payment tomorrow’. It sounds very easy to do, but when you think through the consequences of it, it’s not so clear. What do you expose to external parties? It might be ‘make a payment’ but it’s not going to be ‘make a high value Chaps payment’, so how do you indicate that is should be a Chaps payment? I don’t think anybody has a smart answer to that, though people are thinking
about it.”
There are also potential issues that arise from local infrastructures and market practices, he says. “In the UK for instance, access to the Faster Payments system for many smaller institutions and payment services providers is via a sponsoring bank that has direct access. How would an API be configured to recognise a Faster Payment request from an indirect provider? And what would it do if the request was made out of hours? APIs aren’t really the right place to be building-in business logic and routing capabilities.”
Norton says banks are starting to realise that opening up via APIs is not incompatible with the systems architectures that have been evolving during the past few years. “I think the big change in the past 12 months – since last Sibos – is that effectively you are protecting the payment utility or hub by putting an API around it and that API potentially has to be published at some point – certainly in Europe – so that other people can have access to those services,” he says. “Those services are implemented through a set of technologies. It could be a payments hub, it could be a gateway to Faster Payments, or an FX conversion function. All of the big banks are thinking along these lines and the issue is at what granularity do you build that API? The picture is of an API that exposes a set of services externally and internally you’ll have a whole set of technologies. In effect, the whole thing is a sort of utility or payments factory. The API piece is the key difference between yesterday and today.”
The adoption of APIs poses some existential questions for banks with which they will have to come to terms. “If you make the API available, are banks forced into just being a transaction entity for payments?” says Norton “Or do they offer other functions? It’s a strategic decision and different banks will do different things.”
Clarke agrees: “With PSD II on the horizon and the general move towards more open consumer data, it’s not a case of if but when banks will need to consider their strategy in open banking,” he says. “It is worth noting that PSD II does not preclude banks themselves becoming TTPs potentially offering competing consolidated and innovative payment services to their clients.”
Whichever approach they take, be it becoming TTPs or forging alliances with emerging TTPs and financial technology companies, it is clear that the industry is on the brink of major change, says Norton: “We are now seeing real innovation from the banks, so the good news is that all this pressure from governments and regulators is pushing things in the right direction.”
Tags: BankingTech, FinTech, PayTech Analysis, Features
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Submitting Abstracts
Tutorials and Exhibitions
Student Poster Contest
Conference Sponsorship Form
Sixth International Conference on Water, Energy and Environment
ICWEE/6
March 26, 2019 to March 28, 2019
The conference promotes a global collaboration among faculty, students, engineers and managers on ecological economics and water, energy and environment resources management. It provides a forum for distinguished guest speakers and practitioners to address recent research results and to present and discuss related issues in energy, water and environment. A number of leading practitioners, policy makers and researchers will be invited to deliver keynote lectures.
The conference will include a peer-reviewed technical program, demos, short papers, posters, invited sessions, industrial presentations and exhibitions on topics such as:
water regulation and policies
water resources and sustainable development of the region
progress in water protection and remediation
economic management and development of water resources
other water-related topics
Bee’ah
Griffin Consultants
All abstract/extended abstracts (two pages in length) should be submitted via the conference website https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICWEE2019 or by email to ICWEE2019@aus.edu.
Presenters are solely responsible for submission and subsequent receipt of their abstracts. All extended abstracts must be received by December 30, 2018.
For accepted abstracts, at least one author must register for the conference in order for the paper to be published in the conference program and proceedings.
We encourage our colleagues to limit their submission to their best poster abstract. No more than two total abstracts per author will be allowed (one poster and one paper.
All submissions must be in Microsoft Word format. Each submission should include a separate title page listing the following: title of paper, author(s), organization affiliation(s), complete mailing address, email address and keywords (three to four keywords). All abstracts will be reviewed by members of the technical committee.
Selected manuscripts will be published in a special issue of selected journals such as Desalination and Water Treatment after the normal peer-review process.
Keynote I
Innovation & Environment Impact: How Sharjah is leading the Landscape for Change
Mr. Khalid Al Huraimel
Group Chief Executive Officer of Bee’ah, UAE
Khaled Al Huraimel is the Group Chief Executive Officer of Bee’ah, and has served in this capacity since August 2009. Under his leadership, Bee’ah has transformed from a waste management company, to a sustainability pioneer who is setting new benchmarks for quality of life across the MENA region.
Khaled has been the driving force behind Bee’ah’s vision for the future, facilitating the achievement of several remarkable milestones, such as building the first waste-to-energy plant in the Middle East through the Emirates Waste to Energy Company, a joint venture with Masdar. He has established ION, the first sustainable transport company in the UAE; and founded Evoteq to lead digital transformation through the creation of disruptive, technological platforms.
Taking the helm when Bee’ah was in the preliminary stages of pursuing a zero-waste ambition, Khaled enforced this ambition and took it even further. He implemented state-of-the-art solutions and a unique approach to a circular economy, supporting Bee’ah to establish the UAE’s first fully integrated waste management complex, and achieve the highest waste diversion rates in the Middle East. From improving the quality of natural resources like air and water, to executing awareness initiatives for communities, Bee’ah took a holistic approach to environmental management under Khaled’s stewardship.
Khaled has led the diversification of Bee’ah’s portfolio, investing in ventures ranging from renewable energy, to healthcare, mobility, and technology, to execute an all-encompassing master plan to raise living standards across the region. Championing the Middle East’s move towards green architectural solutions, Khaled is also overseeing the establishment of Bee’ah’s new headquarters. Designed by Zaha Hadid, the sustainable, net-zero energy building is slated be the smartest office in the region.
Prior to joining Bee’ah, Khaled held leadership roles at ENOC, Nakheel and Arabian Global Investments, using innovative insights to achieve remarkable results. He has also founded several successful startups.
Khaled graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Marketing, from King Fahd University, and an MBA from the University of Bradford. He also graduated from the Harvard Business School’s prestigious Senior Executive Leadership Program and the Dubai Leaders Programme at the Wharton Business School.
Keynote II
The Sustainability of Providing Water, Energy, and Food
Heriberto Cabezas
US Environmental Protection Agency
National Risk Management Research Laboratory
Pazmany Peter Catholic University
Center for Process Systems Engineering and Sustainability
The World is steadily moving into a major challenge. The challenge is how to provide for the growing and developing human population within the limits of one planet, the Earth, over the long term. The effort is known as sustainability. To explore this challenge, I will focus on the three closely linked issues of providing water, energy, and food. In addition, there is the issue of maintaining order and stability as necessary conditions for any kind of acceptable human existence. These issues, unfortunately, present critical but not well-bounded problems, and for that reason there are many more questions than answers. However, to explore the issues and their bounds, I will discuss what is known including some planetary limits and limits imposed by the known laws of Nature. This will include consideration of what exactly constitutes a sustainable system for water, energy, and food. While many considerations are possible, these can be condensed to about six requirements roughly representing human well-being, burden on land, energy resource use, efficiency of energy use, economic value productivity, and system stability. The application of these requirements to real systems will be discussed. The lecture will conclude with some thoughts on approaches stand a chance of adoption under current and foreseeable future conditions.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Heriberto Cabezas serves as Senior Science Advisor to the Land and Material Management Division in the U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), and as Professor at the Institute for Process Systems Engineering and Sustainability at the Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary. He is Chair of the Engineers Forum on Sustainability, a workgroup of all of the major professional engineering societies. His awards include: 1998 U.S. EPA Science Achievement Award in Engineering, 2007 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2011 Research Excellence Award in Sustainable Engineering from the AIChE, ORD Sustainability Award (team) from the U.S. EPA, 2013 Lawrence K. Cecil Award in Environmental Chemical Engineering from the AIChE. Dr. Cabezas holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a M.S. from the University of Florida, and a B.S. (magna cum laude) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering. He served as Embassy Science Fellow at the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia in 2014. His publications include over ninety peer-reviewed articles and chapters, two edited books, and major software. He is a Fellow of the AIChE, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Board Certified Member of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists. Dr. Cabezas’ current research interests focus on: (1) the design of sustainable chemical processes and supply chains, (2) the design of sustainable productions systems in the nexus of food-energy-water, and (3) global sustainability where he leads the international Workgroup on Global Sustainability from his appointment at the Pazmany Peter Catholic University.
Keynote III
The emerging application of 3D printing in desalination and water treatment processes
Dr. Hassan Arafat
Director, Center for Membrane and Advanced Water Technology
Additive manufacturing, also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, is a state of the art technology that has been gaining momentum in several applications including aerospace, automotive industry and the medical field. Recently, 3D printing has also gained attention as a promising fabrication pathway for key components of membrane-based systems for desalination and water treatment. Such system components that can potentially be fabricated via 3D printing range from large module parts, such as the anti-telescoping caps of reverse osmosis vessels, to the membranes themselves. Despite the promise 3D printing brings to this field, thanks to its agility in printing complex shapes, it still has several challenges to be overcome. Scalability, cost, build size, speed, resolution and the mechanical integrity of printed shapes are among the key challenges for this technology. Nonetheless, tangible advances were made in recent years in making a particular system component via 3D printing: the feed channel spacer. A handful of research groups around the world have made it their mission to print feed spacers with very interesting architectures and properties for a range of water treatment processes. For example, our group at Khalifa University in the UAE has successfully developed and tested 3D printed feed spacers with complex geometries based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) mathematical architectures. TPMS are surfaces that can be described mathematically such that they have no self-intersecting or enfolded surfaces. “Triply periodic” means that the structure can be patterned in the 3D space and “minimal surface” means that it locally minimizes surface area for a given boundary such that the mean curvature at each point on the surface is zero. The complex and intertwined minimal surface divides the space into two or more entangled convoluted domains, such that each domain is a single connected and infinite component. In nature, minimal surfaces topologies usually exist as interfaces separating two sub-volumes, as can be observed in soap films, cell membranes and butterfly wings, among others. These shapes have unique topological properties that proved them very beneficial as feed spacer designs in water systems, as was proven through several studies which we conducted over the past 3 years. The use of TPMS spacers not only resulted in enhanced mass transfer through the membranes, it also led to significantly curtailed fouling and pressure drop in the feed channels. This was shown for a wide range of water treatment systems, including reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration and membrane distillation.
Prof. Arafat is the director of the Center for Membrane and Advanced Water Technology and professor of chemical engineering at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, UAE. His current research expertise is in membrane-based desalination, with focus on third-generation desalination technologies such as membrane distillation (MD) and the development of novel membranes thereof. He initiated a new research trend on sustainable desalination, which integrates multiple multidisciplinary tools to enhance the prospects of deploying desalination, with the aim of achieving national water and food security. The concepts behind this trend are captured in his book: Desalination Sustainability: A Technical, Socioeconomic and Environmental Approach. Prof. Arafat received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Univ. of Cincinnati (Ohio, USA) in 2000 and a BSc in Chem. Eng. From the Univ. of Jordan. From 2000 to 2003, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory (Illinois, USA) as a postdoc then as a research scientist, developing processes for nuclear waste treatment at the United States Department of Energy (DOE) sites. Between 2003 and 2010, he was a faculty member of the Chem. Eng. Dept. at An-Najah University (Palestinian Territory). Between 2009 and 2012, he served as an adjunct associate professor of the Biological Eng. Dept. at Utah State Univ. (Utah, USA) and in 2010, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts, USA) as a visiting professor. He is a recipient of four research fellowships by the US National Academy of Science (USA), the Open Society Foundation (USA) and DAAD (Germany). Through his career thus far, he supervised more than 30 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students and received 23 research grants, exceeding $13 Million in funding. His research was published in 230 book chapters, journal papers and conference presentations, in addition to two US patents and 50+ keynote and invited talks worldwide. Among other honors, Prof. Arafat received the Khalifa Award for Education, presented by the President of UAE, the Mohammad Bin Rashid Medal for Scientific Excellence, presented by the Prime Minister of UAE, the United States Department of Energy Secretarial Honor Award, the Mondialogo Engineering Award by Daimler AG and UNESCO, and the Univ. of Cincinnati Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship.
Keynote IV
Computer Aided Methods/Tools for Sustainable Chemical Process and Product Design
Dr. Mario Eden
Department Chair and Joe T. & Billie Carole McMillan Professor
Process and product design problems by nature are open ended and may yield many solutions that are attractive and near optimal. It is incumbent upon the process systems engineering community to help bridge the gap between fundamental science and engineering applications as new research areas continue to emerge. This presentation will highlight several novel methods/tools for chemical process/product design, specifically: 1) Group contribution based synthesis of process flowsheets and 2) Chemical product simulator software for mixture/blend design.
A systematic group contribution based framework has been developed for synthesis of process flowsheets from a given set of input and output specifications. Analogous to the group contribution methods developed for molecular design, the framework employs process groups to represent different unit operations in the system. Feasible flowsheet configurations are generated through a computer-aided tool (ProCAFD) using efficient combinatorial algorithms and the performance of each candidate flowsheet is evaluated using a set of flowsheet properties. The design variables for the selected flowsheet(s) are identified through a reverse simulation approach and are used as initial estimates for rigorous simulation to verify the feasibility and performance of the design.
Mixture design is a Design of Experiments (DOE) tool used to determine the optimum combination of chemical constituents that deliver a desired response (or property) using a minimum number of experimental runs. While the approach is sufficient for most experimental designs, it suffers from combinatorial explosion when dealing with the multi-component mixtures found in e.g. pharmaceutical excipients and polymer blends. Use of computer-aided mixture/blend design (CAMbD) methods is finding increasing use because of their potential to quickly generate and evaluate thousands of candidate mixtures/blends of chemicals; to estimate a large number of the needed physico-chemical properties of chemicals and their mixtures, and to select a small number of feasible product candidates for further verification by experiments. This is a challenging task requiring data acquisition, data testing, model development, model-based design method development, etc., that needs to be integrated within a computer-aided framework. A systematic computer-aided framework has been developed and implemented in a product design software tool (ProCAPD). It contains a suite of databases of chemicals and properties, a library of property models, numerical routines to solve mathematical/optimization problems as well as various property based product performance calculation procedures.
Dr. Mario Eden is the Department Chair and Joe T. & Billie Carole McMillan Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Auburn University. His main areas of expertise include process design, integration and optimization, as well as molecular synthesis and product design. His group focuses on the development of systematic methodologies for process and product synthesis, design, integration, and optimization.
Dr. Eden’s research has generated 3 edited books, 141 refereed papers/book chapters and resulted in almost 400 presentations at national/international meetings, including 65 invited lectures and seminars. To support his research and educational activities, Dr. Eden has successfully secured almost $21.0M in extramural funding from federal industrial sponsors.
Dr. Eden is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2006), the Auburn Engineering Alumni Council Junior Faculty Research Award (2006), the William F. Walker Superior Teaching Award (2007), the Fred H. Pumphrey Teaching Award for Excellence (2009 and 2011), the SGA Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering (2009 and 2011), the Outstanding Faculty Member in the Department of Chemical Engineering (2009, 2011, 2013, and 2014), the Auburn Engineering Alumni Council Senior Faculty Research Award (2012), and the William F. Walker Merit Teaching Award (2014). As one of the founding members of Auburn University’s Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts, Dr. Eden and his collaborators received the AU President’s Outstanding Collaborative Units Award (2012). At the 2009 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD), he was honored with the Best Faculty Contribution Award. Dr. Eden was selected to participate in the 2010 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium. He was awarded the 2014 AIChE Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division Outstanding Young Researcher Award and is the recipient of the 2015-2016 Auburn University Creative Research and Scholarship Award (the highest recognition for research at Auburn University).
Dr. Eden received his M.Sc. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) degrees from the Technical University of Denmark, both in Chemical Engineering. He has been an active member of the process systems engineering community for almost 20 years. Dr. Eden was elected 2nd Vice-Chair and has previously served as a Director of the Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE (2013-2017) and is currently a Trustee of Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering (CACHE) Corporation. Dr. Eden was selected to co-chair the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference and also co-chaired the 2018 Process Systems Engineering conference (PSE 2018). He serves on the editorial boards for Computers & Chemical Engineering, Process Integration & Optimization for Sustainability, Clean Technologies & Environmental Policy, Chemical Process & Product Modeling, and the Journal of Engineering. He is a co-founder of the PSE for SPEED (Sustainable Product Process Engineering, Evaluation and Design) company.
Keynote V
Development of Advanced Functional Membrane Technologies for Enhanced and Selective Separation in Water and Wastewater Treatment
Dr. Renbi Bai
Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Polymeric membrane separation technology has increasingly, as well as widely, been used in various separation applications, especially in water and wastewater purification, now. The technology can provide many advantages such as a simpler system, with higher separation efficiency and, possibly, lower cost and lower energy consumption, etc. However, the technology still faces a number of major challenges for its more widespread and more effective applications. These challenges include: (1) Severe membrane fouling: Conventional polymeric membranes, for example, cannot be directly used for oil/water separation applications, due to the severe and rapid fouling of the membranes by oils and thus low water productivity and high operational cost. (2) Simple function and lack of selectivity: Most membrane separation is simply based on the size-exclusion mechanism. It may remove both harmful as well as beneficial components from water, without the capability to differentiate them. (3) Heavily experimental one and lack of predictivity: Membrane development and the selection of membranes for separation applications are still largely, or even completely, dependent on many repeated and often tedious experiments without any predictive capability: With so many types of membranes and diversified separation targets or conditions, there is a lack of predictivity that may guide new membrane development, proper membrane selection or the prediction of membrane separation performance.
In this presentation, I will address some of the progress in the above-mentioned challenge areas. Fundamental theoretical analysis is shown to be useful in new membrane development, and membrane fouling analysis. Multifunctional membranes are demonstrated to be an effective method to achieve selective separation, reduce energy consumption and possibly realize resource recovery as well as for risk warning, etc. A focus will also be put on a novel polymeric membrane prepared to have both super-hydrophilic and super-oleophobic surface properties through the approach of using a novel triblock copolymer as the additive. The membrane was tested for direct oil/water separation of artificial samples prepared from hexadecane, crude oil and palm oil as well as real samples collected from produced water in oil field, palm oil plant’s effluent, and lubrication oil emulsions from mechanical cutting factory, etc. in a wide range of oil concentration from a few hundreds to a few hundred thousand milligrams per liter in the feed. The experimental results indicate that, while the conventional polymeric membranes may be fouled within seconds, the novel polymeric membrane exhibited excellent performances, with high water flux and low flux decay, high or complete flux recovery by a simple physical cleaning (e.g., water flushing or backwashing) after a filtration run, while can achieve the oil removal efficiency at as high as 75 to above 99%, depending on the type and state of oil in the water medium. The developed novel polymeric membrane showed strong anti-fouling performance, even for the most difficult compound of oils, and hence have a great potential to be used as an effective method for oily wastewater treatment and oil recovery for many industries in the future.
Dr. Bai is a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his PhD degree from the University of Dundee, UK in 1994. He worked as the Technical Manager for the Asia Pacific Region with the Baker Process company, USA, for a few years and then joined NUS in 1999. One of his main research areas has been in the novel membranes and membrane technologies for special separation applications. He has published more than 80 papers in various leading international journals, with more than 5600 SCI citations (more than 8000 citations in Google Scholar). He has been granted more than 10 international invention patents, including the USA and European ones, most of them in the areas of novel membranes and composite photocatalysts. He has been serving as an editorial board member for various international journals, including Separation and Purification Technology. He has been invited to author the chapter of “Stimuli Responsive Membranes” in the ‘Encyclopedia of Membrane Science and Technology’ (published by John Wiley in 2013) and the chapter of “Materials Used in Membranes for Water Purification and Recycling” in the book of ‘Materials for a Sustainable Future’ (published by RSC, London, in 2012). He has also been invited to deliver a number of Plenary and Keynote lectures in major international conferences, including the World Particle Separation Congress (IWA, Toulouse 2007), etc.
The conference constitutes an excellent opportunity for participants to hear from experts about the latest developments in water and environmental technology and to get practitioners’ views of innovative practices in some of the leading organizations. Companies and individuals are welcome to submit proposals for tutorials (short courses) and exhibitions to be held in conjunction with ICWEE 2019. Please send your proposal by email to ICWEE2019@aus.edu.
The committee will also provide facilities for exhibitors during the conference. For more information, please email ICWEE2019@aus.edu.
The contest is open to graduate and undergraduate students. All student posters must be submitted during the call for papers and must be accepted for the students’ poster session to be entered into the contest.
Posters for the contest will be displayed and winners will be announced at the general poster session on March 28, 2019. prizes will be given to first, second and third-place prize winners at the conference banquate.
Poster abstractc/extended abstracts must be submitted by November 15, 2018.
Paper abstract/extended abstract submission: November 15, 2018
Poster abstract/extended abstract submission: November 15, 2018
Notification of acceptance: December 7, 2018
Tutorial/special session
proposal: November 30, 2018
Paper submission: December 30, 2018
Early Registration US $400 (By January 5, 2019)
On-Site Registration US $500
Student Registration US $200
Student On-Site Registration US $250
Registration fees include a leather briefcase, the conference proceedings USB, daily lunch, and the conference banquet dinner.
Taleb Ibrahim
Raafat Alnaizy
Yousef Haik
Hans G. Huber
Ibrahim Abu-Reesh
Antonio Baptista
Yung-Tse Hung
Zarook Shareefdeen
Paul Nancarrow
Kazi Parvez Fattah
Nabil Abdel-Jabbar
Sameer Al-Asheh
Ahmed Aidan
Mustafa Khamis
Sofian Kanan
Yehya El Sayed
Farid Abed
Mark Holtzapple, USA
Mahmoud El-Halwagi, USA
Ibrahim Dincer, Canada
Clayton Maugans, USA
Karl Rudolph, Germany
Stefania Paris, Germany
Nidal Hilal, UK
L. Rizutti, Italy
V. Nenov, Bulgaria
Tim Fuhrmann, Germany
Hisham Ettouney, Kuwait
I. Al-Mutaz, Saudi Arabia
Nabil Fayad, Saudi Arabia
Rodger Macfarlane, UAE
Tamer Gadallah, UAE
Youssef Mouneimne, Lebanon
Ramdhane Dhib, Canada
Mehrab Mehrvar, Canada
Fawzi Banat, Jordan
Mousa Abu Orabi, Jordan
S. Al-Sulaiman, Oman
K. Bourouni, Tunisia
Maazuza Othman, Australia
Joonkyu Kim, Korea
Sergio Mussati, Argentina
Tamer Shahin, UAE
Basem Yousef, UAE
Kazi Parvez Fattah (Co-Chair)
Mustafa Khamis (Co-Chair)
Yehya El Sayed (Poster-Chair)
Maruf Mortula
Abdallah Shanableh
Mohamed Abouleish
Naif Darwish
Dana Abouelnasr
Rana Sabouni
Hasan A. Hasan
Hassan Arafat
Hussein Ahmad
Farouq Mjalli
Jamil Nasser
Isaac Wait
Mohammad Hamdan
Habib-Ur Rehman
Mohamed Bououdina
Lucia Pappalardo
Aileen Yulay, ICWEE2019@aus.edu
Web & IT
Aniss Zakaria
Download & fill the Conference Sponsorship Form
This PDF is a fillable form, please download it and open it with Adobe Acrobat
For further information, please contact the organizers:
Dr. Taleb Ibrahim, Department of Chemical Engineering, American University of Sharjah
PO Box 26666, Sharjah, UAE | Tel +971 6 515 2460 | Fax +971 6 515 2979 | italeb@aus.edu
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Added Color
Mr. Industry
Brazil-born and Brooklyn-based Added Color are back with a new EP called Mr. Industry. The EP is a straightforward rock set and a set that can still impress people who respect the power that pure music, especially pure rock music can still have.
The EP isn’t over-polished and produced, it plays across as an organic sound. Guitarists Kiko Freiberg and Tim Haggerty play extremely well across these four songs and Kiko doubles as the vocalist for the band and does a tremendous job.
“Panic Attack” is a clear highlight off the EP, with it’s cool introduction and its frantic vibe sets the tone for the rest of the EP. The title track off the EP is perhaps the coolest song, Kiko really shows off on the song in the verses and the overall song is fun and interesting.
These five songs will find an audience, it might be a niche audience, but it will be an audience all the same. The band is actually really good but they took a different approach to this EP that won’t resonate with everyone, but it will get the attention of who it needs to.
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Football: Cyclones want better accuracy, an edge from QB Richardson
Oct 14, 2015 at 10:44 AM Oct 16, 2015 at 7:54 AM
Sam is still the man.
The Iowa State coaching staff is standing by starting quarterback Sam Richardson after a tough game against Texas Tech, though they did like what they saw from backup Joel Lanning in relief.
"I am not ready to throw Sam to the wayside," offensive coordinator Mark Mangino said. "I think he has proven he can play, and he will get his mojo back. I am confident of that this week.
"But we do know that we have Joel, who we do have a great deal of confidence in right now and we feel that he can play."
Coach Paul Rhoads was firm in his belief of Richardson after a 10-of-21 performance in which he threw for 139 yards (the fewest he’s thrown for since completing just 1 of 2 passes for 9 yards in a 48-10 loss to Oklahoma on Nov. 16, 2013), one touchdown and three interceptions in a 66-31 loss on Saturday.
But, he wants the fifth-year senior to put ISU’s receivers in a position to make plays.
"He didn’t throw the ball with the accuracy that we are accustomed to with Sam," Rhoads said, "so he has to get back to doing that.
"The offense is very manageable with what we are asking him to do with the efficiency that we are running the football with in the last three games."
Lanning impressed Rhoads and Mangino last week. The fourth quarter was his first extended time running the entire offense. Lanning was 5-of-9 passing for 41 yards and rushed for 17 yards and one touchdown.
"Joel played very well," Mangino said. "Look back probably until about last week of training camp until now, and he’s progressed enormously in the mental aspect of the game and his reads and his delivery of the ball.
"He throws the ball extremely well. He throws it with great spin. His accuracy has gotten so much better than when we first got here."
Rhoads wouldn’t say if Lanning will get additional playing time against No. 3 TCU on Saturday (6 p.m., ESPN2).
"Could be," Rhoads said. "Not saying it won’t happen. Not saying it will."
Richardson thought he pressed against Texas Tech. He realized the Cyclones needed to score repeatedly to match the Red Raider offense, and he tried to do too much.
"With an offense that’s scoring like that," Richardson said, "you’ve got to take every drive that you get and (you) can’t take any of them for granted, and then I think it’s trying not to push at the same time as well.
"Sometimes you are put in a situation like that and you can’t try to push to make plays in certain situations and try to take what a defense gives you."
He also is looking to improve his response to facing pressure.
"Maybe that built up in me," Richardson said, "just feeling stuff when it wasn’t there.
"Other than that, whatever it was, it was not making the right throws at the right time, and overthrowing. I think I sailed quite a few balls there at the end."
Mangino wants Richardson to play with an edge. The Texas Tech game may have provided Richardson with what he needs to do it.
"The impression I get of Sam is I think he’s a confident guy," Mangino said. "but every once in awhile, he loses that sense of urgency and just wants to go on ‘I’ve made this throw before. I’ve done this before so I can do it again.’
"Every play needs total focus every time you do it, no matter if you’ve run a play 200 times. You still got to take the same focus each time you execute that play."
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Mexicali Tour, From Tummy Tuck to Root Canal
Sat, 07 Jul 2012 09:50:32 -0700
Tourists often come to Mexican border towns looking for some kind of illicit adventure, trotting among the bars, strip joints and seedy motels that dot the streets. Here, though, the visitors are searching for something more basic: a root canal they can afford or surgery they have been putting off for months. Mexicali has adopted medical care as its primary tourist lure, and it has been attracting a growing number of health care commuters from California and other nearby states. Hospitals offer operations for gastric bypass, liposuction and chronic back pain. Dentists promise that extractions, fillings and whitening can all be done for less money. And ophthalmologists advertise laser surgery and routine exams. Thousands of people are crossing the border and driving to Mexico in search of care they either cannot afford or wish to get more cheaply. The influx has grown steadily over the last several years, attracting uninsured Mexicans who have made their lives in the United States and desperately need affordable care. But it increasingly includes a smaller but growing group of middle-class patients from all over the country looking for deals on elective surgeries that most medical insurance will not cover. “At first, I was like, Mexicali, where is that?” said Stephanie Rusky, a 26-year-old social worker from Perkins, Okla., who paid roughly $8,000 for some liposuction, a breast lift and a tummy tuck (a combination known as a “mommy makeover”) that would have cost about twice that in the United States. “But I asked every question I could think of and eventually felt really comfortable with it.” Last year, more than 150,000 patients drove to Mexicali, pumping more than $8 million into the city’s economy, officials said. There are some dozen hospitals that regularly see Americans, and many have a special administrator to coordinate medical and travel plans. With nearly 100 medical offices in a six-block radius, the city hopes to create a special medical zone by improving streets and sidewalks and adding more services for tourists. Just across the border in Southern California, the small city of Calexico has struggled for decades. The area has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Many of the residents in the Imperial Valley there rely on seasonal agricultural work and have no insurance. For them, coming to Mexicali for care can seem obvious. A few insurance providers have even expanded some coverage into Mexico, encouraging their customers to seek the less expensive care. A 2010 study showed that roughly 85 percent of those who crossed the border into Mexico for medical care were Spanish speakers. In strip malls and office buildings here, there are far more medical offices than anything else. Hotels offer special rates for patients, and the local tourism office has begun subsidizing van rides from Las Vegas to bring in those who would rather avoid the drive themselves. And this year, the government opened a special lane to allow medical tourists to bypass most of the wait on the Mexican side of the border, which can often take as long as three hours. The doctors, with strong support from the local government, are hoping to attract more Americans for elective procedures or more basic care that they may not be able to afford at home. And many here believe that the market will only grow as health care costs continue to rise and more people, particularly low-wage workers along the border, are desperate to find affordable care. Here, many Mexicans talk with pride about the easy access they have to their doctors, sending them frequent text messages with questions and expecting calls back within minutes. One oft-repeated anecdote illustrates a sign of more compassionate care: nurses will warm a patient’s hand before sticking him with a needle. “The people who live a few miles away from the US Mexico border can’t afford the care,” he said, “so we will provide it for them for less, whatever they need.” Since the special medical lane at the border opened at the end of April, doctors have issued roughly 1,600 passes, which are required to use the lane. “We want to make it as easy as possible, so that there is no hesitation to drive to Mexico,” said Diana Cota, who oversees international care at Hospital Almater, where roughly 20 percent of patients come from outside Mexico. “Even before the point where someone says they can’t pay for what they want in the U.S., we want them here.” ...
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White Evangelicals Flocking To GOP
Ralph Z. Hallow, Washington Times, Jul. 27
The party of John Kerry and John Edwards is improving its standing with minorities, but losing ground to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney among white evangelicals, a new survey found.
Those findings are bad news for Democrats assembled in Boston for their national convention, because white evangelicals and born-again Christians far outnumber blacks and Hispanic combined.
“White evangelicals and born-again Christians are 26 percent of all registered voters—that’s quite a big chunk—and the survey shows they are quite happy with Republicans,” said Adam Clymer, political director of the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey, which polled 3,715 registered voters nationwide July 1 to 21, with a margin of error of 1 percentage point.
“Whatever percentage the turnout of your voters, if you get another 1 percent of evangelicals and born-agains, that’s a lot more votes,” Mr. Clymer said. “It makes a lot more difference than getting an additional 1 percent of blacks or Hispanics.”
The good news for Mr. Kerry and his party is that the Annenberg survey also shows Republicans are failing to make the big gains they hoped for among minorities, especially Hispanics, in the past four years.
What might be more important to the electoral map, however, is that among registered white Protestants who described themselves as born-again or evangelical, Republicans now enjoy majority status, Mr. Clymer said.
Both political parties have been going all-out to stir their voter base to turn out in record numbers on Nov. 2, but although blacks and Hispanics are key constituencies for the Democrats, together they account for only 17 percent of registered voters. In contrast, white born-again and evangelical Christians are fully 26 percent of all registered voters.
And 51 percent of those white evangelical and born-again Christians now call themselves Republicans, up eight percentage points from four years ago, when 43 percent called themselves Republicans.
Only 22 percent of white evangelicals say they are Democrats, down slightly from four years ago, when 24 percent said they were Democrats.
For registered black voters, it’s a wholly different partisan story, with 66 percent calling themselves Democrats and only 7 percent Republicans. That represents almost no change from the 65 percent to 7 percent ratio the survey reported in 2000. Actual black turnout for Democrat Al Gore in 2000 was higher, with 90 percent of black voters opting for the Democratic ticket, according to exit polls
Among registered Hispanics, the fastest-growing component of the electorate, Democrats outnumber Republicans 45 percent to 24 percent. In 2000, only 39 percent of Hispanics said they were Democrats. The Democratic gain occurred despite Mr. Bush’s proposals earlier this year to accommodate illegal immigrants and the American businesses that hire them.
But although Hispanic Democrats are a critical voter group in about four states, Mr. Clymer said, white Protestants are critical in many more states.
The biggest Hispanic populations are in California and New York, both firmly in the Democratic column, and in solidly Republican Texas. The battleground states where Hispanics can make a difference are Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Nevada, he said.
“Born-again and evangelical white Protestants are all over the country, and they matter everywhere,” Mr. Clymer said. “And their attitudes don’t change much regionally. There are more of them in the South than the Northeast, but they are just as much pro-Bush and pro-Republican in general in either place.”
He noted that the more regularly white Protestants attend church, “the more conservative, pro-Republican and pro-Bush they tend to be.”
Blacks, Hispanics Resist Republican Appeals But Conservative White Christians Are Stronger Supporters Than In 2000, National Annenberg Election Survey Data Show
Annenberg Public Policy Center, Jul. 25
Republicans have failed to make the significant gains they hoped for among minority voters in the last four years, but their core support among evangelical and born-again white Protestants is stronger, the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey shows.
As the Democratic National Convention begins, 66 percent of African-American registered voters called themselves Democrats and just 7 percent say they are Republicans, numbers almost unchanged since 2000, when it was 65 to 7 percent. Among registered Hispanics, Democrats now outnumber Republicans 45 to 24 percent, compared to a 39 to 21 percent margin in 2000. But among registered white Protestants who described themselves as born-again or evangelical—a share of the population bigger than blacks and Hispanics together—Republicans now enjoy majority status. Fifty-one percent of this group called themselves Republicans, while 22 percent said they were Democrats. Four years ago, 43 percent said they were Republicans and 24 percent said they were Democrats. The data, derived from interviews with 3,715 registered voters between July 1 and 21, also showed George W. Bush more popular with evangelical and born-again white Protestants and less popular among blacks and Hispanics than he was among 3,311 registered voters interviewed by the 2000 Annenberg survey from July 1 through 21, 2000.
Seventy-one percent of registered white evangelical and born-again Christians now view Bush favorably and just 19 percent see him unfavorably, up from 63 percent favorable, 19 percent unfavorable in 2000. That ratio is reversed among African-Americans, where 12 percent view Bush favorably and 72 percent unfavorably. In July of 2000, 34 percent had a favorable view and just 40 percent an unfavorable opinion. -More- 1 1 Page 2 3 Annenberg Public Policy Center 2 Despite their Democratic leaning, Hispanics still had a positive balance of opinion on Bush. Forty-eight percent had a favorable view, and 38 percent an unfavorable view. But at this point in 2000, 56 percent of Hispanics had a favorable opinion of Bush and 30 percent an unfavorable opinion.
The data offered mixed messages about the degree of motivation among these groups, all of whom are heavily targeted in get-out-the-vote efforts. Among registered voters, 30 percent of the evangelical and born again white Protestants, 27 percent of the African-Americans and 24 percent of the Hispanics said they were following the presidential campaign very closely.
Another important measure of interest showed a dramatic increase since four years ago for all groups, but most of all for Hispanics. Thirty-two percent of the evangelical and born-again white Protestants said they had discussed politics with family or friends at least four days in the last week, double the 16 percent of four years ago.
For registered Hispanics, the percentage was 31 percent, up from 10 percent in 2000. And for blacks it was 28 percent, up from 11 percent in 2000. For all registered voters, it was 34 percent, up from 15 percent in 2000. Another measurement reflected greater Hispanic interest this time. When all 4,275 citizens in the survey were considered, 76 percent of all Hispanic citizens said they were registered to vote. Four years ago, the comparable percentage was only 60 percent. For blacks, the current percentage was 76 percent, down from 82 percent and for white born-again and evangelical Protestants, it was 88 percent, up from 82 percent. On a range of answers from registered voters, the born-again or evangelical white Protestants were more supportive of Bush and more conservative than other groups. For example, 72 percent of them approved of his handling of the presidency, compared to 53 percent for white Protestants who said they were not born-again or evangelical, 51 percent for white Catholics, 52 percent for Hispanics and 14 percent for African-Americans. Fifty-seven percent of the born-again or evangelical Protestants said they favored a constitutional amendment to prohibit states from having same-sex marriages, compared to 38 percent of other white Protestants, 39 percent of white Catholics, 45 percent of Hispanics and 39 percent of blacks.
On Iraq, 63 percent of the born-again or evangelical white Protestants said the war there had been worth it, while 32 percent said it had not. Other white Protestants split evenly, with 49 percent giving each answer. Forty-four percent of white Catholics said the war was worth it while 51 percent said it was not. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanics said it was worth it, while 66 percent said it was not. Among blacks, just 9 percent said the war was worth it while 84 percent said it was not.
On these issues and many others, those who attended church more often tended to be more conservative, more Republican and more pro-Bush. For example, among born-again or evangelical white Protestants, 78 percent of those who attended religious services once a week or more approved of Bush’s handling of the presidency, while only 60 percent of those who attended less often. Among blacks, while the percentage approving was low among both groups, 18 percent of the more frequent church attenders approved and only 9 percent of the less frequent attenders did. Among blacks 37 percent of those who attended church more than once a week favored banning all abortion, a view held by only 17 percent who attended less frequently. Among the born-again or evangelical white Protestants, 61 percent of those who attended weekly or more often favored a ban but just 25 percent of those who came less frequently.
With both campaigns arguing intensely about values, the contrasts between blacks and evangelical or born-again white Protestants were sharp. Forty-seven percent of registered black respondents rated Kerry above Bush on sharing their values, while 10 percent rated Bush higher. Among the evangelical or born-again white Protestants, 63 percent rated Bush higher and 21 percent gave Kerry an edge. The favorable and unfavorable opinions of Kerry, whom the Democrats will nominate for President in Boston this week, were not very different from attitudes toward Al Gore four years ago. Blacks were 65 percent favorable, 10 percent unfavorable on Kerry, compared to 69 to 13 percent for Gore in 2000. Hispanics were 45 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable, compared to 63 percent favorable and 23 percent unfavorable in 2000. But only 25 percent of evangelical or born again-white Protestants viewed Kerry favorably, while 50 percent viewed him unfavorably. Four years ago, 32 percent of them viewed Gore favorably and 49 percent viewed him unfavorably.
Topics: Elections
< Caucasian Club Likely To Draw Fire
Drennan: Killed For Being White >
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Business selected
Jimmy Choo bought by luxury goods firm Labelux
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13499644
Image caption The brand was founded in 1996 by Jimmy Choo and Tamara Mellon
UK shoe maker and retailer Jimmy Choo has been bought from TowerBrook Capital Partners by luxury goods group Labelux.
The size of the deal, which should be completed in June, has not been disclosed.
Jimmy Choo was founded in 1996 in London by current chief creative officer Tamara Mellon, a former Vogue editor, and shoemaker Jimmy Choo, who sold his interest in 2001.
Labelux was founded by Germany's billionaire Reimann family in 2007.
It is based in Vienna, Austria, and its other investments include shoemaker Bally.
Ms Mellon and chief executive Joshua Schulman will stay on in their current jobs as part of the deal.
TowerBrook Capital Partners bought Jimmy Choo in 2007 for £185m.
It has developed the company into a global brand, which last year reported net sales of £150m.
Milan Station handbag firm surges on Hong Kong debut
TowerBrook Capital Partners
Labelux
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Sally Beauty Supply Names Sharon M. Leite as President
Sally Beauty Holdings has named retail executive Sharon M. Leite president of the Sally Beauty Supply, U.S. and Canada business, effective Feb. 1.
“Sharon is a dynamic executive with deep retail experience,” said Chris Brickman, president and CEO of Sally Beauty Holdings. “She brings a keen understanding of customer engagement and a proven track record of building and driving sales in a demanding retail environment. I am confident that her consumer-led approach will accelerate our progress in becoming the leading provider of salon-quality products in the retail sector. Under Sharon’s leadership, and with the help of our talented team of retail executives at Sally, we believe the team can take the business to the next level of growth and performance.”
Leite has more than 25 years of experience in the retail sector. Prior to joining Sally Beauty, she held various executive-leadership roles since 2007 at Pier 1 Imports as an executive vice president. She led the global importer of decorative home furnishings and gifts' sales and customer-experience strategies. Pier 1 Imports has more than 20,000 field associates in 1,000-plus stores in the United States and Canada. In addition, her responsibilities included ecommerce, operations and real estate.
Prior to joining Pier 1 Imports, she served as vice president of sales and associate marketing (2007), vice president of store operations (2001-2006), and director of store operations and sales support (1999-2001) for Bath and Body Works—an international retailer specializing in bath-and-beauty products.
“It is an honor to be named president of Sally Beauty,” stated Leite. “Sally Beauty has taken great strides to articulate its value proposition to the consumer and improve the in-store shopping experience, resulting in a strong foundation for continued success. I look forward to working with the Sally Beauty executive team and store team. I share their passion for superior customer service and support their initiatives already under way. Given the company's long-term history in a very resilient industry, I have great confidence that we can continue our growth trajectory and succeed.”
[Image courtesy of Sally Beauty Holdings]
new president
Sharon M. Leite
Sally Beauty Holdings
beauty supply chains
international beauty retail
Chrick Brickman
beauty retail chains
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beauty business news
beauty distributor
SBH
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Author (1898-1963)
C.S. Lewis was a prolific Irish writer and scholar best known for his 'Chronicles of Narnia' fantasy series and his pro-Christian texts.
Who Was C.S. Lewis?
Born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland, C.S. Lewis went on to teach at Oxford University and became a renowned Christian apologist writer, using logic and philosophy to support the tenets of his faith. He is also known throughout the world as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series, which have been adapted into various films for the big and small screens.
C.S. Lewis Books & Film Legacy
Lewis was a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction who wrote dozens of books over the course of his career. His faith-based arguments as seen in texts like The Great Divorce (1946) and Miracles (1947) are held in high regard by many theologians, scholars and general readers. His satirical fiction novel The Screwtape Letters (1942) is also a beloved classic. Lewis also continued his love affair with classic mythology and narratives during his later years: His book Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956) featured the story of Psyche and Cupid. He also penned an autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955).
Lewis' landmark series, The Chronicles of Narnia, has seen a number of on-screen iterations, including a cartoon version of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe that was released in 1979 and a 1989 BBC film series. Additionally, in 2005, a big-screen adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe hit movie theaters, starring Tilda Swinton as the witch Jadis and Liam Neeson as the voice of Aslan. Two more Narnia films were brought to theaters as well: Prince Caspian (2008) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). A movie version of The Silver Chair was slated to hit theaters in the near future, with filming starting in the winter of 2018.
Lewis' relationship with his wife, Joy, has also been depicted in Shadowlands, presented as a play and two films; one of the film versions was directed by Richard Attenborough and starred Anthony Hopkins as Lewis.
'The Chronicles of Narnia'
During the 1940s, Lewis began writing the seven books that would comprise The Chronicles of Narnia children's series, with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) being the first release. The story focused on four siblings who, during wartime, walk through an armoire to enter the magical world of Narnia, a land resplendent with mythical creatures and talking animals. Throughout the series, a variety of Biblical themes are presented; one prominent character is Aslan, a lion and the ruler of Narnia, who has been interpreted as a Jesus Christ figure. (Lewis would assert that his Narnia stories weren't a direct allegory to the real world.)
Though the book received some negative reviews, it was generally well received by readers, and the series retained its international popularity over the following decades.
Early Life in Belfast, Ireland
Author Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on November 29, 1898, to Flora August Hamilton Lewis and Albert J. Lewis. As a toddler, Clive declared that his name was Jack, which is what he was called by family and friends. He was close to his older brother Warren and the two spent much time together as children. Lewis was enraptured by fantastic animals and tales of gallantry, and hence the brothers created the imaginary land of Boxen, complete with an intricate history that served them for years. Lewis' mother died when he was 10, and he went on to receive his pre-college education at boarding schools and from a tutor. During WWI, he served with the British army and was sent home after being wounded by shrapnel. He then chose to live as a surrogate son with Janie Moore, the mother of a friend of Lewis' who was killed in the war.
Teaching Career at Oxford and Wartime Broadcasts
Lewis graduated from Oxford University with a focus on literature and classic philosophy, and in 1925 he was awarded a fellowship teaching position at Magdalen College, which was part of the university. There, he also joined the group known as The Inklings, an informal collective of writers and intellectuals who counted among their members Lewis' brother Warren and J.R.R. Tolkien. It was through conversations with group members that Lewis found himself re-embracing Christianity after having become disillusioned with the faith as a youth. He would go on to become renowned for his rich apologist texts, in which he explained his spiritual beliefs via platforms of logic and philosophy. Lewis began publishing work in the mid-1920s with his first book, the satirical Dymer (1926). After penning other titles — including The Allegory of Love (1936), for which he won the Hawthornden Prize — he released in 1938 his first sci-fi work, Out of the Silent Planet, the first of a space trilogy which dealt sub-textually with concepts of sin and desire. Later, during WWII, Lewis gave highly popular radio broadcasts on Christianity which won many converts; his speeches were collected in the work Mere Christianity.
Marriage and Later Life
In 1954, Lewis joined the faculty of Cambridge University as a literature professor, and in 1956 he married an American English teacher, Joy Gresham, with whom he had been in correspondence. Lewis was full of happiness during the years of their marriage, though Gresham died of cancer in 1960. Lewis grieved deeply for his wife and shared his thoughts in the book A Grief Observed, using a pen name.
In 1963, Lewis resigned from his Cambridge position after experiencing heart trouble. He died on November 22, 1963, in Headington, Oxford.
Guion S. Bluford
Christa McAuliffe
Augusta Savage
George C. Wallace
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Myth & Legend Told As Fiction
Who Fears Death
3.96 (14,293 ratings by Goodreads)
By (author) Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
US$8.25 US$8.99 You save US$0.74
Now optioned as a TV series for HBO, with executive producer George R. R. Martin! An award-winning literary author enters the world of magical realism with her World Fantasy Award-winning novel of a remarkable woman in post-apocalyptic Africa. In a post-apocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways; yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. A woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert, hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand. Gripped by the certainty that her daughter is different--special--she names her Onyesonwu, which means "Who fears death?" in an ancient language. It doesn't take long for Onye to understand that she is physically and socially marked by the circumstances of her conception. She is Ewu--a child of rape who is expected to live a life of violence, a half-breed rejected by her community. But Onye is not the average Ewu. Even as a child, she manifests the beginnings of a remarkable and unique magic. As she grows, so do her abilities, and during an inadvertent visit to the spirit realm, she learns something terrifying: someone powerful is trying to kill her. Desperate to elude her would-be murderer and to understand her own nature, she embarks on a journey in which she grapples with nature, tradition, history, true love, and the spiritual mysteries of her culture, and ultimately learns why she was given the name she bears: Who Fears Death.
Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
Imprint DAW BOOKS
Publication City/Country New York, United States
Praise for Who Fears Death "Haunting and absolutely brilliant. My heart and guts are all turned inside out." --John Green, New York Times-bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars "Who Fears Death is one of the most striking, chilling, truly fascinating, and all-around remarkable novels I've read in a very long time." --Peter S. Beagle, bestselling author of The Last Unicorn "Nnedi Okorafor is American-born but her Nigerian blood runs strong, lacing her work with fantasy, magic and true African reality. Many people need to read Who Fears Death, it's an important book." --Nawal El Saadawi, bestselling author of Woman at Point Zero "To compare author Nnedi Okorafor to the late Octavia E. Butler would be easy to do, but this simple comparison should not detract from Okorafor's unique storytelling gift." --New York Journal of Books "Both wondrously magical and terribly realistic." --The Washington Post "Believable, nuanced characters of color and an unbiased view of an Africa full of technology, mysticism, culture clashes and true love." --Ebony Magazine (editor's pick) "A fantastical, magical blend of grand storytelling." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Beautifully written, this is dystopian fantasy at its very best. Expertly exploring issues of race, gender, and cultural identity, Okorafor blends future fantasy with the rhythm and feel of African storytelling. " --Library Journal (starred review) "Her pacing is tight. Her expository sections sing like poetry. Descriptions of paranormal people and battles are disturbingly vivid and palpable. But most crucial to the book's success is how the author slowly transforms Onye's pursuit of her rapist father from a personal vendetta to a struggle to transform the social systems that created him." --The Village Voice
"Okorafor is a master storyteller who combines recent history, fantasy, tradition, advanced technology, and culture into something wonderful and new that should not be missed." --RT Book Review (top pick)
About Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Nnedi Okorafor was born in the United States to two Igbo (Nigerian) immigrant parents. She holds a PhD in English and is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University. She has been the winner of many awards for her short stories and young adult books, and won a World Fantasy Award for Who Fears Death. Nnedi's books are inspired by her Nigerian heritage and her many trips to Africa. She lives in Chicago with her daughter Anyaugo and family. She can be contacted via her website, www.nnedi.com, or on Twitter at twitter.com/nnedi.
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Morning sports update: Aaron Hernandez allegedly sold his Patriots jersey number for drug money
The story is detailed in a new biography written by Hernandez's former attorney.
Aaron Hernandez in March 2017. –Pat Greenhouse / The Boston Globe
Mark Dunphy
Xander Bogaerts hit two solo homers and Mitch Moreland added a two-run homer as the Red Sox beat the Indians 10-4 on Wednesday night to halt their three-game losing streak. Andrew Benintendi had a three-run double to cap a big fourth inning for the Sox, which lost the previous two nights in a matchup of AL division leaders.
Here are some more sports headlines to get you caught up this morning:
Aaron Hernandez allegedly sold his Patriots jersey number for drug money
Jose Baez reveals a number of details about Aaron Hernandez in his new biography of the former Patriots player, outlining a trade request Hernandez made to Bill Belichick and publishing the letters he sent from prison. The attorney, who represented Hernandez in his 2017 double-murder trial in Boston, also relayed a story involving the tight end’s jersey number, Chad Ochocinco, and an alleged drug deal.
Hernandez wore No. 85 as a rookie in New England in 2010-11. After the season, the Patriots acquired Ochocinco in a trade with the Cincinnati Bengals. Per Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel, Baez writes in “Unnecessary Roughness: Inside the Trial and Final Days of Aaron Hernandez” that Hernandez saw a business opportunity in the veteran wide receiver’s arrival.
Hernandez offered to sell his number to Ochocinco, who had legally changed his name from Chad Johnson to the Spanish word for “eighty five,” for $75,000, according to Baez. Ochocinco countered with an offer of $50,000, which Hernandez accepted. He then took the funds and “floated” them to his cousin’s husband, T.L. Singleton, who allegedly used the money to finance a wholesale drug deal and gave Hernandez back $120,000, Baez wrote.
Both players told ESPN at the time that no money had been exchanged to facilitate the number change. Hernandez said he was simply welcoming a new teammate, noting that he “thought [Ochocinco] may look better and play better in 85, because that’s his last name. So why not give it to him?”
Ochocinco added that the gesture was “Mr. Hernandez’s way of greeting me here. He gave me the number. I didn’t have to pay anything.”
According to the book, Hernandez initially denied to Baez that the money was used for a drug sale but eventually changed his tune.
“OK, I knew what he was going to do with it, but it was not something we ever spoke of,” Hernandez said, per Baez. “He just paid me back.”
‘I definitely have gotten a lot stronger’: Here’s what Jayson Tatum’s been up to: The Celtics forward has been all over the map after an impressive rookie year, working out with Kobe Bryant, returning home to St. Louis to have his high school jersey retired, and talking trash to Joel Embiid. Tatum says it doesn’t matter whether he starts or comes off the bench this season.
“I understand how deep our team is,” he said. “I just care about winning and doing what I can while I’m on the floor.” (Boston.com)
The Patriots’ wide receiver depth chart just lost another player: The Patriots released Kenny Britt, who was struggling with a hamstring injury he picked up during minicamp in June. The wideout signed with New England in December and played in three games last season. (Boston.com)
What Tom Brady had to say about his new helmet: The Patriots quarterback was one of several NFL players who had to change their helmets by the start of the 2019-20 season after 10 styles were banned by the league for performing poorly in laboratory tests.
“Hopefully, the helmet provides more protection,” Brady said. “I’ve been wearing a very old helmet for a long period of time, but it’s worked pretty well, too, so that’s why I haven’t been — I’ve been a little hesitant to change.” (Boston.com)
Daily highlight:
❌^2 pic.twitter.com/3gHiYUIOoK
— Boston Red Sox (@RedSox) August 23, 2018
TOPICS: Patriots Aaron Hernandez
Cardinals great Bob Gibson fighting pancreatic cancer July 14, 2019 | 5:39 PM
Federer comes so close to 9th Wimbledon title before losing to Djokovic July 14, 2019 | 4:33 PM
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The benefits and health risks of beer and wine
By Robert Weisman Globe Staff,November 17, 2013, 12:00 a.m.
Resveratrol, a phytonutrient found in red wine, helps to protect the cardiovascular system and guard against osteoporosis, a bone condition of particular concern to postmenopausal women, doctors say.(istockphoto)
More than a few baby boomers imbibed too much during their misspent youth, leaving them with a lifelong apprehension of what can come from drinking alcohol.
But a raft of medical studies over the past generation shows that alcohol has proven health benefits, provided you drink in moderation — one or two drinks a day, three or four days a week. Many doctors say the findings are no longer in doubt, even if some boomers with long memories continue to be skeptical.
“There’s no question that people who drink moderately have lower rates of heart attacks, lower rates of diabetes, and live longer,” said Dr. Eric Rimm, associate professor in the departments of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. “If you ask most cardiologists, they would say drinking in moderation is beneficial.”
Even more interesting: People who only drink occasionally, or on weekends, aren’t likely to enjoy the same health benefits as those who drink every other day, Rimm suggested. Alcohol reduces the risk of blood clotting in the 24 hours after drinking, for example, but not in the days after. Other benefits, such as a rise in good cholesterol, making it easier to process glucose, are more likely to extend throughout the week.
While the research shows health advantages of both beer and wine — without, for the most part, distinguishing between them — epidemiologists and cardiovascular specialists say there is still much to know about the specific effects of each beverage. Many are calling for a five-year randomized clinical trial to be sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that would focus, among other things, on how drinking beer affects the body, everything from bone density to how food is metabolized compared with drinking wine.
“The evidence now is there’s no huge difference in beverage choice,” Rimm said. “The pattern of drinking is much more important than the choice of beverage. But it would be interesting to do a long-term clinical trial.”
Until such a trial is completed, specialists are left with the results of previous studies, including some lesser-known ones that focused on benefits from alcohol that go beyond heart health.
In one such study, Dr. Katherine L. Tucker, now a professor of nutritional epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, working with researchers in the United States and Europe, found both beer and wine consumption protected bone mineral density in men and women.
“Moderate alcohol consumption is good for the heart,” Tucker said. “But it’s also reliably associated with protecting the bones, which start to get more porous as we age. And that’s even less well known. If you drink, one or two drinks a day definitely improves your bones.”
Tucker is quick to add, however that such a regimen must be carefully balanced against drinking’s risks.
Topping the list is the risk of drinking too much, which can lead to alcoholism and a variety of accompanying ills ranging from addiction to liver damage. People with a family history of alcohol abuse might be smarter to avoid the one or two drinks a day altogether.
Drinking alcohol has also been shown to slightly increase the risk of breast cancer in women, another reason to think twice, Tucker said.
“It’s good for you in small doses,” she said. “That’s always the caveat.”
Much research has shown that red wine has particular health benefits, including antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. While white wine also has been shown to have benefits, “If you’re going to choose based on health, red wine is the best choice to make,” Tucker said.
Resveratrol, a phytonutrient found in red wine, especially helps to protect the cardiovascular system and guard against osteoporosis, a condition leading to fragility of the bones in both sexes, but particularly among postmenopausal women.
“Osteoporosis is very common,” Tucker warned. “A lot of older people die after hip fractures because of immobility. A lot of people don’t walk again without a walker. They become permanently disabled.”
When it comes to beer, researchers pointing to health benefits have focused on a mineral called silicon, which contributes to the strengthening of bones. Darker, earthier beers may have higher levels of silicon. Bone protection for beer drinkers comes partly from the silicon and partly from the alcohol, Tucker suggested.
“Both the wine and beer are protective of bones in both men and women,” she said. “But men tend to drink more beer and women more wine. They both have their benefits in different ways.”
The health benefits of beer and wine are better understood partly because people tend to keep good track of their alcohol intake compared to how many carrots or how much rib roast they consume, according to Harvard’s Rimm.
Despite the arguments for beer or wine, Rimm said the known health benefits are likely to occur regardless of the type of alcohol drunk. Specifically, he said, a 5-ounce glass of wine, a 12-ounce mug of beer, and a single shot of 80-proof vodka or gin are likely to yield the same benefits.
These benefits can be obscured, he said, because of the way alcohol is consumed in the United States. While many Germans drink beer in moderation with meals, he said, too many Americans drink it episodically — and to excess — while watching football or baseball.
“Someone might say, ‘I’m going to live it up and drink a six-pack on Friday night when the Red Sox are playing and not drink the rest of the week,’ ” Rimm said. “You won’t get the same benefit.”
Glug or gag: Weighing the pros and cons of alcohol
(istockphoto)
Benefits of one or two drinks
- Reduces risk of blood clotting.
- Boosts good cholesterol levels.
- Aids body in processing glucose.
- Protects bone mineral density.
Risks of one or two drinks
- Can lead to binge drinking.
- Can lead to alcoholism.
- Increases risk of breast cancer in women.
- Increases risk of liver damage.
Robert Weisman can be reached at robert.weisman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW.
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Tourists to UK forecast to spend record levels in 2018
It has been a record year-to-date for inbound tourism to the UK, with growth set to continue in 2018, according to forecasts from national tourism agency VisitBritain.
Overseas visits to the UK are forecast to break through the 40 million mark for the first time in 2018, reaching 41.7 million, up 4.4% on 2017 which is expected to see 39.9 million visits.
Spending by overseas visitors to the UK is forecast to reach £26.9 billion in 2018, up 6.8% on 2017 which is expected to total £25.1 billion by year end.
VisitBritain director Patricia Yates said: “Tourism is one of the UK’s most valuable export industries.
“It is also a fiercely competitive global industry and these results not only demonstrate Britain’s continued ability to compete internationally for visitors, they are testament to tourism’s importance as a driver of economic growth.
“We are working with partners across the world to tell customers of experiences they can only have in Britain and encourage them to book a trip now.
“We have seen good growth this year from the US and China, and are developing new products that make it easier for overseas visitors to book and explore all of Britain.”
VisitBritain promotes the UK internationally as a visitor destination as part of the UK Government’s global GREAT Britain campaign.
The UK was ranked third for tourism globally in the 2017 Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index (NBI) published last month, equalling its highest rank ever and up two places from last year.
The NBI considered attributes including historic buildings and monuments, having a vibrant city life and natural beauty.
When considering its overall brand, the UK ranked third out of 50 nations, a position it has held since 2011.
Tourism is worth £127 billion to the UK economy, creating jobs and boosting economic growth across its nations and regions.
Decision expected on future of the county’s heritage services
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OPERA THEATRE REVIEWS RESUME
Brad Dalton’s original productions have been produced widely throughout the United States and abroad in opera houses such as Lyric Opera of Chicago, Los Angeles Opera, the Barbican in London (with the LSO), the State Opera of South Australia, Carnegie Hall, Washington National Opera, San Diego Opera, San Jose Opera, Opera Santa Barbara, New Orleans Opera, Hawaii Opera Theatre, Austin Lyric Opera and Opera Boston.
In 2003, Brad was awarded the prestigious Helpmann Award for “Best Direction of an Opera in Australia” for his direction of the Australian premiere of Dead Man Walking.
Brad has received critical acclaim for his “ravishingly theatrical” production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Renee Fleming, which has been seen in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
In 2017, Brad directed the American premiere of Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella, available on Sony DVD and Blu Ray. New opera productions include Alceste, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, Cosi Fan Tutte, La Clemenza di Tito, Idomeneo, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Tosca, La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, Faust, Romeo and Juliet, Carmen, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Anna Karenina, Albert Herring, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Flying Dutchman, Romeo and Juliet and Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella.
Brad is a graduate of Harvard University and the National Shakespeare Conservatory. He has directed numerous productions of theatre and musical theatre as well as opera.
braddalton@aol.com
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We were not given fair hearing, Oando insists
June 18, 2019 Business & Finance Updates, Industries No comments
Again, the embattled management of Oando Plc has accused the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), of not granting it fair hearing before dissolving its board of directors, and appointing an interim management to oversee its operations.
In its complaints to SEC, Oando made the argument while responding yesterday, to a SEC statement that “Oando PLC was given sufficient opportunity of being heard and accorded several opportunities to rebut the issues revealed by investigations.” dated, Sunday, June 9. It insisted that the company was not accorded a fair hearing but rather cooperated with the process by responding to questions posed by the auditors in the course of their fieldwork for findings in a report that it has still not seen.
Oando insisted that a hearing can only be said to be fair when all the parties to a dispute are given an opportunity to present their respective cases, and each side is entitled to know the details of the case/findings being made against it, and is given an opportunity to reply thereto.
Oando explained that prior to the commencement of the forensic audit; it was not granted the same opportunity to meet with the SEC as was accorded the petitioners, despite repeated written requests to that effect.
It said the first of these requests was on Thursday, August 24, 2017, from the Chairman, HRM Oba Michael Adedotun Gbadebo, who wrote to the SEC Director General as follows: “We would like to request for a meeting with you, in your capacity as Director General of the SEC and regulator on matters involving the securities of our Company, to formally table our concerns to you and clarify any further questions that you may have in respect to the issues that we have raised in this and previous letters to the SEC.”
Oando noted that during the 18 month long forensic audit exercise, it was never given an opportunity to present its case based on the concerns or findings of the forensic auditor to the SEC.
“In the kick off meeting with Deloitte on the 29th of March, 2018, they assured the company that we would be allowed to read their report on the forensic audit, and give further clarification or comments on matters raised in their report. Minutes from the meeting, which was shared with parties in attendance state.
“Deloitte concluded by repeating that the audit will be done fairly and from a factual perspective. There will be ‘no surprises’. Oando will be allowed to read their report on the Forensic Audit and give further clarifications or comments on matters raised in the report.
“In the course of Deloitte’s forensic audit exercise the Company had a second meeting with Deloitte on the 1st of November, 2018, and this was at the Company’s insistence. At the said meeting Deloitte promised that on the conclusion of its audit it would hold a close out meeting with the Company, however this meeting never took place.
Furthermore, Oando added:”With the exception of the aforementioned meetings, all other engagements with both the SEC and Deloitte were via letters and emails. On Monday, February 11, 2019, at Oando’s request the Company’s management team met with the SEC for the purpose of getting approval for certain proposed transactions as part of our corporate strategy pending the release of the Forensic Audit.”
Therefore, Oando accused the SEC of circumventing its rules and procedures by failing to invite the firm to appear before the APC and hear its position, noting that the commission rather approached the media to publish the purported findings and punitive directives against the company.
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Uptown Funk Song Download Free
Peter Gene Hernandez (born October 8, 1985), known by his stage name Bruno Mars, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer. After an unsuccessful stint with Motown, Mars signed with Atlantic Records in 2002. He became recognized as a solo artist after lending his vocals and co-writing the hooks for the songs "Nothin’ on You" by B.o.B, and "Billionaire" by Travie McCoy.
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On the digital songs chart, which measures online download sales, Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ throwback upbeat "Uptown Funk!" climbed back to No. 1 with 257,000 downloads after being knocked off last.
Don’t worry, we have the best bits, right here on this week’s free download. This week on Heart Breakfast something magnificent happened.. We played ‘Uptown Funk’, the new track by Mark Ronson and.
The Blooze Brothers show is the second in a series of seven free concerts organized. the band also will play songs from Earth, Wind and Fire, Chicago and Motown favorites. “We even play ‘Uptown.
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Definition. This list includes all songs known to be written by Prince (regardless of official credits, and/or whether a studio recording is known to exist). Recording information on songs is not always available, or not accurate enough to state a specific year of recording.
Rachel Sterner was one of hundreds of Eugene residents who cycled, skated and strolled down a car-free West Broadway. as about 25 people suddenly began to dance to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” Sunday.
The app can be downloaded for free on iOS and. as a free digital download. Just Dance 2016 will launch alongside a new subscription service on October 23 in the UK and October 20 in North America.
Sofia Singer Uk Colorful Way But Sofia Richie cast her personal drama aside on Monday. Both Kelly and Khalid opted for striped ensembles, with the Destiny Child singer’s choice slightly more colorful. Kelly stunned in a long. The singer, 29, looked chic in the colourful Self-Portrait frock. Letting the dress do the talking, Taylor accessorized. Sofia – daughter of singer
"Uptown Funk" is a funk-pop, soul, boogie, disco-pop, Minneapolis sound track, with a light EDM influence. It is composed in the key of D minor at a tempo of 115 beats per minute.Mars’ vocal range spans from the low note of B 2 to the high note of D 6. It has been described as a "joyous, energetic and feel-good" song. Billboard and The Guardian music critics noticed the resemblance between.
Mar 09, 2019 · Contents1 Roblox Music Codes (30k) List2 How Roblox Music Codes Or Song ID?3 How to find the Roblox Music code for your favourite song ?3.1 What do you do once you find and copy the Roblox Music code? Roblox is a fun and interactive letting you travel into different worlds and do various activities. One […]
"Uptown Funk" is a funk-pop, soul, boogie, disco-pop, Minneapolis sound track, with a light EDM influence. It is composed in the key of D minor at a tempo of 115 beats per minute.Mars’ vocal range spans from the low note of B 2 to the high note of D 6. It has been described as a "joyous, energetic and feel-good" song. Billboard and The Guardian music critics noticed the resemblance between the.
Mark Ronson, Soundtrack: A Star Is Born. Mark Ronson was born on September 4, 1975 in St. John’s Wood, London, England as Mark Daniel Ronson. He was previously married to Joséphine de La Baume.
Connecting the Echo Plus to the Amazon Alexa app is as easy as plugging the device in and opening the Amazon Alexa app (you’ll need to download it if you don. Echo Plus by playing Bruno Mars’.
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Update: The MTV VMAs full show is now online, so you can watch it for free. The streaming link has been added to. She beat out Beyoncé with "7/11," Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars with "Uptown.
Among the songs accompanying the fireworks of red, white and blue will be "Armed Services Medley" by St. Louis Orchestra, "Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen, "Only in America" by Brooks & Dunn,
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This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Uptown. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.
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Simply download the demo, then snag the free Just Dance Controller app for your Apple. Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk, Meghan Trainor’s All About That Bass, and Gioachino Rossini’s classic.
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Waitress Musical Nyc Theater Apr 13, 2017 · Best Theater District Restaurants NYC. We spoke with hundreds of Headout users and Broadway enthusiasts, and even had a chat with Miki Kawasaki, an accomplished food writer and former contributor of the popular food blog, Serious Eats.We asked them what their favorite places to grab a bite before hitting the theater are
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Fitzsimmons trained on Corpus Christi's North Beach
Blacksmith Bob Fitzsimmons set up a training camp in Corpus Christi in 1895 to prepare for a heavyweight match with Gentleman Jim Corbett.
Fitzsimmons trained on Corpus Christi's North Beach Blacksmith Bob Fitzsimmons set up a training camp in Corpus Christi in 1895 to prepare for a heavyweight match with Gentleman Jim Corbett. Check out this story on caller.com: http://callertim.es/2u2pmp5
Murphy Givens, The Caller Times Published 3:24 p.m. CT March 19, 2018
“Blacksmith Bob” Fitzsimmons trained on North Beach in 1895 for a championship fight with “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. There was a panic in town when Fitzsimmons’ pet lion escaped and fearful mothers kept their children indoors until the lion was found peacefully asleep under a house.(Photo: Contributed photo)
Blacksmith Bob Fitzsimmons set up a training camp in Corpus Christi in 1895 to prepare for a much-anticipated heavyweight match with Gentleman Jim Corbett.
Fitzsimmons rented a house on North Beach (it was later the W. E. Carruth home) and erected a training barn. One of his training exercises was to run holding onto the back of wagon moving at a fast clip. He ran wind sprints on the beach, with one of his two pet lions loping along beside him. When the alarm spread that one of the lions had escaped, mothers kept their kids inside while volunteer lion-hunters combed the area. After four days, the lion crawled out from under a house on North Beach where he had been hiding.
Local boys would hang around the barn-room gymnasium on North Beach to watch Fitzsimmons work out with his sparring partner Duncan Ross. In September 1895, Fitzsimmons invited any citizen in town to spar with him at his training camp.
“He will not hurt anyone,” the paper said, “but they are welcome to pound him as much as they like. He spars with members of his own party, alternating with them as the wind plays out.” The only local man to take up the challenge was Walter Timon, who later was elected county judge of Nueces County and then was appointed district judge.
“Fitzsimmons was a great fighter,” Timon said later. “He never weighed more than 170 pounds but won the world’s heavyweight title. First time I boxed Fitz, I said to myself, anybody who shuffles around like that I’ll whip. But I didn’t. He was a fast man and a terrible puncher. He just looked slow.”
Blacksmith Bob’s fight with Gentleman Jim Corbett was set for Dallas, but the Texas Legislature passed a bill, signed into law, that made prize-fighting illegal in Texas. So the match was called off. Judge Roy Bean, the famous character who was called “the law west of the Pecos,” arranged to stage a fight between Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher on a sandbar in the Rio Grande, which was outside Texas’ jurisdiction. It wasn’t much of a fight. Maher went down in less than two minutes.
That summer Corpus Christi got the news that Fitzsimmons’ lion was killed in Chicago when he somehow got entangled in electrical wires.
Finally, the long-waited and much-ballyhooed fight between Blacksmith Bob Fitzsimmons and Gentleman Jim Corbett was held in Carson City, Nev., in 1897.
A crowd gathered in Corpus Christi outside the Caller office where results came in by telegraph. At the end of each round the results were relayed to the waiting crowd.
A great cheer went up when it was announced that Blacksmith Bob, in the 14th round, knocked out Gentleman Jim Corbett to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
Pat Whelan: Sheriff in troubled times
One of Nueces County’s long-serving and outstanding sheriffs was Pat Whelan who emigrated from County Wexford, Ireland, with his three brothers. Patrick, the oldest, was born in 1840. He arrived in New York in 1864 and moved on to Corpus Christi. His brother Thomas, born in 1846, followed and another brother, John, born in 1850, arrived in 1875.
Pat Whelan was listed as a bricklayer in the 1870 census. He was appointed to the State Police Force created by Gov. Edmund J. Davis to replace the Texas Rangers. He also served as city marshal, beginning in 1871, when he was elected over Thomas Murphy. He requested that the City Council purchase a horse for his use so that he might “better discharge his trust.” Whelan led a posse searching for the bandits who killed four men at Peñascal on Baffin Bay in May 1874. He was on the posse that chased the bandits in the Nuecestown Raid in March 1875.
Whelan was a close friend of John McClane and when McClane’s last term as sheriff was coming to an end, the books were audited and a shortage discovered. McClane sent Whelan to seek help from rancher Richard King, another longtime friend. King got expert help and found the books balanced to the penny. Whelan was chief deputy under Sheriff Thomas Beynon, from 1876 to 1882.
Pat Whelan was elected sheriff in 1882 and served until 1896, nine terms in all. In one episode during his tenure, Whelan picked up a prisoner at Brownsville and it was feared a lynch mob might waylay him on the return trip. Whelan brought his prisoner by boat and had him safe in the county jail before any lynching party could be organized.
In another example, Whelan had a female prisoner in the county jail and Mexican authorities were demanding her extradition. Whelan refused. The governor joined the Mexican authorities and ordered Whelan to turn over the prisoner. Whelan still refused and cited some technical legal points. It was later determined that Whelan was right, from a legal standpoint, and the demands were withdrawn. The prisoner was found to have been wrongfully charged.
After his last term as sheriff, Whelan was elected justice of the peace and served in that capacity until he died on May 29, 1921. An obituary in the Caller said of Whelan: “During the tenure as sheriff, Mr. Whelan maintained the reputation of a cool, calculating and capable officer ... he had been in many close and dangerous and places, but never under any circumstances had he been known to falter in his duty. His term of office was during the period when the Southwest was the rendezvous of such bad men as Ben Thompson, King Fisher, John Wesley Hardin, Sam Bass, Bill Longley, and others, but Nueces County was not one of the counties these men selected to perform in. The policy of Pat Whelan the officer and Pat Whelan the private citizen was to save life and not take it, nor have it taken.”
At the time of his death, he lived at his home on Mesquite Street, near the courthouse. His wife Johanna preceded him in death. Pat Whelan was survived by a daughter and his brother Thomas. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery with Rev. Claude Jaillet officiating.
Murphy Givens is the retired Viewpoints Editor of the Caller-Times. Email him at givens.murphy@gmail.com.
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Mom pleads to child endangerment in son's death
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Vitamin shop owner admits to selling misbranded drugs, controlled substance
A Corpus Christi woman has pleaded guilty to selling a controlled substance and misbranded drugs.
Vitamin shop owner admits to selling misbranded drugs, controlled substance A Corpus Christi woman has pleaded guilty to selling a controlled substance and misbranded drugs. Check out this story on caller.com: https://callertim.es/2t99nTr
Eleanor Dearman, Corpus Christi Caller Times Published 6:15 p.m. CT June 18, 2018 | Updated 6:16 p.m. CT June 18, 2018
How does the federal government work? Check out this video. Wochit
A gavel on a sound block(Photo: Stockbyte, Getty Images)
Vanesa Gonzales, 35, pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to one count of possessing a controlled substance with the intent to distribute and one count of receiving a misbranded drug in interstate commerce, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
She was an owner of X2Zero, which sold dietary supplements online and at Corpus Christi stores, according to a news release from the office. A co-owner, Elias Trevino, was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison earlier this year.
More: Vitamin shop owner sentenced to prison for misbranding drugs, selling controlled substance
More: Man, 33, pleaded guilty to selling 'misbranded,' 'controlled substances' as diet drugs
During a hearing before Senior U.S. District Judge John D. Rainey, Gonzles said she possessed and sold diet drugs containing sibutramine, which is no longer approved for human use in the United States.
A prescription drug caller "Meridia" was approved in 1997 for obesity management but in 2010 the Food and Drug Administration asked its marketer to withdraw the drug from the U.S. market, citing health risks like heart attack, stroke and death associated with sibutramine.
"The FDA found a number of the products X2Zero sold as 'herbal weight loss supplement' to contain misbranded or unapproved foreign drugs," the release states.
Gonzales acknowledged importing the drugs from China and selling them online and in X2Zero, violating the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, the release states.
Sentencing is set for September. She faces up to six years in prison and a maximum fine of $350,000, the release states.
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CCPD issues 36 tickets during operation
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Latin America is World's Deadliest Route for Migrants
19 Mar 2019, 15:20 GMT+10
GENEVA - The International Organization for Migration reports Latin America has displaced previous record-holder, the Mediterranean Sea as the deadliest route for migrants in the world.
Thousands of refugees and migrants have died while making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe.
The regions grim yearly record as the deadliest route for migrants for now has been broken by Latin America.
International Organization for Migration spokesman, Joel Millman, says since February 1, 79 deaths have been reported along this route. He says this is nearly three times higher than the numbers reported in the Mediterranean.
He agrees the rise in deaths is a consequence of increased migration from Latin American countries to the United States. He tells VOA the journey has become more dangerous because of greater reliance by refugees and migrants on smugglers to transport them to the U.S. border.
Circular migration, in which there were repeat customers every year in Latin America going to jobs has largely ended. And, that means that the relationship that migrants have with the people who transport them tends to be much harsher and they are dealing with a more criminal class of smuggler than existed a generation ago. Clearly, that shows up in the numbers of people killed, he said.
Millman says smugglers often take risks and cut corners to increase profits. He says many drive unsafe vehicles, and this often results in deadly accidents.
Just 10 days ago, he notes a truck accident in Mexicos southern state of Chiapas killed 24 Guatemalan men and women. He says this year has been a particularly deadly one for Guatemalans. He says this crash was one of the worst reported by IOM in the past five years.
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GALLAGHER ELECTED DIRECTOR-AT-LARGE FOR MCAA
http://themcaa.org/about-mcaa/board-of-directors/board-of-directors_gallagher/
MCAA Elects New Leaders for 2016
The Measurement, Control & Automation Association elected Joseph Incontri, Director of Marketing and Projects at KROHNE Inc., as its Chairman for 2016. Robert Carrell, President of Hoffer Flow Controls (who will continue on the Board as Past Chairman), will pass a virtual gavel to the new Chairman during a meeting of the Board of Directors on December 7. The elections were completed by letter ballot of the membership during November. Mr. Incontri currently serves as Marketing Director for KROHNE’s North American arm headquartered in Peabody, MA. Headquartered in Duisberg, Germany, KROHNE is a worldwide leader in the development, manufacture and distribution of accurate, reliable and costeffective measuring instrumentation for the process industries. Incontri is responsible for all aspects of marketing including marketing communications and product marketing to meet North American product needs. He joined KROHNE in 2002 and previously was with Barton Instruments. He holds a CIT degree in Industrial Instrumentation Technology from Vanier College in Montreal, CA. He has been employed in the instrumentation industry since college, first in Canada and since 1992 in the United States. He is an avid Boston-area sports fan.
Also elected in November was Peter Martin, Vice President for Schneider Electric (formerly Invensys) headquartered in Foxboro, MA Martin will serve as Vice Chairman as well as Treasurer of the Association for the coming year. Dr. Martin has worked in industrial automation for more than 30 years with experience in the industry segments of training, engineering, product planning, marketing and strategic planning. He holds BA and MS degrees in Mathematics and an MA in Administration and Management. He also holds a Master of Biblical Studies degree, and doctorates in Industrial Engineering and Biblical Studies.
Elected as Directors-at-Large were Michael Gallagher, President of CENTRO Inc. in Memphis, TN, Don Maness, Vice President and General Manager of Field Products for Honeywell Process Solutions located in Duluth, GA and Mike Waters, President & CEO of SOR Inc. in Lenexa, KS. Each Director serves a three-year term until December 2018. Leaving the Board at the completion of their service were Past Chairman Todd Lucey, General Manager of Endress + Hauser, Inc., Carl Derian, President of Forberg Scientific and John Schwin.
MCAA provides resources to the world’s leading process control suppliers. Its core purpose is to bring process control providers together to develop the resources they need to prosper. The organization helps the management teams of process and factory automation product and solution providers run and grow successful businesses by offering timely, unique and highly specialized resources acquired from shared management benchmarks and strategies where proprietary company information is secure. For more information visit their website at www.measure.org or contact MCAA at mcaa@measure.org or 757-258-3100
MCAA interview
MCAA interviews Mike Gallagher, MCAA Board MemberInterview with MCAA board member Michael Gallagher, President of Centro, Inc., a manufacturer's representative firm located in Memphis, TN. Mr. Gallagher talks about the value of MCAA membership to a company such as his during the MCAA Industry Forum held in May 2014 in Charlotte, NC.
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Franks says ‘outplayed’ Notts got what they deserved
Assistant coach Paul Franks, who accepted that Notts got what they deserved in a heavy defeat against Lancashire.
Published: 10:13 Monday 14 May 2018
Assistant coach Paul Franks felt Nottinghamshire got what they deserved after they were “outplayed” by Lancashire in the Specsavers County Championship.
Tabletopping Notts looked nothing like potential champions as they crashed to defeat by an innings and 67 runs in little more than two days at Trent Bridge, and against a Lancashire outfit they had beaten only a month earlier.
Franks said: “If you don’t play at your best, then you get what you deserve. The frustrating thing from everybody’s point of view is that we didn’t reach anything like the levels that we expect and certainly the levels that we produced last week against Hampshire.
“If there’s anything that we need to realise after the first five Championship games, it’s that, at our best, we look very good, but when we’re not, we get what we deserve. Ultimately, we were outplayed over the course of a very short game and we have to take it on the chin.”
One of the visitors’ heroes was former England bowler Graham Onions, whose liking for Trent Bridge was confirmed by a return of 6-55 in Notts’s woeful second innings.
Onions, who once took nine wickets in an innings on the same ground for Durham, said: “It was brilliant. There has been a lot of hard work over the last six weeks, so to get a win against a top side is pretty special.
“We’ve done a lot of good things this season, but we were completely outplayed by Notts in the first week of the season at Old Trafford, so we’ve come here wanting to show them how good we are.”
Lancashire collected 22 poiunts for what was their first win of the campaign and their first away win in the Championship since 2015.
Another of their heroes was England batsman Keaton Jennings, whose knock of 126 helped his side score 338 to open the match. Notts were then skittled for 133 and 138, with opener Jake Libby top scoring in both innings, first with 34 and then with 46.
New signing Chris Nash continued his nightmare start to life at Trent Bridge by twice becoming a cheap victim of Onions, including for a duck in the second innings.
Fellow new recruit, New Zealander Ross Taylor, fared even worse, falling for nought, trapped lbw by Onions, in both innings.
The two sides meet yet again this Thursday when Notts Outlaws begin their defence of the Royal London One-Day Cup in a qualifying group tie at Old Trafford.
Head coach Moores admits that thrashed Notts played poorly
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Saturday, Apr 27, 2019 11:26 AM
Exclusive First Interview with Drue Tranquill
Ricky Henne
Shortly after being selected 130th overall in the fourth round, linebacker Drue Tranquill hopped on the phone for his first ever interview as a Charger.
Question: Drue Tranquil – how does it feel to be a Charger?
Tranquill: It’s amazing, man! Our mascot in high school was a Charger, so I guess once a Charger, always a Charger! This is such a special moment, I can’t describe. It’s second in my life after getting married to my wife.
Question: You’re also in a nice little situation where you get to go through your rookie year with a teammate of yours from Notre Dame. How great is that?
Tranquill: Oh, it’s incredible. Jerry is there. We also have Isaac Rochell there. So just to have two former teammates of mine there, just to learn and grow with them, it’s going to be a special, special time. I can’t wait to get after it and get one of these Super Bowls.
¡Bienvenido a LA, @DTranquill!
Watch the final day of the Draft on ABC, ESPN, NFL Network or online at https://t.co/ySiDLvzKSm 📺 pic.twitter.com/aQr4HqWQXV
— Los Angeles Chargers (@Chargers) April 27, 2019
Question: A two-time captain at Notre Dame is a pretty big deal. What kind of player, and person, are the Chargers getting in you?
Tranquill: They’re getting a complete football player who has a passion and love for this game, not only on the field but off the field, and in the community. They are getting a versatile guy who can play all four downs. A guy who can cover and run sideline to sideline. A guy who can still hold (his own) and play special teams. I want to be a captain off the field and in the community.
Chargers Kick Off Day Three With Notre Dame LB Drue Tranquill
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Question: You accomplished a lot at Notre Dame, but what was your proudest accomplishment?
Tranquill: On the field, it has to be being a two-time captain. You can talk about stats. You can talk about whatever. But at the end of the day, we were 4-8 in 2016, and I knew that was unacceptable. We knew we had so much more in the tank. In 2017 and 2018 I’m a captain, and we were able to turn the ship around, me and our coaching staff. They did a great job bringing people in and captain, and we turned the ship around (having) a 12-0 regular season and having a chance to play for a College Football National Championship. So being a two-time captain voted on by my teammates, that was my proudest moment and accomplishment I had.
Question: That’s awesome. But now that you are joining the pros, what is it you are most looking forward to proving your rookie year?
Tranquill: Man, I’m just excited because it’s been such a long process. These four months have been long with doing all this combine stuff. All this testing. I’m just so excited to put on the pads again, and getting to get out there with my new teammates. Just learning the playbook and getting back to playing the game I love.
Question: Speaking of those teammates, you get to join a defense with some big-time playmakers. Joey Bosa. Casey Hayward. Melvin Ingram. Derwin James. I can go on and on….
Tranquill: Whenever you have great players, it makes things a lot easier. We have a lot of playmakers over there. I can’t wait to just get out there and learn from those guys, and contribute to winning a Super Bowl.
Question: You changed to linebacker after three seasons as a safety. Why the move, and why does linebacker suit you better?
Tranquill: I think in the most basic terms, I just love to hunt! I just love to be by the football and in the action. I’m a real hands-on guy. A physical guy. So the position just fits me better than it did safety. I can create some mismatches when I’m lined up on tight ends and running backs. I provide an advantage for our team there, so I think my versatility allows me to move around. I’m strong enough and big enough to play that position, but I bring the athletic skillset of a safety to linebacker, which is what you see the game evolving to.
Question: Finally, what do you want to tell all your new fans out there?
Tranquill: My family and I, my wife and future son, we’re so grateful to be Chargers. That you’re welcoming us with open arms and giving us this opportunity. I will continue to work as hard as I can. My goal in college was to win a national championship, and I fell short of that, but now I’ve shifted my eyes and my focus is on winning a Super Bowl and bringing that to the city of L.A. I couldn’t be more excited for this opportunity, and I can’t wait to get to know the fans and community and get involved. I’m very grateful.
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"We're treated as part of the team. There's such a great trust. I'm so appreciative of the Chargers because it is such a privilege and such a great opportunity for these women."
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The Flaming Herald
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Worship Leaders Must Take a Stand Against Homosexuality
7:00AM EST 2/23/2017 John Burton
On one of the largest stages in the nation, Carrie Underwood was invited to participate in the latest Passion Conference. She belted out "Amazing Grace" alongside Crowder in front of thousands of worshippers. What many didn't realize is Carrie is a supporter of homosexual rights. (REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni)
The enemy is looking for a back door into the church—through worship teams.
I'll never forget an extremely powerful and disturbing experience I had when praying in a church many years ago.
Both in Colorado Springs and Detroit, I had the privilege of giving some leadership to remarkable prayer movements. Every Friday from 10 p.m. until midnight, we would gather hungry people from the region to pray in tongues. We'd spread out and pray boldly through the sanctuary, on the platform, in classrooms and outside. The roar of intercession was intense.
The focus each week was to bless the ministry and to partner with them in their mission. At times, we'd have over 200 people squeezing into a property designed for 30. I was always thrilled when the pastor and his core team would show up in force. I was always confused when a secretary or janitor would unlock the door for us and then disappear into another part of the property.
The night of the experience I am about to share with you, from what I can remember, included no one from the host church. However, scores of fiery zealots from all over the region were praying with passion.
In the midst of pacing and praying, one of the other leaders called me over. He said, "John, go walk through the baptismal." I was perplexed and asked why. He encouraged me to just do it. The baptismal was empty and positioned behind the platform. While praying in the Spirit, I walked down into the vessel designed for introducing people into a life-altering eternity with Jesus. I gagged. I felt sick. The swirl of demons in that very spot was so overwhelming that I was shocked. Slowly, I walked through, praying and attempting to analyze what was happening in the invisible realm. I emerged on the other side and approached my friend. With my eyes wide open and shock on my face, I said, "What in the world was that?" He smiled (not a happy smile, but one that indicated bewilderment) and said, "I told you something was going on there."
We didn't share the experience with anybody there but simply prayed and took authority.
Shortly after that night, it was discovered that the worship leader of that church had been involved in homosexual relationships. The memory of my walk through that baptismal tank caused me to grieve.
Worship Leaders Must Make Their Position Known
It's expected for today's righteous pastors and leaders to take a stand and to oppose all wickedness, including homosexuality. Sadly, fewer and fewer are, but that's an article for another day. Today we need to talk about the responsibility of worship leaders and those on worship teams to stand for truth.
It's quite uncommon to hear from worship leaders regarding their doctrinal positions. They are a vulnerable vehicle for the enemy to deliver his next assault in the church through.
On one of the largest stages in the nation, Carrie Underwood was invited to participate in the latest Passion Conference. She belted out "Amazing Grace" alongside Crowder in front of thousands of worshipers. What many didn't realize is that Carrie is a supporter of homosexual rights.
From a recent Charisma News article: The controversy is why would Louie Giglio put someone in front of millennials—who are struggling with this issue—who is basically saying that the Bible is not true in what it says about homosexuality," American Family Association Ed Vitagliano says.
"[There is a] growing strain within the evangelical community that is denying the truth of Scripture," he continued.
Carrie Underwood Stuns CMA Crowd With Powerful Heavenly Message
The Sad Story of Carrie Underwood's Megachurch Gone Gay
As Underwood told The Independent in 2012:
Our church is gay-friendly. ... Above all, God wanted us to love others. It's not about setting rules, or "everyone has to be like me." No. We're all different. That's what makes us special. We have to love each other and get on with each other. It's not up to me to judge anybody.
She also said:
As a married person myself, I don't know what it's like to be told I can't marry somebody I love and want to marry. I can't imagine how that must feel. I definitely think we should all have the right to love, and love publicly, the people that we want to love.
Eternity Is at Stake
This isn't about debating about differing theological viewpoints. This argument isn't even an argument. It's settled. The Bible is clear. Eternity is at risk.
It goes down like vinegar, but the truth remains, those who support homosexuality can't presume to be saved. They will experience horrifying torment in hell forever. We have to let that sink in: "Who know the righteous requirement of God, that those who commit such things are worthy of death. They not only do them, but also give hearty approve to those who practice them" (Rom. 1:32).
If we are allowing worship leaders to minister in the name of God while endorsing homosexuality or other wickedness, not only are we aligning with extremely powerful demonic spirits as they ramp up their assault on millions, we are stepping aside, allowing people to be put at extreme risk of hell.
Entire churches risk having "Ichabod" posted above the doorposts because of leaders, including worship leaders, who are inviting unholy spirits to take residence through their alliance with them. Simply, when we agree with a doctrine of demons, we become a partner with them. We align ourselves with them and give their evil war power and strength.
This Is a Prophetic Message for Today
I sense strongly that God is attempting to awaken worship leaders who are toying with spiritual death, and he is also attempting to strengthen his holy army of worship warriors. He's looking for those anointed men and women of God who are partnering with him in holiness and who are taking their call to lead people in worship of a fearful, holy God seriously and soberly.
I don't know about you, but it is important to me to know just what a worship leader believes. I'm often troubled with the doctrine that's coming through in the lyrics of much of today's popular worship music. However, this prophetic call takes us down a very specific path. We have to understand the enemy is attempting to normalize homosexuality in churches. What better strategy than to anoint those who are leading people into a spiritual/emotional place. I've heard people support homosexuality by saying, "Don't you feel God's presence when we worship? We consider that his endorsement of our position on homosexuality."
Respectfully and with great honor, send this message to your worship leader and your pastor. Pray for them. Collectively, let's encourage worship leaders to make their positions on morality and biblical truth clear.
The church, revival and eternity are all at risk.
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9-10).
Related topics: Homosexuality | LGBT | Music | Worship
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Fontenot leads the way in stirring Cubs win
Jeff Vorva
Cubs beat Rockies 10-9.
What looked like a glorious night for rookie Mike Fontenot and the Cubs turned ugly quickly in the ninth inning. Then it quickly turned glorious again as the Cubs pulled out a 10-9 victory with two runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Fontenot had a career-best five hits, and the Cubs took an 8-3 lead into the ninth. But Scott Eyre and Bob Howry surrendered that lead, and moments after Howry gave up a three-run homer to Troy Tulowitzki to give the Rockies a 9-8 lead, a patron ran from the stands and charged the mound. He was inches away from Howry, who did not move, before security grabbed the man and escorted him away. The Cubs rallied for the win with a two-out burst in the bottom of the frame. With a runner on first, pinch-hitter Koyie Hill singled to left. Ryan Theriot then hit a grounder to second that Kazuo Matsui bobbled for an error to load the bases. Alfonso Soriano followed with a single to right that drove in the tying and winning runs. Before the scary incident, Fontenot went 5-for-5 with two doubles, two runs and two RBI in front of a Wrigley Field crowd of 40,269. Fontenot raised his average from .345 to .397 with the huge night and has hits in his last seven-at bats. He also received a standing ovation for a diving stop of Brad Hawpe’s hot grounder even though his throw to second to try to get Garrett Atkins was late and everyone was safe. Derrek Lee (three hits), Mark DeRosa (three RBI) and Angel Pagan (three-run homer) also paced the offense. Earlier, it looked like Jason Marquis was en route to his first victory since May 9, when he threw a shutout against Pittsburgh. Fontenot, who wasn’t even invited to spring training this year, has gained the respect of the organization. He received the ultimate compliment from his boss when he looked at the lineup card Monday night. Aramis Ramirez was at third base for the first time since coming off the disabled list with a knee injury on Friday. DeRosa, who took over for Ramirez, did not go back to his customary spot at second base. The left-handed-hitting Fontenot was in the lineup against left-handed starter Jeff Francis. The veteran DeRosa was moved to right field Monday. Francis gave up six runs on 10 hits in five innings. It appears that Fontenot wants to follow in the footsteps of Soriano. Soriano was named National League Player of the Week on Monday after hitting .480 with four homers and five RBI last week. He receives a Swiss watch for his efforts. Not only did Soriano have a banner week, he’s having a tremendous June. In his first 23 games in June, he hit .350 with 11 homers and 16 RBI. “I’m feeling very comfortable at the plate,” Soriano said. “My bat speed and power is there. I’m feeling good.” Soriano struggled in April, hitting .270 with one home run, and parts of May before turning it on this month. “Boy, he’s really been hot,” Cubs manager Lou Piniella said. “The warmer weather has helped. The move to left field (from center) has helped. I think the fact that he’s acclimated himself to these day-night games has helped. Having (rookie Felix) Pie here helped. They seem to have a nice rapport going. “And the last reason is that he’s a very talented young man who is finally hitting his stride.” More Cubs coverage is at www.dailysouthtown.com/sports.
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www.umicore.com
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Umicore is a global materials technology and recycling group, with about 9700 employees and a turnover of €12.3 billion (£11 billion) in 2017. It focuses on application areas where its expertise in materials science, chemistry and metallurgy makes a real difference. Its activities are organised in three business groups: catalysis, energy & surface technologies and recycling. Each business group is divided into market-focused business units offering materials, chemicals and solutions that are at the cutting edge of new technological developments and essential to everyday life.
Umicore generates the majority of its revenues and dedicates most of its R&D efforts to clean mobility materials and recycling. Umicore’s overriding goal of sustainable value creation is based on an ambition to develop, produce and recycle materials in a way that fulfils its mission: materials for a better life.
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Creating carbon–carbon bonds via transition metal catalysis
Cross-coupling and metathesis reactions are powerful ways of making carbon–carbon bonds, the crucial links behind most organic compounds
Metathesis: around the catalytic cycle
Three Umicore scientists discuss the advantages that metathesis can bring to a variety of industries
Metathesis: the green method of chemical synthesis
Getting the most out of your reactions is a crucial part of green chemistry. The bond-forming prowess of metathesis catalysts can help
In conversation with Robert Grubbs, Nobel laureate
Following the recent acquisition of the world-leading Materia catalyst business by Umicore, we’ve been granted an exclusive interview with Robert Grubbs, chemistry Nobel laureate and co-founder of Materia.
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Common cold and flu can increase risk of stroke in kids
By Maureen Salamon
October 1, 2015 / 12:18 PM / HealthDay
Having a cold or the flu may sometimes trigger a stroke in children -- particularly those with underlying health conditions -- though the overall risk remains low, a new study indicates.
Comparing two groups of more than 350 children -- one set had suffered "ischemic" clot-based strokes and the other had not -- researchers found that those with stroke were six times more likely to have had a minor infection the previous week than those who didn't have a stroke.
Also, children who had most or all of their routine vaccinations were significantly less likely to suffer a stroke than children who received only some or no vaccinations, according to the study, published online Sept. 30 in the journal Neurology.
"The findings are definitely revelatory in terms of expanding our understanding of childhood stroke compared to a decade ago," said study author Dr. Heather Fullerton, a professor of child neurology and pediatric stroke neurologist at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Benioff Children's Hospital in San Francisco.
"It basically offers some explanation why a stroke may happen on a particular day in a child's life, and offers an opportunity for stroke prevention," Fullerton added. "You can't change a child's underlying condition, but you can potentially do something about that stroke trigger."
The stroke threat: Why young people need to be concerned
However, the study merely showed an association between minor infections and children's stroke risk, but didn't prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
Stroke in children is exceedingly rare, occurring in two to 13 out of every 100,000 children annually. Most of those children cope with underlying health conditions such as congenital heart disease, sickle cell anemia or a blood-clotting disorder. Only about one in 100,000 otherwise healthy children suffer a stroke each year, Fullerton said.
Stroke symptoms in children are typically similar to those in adults, including slurred speech, facial drooping and arm weakness. But adults' risk factors for stroke are much different than children's, arising mainly from factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking.
In the study, Fullerton and her team reviewed medical charts and conducted parent interviews of 355 children up to age 18 (average age 7) diagnosed with a stroke and 354 stroke-free children of similar ages. The groups hailed from nine countries. Researchers analyzed the children's exposure to infection and their vaccine history.
Of all participants, 18 percent of those with stroke had an infection -- including flu, colds, or to a lesser extent, urinary tract or gastrointestinal infections -- in the prior week. Only 3 percent of the children who didn't have a stroke had had an infection the week before. The association between infection and stroke was short-lived, lasting no longer than a week, experts noted.
Meanwhile, children who had received some, few or none of their routine vaccinations were seven times more likely to have a stroke than those who received most or all of their vaccinations.
"Vaccines are clearly protective," Fullerton said. "No matter how we cut the data ... vaccines always appear to protect against childhood strokes."
What you should know about this year's flu vaccine
How a minor infection might trigger a stroke is not entirely clear, neurologists said. But it's possible that an infection may set off an inflammatory process throughout the body that contributes to stroke, revving up clot formation. Dehydration during an illness could also play a role, they said.
Fullerton, also director of the Pediatric Brain Center at UCSF, said that even otherwise healthy children can suffer a stroke, "but when lightning strikes, and that previously healthy kid has a stroke, we're still trying to better understand why."
"This is definitely not something for parents to worry about," she added. "If your child is otherwise healthy, your child's risk of having a stroke is very low. It's not zero."
Dr. Stephen Eppes, vice chair of the department of pediatrics and director of pediatric infectious diseases at Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, Del., said he was "a little bit struck by the results" of the study.
"Obviously the burden of stroke in the pediatric population is much lower than the adult population," said Eppes. "But the study authors ... have hit on something."
But, Eppes added, "I would try to put things in perspective for parents and tell them that illnesses with fever are much more likely to represent something bad from an infection point of view than from a stroke point of view. Minor infections ... are usually not associated with stroke to an extent anyone should worry about."
Dr. Jose Biller, chair of neurology at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, wrote an editorial accompanying the new research that said the findings will be pivotal in defining further stroke prevention strategies in children.
"I think further studies will be needed, but this was a very well-conducted study, particularly in a population that has been less well-studied [than] adults with stroke," said Biller.
In addition to making sure children receive all routine vaccinations, including for flu, parents and teachers can remind children of easy ways to avoid passing along colds and other infections, Fullerton said.
"Common infection-control measures like hand-washing and covering their mouths are going to be helpful in these kids," she said. "Even teaching kids to cough into their elbow rather than their hand ... can actually make a big difference to protect kids we know to be at increased risk."
First published on October 1, 2015 / 12:18 PM
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America's aging infrastructure: What would $2 trillion actually buy?
By Rachel Layne
May 2, 2019 / 2:21 PM / MoneyWatch
What $2 trillion in infrastructure looks like
Congressional leaders and President Donald Trump agree the U.S. must spend at least $2 trillion to fix the nation's aging infrastructure -- that comes to about 0.8 percent of U.S. GDP.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gives America's infrastructure a D+, calling current levels of investment "woefully inadequate."
Perhaps the top priority is fixing the country's crumbling roads, highways and bridges -- the costs for that could easily top $1 trillion.
Even as partisan conflict divides Washington, lawmakers across the political aisle agree on one thing: America's crumbling and outdated roads, bridges, levees and other vital infrastructure are in dire need of repair. There's even general consensus -- at least in principle -- about what that mammoth rebuild might cost: $2 trillion over 25 years.
That's where the good vibes end. Democrat and Republican leaders disagree over how to pay for such an overhaul, and pundits say a major piece of legislation is unlikely to survive the political gantlet before the 2020 election. Still, hope springs eternal: President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are due to meet later this month to discuss how to fund a national infrastructure upgrade. Read on to see what might be on the table.
At least it's not an "F"
In letter-grade terms, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2017 gave America's infrastructure a D+ , describing investment as "woefully inadequate." It put a total price tag on an overhaul at $2 trillion, or about 0.8 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, over 10 years -- a much shorter time frame that what was discussed in Washington this week. The group said federal investment in everything from transportation to the nation's energy grid must rise from 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP by 2025 -- and that's just to keep the economy from falling behind.
"We're going to have to see spending go up to levels that we have not seen in inflation-adjusted terms since the New Deal," the Brookings Institution's Adie Tomer said in a podcast. He likened spending $200 billion each year over a decade to the "scale up" of the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts in the 1970s and 1980s.
Schumer says Dems, Trump agree on $2 trillion for infrastructure
Although finding that money could be difficult as the U.S. reaches historic debt levels, it's imperative--the average family forks over $3,400 annually in extra expenses because of a failure to invest in infrastructure, Tom Smith, the ASCE executive director recently told NPR. Some systems, like parts of the power grid and drinking water networks, date to the 19th century, leaving them vulnerable to natural disasters and even cyberattacks.
No. 1 priority: Roads, bridges, highways
One of every five miles of highway pavement in the U.S. is in "poor condition," while roads have a "significant and increasing backlog of rehabilitation needs," according to the ASCE. In 2014, American drivers spent an average of 42 hours per year in traffic, wasting more than 3 billion gallons of fuel. Combined, that cost about $160 billion, the group estimated.
Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told the Washington Post this week that the largest chunk of spending in an infrastructure agreement would likely go to roads, bridges and transit, and also could include airports. The tab for repairing highways and bridges alone could top $836 billion.
As much as $68 billion is needed to upgrade water and wastewater infrastructure annually over the next decade, according to a 2018 analysis by Bluefield Research. Drinking water is delivered via 1 million miles of pipes across the U.S., much of them laid in the early-to-mid-20th century and with a lifespan of 75 to 100 years, according to the ASCE. That's one reason why lead in America's water systems is a national problem.
Wastewater systems, too, are antiquated. An estimated 56 million new users will have to be connected to thousands of treatment plants over the next two decades. The bill? At least $271 billion, according to the group.
Aging dams are another issue. The more than 90,000 dams across the U.S. are half a century old on average. About 15,000 of them are considered "high hazard." The Association of State Dam Safety Officials puts the required investment to fix them at $64 billion.
Broadening broadband
The "vast majority" of the country's broadband infrastructure is privately funded, notes Brookings' Tomer. Yet in what's become known as the "digital divide," roughly 19 million Americans, mostly in rural areas, lack high-speed internet access.
As CNET points out, the Federal Communications Commission plans to use some $20 billion over the next 10 years to expand broadband in underserved areas. But such plans often come under political fire.
"Federal broadband programs are often criticized for either investing inefficiently in rural America or fraud within pricing support programs," Tomer notes. "Is Congress ready for a robust broadband program that will gather support on both sides of the aisle?"
So last century
The U.S. power grid, gradually wired together over more than a century, isn't a single cohesive entity, and some parts of it predate the 20th century. Another complication in revamping it is that the grid is overseen by a complex array of ownership that includes both public and private utilities.
Before electricity is delivered to your wall outlet, it flows along a network from power plants through substations, transformers and power lines into one of five main connections, which themselves interlock with systems in Canada and a small part of Mexico. Its operation is overseen by eight regional councils, run under National Electric Reliability Council, the federal government, 50 state and five territorial commissions, public and private companies, and even small cities and towns.
To replace the grid completely would trump even the overall infrastructure plan, costing up to $5 trillion, Joshua Rhodes, a research fellow at the Webber Energy Group and the University of Texas at Austin, estimated in 2017. That would allow for new kinds of technology including security, smartgrid devices, solar and wind power, he wrote.
Make drivers pay?
One way to raise money for infrastructure spending: increase the gas tax, a possibility briefly floated -- and quickly abandoned -- by Mr. Trump last year. Some 30 states already use that approach to fund transportation projects, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Even before the 2016 election, Mr. Trump and then Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton both outlined infrastructure goals and how to pay for them. Mr. Trump's $1.5 trillion proposal last year, which relied mostly on non-government funding, fizzled almost the moment it left the White House. Meanwhile Democrats last year suggested raising the corporate tax rate or rolling back some parts of last year's tax reform package.
First published on May 2, 2019 / 2:21 PM
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Chargers, Raiders, Rams file for relocation to Los Angeles
By Tribune wire reports
Jan 04, 2016 | 11:22 PM
| SAN DIEGO
Chargers defensive back Darrell Stuckey huddles with teammates against the Oakland Raiders in Oakland, Calif. (Tony Avelar / AP)
The San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams filed for relocation to the Los Angeles area on Monday night, trying not to be left out in the race to return the NFL to the nation's second-largest market after a 21-year absence.
The Chargers want to partner with the AFC West rival Raiders on a stadium in Carson.
Chargers chairman Dean Spanos has had the right to leave San Diego since 2008, but the team's long, contentious efforts to replace aging Qualcomm Stadium became more aggressive after Rams owner Stan Kroenke announced plans to build a stadium in Inglewood.
The NFL confirmed it received the applications to move for the 2016 season. They will be reviewed by league staff and three committees of owners that will meet in New York on Wednesday and Thursday. All owners will meet in Houston next week and are expected to vote on whether to allow any of the teams to move. A team wanting to move needs 24 of 32 votes.
Los Angeles has been without the NFL since after the 1994 season, when the Raiders moved back to Oakland and the Rams moved to St. Louis. The Rams had been in the L.A. area since 1946.
The Chargers and City Hall have been at odds since 2000, when team owner Alex Spanos said the team needed a new stadium. That was just three years after the stadium was expanded to accommodate the Chargers and Super Bowls.
The stadium saga turned nasty this year as Mark Fabiani, an attorney for Dean Spanos, attacked Mayor Kevin Faulconer and his proposals to keep the team.
In a video posted on the team's web site, Dean Spanos blamed "the inability of the city at the political level to get any kind of public funding or any kind of vote to help subsidize a stadium."
The Chargers' filing came hours after Spanos' son, John, the team's president of football operations, thanked fans for "your unwavering support and passion" in a statement in which he expressed support for beleaguered coach Mike McCoy and general manager Tom Telesco. McCoy will return despite the Chargers going 4-12, their worst record in 12 seasons. Telesco had his contract secretly renewed last summer.
The Raiders and Rams were both 7-9.
The Chargers walked away from negotiations with the city and county in mid-June.
In the three brief negotiating sessions between the Chargers and city and county officials, the team mostly focused on what it called a flawed environmental impact report for a new stadium. The team did not negotiate finances, but it has said in the past that it expects a public contribution of at least 60 percent.
Under the city and county's proposal, public funding would be capped at 32 percent, with the team being responsible for overruns.
The Chargers claim 25 percent of their fan base comes from north of San Diego County, although they've declined to offer proof.
Oakland has expressed interest in building a new stadium for the Raiders at the Coliseum site but has no funding plan as of yet.
The Rams currently have a year-to-year lease with the Edward Jones Dome.
Kroenke has ignored efforts by a St. Louis task force that is proposing a $1.1 billion stadium along the Mississippi River, not far from the Rams' current stadium built in 1995.
The Rams have had 12 consecutive non-winning seasons, including a 15-65 record from 2007-11 that is the worst five-year stretch in NFL history. Out of 21 seasons in St. Louis, they've fielded four winners, including the 1999 Super Bowl title team and 2001 team that lost to Patriots in the Super Bowl.
The St. Louis stadium task force said in a statement it had anticipated the filing "for more than a year" and was "extremely confident" its proposal would be "well received as the league weighs its options in the weeks ahead."
Rams coach Jeff Fisher was head coach of the Houston Oilers when they relocated to Tennessee in the 1996, and that could happen again.
"I shared with the team today, I've been through this experience before," Fisher said earlier Monday. "We have to take the approach and with the assumption that everything's taking place here in St. Louis until we're told otherwise."
Safety T.J. McDonald's father, Tim McDonald, was a rookie defensive back on the Cardinals in 1987 in their final year in St. Louis before owner Bill Bidwill moved the franchise to Phoenix.
Former Cubs pitcher Ernie Broglio, part of the famous Lou Brock trade, dies at 83
'We’ve done a lot’: Jeremy Colliton eager to get going with a deeper — and more versatile — Blackhawks roster
Eloy Jimenez goes on the 10-day injured list with a right ulnar nerve contusion
Diamond DeShields’ 22 points lift Sky to 77-76 win against the Dream
Cole Hamels’ rapid recovery could have him on track to return to the Cubs by the end of July
"That's kind of crazy," said T.J. McDonald, who's rehabbing from shoulder surgery. "He's told me a lot of stories, too many to try to remember."
Middle linebacker James Laurinaitis said the demands of the season kept it from being too big of a distraction.
"Really, it'll become a big distraction now as you sit with nothing to do and you realize it's what, two weeks or not even (that) away from the decision," Laurinaitis said. "Everyone's just kind of fatigued about it, to be honest. Everyone wants closure to it all, just wants to know one way or another."
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Bullying is top concern for young people, survey finds
Bullying is the biggest concern among young people in Gibraltar, a questionnaire launched by the Voice of Young People group has found.
More than 1,300 young people completed the questionnaire which set out to identify the main issues affecting young people today.
Following which, personnel from the group met with Government Ministers Steven Linares and Dr John Cortes as well as Education Adviser Jackie Linares to discuss the outcomes of the survey.
In a statement the Gibraltar Government said the meeting enabled young people to have a voice and explore a variety of techniques and approaches to address their concerns.
As a result, the group will shortly be meeting with the Department of Education to have an input on the policy and guidelines of “Preventing & Tackling Bullying” in schools.
During the meeting, there was also a request for Arabic to be taught in schools at GCSE level as pupils feel this language is more in keeping with part of Gibraltar’s culture.
“Overall, the meeting was informative and interactive with young people keen to have their views taken seriously and explored at the highest level,” the statement read.
Additionally, the Government explained that due to the success of this initiative, it was agreed that a Questions and Answers session with the Ministers will be organised in the coming months.
Anyone wishing to get involved in the Voice of Young People please contact Caroline Dixon on 20041948. For any general information about the Gibraltar Youth Service or future events please contact Mark Zammit, Principal Youth Officer on mzammit@gibraltar.gov.gi or call 200 78637.
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Govt pushes ahead with juvenile detention centre
As the Government takes steps towards establishing a juvenile detention centre in Gibraltar, latest data shows that HM Windmill Hill received 18 juvenile admissions in the last two years.
According to Government statistics, six local juveniles were detained at the adult prison between October 2015 and October 2017. Most of them, however, were repeat offenders.
One juvenile was admitted five times during that two-year period and only two of the juveniles detained at Windmill Hill had just one spell in custody.
Of the remaining juvenile offenders, two of them were detained in prison twice and another endured three spells in custody.
A further four juveniles detained at Windmill Hill during the same time frame were immigrants, data shows.
Gibraltar’s courts use custody as a last resort when it comes to juvenile offenders but when it becomes necessary to detain youngsters, they are sent to the adult HM Windmill Hill prison as Gibraltar lacks a purpose-built detention centre for them.
The establishment of alternative provision for young offenders is a long-standing matter which was recently placed under the spotlight by a series of cases involving juveniles being detained at the adult prison.
The data therefore, once again, places a spotlight on the lack of facilities to appropriately accommodate juvenile offenders when detention becomes necessary and further highlights the lack of rehabilitation facilities in Gibraltar for youth offenders.
In an interview with the Chronicle earlier this year, Childline representatives revealed the charity had received more call-outs to assist detained juveniles through its Appropriate Adult scheme during a six-week period between July and August than it usually does in an entire year.
The charity’s representatives described those figures as “unprecedented” and “concerning” as they flagged how a number of the juveniles they have been called upon to assist are repeat offenders.
This comes against a backdrop of year-on-year increases in demand for its services assisting juveniles detained by the police.
The Government is, however, taking action on the issue which is wide ranging and encompasses the role of not only the police but also the likes of Social Services, the Care Agency and the community as a whole.
Last month, in a question and answer session of Parliament, the Government revealed that it has identified a ‘potential location’ and is assessing its suitability for establishing secure accommodation and a detention centre for young offenders.
Justice Minister Neil Costa confirmed that the Government is actively looking at the possibility of alternative provision for young offenders.
He explained that consultations are already ongoing between pertinent government departments and agencies with a view to finding a satisfactory solution.
“At the present stage, we have identified a potential location which we are actively considering to determine if they are suitable to provide a secure accommodation and a detention centre,” Mr Costa told MPs.
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Méditation de Thaïs
Composer: Massenet, Jules Arranger: Ruske, Eric
Instrumentation: Solo and Piano Instruments: French Horn, Piano
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Horn soloist Eric Ruske has established himself as an artist of international acclaim. Named Associate Principal Horn of The Cleveland Orchestra at the age of 20, he also toured and recorded extensively during his six-year tenure as hornist of the Empire Brass Quintet. His impressive solo career began when he won the 1986 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, First Prize in the 1987 American Horn Competition, and in 1988, the highest prize in the Concours International d'Interpretation Musicale in Reims, France.
Of his recording of the complete Mozart Concerti with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the New York Times stated, "Mr. Ruske's approach, firmly positioned with the boundaries of balance, coherence and good taste that govern the Classical Style, enchants by virtue of its confidence, imagination and ebullient virtuosity". Performances as soloist include appearances with the Baltimore Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Shanghai Radio Broadcast Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, European Camerata, San Diego Symphony, Boston Pops Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic and a tour with the Israel Chamber Orchestra throughout Israel. His recitals have been presented in venues such as the Louvre in Paris, the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Dukes Hall in London, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Mariinsky Concert Hall in St. Petersburg, Russia.
An active chamber musician, he has appeared with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Festival de Musica de Santa Catarina in Brazil, Moab Music Festival, Newport Music Festival, Spoleto Festival, Festival de Musique in St. Barthlélemy, OK Mozart International Festival, Recontres Musicales d’Évian , La Musica in Sarasota, Bargemusic in Brooklyn, Music from Angel Fire, Boston Chamber Music Society, and the Festival Pablo Casals both in Puerto Rico and in France. Mr. Ruske is in great demand as a teacher and clinician, and in addition to having given master classes at over one hundred universities and conservatories in the United States, he has taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, Banff Centre in Canada, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, Tokyo College of Music, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the College of Music at Seoul National University and most recently at the Ionian Academy in Corfu, Greece.
In 2012, Albany Records released a 7-CD box set of Mr. Ruske's recordings entitled The Horn of Eric Ruske. The set includes: Music by Three, a disc of music for horn, violin and piano; a collection of unaccompanied horn repertoire entitled Just me and my horn; two discs of virtuoso transcriptions for horn and piano, The Classic Horn and Virtuoso Music for Horn and Piano; a disc of the Strauss and Glière horn concerti, The Romantic Horn Concerti; the complete Mozart Horn Concerti and a disc of horn and piano repertoire entitled Night Poems. He has also made the world premiere recording of the Concierto Evocativo for horn and string orchestra by Roberto Sierra. His numerous arrangements and transcriptions, including a complete edition of the Mozart Concerti, are now available from Cimarron Music. A student of Dale Clevenger and Eugene Chausow, he grew up in LaGrange, Illinois and is a graduate of Northwestern University.
Joining architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, trumpeter Miles Davis and comedian Richard Pryor, Mr. Ruske was inducted into the Illinois Hall of Fame in 2007. He has received grants from the National Philanthropic Institute, the Saunders Foundation, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the International Institute of Education, the Mattina R. Proctor Foundation and Boston University. Mr. Ruske currently directs the Horn Seminar at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and is the Professor of Horn at Boston University.
Eric's personal webpage can be found here: http://www.ericruske.com
Ruske, Eric
French Horn, Piano
Solo and Piano
Cimarron Music Press
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Home Cineworld Blog 2018 London Indian Film Festival: everything you need to know
2018 London Indian Film Festival: everything you need to know
Posted on Monday, 18 June 2018 Share this article
The Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival (LIFF) returns for its ninth year with a host of premieres and special screenings taking place at Cineworld sites across the country. Supported by the British Film Institute (BFI), Hollywood and Bollywood stars alike will be present to celebrate this year's festival.
Running from 21st to 29th June in London with additional events taking place in Birmingham and, for the first time, in Manchester, it features some of the most prestigious and thought-provoking new independent films from the Indian subcontinent. Here's what you can expect.
London sites hosting the festival are: BFI Southbank, Cineworld Leicester Square and Wembley, the Barbican, Picturehouses Central, Crouch End and Stratford, Watermans Art Centre, Genesis, LSE and SOAS. For the first time, independent arts space HOME in Manchester will be hosting LIFF.
Due to popular demand, LIFF returns to Birmingham for its fourth year. Films will be showing at mac Birmingham, Cineworld Broad Street and The Mockingbird Cinema Kitchen.
Movies include the dramatic Fathers and Sons, exploring powerful themes of paternal relationships, and the raucous British comedy Eaten By Lions, in which Bradford teenager Omar and his half brother search for his real Asian dad on the streets of Blackpool.
The Song of Scorpions, meanwhile, is set in the deep deserts of Rajasthan. A lone camel herder played by Irrfan Khan (The Lunch Box) is obsessed by a magical, female healer who has the power to sing away scorpion bites, played by Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani (About Elly).
The Bagri Foundation
The Bagri Foundation is a UK registered charity that promotes Indian arts through its cultural programmes, working closely in tandem with LIFF to help present the very best that Indian cinema has to offer.
Opening and closing gala screenings
Cineworld Leicester Square will host its first-ever LIFF premiere on 21st June in the form of Love Sonia, which opens this year's festival. From the producer of the Oscar-winning Life of Pi, and directed by Tabrez Noorani (former line producer on Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire) this powerful story, shot across three contintents, follows two children sold into slavery.
It features an all-star cast of Hollywood and Bollywood stars, including Demi Moore, Freida Pinto, Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao, Richa Chadda, Anupam Kher, Adil Hussain, Sunny Parwar and Mrunal Thakur. Additional screenings will follow at Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham on 22nd June, and the BFI Southbank in London on 23rd June.
The Festival finale red carpet is at BFI Southbank with the UK Premiere of Venus, a feel-good comedy of identity, gender and family. Director Eisha Marjara and talent will attend the gala of this empowering, laugh out loud comedy on 29th June. Additional screenings will follow at BFI Southbank on 29th June and HOME Cinema Manchester on 30th June.
Central gala screening
The Central Gala is T For Taj Mahal, an inspiring tale about a roadside eatery owner who lives beside the main road to India's iconic landmark, the Taj Mahal. He embarks on an innovative and risky plan to educate the local illiterate children by offering free food in exchange for tourists teaching the kids.
Starring Ali Faulkner (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Pitobash (Million Dollar Arm), it's directed by Kireet Khurana, who is expected at the Cineworld Leicester Square screening on 23rd June. An additional screening will follow at London's Watermans Arts Centre on 24th June.
The Female Eye
We are delighted to screen a special selection of new films by some of the finest award-winning South Asian women filmmakers on the planet. This includes the UK premiere of multi-award-winning Village Rockstars, a joyous mother-daughter story about a free-thinking village girl who dreams of being a rock guitarist, followed by a Q&A with director Rima Das.
Teen Aur Aadha (Three and a Half) is an envelope-pushing compilation of three dramatic tales of modern Mumbai, shot in three and a half takes. British Bengali director Sangeeta Datta’s mesmerisingly beautiful Bird of Dusk examines the inner life of the late, great Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh.
LIFF will also screen a cinematic tribute to the legendary Bollywood star Sridevi, who died in February, with a special treat for all her fans: a rare showing of Shekhar Kapur’s iconic 1987 blockbuster, Mr India, co-starring Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor.
Festival awards
The Festival’s annual Satyajit Ray Competition is presented in association with the Bagri Foundation. With its £1,000 prize, it offers a platform for emerging filmmakers and six, shortlisted entries will be screened. The Festival will present its Pure Heaven Icon Award and its Outstanding Achievement Award, supported by Sun Mark Ltd.
For more details on the festival, click here. Tweet us #LoveLIFF, follow the festival on Facebook and using @Cineworld and join us for a unique celebration of the finest Indian cinema has to offer.
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Gillian Anderson film Sold to open London Indian Film Festival
Tags: london indian film festival
Your weekend movie news round-up!
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North American-led group halfway done reviewing Bangladesh garment factories
By Jessica Wohl
(Reuters) — More than one-half of the Bangladesh garment factories that do work for a group of North American retailers and apparel makers have already been inspected for fire and building safety, the group said on Oct. 22.
Last week, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety released a list of more than 620 factories its 23 current members do business with.
Bangladesh garment factory working conditions have been under close scrutiny since the April collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex killed more than 1,100 garment workers and a November 2012 fire at the Tazreen factory killed 112 workers.
Members of the Alliance, including industry heavyweights such as Canadian Tire, Gap and Walmart, have agreed to inspect all of the Bangladesh factories from which they source goods within a year. So far, more than 50 per cent of those factories have been inspected. It was not immediately clear how many factories may or may not need to make safety improvements based on those inspections.
The Alliance said it plans to have experts review and assess those inspections. If any inspection does not meet its requirements, another inspection will have to be completed.
About 3.6 million people work in Bangladesh's clothing industry, making it the world's second-largest clothing exporter behind China. Some of the mostly female workforce earn as little as $38 a month, and workers are pushing for an increase in the minimum wage. About 60 per cent of garment exports go to Europe and 23 per cent to the United States.
Roughly 50 per cent of the factories that do business with members of the Alliance also make garments for members of the separate European-led Accord and Fire and Building Safety.
The Accord group, which had 100 companies on board as of this month, is doing its own work to ensure the safety of garment workers in Bangladesh. Accord members include U.S. companies such as Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle Outfitters.
The Alliance also said that it has appointed two technical experts to help implement its fire and buildingsafety standards and inspection process, adhering to a set of fire and building safety standards that it says align with the Bangladesh National Building Code. The people assigned to that task are Ishtaique Ahmed, a professor of civil engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering; and Technology and Tracey Bellamy, chief engineering officer for Telgian, a fire protection and safety services firm, the Alliance said.
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Simon Cowell's little helper wins the Xmas Factor
By Simon Cable for The Mail on Sunday and Rachel Quigley
Updated: 07:25 EDT, 11 December 2010
Here's hoping: Cheryl Cole has two acts left in the X Factor final - and is hoping one of them will win the show
She looks like she’s kitted out to release a festive record of her own.
But Cheryl Cole was more concerned yesterday with ensuring one of her acts gets the chance to release a Christmas No.1 by winning this weekend’s X Factor final.
Just hours after she reminded fans that the competition was ‘a talent show, not a catwalk show’, the 27-year-old turned up at rehearsals in a red leather jacket and large white fluffy headband, resembling a mini-Santa Claus.
The tension at the show’s studios was ratcheting up, despite Miss Cole’s fellow judge Simon Cowell claiming he could hand all four finalists a record deal.
The X Factor chief admitted it was a ‘possibility’ he may give contracts to his act, One Direction, as well as to Cheryl’s two girls, Cher Lloyd and Rebecca Ferguson, and Matt Cardle, mentored by Dannii Minogue.
At the end of the last series, Cowell signed up only two acts, winner Joe McElderry and runner-up Olly Murs.
The year before, he just signed winner Alexandra Burke, while runners-up JLS were signed to Epic and Sony.
Cowell said: ‘I haven’t made a decision yet on whether I will give all finalists a record deal. The only person who is guaranteed one is the winner. But it is definitely a possibility.
‘I will just have to see how they perform on Saturday. Seriously.’
Simon Cowell insists: 'We didn't intentionally mislead X Factor voters'
This year’s final, to take place over tonight and tomorrow, is expected to reel in 21million viewers, a record for a British talent show.
Cowell has ordered the four remaining finalists to put in extra hours this week as he is said to be disappointed at the standard of last week’s performances.
He was also said to be giving a lot of advice to Cher, to the apparent irritation of her mentor Miss Cole, who called him and told him to stay away from the 17-year-old as she does not want him to take any credit for her performance.
In it to win it: Cher will duet with Will.i.Am and Rebecca Ferguson will take to the stage with Christina Aguilera in tomorrow's X Factor final
Miss Minogue also confirmed that odds-on favourite Matt was unable to finish his rehearsals due to a throat infection and was worried he might not be able to sing. Matt himself admitted: ‘It would be a complete disaster, and it could happen.
‘I’ll sing it the best I can on the night. This has definitely been my worst moment on the show.’
Tonight’s programme will include each act duetting with a celebrity: One Direction will perform with Robbie Williams, Rebecca with Christina Aguilera, Cher with Will.i.Am and Matt with Rihanna.
One person will be evicted from tonight’s show with a second finalist ousted half-way through tomorrow night’s programme.
The two remaining acts will then battle it out to be crowned the X Factor’s 2010 winner and win a £1million recording deal.
Matt is the 5/6 favourite to win with bookmakers, while Rebecca has odds of 5/2, One Direction are put at 11/4 and Cher is at 20/1.
X Factor final 2010: Simon Cowell's little helper Cheryl Cole wins Xmas Factor
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Airbus, Broughton, to grow despite recession
THE Airbus business will continue to grow despite the recession, according to the company’s executive vice president of programmes.
At a briefing at the Broughton site last week, Tom Williams said he predicted the company would see almost 5% growth over the next 20 years.
He said: “We had anticipated the downturn.
“We worked extremely hard to build up an order backlog.”
So far this year Airbus in the UK has delivered 358 aircraft and Mr Williams said they were on track to repeat the 2008 delivery record of 483 planes.
“We have been using the order backlog to try and smooth the cycle out,” Mr Williams added.
But the company has some work to do before it makes its order target of 300 for this year, with just 149 orders made in 2009 so far.
Work is continuing on the new building at the Broughton site, where composite wings will be created for the A350.
Once completed, the site will be 900ft long, 840ft wide and 80ft high.
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Hugh Jackman Set To Host This Year’s Tony Awards!
By Allison Cacich
If there's one thing we've learned about the Tony Awards, it's that they like recycling hosts!
After recruiting Neil Patrick Harris to host the show over the last three years, the Tonys are returning to an old favorite for their 68th ceremony: Hugh Jackman!
This will be the Australian's fourth time hosting Broadway's biggest night, and the 45-year-old couldn't wait to share the news, posting this video to his Instagram account:
//instagram.com/p/kSW3EjChLQ/
The Golden Globe-winning actor previously hosted in '03, '04 and '05 and also tried his hand at hosting the Oscars in 2009. So he's definitely got the experience!
"We are thrilled that Hugh will be joining us, once again, at Radio City Music Hall to host ‘The 68th Annual Tony Awards,’" said Charlotte St. Martin, Executive Director of The Broadway League and Heather Hitchens, Executive Director of the American Theatre Wing.
“Hugh is an extraordinary talent and loyal supporter of the Broadway community – whether he is on-stage or in the audience – and we are honored to have him back as host.”
Jackman won a Tony Award in 2004 for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his role in "The Boy from Oz." He was also awarded the Special Tony in 2012 for extraordinary contribution to the theatre community.
The Tony Awards will be broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 8th on CBS.
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