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__label__cc	0.516701	0.483299	blogs.reading.ac.uk SAGE(S) Advice: Fieldwork, Gender & Careers Gender and Fieldwork Inspirational Links Tag Archives: Women in Science Women in Science Video Narratives Posted on June 3, 2016 by louisejones In 2014/2015, the University of Oxford interviewed 39 women scientists, all working at Oxford. From this they have created a website (Women in Science) with information and links to the video interviews. The themes which are covered include obtaining funding, career progression, mentorship, and taking parental leave. From the website – ‘The aim of the project was to provide support to women making career decisions, by offering them the opportunity to explore a broad range of experiences shared by other women through video interviews. The women talked about many issues, including the culture of science, publishing, obtaining fellowship funding, having a mentor and Athena SWAN. This project focussed mainly on women working in the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford. The project team acknowledges the many other inspiring women working in scientific disciplines across Oxford and hopes in time to include their views here too. This project was funded by the Vice Chancellor’s Diversity Fund and supported by the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, the Radcliffe Department of Medicine and the Medical Sciences Office. The grant holders are Chris Price and Sue Ziebland. Alison Chapple conducted the interviews. She also analysed the data with Sue Ziebland.’ Is this something we could/should do here at Reading spanning across all disciplines? Have as much fun in science as I have! Prof. Dame Sally Davies, first female Chief Medical Officer of England, encourages you to use this website as a resource to support your career. Tagged University of Oxford, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| Manifesto for Change Posted on April 1, 2016 by louisejones Published on the 28th March, Athene Donald has written a new blog post discussing women in science, discrimination, and the recent L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science awards. Athene also highlights a new initiative – the L’Oreal Manifesto.What do you think about the manifesto? ‘There is no point getting angry, since this too often is simply misplaced energy and a waste. But there is every point in highlighting transgressions – small and large – whenever possible to emphasise the structural inequities that exist. The sad fact is, however, that too often circumstances mean that speaking out can backfire. Every genuine supporter of equality has to walk that tightrope. In the meantime, signing the L’Oreal Manifesto is one small action to spell out that enough is enough. We need to shout about the deep-seated societal problems and we need to do it loudly and persistently.’ Do you feel like you are walking a tightrope when you highlight equality issues? Tagged Athene Donald, L'Oreal Manifesto, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| Applications are open for the 2016 L’Oréal-UNESCO Women In Science Fellowships Posted on January 29, 2016 by louisejones What are the L’Oréal UK and Ireland Fellowships For Women in Science? ‘The L’Oréal-UNESCO UK and Ireland Fellowships For Women in Science are awards offered by a partnership between L’Oréal UK & Ireland, the UK National Commission for UNESCO and the Irish National Commission for UNESCO, with the support of the Royal Society, to promote, enhance and encourage the contribution of women pursuing their research careers in the UK or Ireland in the fields of the life and physical sciences. The National Fellowships are offered under the umbrella of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme, which has promoted women in scientific research on a global scale since 1998. Five Fellowships will be awarded in 2016 to outstanding women scientists in the early stages of their career to enable and/or facilitate promising scientific research. The Fellowships are tenable at any UK or Irish university or research institute to support a 12-month period of postdoctoral research in any area of life, physical and computer sciences, engineering and mathematics.’ Applications open: Thursday 28th January Applications close: Friday 11th March Shortlist published: Monday 30th May Awards Ceremony: Wednesday 22nd June See the L’Oréal-UNESCO website for more information. Good luck! Tagged L'Oréal, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| Female success rate dips to 10 per cent in latest ERC grant round Posted on June 30, 2015 by louisejones Announced toady (30th June) – ‘female academics have won just 10 per cent of the latest tranche of the European Research Council’s flagship advanced grants‘ In an article published in the Times Higher Paul Jump notes that ‘according to the statistics for the 2014 round, released on 30 June, women account for just 19 of the 190 awardees. Of the 25 award-making panels, 12 made no awards to females, including two out of the nine panels in the life sciences, six out of 10 in the physical sciences and engineering, and four out of six in social sciences and humanities. In the previous round of advanced grants, in 2013, women accounted for 13 per cent of awardees. However, a spokesman for the ERC said that significantly fewer women had applied in this round. Of the 2287 applications, just 310 came from women, or 13.4 per cent of the total. The female success rate was 6.1 per cent, compared to 8.6 per cent for men. The spokesman also pointed out that in the most recent round of consolidator grants, aimed at mid-career researchers, women were slightly more successful than men, taking 28 per cent of the grants, with a success rate of 15.2 per cent, compared to 14.9 per cent for men. He said the issue of low female representation among grantees was “something we are working on”. The full article can be seen here – https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/female-success-rate-dips-10-cent-latest-erc-grant-round What do you think? Is there anything that can be done to encourage more female staff to apply for these grants? Should Departments/School’s/University’s be offering more support and/or encouragement? Tagged ERC, Paul Jump, Times Higher, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| The women whom science forgot On 19th June Jawad Iqbal published this article on the BBC Science and Environment page – The Women whom science forgot ‘A quick web search for the world’s most famous scientists lists, among others, Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Stephen Hawking and Alexander Fleming. One of the few women to receive a mention is Marie Curie, a physicist and chemist who basically discovered radiation and helped apply it in the field of X-rays. The Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt was heavily criticised for his disparaging remarks about women in science last week, which for some raised the issue of where women stood in the scientific community. But many female scientists in the past were not given the credit they deserved for their achievements. As a result, their names have all but disappeared from public consciousness ……..’ Esther Lederberg – an American microbiologist The list includes: Esther Lederberg – a microbilogist who undertook groundbreaking research in genetics Rosalind Franklin – a biophysicist who pioneered X-0ray crystallography Ida Tacke – conducted groundbreaking research in chemistry and atomic physics Lise Meitner – her research led to the discovery of nuclear fission Jawad Iqbal notes that ‘the Royal Society, swift in its condemnation of Sir Tim’s remarks, was founded in 1660 and has yet to elect a female president. Some say that the comments from Sir Tim, a prominent fellow of the society will damage the efforts it is making to improve diversity. It has been reported that only 6% of its fellows (a prestigious title in the world of science) are women. That statistic, some say, sums up the scale of the wider problem of the difficulties faced by women in the scientific world’ What do you think? Have any female scientists in your field of research disappeared from public consciousness? Tagged BBC News, Diversity, Jawad Iqbal, Royal Society, science, Tim Hunt, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| Time to keep score on female scientists ‘The success of female scientists at securing research funding has never been under closer scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Royal Society published the results of a detailed investigation into why so few women managed to get their 2014 University Research Fellowships. Now, as reported by Holly Else in Times Higher Education this week, Research Councils UK has published data for the first time on female success rates for each specific research council’s grants and fellowships. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/time-to-keep-score-on-female-scientists/2019408.article What is emerging is a new understanding of why so few women manage to get ahead in science: they simply do not apply for research grants and fellowships at the same rate as men.’ Tagged Grant applications, Times Higher Education, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| Female science writers celebrated Posted on March 16, 2015 by louisejones ‘A Royal Society discussion has considered the behind-the-scenes and often neglected roles that women have long played in the advancement of science. Held on 10 March to tie in with International Women’s Day, “Women Writing Science” brought together three historians to explore and celebrate the major contributions made by women even at a time when the doors to universities, learned societies and laboratories were largely closed to them.’ The full article in the Times Higher by Matthew Reisz can be seen here – http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/female-science-writers-celebrated/2019101.article Tagged International Women's Day, Royal Society, Times Higher, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| L’Oreal UK and Ireland Fellowships for Women in Science Posted on February 19, 2015 by louisejones Applications for the 2015 L’Oréal-UNESCO UK & Ireland For Women in Science Fellowships now open. The L’Oréal-UNESCO UK and Ireland Fellowships For Women in Science are awards offered by a partnership between L’Oréal UK & Ireland, the UK National Commission for UNESCO and the Irish National Commission for UNESCO, with the support of the Royal Society, to promote, enhance and encourage the contribution of women pursuing their research careers in the UK or Ireland in the fields of the life and physical sciences. The National Fellowships are offered under the umbrella of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme, which has promoted women in scientific research on a global scale since 1998. http://www.womeninscience.co.uk/ 2015 Key Dates Applications open: Monday 2nd February Shortlist published: Tuesday 2nd June Awards Ceremony: Tuesday 23rd June In a special edition of ‘International Innovation’ focusing on ‘A Passion for Progress’ our four 2014 fellows showcase their pioneering research of as an example of what women scientists around the globe are working on. When it comes to forging a successful scientific career, women in the 21st Century have much better prospects than their female counterparts from previous generations. Yet in spite of significant gender equality advances – set in motion during the 1960s and 1970s – women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of R&D in every region of the world. For instance, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimates that just 30 per cent of researchers worldwide are female, while in the UK and Ireland women comprise only 13 per cent of STEM employees. Multiple studies have identified a number of recurring barriers to women in STEM, including a male dominated working culture, a ‘chilly’ classroom environment, the insecure nature of science research and a lack of access to mentors. http://www.internationalinnovation.com/build/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/p15-17_Loreal_Intl_Innovation_171_Research_Media.pdf L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme The L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme recognises the achievements and contributions of exceptional females across the globe by awarding promising scientists with Fellowships to help further their research. Over 15 years ago L’Oréal and UNESCO founded the For Women in Science Programme to promote and highlight the critical importance of ensuring greater participation of women in science. Each year the Programme recognises the achievements of exceptional female scientists across the globe, and awards them with Fellowships to help further their research. Since the Programme was founded in 1998 more than 1,300 women in 106 countries have been recognised for their research and received funding to further their careers. The UK and Ireland Fellowship application process re-opens in February 2015. More information can be found here: http://www.womeninscience.co.uk/index.php Tagged L'Oréal, UNESCO, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| Athene Donald’s Blog On 11th January Athene Donald wrote a blog post focusing on women in science and the role of Athena Swan – ‘We’ve Come a Long Way But ……’ http://occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald/2015/01/11/weve-come-a-long-way-but/ Athene Donald is a Professor of Physics in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge working on soft matter and Biological Physics. She has an active interest in issues around women in science within the University (WiSETI) and outside (Athena Forum), as well as in equality and diversity more generally; and a growing interest in education and science policy. Athene holds a variety of positions on committees etc, but her blog (see the link above) is written in a purely personal capacity. Tagged Athena SWAN, Athene Donald, Women in Science \| Leave a comment \| This blog is brought to you by the School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science. Please follow and enjoy! The ‘Mums’ penalty’ in the workplace and why we’re all paying the cost new blog posts written by our students! The blog is evolving Athena SWAN Award Ceremony today! Improve gender balance in Irish HE or face fines, says review Amanda Clarke archaeology Athena SWAN Athene Donald BBC BBC News blog Bolivia careers Diversity Equality Equality Challenge Unit Fairtrade fieldwork gender Gender and Fieldwork Gender Equality Gender pay gap geography Holly Else Imposter Syndrome International Women's Day Interviews Jack Grove L'Oréal Macarena Cardenas Mindfulness Pascal Flohr Pond Farm Research Professional Roberta Gilchrist Royal Society SAGES science Sean Coughlan Silchester Times Higher Times Higher Education Tim Hunt unconscious bias University of Reading wellbeing women Women in Science Work Life Balance louisejones on Student Mindfulness Course Christine Halls on Student Mindfulness Course Nicola Roberts on Annual Norma Wilkinson Lecture Secret diary of an Athena SWAN lead (re-blogged) \| The Culture of Enthusiasm on Brick Walls: Diary of a SAGES Athena SWAN Lead by Hilary Geoghegan Out in the field (and not in the office!) \| SAGE(S) Advice: Fieldwork, Gender & Careers on Silchester 2015 Archaeological Excavations at Insula III – Silchester & Pond Farm Hillfort 17th August – 13th September © University of Reading	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line601
__label__wiki	0.861997	0.861997	Lebanon laments burden of Syria refugees Sep 25, 2013, 1:39 AM EDT (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Lebanon's president said Tuesday that his country was struggling under the weight of at least a million Syrian refugees as the U.S. pledged tens of millions of dollars in aid to offset the costs of the war spillover. Michel Suleiman spoke of the crisis in his country in his address to world leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Hours earlier, he met with President Barack Obama, who praised Lebanon for its generosity in welcoming refugees fleeing the crisis in neighboring Syria. Obama announced $339 million in additional humanitarian aid in response to Syria's crisis, including $74 million for Lebanon. He also said the U.S. was sending $8.7 million to help Lebanon's military protect its borders against terrorist threats and illicit goods. Suleiman said Lebanon is overwhelmed by Syrian refugees who have reached around a fourth of Lebanon's population of 4.5 million. He said the burden of hosting them was beginning to take on "an existential dimension" for his nation. The impact of Syria's refugees on Lebanon will be the focus of a meeting Wednesday on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The meeting of the International Support Group for Lebanon will draw donors and others to discuss the dimensions of the crisis. The Washington-based World Bank has concluded a quick assessment at the request of the Lebanese government to determine the economic and social impact of spillover from the conflict in Syria and the financial resources Lebanon will need to cope with it. It was done in preparation for Wednesday's meeting. Lebanon faces billions of dollars in lost economic activity, and the massive influx of refugees is overwhelming public services and risks driving up unemployment and poverty rates, according to the assessment. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim met Suleiman on Tuesday to begin work on a plan for coping with the Syrian spillover. He thanked Lebanon for its generosity and discussed how the World Bank and the international community can do their part so that Lebanon does not shoulder the costs alone, according to a World Bank statement. "We now have a clear picture of the costs Lebanon faces for sheltering nearly a million refugees fleeing the fighting in Syria," Kim said. The assessment covered the period of 2012-2014 and is meant to both guide government policy and provide a basis for coordinating global support. It concluded that Syrian refugees in Lebanon could reach 1.3 million by the end of 2013. "If the conflict continues, there could be as many as 1.6 million refugees in Lebanon by the end of 2014," said Inger Andersen, World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa region. The demand on public services has surged along with the population. If things continue on the same course, rising demand will drive up government expenditures by an estimated $1.1 billion for 2012-2014. Government revenues are expected to drop by $1.5 billion because of interrupted trade and an erosion of business and consumer confidence, the assessment found. More than 170,000 Lebanese will be pushed into poverty by 2014, and unemployment could double to more than 20 percent over the same period, the World Bank said. Up to $1.6 billion will be needed to maintain the quality of social safety nets and health and education systems, and to restore access to pre-crisis levels, according to the World Bank report. In addition, services such as electricity, waste management, transportation and water will need additional investments to meet the needs of the Lebanese population and the refugees. Lebanon-World Syria-World Michel Suleiman Report: Israeli jets strike eastern Lebanon Twin bombing in Beirut kills 3, injures dozens Hezbollah stronghold bombed in Beirut Aid group: Debt of Syrian refugees spiraling Blasts near Iranian Embassy in Beirut kill at least 23	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line603
__label__cc	0.554453	0.445547	Correlates of regret with treatment decision-making among Japanese women with breast cancer: results of an internet-based cross-sectional survey Keiko Yamauchi ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0909-52801, Motoyuki Nakao1 & Mitsuyo Nakashima2 Satisfaction with medical decisions among patients with cancer is associated not only with the results of decisions they make but also with how they make those decisions. To elucidate the decision-making process among Japanese women with breast cancer, we explored the correlates of regret with patients’ treatment decision-making. An Internet-based cross-sectional survey was utilized. Japanese women (N = 467) who self-reported that they had been diagnosed with stage 0II breast cancer participated. Data regarding their decisional role (active, collaborative, or passive) in treatment decision-making, their most regrettable experience regarding their decision-making, the importance of various factors related to decision-making at the time, and clinical and sociodemographic factors were obtained. A forced-entry logistic regression analysis was performed on the likelihood that patients would have some regrets regarding the decision-making process. About half the women expressed some regret (51.4%). Women who had a mastectomy were significantly more likely to have regret than women who had breast conserving surgery. Correlates of regret differed by surgical type. For women who had a mastectomy, those who were aged ≥50 years when diagnosed, or who made their decisions collaboratively with their doctors were significantly less likely to have regret with the decision-making. For women who had breast conserving surgery, those who worked on a contract or part-time basis or whose decision-making roles matched their preferred role were significantly less likely to have regret. Among women who reported some regret, 23.8% expressed that their most regrettable experience concerned gathering information, while 21.3% regretted not consulting with others. For women who were diagnosed at a younger age, the influence on their sex life and pregnancy and childbirth was more important when making their treatment decisions than for women diagnosed an older age. Approximately half of the Japanese women with breast cancer in this study reported some regret in the treatment decision-making process. Effective participation in decision-making differed by surgical types. Additionally, women who are diagnosed with breast cancer at a relatively younger age, as compared to those who are older, may need additional information and support regarding their sex life and fertility after cancer treatment. Breast cancer (BC) is the most common type of cancer in Japan, and the number of women diagnosed with BC has recently increased; in 2017, about 89,000 Japanese women were diagnosed with BC [1]. These women are required to make difficult decisions regarding primary treatment after diagnosis such as whether to undergo a total mastectomy (TM) or breast conserving surgery (BCS) to resect primary tumors. Satisfaction and regret with medical decisions as well as quality of life (QOL) among patients with BC are associated not only with the results of the decisions they make, but also with how they make those decisions; however, prior findings concerning the influence of this decision-making vary. There are discussions based on the level of involvement in decision-making. More active participation is associated with higher QOL [2, 3]; patients who collaborate with their physicians to make treatment decisions have less regret with treatment and higher QOL compared with patients who make decisions by themselves, or patients who entrust their physicians to determine the treatment [4, 5]. Other discussions concern the congruence of preferred and actual participatory styles. Decisional regret is lower and QOL is higher among patients whose involvement in decision-making is congruent with their preferred involvement, regardless of how they made treatment decisions [6,7,8]. Several studies have addressed the treatment decision-making process of Japanese women with BC, their preferred and perceived involvement in decision-making, and the impact of participation on satisfaction with their decision and the decision-making process [9,10,11]; however, these studies have not always reached consistent conclusions. For instance, the proportion of women who preferred to choose their cancer treatment collaboratively with their physicians ranged from 13 to 70% [9,10,11]. Participants were more satisfied with the treatment decision-making process when their participation in the process matched their preferred role [11]; however, another study found that almost all women (99%) were satisfied with the decision-making process regardless of congruence between their preferred and perceived participation, nor the role they played [9]. It should be noted, however, that studies conducted outside of Japan revealed that even patients with BC who were satisfied with their decisions reported some regrets with their decision-making process [3, 12]. This finding suggests that exploring decision-making regret might be helpful in gaining a better understanding of decision-making itself. The aforementioned studies involving Japanese women with BC focused on decision satisfaction or satisfaction with decision-making process [9,10,11]. We believe that exploring not only satisfaction but also regret with decision-making would provide new information regarding treatment decision-making for Japanese women with BC, which could be important in improving patients’ decisional satisfaction. To better understand Japanese women’s decision-making for BC treatment, we investigated the extent that women experienced decision-making regret, the association of regret with decisional roles and other factors, and women’s most regrettable decision-making-related event. Furthermore, we examined the degree of importance of various clinical and social information for Japanese women when they considered their BC treatment. Sample and data collection The details of the study design and sample have been described in a previously published article and are reviewed herein [11]. We conducted a cross-sectional, self-reported Internet survey of Japanese females with BC/survivors using an online marketing research company (Rakuten Research Inc., Tokyo, Japan). We analyzed data from 475 women who completed the online questionnaire from March 11 to 14, 2016, and who reported that they had been diagnosed with stage 0–II BC. All data were complete. Treatment decision-making role was elicited using the Japanese version of the Control Preference Scale [9]. Participants indicated the final decision-making role that best described their involvement in the decision-making process: active, “myself” and “myself with consideration of the opinions of the physician”; collaborative, “the physician and I together” and passive, “the physician” and “the physician with consideration of my opinions.” Their preferred role before diagnosis and their perceived role (actual role) in deciding treatment for their BC was elicited. Decisional congruence between preferred and actual roles was computed based on the five decision making styles. Regret regarding the medical decision-making process was evaluated using the item, “have you had any regret or something you wanted to do over again in the treatment decision-making process?” Responses were made using a numerical rating scale: having nothing to do over again (0) to everything to do over again (100). Because of the skewed nature of the responses (48.8% reported having nothing to do over again), we dichotomized the variable (having no regret vs. having some regret). Additionally, women who had some level of regret expressed their most regrettable experience regarding their decision-making in areas such as choosing a hospital, building trusting relationships with doctors, gathering information, taking the time to consider options, and consulting with others. We also assessed the degree of importance of various clinical information for Japanese women when they considered their BC treatment, such as cancer characteristics, treatment benefits and risks, obtaining a second opinion, and medical expenses, as well as life influences such as pregnancy and childbirth, sexual activity, and work/housework. Participants rated each item on a 5-point scale (1 = not at all to 5 = very). Descriptive statistical analyses were used to determine participants’ characteristics and their most regrettable decision-making experiences. A forced-entry logistic regression analysis was conducted with whether or not participants had some regrets as the dependent variable. Independent variables included demographic variables (i.e., current age, age at diagnosis, marital status, educational level, household income, and employment status) and clinical variables (i.e., time since diagnosis, cancer stage, surgery type, whether they received radiation, chemotherapy and/or hormone therapy), preferred and perceived decision-making roles, and congruity between preferred and perceived decision-making role. Adjusted odds ratio (AOR) were reported together with 95% confidence intervals. Chi-square tests were performed to examine proportional differences between age groups upon diagnosis and the perceived degree of importance of the items. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS Version 24 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY, USA). Participants’ characteristics Table 1 presents participants’ sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. Most (67.9%) were aged ≥50 years; had been diagnosed with BC between 41 and 50 years of age (60.7%); and had undergone BCS (65.1%), radiation therapy (62.7%) and/or hormone therapy (71.5%). About half (50.3%) preferred to make treatment decisions collaboratively with their doctors, while roughly one-third (31.3%) perceived that they collaborated with their doctors in choosing their treatment. Moreover, about half (51.4%) had some regret regarding the decision-making process. Table 1 Participants’ sociodemographic and clinical characteristics (N = 467) Correlates of regret in the decision-making process for cancer treatment Table 2 presents the impact of sociodemographic and clinical variables, as well as decision-making roles, on the likelihood that patients would have some regret regarding the decision-making process, as revealed by multivariate logistic regression analyses. Sociodemographic correlates of regret in treatment decision-making were age upon being diagnosed with BC and employment status. Specifically, women diagnosed with BC when aged ≥50 years and who worked on a contract or part-time basis were significantly less likely to experience regret in the decision-making process than were their counterparts. In addition, only surgical type showed an association with regret in treatment decision-making: participants who received a TM were significantly more likely to feel regret regarding treatment decision-making compared with those who had BCS. Further, women who had TM and who made their decision for cancer treatment collaboratively with their doctors were significantly less likely to experience regret about the decision-making process compared with those who decided by themselves; women who had BCS and who participated in the process in their preferred role were significantly less likely to experience regret compared with those who did not participate in their preferred role. Table 2 Multivariate logistic regression analysis concerning having regret in the treatment decision-making process Table 3 shows the most regrettable experiences regarding the decision-making process for women who reported some regret. The most frequent regrets were issues related to gathering information (23.8%) and consulting with others (21.3%). Table 3 The most regrettable experiences among women who had some regret (N = 240) Importance of other factors on treatment decision Table 4 presents the degree of importance of various factors when considering treatment options by participants’ age group. Cancer characteristics and treatment benefits and risks were very or fairly important for most participants, regardless of age. For women who were diagnosed with BC at a younger age, the potential impact on their sex life and pregnancy and childbirth was more important when making their medical decisions than for older women. Table 4 Degree of importance of various factors related to decision-making by age at diagnosis In our Internet survey of Japanese women with BC, approximately half of the women surveyed reported some regret in the treatment decision-making process. For one quarter of them, the most regrettable experience concerned the process of gathering information for their decision-making. Multiple logistic regression analyses revealed that the pattern of association between the decision-making and regret with the decision-making process differed by surgical type. For women who were diagnosed with BC at a relatively young age, the influence of treatment on their sex life and fertility was more important than it was for women who were older. Our results suggested effective participation in the decision-making process differed by surgical type. For patients who had TM, making treatment decisions collaboratively with their doctors was associated with lower levels of regret; for patients who had BCS, congruence between preferred and perceived actual role was a predictor for not having regret. This result regarding TM contrasts with our previous finding that Japanese women with BC are more satisfied with treatment decision-making when their participation matches their preferred role, regardless of how they participate [11]. Differences in the cancer stage of the participants in the two studies may explain this inconsistency. Women who reported that they had stage 0–II BC were included in the current study, while women who reported that they had any stage of BC, including unknown stages, participated in the previous study. In the previous study, women who were diagnosed with stage III or IV BC were more likely to play a passive role in decision-making, and satisfaction with the decision-making process for women in this group was highest when their decisional role was congruent [11]. This is consistent with a study of Taiwanese women with early stage BC: regret regarding surgical decisions increased with decisional role incongruency, but only among women with stage II BC [7]. As the practice of shared decision-making has been recommended in oncological settings, questions have been raised as to whether this approach is beneficial to all patients. Our results provide insight into this question— collaborative decision-making may play a stronger role with regard to regret for those who had a higher stage of BC and who have undergone TM (data shown in Additional file 1: Table S1). Conversely, for patients who preferred to have BCS, who had a lower stage of cancer and who participated in decision-making in the manner in which they preferred may lead to less regrettable decision-making. Different approaches to decision-making based on their cancer stage or available surgical options may best serve the needs of BC patients. Furthermore, type of surgery was the only clinical variable associated with decision-making regret. The AOR of having regret was significantly lower among women who had BCS than those who had TM. Similarly, the aforementioned study in Taiwan [7] and a population-based study in the U.S. [3] showed that regrets with decisions and the decision-making processes were lower among patients who had BCS compared with those who had TM. The most frequent factors associated with preferring TM among women with early stage BC in systematic review were survival and recurrence (46%) while it was 17% for those women who preferred BCS [13]. This suggests that patients in current study, who have higher stage of cancer may experience more difficulty in their decision-making process compared with patients who have lower stage of cancer due to their misconception regarding BC stage and the treatment options. Unnecessary concerns of death or cancer recurrence may take away their opportunities to participate in decision-making in the way they would prefer, resulting in them feeling not fully involved in the decision-making process. Additionally, the proportion of decisional incongruence in patients who played a passive role was higher for women with TM compared with those who underwent BCS (76% vs. 64%, respectively; data shown in Additional file 1: Table S2) suggests that some patients with TM may have unwillingly had this surgery as a result of their insufficient knowledge about their treatment options. These findings indicate that shared decision-making would be an appropriate approach to assist patients whose knowledge of BC is determined to be insufficient. On the other hand, this may not always be appreciated by patients who understand their eligibility and the equal efficacy of the two surgical options: TM and BCS with radiotherapy. For these women, healthcare professionals should verify how patients would like to be involved in their medical decision-making and provide guidance in this area. Compared with women who were working full-time at the time of the survey, women who worked on a contract or part-time basis showed significantly lower odds of having decision-making regret. This was found only for women who had BCS. Treatment costs of BC increase as the stage of cancer increases [14] and cost is a major concern for patients with cancer everywhere, including Japan [15,16,17], often forcing patients to stay in their full- time job no matter what they truly desire. However, we do not know whether they continued their work after their diagnosis with BC. Further studies are needed to clarify the influence of the financial burden of cancer treatment on employment status, decision-making regret, and their interaction. Given the extensive availability of BC treatments, a recommendation of active participation in medical decision-making may make some women feel overwhelmed. Among the women who reported regret in this study, nearly one-quarter indicated that their most regrettable experience concerned gathering information or not consulting with others. These results are consistent with other studies conducted in Japan [9, 18]. Nakashima and colleagues showed that more than half of their study participants with BC reported negative experiences with information-seeking, which includes a lack of available information, the time and effort required for finding information, and the lack of time to search [9]. Relatively recent data regarding the information that Japanese patients and survivors with BC sought on the largest cancer information website in Japan from April 2012 to December 2017 suggests that women were frustrated because they could not find the information they needed [18]. Next to information on metastasis and recurrence, treatment-related information such as possible treatments, hormone therapy, and the side effects of various treatments were the most frequently sought but most difficult to find information on this site [18]. Even when women could find the information they sought, they had concerns regarding its quality and had difficulties understanding the information they found [9]. This may be the reason why some women in the present study reported that their greatest regret regarding decision-making was that they did not consult with others. According to the results of the multiple logistic regression analyses, women who perceived that they collaboratively made the treatment decision with their doctors were less likely to have regret about the process, suggesting that doctors are among those with whom they wish to consult. A German study of patients with breast or colon cancer showed that patients who perceived that their physicians showed them more sympathy were more likely to play a collaborative role in decision-making and have less decisional regret [8]. In a study of Chinese women with BC, a higher degree of shared decision-making at the diagnostic treatment consultation, which includes the provision of clear and unbiased information by the physician, was associated with greater satisfaction with the decision-making and less regret with the decision [5]. Sufficient time to discuss the type of cancer and its treatment and expressing to the doctor one’s preferences and feeling about the treatment choices, would produce less stressful decision-making, and may lead to greater satisfaction with the decision. The present study revealed that age at diagnosis was associated with decision-making regret, especially for women who had TM. Women who had TM and were diagnosed with BC when they were aged older than 41 years were significantly less likely to experience regret in the decision-making process than were women who diagnosed with when they were younger than 40. In women aged younger than 40 years, the influence of BC treatment on pregnancy/childbirth and their sex life was considered more important when they chose their cancer treatment than it was for older women. This did not differ by surgery type (data shown in Additional file 1: Table S3). According to 2013 Japanese cancer statistics, among women under 30, BC accounted for less than 5% of cancer incidence; however, that percentage rises to over 20% for women in their thirties and is about 40% for women in their early forties [1]. Considering this statistic, our findings indicate that information regarding fertility and sexuality, is a critical factor in treatment decision-making for young patients. Regarding fertility, as described earlier, a gap between the information that younger patients need and the information that health-care providers provide may exist. Two surveys targeting doctors who routinely examined patients with cancer including breast oncologists illustrate this gap. The proportion of doctors who reported that they referred patients who expressed fertility concerns to reproductive specialists was 42% in a national survey [19], and 30% in an Internet survey [20], and the proportion of doctors who routinely discussed fertility issues with their patients was 21 and 42.7%, respectively [19, 20]. The greatest barrier for physicians to discuss fertility issues with young patients was the priority of cancer treatment, especially for patients with aggressive disease [19, 20]. Time constraints in the clinic was a second greatest barriers for breast oncologist [19]. Therefore, bridging this gap by using non-physicians such as nurses, social workers and psychologists is anticipated [21]. In contrast to fertility, only a few small-sample studies have investigated the impact of BC on Japanese women’s sexuality [22, 23]. One such study, which involved 102 post-surgery patients, showed that the average age of patients who chose a skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate breast reconstruction was younger than were those who chose BCS or TM. Further, the value that these younger patients attached to their physical appearance, self-evaluation of femininity, and sexuality was significantly higher than for other surgery types [22]. Another study of 85 BC survivors, who were aged mainly in their forties or fifties and who had an active sexual relationship before surgery, showed that 73 of the women had resumed sex after surgery and that, while all except one reported sex-related symptoms, only nine of the women had consulted someone about their sexual concerns [23]. In addition, about half of the women in their twenties, thirties, or forties expressed a desire to include sexuality-related topics in a booklet for patients with BC [23]; for example, “influence of various treatment modalities on sexual response,” “relationship between sexual activities and recurrence of the disease,” and “informational resources regarding partnership or sexual issues.” Thus, it is possible that some discussion of fertility and sexuality with health care providers can reduce feelings of regret in decision-making, especially for younger patients. Further study to determine the association between the quality and quantity of time taken to discuss fertility and sexuality concerns in a clinical setting and regret or satisfaction with decision-making is needed. There are several limitations to this study. First, given the nature of Internet-based, self-administered surveys, we were unable to evaluate the accuracy of the medical information provided, such as cancer stage and surgery type. However, previous study found that the proportion of correctly reported surgery type is 97.6% among patients with lumpectomy and 99.3% for mastectomy [24], suggesting that self-reported medical information is reliable. Second, participants who were registered with an online marketing research company and were willing to participate in surveys were recruited for this study. Selection bias thus limits the generalizability of our results. However, the Internet-based survey enabled us to recruit participants from a variety of regions and age groups; this is a study strength, as previous studies of decision-making among Japanese patients with BC were conducted in a single city with a small number of participants [9, 10]. Third, we did not investigate how regret regarding the decision-making process is associated with decision regret or satisfaction. Patients with BC have two contrary feelings which are greater satisfaction or less regret with their decisions, as well as some regret related to their decision-making process [3, 12]. To provide information leading to better interventions that foster patients’ satisfaction with their treatment, further study investigating the details of this association is needed. Approximately half of the Japanese women with BC in this study reported some regret in the treatment decision-making process. Effective participation in decision-making differed by surgical types. Additionally, women who are diagnosed with BC at a relatively young age may require additional information and support regarding their sex life and fertility after cancer treatment. Datasets used and analyzed during the currents study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. AOR: BC: BCS: breast-conserving surgery TM: total mastectomy Foundation for Promotion of Cancer research. Cancer statistics in Japan 2017. https://ganjoho.jp/data/reg_stat/statistics/brochure/2017/cancer_statistics_2017.pdf. Accessed 11 Jan 2019. Berger AM, Buzalko RJ, Kupzyk KA, Gardner BJ, Djalilva DM, Otte JL. Preferences and actual chemotherapy decision-making in the greater plains collaborative breast cancer study. Acta Oncol. 2017;56(12):1690–7. Lantz PM, Janz NK, Fagerlin A, Schwartz K, Liu L, Lakhani I, et al. Satisfaction with surgery outcomes and the decision process in a population-based sample of women with breast cancer. Health Serv Res. 2005;40:745–67. López ME, Kaplan CP, Nápoles AM, Hwang ES, Livaudais JC, Karliner LS. Satisfaction with decision-making and treatment regret among Latinas and non-Latina whites with DCIS. Patient Educ Couns. 2014;94(1):83–9. Lam WWT, Kwok M, Chan M, Hung WK, Ying M, Or A, et al. Does the use of shared decision-making consultation behaviors increase treatment decision-making satisfaction among Chinese women facing decision for breast cancer surgery? Patient Educ Couns. 2014;94(2):243–9. Atherton PJ, Smith T, Singh JA, Huntington J, Diekmann BB, Huschka M, et al. The relation between cancer patient treatment decision-making roles and quality of life. Cancer. 2013;119(12):2342–9. Wang AW, Chang SM, Chang CS, Chen ST, Chen DR, Fan F, et al. Regret about surgical decisions among early-stage breast cancer patients: effects of the congruence between patients’ preferred and actual decision-making roles. Psychooncology. 2018;27(2):508–14. Nicolai J, Buchholz A, Seefried N, Reuter K, Härter M, Eich W, et al. When do cancer patients regret their treatment decision? A path analysis of the influence of clinicians’ communication styles and the match of decision-making styles on decision regret. Patient Educ Couns. 2016;99:739–46. Nakashima M, Kuroki S, Shinkoda H, Suetsugu Y, Shimada K, Kafu T. Information-seeking experiences and decision-making roles of Japanese women with breast cancer. Fukuoka Igaku Zasshi. 2012;103(6):120–30. Kokufu H. Conflict accompanying the choice of initial treatment in breast cancer patients. Jpn J Nurs Sci. 2012;9(2):177–84. Yamauchi K, Nakao M, Nakashima M, Ishihara Y. Congruence between preferred and actual participation roles increase satisfaction with treatment decision making among Japanese woman with breast cancer. Asian Pac J Cancer Prev. 2017;18(4):987–94. Hack TF, Degner LF, Watson P, Sinha L. Do patients benefit from participating in medical decision making? Longitudinal follow-up of women with breast cancer. Psychooncology. 2006;15(1):9–19. Hamelinck VC, Bastiaannet E, Pieterse AH, Jannink I, van de Velde CJ, Liefers GJ, et al. Patients' preferences for surgical and adjuvant systemic treatment in early breast cancer: a systematic review. Cancer Treat Rev. 2014;40(8):1005–18. Sun L, Legood R, dos-Santos-Silva I, Gaiha SM, Sadique Z. Global treatment costs of breast cancer by stage: a systematic review. PLoS One. 2018;13(11):e0207993. Takahashi M, Tsuchiya M, Horio Y, Funazaki H, Aogi K, Miyauchi K, et al. Job resignation after cancer diagnosis among working survivors in Japan: timing, reasons and change of information needs over time. Jpn J Clin Oncol. 2018;48(1):43–51. Catt S, Starkings R, Shilling V, Fallowfield L. Patient-reported outcome measures of the impact of cancer patients’ everyday lives: a systematic review. J Cancer Surviv. 2017;11(2):211–32. Martin MY, Fouad MN, Oster RA, Schrag D, Urmie J, Sanders S, et al. What do cancer patients worry about when making decisions about treatment? Variation across racial/ ethnic groups. Support Care Cancer. 2014;22(1):233–44. Okuhara T, Ishikawa H, Urakubo A, Hayakawa M, Yamaki C, Takayama T, et al. Cancer information needs according to cancer type: a content analysis of data from Japan’s largest cancer information website. Prev Med Rsp. 2018;12:245–52. Shimizu C, Bando H, Kato T, Mizota Y, Yamamoto S, Fujiwara Y. Physicians’ knowledge, attitude, and behavior regarding fertility issues for young breast cancer patients: a national survey for breast care specialists. Breast Cancer. 2013;20(3):230–40. Takeuchi E, Kato M, Wada S, Yoshida S, Shimizu C, Miyoshi Y. Physicians’ practice of discussing fertility preservation with cancer patients and the associated attitudes and barriers. Support Care Cancer. 2017;25(4):1079–85. Takeuchi E, Kato M, Miyata K, Suzuki N, Shimizu C, Okada H, et al. The effect of an educational program for non-physician health care providers regarding fertility preservation. Support Care Cancer. 2018;26(10):3447–52. Adachi K, Ueno T, Fujioka T, Fujitomi Y, Ueo H. Psychosocial factors affecting the therapeutic decision-making and postoperative mood states in Japanese breast cancer patients who underwent various types of surgery: body image and sexuality. Jpn J Clin Oncol. 2007;37(6):412–8. Takahashi M, Ohno S, Inoue H, Kataoka A, Yamaguchi H, Uchida Y, et al. Impact of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment on women’s sexuality: a survey of Japanese patients. Psychooncology. 2008;17(9):901–7. Kool M, Bastiaannet E, Van de Velde CJH, Marang-van de Mheen PJ. Reliability of self-reported treatment data by patients with breast cancer compared with medical record data. Clin Breast Cancer. 2018;18(3):234–8. We thank Ms. Tomoe Terasaki of Kurume University for manuscript preparation. This study was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research 25670254 and 16 K15313 from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The funding body had no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and in writing the manuscript. Department of Public Health, School of Medicine, Kurume University, 67 Asahimachi, Kurume, Fukuoka, 830-0011, Japan Keiko Yamauchi & Motoyuki Nakao Department of Nursing, School of Medicine, Fukuoka University, Fukuoka, Japan Mitsuyo Nakashima Search for Keiko Yamauchi in: Search for Motoyuki Nakao in: Search for Mitsuyo Nakashima in: KY participated in the study design, coordination of data collection, analysis and interpretation of the data, and drafting the manuscript. M Nakao participated in data interpretation, drafting the manuscript and proofreading the final submission. M Nakashima participated in the study design and data interpretation. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Correspondence to Keiko Yamauchi. This study was approved by the Clinical Ethical Review Board of Kurume University, School of Medicine (Ethics approval number: 13138). Prior to the investigation, participants were provided with explanations via the Internet as to the purpose and method of the study as well as information regarding the handling of the results. The study was conducted upon receiving participants signed consent online. Additional file Table S1. Surgery type by cancer stage (N = 467). Table S2. Decisional congruence by perceived decision-making role and surgery (N = 467). Table S3. Degree of importance of various factors related to decision-making at the time stratified by surgery type. (DOCX 40 kb) Yamauchi, K., Nakao, M. & Nakashima, M. Correlates of regret with treatment decision-making among Japanese women with breast cancer: results of an internet-based cross-sectional survey. BMC Women's Health 19, 86 (2019) doi:10.1186/s12905-019-0783-5 Received: 20 February 2019 Decisional regret Decisional role Breast cancer and breast health	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line605
__label__cc	0.690497	0.309503	Online reported women’s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse after vaginal birth Maria Mirskaya ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5224-64111, Eva-Carin Lindgren1 & Ing-Marie Carlsson1 BMC Women's Health volume 19, Article number: 129 (2019) Cite this article Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a major public health problem with a relative high lifetime risk of surgery. The main risk factor for developing POP is vaginal birth. Many women become symptomatic later in life and most of the existing research on symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse (sPOP) predominantly concentrates on the effects of the condition on postmenopausal women. However bothersome symptoms of POP can be reported as early as in women’s 20s and may occur shortly after vaginal birth. Limited studies provide an insight into daily life of fertile women with sPOP. Thus, we aimed to explore fertile women’s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ (sPOP) after vaginal birth. An inductive, text-driven approach was taken by selecting thread posts from an internet forum written by 33 Swedish fertile women who had experienced sPOP after vaginal birth. The overarching theme “being irreparably damaged” was identified as representing an experience of being disabled by sPOP after vaginal birth. The fertile women experienced that their lives were ruined because of physical and psychological limitations caused by this unexpected, unfamiliar and unexplained condition. Living with sPOP impinged on sexual health, restricted daily and sports activities and affected the women’s ability to fulfill everyday parental duties. This in turn compromised women’s psychological health. In addition, the negligence of healthcare professionals who tended to trivialize and normalize the symptoms led to the belief that there were no sustainable treatments and that women would have to live with bothersome symptoms of POP for rest of their lives. This study found that sPOP had a significant negative impact on fertile women’s lives. The women indicated that they had not had the opportunity to voice their concerns and had not been taken seriously by healthcare professionals. It is of the utmost importance to acknowledge this problem and develop guidelines for prevention and management of sPOP to improve the quality of life for women. Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is characterized by a weakness of the vaginal walls, resulting in descent of pelvic organs through the vagina [1]. POP has become a major public health problem with 12.6% lifetime risk for surgery in U. S [2] and 19% in Australia [3]. Some women have no symptoms despite the anatomical changes while others experience symptoms such as pelvic pressure and difficulties with urination and defecation [1]. The main risk factor for developing POP is vaginal birth which more than doubles the risk for symptomatic POP (sPOP) compared to women undergoing Caesarean sections [4, 5]. Moreover, there is an established relationship between a more advanced stage POP and postpartum levator ani muscle (LAM) avulsion [6, 7]. It is well documented that there is a decades-long delay between childbirth and onset of sPOP, and since women become symptomatic later in life [3, 4, 8, 9] it is not surprising that most of the existing studies on POP focus on postmenopausal women or women shortly before menopause [10]. Bothersome symptoms of POP can be reported as early as in women’s 20s, may occur immediately after vaginal birth [11] and may be accompanied by LAM injury [12]. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore fertile women’s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse after vaginal birth. For this study, a retrospective text analysis with an interpretive qualitative approach was chosen [13]. Texts from posts within a thread from an online forum were collected since this can be used as a rich source of empirical data [14, 15]. The current study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board Sweden (Dnr 2017/65). All materials published on the forum are public and no password is required to read thread posts. However, registration is required for writing own posts and communicating with other members. Written informed consent to undertake the study was obtained from the forum’s web operations manager. An information letter with details about the study’s aim and structure and about confidentiality, the voluntary nature of and right to withdraw at any time without explanation was sent to the forum manager to be published on the forum’s website. This study was performed in Sweden where primiparous and their partners are offered antenatal courses that includes both childbirth and parental information. A majority of Swedish women give birth at hospitals and are offered a postpartum check-up, 6 to 12 weeks after birth. These checkups should include a vaginal examination, pelvic floor assessment and exercise advice. Our sampling strategy was purposive and obtained women’s posts from a Swedish online forum focusing on family life and parenting. The forum thread was identified through the search engine Google. The specific targets were threads consisting of chains of questions and answers or simply comments posted by women who had experienced sPOP after vaginal birth. Data was collected between January 2015 and July 2017. To be included in the study, the thread posts needed to meet the following inclusion criteria: to be written in Swedish by fertile women 18 years and older who had experienced sPOP after vaginal birth. Posts which contained discussions about the postoperative recovery process after POP surgery were excluded. In total, 487 thread posts written by 54 women were read in order to obtain sufficient data. Finally, posts written by 33 women were considered relevant and selected for analysis. Information on participants was extracted from the posts. Age could be identified for 17 women, with ages ranging from 24 to 45 years old (mean = 27). 18 of the participants were primiparous and their children were mostly younger than 8 years of age. 12 of the women had children younger than 1 year old (Table 1). Table 1 Background characteristics of the participating women when the data collection started In line with qualitative content analysis, which implied moving from the data to a theoretical understanding, the data-analysis procedure followed five steps [16,17,18]. First, all texts from the thread posts were read several times as open-mindedly as possible to obtain an overall impression of women’s experiences of sPOP. Following this, the texts that met the study’s aim were copied to a separate document. Secondly, the texts were divided into units of meaning (segments of text or simple quotes). Thirdly, these units of meaning were condensed into keywords or key phrases that reflected the content, and coded. Fourthly, similarities and differences between codes were compared and sorted into tentative categories. The tentative categories were then reviewed and discussed and the final system of four categories with 10 subcategories was constructed. The data analysis procedure moved from descriptions of the content on a manifest level in sub-categories, to the more abstract level where the categories were established [16], and finally, in the fifth step, the four categories were abstracted into one theme (Table 3). While this analytic procedure may look like a linear process, it actually involves going back and forth between decontextualization and contextualization, which, although complex, creates analytic depth. The first author (M.M.) in collaboration with the third author (I-M.C.) mainly performed the analysis. However, all steps in the analytical process were discussed among all co-authors until agreement was reached. An example of the process of creating of units of meaning, codes, sub-categories and categories is given in Table 2. Table 2 An example of the process for creation of meaning units, codes, sub-categories and theme Being irreparably damaged The overarching theme “being irreparably damaged” illustrates that the women found themselves in a hopeless situation balancing being a parent and being disabled because of sPOP. Ambivalent feelings of happiness about being a mother were often expressed and at the same time the women experienced feelings of hopelessness at being far too young to be living with a nonfunctional body. When accessing healthcare, some of them were told that surgery was not an option since they were too young to undergo a procedure that could cause even bigger problems in comparison with their current situation. This development, meaning that they would have to live with sPOP for the rest of their lives, left them in an impossible situation. Phrases like “ruined life” and “wanting my life back” revealed the women’s sense of being damaged for life. “But perhaps it is the case that people can’t even understand how terrible it feels to have wide-open, aching vagina. It totally crushes your life. You can’t walk, stand or sit properly. Can’t have intimacy with your partner or even pee or poo normally. It is awful.” (Participant 3) The theme “being irreparably damaged” consists of four categories: taken by surprise, restricted life, neglected by healthcare, and psychological intrusion, with additional subcategories (Table 3). Table 3 The overall theme “being irreparably damaged” with four categories and additional sub-categories Taken by surprise There was a general unawareness of the existence of the condition ‘pelvic organ prolapse’ until the first symptoms were discovered. The feeling of being taken by a dreadful surprise was prominent in the women’s stories. This consisted of surprise at not knowing their own bodies and a lack of warning that something like this could happen. Not knowing their body Unfamiliarity with pelvic floor anatomy was frequently described, regarding both the normal anatomical position of the uterus and the appearance and structure of the vaginal walls. Not knowing what constituted normal anatomy made it difficult for the women to understand the abnormalities they now had to contend with. “…I have personally asked about my cervix, which I think is sitting low since giving birth … I wonder how you know whether it is a lateral defect and what it means? And I personally have no idea of how the vaginal walls should look/feel when they are “normal” and I don’t know where a cervix should be positioned, I just haven’t thought about that kind of thing before.” (Participant 2) Not being warned Vaginal birth was the norm of discourse and considered the normal way to give birth, and no one had told the women that it might be associated with an increased likelihood of injury. The women expressed that they had not been warned during prenatal education courses, which caused feelings of being misled. Anger and astonishment arose, vaginal birth was described as a fatal mistake, with many women saying that if they were to give birth again they would prefer to undergo a Caesarean section. One woman went as far as saying she would not have had children if she had known about the risks. “Everything is just so normal, if I had known before what would have been normal, I would probably not have had children or fought for a Caesarian! Nope, it is impossible to imagine the consequences these problems lead to. Would be easier to have an injury in absolutely any other body part!” (Participant 7) Restricted life The women experienced that sPOP restricted their lives dramatically, which they had to adapt to. Their daily lives were seriously affected by a dysfunctional body, constant discomfort, and worrying about sPOP worsening from both a short- and a long-term perspective. Moreover, sPOP also impinged on intimate relationships. Being dysfunctional Disturbance of urinary function and defecation had a negative impact on everyday life. The women described several difficulties such as altered micturition and defecatory patterns, including symptoms of urinary urgency, frequent urination, urine retention, voiding problems, urinary incontinence, urinary tract infections, and difficulties emptying the bowels. What previously had been an ordinary physical function did not work anymore, which impinged on every aspect of life, including employability. The women had become desperate in their attempts to overcome these problems, for instance by fasting in order to avoid emptying the bowels or overdosing on laxatives to avoid being constipated. Furthermore, they used various techniques in order to facilitate bowel emptying, for instance the need to splint. “I had quite a big cystocele, it almost bulged outside. I had difficulty emptying my bladder, always needed to pee and I got a urinary tract and kidney infection as a result. I had to insert my fingers into the vagina and push against it when doing a poo to help to evacuate my bowels.” (Participant 3) Having constant discomfort The women described feelings of constant discomfort which severely disrupted daily life, such as pressure, heaviness, fullness, and the sensation that something was falling out of the vagina. Some women complained about vaginal flatus, and an awful “open” feeling with a dragging sensation in the vagina. Some women also spoke of itching, soreness in the vagina and rectum, and lower back and abdominal pain. “ … I am probably also most upset about being so open. Feels like I have something in the way when I go to the toilet, I want to feel to see if something has fallen down but, each time I feel, everything seems to be in the right position. I also take in a lot of air. I go around queefing to get the air out, I feel really stupid….” (Participant 17) This constant discomfort was compounded by basic day-to day activities such as cooking and walking, and even standing or sitting. The women described an inability to use tampons because of a prolapsed uterus, which prevented them from doing exercise and other physical activities. Being non-sexual Living with sPOP caused various sexual health problems such as painful intercourse, lack of sexual pleasure and inability to achieve orgasm. Sexual intercourse no longer provided any pleasure for the women and they complained of decreased vaginal sensation and vaginal looseness. Women described that they had to adjust to specific positions during intercourse or had to discontinue because of pain and unpleasant feelings. These limitations made sex less enjoyable and resulted in faked orgasms, having sex only for their partner’s sake, and long intervals between intercourse or inability to have penetrative sex. A nearly non-existent sex life resulted in feelings of being non-sexual, disabled and destroyed as a woman. The women described that they wanted badly to be more sexually active like they used to be before they had had a child, which caused sadness and grief over the loss of sexuality. “I also have problems with my pelvis area 2 years after having my baby. … it hurts during intercourse so we more or less don’t have a sex life… I stopped feeling like it because of all my genital troubles…. I mourn that…” (Participant 11) Moreover, the women commonly expressed fear of abandonment by their partner due to the inability to have sex. Ideas about allowing their partners to have sex with someone else just for the relationship’s sake were discussed in the thread. “At some point he will feel sad about not being allowed to have sex. Should I then let him go out with other people or just be alone?” (Participant 27) Worry about worsening The women were worried about sPOP worsening. This restricted them as they lived in permanent fear that doing regular household tasks like lifting groceries, or activities that were considered simple parental responsibilities like playing with children, might worsen the symptoms. Having to renounce activities and constantly worrying about making things worse led to frustration, anger, sadness and a feeling of being inadequate mothers. “… I don’t dare lift heavy things, become constipated or exercise etc. I am also young (26) …I can’t help my 3-year old up onto the swing … it hurts my heart so much: ( . My little girl, who is a month old, already feels heavy to carry … how will I be able to help my children and take care of them? How will I manage my everyday life with two small children? I want to play with my children and feel a sense of freedom in my body.” (Participant 23) In a long-term perspective, the women feared the future and especially the potentially worsening symptoms of their condition due to the menopause and the ageing process. Moreover, the women expressed that they were afraid of being further damaged following another pregnancy and birth, or, if they had undergone surgery, compromising this if they were to give birth again. “Will I be able to have children without destroying my body even more?… I’m so worried and now my partner wants children and I am so afraid! Afraid about destroying my life.” (Participant 9) Neglected by healthcare There was a discrepancy between women’s experiences of their problem and how they were treated by the healthcare system. This discrepancy was considered as due to the fact that healthcare professionals demonstrated inability to give proper information, but also a tendency to trivialize and neglect both the condition and the women. This negligence reduced opportunities to get help and led to feelings of not being taken seriously. Lack of information It was considered important to receive a proper diagnosis, treatment and psychological support, which was sought from different types of healthcare providers. However, the women frequently did not receive proper information. For example, some received completely different diagnoses from different physicians and physiotherapists. Postnatal healthcare was described as a catastrophe, and women expressed shock at how little some healthcare professionals knew about sPOP. Some women stated that they had been convinced to give birth vaginally and now that they had been damaged, no-one took responsibility or had the competence to deal with the problem. The women wanted to know more about the condition to prevent the damage getting worse, such as advice on lifestyle changes and how to adjust physical activity in relation to sPOP. However, it was found difficult to access good, unambiguous information. Instead, information from doctors was inconsistent, unclear and difficult to understand, and advice was not in line with what women found out by themselves from independent sources. This left them with more questions than answers. “I don’t get any clear information from the doctors… They think I am young and they don’t want to cause bigger problems … What do they mean by bigger problems? Is an operation to the back wall so complicated? Do you become so tight? And do most of them become so much worse after surgery at the front that they pee themselves?” (Participant 4) Being trivialized Women felt that sPOP was a condition that was trivialized and that the healthcare providers acted as if the women were “making a big thing out of it”. There were often discrepancies between the physician’s account of signs and symptoms and the women’s own experiences. Physicians explained sPOP as a natural condition after vaginal birth, using expressions that belittled and normalized the problem like “it doesn’t look too bad”, “minimal collapse of front wall”, “nothing abnormal” and that “POP is very common”. During the pelvic examination, the physician compared the woman with other patients and comment that “he had seen worse”. However, contrary to healthcare professionals’ opinions, women did not perceive the symptoms of POP as normal or natural, and this attitude was experienced as humiliating and discouraging. Psychological intrusion Women expressed that sPOP caused psychological harm and distress in multiple ways such as distorted body-image and negative feelings toward their own genitalia. Further, living with sPOP invaded them mentally with intense grief and anxiety. Distorted body image sPOP negatively affected the women’s body image and they saw no beauty in themselves. Living with sPOP was seen as having “an old lady’s disease”, and feelings of disgust and embarrassment with themselves were highlighted in the thread. Comparing themselves before and after birth nurtured a negative attitude and an overt dissatisfaction towards their own vagina and difficulties accepting the new appearance of their genitalia, as one woman expressed: “I feel disgusting and have difficulty accepting how I look.” (Participant 6) Being mentally broken Women expressed that sPOP had broken them mentally, and the psychological impact of sPOP was often considered even worse than the physical problems. All their thoughts were focused on their bothersome symptoms. Anxiety and panic attacks were common and could be induced by simple everyday things like toilet visits. The happiness of becoming a parent was overshadowed by the feeling that they had become disabled because of sPOP. Moreover, an inability to participate in activities they had enjoyed before, such as high-intensity sports or a job as a training instructor, which were a key part of the women’s identity, had the potential to cause an identity crisis, leading to depression. The psychological impact of sPOP caused women to take sick leave due to depression and some were put on antidepressants. Forum members expressed the feeling that sPOP had turned their life into a living hell, and some of the women even experienced suicidal thoughts. “I cry during all my spare time when my partner isn’t home… I am so depressed that I can hardly cope with life…. I would rather not live any longer but need to for my son… Thoughts of suicide… Feeling of not wanting to live any more…. I ask myself how to cope with this hell every bloody damned day…Want to be happy… Soon won’t be able to take any more…Living with thoughts about my vagina 99% of the day… (Participant 11). Despite the psychological distress, women had to cope with the condition and the forum helped them to keep looking ahead in life. Sharing helpful tips and happy personal stories about good outcomes of surgery, and just being a part of a group that reminded them that they were not alone, encouraged the women and made them feel better. This study demonstrates that sPOP has profound consequences for the fertile woman and her family. The women in our study revealed that they had been irreparably damaged and felt that their lives had been ruined. We argue that our study brings women’s subjective experiences into focus and highlights the importance of considering experiential knowledge without exception when evaluating and treating sPOP. The women perceived negatively the interactions with healthcare professionals while encountering care. Normalization, trivialization and belittling of the condition were common where healthcare professional authoritative knowledge was valued over the woman’s experience. In addition, the women felt dissapointment not only with postnatal care but with prenatal education. They wondered why no one informed them on potential risks prior the delivery. Improved information about potential pelvic floor problems could help better prepare women to manage sPOP following vaginal birth. Sadly, several other studies have shown similar results as ours regarding miscommunication between women with pelvic floor injury and healthcare professionals [11, 12, 19, 20]. Midwives, obstetricians and physiotherapists need to be aware of the discourse on these forums and take part in the dialogue in order to ensure professional support for these women. The women in our study suffered from multiple symptoms of urinary and bowel dysfunction and felt constant discomfort and pain, in line with experiences described in previous research [11, 12]. This in turn impinged on their sexual health and sexuality such as orgasm, intimacy, relationship satisfaction and physical ability to engage in penetrative sex. The women emphasised a difficulty to achieve orgasm and lack of vaginal sensation due to vaginal looseness, which is in contrast with previous research claiming that sPOP has no effect on orgasm and sexual satisfaction [21]. Our result may be due to the data being from an online forum where the women could remain quite anonymous [15]. Emotional responses to altered sexual function, as reflected in feelings of being a disabled and destroyed woman, are not surprising and are in concordance with other studies [11, 12, 22]. In summary, the women experienced that sPOP had turned their lives into literally a living hell; they reported suicidal thoughts and feeling of hopelessness and tended to have a bleak outlook on the future. Thus, we can observe the link between onset of sPOP after vaginal birth and psychological trauma, which is in line with an Australian study [12]. Although there is a growing awareness of earlier unrecognized childbirth-related pelvic floor injury like LAM avulsion [6], the bothersome symptoms of POP are still viewed by healthcare providers as normal expected unavoidable issues after vaginal birth and are not investigated properly. Healthcare professionals seem to be unaware of the real impact of this condition on the quality of life and psychological health of new mothers. The Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services reveals that a large number of treatments given to women with childbirth traumas have not been scientifically evaluated in reliable systematic reviews, and there are no systematic reviews regarding addressing the acute POP associated with vaginal birth [23]. It may be assumed that this lack of evidence, can partly explain our findings that the healthcare professionals’ failed to meet the women’s needs regarding diagnostic, information and treatment options. The strength of this study is that qualitative method was used to provide insight into fertile women’s daily lives from the perspective of those who experience the problem. Our findings highlight the condition as a worthy topic [24] complementing the existing quantitative research proposed that maternal birth trauma is a public health problem [25]. Rich rigour [24] was enabled by use of data that covered a time period of 2 years and 7 months with 33 participants, which generated a wide variation of experiences. Online posts, compared to interviews, can sometimes be more detailed than verbal narratives, particularly in discussions about body parts and sexual issues [15]. On the other hand, a limitation was that some of the posts were fragmentary and it was not possible to obtain additional information by asking questions, for instance, about the grade of POP or proposed treatment plan, which is a known disadvantage of online data collection [15]. Furthermore, bloggers may comprise an atypical sample of the population. It could be assumed that women who seek support on the internet forum might have bad experiences encountering healthcare and this may have caused a selection bias by an opinionated group who already have a position on the issue. Women who had positive experiences could have been overlooked. Therefore, our finding may not reflect the experiences of women with good pelvic floor recovery postpartum and with good outcomes of conservative treatment. The other limitation applies to sexual difficulties experienced by women. It should be taken into consideration that the demands of childcare and psychological trauma accompanying childbirth could also contribute to lack of sexual desire and performance. Additionally, the current study has shown similar results as other qualitative studies from Netherland, Australia and USA [11, 12, 22] which could demonstrate transferability of the results [24]. As an aid to increase the credibility of the study, a variety of voices from the participants are included with rich quotes in the findings. Trustworthiness is strengthened by the fact that a group of interdisciplinary researchers with a lot of experience from qualitative research performed the analysis via discussions until consensus was achieved [17]. Conclusion and clinical implications This study demonstrates that sPOP has a significant impact on fertile women’s lives. The women expressed that they had been irreparably damaged which restricted and ruined their lives, as well as impacted negatively on the whole family. The women indicated that they had not had the opportunity to voice their concerns and had not been taken seriously by healthcare professionals. It is of utmost importance to address these issues after delivery in follow-up counselling to acknowledge the problem. Symptoms of POP after vaginal birth should be included in existing Pregnancy and Medical Birth Registers as well as prenatal consent forms that highlights the risks of vaginal birth and traumatic LAM injury. Furthermore, there is a need to develop national guidelines for prevention and management of sPOP. The data that support the findings of this study are available from Halmstad University but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of Halmstad University. LAM: Levator ani muscle POP: sPOP: Symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse Smith TA, Poteat TA, Shobeiri SA. Pelvic organ prolapse: an overview. JAAPA. 2014;27(3):20–4. Wu JM, Matthews CA, Conover MM, Pate V, Funk MJ. Lifetime risk of stress incontinence or pelvic organ prolapse surgery. Obstet Gynecol. 2014;123(6):1201–6. https://doi.org/10.1097/AOG.0000000000000286. Smith FJ, Holman CAJ, Moorin RE, Tsokos N. Lifetime risk of undergoing surgery for pelvic organ prolapse. Obstet Gynecol. 2010;116(5):1096–100. Gyhagen M, Bullarbo M, Nielsen T, Milsom I. Prevalence and risk factors for pelvic organ prolapse 20 years after childbirth: a national cohort study in singleton primiparae after vaginal or caesarean delivery. BJOG. 2013;120(2):152–60. Trutnovsky G, Kamisan Atan I, Martin A, Dietz H. Delivery mode and pelvic organ prolapse: a retrospective observational study. BJOG. 2016;123(9):1551–6. Yu CH, Chan SSC, Cheung RYK, Chung TKH. Prevalence of levator ani muscle avulsion and effect on quality of life in women with pelvic organ prolapse. Int Urogynecol J. 2018;29(5):729–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00192-017-3454-9. Dietz HP, Simpson JM. Levator trauma is associated with pelvic organ prolapse. BJOG. 2008;115(8):979–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0528.2008.01751.x. Milsom I, Gyhagen M. Breaking news in the prediction of pelvic floor disorders. Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2018.05.004. Thomas V, Shek KL, Guzmán Rojas R, Dietz HP. Temporal latency between pelvic floor trauma and presentation for prolapse surgery: a retrospective observational study. Int Urogynecol J. 2015;26(8):1185–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00192-015-2677-x. Touza KK, Rand KL, Carpenter JS, Chen CX, Heit MH. A scoping study of psychosocial factors in women diagnosed with and/or treated for pelvic organ prolapse. Life (QOL). 2018;4(9):10. Buurman MBR, Lagro-Janssen ALM. Women’s perception of postpartum pelvic floor dysfunction and their help-seeking behaviour: a qualitative interview study / Women’s perception of postpartum pelvic floor dysfunction and their help-seeking behaviour: a qualitative interview study. Scand J Caring Sci. 2013;2:406. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6712.2012.01044.x. Skinner EM, Barnett B, Dietz HP. Psychological consequences of pelvic floor trauma following vaginal birth: a qualitative study from two Australian tertiary maternity units. Arch Womens Ment Health. 2018;21(3):341–51. Thorne S, Kirkham SR, O'Flynn-Magee K. The analytic challenge in interpretive description. Int J Qual Methods. 2004;3(1):1–11. Polit DF, Beck CT. Essentials of nursing research : appraising evidence for nursing practice; 2017. Seale C, Charteris-Black J, MacFarlane A, McPherson A. Interviews and internet forums: a comparison of two sources of qualitative data. Qual Health Res. 2010;20(5):595–606. Graneheim UH, Lindgren B-M, Lundman B. Methodological challenges in qualitative content analysis: a discussion paper. Nurse Educ Today. 2017;56:29–34. Graneheim UH, Lundman B. Qualitative content analysis in nursing research: concepts, procedures and measures to achieve trustworthiness. Nurse Educ Today. 2004;24(2):105–12. Krippendorff K. Content Analysis. An Introduction to Its Methodology (3rd ed). California, CA: Sage Publications; 2013. Lindqvist M, Persson M, Nilsson M, Uustal E, Lindberg I. A worse nightmare than expected' - a Swedish qualitative study of women's experiences two months after obstetric anal sphincter muscle injury. Midwifery. 2018;61:22–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2018.02.015. Low LK, Tumbarello JA. Falling out: authoritative knowledge and Women's experiences with pelvic organ prolapse. J Midwifery Womens Health. 2012;57(5):489–94. Tok EC, Yasa O, Ertunc D, Savas A, Durukan H, Kanik A. The effect of pelvic organ prolapse on sexual function in a general cohort of women. J Sex Med. 2010;7(12):3957–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2010.01940.x. Roos AM, Paulus AT, Thakar R, Sultan AH. Sexual experiences of male partners before and after female pelvic floor surgery: a qualitative study. Int Urogynecol J. 2014;25(10):1327–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00192-014-2387-9. Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (250/2016) Treatment of maternal birth injuries following vaginal birth. https://www.sbu.se/en/publications/sbu-kartlagger/treatment-of-maternal-birth-injuries-following-vaginal-birth/ Tracy SJ. Qualitative quality: eight “big-tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qual Inq. 2010;16(10):837–51. Skinner EM, Dietz HP. Psychological and somatic sequelae of traumatic vaginal delivery: a literature review. Aust N Z J Obstet Gynaecol. 2015;55(4):309–14. We are grateful to S. Abbas Shobeiri, MD, Professor, INOVA Women’s Hospital, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology for his editing assistance of the paper “Online reported women’s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse after vaginal birth”. Department of Health and Welfare, Halmstad University, SE-823, SE-301 18, Halmstad, Sweden Maria Mirskaya , Eva-Carin Lindgren & Ing-Marie Carlsson Search for Maria Mirskaya in: Search for Eva-Carin Lindgren in: Search for Ing-Marie Carlsson in: MM: identifying the research question and design of the study, data collection, management data analysis, manuscript writing, and read and approved the final submitted version. E-CL: identifying the research question and design of the study, provided critical revision of the paper in terms of important intellectual content and read and approved the final submitted version. I-MC: identifying the research question and design of the study, management data analysis, manuscript writing, provided critical revision of the paper in terms of important intellectual content and read and approved the final submitted version. Correspondence to Maria Mirskaya. The current study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board Sweden Lund University (Dnr 2017/65). Written informed consent to undertake the study was obtained from the forum’s web operations manager. On recommendation from the Regional Ethical Review board an information letter with details about the study’s aim and structure and about confidentiality, the voluntary nature of and right to withdraw at any time without explanation was sent to the forum manager to be published on the forum’s website. Mirskaya, M., Lindgren, E. & Carlsson, I. Online reported women’s experiences of symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse after vaginal birth. BMC Women's Health 19, 129 (2019) doi:10.1186/s12905-019-0830-2 Fertile women Pelvic organ prolapse symptoms Gynecology, gynecological disease, and reproductive health	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line606
__label__cc	0.582192	0.417808	A patient community: Ramatou’s story Seated in a circle around a savings box on a sand floor in the village of Hamdallaye in Niger, 24 women have found their way out of poverty – together. By Therese Leine Sogard Can “number seven” please approach? “Number seven” stands up from the patterned straw mat, rubs away the folds in her pink dress and approaches the five women that have been elected to run the savings box. She puts this week’s savings amount in a blue plastic bowl before the notes are moved over to the box. The secretary of the group, Ramatou Yayé (45), arranges her white laced hijab. She opens her notebook carefully and writes down the amounts the other women submit. When the group meets every Thursday at 2 pm, they save 500 XFA-franc (approx. 0,85 USD) each. After a little while it is possible to take up a loan from the box that the members can invest in for instance a goat or a patch of land. Instalments and interests are decided by the group itself and the profit is divided between the women. In this way they have been able to save up a lager sum of money they can use for income generated activities, household expenditures or school for their children. These women in particular have stayed together since the year 2000. They chose to call their group “Patience” which is exactly what you need as a woman in Niger, and a lot of it. On last place “If I could do something to better women’s situation in Niger, I would empower them financially so that they can care for themselves,” says Ramatou. While life in Canada is the most satisfying in the world, according to UNs human development index, Niger comes out last of 187 states. If you were born as an average girl in Niger, your starting point would be all other than fair: Women are systematically discriminated against in almost all aspects of society: in their families, in business, in education. 75 percent of people living below the poverty line, are women. And only nine percent of Niger’s female population can read and write. At the age when typical Canadian girls start to experiment with makeup and social media, many Nigerien girls quit school. “I was attending school until the 6th grade, but I couldn’t pass my exam, so I had to drop out,” Ramatou explains. Far too few girls in Niger complete school. And many tell the same story as Ramatou: that they didn’t pass the exam to get to the next grade. And if you cannot attend school in a country like Niger, what do you do? Ramatou got married. She was 14 years old. And with her lack of education there were few possibilities to get a job, so she completely depended upon her husband. Occasional contributions Ramatou did not have kids with her first husband. She was divorced eight years later and remarried. She now lives in a polygamous marriage as many do in Niger. But it didn’t help her financial situation and she also depended on her second husband’s occasional contributions to household expenditures. “If he did not give me money to cover the expenditures, I had to be patient. Sometimes he helped, but most times I did not receive money to cover the things I needed,” she claims. One day some women asked her if she wanted to join a savings and loan group that CARE was about to establish. In addition to a better understanding of economics, she was given the opportunity to learn better how to read and write. “I learned it at school, but I was not good enough. When I joined the group I received extra training.” She laughs when she is asked whether she is literate now: “Come on, I’m the secretary. Of course I can read and write.” But even more important for the 45 year old was the feeling that she could take care of herself financially and not depend on her husband to provide for their children. With her savings from the group she started selling couscous. Now she has invested in goats and has started to breed them. In the backyard she has both grown goats and little goat kids. They are terrified and start to back when they see the camera lens. Ramatou gives them a proud look. “Now I can cover my own and my family’s needs without waiting for my husband. He even asks me for a loan sometimes.” – Does he always pay you back? “Oh yes! If he doesn’t pay me back he knows he won’t get any more loans later,” she says. Not afraid to speak up The strong sun heats up the village to almost 40 degrees Celsius. But in the house where the group meets, it’s cool. They always meet in the house of the mayor in Hamdallaye because his wife was the former president in the group. The sand floor is covered by straw mats, and in the corner there is a massive wooden table and a yellow office chair, which four wheels are not so useful in the sand. Everybody is quiet and waiting for instructions from the elected leaders. In the six years Ramatou has been the secretary, she has received a lot of self-confidence. Now she is not afraid to speak up in her community. “A lot of people didn’t know me before, but now I am one of those who are invited to meetings with the mayor. Before I was afraid to talk, but now I’m making myself heard,” she says. Just like Ramatou had to be patient with her husband to get resources to take care of her children, all the members in the savings and loan group have lived up to the name. Patience has given the women a possibility to build up equity, a self-conscious and climb steadily out of extreme poverty. You can help women like Ramatou lift themselves, their families, and their entire communities out of poverty. Help a woman start a business Quiz: How much do you know about women’s rights?	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line609
__label__wiki	0.539274	0.539274	Humanitarians risk their lives for a better world By Jessie Thomson, director of CARE Canada’s humanitarian assistance and emergency team (HAET) One of the most inspiring people I have ever met is a professor named Dr. Gil Loescher. Not your typical academic, his commitment to going out in the field to meet and write about refugees long-forgotten greatly influenced my work. Today is World Humanitarian Day. It marks the anniversary of August 19, 2003, in which 22 people were killed and about 150 injured in a massive car bomb targeting the UN Headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq. Dr. Loescher was amongst those seriously wounded. This devastating attack shook the humanitarian community to its very core, calling into question the sacred tradition of protecting those who seek to help in times of crisis. Ten years later, World Humanitarian Day continues to pay tribute to humanitarian personnel who have lost their lives in the line of duty and continue to take substantial risks to deliver assistance to those most in need. Personally, World Humanitarian Day is a chance to celebrate my colleagues and peers and reflect on the changing nature of humanitarian action and the highly insecure world in which we now work. Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross-fire and have become direct targets of messy, complex and fluid wars. In 2008, the number of attacks in which aid workers were killed, kidnapped or injured had risen significantly since the late 1990s, ultimately changing the way humanitarian assistance is delivered. While the end of the last decade saw a slight decline in security incidents directly targeting aid workers, 2011 marked the highest number of humanitarians killed, kidnapped or wounded yet recorded. As these statistics remain high, we are also seeing a declining presence of humanitarian personnel in the most insecure places. According to a 2011 Aid Worker Security report, “simply stated, in these places, fewer aid workers are on the ground to be attacked.” This is particularly worrying, as it means that conflict-affected communities in the most insecure areas are receiving less support. Even more concerning is the increasing number of national staff and local partners at risk. These brave aid workers often take the biggest risks to serve their own communities in remote and dangerous zones. However, all too often, we hear only about the expatriates killed or kidnapped, despite the fact that national staff and local partners comprise the vast majority of victims each year. So for me, World Humanitarian Day is a chance to remind people that humanitarian aid workers are also mothers, fathers, partners, sisters, brothers and friends. They are field officers and program managers, but they are also drivers and secretaries, proposal writers and finance officers, academics and policy makers. They come from all walks of life, but share a common vision to help those most in need in some of the world’s most forgotten places. And they do so at great risk to their own lives. Sometimes my family and friends ask me why I work in the humanitarian field, given these risks. My answer is simple: we have a duty to do what we can, to try our best to reach those most in need. Ten years after the Baghdad attack, Dr. Loescher continues to play an important leadership role in the humanitarian community, fighting for the needs of refugees in some of the most protracted and chronic conflict situations around the world. In an article reflecting on the hideous 2003 bombing, he said, “We must take from this tragic event a renewed sense of commitment to doing whatever small things we can to try to repair our damaged world.” I cannot agree more and I thank our team of dedicated humanitarian professionals at CARE for their small part in repairing our damaged world. I wish them safe and uneventful travels as they set out to help those in need. CARE’s approach to emergencies Whether we’re responding to a natural disaster or supporting refugees fleeing from war, our work focuses on ensuring people have enough food to eat, clean water and proper sanitation, a roof over their heads, safety from violence and assistance for their specific health needs. Learn more. In profile: CARE’s Lisa Faye	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line610
__label__wiki	0.510111	0.510111	Yemen: Ceasefire Must Hold or Thousands More Will Die SANA’A, Yemen — The agreed cessation of hostilities in Yemen comes at a crucial moment when an entire country is on the brink. Humanitarian agencies warned today that should the ceasefire break down again, as previous ones did, the consequences would be catastrophic. This last year of escalated violence has meant that each day, around 6,610 people were forced to flee their homes and around 25 civilians were killed or injured. A school or health facility has been attacked every three days. The number of children dying daily from preventable diseases has risen to 137, an additional 28 a day since the start of the war. More than 82 per cent of Yemenis, or 21.2 million people, now depend on humanitarian aid. In just the last two months, more than 325,700 people were displaced by the conflict, raising the total number of displaced to a staggering 2.75 million. “This is a moment of truth for Yemen’s millions of civilians. A real ceasefire could be the first step towards ending this staggering yet forgotten crisis,” said the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland. “If it doesn't hold, those breaking it must be held accountable for the bloodshed. The figures speak for themselves. Every day of war is another day of massive death, displacement and despair.” While an immediate cessation of hostilities is essential, it is just the first of several measures needed to stop the crisis and pave the way for long-lasting peace and recovery. “The widespread destruction of Yemen's houses, factories, schools and hospitals will require decades to rebuild; the destruction of Yemen's social fabric and the trauma millions of innocent people are suffering will take even longer to heal,” said Sajjad Mohammad Sajid, Oxfam's Country Director in Yemen. “In the more than three decades that we've been working in Yemen, we have never witnessed a crisis of this scale. The blockade, war and now a looming banking crisis risk pushing millions into famine.” The humanitarian agencies reiterated their call on international governments to fully fund the humanitarian response so that millions of civilians receive essential aid and services like food, water, medicine and housing as an immediate priority. Parties to the conflict need to allow aid agencies to reach those most in need caught in the fighting, and the most vulnerable to reach the services they need. The commercial blockade needs to be lifted so that commercial supplies are allowed into Yemen. Save the Children's Country Director in Yemen Edward Santiago said: “As long as parties to the conflict continue to wage war and obstruct aid, millions of children will continue to go hungry or without healthcare, clean water and education. Yemenis must not be let down yet again, with more empty promises of ceasefires that fail to stop the killing. Yemeni children need more than words this time, they need action and a genuine commitment to end the violence once and for all.” The agencies warned that the upcoming UN-sponsored peace talks, due to start on 18 April, are the only real opportunity to end the suffering. Long-term solutions however must include the voices and concerns of Yemeni civil society in a representative and inclusive process. “All Yemenis need their voices to be heard if there is any hope for these peace talks to be sustainable,” said Daw Mohammed, CARE Country Director in Yemen. “Women, youth and minority groups must be included because they will be critical to rebuilding Yemen in the years to come.” Canadians can support CARE’s emergency response at: www.care.ca/response. CARE has Canadian spokespeople available in Yemen and Canada. Contact: Darcy Knoll Communications Specialist \| CARE Canada darcy.knoll@care.ca \| 613.228.5641 Statement released by: Danish Refugee Council Intersos Islamic Relief Operation Mercy Premiere Urgence Pure Hands Fires in Australia must serve as wake-up call to climate crisis CARE France’s charitable lottery: A Picasso for 100 Euros	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line611
__label__cc	0.690327	0.309673	Tenure-track faculty position - Innovative Clean Water Technologies for the 21st Century The Johns Hopkins University Dept of Environmental Health and Engineering Civil - Environmental, Civil - Water / Wastewater, Civil Engineering The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Environmental Health and Engineering seeks applicants for tenure-track faculty positions focused on Innovative Clean Water Technologies for the 21st Century. Candidates should have core expertise in the broad areas of water and/or wastewater treatment with an emphasis on novel cost-effective and energy efficient technologies. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: physico-chemical or biological processes to advance technologies for recovery and reuse of impaired waters, resource recovery from wastewaters, novel sensors and diagnostic tools for monitoring water supply and treatment infrastructure, and novel materials. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to develop broad interdisciplinary collaborations to address water challenges in a global context, by leveraging technological advancements in other fields such as utilizing the JHU Materials Characterization Processing (MCP) Core Facility, or incorporating life-cycle/systems analysis and sustainability concepts into analysis and design, and considering societal and environmental impacts and resource circularity. Individuals who integrate the above areas with public health or policy are especially encouraged to apply. The Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, which spans the Whiting School of Engineering and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, has 49 tenured/tenure-track and 40 non-tenure-track faculty members. We embrace the vision outlined in the 2018 National Academy report Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing Grand Challenges. We strive to position JHU as a world leader in understanding how environmental change affects human health and welfare, and in finding solutions that improve the health of the environment, the planet, communities and people, together as linked goals. We invite candidates who share our vision to apply for this position. More information about the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering can be found at https://ehe.jhu.edu The Whiting School of Engineering comprises over 200 full time tenure-track, research, and teaching-track faculty in nine academic programs with a total annual research budget of over $100 million. The Bloomberg School of Public Health is the number 1 ranked public health school in the country with over 670 full time tenure-track faculty in 10 academic departments with an annual budget of over $500 million. Research partnerships with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences make the Whiting School of Engineering a unique research and educational environment. Student enrollment exceeds 1800 at the undergraduate level with over 1000 full time MS and PhD students. The Engineering for Professionals program enrolls over 2000 part time continuing education students and is the largest program of its kind in the country. Applicants must hold an earned doctorate in an appropriate field by the time their appointment begins. Candidates must have demonstrated an ability to conduct outstanding independent research and establish a strong internationally recognized research program. Commitment to excellence in teaching and mentoring a diverse body of students at all levels is required. Applications at all levels will be considered; salary and rank will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, a research statement, a teaching statement, three recent publications, and complete contact information for at least five references. Applications must be made on-line through the Interfolio web portal (http://apply.interfolio.com/72751). Review of applications will begin in March 2020. While candidates who complete their applications by March 1, 2020 will receive full consideration, the department will consider exceptional applicants at any time. The Johns Hopkins University is committed to active recruitment of a diverse faculty and student body. The University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer of women, minorities, protected veterans and individuals with disabilities and encourages applications from these and other protected group members. Consistent with the University’s goals of achieving excellence in all areas, we will assess the comprehensive qualifications of each applicant. The Whiting School of Engineering and the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering are committed to building a diverse educational environment, and women and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply. About The Johns Hopkins University Dept of Environmental Health and Engineering Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line612
__label__wiki	0.508459	0.508459	Tag Archives: Martin Luther King Controversy Casting a White MLK in a PLay Another one off the deep end. Kent University college production of “To The Mountaintop” has cast a white actor to play MLK to the inevitable chorus of protest by both the playwright and some others. I seriously am not feeling this. First, because those of you familiar with the hottest play on Broadway right now, “Hamilton”… Where a majority of the main actors are minorities, who play Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, Marquis De Lafayette, James Madison – and the music is delivered in Hip-Hop. Black folks and Hispanic folks playing dead white guys who were part of the Founding Fathers of our country. Having read a lot of MLKs work, I have never seen anything as part of his vision that we should segregate on any basis, including the race of an actor. Nor were the objectives of his work limited to just freedom for black folks. It’s a play, dammit! I would imagine the howls if they put him in blackface…To be more “historically accurate”. Ohio college production casts white actor as Martin Luther King Jr. in biographical play Kent University production of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop featured a white and black actor, which Hall says was ‘disrespectful’ and a ‘disservice’ The casting of a white actor as Martin Luther King in an Ohio university production of Katori Hall’s acclaimed play The Mountaintop was “a disservice to not just Dr King but an entire community”, the playwright has said. Hall wrote an essay for the African American cultural website the Root on Monday about Kent State University’s production of her play, which dramatizes the night before King was assassinated in 1968. Hall told the Guardian that director Michael Oatman’s decision to double-cast the six-show production with a black actor and a white actor as King went “deeper than just casting a white man in the role of MLK”. “I just really feel as though it echoes this pervasive erasure of the black body and the silencing of a black community — theatrically and also, literally, in the world,” she said. Oatman, who like Hall is black, said in a statement in August promoting the play that he chose a white actor for the production “to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity”. “I didn’t want this to be a stunt, but a true exploration of King’s wish that we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin,” Oatman said. “I wanted the contrast … I wanted to see how the words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.” Oatman did not respond to a request for comment, but Hall said she had a respectful phone call with the director about a month after he staged the play at the university’s Department of Pan-African Studies’ African Community Theatre from late September to early October. She said that Oatman did not discuss the decision to use a white actor with her before the play ran and called the decision “disrespectful”. Hall said she thought that if a director was going to experiment like Oatman did, then they should include a discussion with the audience or create another forum to measure the success of such an exercise. “With a playwright’s intention being dangerously distorted, Oatman’s experiment proved to be a self-serving and disrespectful directing exercise for a paying audience,” Hall wrote. Hall learned about Oatman’s decision to use a white actor in the production after the show had closed. She immediately notified her agent, who contacted the theatre licensing service Dramatists Play Service, which then wrote to the university questioning its decision. Since the Kent State University production ran, Hall has adjusted The Mountaintop’s licensing agreement to say: “Both characters are intended to be played by actors who are African-American or Black. Any other casting choice requires the prior approval of the author.” She said that the issue of representation is a common discussion topic for theatremakers of color, but rarely gets attention beyond that community. The decision to cast a white man as one of the country’s best known civil rights figures, however, changed that. “I feel as though a lot of theatermakers were a bit appalled at the choice that the director made – and that it was supported so wholeheartedly by the institution,” Hall said. “So it was really a moment to talk about playwright intention, but to then, beyond that, talk about much bigger issues, about not only being a black artist but also being a black person in America.” Posted by btx3 on November 11, 2015 in The Definition of Racism Tags: America, controversy, Kent University, Martin Luther King, MLK, race, tempest, To The Mountaintop, white actor Twisted – Freddy Gray and MLK Yeah…I got a problem with this. Putting Freddy Gray, a victim of out of control police violence in Baltimore next to Martin Luther King seems a bit of appropriation that just doesn’t belong here. Martin developed a philosophy, moved a nation with his words, and fought against the forces of Jim Crow oppression, and ultimately gave his life. He stood up, knowing exactly the extent to which racist forces in America would go, suffering imprisonment and beatings for the simple act of non-violent resistance, and ultimately being murdered. Gray was a street kid and a drug dealer. Which doesn’t make his murder right at the hands of Baltimore Cops…But he “ain’t no hero” in terms of what he may or may not have accomplished while alive. He is a small part of a black community which suffers in small part due to his illicit acts. Injustice in this case was a purely personal event. Seems folks worry more about the racial background of a few folks working to end this type of injustice…Than the fact those folks are working for the betterment of the entire American community. And no – I am not buying into the black-on-black crime racist meme – because all crime in a largely segregated America is intra-racial. Crime is more a statement of opportunity, than any wall painted large of cultural or racial dysfunction. The most dangerous thing for the BlackLivesMatter movement is an identification with the victim, instead of a disgust and opposition to the crime, and it ever happening again. I don’t think (and I hope) that is any secret to the folks at BlackLivesMatter. 3 year old Mckenzie Elliot, whose murderer has yet to be brought to justice. “He shouldn’t be up there with Martin Luther King”: A mural of Freddie Gray with the civil rights leader provokes disgust, on my ride-along with the Baltimore Police The streets are quiet tonight in West Baltimore. I’m in the backseat of a car on a ride-along with two Baltimore City police officers in late May, nearly a month after the riots following the death of Freddie Gray. There have been 26 murders this month to date, a number that will leapfrog to 43 before May draws to a close. The media is calling this a “surge in violence” and touting theories to account for the spike, everything from officer apathy to a plethora of looted prescription drugs flooding the market and causing gang violence, but tonight the streets of West Baltimore are largely deserted. We see one group of young men hanging on a corner and a few kids pedaling around on bikes, but otherwise it’s eerily quiet. I’ve come on this ride-along because I want to see for myself what’s happening on the streets in the wake of the riots. Many of stories told by the media have sympathized either with the protesters or with the police, thus setting up an “us versus them” dynamic that feels reductive. I don’t buy into this good guy/bad guy type of narrative. I don’t believe that the majority of the rioters were bad people or that the majority of police officers are bloodthirsty brutes. What I believe is that most of the rioters were good people engaging in bad behavior and that most of the police are good officers doing the best they can while working in deeply flawed system, a system that revolves around the “War on Drugs,” a system that targets poor, black neighborhoods. We ride by the burned-out CVS and the boarded-up buildings. We slow down next to the huge mural that has been painted on the side of a row house in Sandtown-Winchester, close to the spot where Freddie Gray was first arrested. Two chimney-like structures divide the mural into three panels. In the center is a huge painting of Freddie Gray’s face; on the left Martin Luther King Jr. is depicted marching with a group of protesters, and on the right, Freddie Gray’s family also marches. We all stare at the mural in silence for a moment. It reminds me of the statue that towers outside of Baltimore’s Penn Station, which features two bisecting body profiles, one male and one female. Baltimoreans either love or hate this polarizing piece of art. Whenever I look at it, I both understand it and question it, which is the same way I felt when the riots occurred. The riots made no sense to me and yet, they made perfect sense. For years, I’ve heard stories from young, black men about their experiences with the cops — young men who have been pulled over without cause, who have been illegally searched, who have been spoken to disrespectfully. Some have been physically assaulted. I have also been witness to some of these acts on a handful of ride-alongs that I went on several years ago with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). I went with the goal of writing about the fraying relationship between the BPD and the black community, but every time I tried to put pen to paper, the task felt impossibly complex. On one of the ride-alongs, I watched a car full of young black men dressed in bright polo shirts and cocked ball caps get pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The driver of the vehicle handed over his license and explained that he was a college student, and that he and his friends were on their way to meet some friends. The young man was polite and respectful, but it was easy to see that getting pulled over like this was not a new experience for him. There was a lilting impatience in his voice, the slightest tinge of angry exasperation that he attempted to keep tucked away. After the young man answered a few questions, the officers let him off without issuing any sort of traffic citation. I remember watching him drive off and wondering what he would do with the remnants of that anger that he’d kept so neatly tucked beneath those polite answers. I have long wondered where that young man and all the others like him put their anger over this kind of degradation. But I stopped wondering on the day of the riots; when I saw the images of young people lobbing bricks, stomping on cars and looting stores. There, I thought, the anger is right there. The riot was a release. A giant exhale on a long held breath that has been waiting for the proverbial arc of justice to bend toward it. “He shouldn’t be up there with Martin Luther King,” one of the officers finally says of the Freddie Gray mural, a note of disgust in his voice. These officers, one Caucasian, one Hispanic, knew Freddie Gray long before the media ever uttered his name. At the station where we started the night, there were photographs of Gray hanging on the wall. In the photos, he was surrounded by a posse of baby-faced young men who mugged for the camera. In one picture, Gray held up his middle finger. There were handwritten numbers above the head of each of the young men and below a list of names that corresponded with the numbers. When these officers look at this larger-than-life mural with Gray in the center, they see a drug dealer next to the greatest civil rights leader of all time and they can’t seem to make sense of that. “Put that little girl up there. McKenzie. Not him,” the officer says. He is referring to 3-year-old McKenzie Elliot, who was killed in a drive-by shooting last August. “Why weren’t there riots for her? That, I would understand.” McKenzie Elliot and Freddie Gray — the former was presumably killed by drug dealers (although nobody has been arrested despite the fact that the crime occurred in front of multiple witnesses), the latter indisputably died in police custody….More… Posted by btx3 on August 22, 2015 in The Post-Racial Life Tags: appropriation, Baltimore, BlackLivesMatter, crime, Freddy Gray, Martin Luther King, MLK, Movement, murder, Police What Martin Luther King Actually Accomplished “The negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect” March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, of the United States Supreme Court This article talks a bit about the horrors of the Jim Crow era in America. Mary Turner 1918 Eight Months Pregnant Mobs lynched Mary Turner on May 17, 1918 in Lowndes County. Georgia because she vowed to have those responsible for killing her husband arrested. Her husband was arrested in connection with the shooting and killing Hampton Smith, a white farmer for whom the couple had worked, and wounding his wife. Sidney Johnson. a Black, apparently killed Smith because he was tired of the farmer’s abuse. Unable to find Johnson. the killers lynched eight other Blacks Including Hayes Turner and his wife Mary. The mob hanged Mary by her feet, poured gasoline and oil on her and set fire to her body. One white man sliced her open and Mrs. Turner’s baby tumbled to the ground with a “little cry” and the mob stomped the baby to death and sprayed bullets into Mary Turner. So…One of the things MLK did was to finally put the skids, if not the end to this sort of “domestic terrorism”, against black folks. Now, our black conservative Uncle Toms would like you believe that liberals are using the past as an excuse for everything. But do you see the Jewish people forgetting the Holocaust? Black conservatives, and white conservative racists they support are big on black on black violence. But the thing hy won’t tell you, and you will never find in their pseudo-scientific statistics is that 92% of the men locked up or child sexual abuse …Are white. During Jim Crow white men were free to rape, sodomize and brutalize not only black women…But black children. While lynchings were sometimes reported, these other categories of violence and sexual predation were entirely swept under the rug. The second thing they lie about is the violence statistics. Sexually abusing a child in the FBI’s version of the violent crime world doesn’t qualify as a “violent crime” – and thus is excludes from the statistics which include murder, and the rape of adult women (or men). We are going to count veggies, but green tomatoes don’t count. Back to that pre-Civil Rights time – there was little or no hope of actually prosecuting these white criminals in the southern “Justice” system. Laying the groundwork of why black folk will never trust the conservative judges the right is so desperate to appoint. Gaining the right to walk down the street unmolested may not seem like that big a deal solely from a cynical intellectual viewpoint – but it is pretty freaking important if it is you trying to get down the street. Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective. The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished. The reason I’m posting this is because there were dueling diaries over the weekend about Dr. King’s legacy, and there is a diary up now (not on the rec list but on the recent list) entitled, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dream Not Yet Realized.” I’m sure the diarist means well as did the others. But what most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impactwas not to make white people nicer or fairer. That’s why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind. I remember that many years ago, when I was a smart ass home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, probably for the second time. A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, “peasant” origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, pot belly stoves for heat in the winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung, chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and urbanization that my father left that life. They lived in a valley or hollow or “holler” in which all the landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you wanted to talk to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind the outhouse and yell across the valley, “Heeeyyyy Taaaaft,” and you could see him far, far in the distance, come out of his cabin and yell back. On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules of Jim Crow applied. By the time I was little, my people had been in this country for six generations (going back, according to oral rendering of our genealogy, to Africa Jones and Mama Suki), much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns. Anyway that’s background. I think we were kind of typical as African Americans in the pre Civil Rights era went. So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had. I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.” Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act. At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech. My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.” Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about. But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches. He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south. I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing “The Help,” may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism. It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus. You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s. It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment. This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people. White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of “assault,” which could be anything from rape to not taking off one’s hat, to “reckless eyeballing.” This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father’s memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady. This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk. I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparent’s vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand. This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended. If you didn’t get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans. The question is, how did Dr. King do this — and of course, he didn’t do it alone. (Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of non-violent resistance, and taught the practices of non violent resistance.) So what did they do? They told us: — whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down. Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed. If we do it all together, we’ll be OK. They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating — from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people. And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn’t that bad. Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicked on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened? These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail. That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era. Please let this sink in. It wasn’t marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free. So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears. So please don’t tell me that Martin Luther King’s dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you’re not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished. That is what Dr. King did — not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives. Once the beating was over, we were free. It wasn’t the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had done. PS. I really shouldn’t have to add this but please — don’t ever confuse someone criticizing you or telling you bad things over the internet with what happened to people during the civil rights movement. Don’t. Just don’t do it. Don’t go there. PSS Weird, but it kind of sounds like what V did to Evie. UPDATE: There is a major, major hole in this essay as pointed out by FrankAletha downthread — While I was focusing on the effect on black men, she points out that similarly randomized sexual violence against black women was as severe and common and probably more so, because while violence against black men was ritualistic, violence against black women was routine. UPDATE 2: Rec list — I’m honored!!! Posted by btx3 on January 20, 2014 in Black History, The Post-Racial Life Tags: accomplishments, civil rights, crime, Freedom, Martin Luther King, MLK, violence If There Were a 1% Debate… MLK vs. Romney What would MLK do? What would MLK say? There is very little evidence that MLK would have anything good to say about today’s Republican Party. Indeed – for many folks today’s Republican have gone about as low as you can go. Here is a mash up of points by MLK and “Willard” Romney… Posted by btx3 on January 20, 2012 in American Greed, Domestic terrorism, Stupid Republican Tricks, Stupid Tea Bagger Tricks, The Post-Racial Life Tags: 1%, 99%, class warfare, economic justice, Economy, Freedom, Martin Luther King, middle class, Mitt Romney, MLK, Post Racial, poverty, race, Republican, rich, right wing What Would King Do? This from a website, “Campaign for America’s Future”, written by Terrence Heath – MLK’s Dream Deferred Dr. King’s words, invoked during President Obama’s inauguration, suggest what he would call us to remember and how he would challenge us today. “As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at the Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand our boasting of being independent. We are interdependent. “The ultimate measure of a man or woman is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother or sister to a higher and more noble life.” But he would not stop there. Dr. King would be concerned that an already slow economic recovery is leaving black Americans behind. King concerned about the epidemic of black unemployment — that black unemployment is at 16.2%, compared to 9.2% for the general population, 17.5% for black men, and 41% for black youth. King would be outraged that one in three black children lives in poverty. King would be troubled that black households now have 20 times less wealth than white households. King be concerned about the backward mobility happening in the African American communities, as middle class families quickly lose ground in this recession — losing hard won gains, in a fraction of the time it too achieve them. King would denounce the attacks on public workers that are hitting blacks and women the hardest. King would stand with public workers in Wisconsin, who now have to choose between health insurance and feeding their children. Dr. King would be outraged that the “welfare reform” of the 1990s is leaving more people in poverty today. Dr. King would scorn a recovery where CEO pay soars 27 percent, while virtually no jobs are created. King would denounce the GOP’s exploitation of racial and economic anxiety, and denounce Democrats just as loudly for failing to offer much of value to working-class whites. King would stand today where he stood then: with working families who are struggling in this recession, losing ground while our government seems content to let it happen. Dr. King would deliver the full-throated challenge to the status quo that many Americans are longing to hear. It was popular in Right Wing circles for a while to try and steal from MLK’s words to justify their perverted logic. Fortunately that level of insanity has largely ceased, if for no other reason than the explosive nature of the “conversations” that typically followed. Funny thing is, I don’t think King would be fighting just for the poor, and lower middle class in America right now… I think he would be fighting to change a system which has become so perverted there is no reasonable expectation of living as well as our parents did – or being able to hold a job even after pushing all the right buttons along the educational highway while CEOs and Wall Street Barons make billions in bonuses and salary. Yeah…Something is wrong here. Posted by btx3 on September 1, 2011 in American Genocide, The New Jim Crow, The Post-Racial Life Tags: alive, economic justice, Economy, Justice, Martin Luther King, memorial, MLK, race, Racism, social justice, Today's Problems Some Issues With Martin Luther King Memorial Surface Taking a few words at their meaning, out of context with the events, or in some cases hundreds of words surrounding them is a recipe for disaster. In particular, the Rev. Martin Luther King, whose speeches and collective will driven by the righteousness of our cause shook our national psyche to it’s very foundations, left us with a number or speeches and written words left us with a number of “quotable moments” which cannot be distilled without context. My parents, being educators collected a number of King’s Speeches and much of his oratory on old 33 1/3 RPM records allowing us to go back and review and rehear his speeches, discussions, and debates again and again. I would guess that well North of several thousand published works document the Civil Rights period, making it, WWII, and the Great Depression the most documented and detailed events of the past century. So it is a little distressing when they get it wrong on the Memorial… At King ceremony, a chance to bend toward justice The arc of a mistake is long, and it now stretches from the Oval Office over to the Mall. An error has been etched in marble on the grand Martin Luther King Jr. memorial that was to be dedicated Sunday, on the 48th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Some of King’s speeches and writings have been inscribed in the memorial. But one of the sayings on the wall by the Tidal Basin is incorrect — or incomplete — in its attribution. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According to David Remnick’s biography of Obama, that is the president’s “favorite quotation.” Obama brought the idea back into present-day parlance and even had it sewn into the rug in the Oval Office when he redecorated last year. But as I wrote on this page last September, King is not the source of that quote. Read the rest of this entry » Posted by btx3 on August 31, 2011 in Black History, News, The Post-Racial Life Tags: civil rights, errors, mall, Martin Luther King, maya Angelou, memorial, MLK, Quotes, Statue, Theodore Parker The Comic Book Which Rocked the World Apparently the hottest reading in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East right now is a comic book… Only instead of phantasmal “super-heroes” with otherworldly super-powers, this book is about normal folks, a real “super-hero” who inspired with words and faith, and a key event in American Civil Rights – The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (Visit this site to read the books in English, Arabic, or Farsi) HAMSA, in conjunction with our parent organization AIC, is proud to announce the release of a groundbreaking Arabic edition of a 50-year-old comic book on Martin Luther King and the power of nonviolence. Several thousand copies were printed in Cairo, as part of an effort spearheaded by AIC-Egypt Director Dalia Ziada (right). They are being distributed across the Middle East. Called “The Montgomery Story,” the comic book was published in 1958 and helped inspire the American civil-rights movement in the 1960s. In 2008, it was translated and designed by young reformers in the Mideast. It features full-color panels depicting the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a campaign to end segregation on buses in the capitol of Alabama. The comic book ends with a section on “how the Montgomery Method works,” outlining essential techniques of nonviolence. After an initial run of just 2,500 books – the Montgomery Story and King’s message has caught on like wildfire throughout the Middle East. Copies are available online, and are being actively distributed electronically by bloggers across the Internet. The Arabic comic book has now been distributed in print and on-line to a network of young activists and bloggers throughout the Middle East, including Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen. Feedback has been enthusiastic. At a book fair in the Egyptian industrial city of Mahalla, one woman grabbed the comic book with passion and scanned the cover, asking, “Is this Gamal Abdel Nasser?” A Farsi version of the comic was rushed into production in June of 2009 as post-election protests were erupting. Translators in Iran helped put it together in a week, and the comic was soon being distributed digitally. The Montgomery Bus Boycott had resonance in Iran with the 2005 Tehran bus protests, which made headlines when one trade unionist, Mansour Osanloo, had his tongue cut by members of the Islamic Republic for seeking improved working conditions for his fellow bus drivers. As with the violence in Iran, “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” cautioned that brutality often accompanies steps towards peace. Scenes of a Ku Klux Klan parade, a cross burning, and the bombings of Negro churches and homes were vividly depicted within its pages. An impassioned King is seen imploring an angry crowd: “Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence. I want you to love our enemies, for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just – and God is with us.” The Revolution may not be televised… But it will cover the world. BTW kiddies, this has also been translated into Vietnamese and Spanish… Posted by btx3 on February 3, 2011 in Black History, News, The Post-Racial Life Tags: comic book, egypt, inspiration, Martin Luther King, Middle East, MLK, revolution, The Montgomery Story, uprising	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line615
__label__wiki	0.907313	0.907313	ST. LOUIS & S. F. R. CO. v. BROWN ST. LOUIS & S. F. R. CO. v. BROWN(1916) Argued: Decided: May 22, 1916 [241 U.S. 223, 224] Messrs. W. F. Evans, R. A. Kleinschmidt, and J. H. Grant for plaintiff in error. Messrs. C. B. Stuart, A. C. Cruce, M. K. Cruce, W. I. Cruce, and L. S. Dolman for defendant in error. Mr. Chief Justice White delivered the opinion of the court: Basing his cause of action upon the Federal employers' liability and safety appliance acts, Brown, the defendant in error, sued to recover damages resulting from injuries alleged to have been occasioned by the negligence of the railroad company while he was in its employ and engaged in interstate commerce. At the close of the testimony the claim under the safety appliance act was withdrawn and the case was submitted to the jury alone upon the employers' liability act. There was a verdict and judgment for the plaintiff, which was affirmed by the court below. -- Okla. --, 144 Pac. 1075 There was a sharp conflict between the testimony offered on behalf of the plaintiff and that on behalf of the defendant. The material facts disclosed by the plaintiff's testimony are as follows: Brown, a head brakeman, and other members of a local freight train crew on the day in question were engaged in the yards at Ashdown, Arkansas, in making up an extra freight train to be taken out by an extra crew to Hugo, Oklahoma. The cars intended [241 U.S. 223, 225] for the interstate train were placed on an east and west passing track east of a switch connecting a spur track which ran in a northeasterly direction past a stave mill. After placing some cars from the spur track on the passing track, the engine returned to the spur track with several cars, some of which were to be left at the mill and the remainder brought out and coupled to those already collected for the train and standing on the passing track. Brown accompanied the cars, and, after cutting off those intended for the mill, gave the engineer a signal to go ahead, the engine being headed west, and when the cars approaching the switch came opposite the car on the passing track to which the coupling was to be made, Brown crossed over from the spur track to the passing track to adjust the coupler on the car standing there. Finding the knuckle of the coupler closed, he attempted to open it with the lever at the side of the car, but it did not work. He then tried to manipulate the knuckle with his hand, but could get it only part way open, and, closing it, he stepped out to the north side of the track (the engineer's side). As the last car coupled with the engine was then just clearing the switch, he gave the engineer a stop signal and walked west to the switch stand to set the switch so that the engine and cars might be backed to make the coupling. By the time he had walked the short intervening distance and set the switch the engine had come to a stop with the rear car a few steps west of the switch. Intending then to adjust the coupler on the end of this car, Brown gave the engineer, who was watching him, a 'spot' signal, which indicated that he was not to move the engine until a further signal was given by Brown, and crossed over to the south side of the track in order to use the lifting pin to open the knuckle of the coupler. When the lever failed to work he stepped behind the car and was about to try to open the knuckle with his hand when he heard the cars ahead of him move. He at once turned to leave the [241 U.S. 223, 226] track, but was struck and knocked down by the car which was backed in disregard of the 'spot' signal, and his feet were caught under the wheels and crushed. The assignments of error are numerous, but those requiring to be specially noticed may be disposed of under three headings: 1. The contention that rights of the railroad company guaranteed by the 7th Amendment were violated because only nine of the twelve jurors concurred in the verdict is without merit. Minneapolis & St. L. R. Co. v. Bombolis, 241 U.S. 211 , 60 L. ed. --, 36 Sup. Ct. Rep. 595. 2. A twofold contention is based upon rulings concerning the doctrine of the assumption of the risk. Upon the withdrawal by the plaintiff of his claim under the safety appliance act, the court charged the jury concerning assumption of the risk as follows: 'You are instructed that, by accepting employment as a brakeman with the defendant, the plaintiff assumed the risk of such dangers as are ordinarily incident to the occupation he was engaged in, and if you find that his injury was occasioned by one of the incidents ordinarily attending the occupation upon which he was engaged, you should return a verdict for the defendant; but you are instructed in this connection that the plaintiff only assumed the risks that are ordinarily incident to the occupation in which he was engaged, and that he did not assume the risks that were attendant upon the negligence of a fellow servant.' (a) It is insisted that the abandonment of the claim as to a violation of the safety appliance act necessarily withdrew all evidence tending to show that the couplers were defective, and, in the absence of such evidence, the proof established as a matter of law that the plaintiff assumed the risk, and the court should have directed a verdict in favor of the railroad. We think the proposition is plainly without merit. The testimony concerning [241 U.S. 223, 227] the condition of the couplers was clearly admissible under the issues based on the employers' liability act as explaining the occasion for Brown's being on the track, and as negativing negligence on his part. In so far as the contention implies that the withdrawal of the claim was a concession that the testimony relating to the couplers was false, we think the conclusion is wholly unwarranted. If we were to conjecture as to the reason for the abandonment of the claim under the safety appliance act, we think it at least quite as probable that plaintiff's counsel were of opinion that, in the situation disclosed by the plaintiff's testimony, the safety appliance act was inapplicable. (b) In the court below it would seem that the correctness of the general instruction as to assumption of the risk which we have quoted as given by the trial court was challenged on a ground which has been abandoned because not here pressed. But it is said reversible error exists because the court below, in passing upon such objection, remarked that as the 'defendant's liability to plaintiff grows out of a violation of a statutory duty, arising under an act of Congress,' assumption of the risk was not a defense. This, it is said, was erroneous, first, because so far as the safety appliance act was concerned, it was inapposite, as reliance upon that law by the plaintiff had been disclaimed, and second, because, under the facts, it was open to find the existence of assumption of the risk depending upon conditions of fact not involved in the safety appliance act. But we fail to see the pertinency of this objection, as there is now no contention concerning the correctness of the charge as to assumption of the risk upon which the case was submitted to the jury for their verdict. At best, therefore, the error asserted simply amounts to contending that because the court below may have inaccurately expressed in one respect its reasons for affirmance, that inaccuracy gives rise to the duty of [241 U.S. 223, 228] reversing the judgment although no reversible error exists 3. It is contended that the court erred in charging the jury that, in the event they found the plaintiff guilty of contributory negligence, they should 'reduce his damages in proportion to the amount of negligence which is attributable to him,' since the court did not define the word 'proportion,' and hence failed to fix any standard by which the damages should be measured. The charge is clearly distinguishable from the instruction disapproved in Seaboard Air Line R. Co. v. Tilghman, 237 U.S. 499 , 59 L. ed. 1069, 35 Sup. Ct. Rep. 653, which is relied upon, since in that case the jury were in effect instructed to diminish the damages according to their conception of what was reasonable. The instruction given is almost in the identical language of the statute, and while definition might have further conduced to an appreciation by the jury of the standard established by the statute, we think there was no error in the charge given, especially as the railroad company made no request for a charge clarifying any obscurity on the subject which it deemed existed. It is true to company made a request on the subject which the court declined to give, but that request, we are of opinion, taken as a whole, instead of clarifying any ambiguity deemed to exist in the instruction which the court gave would have served to obscure it. There was no error, therefore, leaving aside the question whether the requested instruction did not contain matters which, if given, would have been erroneous. Although we have examined the whole record, and, as the result of that examination, conclude there is no ground for reversal, we have not particularly noticed subjects embraced by some of the assignments, but not pressed in argument, and others not embraced by the assignments, but indirectly referred to in the argument.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line617
__label__wiki	0.587575	0.587575	New publication from Veritas to resource the Prayer of the Faithful Home/News, News Feed/New publication from Veritas to resource the Prayer of the Faithful Prayer of the Faithful is the title of a new book published by Veritas which is a collection of prayers to assist with the preparation of the Prayer of the Faithful on Sundays and solemnities throughout the liturgical year. The Prayer of the Faithful is a fundamental part of the liturgy and prompts reflection in parishioners in a unique and special way throughout the Church year. It offers the congregation an opportunity to respond to the Word of God by offering prayers for the salvation of all and to approach God as a community of the faithful. In this new collection, Father Leslie McNamara has been guided by the General Instruction of the Roman Missal and offers readers a wide-ranging selection of intentions for use throughout the three-year cycle (A, B, C). The wording of the prayers has been specially tailored to suit the particular celebration or Sunday in question, with intentions that respond in a thoughtful and nuanced fashion to the liturgical season, the lectionary readings and the challenges facing both the Church and society today. This important work is offered as a resource for priests, leaders of prayer and all who inspire and engage our congregations in worship on Sundays and holy days throughout the year. Father McNamara is former President of Saint Munchin’s College, Limerick and former Director of Vocations for the Diocese of Limerick. Prayer of the Faithful, his first book, is born out of a decades-long devotion to reading and studying the Liturgy of the Word. Writing in the foreword to the book, Bishop Brendan Leahy, Bishop of Limerick, said that the book is a timely resource that will be invaluable. He said, “The Prayer of the Faithful is the moment in the Mass when we articulate our everyday concerns, both immediate and universal. We bring before God, not only our personal petitions. Our heart is expanded to embrace and pray for the whole world. ” Bishop Leahy said Prayer of the Faithful is a collaborative work, and as such, it includes different voices (male and female) and styles. He said, “My wish is that all who use this book will be helped in articulating the faith community’s prayerful outreach in response to God’s word.” Prayer of the Faithful is available now from www.veritas.ie. Brenda2019-02-06T16:27:27+00:00February 6th, 2019\|News, News Feed\|	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line621
__label__wiki	0.705488	0.705488	CCI Commencement 2019 CCI Outstanding Graduates: What’s Next? Every graduate has that next step ahead, whether walking across the stage means a journey toward further education or the launching point of a career. As graduation season returns to Rocky Top, here’s a look at the outstanding graduates from each CCI school and major including their future plans and how thier majors prepared them for professional careers. OUTSTANDING ADVERTISING GRADUATE Matthew Meyers (Memphis, Tennessee) “I am waiting to hear back from agencies to get quality assurance job, but ultimately move to New York.” How did your program prepare you for your career? “I think that the degree … Read more “2019 CCI Outstanding Graduates: What’s Next?” Larry Patrick to Deliver 2018 CCI Commencement Speech Larry Patrick (MS/C&I ’73) will deliver the 2018 College of Communication and Information commencement speech at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 12 in Thompson Boling Arena. He is managing partner of Patrick Communications, a media investment banking and brokerage firm based in Maryland with over $7.5 billion worth of deals to its credit. The firm has sold over 600 radio stations and 160 television stations. Patrick also owns Legend Communications, a group of 22 small-market radio stations in Wyoming, and an interest in 14 major market television stations. Patrick served as chairman of the board of ION Media Networks, a … Read more “Larry Patrick to Deliver 2018 CCI Commencement Speech” Larry Patrick Edelman Urges Grads to Make a Difference Civil rights and social equality advocate Marian Wright Edelman urged UT graduates to do their part to make America “more just, more hopeful, more peaceful, more productive, inclusive, and unified.” Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek awarded Edelman an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters —the ninth honorary degree given by UT—at the College of Communication and Information commencement ceremony on Friday. Edelman then addressed graduates. “This may be the first time in our history when our children and grandchildren will be worse off than their parents and grandparents unless we correct course and do whatever is necessary to get them to safe … Read more “Edelman Urges Grads to Make a Difference” Pulitzer Prize-Winning Alum Receives UT's Sixth Honorary Degree Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist John Noble Wilford has told some of the world’s biggest stories since he graduated from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, almost 60 years ago. The first walk on the moon. The search for life on Mars. The Challenger disaster. Wilford—who received UT’s sixth honorary doctorate and spoke at the College of Communication and Information commencement ceremony on Wednesday—won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his reporting of science and space exploration and again in 1987 as part of the reporting team that covered the space shuttle Challenger disaster. His New York Times front-page story about the … Read more “Pulitzer Prize-Winning Alum Receives UT's Sixth Honorary Degree” John Noble Wilford 2013 CCI Commencement CCI Commencement on May 9, 2013 marked the end of another academic year for the college. Over 300 students graduated this spring and many will soon be starting their new careers. Monica Langley, esteemed Wall Street Journal writer, gave the commencement address to the students and guests attending the ceremony. In her address she shared her three guiding principles: people, persistance and passion. With her stories from 25 years at the WSJ and her early days as an intern copy clerk at the Knoxville News Sentinel, she captured the graduates attention with her practical and timely guidance. Click here … Read more “2013 CCI Commencement” Angelia Onuoha Monica Langley WSJ Journalist Langley to Speak at CCI Commencement Monica Langley, senior special writer for the Wall Street Journal, will deliver the spring 2013 commencement address for the College of Communication and Information (CCI) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Langley will address graduates and their families at 8:30am on Thursday, May 9, in Thompson-Boling Assembly Center and Arena. “As one of the top journalists of her generation, Monica Langley has interviewed many of the richest and most powerful people in the world,” said CCI Dean Mike Wirth. “Her remarkable career has been characterized by honesty, integrity and an extraordinary ability to both get and tell the story. … Read more “WSJ Journalist Langley to Speak at CCI Commencement” Scripps Networks Interactive CEO Ken Lowe to Address UT College Grads Ken Lowe, chairman, president and CEO of Scripps Networks Interactive Inc., will deliver the commencement address for the College of Communication and Information (CCI) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Lowe will address graduates and their families at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, May 10, 2012, in Thompson-Boling Assembly Center and Arena. “As one of the communication and information industry’s top executives, Ken Lowe’s remarkable career has been characterized by innovation, across-the-board excellence and a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion,” said CCI dean Mike Wirth. “We are very fortunate to have Ken as our commencement speaker, and we know that the … Read more “Scripps Networks Interactive CEO Ken Lowe to Address UT College Grads” Ken Lowe Scripps McCormick CEO Wilson to Receive Alumnus Award, Address CCI Grads Submitted by info on April 14, 2011 – 5:40pm Alan Wilson McCormick & Company	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line624
__label__wiki	0.517849	0.517849	In the Eye of the Hurricane Tropical Storm Dorian endangers US Dorian has increased in size over the last few days, but its eye was looking less defined on Wednesday morning. Maddy Kang, Co-Editor in Chief Hurricane Dorian was declared a Category 2 Hurricane, according to the Weather Channel. The storm has been destroying the Bahamas with winds above 40 mph. Now, Dorian is moving away from the Bahamas and approaching the US at a rate of 6 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. It is expected to get alarmingly close to Florida’s coast Tuesday and Wednesday. The storm appears to be nearing the eastern coast of Florida, according to CNN. Dorian is forecasted to move near the edges of both of the Carolinas. Hurricane warnings were announced along the areas the storm is estimated to trek through — from Jupiter Inlet to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. The warnings for Grand Bahama and the Abacos Islands in the Bahamas are still in effect as well. With storms, power outages are also possible. Outages are likely from Florida to North Carolina, but also from eastern Florida to southeastern Virginia. Due to the severity of the anticipated storm, Walt Disney World in Orlando even cut back its “Extra Magic Hours” that allow the park to operate for two additional hours from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. Many efforts are being made by the Defense Department in response to these potential weather dangers. According to officials at a briefing at the Pentagon, 5000 National Guard have been activated, 80 high water vehicles are on standby and the Coast Guard is preparing six helicopters in the Bahamas for rescue missions. Many Florida Counties such as St. Lucie county and Martin County have removed their mandatory evacuation orders, however, the threat of Hurricane Dorian still remains. Maddy Kang, Co-Editor-in-Chief Maddy Kang is a co-editor in chief for The Tiger Print. She is a senior at BVHS and plays Varsity Soccer, is a member of NHS, tiger mentors and the environmental... Impeachment Confusion What’s Hiding in Your Food? A Shorter Second Chance Off the Radar December 2019 Death of American Rapper K-pop Groups Create Waves IN-N-OUT Under Fire A Voyage into Space Tiger Tidbits	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line629
__label__wiki	0.69334	0.69334	Ride service needs drivers by Lynn Atkins \| August 7, 2019 at 5:30 a.m. Lynn Atkins/The Weekly Vista Harrison Ramey, Charlotte Champagne and Allen Lovell are drivers for the Courtesy Van of Bella Vista. All three find the volunteer job rewarding and fun. The program is looking for a few more drivers. Every weekday, two white vans leave the Highlands Crossing parking lot en route to doctor's offices and beauty salons. The vans enable some Bella Vistans to stay in their own homes in the face of medical issues. The Bella Vista Courtesy Van program has been going strong for over 25 years. There are other transportation programs that help low-income seniors, but Courtesy Van doesn't ask about income. It can help any adult who needs a ride because of a disability even if it's a temporary disability. In the 12 month period that ended with September 2018, the vans traveled 64,735 miles, providing 4,100 rides. Most of the rides were to medical appointments, but there were also trips to the store and the beauty salon. Usually, the organization has about 300 clients who need its services, although not every day. It takes about 50 drivers who drive one or two days a month to keep the vans going but, right now, there are only about 35 available, board member Louween Schoenhard said. More volunteers are needed. "It's very rewarding," volunteer driver Harrison Ramey said. "You get to meet a lot of interesting people." "It's a good way to learn your way around Bella Vista," Allen Lovell said. Drivers use a GPS, and sometimes the advice of their passengers because, in Bella Vista, the GPS route isn't always the best route. They will drive as far north as the Jane Walmart and as far south as Mercy Hospital in Rogers. Drivers don't need a special license, although they do need a decent driving record for the insurance company, Schoenhard said. And they have to be under 77 years old. Even their best drivers have to stop when they turn 77 because of the insurance regulations, she said. "I met a lady from South Africa," driver Charlotte Champagne said. "We laughed the entire time." Her passenger was telling her about Arkansas phrases she didn't understand. "I can't wait to pick her up next time." It's not unusual for the passengers to be very talkative, Ramey said. Often he finds himself driving people who have little chance to socialize and they enjoy talking to the driver. In fact, if passengers are asked to travel out of the way to pick up another passenger, they usually like the idea. They like seeing the scenery and talking to whoever the next passenger turns out to be. The drivers decide the logistics each day, Champagne said. Schedulers answer the phone and write down all the details on individual cards. When the drivers arrive at 7:45 each morning, they take the cards and decide how the pickups will go. Most rides are two ways, but the van doesn't necessarily wait. Once a passenger is dropped off, the van goes on to the next passenger and then returns. That means that there's often some waiting. The passengers don't seem to mind. Occasionally, there are unexpected stops. For instance, if the passenger needs to pick up a new prescription. The drivers do their best to fill all requests. When it's the driver who needs to wait, Champagne takes advantage of the time to fit in a quick walk. Sometimes even the best plans go awry and the drivers call each other for help. Every driver is trained and there's not often a reason to substitute, Schoenhard said. But drivers do have to be able to push a wheelchair up the ramp into the van. If they can't handle a wheelchair, they can become schedulers and work in the office. Courtesy Van is a free service, although many of the passengers donate. It is a nonprofit with an annual operating budget of about $39,000. The funds come from donations, including grants and a large donation from the Cooper Charity Classic Golf Tournament each year. Its volunteers also run their own golf tournament each summer. Churches and some businesses also donate, Schoenhard said. For more information or to volunteer, call Bill Puskus at 402-981-1571. Print Headline: Ride service needs drivers	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line630
__label__cc	0.575122	0.424878	Man allegedly involved in standoff with police charged with attempted murder The Canadian Press December 28, 2019 RICHMOND HILL, Ont. — Police say they have laid multiple charges against a man allegedly involved in a long standoff with officers north of Toronto. York Regional Police say the man surrendered to police sometime after 10 p.m. Friday and was charged with attempted murder, assault, dangerous driving and a number of weapons offences. They say 34-year-old Anoshirvan Shirizadeh of Richmond Hill, Ont., is in custody and scheduled to appear in court on Thursday. Police say the incident began around 10:30 a.m. Friday, when an officer made a traffic stop near the intersection of Bayview Avenue and Major MacKenzie Drive in Richmond Hill, Ont. They say the driver of the stopped vehicle opened fire and the officer shot back, then the suspect fled into a nearby residence. Ontario's police watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit, announced Friday afternoon that it is investigating after a man was "possibly struck" during the exchange of gunfire. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 28, 2019. Why Taylor Swift's 'Terrified' Father Opposed Her Taking a Political Stance N.S. declined to seize insurance money granted to mentally ill man who killed wife 175 reservists helping shovel snow in Newfoundland	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line631
__label__cc	0.623419	0.376581	Wednesday, Sep 20 2006 Report: UC Mental Health Services Need Change Mental health services at the University of California do not have enough staff or funds to maintain their role as a safety net for students, according to a report that the Board of Regents will consider Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Schevitz, San Francisco Chronicle , 9/20). Nearly 25% of students seeking counseling services are on some type of psychotropic medication, and the number of counselors per student has fallen below recommended guidelines, the report finds (Maitre, Oakland Tribune , 9/19). There are 2,200 students for every one mental health staff member at UC ( San Francisco Chronicle , 9/20). The International Association of Counseling Services recommends one counselor for every 1,500 students, according to Jeff Prince, director of counseling and psychological services at UC-Berkeley's University Health Services ( Oakland Tribune , 9/19). The number of students seeking counseling services at eight UC campuses also has increased by about 23% over the past five years ( San Francisco Chronicle , 9/20). The report recommends: Increasing salaries of mental health professionals; Improving retention of mental health care providers; Developing campus-wide mental health awareness campaigns ( Oakland Tribune , 9/19); and Launching intervention campaigns focused on high-risk groups, including graduate, international, and gay and lesbian students (Trounson, Los Angeles Times , 9/20). The report indicates that at least 29 UC students committed suicide between 2000 and 2005, based on coroners' statistics ( Oakland Tribune , 9/19). However, Prince said that figure does not include deaths that campus officials consider suicides, noting that coroners' definition of suicide is narrower than other definitions ( San Francisco Chronicle , 9/20). This is part of the California Healthline Daily Edition, a summary of health policy coverage from major news organizations. Sign up for an email subscription.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line637
__label__wiki	0.553015	0.553015	Advertisement, Buzzworthy, News Pasadena, CA – This weekend, the beloved California Torch celebrates its 250th anniversary. Founded by Abraham Starbuck Parnassus on October 23rd, 1768, The California Torch has continued to provide only the finest, curated news for readers with a distinguishing eye for the quality of the finest, curated news for readers with a distinguishing eye for the quality. “The fuck is a sestercentennial?” Mr. Parnassus was born in the winter of 1743 to a pair of surfers from the outskirts of modern-day San Diego. It was a hella chill winter, and many people suffered due to a critical boba shortage. However, Mr. Parnassus survived that winter, and became a bright, curious boy. After earning a 1600 on his SAT, he was invited to study at the Throop Training School for Ye Olde White Fuckboyes (later called Caltech). Mr. Parnassus traveled on foot from San Diego to Pasadena, arriving in the fall of 1764 with only 1 Dbal in his pocket. In 1764, Pasadena had a very small population of 300 people, composed mostly of professors (many of whom still ‘teach’ today). There were only a dozen log cabins then, and all of them were luxury apartments with a rent of $2200 per month. Because nobody could afford these apartments, the students settled for cooking and sleeping in the open air. At night, they often entertained themselves with songs, storytelling, and dances. It was in this manner that Parnassus passed many happy years, often writing home to his parents. Parnassus often wrote letters in LaTeX due to his horrible snobbery. However, in the spring of 1768, violence struck when several rogue professors disagreed with how self-important the institution should be. Those who voted “we’re like MIT’s peer institution” were allowed to stay. However, those who voted “we’re probably not” were banished to San Luis Obispo, where they formed Cal Poly. By this time, Parnassus was a cynical senior. He wisely predicted that Cal Poly would cause problems for future students, and led a campaign to fortify the institute. (It was at this time that the Fleming Cannon was purchased.) “I don’t know why, but I just feel like Cal Poly is going to cause everybody trouble in the future. Like, maybe some name-based similarity. Which is wild, because we’re called the Throop Training School. No, I don’t know why. Also, invest in Apple,” Parnassus wrote to a fellow student in 1768. For his senior thesis, Parnassus carefully devised an economical recipe for the defense of Our Fine Institute against intruders. “Each year, ye shall take a massyv shyte on the frosh.” This self-flagellating recipe has served to scare off weak proto-frosh ever since, much like the sight of a person cutting off their own fingers to ‘make themselves stronger.’ In the 1970s, this recipe was codified into the Caltech Core. To this day, many upperclassmen happily partake in the spirit of Parnassus’ manifesto. “If we had to be miserable, so do you,” they gleefully shout in the hallways. Although The California Torch has taken on many shapes and forms over the years, it has long been associated with its commitment to making its readers feel ashamed and dirty, much like The Tech. While many traditional newspapers are struggling with the transition to the digital age, The California Torch has thrived by fostering a complete disregard for editorial standards. “It’s true,” says Parnassus. Many commemorative events will take place around campus this weekend, including a 5k unfun run. For a full schedule of festivities, go fuck yourself, frosh. October 19, 2018 May 6, 2019 Previous Previous post: New Institute Policy to Ban Crying in Public Spaces Next Next post: Caltech Security to be Enhanced by Heavily Armed U.S. Troops Mars Twain Mars Twain is an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, lecturer, and alumnus of something or another. View all posts by Mars Twain	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line638
__label__wiki	0.624101	0.624101	MCCARTHY: Els defends Aussie fans ... Prez Cup draft top-notch ... When golf goes wild Updated: December 14, 2019 8:02 PM EST International captain Ernie Els delivered one of the most compelling moments of the week at the Presidents Cup, and he did it from a chair in the interview room. During the captain’s press conferences on Saturday after the matches, and after answering questions about Patrick Reed’s caddie’s altercation with a fan, American captain Tiger Woods had a few words for the Australian spectators. “Have people said things that have been over the top? Yes. I’ve heard it,” Woods said. “I’ve been in the groups playing when it has happened, and I’ve been inside the ropes as a captain today witnessing it. As I said, all I ask for all the galleries is be excited but be respectful of the players, all 24 of us.” A few minutes later, seemingly after having a little time to digest Woods’ statement, Els delivered an unprompted stirring defence of the fans at Royal Melbourne. “I just want to say one thing about the crowd,” Els began. “I’ve played in many Presidents Cups. I’ve played in the U.S. many times. If you look back at New York and how these players were treated in New York, this crowd is pretty quiet. I mean, we just get treated the same wherever you go as an away game, there’s some heckling going on and we all know that, and you prepare for that, and that’s just the way it goes. We shut up and we get on with things. That’s what we did in New York. So it’s part of the game. And I’m with Tiger; I absolutely, I’m against heckling. I’m against crowds being disrespectful to the players, but it happens. We as professionals, we move on.” Els followed it by heaping praise on Woods’ ability over the years to deal with hecklers of his own, and pointed to him as an example of how a professional should act, but he had made his point. And from what we’ve heard, it was very well received by Els’ International players. Having been at Bethpage Black this year for the PGA Championship, I can confirm that these Australian fans are choir boys compared to a New York crowd. Everybody inside the ropes that week at Bethpage was fair (or unfair) game. I saw a player berated with, “Better luck next year!” exactly two seconds after missing a putt to make the cut on Friday. I saw players asking security to have fans removed. I saw an officer being heckled for wearing a bulletproof vest, “You really think you’re going to get shot on a golf course!?!” So Aussie fans, don’t worry, you guys are just fine. I SELECT TIGER WOODS One of the best parts of the Presidents Cup this week is watching the captains react off one another and select their pairings. The Ryder Cup definitely should follow suit and let the captains have more of a say in the who will go head-to-head, rather than force them to make their selections blind. It’s great watching the hulking Els put on his glasses and have his assistants huddle around him before each pick. The International captain stays so calm throughout the process that it’s easy to imagine the positive effect his demeanour has on his team. Never flustered, Els seems almost bored with the proceedings, as if they are keeping him away from his dinner. As for Woods, it was worth the trip Down Under just to listen to him refer to himself in the third person when he makes his picks. It took him about half-a-second on Saturday night to counter Els first singles pick of Abraham Ancer with, “Tiger Woods.” It’s like the world’s most important fantasy draft and I can’t get enough of it. RUN FOR YOUR GOLFING LIVES A golf event isn’t a place where you usually worry about things getting out of control. But three times this year I’ve found myself running to stay ahead of a mob of over-refreshed men in golf shirts. The first was at the PGA Championship at Bethpage when spectators broke through the ropes after Brooks Koepka hit his drive on the 18th. There is no mistaking the rumble of humanity coming up behind you. But on that day, there were plenty of New York cops on hand and they apparently had some experience with these situations, and order was quickly restored. The second was at the Open Championship at Royal Portrush. On Sunday afternoon after Shane Lowry hit his approach shot to the green, the Irish fans couldn’t wait any longer for the party to begin. They poured into the fairway and stormed toward the green. That day, it was an eight-inch diameter rope being pulled across the fairway to protect the green. It was like a scene from Game of Thrones and I broke into my first full sprint in 20 years to narrowly beat the closing gate. Saturday at Royal Melbourne was the third. Early in the week, the Australian crowd was entertaining and amusing, armed with songs and chants they had created in advance. But on Saturday afternoon the spirit of competition went to a level unseen in years, even decades at a Presidents Cup, and the heavily partisan crowd lifted it even further. As the final group of Ben An and Joaquin Niemann versus Matt Kuchar and Tony Finau came up the 18th fairway with their match hanging in the balance, a frenzied gallery stormed the ropes and headed toward the green. I had to deke out good Australian Samaritan Adam Scott who was trying to keep order and mistook me for a fan, before safely making it greenside. Who says golf isn’t a contact sport? The year in golf: Tiger Woods stages major encore in 2019 Tiger determined to compete in 2020 Olympics Tiger Woods shoots six-under-par 64 for clubhouse lead at Zozo	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line640
__label__wiki	0.542396	0.542396	Infosec research and app security with Aaron Hnatiw Aaron Hnatiw joined the show to talk about being a security researcher, teaching application security with Go, and a deep dive on how engineers and developers can get started with infosec. Plus: white hat, black hat, red team, blue team…Aaron sorts it all out for us. Aaron Hnatiw – Twitter, GitHub Aaron blessed us with a veritable slew of links to help Go developers level up their security game: Go Meta Linter Go AST Scanner SafeSQL Race-The-Web (Also check out the accompanying practice site) Go-fuzz (Check out their trophies section) Gryffin Webseclab Gobuster Input-field-finder OWASP Top 10: (Counterpoint - Vulnerabilities beyond the OWASP Top 10) SSRF as a Service: Mitigating a Design-Level Software Security Vulnerability Fencing off Go Applied - A Practical Look at a Go Research Paper Go 1.9 Release Notes GoRef (v. similar to trace) Erik - K8GUARD (The guardian angel for Kubernetes) Carlisia - Goman Brian - WSLtty Aaron - Visual Studio Code (with the Go plugin, of course) Welcome back everybody to another episode of GoTime. We had a little bit of a long break there (two weeks), but we are back. On the show today we have myself, Erik St. Martin, Brian Ketelsen is also here… And our special guest for today actually gets to blend two worlds for us, both Go and information security. Please welcome to the show Aaron Hnatiw. Aaron Hnatiw For anybody who may not be familiar with you, do you wanna give a brief background, maybe how you got into security and how you transitioned into Go, and a little bit of how that fits into your current role? Sure. Starting out in security - I never really got into the industry early on; it was a little bit later when I was in university. I originally went to school for criminology and I was on the path to becoming a federal police officer, but when I was at school I ended up meeting a guy who was into hacking, and he was actually pretty good at what he did. He was showing me some of the stuff he was doing, and I remember one day he pulled open his laptop - he was running Linux on it, probably some Ubuntu derivative - and I think he was hacking the Wi-Fi. He showed me this and it blew my mind. I said “You can do that with a computer?” From then on, I basically spent all my time just researching how we did that and how this stuff works, and I was spending all my time doing that, so I figured “Why not just switch into doing that permanently?”, instead of going on the path I was going on, and I ended up switching into computer security as the end goal. To get there, I knew that I had to do a lot of other things, cover a lot of bases to get to the point where you’re doing security, so I ended up going back to school for essentially systems administration and networking. Then I did another program for computer programming. I worked at a firewall company, and just kind of found my way through different roles, like system administrator, network engineer, developer, with the ultimate goal of getting into security. I ended up starting my own security consulting company after a couple years of doing those other jobs. That went really well; it was more of a red team side of things, and we can talk about what red team means later on. I was working with smaller companies. Then I ended up getting approached by the company that I work for now, and I had the opportunity with them to do security consulting as well. The big draw for me was that the people that worked there were all really smart and they knew a lot about security, so I knew I could learn a lot from them… And not only that, but they had a more international clientele, so I wanted the opportunity to work with big clients, to travel around the world and really see how security works at a bigger scale than what I was working on before. [00:03:41.09] So I got into consulting that way, and eventually found my way, after doing that for a few years – I really enjoyed it, but I found that I was getting to a point where I needed to get more coverage than depth. I was doing a lot of the same stuff over and over again, and it was interesting, but I wanted more. I wanted to be able to dive a little deeper. Now the job that I’m in is I’m a security researcher at Security Compass. The role basically involves me diving deep into security, into technologies and finding ways to break them, to better secure them, and then from there going around and sharing what I learned at conferences, at local user groups, and just sharing what I have. Part of that background that I didn’t really mention that ties into this is I was also a college professor in applications security for some time. Fun fact - I chose to use Go as the programming language for that, and a lot of the students really enjoyed it and it was an interesting experience. I can get into that more later, too. That’s kind of how I found my way to this point. As far as Go, what got me interested in Go was I have a friend who’s name is Thomas Shadwell; he’s a senior security engineer over at Twitch, and I think everyone knows Twitch is a pretty big proponent of Go… So he uses it every day in his job, and he loved using it; he’s really, really good at it, he’s a super smart dude, and he showed me what he was doing with it and it kind of helped guide me through some of the basics. Then from there I just latched on and I really enjoyed using it. Sort of building some open source tools, contributing to projects… I actually started using it as the scripting language almost for my pentesting work. Python is kind of the most common one now, but I started using Go on a regular basis… I just picked it up and started using it more and more, and to this day I really enjoy working with it, for a number of reasons. That’s kind of the long-winded answer to how I got to where I am today. I wanna pick up on one thread… You mentioned that you were using Go to teach, yeah? Two related questions - how did it go teaching Go? Did the students find it easier, did they complain, did they have praises for it? How did that go? And how do you think Go compares with Python for security related things? To answer the first question as far as how it went teaching it - teaching it was good. I was teaching developers; they were a group of third-year programmers, so they had some of the basics; I think they had done a lot of work in Python before, Java as well, so they had some of the basics and fundamentals down. It was just a matter of teaching them – the approach that I took was forcing them to learn a lot on their own, because as we know, when you’re in software development (and InfoSec especially) you have to teach yourself a lot. So now that they knew the basics, what I did was I pointed them towards a few resources, like the Go Tour, which is fantastic, and giving them a few books on Go. I think the one that I used in the course was The Go Programming Language by Donovan/Kernighan. Now I think both Brian and Erik have both put out a book as well… There’s so many out there, there’s a ton of resources. So I pointed them to the right resources and then guided them through using it in real applications, and I think that was the real key point - giving them projects where they had to actually build things in Go. Starting out easy, but being able to tie that into really useful, interesting things like building a fuzzer in Go, or writing a deliberately vulnerable web application where it was vulnerable to something like SQL injection. I gave them something interesting to work on… This is how I’ve always approached learning a language - finding a project to build on, and I think by doing that with them, it made it a little bit easier for them. I wouldn’t say it was super easy for them to pick up, but having those resources and then being able to answer questions to them was really valuable for that. The second question was how it compares to using something like Python for InfoSec… [00:08:07.03] I’d like to hear that from a more generic perspective, because a lot of InfoSec people use Python, and I think a lot of that is they can do things like HTTP servers and things like that significantly easier, and I think the standard library that Go provides makes a lot of that easier. So I’m really interested in both that learning example and just in the broader area of developing security tools… Because most of it is developing one-off things, right? A lot of people build scripts and stuff they reuse, but a lot of times it’s just one-off things, and I’m really curious myself too, to follow up on that - how you feel about using it to write those tools, in place of Python. There’s no doubt that Python right now in most cases is the easier choice and the better choice because there is a ton of libraries out there right now that support Python for security. But the thing is Go is getting to the place where there’s more support for that… A lot of the work that I’ve done to this point has been mostly with the standard library, and it’s entirely possible; it’s one of the things I love about Go - it’s possible to write full applications and even scripts just using the standard library. But as more and more libraries come online and packages become available and more people start contributing to Go from the security world, it’s going to get a lot more use and it’s gonna be a lot easier. Right now I would say it is more difficult for most things, because you have to really do it almost from scratch, you have to do it from a much lower level, but it’s not impossible, and I think once you get the basics and once you start to learn what’s available to you in the standard library, then it becomes easier. So you’re saying that part of the difficulty is having to write things from scratch, but it’s more difficult because people are not aware of the functionality in the standard library? Because it’s such a common thing for Go developers to want to always build things from scratch, and they find that there are a lot of benefits from that. Yeah, if you’re coming from a developer’s standpoint, I would say it’s a lot more fun to do that. You get to understand the language a lot more. That’s one of the things that I’ve benefitted from in writing Go - I’ve gotten to understand how it works at a much lower level, because I’m diving into the source code of the actual standard library more than I would have done in any other language. So I’m learning a lot more about Go in the process, but I think the problem comes in where a lot of people that are in security are not necessarily developers, they don’t have a developer background. A whole separate point is why developers would make good security engineers and good pentesters (I can cover that later), but the reason why I think it’s harder is because, like I said, a lot of people in InfoSec don’t necessarily come from a software development background. For me, I do, so I enjoy doing that, and I think that’s one of the things that’s made it easier for me. But I think a lot of people want – Erik’s right, there’s a lot of one-off scripts, and if you can do something quickly using another library, then it makes it a lot easier. That’s something that I think we can contribute more to, and what I’m trying to do is help build more of those things, but there’s only one of me and there’s a lot that needs to be done… So I would say that if you wanna contribute to InfoSec from the Go side of things, start looking at what Python libraries are available. Beautiful Soup was one that was made in Python (it was pretty big) for scraping web content. I know that recently there was an open source version of that in Go that I looked at. There’s a major package called Scapy that does low-level packet manipulation in Python, and there may be something out there (but I haven’t found it) that does similar things, but if you can build something like that in Go, to do easy low-level packet manipulation, then that would be – that’s probably one of the most heavily-used libraries in InfoSec, when we’re talking about developing. [00:12:19.20] To answer your question, it’s hard because of the lack of libraries, because not a lot of people come from a development background, but if you do come from a development background, it’s awesome and you’ll learn a lot doing it, and you just get better over time. It’s the same with anything. That makes total sense. Speaking of the background thing - one of the things that stands out when you were talking about how you got into this is just the breadth of your background. Do you feel like there’s room for somebody to just come in and start learning about InfoSec and security, or do you feel like having that really broad operations and security and programming background is required, or just helpful? There’s no doubt that it’s helpful. The way I look at it – I get asked all the time, “How do you learn to hack?”, it’s kind of the most common question that I get, and the answer I always give is hacking is really understanding a technology or understanding how something works so well that you can find ways to abuse it or ways around it that other people haven’t thought of. You don’t need a deep operations background to do that, you don’t need to have done a lot of development to do that; you just need to start somewhere that you really wanna understand more, and dive into that and start looking at it… The most fun part is looking at applications like you’re an attacker; look at an application or a technology and say “If I was going to attack this, what would I do?” The three things you wanna really look at is - it’s called “the CIA triad” - confidentiality, integrity and availability. So if you can look at breaking one of those three things in an application, if you understand it well enough, you’ll probably find a way to break it, regardless of your background. It’s just a matter of diving deep into something to understand it well enough that you can find a way around it. And I thinks sometimes it comes down to – you know, you fuzz things a little bit and then understanding why it broke. If you can reproduce it breaking, then you can usually exploit that, but you have to understand why it broke, so that you can use that to your benefit. It’s really for people who love deep diving into stuff, and “Why does this work?” and things like that. It’s a lot of fun, though. Yeah, and that’s why I think developers love it, or developers could be really good at it, because I think every developer I know who’s really, really into it, you have to keep learning, you have to dive deep into a technology all the time, and that’s really the same basis for InfoSec. I think it takes a creative mind, too. When you understand alll the pieces and how they fit – it’s almost like solving an engineering problem or troubleshooting some issues… If you understand how it’s supposed to work, you can figure out the points of attack and how you can sneak around, using it the way it’s supposed to. And for anybody who wants to just try their hand at it, there’s a bunch of sites for that stuff: vulnhub.com has vulnerable virtual machines that you can attack, and if you need a little help, there’s usually walkthroughs for those. I think OverTheWire has some from like a Linux systems’ perspective, where you try to attack permissions issues and things like that. I’m trying to think if you wanna get into reverse engineering, there’s a few sites for crack means and stuff, too. But I think everybody should try their hand at it, just to kind of understand the perspective an attacker comes from. Yeah, and you’re totally right when you say it’s just like an engineering problem, or an engineering challenge. The way I look at it a lot of the time is it’s a game, it’s a really fun, deep, technical puzzle that you have to solve, and there’s a ton of resources out there to practice it. That’s really how I started learning… [00:16:17.18] Way back in the day, people started learning by essentially doing criminal activities, where you’re hacking into things you’re not supposed to be hacking into, but you don’t have to do that anymore. The way I learned was I basically set up a virtual lab using a VM or a virtual box, and I would have three VMs going at once. I would run an old version of Ubuntu, I’d run maybe an old version of XP, and then – there’s also a few other virtual machines that you can use… There’s one called Metasploitable, there’s one called Mutillidae… There’s a couple other ones out there. There’s a ton of different deliberately vulnerable VMs you can go and attack, and that’s what I did. You learn how to do it through doing it. If you want more of a collaborative environment, there’s essentially games called “Capture the flags.” I can get into that more, but it’s essentially a hacking game, or a hacking competition, and they’re held all over the world; you can access them online. There’s a website called ctftime.org, and it’s essentially a location where you can find where all sorts of active “capture the flag” games are happening and you can sign up for them. That was another way that I learned a lot of about security, through those competitions. Those competitions are good because they teach you how to think like an attacker, they don’t necessarily teach you as many real – some of them teach you the real applicable attacks you can use, but a lot of them are about really tough challenges that force you to think the way an attacker would have to think. So there’s all different ways to actually learn on your own through those kind of services as well. I think it’s interesting though too, because there’s a lot of similar aspects when you think about learning engineering, where you go down these avenues, and maybe it doesn’t get you to what you’re trying to build, but you’ve learned a lot in the process. I think information security is the same way - when you’re trying to attack something, being able to identify that you’re chasing a red herring… It’s easy to lose a ton of time, because something looks like that’s the way, and it’s actually much easier, so being able to kind of step back and take a fresh look. Yeah, it’s so much fun… I kind of have a question too, because you border these two worlds, right? You’ve got an information security background and a development background, and I’m really interested on your perspective about how those two worlds meet. From my standpoint, the way I see it is there’s a lot of information security people talking to information security people, and there’s a lot of programmers taking to other programmers, and I don’t think there’s a lot of cross-pollination between those two worlds. It’s constantly the other side feeling like the other side is evil, they’re the enemy… In the security world they wear their programming abilities like a badge of honor. The first thing almost every security person says when they get up on stage is “I know my code is crap, but…” Yeah, so bridging the two worlds - I mean, do you have another two hours to talk about this? [laughter] It’s an issue that I think a lot of us have seen. I’m fortunate in that I have that background to be able to speak to developers and not be intimidated. I think part of it may be an intimidation thing, because both fields are really deeply technical, and really specialized. [00:19:58.07] Stepping back, part of my role and part of what I do is I go to conferences and I speak about security, but a lot of the conferences that I go to are security conferences and I’m not alone in doing this. A lot of us are going to the echo chamber that is the security world and saying “Hey, these things are broken, we need to fix it”, but not a lot of people are going to other platforms, so speaking to developers, going to a Linux conference, or going to another conference where you have people that aren’t necessarily in security and teaching them about security… I think that’s something that is lacking. If we were to do more of that, for example coming on here and being able to speak to a whole bunch of developers about security is an honor and it’s really I think a good opportunity to educate people about this, because the people that are implementing security aren’t necessarily the security people. People implementing security are people in operations and development, mostly. So those are the people that need to know a lot more of this information than necessarily those people who are almost siloed in the security team. So as far as how to approach that - it’s a tough challenge. What I found in work with a lot of clients has been the most effective thing I can do is have conversations with individual people, individual developers about security and just answer their questions and get them a little bit interested in one little area of security. Developers are a curious group, InfoSec people are a curious group. If you teach and you get them excited about one little thing, from there that spark ignites something more and they start to grow on their own and start to learn on their own, and I think that’s one of the most effective things that you can do in an organization… Not siloing security in the security team, but teaching a little bit at the time to different people and getting them interested. From there – developers are smart people; operations people are smart people. If they have that interest, they will find a way to learn what they need to learn, and way more than you can just teach them sitting down, spewing information about InfoSec. So if you just give them the basic information, I think that is a really good way to start, because they’ll lead themselves down the path to learn more. That’s the way I found is the best way to cross over. I kind of wanna argue a different point of view on that just a little bit. I agree that developers are really smart people, but I also think that developers are overloaded with all of the things that they already need to know, like how databases work and how to index things, and how networks work… Adding security is yet another thing that makes it hard to be successful as a good engineer. Have you thought about ways to make security easier for developers? Are there things that you thought of that we can do as a security community, as a developer community to make writing more secure software easier, other than the obvious things like garbage collection and safe memory access? What are the things that we can do as a group to make applications more secure? I keep looking at these news articles about all these compromised machines across the globe, and thinking that that’s a failure on our part as developers in whole, or as companies, as businesses even, to secure software. I think that that’s also a management problem too though, right? Because it’s not part of the lifecycle, and I think that engineering and security are two different hats. Even if you possess both skills, it’s very hard to look at the problem in both ways, right? I think there’s time developing features and then I think there’s time kind of really going over your code in a meticulous way, looking for potential attack factors. Before Aaron answers, I wanna throw one perspective… I’ve been sitting here and thinking about security and thinking “Oh my god, if I had to learn enough about security to make an application thoroughly secure, it is so much…” Like Brian was saying, we have to know so many different things. And the context switching, like Erik said - you have to look at things from a totally different perspective to think about security. [00:24:09.20] I was sitting here, thinking I am surely glad the place where I work now, they have a security team (like many companies do) and there is an audit process. So at some point in the software development, once it gets close to being ready for production, it goes through this audit. For me, it’s like “Yeah, great! Find out all the problems the software has, tell me and I’ll fix it.” But having to know a lot more about security than I do - it’s burdensome, I think. Security is a really broad world, and I’ll let Aaron speak to this as far as Red Teams and how involved that is, how many people there are with specialized skills when they do that… But I think when we talk about engineers, I think we’re talking about a surface level of security. The better majority of things that happen are usually the trivial things. It’s SQL injection, it’s unsanitized inputs; especially for PHP, it’s local and remote file inclusion vulnerabilities, and these are really easy things to catch. I think that most of us are aware of what they are, right? I think if you were asked a question in an interview, like “What is SQL injection?”, most engineers could describe what that is. But I think having the time and actually exploiting a cross-site scripting vulnerability or a SQL injection vulnerability starts to make you aware of how it’s used, and I think it makes it easier to catch. I think the point that you bring up about having the basics covered is really important. It is intimidating to think about all of the things you need to think about to be an expert in security, to know what different kind of vulnerabilities there are out there… And I’m gonna let you know a little secret - no matter how much you catch, there’s always gonna be something there. I don’t think it’s possible to have code that is completely secure, unless it’s maybe one line, developed in isolation, and has no callouts and no inputs. It’s almost impossible. I don’t think you can necessarily lose sleep over that. You have to look at it from the basics perspective, and then from there, I think what a good security person will do is understand – because the way to make something the most secure is to make it not functional at all. You have to have a tradeoff. A good security person will look at something and understand the business risks and understand really what it’s trying to do, and find the best way to put the most security measures in place. But some of the basics – I mean, I can go over some of the basics you should probably know, as a reference, to cover the basics. I think three main things stand out that you can easily do and keep in mind when you’re developing something, and then you’re covering a substantial amount of vulnerabilities. The first one is the patch. Just make sure your libraries are up to date as much as possible, especially if there’s a security vulnerability. So just be aware that the latest one is probably going to be the best for that. It’s not always possible to keep things up to date, I understand that. In an environment where you have so many dependencies, sometimes upgrading is not an option. From there, there’s other mitigations you can put in place - put something in front of it, or try to learn what the exact vulnerabilities are and find out the ways of mitigating it. So patching and keeping things up to date is probably one of the most important things and one of the easiest wins you can have. That applies to operating systems as well, and applications and libraries. The second thing - and probably the most important thing - is input validation. Understanding that the input that you’re getting from a user is what you think it is, and checking that on the server, rather than on the client. Because client-side control can be bypassed very easily. [00:28:01.24] In a browser, if you use a proxy like Burp or ZAP you can intercept the request, change the data after it’s left the browser, and then send it on and it completely by-passes any kind of client-side input validation. So checking that the information that you’re getting is what you think it is, and not some malformed input like a super long string to get a buffer overflow, or negative numbers when you don’t expect negative numbers, or special characters that you don’t expect… The best way to do that is to use a whitelist over a blacklist. The difference between a whitelist and a blacklist means – a whitelist is looking for a set number of things that are allowed, whereas a blacklist is looking for a set number of things that are not allowed. The number of inputs that can be allowed through is significantly less when you use a whitelist, so you are much more aware and you’re much more in control about the data that comes through, as opposed to with the blacklist… Where there may be a ton of things that you haven’t even thought of that could come through and could get around your validation. So input validation is probably the most important, because really any vulnerability, any exploit comes from user input. If you can control that, if you can find some way of mitigating that, you could probably reduce at least 50% of the vulnerabilities that you may have in place, which is huge. The third one is output encoding, and this is more of a preventative measure. When you’re outputting data onto a web application, for example, if you encode it with HTML encoding, for example, by doing that you will then reduce the likelihood of something like cross-site scripting, which is essentially when an attacker can get JavaScript to run in a client browser through input they provided. So if you can encode those characters, then it won’t look like JavaScript and it won’t execute like JavaScript, it will just look like a string of gibberish, almost. So doing patching, input validation and output encoding are three of the biggest things. There’s a few other things that I can just briefly mention, in case you’re taking notes and you want some more depth… One is hardcoded credentials in API keys. I think probably like four months ago it showed up on Hacker News that you could just do a search for password in Git pushes - you search that and you find thousands and thousands of Git commits that had a password in it, or had someone mentioning a password, or taking a password out of their application. So having those hardcoded credentials, especially in open source software, is trivial to find, and then someone could take that easily; they don’t have to have any skills, and they could just access your machine. So making sure you have a safe way of passing up strings and secure information and secrets to an application is important. Then two other key things is authentication and authorization, so making sure that people are doing the things that they should be doing, and they’re allowed to do that and they’re gated from doing things they shouldn’t be doing. Then the last key point is encrypting data arrested in transit; making sure that you’re using a TLS over the web, you’re implementing a security certificate. Letsencrypt makes it super easy to do that now. And then encrypting it at REST, so using proven crypto, like AES or Bcrypt for hashing - just some examples. I know that was a lot to take in, and I’m sure that a lot of people are probably gonna go back and review over that… But if you can just cover those things, just keep those in mind as you’re developing, I guarantee you’ll reduce at least 90% of the vulnerabilities that can be introduced in your application just from those things alone. How about my favorite one, which is “Don’t roll your own Crypto!” [laughter] Number one rule in crypto: Don’t roll your own Crypto! Yeah… Please. I was gonna say, what you just said, that list, it will make a great blog post. Absolutely. I might do that. Yeah, if you do it, make sure to share it with us, and we’ll share it with everybody. [00:32:00.26] These are kind of generic from any programming language. How about - since you’ve had some time in Go, how about Go? What are some attack factors that exist in Go, or what are some areas where Go saves you from yourself? So Go is pretty good at saving you from yourself, especially on the web side. The number one thing that I’ve seen that makes it a lot easier to defend against attacks - and I had my students go through using this as well - is HTML templating in the standard library. It provides automatic output encoding on your HTML pages; I’m pretty sure that most of the web frameworks out there now are using templating - it would be kind of a waste of time not to - but the default HTML templating does output encoding for you, which saves you a lot. And output encoding isn’t just for client-side, it’s also applied to when you’re passing data into a database, into like a SQL database in the back-end. One other thing that Go does for you, if you’re using a lot of the SQL packages that you can use – they have the concept (actually, they all should have this) of parameterized queries. What that means is when you’re passing data into your database connection, when you’re sending a SQL query, you’re not just simply passing data that a user provides and adding it directly into the SQL query, so concatenating it into a string… By doing that you’re essentially allowing an attacker to make whatever SQL query they wanna make on your database, and if you return that data into the application in some way, then they can see sensitive data, or they can even just drop all the tables. There’s a classic xkcd comic, it’s called Bobby Tables… If you look that up you’ll see a funny example of SQL injection. So that’s really good for that. You know, one of my favorite things learned in SQL injection was for years I understood SQL injection and getting content back on the page or inserting data, logging in using SQL injection, but the one that really blew my mind when we talk about the creativity of a hacker is blind SQL injection… I’ll let you describe how this works, but it’s just amazing that people can just use things like SLEEPs and enumerate data… Yeah, so blind SQL injection is like a whole other level of SQL injection attacks, and it’s more common nowadays because there’s even better SQL protections in place by default in most languages. So a blind SQL injection, like you referred to, is using ways – so when you don’t have immediate feedback as to what the results of your SQL injection was, you have to find other channels to determine what happened. A perfect example is people use timing attacks. So if you make a SQL request where you pass in data that results in a SQL injection, it will return back in a certain amount of time fairly consistently, on a normal request. But if you were to inject a SLEEP() command, and then suddenly the application takes ten seconds or however long you specify longer to actually return back to you, then you know that you’ve gotten a SQL injection and from there it’s a matter of mapping it out. There’s a really useful tool – I don’t know how many people actually do manual SQL injection anymore, because it’s so complex and there’s so many good defenses in place now, but there’s a tool called SQLmap that does this automatically for you. It’s got a lot of really good options, but it essentially enumerates what kind of injection vectors there are and tell you how vulnerable it was, what kind of strings will result in an injection attack, things like that. It automates a lot of it for you, and most of the people that I know that do SQL injection will usually start with something more manual, like doing a SLEEP() command, for example, and then once they find that there’s something there, then they’ll throw a SQL map at it and get some more detailed output… Because there’s just so much to know when it comes to SQL injection. I’m sure there are a few experts out there, but it’s a lot. [00:36:12.12] There’s also a newer tool called NoSQLmap that is for like MongoDB and things like that, too. To kind of go more in-depth about the blind SQL attack, an example of that would be – most of the time when you see a SQL injection you’ll see where people try to login, with a username, and they’ll put their parenthesis and stuff, but basically you could do where username like%; sleep(). Then basically you’ll go through and you’re like “Oh, C slept for five seconds. I know it starts with C. Let me move to the next character.” The fact that somebody had that creativity blew my mind. It’s really crazy. One book I’d recommend for anyone that’s interested in web application security - I would say this is probably the standard book you can reference… You don’t even need to read it from cover to cover, just using it as a reference is important; it’s called The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook. It’s really good and it covers a lot of these topics in depth that you need to know for web-specific security. So if I can make a recommendation, I’d make that one. I don’t think I have that one. It’s really good. I think it’s at the second edition now. Yeah, most of those books are in like their second, third, fourth edition. It’s like the same problems keep repeating themselves. Yeah. It’s just that it evolves so much and so quickly over time… That’s one of the things I love about it - it’s a constant game of learning and cat and mouse, but because of that it’s hard to have a standard paper book as a medium nowadays, because it’s so fast. Before we kind of close out on this, there’s a couple of things I’m interested in… Do you think that the nomenclature between the sides helps create that kind of polarization? You know, “red team vs. blue team”, it kind of creates that tension between the sides? Do you think there’s a way that we can change that? Because it really does feel like a game, right? Like, you versus them, and that’s not really how I think we’re going to evolve. I think that becoming team members is more important. That’s a really good point. It’s funny you bring that up - that’s the thing I’m researching most right now. There’s a term that covers this movement towards integration of developers, operations and security, and it sounds very buzzwordy, but… It’s the dumbest term ever. [laughter] I know, I don’t necessarily agree with the term; saying it, I feel… Anyways, it’s called DevSecOps. The way I look at it, it’s just an integration between those three groups. The idea is to have developers, operations and security work together in a lot more ways. From what I’ve learned when I’m working with clients with this is the top two ways to do that is through automation and through education, as well. There’s more to it, but basically, by automating things you can make it easier for developers to not have to worry about security as much, or to fix things more easily, and that’s kind of where the DevOps movement comes in - automating a lot of the common tasks that you’re gonna be doing. There’s no way that you can automate everything; I really don’t believe that at least in the next 5-10 years everything will be automated away in security, because things are changing so much and there’s so much room for creativity… But there are certain common things that you can automate, even just doing regular expressions, looking for common mistakes or looking for SQL strings that have a plus character in it for concatenation. Simple things like that make it easier to move quickly and to not have to worry about security as much. [00:39:55.24] And then where the education standpoint comes in is – there’s a few approaches to this. One is like a Security Champions, so to have an individual in each team represent security. There’s also Center Of Excellence, where you have one security group where they then disseminate information through the organization. Adobe has a belt program… There’s all different ways that people go about doing it, but the idea is essentially that you are sharing information about security actively with your developers and operations team, so that they are able to at least understand it a little bit more. Not necessarily as thoroughly as like a security expert will, but at least they have the basic understanding. That’s where things like the OWASP Top 10 comes in handy, which is the top 10 most common security vulnerabilities on the web. It’s a little older, but it’s the SANS and CWE Top 25 most dangerous software errors. There’s a few lists like that help, but coming back to DevSecOps (the buzzwordy term), it’s the idea of joining all three together, and doing it as very unique to an organization. Essentially, it really revolves around automation and education. So there’s one thing that I wanna add in terms of automated help… HP Labs released an app called Gas that’s included in gometalinter, and it’s truly my favorite in terms of automation. Gas lets you check your code in an automated fashion against several types of vulnerabilities and known insecure things, and you can tweak which tests it runs. I highly recommend it if you’re gonna have an application in production that you run Gas in your CI, in your tests suite before you put it into production. I’ve found that it’s got some pretty decent defaults in terms of security, and it catches things like using string concatenation in your SQL queries, and things like that. I like Gas a lot. That came from HP Labs originally, but I think they’ve put it under its own domain. It’s on GitHub now at github.com/goASTScanner/gas. We need a link for that, Brian… Please. And Aaron, so if I’m an engineer, and we only have so much to keep up with, but if I do want to learn at least to make sure that I’m doing the basics, and I wanna do a little bit at a time, like I don’t wanna go do a project, what recommendations would you have? I think one of the obvious answers to me right now is – there’s actually a product that Security Campus made just to solve that problem. I don’t know if there’s anything else out there right now like that, but what it is is it’s called SD Elements. Think about it as a software security requirements checker. So you give it a list of what you’re doing - it’s a web application written in this language, let’s say Java, and it has these kinds of users. You give it those requirements, and it basically gives you a checklist of things that you need to know as a developer to write things securely. There’s also things like – the OWASP top 10 is probably another really good resource, because it’s giving you just 10 things that you should keep in mind when you’re writing web applications. There’s more to the OWASP, there’s more than just the OWASP top 10, but it’s a really good start, and if you had those fundamentals, then it will cause a huge improvement in your security. So I would recommend those two things just to start. I think a lot of that stuff is almost from a blue team perspective. I think what Carlisia might have been hinting at, if you wanna kind of be more aware of the red team angle and maybe educate yourself to attack these vectors, but had minimal time to invest in that training… Is there kind of like any recommendations for places to start? [00:43:59.27] I also wanted to point out that there is a Go specific OWASP book at GitHub.com/checkmarx/go-scp. I have not read this yet, but I have heard of several people who have and found it to be a pretty decent guide as to following OWASP standards from a Go app. So if you do read it, let us know what you think about it. Yeah, I read through the first part of that, it’s actually pretty well done. It did cover a lot of good, specific Go OWASP security issues that you need to be aware of. And there’s a new book that’s being worked on called Black Hat Go. Oh yeah, I saw that. I bought it, actually. I just didn’t wanna miss it. Yeah, I’ve already pre-ordered mine. Yeah, I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget about it. I didn’t know that they were selling it. I’ve reviewed a couple of chapters for them, but I didn’t realize it was for sale. It’s in pre-order, they don’t have anything to give yet. I’m also doing a technical review of that as well. So the question that Carlisia had - if I’m getting it right - was “What’s something that you can do fairly quickly to understand security a little bit better so you can develop a lot more securely?”, is that correct? Let’s kind of frame it as you’re an engineer and you’re trying to become more red team, but you don’t have a lot of time to invest in that… Like, book recommendations or something. Alright, I’m gonna be annoying. Wait, I’m gonna be annoying. Go ahead. Let’s define red hat… Red team. Or team… Oh yeah, I think we said we would come to what those were, but I don’t think we ever defined… Yeah, this is a problem in InfoSec, because we use terms all the time that we understand, we use them in everyday conversation all the time, we throw out terms like red team, blue team, even purple team, assuming that people know what it means, and it’s the same in any deeply technical field; that happens all the time. So the idea of red team, when you’re talking about – so there’s two different ways that red team is used. One is the term of the offensive side of security - red team. Blue team is the defensive side of security. It comes from the military term where they would do simulations or they would do practice attacks, and the red team would be the attackers and the blue team would be the defenders. There’s also a practice called red teaming - and this is I think what Erik referred to earlier… The idea of red teaming is doing a full simulated attack on an organization, on an environment, with the particular goal of, for example, getting to database admin, or getting HR records. The idea is you’re essentially emulating an attacker with no holds barred, and doing everything that an attacker would. I’ve done a number of these assessments myself, and what it essentially involves is let’s say you have an organization that you’re choosing to attack, and you use means that are technical, social engineering as well comes into play, so you’re tricking people into doing things for you, or giving you information… There’s also a physical side of things; you will physically break into buildings or pick locks, things like that, and all of it really is around emulating a real attacker, someone who wouldn’t be held back by needing to come in between 9 to 5. So that’s another way that people use red teaming, in that specific type of attack. And I think to feel better about the breadth of security knowledge, those red teams are usually composed of multiple people - there’s a web guy, there’s a Wi-Fi guy… Usually they’ll reverse-engineer depending on what’s being attacked. So no one person kind of encompasses all of that knowledge. There’s just too many attack factors to be familiar with. [00:48:07.25] So what is the difference between red hat and red team, and blue hat and blue team, black hat, black team? I don’t know if there is a black team. What you’re probably thinking of is white hat/black hat. And grey hat… Grey hat, yes… If we wanna talk about grey hat, if that’s even a thing… [laughs] The difference is the idea of – it takes the term from those old cowboy movies, where usually the good guy would be wearing a white cowboy hat, and the bad guy would be wearing a black cowboy hat. So usually when you’re looking at a hacker, a malicious attacker would be a black hat, whereas someone who’s doing security for the good guys, protecting an organization, is usually a white hat. There’s the term grey hat, which people can argue as a thing, but I think it’s just… You know, the idea is to do things that maybe - it’s almost like chaotic neutral - could be illegal or could be attacks, but you’re doing it for good reasons. It’s that middle zone where you’re not really sure whether they’re the good guy or the bad guy. I guess a good example of that would be you possess hacking skills and you’re constantly looking for vulnerabilities in sites that you don’t have permission to do so, but you’re reporting to them. So you’re hacking in the sense that that’s not legal, you don’t have permission to do that, but you kind of are trying to do it for your own righteous cause. I don’t know whether hacktivism falls into grey hat. I think that’s too far on the black side. Yeah, so what you’re referring to is now – I think it’s evolved over time. I think that was what it was originally, how people referred to it. Now most people that do that call themselves freelance security researchers; what’s more common is they’re involved in bug bounty programs. It’s transitioned to a model where – a bug bounty program is a way for an organization to open up an application and set specific guidelines around the ways that can be attacked, but they open it up for attack to anyone, as long as they follow the rules of like “This thing can’t be touched.” As long as you’re not doing denial of service attacks, everything’s open. If an organization opens up their application or their system for doing that, then anytime someone submits a bug to them, a security vulnerability, they will be then rewarded with swag or with real money. There’s a few big players in that space - there’s HackerOne… Sidenote - HackerOne actually has a couple of really good resources if you wanna learn more about security and bug bounties. It’s a really good way to keep up. They have something called the Zero Daily newsletter, which as it sounds, it’s a daily newsletter for security, which is showing just some of the latest bug bounty reports. Then there’s also HackerOne and Cobalt.io is another one. Those are kind of the main players in the bug bounty space. It’s a way that people practice it in a legal way, but people still do it in that grey area where they’re finding problems and they’re submitting issues. The problem is an organization technically could issue a legal action, and it has happened many times; that’s where it becomes problematic, and there’s a whole other debate around whether that should happen or not, but I think that’s kind of what you were referring to, Erik - people doing research and finding these things and submitting them, and that still does happen. Any questions before we move on to our projects and news? I think it’s time. Carlisia, any follow-up questions? No, just… If Aaron could drop a link eventually for that tool he mentioned, the developers [unintelligible 00:51:54.19] do a check of all the things they’re doing and get a recommendation. Sure. Yeah, I’ll do that. [00:52:04.19] No problem. And I should note that if anyone has any questions, there’s so much that can be covered and I could probably be on here for another three hours and talk about security to help discuss what the issues are… But I’m open if anyone wants to reach out to me at any point in time. I’m sure we’ll post my Twitter in the show notes, but I’m always open to talk and I wanna help people with this. There’s a lot to know, and I feel like sharing what I know is a way to help improve that, so don’t be shy to reach out. And are you going to be at GopherCon? I so badly wanted to, but I have to be at a wedding that day that my wife’s actually involved in the wedding, so I couldn’t get out of that one. Oh, that’s a bummer… That’s a pretty poor excuse… I tried… [laughter] I’m not buying that. Just because your wife has to be at the wedding doesn’t mean you need to miss the greatest conference on Earth… The only people we forgive for missing the conference is people who are actually getting married that day. Or giving birth, that’s also a good one. Yeah, giving birth as well. So is your wife in the bridal party? Yeah, she is. See, so if they have the bridal party table, you’re not gonna stay there anyway… [laughter] That’s a good point, maybe I’ll use that on her. [laughter] “You’re gonna be taking pictures, and you know…” “But honey, you won’t even know I’m not there…” That’s right, “This is like the Olympics for Go; how can you let me miss this for just sitting at some table with all of the other spouses?” [laughter] If it’s support you need, there’s more where that came from, so just get in touch with Erik or Brian. Yeah, just let us know, we’re good at this; we’ve got years of experience. “Honey, it’s 2017. There’s Facetime.” [laughter] “We gave them a really nice gift from the registry…” [laughter] Alright, we better move on to news before we get ourselves all divorced. [laughter] I was gonna make a comment, but never mind. It’s too, late, right? [laughter] Now, I’m interested… What was that comment going to be? [unintelligible 00:54:17.10] Go news. Right, so I saw an interesting article - I think it was earlier this week - called Fencing Off Go and it was based off of like a whitepaper. It’s really interesting - I won’t go into too much detail there; I’ll put it in the show notes, but it’s a lot of cool stuff in trying to find deadlocks and risk conditions in your Go programs. I’ll drop that in the Slack channel now for anybody who’s following along live… Anybody else have anything cool they’ve found this week? Yes. First of all, Go 1.9 beta 2 was released, and that’s big… Very, very big. So speaking of 1.9, what do we have coming in that? Aliases? Parallel compilation - that was something that’s really cool. Parallel compilation, that’s a big one. I’m interested to see – has anybody done any comparisons on compile time, now that parallel compilation is in there? No, I’m actually cloning a fresh copy of Kubernetes this afternoon, so I can do a test with 1.8 and 1.9 just to see… Kubernetes is about the biggest Go app I can think of to download and compile, with each version. Isn’t there support for ARM 64-bit as well on this one? I think it was PPC64… I think it’s ARM7. We’ve always had ARM– well, not always, but we recently already had ARM 64… I think it’s ARM7 that is new. But I could be wrong. I’ll have to google it again later. [00:56:08.13] We’ll have to go look at the release notes. Yeah, we’ll link to the 1.9 release notes in the show notes. I’m trying to think of anything else that was really big there… I think they implemented a concurrent map in the standard library. Yeah, concurrent maps, and… Oh, and the big thing that this enables though is Go 1.8 on App Engine. So finally, Go 1.8 is in beta on App Engine; if anybody’s got Go apps and have been frustrated by being stuck at Go 1.6.2 forever, now Go 1.8 is in App Engine, because we have type aliases. That’s a big deal. Alright, what else do we have? I found a package that I liked… I haven’t used it, but it looked interesting. It’s called GoRef, and it’s at gitHub.com/mreithub/goref, and it reminds me of the package that I kind of did a proof of concept on, which was my Trace package, and that this is an invocation tracker; it tracks the execution times of your functions, it finds bottlenecks in your code, making sure all your goroutines exit properly, and it tracks all the calls to your HTTP endpoints. It was implemented very similarly to the way I did; the only difference in this one versus mine is that I built mine with context support. I wanted to go dig into this and see what kind of things I could learn to improve mine, because it looks pretty good. I’ll drop the link to that in the Slack. I think other than that, we have a lot of conference stuff going on right now. GopherCon is in two weeks… if you’re slacking, buy your ticket. GothamGo I think just started doing ticket sales, one of the other GopherCons just started doing ticket sales, too. DotGo has announced speakers, and Brian is one of them… And same for Golang UK - Golang UK is announcing speakers, and I’m one of those, too. It’s that time of the year, conference season. Get ready for GopherCon Brazil. The CFP is not open yet, but it’s gonna happen in November; they’re selling tickets… Can you guys hear that lightning? We’d better wrap this show up before we lose electricity again… [laughter] So are we ready for #FreeSoftwareFriday? I wanna mention a couple things… One, the #GopherConOrBust hashtag on Twitter has been very sad. It has. The years before it was awesome; two weeks to go for the conference it was buzzing. It’s very sad now, so people, start using it. I think last year it was because so many people started commuting there. You know, they were driving from Canada, and Brian drove up from Florida… That is true. There was that big CoreOS bus. They’re not doing that? That was two years ago… Yeah, so for your commute to GopherCon, all your travels and preparations for GopherCon, #GopherConOrBust is kind of fun. And mine will start a week from Monday. That’s when I travel out there. Really? Is it that soon? It is that soon. So by the time this is released, it will be like only a couple days until we hop on a plane. Wow, that thunder is really going, huh? [00:59:46.06] Yeah, we’re in trouble. So I promised that I would announce my big news today, but I have to kind of couch that a little bit. I have accepted an offer at an exciting company, but they’ve asked me not to announce it until roughly next week, because they’re getting a full-page ad for the New York Times together, and Washington Post and CNN. So I won’t announce where I’m going, but I do have a very exciting new job. I could not be happier about joining the team. I can’t tell you where it is yet. And that full-page ad thing was a joke, sorry. I heard no laughing… [laughter] But yeah, that was a joke. So you get to hang another week to find out where I’m going… Amazon whole foods. Putting your votes in. We need a Twitter poll. [laughter] Alright, so #FreeSoftwareFriday. For anybody who’s new to the show, every Friday – well, we release these on Thursdays, but it started as a Free Software Friday, so we’re keeping it that way. We just try to give a shoutout to a project or a maintainer, not necessarily Go-specific, but just to show the love… They don’t always the good feedback, so let’s praise everybody. There used to be a #FreeSoftwareFriday on Twitter, I don’t know whether people are still using it, but definitely do that, too. I see some, but I haven’t been leading the way either, so… Because we do it on the show; it’s kind of overkill. Alright, so who – I’ll start, if you want. I’ve got a package that I’ve found over the last two weeks that I absolutely love. I think it’s been pretty obvious that I’ve moved over to Windows, I’ve given up my Mac completely - I don’t have any Macs left; I do have a single Linux machine left in my house, but it’s not turned on anymore, so I’m pretty much 100% Windows at this point… And I’ve been using Windows Subsystem for Linux and the command prompt in Windows is getting significantly better, but it’s still nothing like a really good Linux terminal prompt. So I’ve found an app called WSLtty. It basically a bridge between Mintty - which is the nicest Windows command terminal thing - and WSL. It allows you to have what I would expect to be a decent Linux terminal prompt, but in Windows, and pointed at the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It has made me significantly happier working on the command line… So thank you to the WSLtty team. That’s at gitHub.com/mintty/wsltty. Alright, I’ll go next - I’ve found this actually on the Go newsletter, it’s called Goman. It’s a tool to produce man pages based on the readme that you have on your repo, and especially for open source projects I think it’s really cool. If you go to their repo readme page, they list other tools that are related… There is one called GomanGo – gosh, I have to go there and see… But it will let you produce a man page based on comments that you put on your Go code itself. I haven’t used it, but it looks really neat, and I do wanna use it. Now, if I could just get a tool to generate Bash and Zsh completions for me automagically. I suppose you could do that if you use something like… Ruby? Cobra? [laughter] So there’s a lot of Go command line app tools, so you could do some static analysis… [laughs] That was my dynamic language troll of the week… I’ll step away from the microphone now. [laughter] How about you, Aaron, did you have anybody you wanna give a shoutout to this week? [01:03:55.12] Yeah, I’m gonna give a shoutout to Visual Studio Code, and specifically the Go plugin, because that is like – I use it for everything related to Go: everything I write, everything I review, all done in there and it’s really easy. I know you guys are heavy Vim users, and I’ve yet to make the jump, the leap over to it full-time, but for now it’s Visual Studio Code. Code is awesome. Did we release our episode with Ramya? We did, right? Yeah, I haven’t used VS Code, but I think people should use whatever they’re comfortable in, whatever they’re productive in. You don’t have to kind of follow suit… If I hadn’t been a Vim user for – I don’t even know now; it’ll probably make me feel old thinking about it… I think VS Code looks really good. You know, I have absolutely no problem jumping editors constantly. I use Visual Studio Code, I use Gogland and I use Vim. The only thing that I do is I consistently use the Vim plugins for the editor and the IDE when I’m in Gogland and Visual Studio Code, but they’re both great editors. Visual Studio Code is just fast and it’s light and it’s easy to open, Gogland has all kinds of awesome, powerful features, and Vim is Vim. I have no problem jumping between them, and I don’t feel the need to apologize. Yeah. My policy is every two years I check out a new editor. A big thing with me is I have no problem being the user of a couple editors simultaneously; I’ll use one for most things, but I’ll use another one for things that that particular editor is really good at. There is no problem with that either. It’s not a religion. I might make that my mission after GopherCon - do a two-week or a month stint with VS Code. I highly recommend it, especially if you use the Vim plugin, which is really good for both Gogland and VS Code. You won’t be sad about your muscle memory, but you’ll get some really pretty tools. The code lenses in Visual Studio Code are gorgeous. I love those. The debugging is pretty useful, as well. It’s got Delve built-in. Yeah, debugging is for wimps. [laughter] fmt.Println(). [laughter] Actually, just println(); I said fmt.Println, but if you use just println() in your debugging, then you don’t have to remove an import when you’re done debugging… So don’t use fmt.Println(), just use println(), with a lower-case “p”, it’s a built-in. [laughter] It’s your tip of the week. Stop trolling, Brian. I’m not trolling. [laughter] A little bit… Much. [01:06:49.17] My #FreeSoftwareFriday for this week is actually something that Target put out K8GUARD. It’s really interesting, and for anybody who listens to the show, it’s programming Kubernetes and InfoSec for me. So this is a Kubernetes thing, and it’s basically something you install on your cluster and it works really great for clusters that have a lot of stuff, especially multitenancy, where there’s multiple teams deploying multiple apps, and it kind of monitors the cluster for things that are running that have specific violations, on the size of the image, whether they’re setting UID or GID, whether the containers are running privileged, whether you’re mounting host volumes, whether there is only single replicas… Just kind of like a variety of filters on looking at things that are running in the cluster and kind of producing notifications about those. So it might work really well for an operations team that’s supporting multiple development teams, pods and stuff… And I will drop a link to that in the channel, and it will also be in the show notes. Drop the mic. Alright, any other shoutouts before we close this thing out? Alright, I will take that as a no. So a big thank you for everybody for being on the show, especially Aaron - thank you for coming on. You’re welcome, thanks for having me. This has been really great, and as Aaron said, he’s available for anybody who has questions and wants to learn more about security and writing better code. We’ll drop all of his contact details - home address, phone number… His home address, his social security number… [laughter] Yeah! We get all of that before we put people on the show. [laughter] It keeps them in line. I forgot to send you the CVV code, I’ll get that to you after. [laughter] So huge thank you to all of the listeners right now… You can find us on Twitter, GoTime.fm online, and if you wanna be on the show, have suggestions for guests or questions, hit us up at ping. With that, we’ll see you next week. Bye, everybody! Bye, this was fun! Bye, everyone!	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line641
__label__wiki	0.798448	0.798448	Find everything you need to illustrate your stories about Google Cloud. Questions? Reach out to us at press@google.com. What's new? View the latest press releases. Google Cloud is widely recognized as a global leader in delivering a secure, open, intelligent, and transformative enterprise cloud platform. Our technology is built on Google’s private network and is the product of nearly 20 years of innovation in security, network architecture, collaboration, artificial intelligence, and open source software. We offer a simply engineered set of tools and unparalleled technology across Google Cloud Platform and G Suite that help bring people, insights, and ideas together. Customers across more than 150 countries trust Google Cloud to modernize their computing environment for today’s digital world. Download photos and read bios of our leadership team. Read Bio Downloadget_app Urs Hölzle Senior Vice President, Robert Enslin President, Global Customer Operations John Jester Vice President, Customer Experience Tariq Shaukat President, Industry Product and Solutions Alison Wagonfeld Andrew W. Moore Head of Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence Amit Zavery Carolee Gearhart Vice President, Worldwide Channel Sales Kevin Ichhpurani Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem and Business Development Google Cloud Logos Download Google Cloud product logos, suitable for print or web. Downloadget_app Choose from a selection of high-quality images of Google Cloud products. Browse Photosarrow_forward B-Roll Video Incorporate behind-the-scenes videos of Google Cloud in action. See More Cloud Videosarrow_forward Google Cloud Product Videos (B-roll) Google Cloud Data Center (B-roll) Download resources for our latest Cloud-related events. Watch More Event Videosarrow_forward See All Photosarrow_forward see all eventsarrow_forward Google Cloud Next '19 Next '19 was a global exhibition of inspiration, innovation, and education connecting big thinkers and doers. Learn how industries adapt, innovate, and grow with cloud. Thomas joined Google in November 2018 as the CEO of Google Cloud. Prior to Google, Thomas spent 22 years at Oracle, where most recently he was President of Product Development. Before that, Thomas worked at McKinsey as a business analyst and engagement manager. His nearly 30 years of experience have given him a deep knowledge of engineering, enterprise relationships, and leadership of large organizations. Thomas' degrees include, an MBA in Administration and Management from Stanford University as an Arjay Miller Scholar and a BSEE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. Thomas serves as a member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council and Princeton University School of Engineering Advisory Council. Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle oversees the design and operation of the servers, networks, and data centers that power Google’s services, as well as the development of the software infrastructure used by Google’s applications. Lately, he’s spending his time on Google Cloud Platform, making the infrastructure work his team pioneered for Google available to developers around the world. Urs joined Google as its first vice president of engineering after having been an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, he contributed to the efficient implementation of virtual machines for programming languages such as Java. With a good search engine, you can find out much more about him. Robert joined Google Cloud in April 2019. Prior to Google, Robert spent 27 years at SAP in leadership roles across sales and operations, most recently as President, Cloud Business Group and Executive Board Member. He developed and managed SAP’s entire cloud product portfolio, led the field revenue and enablement efforts across multiple geographies, and oversaw core functions including professional services, ecosystem, channel, and solutions. Before joining SAP, Robert spent 11 years in various roles in the IT industry. An avid supporter of youth advancement and development, he serves as the honorary global Chairman of the Els for Autism Golf Challenge. Robert currently sits on the Board of Directors of Discovery Limited in South Africa and Docker in San Francisco, California. John leads the Customer Experience organization for Google Cloud responsible for developing and executing on the strategy that ensures customers adopt and realize business value from Google Cloud. This includes leading Professional Services, Training and Enablement, and Customer Support. Prior to Google, John spent 20 years at Microsoft in numerous roles, including corporate vice president of Worldwide Customer Success, where he established a new organization to drive adoption of Microsoft's cloud services, vice president Worldwide Specialist Sales, where he led enterprise sales strategy across the full suite of enterprise cloud services, and general manager of Global Accounts with responsibility for Microsoft's top 100 enterprise customers. John attended George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, where he earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's in business administration. He lives in the Seattle area with his wife Kelly and their two daughters. In his spare time, John enjoys golfing, cycling, and sports car racing. Tariq Shaukat is responsible for driving step-change growth for Google Cloud through strategic partnerships and customers, industry platforms and solutions, and customer operations, and was previously President, Customers at Google Cloud. Before joining Google, Tariq was the chief commercial officer of Caesars Entertainment, overseeing sales, marketing, information technology, analytics, e-commerce, distribution, and product. Tariq joined Caesars as chief marketing officer in 2012 from McKinsey & Company, where he was a partner working globally with clients in financial services, travel, and media/entertainment. Before joining McKinsey, Tariq held a variety of roles in the technology industry. Alison Wagonfeld leads marketing for Google Cloud, covering the Google Cloud Platform, G Suite, Google Maps, and Google for Education businesses. Previously, she was an operating partner at Emergence Capital, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on enterprise cloud companies. Prior to that, Alison was Executive Director of the Harvard Business School California Research Center, where she worked with faculty to build the entrepreneurship curriculum and develop the Harvard Innovation Lab. Before her role at HBS, Alison led marketing and business development at Greenlight, a venture-backed startup. She also worked at Intuit, where she co-founded the Quicken Loans business. Earlier in her career, Alison worked as a product manager at Microsoft and as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. The San Francisco Business Journal named Alison one of the “Most Influential Women in the Bay Area.” Andrew W. Moore, PhD, is a distinguished computer scientist with expertise in machine learning and robotics. He became the Head of Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence in January 2019. Moore previously worked at Google from 2006 to 2014 and was the founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh engineering office in 2006. He then spent a four-year hiatus at Carnegie Mellon University as the dean of the School of Computer Science. Andrew’s research interests encompass the field of “big data” — applying statistical methods and mathematical formulas to massive quantities of information, ranging from web searches to astronomy to medical records, in order to identify patterns and extract meaning from that information. His past research has included improving the ability of robots and other automated systems to sense the world around them and respond appropriately. Andrew lives in Pittsburgh and makes frequent trips to the Google Cloud headquarters in California. Amit Zavery is a result-oriented transformational leader with deep technical knowledge and proven business acumen. He is the head of platform for Google Cloud. Previously he was executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Cloud Platform and Middleware products. He led Oracle's product vision, design, development, and go-to-market strategy for cloud platform, middleware, and analytics portfolio and oversaw a global team of more than 4,500 engineers. Amit has a proven track record of designing and delivering market-leading products and building organizations by recruiting and retaining world-class talent. He was instrumental in building Oracle's Fusion Middleware product portfolio before leading Oracle's transformation into a cloud platform provider by starting and building Oracle Public Cloud and operating multiple cloud-native services. Amit is a regular keynote speaker at industry events and considered a thought leader in enterprise software by customers, press, and analysts. He also has extensive experience in identifying, acquiring, and integrating numerous private and public companies. Carolee is the Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales at Google Cloud. Reporting to the President of Google Cloud, Carolee is responsible for the tens of thousands of partners who resell and serve Google Cloud's business — from small system integrators and online partners to the world's largest consulting, telco, and manager services providers. In this role, Carolee ensures that the sales team has a selection of highly skilled partners for every workload, vertical and segment all throughout the world; that Google Cloud delivers a world-class partner experience for our partners; and that our partners deliver a superlative experience to our shared Google Cloud customers. Carolee has more than 20 years of industry, international sales and executive management experience with an accomplished track record for leading global channels, devising and executing sales strategies, and delivering extensive growth. Carolee has served as the Chief Ecosystem & Channels Officer for GE Digital, where she was responsible for driving the vision, strategy and execution for all of GE Digital's partner relationships and channels to market globally. Prior to GE Digital, she served as the Senior Vice President of Customer Success & Global Channels at Adaptive Insights, a cloud corporate performance management company. Carolee was responsible for the company's world-wide sales strategy, all customer-facing initiatives, professional services, global customer support and training — as well as global sales and business development. Prior to this, Carolee spent over six years at SAP in diverse roles, primarily as the Global Vice President of Ecosystem and Channels Strategic Partner Organization & OEM. Earlier in her career, she held a series of international executive sales, operational and consulting roles with PeopleSoft and Deloitte. Kevin Ichhpurani is Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem and Business Development at Google Cloud. Kevin brings nearly 25 years of experience in the technology industry leading global strategy, platform ecosystem transformation, venture capital and mergers and acquisitions. Most recently, Kevin served as Executive Vice President and Corporate Officer of GE. Prior to GE Digital Kevin was a Senior Partner, Global Markets at Ernst and Young and before Ernst and Young Kevin served at SAP as Executive Vice President, Head of Business Development and Global Ecosystem. Kevin holds an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line645
__label__wiki	0.64614	0.64614	Flint Soap Box Derby Race Restored A Flint Tradition cchurch/TSM Soap Box Derby racing returned to Flint last weekend for the first time in 25 years. Soap Box Derby racing had been a long standing Flint tradition, but the races stopped about 25 year ago. Kevin Cronin is the executive director of the revitalized 'Flint Soap Box Derby Race' and helped to bring the race back to Flint. He talked to Mlive at the event about why the race is so important for Flint. This is a great program for the city. It’s about the city at the end of the day, and about this community. What we’re seeing so far is that this is a really powerful community where people really rally together, and this will be a really good thing going forward. Not only do we believe these efforts will build critical skills, but we also know they’ll build friendships and a sense of community that will last The weather could not have been better for the races at Kettering Saturday. My family and I watched as each racer checked over their car, and got some last minute advice. The kids were serious about winning, but no matter what, at the end of the race they ran directly over to each other to talk. Then ran back up the hill hoping for a chance to do it all again. When all the racing was done, a racer from Grand Blanc walked away with the crown and will compete in Nationals. Chase McCallum was the winner, and will head to Akron to compete in Nationals in July. The craziest part about the whole thing is that Chase's dad was also a Flint Soap Box Derby Champion. His dad Tim won the race back in 1982! This is a perfect example of how something like Soap Box Derby racing can bring everyone together. Filed Under: Soap Box Derby Categories: Flint News	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line646
__label__wiki	0.829384	0.829384	Background Colour Close Reset AllSiteArchive CAERFAI, PROMONTORY FORT;PENPLEIDIAU PROMONTORY FORT Digital Images 19 Archive Records 44 Online Resources 1 © Copyright and database right 2020. All rights reserved. Ordnance Survey licence number 0100022206 NPRN 305396 Map Reference SM72SE Grid Reference SM76282398 Unitary (Local) Authority Pembrokeshire Old County Pembrokeshire Community St Davids and the Cathedral Close Type of Site PROMONTORY FORT Broad Class DEFENCE Period Roman, Iron Age Site Description 1. Caerfai Promontory Fort consists of a crescent of three to four lines of banks and ditches, about 100m in length, having what appears to be a former entrance gap, about 30m across, on the east, blocked by two lesser banks, the whole set across the northern, landward approaches to a 45m wide neck of land that opens onto a roughly 100m east-west by 50m cliff-girt promontory; emplacements for circular structures have been reported but not confirmed in the interior and there is said to be a good natural, small-boat harbour to the south. (source OS 495 card; SM72SE9) RCAHMW 2003. 2. DYFED ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRUST DESCRIPTION, 2010: Penpleidiau/Caerfai is a multivallate coastal promontory fort, naturally defended on by c.30m high sea cliffs to the west south and east. The northern side, approached across flat land, is defended by four substantial lines of bank and ditch c. 100m long. The defensive system is covered with bracken, brambles and gorse. The three inner lines of bank and ditch are close set with no berms between banks and ditch. The inner bank (1) stands 3m above the interior and 3.5m over the ditch on its outside. Its western end is above the vertical cliffs. Its eastern end terminates at the entrance. The second bank (2) is less substantial, standing just 2.5m above the ditches either side of it. It begins to turn slightly to the south at its western end before abruptly terminating at the cliff edge. At the entrance, (east end) bank 2 has a marked out-turn (to the north) and rises sharply to 3.5m high, dominating the entrance. Bank 3 is a similar size to bank 1, standing 3.5m above the flanking ditches. It terminates at its west end above the sea cliff. At the entrance the ditch on its outer (north) side curves around the terminal of this bank. The outer bank (4) is separated from the ditch on its inner (south) side by a c. 6m wide berm. This bank stand c. 3m above the ditch on its outer (north) side. Unlike the other three banks, bank 4 (and the ditch on its outer side) does not run up to the cliff edge at its western end but stops c. 45m short of it. A slighter continuation of this bank beyond its western terminal suggests that the builders had intended to continue the bank to the cliff edge, but did not complete. It is possible that the three inner banks were constructed as a single unit, with bank 4 and its ditch added later. The entrance lies between the eastern end the banks and ditches and a steep coastal slope which runs down to the top of vertical sea cliffs. The two inner banks (1 and 2) continue to the south down steep coastal slope, albeit in a much reduced form - the inner bank (1) being just 1.2m high and bank 2 c. 0.5m high, with no obvious ditches. There is an obvious hollow on the north side of the slight inner bank (1) on the east side of the entrance. The entrance passageway through banks 1 and 2 is c. 4m wide. The ditch terminal outside bank 3 and bank 4 stop short of the edge of the coastal slope, forming a wide entrance area rather than a passageway. The grass-covered interior slopes gently down from north to south and is rectangular c.100m N-S and 120m E-W. On the southwest, south and east sides the interior slopes down gently before ending in sea cliffs, indicating perhaps that not a great deal has been lost to erosion. However, on the northwest side a vertically-sided gully has removed a large portion (c.20%) of the interior as well as a little of the inner bank. It is clear that this gully must have formed after the fort's construction, otherwise the position of the defences makes no sense. This is one of the few coastal forts where it is possible to quantify loss, in the case of Penleidiau the 70m E-W and 40m N-S gully has formed since the Iron Age. It is also possible to demonstrate (with reference to the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 1st Edition map of and aerial photographs) that the eastern 15m of this gully opened up between 1880 and 1946. There was a little loss at the southwest end of the inner bank. The gully corresponds to a mineral rich band of shattered rock/geological fault, which the sea is exploiting. Post-medieval mining of the minerals has created a tunnel beneath the fort, no doubt exacerbating erosion. Indeed, it is possible that the gully did not begin to open up until the onset of mining. The character of the side of the gully indicates that it was formed by a series (six to seven) of catastrophic collapses, and that the interior will become an island detached from the defences following three more collapses. Apart from the major loss caused by the gully there are few other problems associated with this fort. There has been loss above the high cliffs at the western end of the defences, but the banks here are covered with vegetation and apparently stable. Bank 2 is beginning to curve to the south at its western end as though to meet a cliff edge, and so loss here may have been only a few metres. Visitors following a path over the western end of the ramparts are causing some erosion, but this is not severe and is long standing, the path having been in use since the 1880s. Penpleidiau is an unusual fort. It is rare for a coastal promontory fort to have four lines of banks and ditch, and where multivallation occurs normally the defences are designed to seen from the landward site, as at Porth-y-Rhaw and Greenala where the defensive banks rise one above the other to give the impression of impregnability. At Penplediau the flat landscape means that only the outer bank is visible, with the other banks hidden behind it. Only at the approach to the entrance are all four lines of bank and ditch readily apparent. If their purpose was to provide an impressive display as the entrance was approached then the Penplediau defences are adequate, and the termination of the outer bank short of the cliff top explained. K Murphy, Dyfed Archaeological Trust, February 2010. PRN 2728. Updated by T. Driver, RCAHMW, 2018. © Crown: CHERISH PROJECT 2018. Produced with EU funds through the Ireland Wales Co-operation Programme 2014-2020. All material made freely available through the Open Government Licence. 3. A detailed magnetometry survey was conducted over approximately 2.5 ha of grassland and scrubland at Caerfai (Penpleidiau) by SUMO Services for the CHERISH Project in March 2019. No definite archaeological responses have been identified, though a large number of anomalies of uncertain origin have been mapped. The survey has identified a number of anomalies of uncertain origin. Sub-circular responses have been detected, and they may be a result of small enclosures, building platforms or ring-ditches. A possible trackway has also been mapped, along with several discrete anomalies of uncertain origin. Areas of enhanced magnetic response have been detected within the fort itself, and it is possible that these are archaeological or natural in origin. Evidence of a ploughing headland is also visible in the data, while one of the uncertain linear trends is possibly related to an historic field boundary. Extract from Davies, R. 2019. Geophysical Survey Report 14719: CHERISH Ireland-Wales Project - Caerfai (Penpleidiau), Pembrokeshire. SUMO Services. Unpublished. Requires Javascript Non-commercial Government Licence	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line649
__label__wiki	0.853716	0.853716	Kentucky, Ohio State and WVU reportedly on Rushel Shell’s transfer list By Ben KerchevalJun 27, 2013, 2:21 PM EDT Since returning to Pitt is not an option for Rushel Shell, the former Panthers running back now must find a new home. Speaking to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Shell’s mother said her son has a strong interest in, and received his release to play for, the following schools: Kentucky, Ohio State, and Pitt’s (former) Backyard Brawl rival, West Virginia. The plan, Toni Zuccaro told the paper, is for Shell to visit all three schools over the summer and make a decision before the start of fall camp. Shell’s mother also confirmed the reason her son wavered on his decision to transfer to UCLA was because he wanted to be closer to his 16-month-old twin daughters. While Zuccaro didn’t have many flattering things to say about Pitt, she said UCLA’s coaches were more understanding of her son’s wishes. If Shell transfers to any one of the three programs reportedly on his short list, he will have to sit out the 2013 season to satisfy NCAA transfer rules unless he receives a special waiver. Shell is apparently okay with that and not interested in transferring down to the FCS or Division II level. He will have three years of eligibility remaining. Ohio State and WVU offered Shell out of high school, and a pair of former Pitt players, Chris and Demitrious Davis, transferred to Kentucky earlier this month. As the primary backup to Ray Graham last season, Shell rushed for 641 yards and four touchdowns. Both of those totals were good for second on the team, and tops among returning backs. Tags: Pittsburgh, Ray Graham, Rushel Shell	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line650
__label__cc	0.672701	0.327299	Couch to couch The stories of a couchsurfer The Euro Job Saga Montmartre: a victim of tourism By christopherbadman, April 15, 2013 Basilique du Sacré-Coeur Where do you find the stereotypical Paris? The one where cafés and restaurants line the streets, artists and philosophers packing the terraces to enjoy fine dining and discuss concepts that we mere mortals cannot comprehend. The answer is it’s everywhere in Paris. The Parisian stereotype (at least, the one that I’ve held in my head over the years) turns into reality every street you walk down. I’ve felt sometimes during my previous travels that towns or even countries feel as though they have to live up to a stereotype. They’ve been labeled at some point in history and now the people expect it from them, so they oblige and attempt to become the expectation. But the place shouldn’t have to become the stereotype. If the true livelihood in the area is not what the people expect, then the visitors have now learned something by actually going there instead of assuming general popular misconceptions. Sure, it may not provide the same experiences as what the visitor had anticipated but at least it remains true to itself and the visitor can discover the reality of the area. Paris is one such city that does live up to it’s stereotypes, but not for result of a masquerade. It does remain itself. It procedes through the days as if there were no expectations of it from anybody other than it’s loyal citizens. There is no truer indication of this than in Montmartre. Montmartre is famous for it’s artistic history. Here, artists including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh lived at some stage in their lives. Salvador Dali too. Today, that artistic inspiration and flair continues to exist in Montmartre. Montmartre, as the translation in French suggests, is actually a mountain rising some 130 metres high. Because of the geography, it provides two things immediately. The first is a great view of Paris. This is best appreciated at the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, the iconic church that sits atop the hill and looks out over the center of Paris. The basilica has become the centrepiece of Montmartre and has stunning architecture that’s quite unique compared to the other churches of Paris. Inside the basilica, and it’s much the same as the other churches’ interiors. The second thing that the geography of Montmartre provides is the abundance of staircases that connect the streets of the area. These, sometimes long and steep, staircases provide great views of the cobblestoned streets. I recall during my time at Alliance Française in Adelaide that there was a picture above the stairwell that showed Paris in a black and white setting. Each time you would descend the stairs, you would see it. It showed a series of steps, with light posts illuminating the path (although from memory the photograph was in a daytime setting). I loved this picture and hoped that one day I could be there, experience the same setting through my own eyes. While I did not stumble across the exact same one, and indeed I’m not even sure if that photograph was taken in Montmartre, this was the closest that I’ve came to that scene, and it was a very satisfying moment. Montmartre is wonderful. Everybody knows this. The Parisians themselves feel it. So too, the tourists. The flocks of tourists. Ascend to the basilica and it’s a push and shove game to keep your footing. That the weather was amazing surely made it worse. It dampened my experience of Montmartre. It was difficult to truly appreciate the beauty of the place when my main focus was to not get stuck in a pedestrian logjam. Worse still, I felt despair for Montmartre itself, and the locals the inhabit it. There’s no doubting that the tourism was providing some positives for the region and it’s people. Artists would offer to sketch portraits of yourself, musicians would fill the corners to busk. But I couldn’t help feel that this was not wanted in the area. The Eiffel Tower had the same amount of tourists. But the Eiffel Tower wanted them. It was designed for them. It opened it’s arms willingly to accept them. Montmartre was different. Au contraire, it was not built to be an attraction, to provide tours to foreign wanderers. Montmartre had become a victim of it’s status. A victim of the french stereotype. Wander behind the basilica for one hundred metres or so and you can finally begin to find some empty streets, although they are rare. Here, the majority of people you find are Parisians. My experience in Montmartre was not necessarily a bad one, I just would have preferred it to have been more intimate. Then again, I can’t blame the tourists for going there. I’m one of them, and I’m sure they, and the Montmartre community, probably would have preferred it if I weren’t there. Categories: France, Travel Tagged: france, montmartre, paris, travel Paris 18th April 2013 2 Responses to “Montmartre: a victim of tourism” beyondlisbon April 15, 2013 Living in a country where there are a lot of tourists who only get to see perhaps 10% or less of its beauty I found it interesting to read your perspective. I think most tourists go to a place looking for what they saw on the leaflet, with little or no will to actually explore the areas they’re visiting. Take Lisbon, for example: most tourists come here with a stereotype in their heads and they seem to be very happy about it. That being said, when I was in Paris my head had more images from ‘Amélie’ than from ‘Da Vinci Code’ and I have to say that my experience in Paris was not at all as I had expected it to be – too ‘old’ and violent. But I guess it might have been some bad luck on my side 🙂 christopherbadman April 16, 2013 It’s nearly impossible to visit a place without any expectations of what it may consist of. I actually prefer when the place doesn’t meet up to expectations, because it means I’m discovering more. Tourists go to a place looking for what they saw on the leaflet because that’s the purpose of the leaflet, right? I mean, there’s a reason that the famous landmarks are famous. Like you however, I like to think that › 90% of the discovery and beauty lies outside of the well advertised sites, and it’s really by traveling differently and meeting the locals that this can be experienced.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line652
__label__cc	0.676452	0.323548	Momentum maps and classical relativistic fields I: Covariant Theory (1997) by M J Gotay, J E Marsden J Isenberg, R Montgomery, J Discrete mechanics and variational integrators by J. E. Marsden, M. West - Acta Numer , 2001 "... This paper gives a review of integration algorithms for finite dimensional mechanical systems that are based on discrete variational principles. The variational technique gives a unified treatment of many symplectic schemes, including those of higher order, as well as a natural treatment of the disc ..." This paper gives a review of integration algorithms for finite dimensional mechanical systems that are based on discrete variational principles. The variational technique gives a unified treatment of many symplectic schemes, including those of higher order, as well as a natural treatment of the discrete Noether theorem. The approach also allows us to include forces, dissipation and constraints in a natural way. Amongst the many specific schemes treated as examples, the Verlet, SHAKE, RATTLE, Newmark, and the symplectic Asynchronous Variational Integrators by A. Lew, J. E. Marsden, M. Ortiz, M. West - ARCH. RATIONAL MECH. ANAL. , 2003 "... We describe a new class of asynchronous variational integrators (AVI) for nonlinear elastodynamics. The AVIs are distinguished by the following attributes: (i) The algorithms permit the selection of independent time steps in each element, and the local time steps need not bear an integral relation t ..." Abstract - Cited by 66 (11 self) - Add to MetaCart We describe a new class of asynchronous variational integrators (AVI) for nonlinear elastodynamics. The AVIs are distinguished by the following attributes: (i) The algorithms permit the selection of independent time steps in each element, and the local time steps need not bear an integral relation to each other; (ii) the algorithms derive from a spacetime form of a discrete version of Hamilton’s variational principle. As a consequence of this variational structure, the algorithms conserve local momenta and a local discrete multisymplectic structure exactly. To guide the development of the discretizations, a spacetime multisymplectic formulation of elastodynamics is presented. The variational principle used incorporates both configuration and spacetime reference variations. This allows a unified treatment of all the conservation properties of the system. A discrete version of reference configuration is also considered, providing a natural definition of a discrete energy. The possibilities for discrete energy conservation are evaluated. Numerical tests reveal that, even when local energy balance is not enforced exactly, the global and local energy behavior of the AVIs is quite remarkable, a property which can probably be traced to the symplectic nature of the algorithm. Canonical structure of classical field theory in the polymomentum phase space by Igor V. Kanatchikov - Rep. Math. Phys , 1998 "... Canonical structure of classical field theory in n dimensions is studied within the covariant polymomentum Hamiltonian formulation of De Donder–Weyl (DW). The bi-vertical (n + 1)-form, called polysymplectic, is put forward as a generalization of the symplectic form in mechanics. Although not given i ..." Canonical structure of classical field theory in n dimensions is studied within the covariant polymomentum Hamiltonian formulation of De Donder–Weyl (DW). The bi-vertical (n + 1)-form, called polysymplectic, is put forward as a generalization of the symplectic form in mechanics. Although not given in intrinsic geometric terms differently than a certain coset it gives rise to an invariantly defined map between horizontal forms playing the role of dynamical variables and the so-called vertical multivectors generalizing Hamiltonian vector fields. The analogue of the Poisson bracket on forms is defined which leads to the structure of Z-graded Lie algebra on the so-called Hamiltonian forms for which the map above exists. A generalized Poisson structure appears in the form of what we call a “higher-order ” and a right Gerstenhaber algebra. The equations of motion of forms are formulated in terms of the Poisson bracket with the DW Hamiltonian n-form H ˜ vol ( ˜ vol is the space-time volume form, H is the DW Hamiltonian function) which is found to be related to the operation of the total exterior differentiation of forms. A few applications and a relation to the standard Hamiltonian formalism in field theory are briefly discussed. 1 ...], gauge fields [23, 24], classical bosonic string [28, 29, 30, 31, 32], general relativity [33, 34, 35], and integrable systems [36, 37]. Several interesting examples are also considered in the book =-=[16]-=-. For possible applications in field theory the understanding of the interrelations between the polymomentum canonical theories and the standard instantaneous Hamiltonian formalism is important. A rec... Categorified symplectic geometry and the classical string by John C. Baez, Alexander E. Hoffnung, Christopher L. Rogers , 2008 "... A Lie 2-algebra is a ‘categorified ’ version of a Lie algebra: that is, a category equipped with structures analogous to those of a Lie algebra, for which the usual laws hold up to isomorphism. In the classical mechanics of point particles, the phase space is often a symplectic manifold, and the Poi ..." A Lie 2-algebra is a ‘categorified ’ version of a Lie algebra: that is, a category equipped with structures analogous to those of a Lie algebra, for which the usual laws hold up to isomorphism. In the classical mechanics of point particles, the phase space is often a symplectic manifold, and the Poisson bracket of functions on this space gives a Lie algebra of observables. Multisymplectic geometry describes an n-dimensional field theory using a phase space that is an ‘n-plectic manifold’: a finite-dimensional manifold equipped with a closed nondegenerate (n + 1)-form. Here we consider the case n = 2. For any 2-plectic manifold, we construct a Lie 2-algebra of observables. We then explain how this Lie 2-algebra can be used to describe the dynamics of a classical bosonic string. Just as the presence of an electromagnetic field affects the symplectic structure for a charged point particle, the presence of a B field affects the 2-plectic structure for the string. ...] in the 1930s. Their ideas have been more fully developed in the subject called ‘multisymplectic geometry’. For an introduction, try for example the papers by Gotay, Isenberg, Marsden and Montgomery =-=[20]-=-, Hélein and Kouneiher [22, 23], Kijowski [27], and Rovelli [29]. In particular, Gotay et al have already applied multisymplectic geometry to classical string theory. There are various ways to do this... Geometry of Multisymplectic Hamiltonian First-order Field Theories by Arturo Echeverría-enríquez, Miguel C. Muñoz-lec, Narciso Román-roy - J. Math. Phys , 2000 "... In the jet bundle description of Field Theories (multisymplectic models, in particular), there are several choices for the multimomentum bundle where the covariant Hamiltonian formalism takes place. As a consequence, several proposals for this formalism can be stated, and, on each one of them, the d ..." In the jet bundle description of Field Theories (multisymplectic models, in particular), there are several choices for the multimomentum bundle where the covariant Hamiltonian formalism takes place. As a consequence, several proposals for this formalism can be stated, and, on each one of them, the differentiable structures needed for setting the formalism are obtained in different ways. In this work we make an accurate study of some of these Hamiltonian formalisms, showing their equivalence. In particular, the geometrical structures (canonical or not) needed for the Hamiltonian formalism, are introduced and compared, and the derivation of Hamiltonian field equations from the corresponding variational principle is shown in detail. Furthermore, the Hamiltonian formalism of systems described by Lagrangians is performed, both for the hyper-regular and almost-regular cases. Finally, the role of connections in the construction of Hamiltonian Field theories is clarified. Multivector field formulation of Hamiltonian field theories: Equations and symmetries by A. Echeverría-Enríquez, M. C. Muñoz-Lecanda, N. Román-Roy , 1999 "... We state the intrinsic form of the Hamiltonian equations of first-order Classical Field theories in three equivalent geometrical ways: using multivector fields, jet fields and connections. Thus, these equations are given in a form similar to that in which the Hamiltonian equations of mechanics are u ..." We state the intrinsic form of the Hamiltonian equations of first-order Classical Field theories in three equivalent geometrical ways: using multivector fields, jet fields and connections. Thus, these equations are given in a form similar to that in which the Hamiltonian equations of mechanics are usually given. Then, using multivector fields, we study several aspects of these equations, such as the existence and non-uniqueness of solutions, and the integrability problem. In particular, these problems are analyzed for the case of Hamiltonian systems defined in a submanifold of the multimomentum bundle. Furthermore, the existence of first integrals of these Hamiltonian equations is considered, and the relation between Cartan-Noether symmetries and general symmetries of the system is discussed. Noether’s theorem is also stated in this context, both the “classical” version and its generalization to include higher-order Cartan-Noether symmetries. Finally, the equivalence between the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms is also discussed. CLASSICAL FIELD THEORY ON LIE ALGEBROIDS: MULTISYMPLECTIC FORMALISM by Eduardo Martínez , 2004 "... The jet formalism for Classical Field theories is extended to the setting of Lie algebroids. We define the analog of the concept of jet of a section of a bundle and we study some of the geometric structures of the jet manifold. When a Lagrangian function is given, we find the equations of motion in ..." The jet formalism for Classical Field theories is extended to the setting of Lie algebroids. We define the analog of the concept of jet of a section of a bundle and we study some of the geometric structures of the jet manifold. When a Lagrangian function is given, we find the equations of motion in terms of a Cartan form canonically associated to the Lagrangian. The Hamiltonian formalism is also extended to this setting and we find the relation between the solutions of both formalism. When the first Lie algebroid is a tangent bundle we give a variational description of the equations of motion. In addition to the standard case, our formalism includes as particular examples the case of systems with symmetry (covariant Euler-Poincaré and Lagrange Poincaré cases), variational problems for holomorphic maps, Sigma models or Chern-Simons theories. One of the advantages of our theory is that it is based in the existence of a multisymplectic form on a Lie algebroid. CATEGORIFIED SYMPLECTIC GEOMETRY AND THE STRING LIE 2-ALGEBRA by John C. Baez, Christopher, L. Rogers "... Abstract. Multisymplectic geometry is a generalization of symplectic geometry suitable for n-dimensional field theories, in which the nondegenerate 2-form of symplectic geometry is replaced by a nondegenerate (n + 1)-form. The case n = 2 is relevant to string theory: we call this ‘2-plectic geometry ..." Abstract. Multisymplectic geometry is a generalization of symplectic geometry suitable for n-dimensional field theories, in which the nondegenerate 2-form of symplectic geometry is replaced by a nondegenerate (n + 1)-form. The case n = 2 is relevant to string theory: we call this ‘2-plectic geometry’. Just as the Poisson bracket makes the smooth functions on a symplectic manifold into a Lie algebra, the observables associated to a 2-plectic manifold form a ‘Lie 2-algebra’, which is a categorified version of a Lie algebra. Any compact simple Lie group G has a canonical 2-plectic structure, so it is natural to wonder what Lie 2-algebra this example yields. This Lie 2-algebra is infinite-dimensional, but we show here that the sub-Lie-2-algebra of left-invariant observables is finite-dimensional, and isomorphic to the already known ‘string Lie 2-algebra ’ associated to G. So, categorified symplectic geometry gives a geometric construction of the string Lie 2-algebra. 1. ...pin, and Ibort [7]. Further details regarding the application of multisymplectic geometry to classical field theory can be found in the work of Kijowski [12], Gotay, Isenberg, Marsden, and Montgomery =-=[9]-=-, Helein [10], and Rovelli [14]. For Lie 2-algebras, see Baez and Crans [1] and also Roytenberg [15], whose approach we will follow in this paper. In Section 3 we consider a Lie group acting on a 2-pl... Stress-energy-momentum tensors and the Belifante-Resenfeld formula by Mark J. Gotay , Jerrold E. Marsden , 2001 "... We present a new method of constructing a stress-energy-momentum tensor for a classical field theory based on covariance considerations and Noether theory. The stress-energy-momentum tensor T µ ν that we construct is defined using the (multi)momentum map associated to the spacetime diffeomorphism gr ..." We present a new method of constructing a stress-energy-momentum tensor for a classical field theory based on covariance considerations and Noether theory. The stress-energy-momentum tensor T µ ν that we construct is defined using the (multi)momentum map associated to the spacetime diffeomorphism group. The tensor T µ ν is uniquely determined as well as gauge-covariant, and depends only upon the divergence equivalence class of the Lagrangian. It satisfies a generalized version of the classical Belinfante-Rosenfeld formula, and hence naturally incorporates both the canonical stress-energy-momentum tensor and the “correction terms ” that are necessary to make the latter well behaved. Furthermore, in the presence of a metric on spacetime, our T µν coincides with the Hilbert tensor and hence is automatically symmetric. On the Canonical Structure of the De Donder-Weyl Covariant Hamiltonian Formulation of Field Theory I. Graded Poisson brackets and equations of motion, Aachen by Igor V. Kanatchikov - hep-th/9312162; I.V. Kanatchikov, Canonical Structure of Classical Field Theory in the Polymomentum Phase Space , 1993 "... As opposed to the conventional field-theoretical Hamiltonian formalism, which requires the space+time decomposition and leads to the picture of a field as a mechanical system with infinitely many degrees of freedom, the De Donder-Weyl (DW) Hamiltonian canonical formulation of field theory (which is ..." As opposed to the conventional field-theoretical Hamiltonian formalism, which requires the space+time decomposition and leads to the picture of a field as a mechanical system with infinitely many degrees of freedom, the De Donder-Weyl (DW) Hamiltonian canonical formulation of field theory (which is known for about 60 years) keeps the space-time symmetry explicit, works in the finite dimensional analogue of the phase space and leads to the Hamiltonian and Hamilton-Jacobi formulations of field equations in terms of partial derivative equations. No field quantization procedure based on this ”finite dimensional” covariant canonical formalism is known. As a first step in this direction we consider the appropriate generalization of the Poisson bracket concept to the DW Hamiltonian formalism and the expression of the DW Hamiltonian form of field equations in terms of these generalized Poisson brackets. Starting from the Poincaré-Cartan form of the multidimensional variational calculus we argue that the analogue of the Poisson brackets is defined on forms ...eading to the functional derivative equation. The connection between the instantaneous and the covariant finite dimensional formulations was studied recently in detail by Gotay [9] (see also the book =-=[10]-=-). Despite all of the attractive features of the second treatment which look especially relevant in the context of general relativity and string theory, there is surprisingly small number of its appli...	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line654
__label__wiki	0.607641	0.607641	10 Best Dubai Foods Everyone Should Try Real Dishes Locals Love in Dubai Emeriti cuisine is a combination of Lebanese, Iranian and even Indian flavours, with plenty of both vegetarian and meat-based dishes to enjoy. Packed full of herbs, Dubai dishes are both healthy and flavoursome. Famous dishes like hummus and falafel are world-renowned, but we have gathered some genuine local dishes that are perhaps less well known to most travellers. This list of the best food to eat in Dubai is likely to be a great introduction to genuine Arabic cuisine. Harees Harees is one of the most famous dishes in Dubai. It can often be found on many an Emirati dinner table, as well as on the menus in some of Dubai's finest restaurants. Its preparation requires a great deal of time and skill, so it’s commonly presented at special occasions, weddings, and banquets. The ingredients for harees are crushed wheat, minced meat (sometimes chicken), as well as onions, ground cumin, a generous amount of water, and salt. Emirati harees is considered one of the country's best-known traditional dishes. It’s an important part of the local culinary heritage and recipes continue to be passed down through the generations. Hosté doporučují: Autor fotografií: Haisameldawi (CC BY-SA 4.0) upraveno Majboos Many of Dubai's visitors enjoy majboos as it’s very popular among Emirati people. Family recipes are passed on from generation to generation. The dish includes basmati rice served with various types of meat. Emirati majboos are frequently served with chicken, with the distinctive flavours of powerful Arabian spices and assorted vegetables. Chicken or meat majboos are served at all kinds of family events and it also features prominently at Iftar meals during Ramadan. Autor fotografií: Miansari66 (CC0 1.0) upraveno Luqaymat Luqaymat is a well-known aspect of Dubai’s traditional cuisine and they’re prepared for various cultural events held across the Emirates. They're considered to be a ‘must-have’ pastry in the home or restaurant, especially on special occasions. These homely sweet pastries are shaped into delicate golden balls that melt in the mouth. They’re made from flour, sesame seeds, turmeric, milk, sugar, salt, and a little yeast. The batter is kneaded and then left to rest for a while, before being fried in oil and drizzled with syrup. Some believe that luqaymat originated in the Arab world, where it’s known as halwa al-luqaymat or ’awama, although the Greeks too have a version which they call loukoumades. The honey-like syrup (sharbat) used to finish luqaymat originally comes from Turkey. Autor fotografií: Wikiemirati (CC BY-SA 4.0) upraveno Madrouba Madrouba is one of Dubai’s most popular foods, and it also has its fans in Bahrain and Oman, too. Madrouba with chicken is the best-known variety, though it’s also served with fish, lamb, and crushed grains. It’s prepared using rice, garlic, onion, tomatoes, yoghurt and seasoning. Butter is also used in moderation. The dish is named ‘madrouba’ (meaning ‘beaten’ in Arabic) because, in the last stage of the recipe, the ingredients are beaten together to form a smooth mash. This dish is ideal for all ages as it’s easily digestible. Autor fotografií: AmnaMF (CC BY-SA 4.0) upraveno Thareed Emirati thareed (or fareed) with meat is characteristic of Gulf cuisine in general and is particularly typical of Dubai. It’s made with bread and vegetable chunks soaked in a meat broth. The dish is served at special occasions and it’s rich in vitamins and protein. Thareed is made with meat and its broth contains wholewheat bread and vegetables. It’s a great energy-providing food that’s reputed to have many health benefits, particularly due to its high quantity of vegetable protein. Meat Biryani Biryani is a dish that's found throughout the Gulf region – and Dubai is no exception. Originating in Indian cuisine, this dish spread first to East Asia before arriving in the Arab world, where it became very popular thanks to its delicious savoury taste. It’s made with Indian spices renowned for their strong aromas and flavours. There are several varieties of biryani, including: Iranian, katchi, Sri Lankan, and Southeast Asian. Made with a mix of basmati rice and spices, meat biryani can be served with chicken or other types of meat. Chicken saloona Despite the influx of western cuisine into restaurants in the Emirates, saloona has kept its place in the hearts of the people of the United Arab Emirates, and is proudly featured on many a dinner table. So, when you’re in Dubai, make sure you discover this Emirati stew, known for its simple preparation, wonderfully delicious taste and amazing flavour. It’s prepared with pieces of chicken, turmeric, olive oil, grated ginger, minced garlic, onion, chilli, spices and white rice. It’s a dish rich in vitamins and protein, and features at almost every special occasion or feast in the Emirates, occupying a special place in the hearts of both locals and visitors. Oozie is one of the best-known dishes from the Gulf region. It features prominently at special occasions such as wedding parties and festive celebrations. Oozie with meat also has a special presence at the Emirati meal table during Ramadan, when family and friends gather together to break their fast. This dish is made with rice and can be stuffed into delicate pastry pockets, or it can also be served with chicken. Sometimes, it’s also served with salad and yoghurt, or garnished with a mixture of fried or roasted nuts. Autor fotografií: Hani Arif (CC BY 2.0) upraveno Jasheed Jasheed is one of the more popular dishes in the Gulf region. Not surprisingly, fish has a particularly important place in Emirati cuisine, especially in coastal regions where fresh fish features in many meals. It’s made from small sharks, or other fish if these aren’t available, and eaten with rice. It’s served with white ‘aysh (rice) and clarified butter. The fish is covered with water and cooked with spices for around 30 minutes until the skin peels off. It’s then cleaned and put into another pot with bazaar spice mix, cinnamon, ginger, ground dried lemon, cardamom, chopped onion, and garlic. The next step is to finely chop the pepper, shred the fish, and mix it with a blend of spices for around 15 minutes. The mix is then cooked until well done, covered, and it’s then ready to serve. Tahta malih Tahta malih is a traditional dish of Dubai that's still popular today. Its original flavours have been preserved, just like the fish that is used to make it. Preserved, salted fish, known as malih, was traditionally used in the Emirates when there was little fresh fish or other food available. Some fish are better suited to the salting and preservation process than others. Popular varieties include mackerel, tuna, herring, or queenfish. People with high blood pressure should avoid eating too much of this dish due to the high salt content. Malih is frequently found in Dubai, with the most commonly available variety being made with yellowfin tuna. Zadejte destinaci nebo název ubytovacího zařízení. 10 Must-Visit Shopping Destinations in Dubai Chris Wotton, 23 Dec, 2019 10 Best Things to Do in Dubai 6 Best Beaches in Qatar Huub Lakerveld, 26 Nov, 2019 10 Things to Do in Tel Aviv in a Day 10 Best Israeli Foods to Eat in Tel Aviv 11 Best Qatari Foods and Where to Find Them in Doha	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line656
__label__wiki	0.67236	0.67236	Reports by Year: 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 More journalists killed on the job as reprisal murders nearly double Journalists from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to the U.S. were targeted for murder in 2018 in reprisal for their work, bringing the total of journalists killed on duty to its highest in three years. The number of journalists killed in conflict fell to its lowest level since 2011. A... Hundreds of journalists jailed globally becomes the new normal For the third year in a row, 251 or more journalists are jailed around the world, suggesting the authoritarian approach to critical news coverage is more than a temporary spike. China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia imprisoned more journalists than last year, and Turkey remained the world’s worst jailer. A... October 29, 2018 11:00 AM ET CPJ's 2018 Global Impunity Index spotlights countries where journalists are slain and their killers go free By Elisabeth Witchel, CPJ Impunity Campaign Consultant Impunity is entrenched in 14 nations, according to CPJ's 2018 Global Impunity Index, which ranks states with the worst records of prosecuting the killers of journalists.... Nothing to declare: Why U.S. border agency's vast stop and search powers undermine press freedom Secondary screenings of journalists crossing U.S. borders risk undermining press freedom as Custom and Border Protection agents search devices such as laptops or phones without warrant and question journalists about their reporting and contacts. As the government ramps up searches of electronic devices, rights groups mount legal challenges to... Nothing to declare: About This ReportThis report was written by CPJ North America Program Coordinator Alexandra Ellerbeck and CPJ North America Research Assistant Stephanie Sugars, with additional research and reporting by North America Research Associate Avi Asher-Schapiro. CPJ Advocacy Director Courtney C. Radsch wrote the accompanying piece, “CPJ’s slog to improve DHS... CPJ’s slog to improve DHS and CBP policy toward journalists One of the key principles of journalism is protecting the confidentiality of sources. So when CPJ started hearing from journalists who said they were being stopped and questioned about their journalism when they entered the United States, and that... Recommendations The Committee to Protect Journalists offers the following recommendations:... Nothing to Declare: CPJ's advice for journalists crossing a U.S. border The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) has authority to search electronic devices without warrant or probable cause. Civil liberties groups are challenging this power in court, but journalists should be aware that current practice risks exposing contacts, sourcing, and reporting material contained on laptops, phones, and other... Acts of Intimidation: In Pakistan, journalists' fear and censorship grow even as fatal violence declines September 12, 2018 12:00 AM ET As killings of journalists in Pakistan decline so too does press freedom, as the country’s powerful military quietly, but effectively, restricts reporting by barring access, encouraging self-censorship through direct and indirect acts of intimidation, and even allegedly instigating violence against reporters. Journalists who push back or are overly critical... Acts of Intimidation: About This Report This report was written by CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler. CPJ’s multimedia producer Mustafa Hameed contributed research and reporting, and produced the accompanying documentary “Acts of Intimidation.” CPJ traveled to Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore, and Okara in February 2018, to meet with journalists, editors, and... Divided and alone, Pakistan’s press finds safety in numbers To compensate for the unwillingness or inability of government institutions to create a safe atmosphere for the press or tackle the ongoing issue of impunity in the murder of journalists, several independent organizations, including the Freedom Network, Media Matters for... The U-turn: Moreno steers Ecuador away from Correa's media repression July 12, 2018 12:30 PM ET The administration of President Lenín Moreno has dramatically diverged from that of his predecessor, Rafael Correa, who was severely critical of the Ecuadoran press and passed one of the most restrictive media laws in the region. Nonetheless, journalists say they will be wary until Moreno fulfills his promises to... The U-turn: CPJ’s work in Ecuador Over the last 10 years, CPJ has viewed the situation in Ecuador as a priority in Latin America and documented the deteriorating press freedom environment under former President Rafael Correa through special reports, articles, and reporting trips to the country. In a 2011 report, “Confrontation,... Correa’s critics disadvantaged online, especially on Twitter Long before other world leaders took to Twitter, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa was using social media and other digital tools to air grievances and abuse his adversaries. After joining Twitter in July 2011 (with a tweet about a boring meeting), Correa quickly... On the table: Why now is the time to sway Rouhani to meet his promises for press freedom in Iran May 24, 2018 12:00 AM ET President Hassan Rouhani sought re-election on the promise of a more open Iran. But little has changed for the press, as hardliners in the judiciary and other powerful institutions jail journalists, block websites, and maintain a climate of fear with harassment and surveillance. The current international focus on Iran... About This ReportThis report was written by CPJ Iran Consultant Hanif Zarrabi-Kashani, based in Seattle, Washington. CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour contributed reporting and research.... Why now is the time to sway Rouhani to meet his promises for press freedom in Iran President Hassan Rouhani came to power in 2013 on a platform of pledges to roll back the repressive policies of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who decimated Iran’s once vibrant media. Rouhani, seeking... Recommendations... « 2019 \| 2017 »	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line665
__label__wiki	0.877477	0.877477	Fox News Poll: Record 51% Back Impeachment and Removing Trump from Office A Fox News poll published Wednesday shows a record 51 percent of respondents support the impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump, a nine-point increase from the news network’s most previous survey on July 19th. The poll shows an additional four percent believe that the president should be impeached yet remain in office, while 40 percent expressed opposition to impeachment in general. Five percent stated they were undecided on the matter. The poll comes as House Democrats are attempting to move expeditiously with an impeachment inquiry against President Trump over a partisan CIA officer mischaracterization the president’s summer telephone call with the leader of Ukraine in a so-called “whistleblower” complaint. Both the credibility of the so-called “whistleblower” and his complaint have come in question as the officer was revealed as a registered Democrat with a previous “professional relationship” with a Democratic presidential candidate, while his accusations are based on secondhand information. His chief claim is that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into allegations of corruption against former Vice President and White House hopeful Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Both President Trump and Zelensky have vehemently denied any pressured was applied and the White House released a transcript of their call to illustrate no wrongdoing occurred. As Breitbart News reported, questions regarding the Biden family’s activities in Ukraine and China continue to swirl: In recent days, President Donald Trump has suggested China and Ukraine investigate alleged corruption committed by the Biden family. As Breitbart News extensively reported, Hunter Biden’s investment company scored a $1.5 billion investment deal with the Bank of China after traveling with his father on Air Force Two to the country in 2013. Further, then-vice president Biden forced out former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin as he was investigating the gas giant Burisma Holdings, which was paying Hunter Biden $83,000 monthly as a member of its board, despite his lack of expertise in the energy sector. Biden later boasted before the Council of Foreign Relations last year that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid unless the prosecutor was fired. The Fox News poll found 43 percent support the notion that President Trump’s comments during the July 25th call with Zelensky were impeachable and 27 percent say that while they were inappropriate, they were not impeachable. Only 17 percent stated his comments were appropriate. The poll surveyed 1,003 registered voters and was conducted by telephone between October 6th-8th.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line671
__label__cc	0.700858	0.299142	Accepting Our Role December 1, 2011 by Greg Hildenbrand, posted in Life Notes Life Notes—December 1, 2011 “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’” Matthew 1:19-21 I have always imagined Joseph as a humble, hard-working man, quietly trying to build a good and righteous life for himself. I suspect he wanted to be a good citizen, a good husband and father, in keeping with the traditions of the time. He spent the time expected in theTempleand tried to apply what he heard to his daily life as best he could. How do I know all this? I don’t. There is very little written about the earthly father of Jesus, but what is written paints a picture in my mind consistent with the above description. The fact that he finds his fiancé pregnant, not by him, but still intends to dismiss her quietly rather than make a public spectacle, indicates to me a quiet and humble man. The fact that he had the above encounter in a dream with an angel and obeyed seems to describe someone faithful, discerning and obedient. I doubt he aspired to raise divinity, but when called to do so he obeyed. Personally, I shudder to think where I might be if I acted on some of my dreams—probably behind bars somewhere… But Joseph had a role to play, if one with few speaking parts. Most of the glory would go to the child and the mother, but someone needed to support the family. Someone had to shepherd the mother and child intoEgyptto flee Herod. Jesus would need a male figure to teach him a trade and model what it meant to be a man in first centuryJudea. But Joseph is seldom mentioned as part of the story of Christ, and never after Jesus was twelve. Was Joseph alive for the crucifixion? Alas, we are not told. There are undoubtedly many unsung heroes, unnamed people who played various and important roles in the growth and development of Jesus—not unlike in our churches and communities. What gets done, gets done because faithful people see a need and step in to do what they are tasked and gifted to do. It’s always been that way. It always will be that way. Joseph receives three brief mentions for what was certainly a difficult, heart-rending and life-consuming role. Should we expect more for our faithful service? This Sunday is the second of Advent and the theme is Peace. Tom will preach downtown, where Life worship is at 10:00 in Brady Hall and traditional worship is at 8:30 and 11:00 in the sanctuary. Mitch will preach at the west campus, where contemporary worship is at 9:00 and 11:00. Come home to church this Sunday. Maybe it’s time to find your role in the church. Greg Hildenbrand, Life Music Coordinator Previous postA Season of Receiving Next postProclamations of the Past	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line672
__label__cc	0.561531	0.438469	Welcome to our site ! Introduction to Corfu Island Corfu was not given the name of the Emerald Island for no reason. The greenest of all the Greek islands Corfu’s natural beauty is hidden under a mantle of emerald green. Home to a mountainous skyline plunging into the crystalline blue waters of the Ionian and Adriatic Sea, wonders will never cease here. With its charming landscape of vibrant wildflowers and slender cypresses rising out of shimmering olive groves, it has enchanted visitors throughout thecenturies. Did I just mention the olive groves? Well… the olive trees constitute a quite interesting detail of Corfu’s history to start with this audio guide in Corfu’s history; Corfu is home to 3 million olive trees which were planted on the island during the rule of the Venetians which was between the14th and 18th century. Olive trees can be found just about everywhere on the island. The locals were paid a gold coin of considerable value for every olive tree they planted. Yet, the most interesting fact is that the oil was not intended as food, but as fuel to light the lamps of Venice! The Island of Corfu measures 590 km² and it stretches 62 km from north to south respectively. The coastline is 217 km in length. Corfu Island is the sixth biggest of the Greek islands and second biggest of the Ionian island group. Corfu town ( Kerkyra- Korfu ) The principal town of the island is also named Corfu, or Kιrkyra in Greek. The general population of the island is approximately 120,000 people; of which 40,000 live in Corfu Town and the rest mainly inhabit the island’s numerous villages scattered around the island. Corfu is home to the Ionian University. Corfu history and culture Corfu has a bountiful culture and is steeped in history. It is directly connected to the history of starting from Greek mythology. Corfu’s Greek name Kerkyra, is connected to two powerful water symbols: Poseidon, god of the sea and Asopos which is an important Greek mainland river. According to legend and myth, Poseidon fell in love with the beautiful nymph Korkyra who was the daughter of Asopus. He abducted her as this was the custom among gods of that era’s myths. Poseidon brought her to an unnamed island and being in marital bliss, offered her name to the place: Korkyra, which gradually evolved to Kerkyra. Together they had a child they called Phaiax, after whom the inhabitants of the island were named: Phaiakes, which was then transliterated via Latin to Phaeacians. Whether you are looking for the hustle and bustle of night life or peace and tranquillity, everything you could need is here just waiting to be discovered….	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line675
__label__cc	0.692469	0.307531	Hops + History: Letters from the War Between 1941 and 1946, several thousand students and graduates of San Diego State College joined the armed forces and went off to war. Letters were written home by these servicemen and women detailing their wartime experiences will be shared during a reader's theatre performance at 6:00 p.m. on February 21. Walter Ritter and Veronica Murphy, co-founders of the theatrical company Write Out Loud, will read from a script prepared by Jonnie Wilson, who in turn was inspired by the book No Forgotten Fronts: From Classrooms to Combat, by Lisa Shapiro. In her book, Shapiro relates the story of how one man—Dr. Lauren Post, a geography professor at San Diego State—became a lifeline to former students as they went off to serve in North Africa, England, France, the South Pacific, and wherever else the military took them. The 5,000 letters Post received from these young men and women during their four years away from campus are today housed in SDSU’s Special Collections and University Archives. Please join us to hear these poignant, humorous, nostalgic, and life-affirming messages from San Diegans who didn’t know they would one day become “The Greatest Generation”. The “Hops + History: Letters from the War” will be held Friday, February 21st with a reception at 5:30 p.m. and the readings beginning promptly at 6:00 pm. This will be an evening for adults to enjoy wine and cheese as Write Out Loud San Diego shares their talents. Tickets can be purchased online at www.coronadohistory.org, at the Museum Store, or by calling (619) 435-7242. Day: Choose a date 2020-02-21 Time: Choose a time 05:30:00 Member ($10.00 each): Non-Member ($15.00 each): Historic Walking Tour 2020 Night at the Museum: Letters from Coronado Wine & Lecture: History of North Island with Dave Landon	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line676
__label__cc	0.598806	0.401194	INSIDE REAL ESTATE INSIDE DESIGN Search for a real estate expert Search for an interior design expert Home / Featured Estate LATEST NEWS Furniture Search by Post Title or Keyword Select Market SELECT Alabama Arizona California Canada Colorado Florida Georgia New Mexico New York North Carolina Pennsylvania South Carolina Washington January 6, 2019 / Laura Schreffler Alec Monopoly On His Haute Art Collaboration With The Beverly Hills Hotel November 7, 2018 / Adam Lehrer Los Angeles Tuscan Style Villa ONE Sotheby’s International Expands Into The Delray Beach and Boca Raton Market September 14, 2017 / Madison Williams This Fireplace Is Perfect For The City August 31, 2017 / Madison Williams 15th London Design Festival Is About To Change The Game…Again August 8, 2017 / Madison Williams Cassina, Crafting 90 Years of Contemporary Classics Haute Residence is a luxe digital platform for real estate and interior design connoisseurs. As a leading real estate, design and architectural platform, Haute Residence connects affluent readers with the most powerful and renowned agents, developers and designers. The elite, expert-curated platform offers the latest in real estate and design news, showcasing the world's most extraordinary residences and projects on the market. Haute Media Group 3050 Biscayne Blvd. #400 Subscribe to get the latest Haute Living Real Estate Network news delivered straight to your inbox. LUXURY AGENT CORNER FEATURED ESTATES All content and source © 2020 Haute Residence Haute Residence is brought to you by Haute Media Group \| Disclaimer Subscribe for Haute Residence News Email Preference Select HTML Plain Text Birthdate Month 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 Day 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Year 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973 1972 1971 1970 1969 1968 1967 1966 1965 1964 1963 1962 1961 1960 1959 1958 1957 1956 1955 1954 1953 1952 1951 1950 1949 1948 1947 1946 1945 1944 1943 1942 1941 1940 1939 1938 1937 1936 1935 1934 1933 1932 1931 1930 1929 1928 1927 1926 1925 1924 1923 1922 1921 1920 1919 1918 1917 1916 1915 1914 1913 1912 1911 1910 1909 1908 1907 1906 1905 1904 1903 1902 1901 1900 Gender Select Male Female Income Range Select Under $50K $50-100K $100-250K $250-500K $500-1 million $1 mill to 2.5 million Over $2.5 million	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line681
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__label__wiki	0.834361	0.834361	The West’s Hysterical Pseudo-Environment, Operation RYAN, and World War III by Walter C. Uhler / July 26th, 2014 “In the period from July 14th to 19th, 2014 we witness a catastrophic increase (of 3473 people, or 47%) in the number of deserters in the units of the Army and the National Guard – in comparison with last week’s numbers (1847 people, 25%). Apart from that, during the stated period the number of missing in action had increased as well (1344 people, 47%, last week – 344 people, 10%). This phenomenon is connected to increased activity of the enemy in the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions as well as to the increase in the number of casualties in the ranks of the above-mentioned structures. This fact [negatively] influences the combat-worthiness of the personnel and makes continuation of the ATO [Anti-Terrorist Operation] impossible. In the event the negative trend continues at the same level, I estimate that 2/3 of the active combat military units currently participating in the ATO will simply cease to exist in as little as 4 to 5 days. With the aim of preserving the combat potential of our military structures, I am proposing that we perform a withdrawal maneuver of our militarily units to the area around Dobropil’ya and Smolyaninove. After replenishment of the ammunition stocks, re-grouping as well as rotation of the personnel by at least 60%, we can continue the offensive. The Head of the Ukrainian Security Service of Ukraine, V. Nalyvaichenko” This memo appeared on the website called The Vineyard of the Saker on July 25, 2014. It appears to be evidence indicating that Kiev’s military forces, fighting in eastern Ukraine, are on the verge of disintegration. Perhaps that explains why, as Natalia Zinets of the Independent.ie reported on July 22nd, “Ukraine’s parliament approved a presidential decree to call up more military reserves and men under 50 to fight rebels in eastern Ukraine and defend the border against a concentration of troops in Russia. But, you can rest assured that this memo will not find its way into broadcasts by any of the major U.S. news networks or into the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Yet, curiously, on July 24th the Post published an editorial titled, “If the West doesn’t do more for Ukraine now, it might soon be too late.” On the 25th the Times published an article stating that the Ukrainian government believes that it can defeat the separatists within 3 weeks or so, if Russia doesn’t get more involved. Such is the “fog of war.” (The neoconservatives at the Post showed their true militaristic colors when they asserted: “Incredibly, the European Union’s position — tacitly supported by Mr. Obama — is that the Ukrainian government should stop attempting to expel the invaders from its territory and instead negotiate with them about the political future of Ukraine. Fortunately, newly elected President Petro Poroshenko has not capitulated to this appeasement strategy.” (My emphasis.) Nevertheless, no serious person should assume that V. Nalyvaichenko’s memo constitutes actual evidence. It might have been fabricated by some propagandist among the separatists or by someone in Moscow. It is just one more assertion of evidence that must vetted and put into context before being deemed to be evidence. Yet, Western journalists, politicians and their spokespersons have been filling newspapers, internet sites, news briefings and TV broadcasts with breathless assertions of evidence indicating that either the eastern Ukrainian separatists or Russians assisting those separatists shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014. Very few of them seem to know the difference between mere assertions of evidence and actual evidence. Yet, by uncritically accepting mere assertions of evidence in the absence of evidence, these journalists, politicians and spokespersons have begun to create what Walter Lippmann called a “pseudo-environment,” one which some observers openly and gleefully admit is pummeling Russia with blame, even before an unbiased investigation has commenced. For example, when spokespersons representing the coup regime in Kiev rushed to assert that Kiev had evidence proving the separatists or Russia shot down Flight MH17, reporters from the mainstream news media correctly reported those assertions as news. Some even acknowledged that the evidence was uncorroborated. Soon, however, western reporters and columnists began to treat those mere assertions as if they were the truth. Later in the afternoon of July 17th, when the U.S. government claimed that Flight MH17 had been shot down, reporters mistakenly treated that mere assertion of evidence as actual evidence. On Friday, July 18th, President Obama asserted that MH17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile that was fired from “territory that is controlled by Russian separatists.” Again western reporters from around the world treated that mere assertion of evidence as actual evidence. Fortunately, on July 24th, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister, Anatoly Antonov asked the White House questions that western reporters failed to ask: “So where is this evidence?” “Why is it not presented to the public? Is it, if I may say so, still being finished off?” Seven days after Obama’s assertion, the world still waits for the evidence. Think about it. Had the U.S. possessed the actual evidence to support its allegation, wouldn’t it have been eager to show such evidence to the entire world? Then, there is the report by Olga Ivshina of the BBC, which was subsequently retracted. As part of her report, Ms. Ivshina claimed: “The inhabitants of the nearby villages are certain that they saw military aircraft in the sky shortly prior to the catastrophe. According to them, it actually was the jet fighters that brought down the Boeing.” This is at least the second time that the BBC appears to have slanted its reporting, in order to tow the political line of the British government. The first time, as reported by Stephen Shenfield on June 19th, was when the BBC deliberately refused to report the Pravyi Sektor massacre of anti-Kiev protesters in Odessa on May 2nd. On July 21st, four days after the downing of the airliner Russia’s Ministry of Defense offered to the world satellite photos of Buk missiles located in territory controlled by Kiev’s coup regime. Those photos might constitute evidence, but I’m in no position to judge. Thus, they remain mere assertions of evidence. On July 22nd, U.S. intelligence admitted that it had no evidence directly linking Russia to the plane crash, notwithstanding such incessant claims by Kiev’s coup regime. Why, then, if it takes time to sift for evidence, did western reporters treat the almost instantaneous assertions of evidence made by the Kiev’s coup regime as actual evidence? Kiev routinely attempts to “frame” world opinion by publicly calling the separatists in eastern Ukraine “terrorists.” It’s pure propaganda. Real “terrorists” would be attempting to blow up people and buildings in Kiev and Lviv (the bastion of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party) – rather than simply taking up arms to defend themselves in their home towns. Moreover, the coup regime in Kiev routinely lies when it denies that their military is responsible for the aerial assaults and artillery bombardments that dismember and kill innocent civilians, including women and children in eastern Ukraine. Even the New York Times, which competes with the Washington Post to be the strongest anti-Russia propaganda bullhorn outside of the Oval Office, admits, “The government in Kiev is prosecuting a war here, and civilians are suffering as a result, their minds hardening.” (July 22, 2014) Nevertheless, western reporters and commentators continue to treat assertions of evidence by Kiev’s coup regime as actual evidence. Apparently, these reporters had failed to read their Walter Lippmann: “The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” (Public Opinion, p 226). To this day, there has been little bringing to light the hidden facts and almost no setting them in relation with each other. Consider the case of Anna Applebaum, a writer for the neo-conservative editorial board of the Washington Post. On July 20th she wrote a column titled, “Look at what Russia has done. Its proxy war in Ukraine has become a real war.” As she states at the outset: “Before there is any further discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, an operation deliberately designed to create legal, political and military chaos. Without this chaos, a surface-to-air missile would not have been fired at a passenger plane…” “With the help of local thugs, these Russian security men besieged police stations, government offices and other symbols of political authority to delegitimize the Ukrainian state.” “Delegitimize the Ukrainian State?” Why, the bulk of the government, as it now exists in Kiev, came to power as the result of a coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych! That is why I sent her the following email: “Dear Ms. Applebaum: I like your logic: “This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine.” Unfortunately, you failed to extend the logic far enough: “This plane crash is a result of an American-inspired and Pravy Sektor led anti-Russia coup in Kiev that toppled a democratically elected government and prompted citizens in Crimea and eastern Ukraine to bid adieu. Walter C. Uhler” Ms. Applebaum also asserted: “Just for the record: There weren’t any Ukrainian government-controlled anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine because the separatists were not flying airplanes.” But, how could she possibly know? Where’s her actual evidence? Especially now that Russia’s Ministry of Defense has offered satellite photos to support allegations that “on the day of the accident the Ukrainian Armed Forces deployed 3 to 4 artillery battalions of Buk-M1 missile system not far from Donetsk.” Like Ms. Applebaum at the Post, the “philosopher” Bernard-Henri Levy and the “scholar” Timothy Garton Ash have recently and further defiled the pages of the New York Times with their hysterical rubbish. Professor Ash even stooped to mention the “rather ratlike face” of President Putin. But, just as we can get a fix on Ms. Applebaum’s objectivity by noting that she’s married to Poland’s foreign minister, we also can get a fix on Professor Ash, by noting his ties to the far right-wing Hoover Institution. On July 20th, Trudy Rubin, the “Worldview” columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a column titled, “After plane horror, Europe must stand up to Putin.” A true believer like Ms. Applebaum and most group-think western journalists, Ms. Rubin asserted: “More than 200 European civilians, along with dozens of Aussies, Asians, and North Americans, lie dead because of Putin’s determination to force Ukraine to join a new Russian empire.” Conveniently, she had forgotten that it was European Union, not Russia, that initially told Ukraine it must choose between Europe’s economic organization and Russia’s. Conveniently, she had forgotten that, when President Yanukovych violated his earlier pledge to join the EU and chose Russia – largely because its short term economic deal was significantly better — American government officials violated Ukraine’s sovereignty by joining protesters who opposed Yanukovych’s volte-face. Conveniently, she had forgotten that the American-inspired and neo-Nazi Pravyi Sektor-led coup spurred a backlash in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Having forgotten all those intermediate events, Ms. Rubin then remembered that Russia was allowing, if not actually providing, assistance to the separatists, who shot down the airliner. Worse, Ms. Rubin then turned into a spokesperson for Kiev’s coup regime. She actually wrote, “The Ukrainian government insists that Russian trainers and military were behind all the shootdowns, military and civilian.” Like so many other poorly trained western journalists, Ms. Rubin misconstrued Kiev’s assertions of evidence to constitute actual evidence. Unfortunately for her credibility, on July 22nd U.S. officials asserted that they had found no evidence directly linking Russia to the Malaysia plane crash. But, even before the U.S. made its determination, I sent an email to Ms. Rubin that challenged her assertions. It reads as follows: “Dear Ms. Rubin: I’ve been reading your work on the conflict in Ukraine and, as a person who has studied Russia for more than 40 years, I find it extremely biased and lacking in historical perspective. Anti-Russia and anti-Putin invective appears to fill the gaps in your education. (I’m not a fan of Vladimir Putin. He had my friend, Igor Sutyagin, arrested. But, I’m not hysterical.) For your information, Robert Parry, who is at least as trustworthy as you, wrote this yesterday: ‘Regarding the shoot-down of the Malaysian jetliner on Thursday, I’m told that some CIA analysts cite U.S. satellite reconnaissance photos suggesting that the anti-aircraft missile that brought down Flight 17 was fired by Ukrainian troops from a government battery, not by ethnic Russian rebels who have been resisting the regime in Kiev since elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown on Feb. 22.’ ‘According to a source briefed on the tentative findings, the soldiers manning the battery appeared to be wearing Ukrainian uniforms and may have been drinking, since what looked like beer bottles were scattered around the site. But the source added that the information was still incomplete and the analysts did not rule out the possibility of rebel responsibility.’ But, like most so-called journalists in the West’s mainstream media, you seem to have ruled out the possibility that the coup regime in Kiev — and that is precisely what it remains, notwithstanding the election of Poroshenko — fired the Buk missile. After all, the Russian Ministry of Defense has tracked down an operational Buk system under Ukrainian control near Stela, outside Donetsk. But this is the worst of your many sins: You’ve become a de facto spokesperson for the coup regime in Kiev. You’re as bad as the propagandists at RT! Walter C. Uhler “ To her credit, Ms. Rubin took the time to respond to my email. She wrote: “Dear Mr.Uhler: I think you have fallen victim to the kind of propaganda you accuse me of propagating. I read Parry’s piece. He is citing a second had unnamed source: ‘I’m told that some CIA analysts cite U.S. satellite reconnaissance photos” he says. That is meaningless. ‘I am told’…. ‘some CIA analysts’…this is weasel sourcing of the worst kind. U.S. satellite intelligence has determined the missile came from a rebel-held area, and that the Ukrainians didn’t have any BUK missiles in that area. Moreover, this is not a missile where you get drunk and just push a button: why on earth would Ukrainians go through the complex technical maneuvers of targeting a high-flying plane when the rebels don’t have an airforce. Even Parry undermines his own totally unsourced argument when he says : ‘Why the Ukrainian military would intentionally have aimed at a plane flying eastward toward Russia is hard to comprehend, however.’ Meantime, there is extensive factual evidence on the other side: the official Russian media websites and key rebel websites crowing about the shootdown (which were erased but widely viewed and photographed) cannot be denied. High flying Ukrainian planes had just been shot down at altitudes higher than the rebels claim to have the capacity to do. Rebel leaders admit they worked for the FSB and have Russian passports. One could go on and on and on. (I have been in Donetsk – the rebel leaders in now way represent the local people.) And of course there are satellite photos and audio taps of cell phones which I am certain the US is now verifying and will be laying out to Putin. No doubt he will deny everything, no matter the concrete facts, as he has done from the beginning. However, Russia propaganda from Putin on down is so absurd and hysterical – dead bodies on the planes??? trying to shootdown Putin’s plane???!!! – and so out there for all to see, that why should one believe anything the Kremlin says? After all, Putin consistently lied about the Russian troops presence in Crimea even as international journalists were photographing and interviewing Russian special forces. As for the alleged ‘coup’ and Neuland’s famous tape: obviously Parry has never even bothered to read the text which is readily available on the web: she was speaking not of overthrowing Yanukovych but of something totally other: Yanukovych’s prime minister had quit and he was making a deal with the opposition as to which of them would be appointed PM, but the opposition was still debating – she thought Yatsenyuk would be the better choice. Russia is seeking to destabilize Ukraine, and that policy is directed from the Kremlin: it does not take a rocket scientist to see this. Parry’s piece is simply his opinion, backed by nothing. And his call to ‘wait for an investigation’ is undercut by the fact that Russian-backed rebels are preventing access to the site and removing evidence. Trudy Rubin Worldview columnist The Philadelphia Inquirer” I didn’t know that the U.S. would admit that it had no evidence linking Russia to the downing of Flight MH17 when I responded to Ms. Rubin’s email. Neither did I know that U.S. intelligence officials would lend credence to Robert Parry’s reporting when they acknowledged that “it was possible the SA-11 [Buk] was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.” (Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2014) So I responded to Ms. Rubin by writing the following: “Ms. Rubin: Thank you for taking the time to respond. Unfortunately, you still seem to be missing the point. Assertions of evidence, whether they be by Robert Parry, Russia’s Ministry of Defense or our intelligence agencies is [sic] quite different from actual evidence. Need I remind you of Colin Powell’s debacle at the UN regarding Iraq’s so-called WMDs? You have no true evidence, neither do I. Yet, you’ve jumped to the gun as an apologist for Kiev’s coup regime. Had you read my latest article, you would know that I remain agnostic — and you could have saved yourself the time you took to tell me things that I’ve already written about. (Believe it or not, my views have captured the attention of the folks at RT and at the VOA — who both sought interviews — not to mention my many regular readers around the world.) One final word: Jake Kipp, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on Russia’s military, wrote to me yesterday to remind me that: “What I’d like folks to remember is that at the height of anti-Soviet sentiment after KAL-007 the Soviet leadership launched Operation RYAN (Raketnoe Yadernoe Napadanie) in search of evidence of a planned US nuclear first strike. Russian rhetoric right now has a lot of talk of a Third World War and Putin has carried out a number of strategic nuclear alerts involving the launching of ICBMs, SLBMs, Cruise Missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles.” Be careful about what you write! To make matters worse for Ms. Rubin’s credibility, one day after she claimed: “I have been in Donetsk – the rebel leaders in now [sic] way represent the local people,” Professor Ivan Katchanovski wrote an article in the Washington Post titled, “What do citizens of Ukraine actually think about secession?” It was based upon the results of a recent survey. Among his findings was the following: “A survey, which was conducted for my research project by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in Ukraine, except Crimea, from April 29 to May 11, shows that the representation of separatism in Donbas by the Ukrainian and the Western governments and the media as small groups of Russian military intelligence agents and local “terrorists” or “rebels” who lack popular backing in this region and, therefore, can be easily defeated by force is unfounded. Most residents of Donbas supported different forms of separatism (54 percent). This survey also confirms that the lack of central government legitimacy in Donbas was a key reason for a single-digit voter turnout in the presidential election on May 25. About 70 percent of the respondents either did not plan to vote or did not know which candidate to support. Just 5 percent of residents in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions intended to vote for Petro Poroshenko, who won the election with 55 percent of the national vote.” Equally significant is Professor Katchanovski’s conclusion about the type of conflict currently embroiling eastern Ukraine. “Some political scientists specializing in Ukraine warned before or at the start of the conflict about possibilities of civil war and the breakup of the country, but such expert conclusions went unheeded. Now, civil war and a de facto breakup of Ukraine have taken place. Attempts to solve the conflict in Donbas by force will lead to mounting casualties among civilians, Ukrainian forces and armed separatists. Even a military defeat of separatists is unlikely to end the conflict because it reflects significant regional divisions since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, including a history of separatism in Crimea and Donbas. And Russia, with significant military, political, and economic leverage over Ukraine, is there to stay.” What Professor Katchanovski failed to say (and what Jake Kipp only hinted at) is that the hysterical pseudo-environment now being created in the West could precipitate World War III. On September 24, 2002, I wrote an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled, “Asking the Question of Preemption: A Crazy Policy in a World Set to Go Off.” The objective of the article was to warn Americans – at a time when the Bush administration was hyping dubious intelligence about Iraq — that the Soviet Union came close to launching a preemptive nuclear strike on America and Europe in 1983, due to dubious intelligence. In 1981, after the election of President Reagan, the KGB’s Yuri Andropov ordered the implementation of “Operation RYAN,” (Raketnoe Yadernoe Napadanie, nuclear missile attack), which was tasked with collecting intelligence that indicated that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. The decision to deploy Pershing II nuclear missiles in West Germany, thereby giving the Soviet Union but a few minutes to respond to a nuclear attack, increased the importance of Operation RYAN. But matters reached a feverish pitch in 1983 due to outrageous American rhetoric. First, there was President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech. Second was his “Star Wars” speech. Third was American-led hysterics about the shootdown of KAL 007. In that super-heated atmosphere, the KGB came to believe that a preemptive nuclear strike might occur under the cover of the Able Archer military exercise that U.S.-NATO forces were then conducting that November. Moscow’s KGB center issued a flash alert for all information indicating that the United States was preparing an imminent nuclear strike. According to Professor Beth Fischer (in her book The Reagan Reversal), Moscow upgraded “the alert status of twelve of its nuclear-capable fighter aircraft” and “in East Germany and Poland, Soviet forces began to prepare for a retaliatory nuclear strike.” Fortunately, the crisis subsided. But, why the Soviet Union did not launch a preemptive strike of its own remains an open question. After all, as Fischer correctly notes, “prevailing nuclear doctrine at the time held that in the face of an impending nuclear attack, the Soviets should have sought to avoid disaster by launching a preemptive nuclear attack of their own.” (“Asking the Question of Preemption”) The hostile pseudo-environment now being created by irresponsible western politicians, spokespersons and reporters — who can’t differentiate assertions of evidence from actual evidence — seems similar to that which the U.S. created in 1983. Thus, Jake Kipp’s warning bears repeating: “Russian rhetoric right now has a lot of talk of a Third World War and Putin has carried out a number of strategic nuclear alerts involving the launching of ICBMs, SLBMs, Cruise Missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles.” But we are not the only people concerned about an impending World War III. The renowned Russia scholar, Steve Cohen, fears the possibility and Jacob Heilbrunn has written an article titled: “The Ukraine Plane Disaster: Countdown to A New World War I?” Finally, Robert W. Merry has recently written an article titled, “The Ghosts of World War I Circle over Ukraine.” Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including Dissident Voice, The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA). He can be reached at: waltuhler@aol.com. Read other articles by Walter C., or visit Walter C.'s website. This article was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2014 at 6:04am and is filed under Fascism, Imperialism, Propaganda, Russia, Ukraine.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line684
__label__cc	0.64579	0.35421	Contact Us / Donate Zelda Robinson is a Southern Girl with a Northern flair. She graduated from Columbia College with a degree in Broadcast Communications and is a retired Radio Personality. She is a Global Speaker/Trainer/Author/TV Producer /Media Consultant specializing in Health & Wellness! She is CEO of Zelda Robinson Communications. a consulting company specializing in Mindfulness Training in the corporate and educational markets. She designed a Mindfulness Breakthrough System a series of techniques that teaches one how to overcome daily challenges, increasing wellness and productivity in the workplace/personal space. She has authored 3 books, and including the recent launch of her second ebook, Diabetic Donut: How To Reverse Type 2 Diabetes. Additionally she has garnered 10+ accolades for her dedication to and involvement with organizations centered on philanthropy, radio, women’s empowerment, and more. Her gift of the spoken word has taken her from behind the scenes in radio/tv, into the community to help restore balance in the world. For more information on Zelda’s story and/or information on speaking engagements, events, and work, visit Zelda Speaks and All About Zelda. View facebook.com/Diabetic.DonutABC’s profile on Facebook A portion of proceeds from donations go to Zelda’s charities, the European American Association and The Higher Learning Network,NFP (Teaches Youth Behind-The-Scenes Radio/TV/Print Production!), both 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organizations. Visit Higher Learning Network & European American Association for more details. Click the button below to donate through PayPal’s secure donations server. Click the above photo for an often-updated event calendar courtesy of Zelda Robinson.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line686
__label__cc	0.501457	0.498543	National Institute of Labour Studies Australian Bulletin of Labour Vol. 36 No. 3 2010 Symposium 4: Australia's Other Two-Speed Economy: Gender, Employment and Earnings in the Slow Lane Jefferson, Therese Preston, Alison Talk of a 'two-speed economy' was prevalent in Australia in the first half of 2010. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry argued against a significant increase in the minimum wage on the basis that most minimum wage earners were employed in the 'slower' sectors of the Australian economy, where employers could not afford increased employment costs. This article considers the recent Fair Work Australia wage decision in the context of the argument that Australia has a two-speed economy. Using earnings and employment data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we find that it is possible to identify significantly different patterns to the earnings outcomes experienced within specific sections of the Australian economy. There are some clear 'tracks', particularly between men and women in the private sector. The data suggest that the recent minimum wage decision will play an important role in countering labour market inequities, particularly those that are evident in Australia's gender pay gap. Further work remains to be done, however, and the forthcoming equal remuneration case will provide a further opportunity for Fair Work Australia to contribute to gender pay equity in Australia.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line690
__label__cc	0.715651	0.284349	DTU Science Park Meet the companies DanskEnglish Futurebox DTU Science Park > News > Entrepreneurship thriving in Denmark – but we should not be blinded by the success Entrepreneurship thriving in Denmark – but we should not be blinded by the success Article published by DTU Science Park in collaboration with the Vaekstfonden. The article is part of the Vaekstfonden’s report From startup to scaleup, which was handed out at this year’s TechBBQ. The Danish Chamber of Commerce states that 36,400 new Danish companies were established in 2018, which is a record number compared to previous years and a clear sign that entrepreneurship is thriving in Denmark. With a well-developed and supportive ecosystem where Danish startups can grow, and with stories of startups like Tradeshift and Trustpilot that in a matter of only a few years are close to having evolved into ‘unicorns’, it looks like a recipe for success. According to Vaekstfonden, the 100% digital companies experience the most rapid growth. But we must not be blinded by this success – because while entrepreneurship is well established in Denmark, there are still too few new companies that actually become large companies and it generally still takes a very long time to get there. According to Vaekstfonden, the average age for companies in Denmark with more than 1,000 employees is approximately 90 years, and in 2015 only 450 Danish companies had a turnover of more than DKK 1 billion. Although we have recently seen some businesses grow into large companies over the span of only a few years, the general rule is still that it takes many years to upscale a business to just 200 employees. This is particularly true for the more technology-intensive companies. Unlike the purely digital companies, there are thus many others who find that it can take more than ten years to create a concept, develop a product, and cultivate a market before actually experiencing real growth. Vaekstfonden describes this process as the long haul. Long haul for deep tech companies The long haul is characterized by a long, complicated, and costly development phase and a more difficult and demanding upscale, thus also requiring more funds. For many of these companies, it takes 5, 10, 15 years or more to really get going and experience serious growth. On the other hand, once successful, these companies often create a lot of jobs, have great impact, and often incorporate in their business a goal of transforming and improving the world. Such companies often fall into the ‘deep tech’ category. DTU Science Park works with deep tech companies. Together with the entire DTU ecosystem, we are trying to create a deep tech ecosystem that nurtures development, growth, and upscaling for deep tech companies. With DTU as a stronghold for talent and knowledge that helps to create new startups, players such as DTU Skylab and Danish Tech Challenge which builds up and further develops early-stage startups, and DTU Science Park which houses, supports, and stimulates research-intensive businesses and startups, the aim is to ensure optimum development conditions for deep tech startups and companies. The Danish Tech Challenge supports ambitious deep tech startups Among other things, DTU Science Park has held the Danish Tech Challenge (DTC) in collaboration with the Danish Industry Foundation for the past five years. Danish Tech Challenge is a four-month accelerator programme for early-stage hardware and deep tech startups. The accelerator programme started in 2014 with the aim of working with and provide resources for deep tech startups. This is done through a tailor-made programme, where skills, experience, and know-how supports the selected startups, so that the long development and growth phases can hopefully be shortened. 100 startups have been through the programme since 2014, and each year a jury of investors, serial entrepreneurs, and others from the ecosystem select the 20 most ambitious and promising early-stage deep tech startups from a list of more than 100 potential participants for the Danish Tech Challenge. This means that some of the best Danish early-stage deep tech startups are given the opportunity to participate. But being in the right environment and being supported with the right skills and know-how is one thing – it is just as important to get funding and establish a capital base for your startup. And, unfortunately, we experience significant challenges in this area, because although these companies attract investors, they do not build enough capital. And without funding, it is often very difficult to develop a company and, not least, to upscale it. Difficulty financing deep tech-startups In 2019, DTU Science Park and the Danish Tech Challenge conducted a quantitative analysis of the 100 startups that have participated in the accelerator programme since 2014. The purpose of the analysis was to gain a better insight into the development, growth, and performance of these companies. Capital acquisition was one of the key elements of the study. The figure below shows the total amount of funding received by early-stage deep tech startups from the Danish Tech Challenge and where the funds come from: On average, companies are just over four years old and the survival rate of the companies that participated in the DTC is 93%—significantly above the general average. Together, the 93 surviving companies have created more than 500 new jobs and several of them have begun to create revenue. However, as shown in the figure above, the 93 companies received only DKK 650,648,841 million in funding. Approximately 55% of the funding is soft funding such as donations, help from family and friends, and other types of soft funding, and 45% is hard funding such as angel capitals, venture capitals, and banks. At first glance, those numbers are fine. The interest in these companies from funds, investors, and banks demonstrates their high level of innovation as well as their growth potential. However, a closer look at the numbers reveals that getting funding for deep tech startups is still very difficult. In 2018, the Danish Venture Capital & Private Equity Association uncovered the largest investment rounds in 10 Danish companies. The majority of these were in the software and IT fields. Together, they raised nearly DKK 4 billion in 2018 alone. These companies are, of course, long past the early stage and have a product, are in a market, experience traction in the form of sales and turnover, and are already good business yielding returns. But compared to the 100 Danish Tech Challenge deep tech startups, which are four years old on average (some in their first year and others in their tenth), the average funding for the 93 deep tech startups of approximately DKK 7 million is peanuts. In addition, the numbers also show that when the necessary funding needs to be raised, deep tech companies have to spend an extraordinarily long time seeking out a large number of funding sources. A total of seven different types of funding sources have been approached to ensure that the 93 deep tech startups could receive approximately DKK 650 million, and on average, the companies have used five different types of funding and have thus only acquired DKK 1.4 million from each source on average. When asked, the company founders estimated that they spend more than a third of their time raising funds instead of actually running the business. When looking at the overall amount of funding received by the 93 deep tech startups, the companies receive relatively small amounts from the various funding sources. For many of these more established deep tech startups, this means that raising funds is similar to bootstrapping, despite the fact that these companies are looking for and need more solid amounts. The downside is thus that the process of developing and growing these companies, which is already long, is extended even further. This means that the risk of investing in these companies is estimated as being higher, and thus it becomes even harder for deep tech companies to raise capital. And that is in spite of the high survival rate, positive development, and potential of many of these companies. Self-fulfilling prophecy A closer look at the numbers also reveals that the deep tech area is difficult to navigate, and that the fundraising challenge does not make it easier. Due to the complexity of the deep tech companies, the long development phases, and the slow upscaling, it is difficult to raise funds and to raise large sums in one go. And that is a problem taking into account that some of these companies are supposed to grow into tomorrow’s Danish industrial companies. With funding difficulties, the prophecy that deep tech/hardware takes a long time to grow becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, more money and more patience from foundations, investors, and other players in the finance environment could shorten the long development phases of deep tech startups and thus contribute to the creation future industrial companies and solid returns. In other words, it is often better business to invest large amounts at a higher valuation than low amounts at a lower evaluation. We need a bolder funding system Deep tech startups are important to Denmark. With the climate and the UN Sustainable Development Goals on the political agenda, and with a Danish industry that wants Danish companies to solve major global problems and be global frontrunners, we need the technology-intensive startups that will find solutions to the key challenges of the future. But someone needs to have the courage to capitalize these companies, despite the greater risks and longer development and growth phases. The lack of appetite for investment in deep tech companies on sensible terms is, unfortunately, increasingly forcing these companies to look abroad, and at DTU Science Park, we see that more and more companies are looking for investors overseas. And with good reason. For example, a report shows that 16 early-stage startups from the Lund University environment have raised more than SEK 1.2 billion over the past four years just from the Swedish stock exchange—i.e. more than DKK 50 million per company on average. With a more courageous funding system that will capitalize deep tech startups and give them some resources to work with, perhaps some of the long development and growth phases would be shorter. And after all, this would benefit both Danish deep tech startups and the Danish business community. Read more about Danish Tech Challenge [1]Dansk Erhverv: https://www.danskerhverv.dk/presse-og-nyheder/nyheder/analyse—rekordmange-nye-virksomheder/ [2] Vækstfonden: ”Hvordan og hvor hurtigt bliver virksomheder store” [3] DVCA: ”Udlandet løfter danske startups til unicorn-status” DTU Science Park, Hørsholm Agern Allé 24 DTU Science Park, Lyngby Diplomvej 381 Elektrovej 331 Go to Futurebox Go to Danish Tech Challenge © DTU Science Park - 2020 CVR 27546439 EAN 5790002263125 Cookie policy Privacy policy We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that your are happy with it.Ok	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line692
__label__wiki	0.806955	0.806955	Content Value Protection Sports OTT Streaming Business Performance, Data and AI Forensic Watermarking Anti-Piracy Services Direct-to-TV Secure Connected Home Telco IPTV Broadcast Pay-TV OTT Pure Play Direct-to-Consumer SVOD Streaming Direct-to-Consumer Sports OTT Streaming Early Release & Digital Cinema Latest News, Articles, Blogs Why NAGRA KUDELSKI GROUP'S 2007 RESULTS MARKED BY STRONG TOP-LINE GROWTH AND LONG-TERM INVESTMENTS Strong top-line growth in all markets and particularly in Asia New contracts wins for Nagravision in Digital TV, Mobile TV and IPTV, and multiple successes in collaboration with OpenTV Global reach with 84 million active cards/devices for Nagra conditional access families in 2007 and 100 million cumulative device licences delivered by OpenTV Strongest ever progress and results for Nagra Public Access in 2007 Nagravision expects major migration to service model during 2008 Operational efficiency improvement and cost reduction initiatives launched to improve profitability (in million CHF) Revenues 925.8 694.3 +33.3 Gain on sale of subsidiary / other operating income 16.7 61.8 Total 942.5 756.2 +24.6 OIBDA 137.2 188.2 -27.1 EBIT 87.7 150.2 -41.6 Net Income 67.4 138.5 -51.3 Cheseaux, February 29, 2008– 2007 Kudelski Group results show a robust top line development with total revenues and other operating income reaching CHF 942.5 million, including organic growth and first-time OpenTV consolidation. This confirms the growth momentum of the last five years with a compounded annual growth rate at 25 percent. Continuous substantial investments in R&D and in new business areas as well as customer shifts to the service model and lower-than expected results of OpenTV affected profitability. The Group’s consolidated EBIT in 2007 was at CHF 87.7 million, down by 3.8 percent compared to 2006 EBIT adjusted for the gain on sale of Ticketcorner. The 2007 adjusted Group EBIT margin was 9.5 percent. Digital TV margin was 15.3 percent. Public Access EBIT margin confirms the improvement trend coming in at 11.5 percent. The consolidation of OpenTV had a dilutive effect on the 2007 EBIT contributing to a loss of CHF 7.6 million. In 2007, the Kudelski Group’s growth momentum has continued at a fast pace. The marketing of joint solutions with OpenTV has been successful and the integration visibly strengthens the Group’s global footprint and product offerings. Digital TV’s new business areas have exceeded by 18 percent the CHF 100 million revenue targets. Nagravision has also introduced two out of three of the latest smartcard families, and the company is continually reinforcing its anti-piracy activities, which have been successful in several countries such as the US, Canada, Italy and Switzerland, aiming to discourage future investments in this illegal industry. By acquiring the control of OpenTV in January 2007, the Kudelski Group changed its role in the digital TV industry. From a conditional access supplier, the Group is on the move to become a major player in the digital TV ecosystem and to address the new market trends. Such a fundamental transformation however leads to high transition costs in 2007 and 2008 for the development of end-to-end, pre-integrated solutions. The growing business opportunities in emerging markets and the trend of the US$ / CHF exchange rate have led the Kudelski Group to launch initiatives to improve its operational efficiency and its cost structure. As part of this initiative, the business portfolio, business priorities and investment schedules will be reviewed. Digital TV net revenues increased by 14.5 percent to CHF 573.4 million. European sales increased by 12.5 percent to CHF 322.0 million, with a well balanced distribution. Digital terrestrial operators as well as Eastern European satellite operators experienced a particularly strong growth, with sales doubling compared to the previous year. In the Americas, revenues were substantially stable at CHF 139.9 million. Strong growth in South America compensated for a volume decline in North America and the USD weakness. In 2007, South American operators generated more than half of the American revenues. Sales in Asia-Pacific and Africa increased by 56.5 percent to CHF 111.5 million, with a material increase of smart card sales in the Indian, South Korean and particularly in the Chinese markets. Digital TV’s new business areas exceeded by 18 percent the CHF 100 millionrevenue target for the full year. The Kudelski Group’s Conditional Access (CA) Modules are gaining traction beyond the traditional footprint and are starting to secure a significant presence in new promising markets such as Italy. In the advanced smart card business, The Group extended its presence in financial services and in the government segments. Further, it continuously expanded in the PVR/push VOD/EPG space, with, in particular, a strong adoption of the company’s NagraGuide solution. The MobileTV market saw major evolution in 2007. Nagravision confirmed its leadership position, with a DVB-H market share over 95 percent in number of users, mainly driven by its success with all operators in Italy, H3G, Vodafone and Telecom Italia. New contracts have been recently concluded with Vimpelcom and associated broadcaster partner Dominanta in Russia, Telefonica in Latin America, and T-Mobile in the Czech Republic. This leadership in DVB-H is starting to translate in early successes in related technologies like MediaFLO in the US and the Chinese domestic standard StiMi. The growth rate of IPTV continues to be significant. This growth will even further consolidate with the advent of Cable IPTV, an area where the increasing number of hybrid deployments use a combination of Nagravision broadband and broadcast technologies for pre-integrated solutions. Nagravision strengthened its position by continuing its relationship with Neuf Cegetel, one of the world five largest IPTV deployments. In digital cable TV, Nagravision confirmed its leadership in Europe, with 72 percent subscribers share, and Latin America with 50 percent of the subscriber share. The active collaboration between OpenTV and Nagravision has resulted in a growing number of contracts wins for OpenTV, including Numericable, Canal Digitaal, Reliance, Portugal Telecom and TV Cabo. New customer wins In Europe, Portugal Telecom has contracted Nagravision as its system integrator for its new DTH service to be launched in 2008. The deployment is based on an end-to-end Kudelski Group solution leveraging Nagravision CAS, OpenTV middleware with a powerful suite of interactive applications, the Quative back-end for interactive services and Lysis content management solution. TV Cabo has selected OpenTV middleware in combination with Nagravision's High Definition Guide for the launch of its high definition PVRs. Nagravision will provide end-to-end solutions for Mostelekom (Russia) for cable and IPTV networks, including Quative IPTV solutions as common IPTV and cable back-end solutions and Lysis content management. Additional contracts are currently under negotiation in Eastern Europe. In the Americas, TV Azteca, Mexico's second largest television broadcaster and one of the countries and regions largest conglomerates has selected the Nagravision CA for its next generation media platform. Two major Cable Multiple System Operators in Taiwan, Taiwan Fixed Networks Media (TFN Media) and Kbro jointly serving over 1.5 million subscribers have simultaneously selected Nagravision as their exclusive conditional access vendor going forward. Etisalat, a large innovative operator in the Middle East incumbent in the UAE with licenses in significant countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Atlantic Telecom (Africa), Sudatel and Canar Telecom (Sudan), Zanzibar (Tanzania), selected Nagravision for the first ever VOD platform deployed in the Middle East and a hybrid Content Management Platform addressing Etisalat Cable and IP customers for launch in the 2nd half of 2008. Public Access with strongest ever results In 2007, Public Access posted the best results in company history for the second year in a row and continued expanding its market share in a growing market. Public Access revenues reached CHF 224.3 million, 15.8 percent up from the previous year. EBIT increased by 46.3 percent reaching CHF 25.8 million. Sales increased across all regions. Europe was up 14.5 percent. The Americas grew by 14.6 percent to CHF 18.4 million and the Asia Pacific and Africa region was up 30.4 percent to CHF 19.5 million. Thus, over the last three years, extra-European Public Access share of sales has increased to 16.9 percent. SKIDATA has benefitted from a significant boost in its worldwide key account business and was able to leverage its core competence in response to a rising demand for large-scale integrated solutions and value-adding services. Performance was particularly strong in Asia, with sizeable follow-up projects in Japan and South Korea, as well as contracts for two major airports in India and further projects in preparation. In Europe, SKIDATA has opened new subsidiaries in Belgium and Spain to reinforce its market presence and strengthen its key account relationships. In North America, SKiDATA further developed its direct sales strategy for large-scale projects. In 2008 SKIDATA will open a subsidiary in Russia. Throughout 2007 SKIDATA continued its solid policy of R&D investment underscoring its recognition as a global innovation leader in the industry. The company received the prestigious Austrian innovation award for the FREEMOTION access gate for ski resorts. 2008 perspectives Over the last months, the Group has been actively promoting the migration of large digital TV customers to the service model to better align with customers’ incentives and to reduce the volatility of the Group’s revenue base. In 2008, the majority of the Group’s active devices are expected to be in the service model, due to the envisaged shift of close to 30 million smart cards to this model. With a resilient, secure solution, this model is expected to generate materially higher revenues per card, thus providing a favorable return on the company’s ongoing investments in new security solutions. The migration, however, will negatively impact the 2008 profit and loss account as the full revenues generated by the cards delivered this year will not be recognized. The Public Access segment expects a continuing growth for 2008. The corrective measures implemented over the last few months at OpenTV have delivered initial tangible results in the fourth quarter of 2007. In 2008, the Group expects further progress along the same lines, with the organizational changes, the ongoing operational improvement program and, in particular, the synergies with the Digital TV division, translating into a material profitability improvement. The Kudelski Group expects 2008 total revenues in the range of CHF 1’030 million to CHF 1’050 million and 2008 EBIT in a range between CHF 5 million and CHF 10 million. The Board of Directors of Kudelski SA proposes to the Annual General Meeting of April 22nd, 2008 the payment of a dividend of CHF 0.30 per bearer share and CHF 0.03 per registered share. The ex-date will be 25th April 2008. The 2007 Financial Report PDF is available on http://www.nagra.com/ar/2007/kudelski_rf_2007_en.pdf Santino Rumasuglia mail : santino.rumasuglia@nagra.com Rodolfo Ciucci mail : rodolfo.ciucci@nagra.com About the Kudelski Group The Kudelski Group (SWX: KUD.VX) is a world leader in digital security and convergent media solutions for the delivery of digital and interactive content. Its technologies are used in a wide range of services and applications requiring access control and rights management to secure the revenue of content owners and service providers for digital television and interactive applications across broadcast, broadband and mobile delivery networks. The Kudelski Group is also a world technology leader in the area of access control and management of people or vehicles to sites and events. It additionally offers professional recorders and high-end Hi-Fi products. The Kudelski Group is headquartered in Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, Switzerland. Please visit our website at www.nagra.com. This Press Release contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements that are predications of or indicate future events, trends, plans or objectives.these statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and could be affected by other factors that could cause actual results, plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Potential risks and uncertainties include such factors as general economic conditions, performance of financial market, competitive factors and changes in laws and regulations. © 2019 NAGRA / All Rights Reserved	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line693
__label__cc	0.72529	0.27471	Shifting Focus to the Gentlemen On January 24, 2018 August 11, 2018 By Donna F. G. HailsonIn Christian Faith, Sports A couple of days ago, I was so incensed over the barbaric conduct of some Philadelphia Eagles’ fans that I posted an article I have since taken down. I regret having shared it. The team shouldn’t be smeared by the brutish and boorish behavior of the few. Far better to focus on the gentlemen who are on the team who are worthy of respect. The article, to which I link here, highlights the faith of quarterback, Nick Foles who has described himself as a “Believer in Jesus Christ, husband, father, son, brother.” After the play-off victory against the Minnesota Vikings, Foles said: “First and foremost, all glory belongs to God. I wouldn’t be here without Him and this is just very humbling and unbelievable…I’m blessed to have amazing teammates, amazing coaches.” Foles took over the starting job in December when star quarterback Carson Wentz went down with a knee injury. Wentz has said, “I think the biggest thing that we’re always challenging each other with is just to not lose sight of the bigger picture. I think wins, losses, highs, lows, everything that comes with this game, it’s so easy to take your mind and your eyes off of the ultimate prize, and that’s living for the Lord.” See more here: https://stream.org/headed-super-bowl-eagles-qb/ Carson WentzChristian faithHonorable behaviorNick FolesPhiladelphia Eagles Go Play By Yourself: Friendships, Shutdowns and Quark The Stranger in the Woods…So Much to Ponder	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line700
__label__cc	0.721944	0.278056	Best Foot Forward: The Shoe Industry in Massachusetts Explore Exhibition Illustration from The Union boot and shoe worker, 1900-1902. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin via HathiTrust. In This Exhibition Early Shoemaking Workers' Lives Selling Shoes War Changes an Industry Cite this exhibition Fahey-Flynn, Anna. Best Foot Forward: The Shoe Industry in Massachusetts. Digital Public Library of America. September 2015. https://dp.la/exhibitions/shoe-industry-massachusetts. It was approximately 40,000 years ago that mankind first donned a pair of shoes. During humanity’s long history of footwear, and an equally broad array of styles, the basic fundamentals of Western shoemaking remained mostly unchanged until the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1800s, the small state of Massachusetts revolutionized the shoemaking industry, cladding the feet of consumers nationwide in unprecedented numbers. One of America’s original colonies, Massachusetts found itself at the heart of the nation’s shoemaking industry by attracting and retaining skilled shoemakers and shoe machinery engineers. Only when the technology that Massachusetts' shoemakers invented became available beyond the state did the industry’s market expand throughout the country. Even with the spread of industrialization, Massachusetts remained the largest producer of shoes in the United States through World War I, responsible for nearly forty percent of America’s shoes and home to an equal percentage of its shoemakers. Credit: This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA’s Public Library Partnerships Project by collaborators from Digital Commonwealth. Exhibition organizer: Anna Fahey-Flynn.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line703
__label__cc	0.635712	0.364288	Advancing equal rights for people with all types of disabilities nationwide. Coverage Archive DRA Video Archive Larry Paradis Legacy Fund Cy Pres Awards Hinkle, et al. v. Kent, et al. Click here for case documents Date Filed: 10/22/2018 Status: On October 18, 2018, DRA and a coalition of blind advocates filed a class action lawsuit in Federal Court against the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) and its county agents for failing to provide Medi-Cal notices in accessible formats, such as Braille. The plaintiffs are the California Council of the Blind and three individuals; co-counsel is the Disability Rights and Education Fund and Disability Rights California. Read the complaint below. When blind individuals request accessible versions of Medi-Cal notices, DHCS and its county agents either fail to provide accessible versions or fail to do so in a timely manner. For example, plaintiff Lena Hinkle waited more than eight months to receive a Braille version of a Medi-Cal notice containing time-sensitive information. This discrimination may cause blind Medi-Cal consumers to lose their benefits. Providing information to blind individuals in alternative formats such as Braille or large print is required by federal and California anti-discrimination laws. To solve the problem, DHCS and the counties need to (1) identify people who need communication in Braille or other accessible formats, and (2) respond appropriately to requests for accessible formats. Plaintiffs seek equal access to Medi-Cal for themselves and other blind consumers. Their ultimate goal is to ensure DHCS institutes a comprehensive remedial plan to properly identify and accommodate blind Medi-Cal consumers. California Council of the Blind (CCB) is a non-profit membership organization composed of Californians who are blind or have low vision. CCB’s mission is to gain full independence and equality of opportunity for all blind and visually impaired Californians. To read more about CCB visit: http://www.ccbnet.org/. Disability Rights Advocates (DRA), founded in 1993, is a nonprofit disability rights legal center that seeks to advance equal rights and opportunity for people with all types of disabilities nationwide. DRA represents people with all types of disabilities in complex, system-changing, class action cases. For more information, visit dralegal.org. Disability Rights California (DRC) Disability Rights California is a non-profit organization founded in 1978. DRC protects the rights of people with disabilities. For more information, visit disabilityrightsca.org. The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), founded in 1979, is a leading national civil rights law and policy center directed by individuals with disabilities and parents who have children with disabilities. DREDF engages in legal advocacy, training, education, and public policy and legislative development to ensure people with disabilities live full and independent lives free of discrimination. For more information, visit www.dredf.org. Disability: Blind/Low Vision Case Area: Healthcare, Public Entities Case Files Read the Complaint Press Releases Blind advocates challenge state’s failure to provide accessible forms of communication to blind Medi-Cal consumers Search Our Cases By Case Area Architectural Barriers Education/Schools Emergency Preparedness Employment Healthcare Housing Investigations Jails Juvenile Justice Private Business Public Entities Technology Transportation Vets Benefits Voting By Disability Blind/Low Vision Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing Developmental Learning Disability Mobility Other Disability Print Disability Psychiatric To stay informed of DRA's work please sign up to receive our e-newsletter. Company/Affiliation DRA does not charge its clients fees for representation. Please help us continue to improve the lives of people with all types of disabilities. 2 Personal Info Donation $100 $250 $500 $1,000 Other Amount Frequency One-time Monthly Yearly The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has preliminarily approved a class action settlement in Center for Independence of the Disabled New York (CIDNY), et al. v. City of New York, et al. If you are a person with a disability who used any of the City of New York’s ramps, cuts, or slopes where a pedestrian walkway crosses a curb (“Pedestrian Ramps”) since January 26, 1994, or if you believe that you will seek to use the City’s Pedestrian Ramps in the future, you may be a member of the settlement class affected by this lawsuit. Qualified disabilities may include, but are not limited to, mobility disabilities and vision disabilities. Please read the Notice of Proposed Settlement for information about the proposed settlement and class members’ rights. The period for class members to file objections ends on July 9, 2019. @dralegal Jan 17 ICYMI: "Even if the agency makes 66 additional stations #accessible by 2025, people in wheelchairs will still be un… https://t.co/9gfqSrHbUS © 2020 Disability Rights Advocates. All rights reserved. Website by Computer Courage.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line704
__label__wiki	0.909558	0.909558	London School of Medicine for Women The London School of Medicine for Women was founded in 1874 by pioneering female physicians including Sophia Jex-Black and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. It occupied a building on Hunter Street in Camden, north London. From 1877, students were able to pursue their clinical training at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London. In 1896, the school, now part of the University of London, was renamed the London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women. In 1998 it became part of the University College London Medical School. Longitude: -0.123635083437	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line707
__label__cc	0.721168	0.278832	Haridusvaldkonna doktor Osaajaga PhD Parim Parimad ülikoolid ja ärikoolid s Ülikoolid › Sellel lehel saate otsida Parimad ülikoolid ja ärikoolid s. Sa lihtsalt leida kogu informatsiooni top reastatud ülikoolides s. Vajuta "Loe lähemalt " üksikasjalikku kirjeldust ja ülikooli ülevaade õppeprogramme pakutakse.... Sellel lehel saate otsida Parimad ülikoolid ja ärikoolid s. Sa lihtsalt leida kogu informatsiooni top reastatud ülikoolides s. Vajuta "Loe lähemalt " üksikasjalikku kirjeldust ja ülikooli ülevaade õppeprogramme pakutakse. Leia ülikoolide ja sirvida nende programmide leida need, mis sobib teile kõige paremini. Saad kõik infot erinevate õpivõimalusi s ja võrrelge õppemaksu ja pikkuse uuring. Võite säästa aega ja kontakt ülikoolidega s otse: täitke "Soovin tasuta teavet " vormi, mis paneb teid kontakti ülestunnistusi kontoris. Start otsida oma tulevase hariduse kohe! Loe lisateavet riigis Ameerika Ühendriikides õppimise kohta Vali õppealad Koole ei leitud Tühjenda kõik Leitud koole: 1019 tulemust: {{ num_programs }} Rady School of Management The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego is a professional school within one of the top-ranked institutions in the U.S. for higher education and research. Established in 2003 and accredited by AA ... Loe edasi The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego is a professional school within one of the top-ranked institutions in the U.S. for higher education and research. Established in 2003 and accredited by AACSB International (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) in 2011, the Rady School is the only new business school created at a U.S. News & World Report top 10 ranked public research university during the past 30 years, and is one of the youngest in the nation ever to achieve AACSB recognition. Näita vähem Florida Polytechnic University Florida Polytechnic University is the newest member of the Florida State University System. We are strategically located in Lakeland, FL, on the I-4 high-tech corridor. Our location is essential becau ... Loe edasi Florida Polytechnic University is the newest member of the Florida State University System. We are strategically located in Lakeland, FL, on the I-4 high-tech corridor. Our location is essential because we will focus on STEM programs, specifically technology and engineering. Näita vähem Hult is not just a business school. It’s a global network that educates, inspires, and connects some of the most forward-thinking business talent from around the world. Hult is not just a business school. It’s a global network that educates, inspires, and connects some of the most forward-thinking business talent from around the world. Näita vähem London , Cambridge , San Francisco , Dubai , Shanghai , London , New York + 6 Rohkem Vähem Oxford International English Schools Welcome to Oxford International, where students have been learning English for over 29 years. We truly believe that whatever your level or learning goals, we have the best course possible to help you ... Loe edasi Welcome to Oxford International, where students have been learning English for over 29 years. We truly believe that whatever your level or learning goals, we have the best course possible to help you make real progress in your language skills. Näita vähem Oxford , London , Brighton , Toronto , Vancouver , San Diego + 5 Rohkem Vähem Oxford International Junior Programmes is part of the Oxford International Education Group. Oxford International was founded in 1991 as ISIS Education and Travel by David Brown and Robert Darell. Oxford International Junior Programmes is part of the Oxford International Education Group. Oxford International was founded in 1991 as ISIS Education and Travel by David Brown and Robert Darell. Näita vähem Greenwich , Horsham , London Colney , Hove , Oxford , San Diego , Toronto , Vancouver , Steep , Benenden , Sheffield , Egham , New Cross , Edinburgh , Liit , Cirencester , Toronto , Boston , Newhall , London , Eastbourne , Sparsholt , Guildford , Worcester + 23 Rohkem Vähem Bucksmore Education The story of Bucksmore Education begins in 1979 when British Educationalist Michael Reise founded a secondary school at Buckswood Grange. ‘Buckswood Summer Programmes’ was also established as a summer ... Loe edasi The story of Bucksmore Education begins in 1979 when British Educationalist Michael Reise founded a secondary school at Buckswood Grange. ‘Buckswood Summer Programmes’ was also established as a summer school for international students wanting to learn English. Näita vähem Greenwich , Wormley , Lewes , Cambridge , Oxford , London , New York , Tonbridge , Oxford , Oxford , Cambridge , Oxford + 11 Rohkem Vähem Loyola Law School Online Located on an award-winning Frank Gehry-designed campus in downtown Los Angeles, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles is home to prominent faculty, dedicated students and cutting-edge programs. The Law Scho ... Loe edasi Located on an award-winning Frank Gehry-designed campus in downtown Los Angeles, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles is home to prominent faculty, dedicated students and cutting-edge programs. The Law School strives to instill in students the knowledge they need to excel on their chosen paths. It dedicates itself to preparing students for the rigors of practice with an extensive portfolio of practical-training opportunities, an 18,000-strong alumni network and a focus on social justice. Näita vähem Saint Xavier University Online A Saint Xavier University education is one that is grounded in the tradition of liberal arts. SXU offers graduate and post-graduate programs that are recognized and respected by employers and delivere ... Loe edasi A Saint Xavier University education is one that is grounded in the tradition of liberal arts. SXU offers graduate and post-graduate programs that are recognized and respected by employers and delivered by professional faculty who are experts in their fields. Näita vähem Michigan State University Online For more than 80 years, Michigan State University (MSU) has prepared criminal justice professionals for successful careers. Experience our 100-percent-online master's degree programs in this growing f ... Loe edasi For more than 80 years, Michigan State University (MSU) has prepared criminal justice professionals for successful careers. Experience our 100-percent-online master's degree programs in this growing field and prepare for advancement, or start your career, without neglecting your personal and professional commitments. Näita vähem Ida-Lansing University of Colorado Denver Online Your busy life shouldn't be an obstacle to reach your goals. Wherever you are in your educational journey, wherever you are in the world, we have a program for you. Research the flexible degree and ce ... Loe edasi Your busy life shouldn't be an obstacle to reach your goals. Wherever you are in your educational journey, wherever you are in the world, we have a program for you. Research the flexible degree and certification options throughout the site that will fit into your life on your terms and on your device of choice. And the best part is ... you'll learn from the same CU faculty and earn the same CU degree as your on-campus classmates, but with the flexibility that you need. Näita vähem The mission of the USC Rossier School of Education (pronounced “ross-EAR”) is to prepare leaders to achieve educational equity through practice, research and policy. We work to improve learning opport ... Loe edasi The mission of the USC Rossier School of Education (pronounced “ross-EAR”) is to prepare leaders to achieve educational equity through practice, research and policy. We work to improve learning opportunities and outcomes in urban settings and to address disparities that affect historically marginalized groups. We teach our students to value and respect the cultural context of the communities in which they work and to interrogate the systems of power that shape policies and practices. Through innovative thinking and research, we strive to solve the most intractable educational problems. Näita vähem USA veebis Purdue University Online Purdue University offers a strong foundation of tradition and history, an environment of intellectual curiosity and discovery, and a supportive, student-centered approach to learning. Purdue University offers a strong foundation of tradition and history, an environment of intellectual curiosity and discovery, and a supportive, student-centered approach to learning. Näita vähem Lääne-Lafayette University of Delaware Online The University of Delaware’s tradition of proven academic excellence in online learning brings together expert faculty, experiential learning, and the flexible access online learning offers. The University of Delaware’s tradition of proven academic excellence in online learning brings together expert faculty, experiential learning, and the flexible access online learning offers. Näita vähem Utica College Online Utica College, founded in 1946, is a comprehensive private institution located in upstate central New York. The College offers regionally accredited online certificates, bachelors, masters, and docto ... Loe edasi Utica College, founded in 1946, is a comprehensive private institution located in upstate central New York. The College offers regionally accredited online certificates, bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in healthcare, cybersecurity, financial crime, nursing, physical therapy, business, criminal justice, and data science. All courses are taught by credentialed, highly experienced faculty with significant and ongoing accomplishments in their respective fields. Näita vähem Seton Hall University Online Founded in 1856, Seton Hall is one of the country’s leading Catholic universities. Rich in history, Seton Hall is also an institution on the rise. U.S. News ranks us among the top universities, and we ... Loe edasi Founded in 1856, Seton Hall is one of the country’s leading Catholic universities. Rich in history, Seton Hall is also an institution on the rise. U.S. News ranks us among the top universities, and we have moved up 13 places in just five years. Näita vähem Lõunaoranž Georgetown University Online Georgetown University is a private, not-for-profit, accredited university located in Washington, DC. Founded in 1789 by John Carroll, Georgetown is America’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit University. Tod ... Loe edasi Georgetown University is a private, not-for-profit, accredited university located in Washington, DC. Founded in 1789 by John Carroll, Georgetown is America’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit University. Today, Georgetown is a major international research university. It has nine schools, an affiliated hospital, and many highly-ranked graduate programs. Näita vähem University of California, Irvine - School of Law UC Irvine School of Law opened its doors to students in August 2009, the first new public law school in California in more than 40 years. UCI Law seeks to create the ideal law school for the 21st cent ... Loe edasi UC Irvine School of Law opened its doors to students in August 2009, the first new public law school in California in more than 40 years. UCI Law seeks to create the ideal law school for the 21st century by doing the best job of training lawyers for the practice of law at the highest levels of the profession. Recruited from prestigious schools, the faculty ranked sixth in the country in scholarly impact in a recent study. The student body has admissions qualifications comparable to those of student bodies at top 20 law schools. The school’s innovative curriculum stresses hands-on learning, interdisciplinary study, and public service. Näita vähem Youth for Understanding USA YFU’s distinctive brand of cultural exchange opens minds and hearts, enables learning that transforms lives, and ultimately helps to make us citizens of one world. While it is true that all travel bro ... Loe edasi YFU’s distinctive brand of cultural exchange opens minds and hearts, enables learning that transforms lives, and ultimately helps to make us citizens of one world. While it is true that all travel broadens perspective and exposes the traveler to new experiences, YFU’s programs transform who you are and permanently change the way you see. Näita vähem Unicaf University is a Pan African independent, recognised university, combining the best elements of international education, offering high quality internationally recognised qualifications. The Univ ... Loe edasi Unicaf University is a Pan African independent, recognised university, combining the best elements of international education, offering high quality internationally recognised qualifications. The University has branch campuses and or learning centres in 9 different countries in Africa and is registered and approved by the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) in Malawi and the Higher Education Authority of Zambia (HEA). Näita vähem New York , Ateena , Bukarest , London , Kairos , Accra , Lilongwe , Port Louis , Nairobi , Lagos , Mogadishu , Lusaka , Irbid , Küpros Online , Lilongwe + 14 Rohkem Vähem Larnaca , New York , Ateena , Bukarest , London , Kairos , Accra , Lilongwe , Port Louis , Nairobi , Lagos , Mogadishu , Lusaka , Irbid , Küpros Online + 14 Rohkem Vähem UNICAF - ACCA Lagos , New York , Ateena , Bukarest , London , Kairos , Accra , Lilongwe , Port Louis , Mogadishu , Lusaka , Irbid + 11 Rohkem Vähem Bentley University - McCallum Graduate School of Business Bentley University is one of the nation's leading business schools, dedicated to preparing a new kind of business leader and one with the deep technical skills, the broad global perspective and the hi ... Loe edasi Bentley University is one of the nation's leading business schools, dedicated to preparing a new kind of business leader and one with the deep technical skills, the broad global perspective and the high ethical standards required to make a difference in an ever-changing world. Näita vähem UC Berkeley School of Information UC Berkeley’s School of Information (I School) is the newest school at the university, featuring programs designed to prepare professionals to understand and use information to solve complex problems. ... Loe edasi UC Berkeley’s School of Information (I School) is the newest school at the university, featuring programs designed to prepare professionals to understand and use information to solve complex problems. With faculty who are experts in their fields, the I School offers on-campus master’s degree programs and a doctoral program as well as an online Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS). Näita vähem Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology (GSEP) provides innovative academic programs dedicated to building scholar-practitioners through hands-on learning. We shape individua ... Loe edasi Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology (GSEP) provides innovative academic programs dedicated to building scholar-practitioners through hands-on learning. We shape individuals who will be catalysts for inspiration and change. Näita vähem Syracuse University College of Engineering and Computer Science Syracuse University's College of Engineering and Computer Science offers online master’s degree programs in cybersecurity, computer engineering, and computer science. Syracuse University's College of Engineering and Computer Science offers online master’s degree programs in cybersecurity, computer engineering, and computer science. Näita vähem The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications; The Newhouse School; Newhouse The Newhouse School, the world’s premier school of communications, is offering an online Master of Science in Communications to students everywhere. The Newhouse School, the world’s premier school of communications, is offering an online Master of Science in Communications to students everywhere. Näita vähem UC San Diego School Of Global Policy & Strategy We are a true global society of faculty, staff, students and community partners dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through education and research — all with an eye on building a Pacific communi ... Loe edasi We are a true global society of faculty, staff, students and community partners dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through education and research — all with an eye on building a Pacific community. The school is anchored in the reputation and successes of UC San Diego and the University of California system. We are guided by individuals who strive to maintain a climate of fairness, cooperation and professionalism that is embodied in our ethical principles. Furthermore, we believe that diversity, equity and inclusion are essential ingredients of academic excellence. Näita vähem Wartburg College The liberal arts education you will receive at Wartburg allows you to not only gain the skills required from your chosen field of study, but also the critical thinking skills required to explore the e ... Loe edasi The liberal arts education you will receive at Wartburg allows you to not only gain the skills required from your chosen field of study, but also the critical thinking skills required to explore the ethics of decision-making and community engagement, effective communication, cultural competence, and collaboration. Näita vähem Laineliselt Epic Flight Academy Epic Flight Academy is strategically located at KEVB – New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport in Florida, USA. Flight training has been our focus at Epic Flight Academy since 1999, and we are proud of our ... Loe edasi Epic Flight Academy is strategically located at KEVB – New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport in Florida, USA. Flight training has been our focus at Epic Flight Academy since 1999, and we are proud of our continued growth and ability to provide students a pathway to achieving professional pilot dreams. Näita vähem Uus Smyrna rand California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is an innovative, forward-thinking university based in San Francisco, California. California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is an innovative, forward-thinking university based in San Francisco, California. Näita vähem Saint Mary's University of Minnesota Online At Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, we take pride in offering online graduate degrees designed to complement the schedules of working adults like you. At Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, we take pride in offering online graduate degrees designed to complement the schedules of working adults like you. Näita vähem Mantissa College Established on the values of being progressive, motivated and innovative, Mantissa College persistently contributed to nurturing students,in not only to be well qualified academically, but also to pos ... Loe edasi Established on the values of being progressive, motivated and innovative, Mantissa College persistently contributed to nurturing students,in not only to be well qualified academically, but also to possess a high level of competency in managerial skills. The institute will provide a solid platform for students to achieve their goal and gain success in the future, it was humbly founded in 1999 as an IT college and has never shied away from the challenges of educating the next generation, the nation’s leaders and knowledge workers. Näita vähem Kuala Lumpur , Fullerton + 1 Rohkem Vähem University of San Francisco - School of Management Be a leader. Build productive and compassionate organizations. Be a force for positive change in the world. Be a leader. Build productive and compassionate organizations. Be a force for positive change in the world. Näita vähem San Francisco , Barcelona , San Jose , Taipei + 3 Rohkem Vähem University of San Francisco - School of Education The School of Education celebrates four decades of involved teachers, devoted leaders and caring counselors. Our faculty and students are scholars and social justice advocates engaged within the diver ... Loe edasi The School of Education celebrates four decades of involved teachers, devoted leaders and caring counselors. Our faculty and students are scholars and social justice advocates engaged within the diverse San Francisco Bay area and beyond. Näita vähem San Francisco , San Jose , Sacramento , Santa Rosa + 3 Rohkem Vähem The Catholic University of America The Catholic University of America, founded in 1887 by the U.S. Catholic bishops with the support of Pope Leo XIII, is the national university of the Catholic Church in the United States. Established ... Loe edasi The Catholic University of America, founded in 1887 by the U.S. Catholic bishops with the support of Pope Leo XIII, is the national university of the Catholic Church in the United States. Established as a graduate research center, the University began offering undergraduate education in 1904 and today is home to 12 schools and 21 research facilities. Näita vähem University of San Francisco - College of Arts & Sciences As one of the country’s premier Jesuit Catholic universities, the College of Arts and Sciences pairs a rigorous academic curriculum with an urban, global perspective. The college's vision of success i ... Loe edasi As one of the country’s premier Jesuit Catholic universities, the College of Arts and Sciences pairs a rigorous academic curriculum with an urban, global perspective. The college's vision of success involves both the head and the heart, with outstanding faculty members giving students the skills and compassion to fashion a more just and humane world. Näita vähem San Francisco , Buenavista , Oranž + 2 Rohkem Vähem Kogod School of Business, American University At Kogod, it's our mission to prepare our graduates to work and lead in all sectors of business: public, private, and nonprofit. We strive to create an interactive learning environment with a strong f ... Loe edasi At Kogod, it's our mission to prepare our graduates to work and lead in all sectors of business: public, private, and nonprofit. We strive to create an interactive learning environment with a strong focus on experiential learning. Our students get hands-on experience in all facets of business through real-world projects inside and outside the classroom. Kogod's broad alumni network and location in our nation’s capital work hand-in-hand to connect our students to the business world beyond campus. Näita vähem Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) With more than 80 graduate programs in high-paying, in-demand fields and scholarships, assistantships and fellowships available, we invite you to take a closer look at RIT. Don't be fooled by the word ... Loe edasi With more than 80 graduate programs in high-paying, in-demand fields and scholarships, assistantships and fellowships available, we invite you to take a closer look at RIT. Don't be fooled by the word "technology" in our name. At RIT, you will discover a university of artists and designers on the one hand, and scientists, engineers, and business leaders on the other – a collision of the right brain and the left brain. Näita vähem Founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, edX is an online learning destination and MOOC provider, offering high-quality courses from the world’s best universities and institutions to learners ev ... Loe edasi Founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, edX is an online learning destination and MOOC provider, offering high-quality courses from the world’s best universities and institutions to learners everywhere. With more than 90 global partners, we are proud to count the world’s leading universities, nonprofits, and institutions as our members. EdX university members top the QS World University Rankings® with our founders receiving the top honors, and edX partner institutions ranking highly on the full list. Näita vähem Krannert Executive Education, Purdue University Purdue University is renowned the world over for its innovative solutions that move our planet forward. Purdue's alumni network spans the globe and numbers more than 500,000 Boilermakers. Purdue University is renowned the world over for its innovative solutions that move our planet forward. Purdue's alumni network spans the globe and numbers more than 500,000 Boilermakers. Näita vähem Lafayette , Lääne-Lafayette + 1 Rohkem Vähem University of Tampa College of Natural and Health Sciences The sciences afford the opportunity for exploration and discovery in the pursuit of new knowledge, understanding systems in the physical and natural world, and for bettering the human condition. With ... Loe edasi The sciences afford the opportunity for exploration and discovery in the pursuit of new knowledge, understanding systems in the physical and natural world, and for bettering the human condition. With the challenges the world faces, there has never been a better time to pursue an education in the sciences, health care or sport studies. Näita vähem University of Tampa - Sykes College of Business The University of Tampa’s Sykes College of Business is a leading private institution focused on the development of tomorrow’s global leaders. Our commitment to excellence is reflected in our AACSB acc ... Loe edasi The University of Tampa’s Sykes College of Business is a leading private institution focused on the development of tomorrow’s global leaders. Our commitment to excellence is reflected in our AACSB accreditation — a recognition that places us among the top 5 percent of graduate business schools worldwide. Näita vähem ISM - International School of Management Headquartered in Paris, and with partner institutions in New York, Shanghai, New Delhi, São Paulo and Cape Town, ISM gives students the global perspective they need to thrive as business leaders. Read ... Loe edasi Headquartered in Paris, and with partner institutions in New York, Shanghai, New Delhi, São Paulo and Cape Town, ISM gives students the global perspective they need to thrive as business leaders. Read more about our flexible, accredited IMBA, DBA and PhD degrees at www.ism.edu Näita vähem Pariis , Shanghai , São Paulo , New York , Kaplinn , New Delhi + 5 Rohkem Vähem Founded in 1898, DBU has one mission—to transform the lives of students who will transform the world, all for the glory of God. Founded in 1898, DBU has one mission—to transform the lives of students who will transform the world, all for the glory of God. Näita vähem Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Penn State World Campus is the second-largest campus in The Pennsylvania State University system with more than 20,000 students. Penn State World Campus provides an accessible, quality Penn State educ ... Loe edasi Penn State World Campus is the second-largest campus in The Pennsylvania State University system with more than 20,000 students. Penn State World Campus provides an accessible, quality Penn State education online to address the needs of individuals who seek higher education beyond the traditional campus experience. Partnering with Penn State's academic units and colleges allows Penn State World Campus to offer more than 150 degree and certificate programs developed and taught by Penn State faculty. Näita vähem Riiklik kolledž Florida College of Integrative Medicine Whether you are interested in integrative medicine as a career or an extension of existing medical practice, the Florida College of Integrative Medicine (FCIM) offers a unique program that integrates ... Loe edasi Whether you are interested in integrative medicine as a career or an extension of existing medical practice, the Florida College of Integrative Medicine (FCIM) offers a unique program that integrates the teachings and techniques of Oriental Medicine with the foundation of Western medical sciences. FCIM is unique in that this integration of knowledge is demonstrated consistently throughout our curriculum, which better prepares our graduates to meet the changing demands of America's fast-evolving healthcare landscape. Näita vähem Wright State University is a nationally ranked public university in Dayton, Ohio with more than 15,000 students Offering 295 degree programs, the university is made up of eight colleges, three schools ... Loe edasi Wright State University is a nationally ranked public university in Dayton, Ohio with more than 15,000 students Offering 295 degree programs, the university is made up of eight colleges, three schools, and a branch campus in Celina, Ohio. Named for the Wright brothers, Wright State University offers an exceptional, affordable education in the American heartland. Näita vähem Clayton State University At Clayton State University, student dreams are made real in practical classes, internships, and real-life experiences. From over 34 different states and 44 different countries, students come to Clayt ... Loe edasi At Clayton State University, student dreams are made real in practical classes, internships, and real-life experiences. From over 34 different states and 44 different countries, students come to Clayton State in suburban Atlanta for personalized attention, small class sizes, affordable career preparation, outstanding faculty, and vibrant campus life. The campus feels like a second home, including 214 acres of park-like beauty and an inclusive and supportive community of students, faculty, and staff. Näita vähem George Washington University - Graduate School of Education and Human Development Online GW's Graduate School of Education and Human Development offers online Graduate Education Master’s programs that prepare leaders like you for research, policy, and practice in the fields of teaching, l ... Loe edasi GW's Graduate School of Education and Human Development offers online Graduate Education Master’s programs that prepare leaders like you for research, policy, and practice in the fields of teaching, leadership and administration and education technology. Näita vähem Winthrop University Online Winthrop University is a public, comprehensive university located just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, with a rich tradition spanning more than 130 years. Winthrop ... Loe edasi Winthrop University is a public, comprehensive university located just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, with a rich tradition spanning more than 130 years. Winthrop blends professional programs, global awareness and civic engagement to build the knowledge, skills, and values that will enrich your life forever and prepare you for what the future holds. Näita vähem Kivimägi Widener University Online At Widener University, we proudly cultivate challenging and culturally diverse learning environments where academics, leadership, and service come first. Founded in 1821 in Chester, Pennsylvania, Wide ... Loe edasi At Widener University, we proudly cultivate challenging and culturally diverse learning environments where academics, leadership, and service come first. Founded in 1821 in Chester, Pennsylvania, Widener is nationally recognized for our commitment to civic engagement, service, and social responsibility. It is our goal to develop true leaders who inspire positive change throughout our community. Näita vähem University of Kentucky Online Propel your career as you study with world-renowned experts and participate in nationally ranked programs. Propel your career as you study with world-renowned experts and participate in nationally ranked programs. Näita vähem St. John's University Online St. John’s is a Catholic Vincentian University that prepares students for personal and professional success in today’s global society. St. John’s is a Catholic Vincentian University that prepares students for personal and professional success in today’s global society. Näita vähem Kuningannad The University of Scranton Online The University of Scranton has grounded its education in Catholic and Jesuit principles based on intellectual growth and integrity, all of which shape the online master’s and certificate programs. You ... Loe edasi The University of Scranton has grounded its education in Catholic and Jesuit principles based on intellectual growth and integrity, all of which shape the online master’s and certificate programs. You can choose one of five degree programs from a selective institution ranked among the top 10 master’s universities in the North by U.S. News & World Report. Näita vähem Queens University of Charlotte Online The Queens University of Charlotte was founded in 1857 on devotion to serving students and has brought that same devotion to its online community with an innovative online learning system, personalize ... Loe edasi The Queens University of Charlotte was founded in 1857 on devotion to serving students and has brought that same devotion to its online community with an innovative online learning system, personalized student support, and the same faculty that teach in the campus programs. Näita vähem Our Lady of the Lake University Online Our Lady of the Lake University is a private, Catholic university with a deep connection to the history and community of San Antonio. Founded in 1895 by the Congregation of Divine Providence, we have ... Loe edasi Our Lady of the Lake University is a private, Catholic university with a deep connection to the history and community of San Antonio. Founded in 1895 by the Congregation of Divine Providence, we have developed a reputation for our personal teaching style. Since 2011, OLLU has been named to the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. We are a university that helps students develop their full potential in an environment that's encouraging and stimulating. Näita vähem Nova Southeastern University Online At Nova Southeastern University, your nursing curriculum is grounded in research and teaches innovative thinking. You’ll learn how to provide the best patient care in any setting amidst constant indus ... Loe edasi At Nova Southeastern University, your nursing curriculum is grounded in research and teaches innovative thinking. You’ll learn how to provide the best patient care in any setting amidst constant industry change. Näita vähem Northern Illinois University Online Create an educational experience as unique as you, and pursue your passion from day one. Get the preparation you need for a successful life and career and the individual support you deserve. Welcome t ... Loe edasi Create an educational experience as unique as you, and pursue your passion from day one. Get the preparation you need for a successful life and career and the individual support you deserve. Welcome to where the big university lifestyle meets personal attention. Näita vähem University of Saint Mary Online The University of Saint Mary (USM) is an accredited institution that has been educating students since 1923. USM offers online undergraduate programs: BS in Health Information Management and RN-BS in ... Loe edasi The University of Saint Mary (USM) is an accredited institution that has been educating students since 1923. USM offers online undergraduate programs: BS in Health Information Management and RN-BS in Nursing. USM also offers customizable, online graduate programs: MS in Nursing with two concentration options and an MBA with six concentrations options. Our online programs combine liberal arts with career preparation to contribute to your professional and personal growth. Näita vähem Sacred Heart University Online Sacred Heart University offers signature humanistic core principles and degree programs offering interactive learning, personal attention, small classes, and rigorous academics. Sacred Heart University offers signature humanistic core principles and degree programs offering interactive learning, personal attention, small classes, and rigorous academics. Näita vähem Lewis University Online Lewis University is a regionally accredited, not-for-profit university committed to student success. Lewis offers 5 in-demand, online Master's degrees (Organizational Leadership, Criminal Justice, Com ... Loe edasi Lewis University is a regionally accredited, not-for-profit university committed to student success. Lewis offers 5 in-demand, online Master's degrees (Organizational Leadership, Criminal Justice, Computer Science, Data Science, and Public Safety Admin.) as well as 5 online Graduate Certificates (Higher Edu. Leadership, Org. Leadership, Prof. Coaching, Data Science and Bioinformatics). Take your career to the next level with advanced education to fit your lifestyle and achieve your goals. Näita vähem George Washington University - School of Medicine and Health Sciences Online At the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences, we prepare progressive leaders across disciplines to meet the challenge of developing and delivering health care to div ... Loe edasi At the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences, we prepare progressive leaders across disciplines to meet the challenge of developing and delivering health care to diverse populations. Our flexible, online programs are designed to advance the careers of health professionals. Näita vähem Benedictine University Online Founded in 1887, Benedictine University is dedicated to the education of undergraduate and graduate students. Benedictine is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Centra ... Loe edasi Founded in 1887, Benedictine University is dedicated to the education of undergraduate and graduate students. Benedictine is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA). Näita vähem Antioch University Online Antioch University is a private, non-profit institution focused on empowering students with the education they need to make a difference. Antioch University is a private, non-profit institution focused on empowering students with the education they need to make a difference. Näita vähem Kollane vedrud Anna Maria College Online Anna Maria College is a private, not-for-profit, Catholic liberal arts institution accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Founded by the Sisters of Saint Anne in 1946, AMC' ... Loe edasi Anna Maria College is a private, not-for-profit, Catholic liberal arts institution accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Founded by the Sisters of Saint Anne in 1946, AMC's programs integrate liberal education and professional preparation that reflect the respect for liberal arts and sciences education grounded in the traditions of the Sisters of Saint Anne—educational innovation, service to others, and access to quality education for all. Näita vähem Stevens Institute of Technology - Graduate Studies Seven thousand students, 300 faculty. One jewel of a campus, beside one amazing city, in a top-3 college town. Countless ideas. Infinite questions. And answers that matter. This is Stevens. Seven thousand students, 300 faculty. One jewel of a campus, beside one amazing city, in a top-3 college town. Countless ideas. Infinite questions. And answers that matter. This is Stevens. Näita vähem Smartly From our elite, free MBA to our radically affordable Executive MBA & business certificates, our courses & career network give graduates marketable skills to accelerate their career fast. From our elite, free MBA to our radically affordable Executive MBA & business certificates, our courses & career network give graduates marketable skills to accelerate their career fast. Näita vähem University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences The College of Arts & Sciences is located in suburban Coral Gables, just minutes from downtown Miami, one of the most diverse, dynamic, and global cities in America. A&S students and scholars ... Loe edasi The College of Arts & Sciences is located in suburban Coral Gables, just minutes from downtown Miami, one of the most diverse, dynamic, and global cities in America. A&S students and scholars live, work, research, and play in Miami, an endless resource for internship and volunteer opportunities, language and cultural immersion, intellectual exploration, and lively entertainment. In turn, the city views the College as its primary brain trust. A&S scholars work closely with government agencies, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the region to improve the economic output and quality of life of our shared community. Näita vähem University of Delaware, Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics For 100 years, the Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics has been driving the business forward in Delaware and beyond by creating opportunities, launching and strengthening companies, shap ... Loe edasi For 100 years, the Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics has been driving the business forward in Delaware and beyond by creating opportunities, launching and strengthening companies, shaping communities and helping students to reach their full potential, something we call Opportunity, Inc. Näita vähem Concordia University Portland If education is your passion, this is your university. One of the most respected names in learning today, Concordia University–Portland is reshaping the way the world views teachers and students. We o ... Loe edasi If education is your passion, this is your university. One of the most respected names in learning today, Concordia University–Portland is reshaping the way the world views teachers and students. We offer education degree programs at every level – many of which can be earned online – from a Bachelor in Education to master and doctorate degree programs. Näita vähem George Mason University - Undergraduate Programs Mason is a young university that, in just a short time, has made impressive strides in size, stature and influence. Today, as Virginia’s largest public research university, we are setting the benchmar ... Loe edasi Mason is a young university that, in just a short time, has made impressive strides in size, stature and influence. Today, as Virginia’s largest public research university, we are setting the benchmark for a bold, progressive education that serves the needs of our students and communities. To that end, we have 10 schools and colleges devoted to a variety of areas of study. Näita vähem Fairfax , Washington + 1 Rohkem Vähem Thanks to nationally recognized faculty, programs, and a truly inspiring location, the study of law at Pepperdine University is a one-of-a-kind experience. Learn why Pepperdine prepares you for a law ... Loe edasi Thanks to nationally recognized faculty, programs, and a truly inspiring location, the study of law at Pepperdine University is a one-of-a-kind experience. Learn why Pepperdine prepares you for a law career the way no other school can by exploring our unique attributes. Näita vähem University of Indianapolis, School of Business UIndy's School of Business has both undergraduate and graduate programs and offers a variety of majors and concentrations in each. All courses are taught by dedicated faculty, many of whom have years ... Loe edasi UIndy's School of Business has both undergraduate and graduate programs and offers a variety of majors and concentrations in each. All courses are taught by dedicated faculty, many of whom have years of real-world experience that they bring to the classroom. The School emphasizes applied learning through courses that include projects and case studies for area businesses and organizations. In addition to the classroom, students gain valuable internship experiences at nearly 100 different businesses each year and are well-prepared to enter the job market or advance in their careers upon graduation. Näita vähem Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs - Syracuse University The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs is Syracuse University’s home for innovative, interdisciplinary teaching and research in the social sciences, public policy, public administration, ... Loe edasi The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs is Syracuse University’s home for innovative, interdisciplinary teaching and research in the social sciences, public policy, public administration, and international relations. It includes America’s leading graduate school of public affairs, offering highly regarded professional degrees alongside advanced scholarly degrees in the social sciences; and it is home to undergraduate programs across the full spectrum of social sciences. Näita vähem US Aviation Academy Here at US Aviation Academy, we pride ourselves on being one of the top choices for aviation education and instruction among aspiring pilots and flight enthusiasts. Here at US Aviation Academy, we pride ourselves on being one of the top choices for aviation education and instruction among aspiring pilots and flight enthusiasts. Näita vähem Discover a new kind of university in New York City, one where scholars, artists, and designers come together to challenge convention and create positive change. Our university takes full advantage of ... Loe edasi Discover a new kind of university in New York City, one where scholars, artists, and designers come together to challenge convention and create positive change. Our university takes full advantage of its location in one of the most vibrant and diverse cities in the world. Our colleges include Parsons School of Design, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts, The New School for Social Research, the Schools of Public Engagement, and Parsons Paris. Näita vähem Founded in 1994, as a Center specialized in CGI - COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGES - (Infographics, 3D Animation, Video Games, Cinema, Advertising and Special Effects) and Digital Image (Graphic Design, Post ... Loe edasi Founded in 1994, as a Center specialized in CGI - COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGES - (Infographics, 3D Animation, Video Games, Cinema, Advertising and Special Effects) and Digital Image (Graphic Design, Post-Production, Viral Video, Short Film, Fashion Films and Web ). With more than 3 million hours of training, our methodology, a pioneer at the international level, allows us to find work in the most important top studios on the planet. Näita vähem Los Angeles , Valencia , Valencia + 2 Rohkem Vähem Aston American University Aston American University is flexible and provides a refined, technological education for students around the world. As we continue to embrace our diverse students with caring and personalized support ... Loe edasi Aston American University is flexible and provides a refined, technological education for students around the world. As we continue to embrace our diverse students with caring and personalized support, we look forward to meet the higher education goals of our diverse group of applicants each year. Näita vähem Founded in 1847, Carthage College is a four-year, private college of the liberal arts and sciences in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Carthage combines an environment of reflection and self-discovery with a cultu ... Loe edasi Founded in 1847, Carthage College is a four-year, private college of the liberal arts and sciences in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Carthage combines an environment of reflection and self-discovery with a culture of high expectation so our students uncover and ignite their true potential. Näita vähem NSU’s main campus is located in Greater Fort Lauderdale with locations around Florida and Puerto Rico. We are at the heart of the region’s academic and research hub, and just minutes from some of the ... Loe edasi NSU’s main campus is located in Greater Fort Lauderdale with locations around Florida and Puerto Rico. We are at the heart of the region’s academic and research hub, and just minutes from some of the world’s best beaches. With more than 26,000 students and 152,000 alumni around the world, you will find Shark Friends in every corner of the country – and beyond. Näita vähem Syracuse University - College of Visual and Performing Arts Our faculty offers rigorous and multi-faceted learning experiences that prepare student-artists for professional and entrepreneurial careers. Our faculty offers rigorous and multi-faceted learning experiences that prepare student-artists for professional and entrepreneurial careers. Näita vähem Syracuse University - iSchool The iSchool is a close community of students, faculty and staff nestled into the larger Syracuse University campus. In addition, more than 10,000 alumni around the world engage with current campus an ... Loe edasi The iSchool is a close community of students, faculty and staff nestled into the larger Syracuse University campus. In addition, more than 10,000 alumni around the world engage with current campus and online students through innovative programs and networking events. Näita vähem Syracuse University - School of Education The mission of the Syracuse University School of Education is to prepare thoughtful and socially just leaders who bridge scholarship and practice. Through collaborative partnerships and multifaceted i ... Loe edasi The mission of the Syracuse University School of Education is to prepare thoughtful and socially just leaders who bridge scholarship and practice. Through collaborative partnerships and multifaceted inclusive approaches, we enhance student learning and success, physical activity and health, and mental health and wellbeing across communities. Näita vähem American University Online American University is a leader in global education, enrolling a diverse student body from throughout the United States and nearly 140 countries. Located in Washington, D.C., the university provides o ... Loe edasi American University is a leader in global education, enrolling a diverse student body from throughout the United States and nearly 140 countries. Located in Washington, D.C., the university provides opportunities for academic excellence, public service, and internships in the nation’s capital and around the world. Näita vähem Clarks Summit University Online For more than 80 years, Clarks Summit University has prepared men and women for Christ-honoring careers and ministries across the globe. For more than 80 years, Clarks Summit University has prepared men and women for Christ-honoring careers and ministries across the globe. Näita vähem Scranton , USA veebis + 1 Rohkem Vähem ABC Business Academy We are a world-leading organization for delivering entrepreneurial-based education programs all over the world, with the intention of bringing together young and ambitious individuals with successful ... Loe edasi We are a world-leading organization for delivering entrepreneurial-based education programs all over the world, with the intention of bringing together young and ambitious individuals with successful entrepreneurs. Our world-class educators & mentors are entrepreneurs, founders, business owners and investors who teach the skills, mindsets, and frameworks necessary in today’s competitive environment. Näita vähem Toronto , München , San Jose , Dublin + 3 Rohkem Vähem Fairleigh Dickinson University - Silberman College of Business Accredited by the world's preeminent business school authority, the AACSB International, Silberman College offers baccalaureate and master's degrees on both New Jersey campuses, as well as professiona ... Loe edasi Accredited by the world's preeminent business school authority, the AACSB International, Silberman College offers baccalaureate and master's degrees on both New Jersey campuses, as well as professional development tracks and the Executive MBA.The College also offers an undergraduate degree option in Vancouver. Näita vähem Madison , Teaneck , Vancouver + 2 Rohkem Vähem Syracuse University - David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics Falk College brings together Syracuse University’s professional programs in Human Development and Family Science, Food Studies, Marriage & Family Therapy, Public Health, Nutrition Science & Di ... Loe edasi Falk College brings together Syracuse University’s professional programs in Human Development and Family Science, Food Studies, Marriage & Family Therapy, Public Health, Nutrition Science & Dietetics, Social Work, and Sport Management in an environment of cross-disciplinary teaching, research, practice, and service. Näita vähem Washington & Jefferson College is a private liberal arts and sciences college located 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our dedicated, experienced professors are passionate about teachin ... Loe edasi Washington & Jefferson College is a private liberal arts and sciences college located 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our dedicated, experienced professors are passionate about teaching and work closely with our students to ensure that they receive a quality, comprehensive education. Our entire community is focused on student success. To that end, we offer an On-Time Graduation Guarantee, opportunities to study all over the world through our Magellan Project and a committed staff of career counseling experts. Näita vähem Summer at Smith College Smith College Precollege Programs welcomes international students each year from around the world into our programs. You'll find that our small classes, similar to the undergraduate experience at Smit ... Loe edasi Smith College Precollege Programs welcomes international students each year from around the world into our programs. You'll find that our small classes, similar to the undergraduate experience at Smith, offer exceptional learning in an environment where women are taken seriously and inspired to excel as leaders. Smith is located in the northeastern region of the United States, an area with some of the highest concentrations of international students anywhere in the country. Näita vähem Tufts University - School of Engineering The Tufts University School of Engineering offers a rigorous engineering education in a unique environment that blends the intellectual and technological resources of a world-class research university ... Loe edasi The Tufts University School of Engineering offers a rigorous engineering education in a unique environment that blends the intellectual and technological resources of a world-class research university with the strengths of a top-ranked liberal arts college. Näita vähem The Katz School at Yeshiva University gives students the opportunity to further their intellectual and professional pursuits and become a part of one of U.S. News and World Report’s top 80 universitie ... Loe edasi The Katz School at Yeshiva University gives students the opportunity to further their intellectual and professional pursuits and become a part of one of U.S. News and World Report’s top 80 universities in the United States. Näita vähem Georgetown University - Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Georgetown is a major international research university with nine schools, an affiliated hospital and many highly ranked academic programs. Today the university has more than 12,000 undergraduate and ... Loe edasi Georgetown is a major international research university with nine schools, an affiliated hospital and many highly ranked academic programs. Today the university has more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students who take classes at five locations. Georgetown has a large and diverse workforce that employs more than 5,000 faculty and staff members. Georgetown continues to move forward as one of the world’s leading universities, building upon its distinctive history, unique values and commitment to justice and the common good. Näita vähem George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School The Antonin Scalia Law School is located just a few miles from downtown Washington, D.C., the nexus for the creation of the world's most important legislation and jurisprudence. The Antonin Scalia Law School is located just a few miles from downtown Washington, D.C., the nexus for the creation of the world's most important legislation and jurisprudence. Näita vähem Georgetown University - McCourt School of Public Policy Our location in Washington, D.C., puts our students at the center of the policy world, giving them access to the highest concentration of policy internships and jobs, and allowing us to bring in leadi ... Loe edasi Our location in Washington, D.C., puts our students at the center of the policy world, giving them access to the highest concentration of policy internships and jobs, and allowing us to bring in leading policy practitioners as both teachers and speakers. Näita vähem Pursue your goals with top-notch faculty and small class sizes. Explore over 80 rigorous programs in the arts, sciences, education, and business. At Northeastern, find yourself among a welcoming and d ... Loe edasi Pursue your goals with top-notch faculty and small class sizes. Explore over 80 rigorous programs in the arts, sciences, education, and business. At Northeastern, find yourself among a welcoming and diverse community of scholars who are as serious about their education as you are. Näita vähem Brentwood University Brentwood University endeavors to provide current and effective graduate business education programs to qualified learners. Instruction is delivered via programs that are adaptable to student needs or ... Loe edasi Brentwood University endeavors to provide current and effective graduate business education programs to qualified learners. Instruction is delivered via programs that are adaptable to student needs or interests. Näita vähem Kansas State University Global Campus Whether you want to learn online or develop professionally, Kansas State University Global Campus is your connection to education that reaches you no matter where you are. Whether you want to learn online or develop professionally, Kansas State University Global Campus is your connection to education that reaches you no matter where you are. Näita vähem Manhattan , USA veebis + 1 Rohkem Vähem Loyola Law School is located in the legal, financial and media capital of Los Angeles. It is home to world-renowned faculty, and academic programs at the leading edge of the legal field. Our students ... Loe edasi Loyola Law School is located in the legal, financial and media capital of Los Angeles. It is home to world-renowned faculty, and academic programs at the leading edge of the legal field. Our students want to change the world, and they’re doing it. Näita vähem Suffolk University — the only private, four-year institution located in the heart of downtown Boston — is proud to offer you a broad range of innovative graduate programs to help advance your career. ... Loe edasi Suffolk University — the only private, four-year institution located in the heart of downtown Boston — is proud to offer you a broad range of innovative graduate programs to help advance your career. Näita vähem Seton Hall University, School of Diplomacy and International Relations Just minutes from New York City and in the heart of Washington, D.C., Seton Hall's School of Diplomacy and International Relations is an ideal place to study global affairs and practice diplomacy firs ... Loe edasi Just minutes from New York City and in the heart of Washington, D.C., Seton Hall's School of Diplomacy and International Relations is an ideal place to study global affairs and practice diplomacy first hand in a professional, dynamic and culturally rich setting. Näita vähem Avionica We have established this non-profit organization under the laws of the government of Puerto Rico, with the commitment to contribute to aviation safety through continuing education, news, articles of s ... Loe edasi We have established this non-profit organization under the laws of the government of Puerto Rico, with the commitment to contribute to aviation safety through continuing education, news, articles of social interest in the field of aeronautics, aviation security issues, new technology and short training on this technology in our training center located inside of the international Luis Muñoz Marín International Airportand in Kissimmee Gateway Airportin Kissimmee, FL. Näita vähem International Programs at Tufts University Tufts is a leader in American higher education, distinctive for its success as a mid-sized university that excels at research and providing students with a personal experience. Our unique combination ... Loe edasi Tufts is a leader in American higher education, distinctive for its success as a mid-sized university that excels at research and providing students with a personal experience. Our unique combination of research and liberal arts attracts students, faculty, and staff who thrive in our environment of curiosity, creativity, and engagement. Näita vähem Penn State Dickinson Law Penn State Dickinson Law’s choice to seek small LL.M. cohorts of no more than 20 students means you’ll study in an intimate environment that allows for greater interaction, with personalized attention ... Loe edasi Penn State Dickinson Law’s choice to seek small LL.M. cohorts of no more than 20 students means you’ll study in an intimate environment that allows for greater interaction, with personalized attention from your professors. Plus, our location affords a diverse selection of career-building opportunities with private law firms, local, state, and federal government, private corporations, and non-profit entities. Näita vähem Bay Atlantic University - Washington, D.C. Bay Atlantic University was established in 2013 as a private but non-profit institution of higher education which aims at providing a unique and invaluable opportunity to train world citizens who poss ... Loe edasi Bay Atlantic University was established in 2013 as a private but non-profit institution of higher education which aims at providing a unique and invaluable opportunity to train world citizens who possess the necessary tools for living up to our global vision. Näita vähem University of San Francisco - School of Nursing and Health Professions	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line710
__label__wiki	0.685907	0.685907	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the History of Dance, Gender, and American Identity January 21, 2019 By History News Network Leave a Comment by Lauren Angel Lauren Angel is a Ph.D. candidate in twentieth-century American history at the George Washington University. An AAUW American Dissertation Fellow, Lauren’s current research has also been funded by a Cosmos Scholars Grant and a New York Public Library Research Fellowship. When an anonymous right-wing twitter account released a video of incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in a joyful homage to The Breakfast Club, commentators on both sides of the aisle were quick to react. Pundits debated the optics of combining dance and politics, questioning whether Ocasio-Cortez's gender has shaped our expectations of how she ought to behave. But while many in the media celebrated the sight of a youthful Ocasio-Cortez and her Boston University pals dancing together, missing from these conversations was an appreciation of the role that dancing bodies have long played in American political life. Physical appearance and bodily movements have traditionally been tied to expressions of personal identity. Dressing in a certain way and following certain behavioral norms have historically marked people as belonging to specific social categories, categories determined by social constructions of race and gender. Because the act of dancing is fundamentally tied to behavior and appearance, debates about dance have inspired lengthy discussions regarding representations of race, gender, and even American national identity. From Victorian-era ideas about dance and demeanor, to folk dances meant to help assimilate newly-arrived U.S. immigrants, fears that public dance halls would lead to white slavery, and the uses of concert dance as cultural weapon in the Cold War, the act of dancing has helped to define American social and political issues for centuries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, dancing was an important part of a young person’s introduction to polite society. As one guidebook recounted, in the words of John Locke, children “should be taught to dance as soon as they are capable of learning it; for … it gives children manly thoughts and carriage more than anything.” Victorian sensibilities held that the body and its movements demonstrated cultural refinement and could even reveal someone’s moral fiber. However, although physical grace was important for both men and women, there were also key differences in the gendered implications of this attribute. According to the wisdom of the day, young men who studied fencing or boxing in order to gain strength were advised to learn dancing so that they might also acquire physical grace and personal control. “It is a matter of the first importance to the young aspirant,” one manual observed, “that he attend to the training and deportment of his body, as well as that of his mind.” A stately bearing, the booklet went on, could offer young men the “command of address” that was the marker of a well-bred gentleman. Such was the reasoning behind the decision of the Annapolis Naval Academy to hire a dancing master in 1898, a move meant to instill America’s future naval officers with the refinement they needed to conduct themselves appropriately both onboard ships and inside drawing-rooms. But while dancing and deportment showed off masculine accomplishments, a woman’s demeanor could purportedly reveal the truth about her inner self. As one Rev. Charles Kingsley explained, “if manners make the man, manners are the woman herself … they flow instinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her inner nature.” Dancing, according to the writer Florence Hartley, was an essential womanly skill. “No woman,” she advised, “is fitted for society until she dances well; for home, unless she is perfect mistress of needlework; for her own enjoyment, unless she has at least one accomplishment to occupy thoughts and fingers in her hours of leisure.” A young lady, Hartley continued, ought to inhabit a graceful demeanor whenever she found herself in the public eye. One should, for example, strive avoid such unladylike performances as “sucking the head of your parasol” in the street. Beginning in the early twentieth century, dance in the United States began to serve another purpose as well, one that was key in shaping ideas about the American national character. As a wave of immigrants arrived in the United States, social reformers worried that newcomers would not be properly assimilated into the fabric of American life. Dance, which psychologist G. Stanley Hall referred to as “the most educative of all because it places the control of the muscles under the will,” worked to impart middle-class American values to the children of these new residents. Taking up the mantle of what was called the “Americanization” movement, orchestra conductor Meyer Davis invented an “Americanization dance” in which various styles combined to form “an American dance to be danced to American music in America by Americans.” But social workers also emphasized the values of the American “melting pot.” They argued that immigrants brought their own “gifts” which, if preserved, might contribute to the advancement of the nation as a whole. As reporter Helen Bullitt Lowry explained, “the Pole who remembers his mazurka is a better American citizen than the Pole who has traded his mazurka for the American ‘toddle.’” Schools, settlement houses, and women’s clubs across the nation held festivals in which young people performed their national folk dances and took part in patriotic pantomimes, celebrating American unity through cultural and ethnic diversity. But if proper forms of dancing could teach good citizenship, then improper forms could pose a serious threat to the racial hierarchies embedded in American life. Following the “White Slavery” Mann Act of 1910, a law which forbid the interstate transport of women “for any immoral purpose,” critics warned young women to beware of the dangers posed by mixed-race dance halls. In Chicago, investigative journalist Genevieve Forbes observed the activities in one such “black and tan.” Recalling a “little white girl” who was dancing in the arms of “a large colored man,” Forbes wrote that the young woman “nestles her blonde curls against his coat. Arms interlocked, bodies pressed close together, she gets some of the ‘loving’ she desired.” In the eyes of contemporary observers, such scenes jeopardized the forward progress of American civilization. Endangering white feminine purity and masculine authority, the crude “barbarisms” of jazz music threatened to ensnare American youth deep inside its web. Later, after World War II, dance was once again called upon to help secure and grow the American way of life. As I explain in my dissertation “Hot Bodies, Cold War: Dancing America in Person and Performance,” the State Department enlisted American dance companies to help establish U.S. supremacy against the rising power of the Soviet Union. Performing in a Russian-dominated art form that was older than the independent United States itself, ballet companies worked to prove that the U.S. system could offer cultural accomplishments as well as capitalist dollars. The innovative movements of modern dance companies showed that the United States could produce new art forms as well score in their performances of the old. And folk dance troupes worked to represent cultural authenticity, showing the world the varied ethnicities that contributed to a thriving American way of life. However, although U.S. commentators called dance an “international language” whose value and meaning transcended politics, these tours were part of a concentrated effort to counter perceptions of U.S. racism and portray the country as a land of progressively equal opportunities. In 1954, the same year that the program “Operation Wetback” relied on racial stereotypes to justify the mass deportation of Mexican workers, Mexican-American modern dancer José Limón emphasized the cultural bonds uniting the United States with South America. In 1960, while the U.S. government sought to eradicate Native American tribal authority at home, the famous “American Indian” ballerina Maria Tallchief performed a balletic version of integrative U.S. expansionism matched with an appealing, all-American exoticism. Two years later, while touring in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, African American dancer Arthur Mitchell performed an intimate pas de deux, or dance for two, with the white ballerina Allegra Kent. Although U.S. television producers refused to broadcast Mitchell dancing with a white partner at home, the State Department framed this performance as an authentic representation of American democracy abroad. Maria Tallchief In more recent days, President Trump’s awkward participation in a traditional all-male Saudi sword dance drew attention on social media, while CNN’s Jake Tapper criticized former President Barrack Obama for his carefree dancing at a Beyoncé concert. In both cases, commentators drew on standard racial stereotypes of dancing men. The powerful white man’s uncompromising self-control translated to hip immobility, while the unrestrained black man’s free movements revealed his lack of personal restraint. Critics of Ocasio-Cortez have also relied on stereotypical gender norms, evoking beliefs that a woman’s bodily movements reveal her true character. Conservative fixation with exposing Ocasio-Cortez as a fraud have also extended to mocking her clothes, calling her a “little girl,” and implying that a high school nickname proves that she is not the person she claims to be, and most recently, a nude phtoto hoax. Because Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas represent a threat to the traditional standards of wealth, race, gender, and social power, her critics argue that her unrestrained body reveals the truth about her self—that she is not the capable young politician she appears to be but is instead an unintelligent and frivolous woman woefully ill-equipped for power. Filed Under: Columnists Tagged With: dance, Lauren Angel Since you made it here … … we have a small favor to ask. We have a lot of people reading our Progressive leaning fact-based blog posts and thousands listen to our Politics Done Right radio/multimedia program. We want to keep our reporting, blogging, and the featuring of Progressive politicians, activists, and everyday citizens that do not normally get coverage. In that light, we developed our 10-point plan on how we will be an activist interactive publication for not just talking, not just being keyboard warriors, but empowering all to engage in whatever manner they can. But we need your support to help us realize the venture. Please consider either subscribing to our network or contributing what you can. Even $1 goes a long way. Please donate via PayPal/Credit Card here. Please subscribe for as little as $1 via Patreon here. Report typos or errors to info@egbertowillies.com About History News Network History News Network's mission is to help put current events into historical perspective. Given how public opinion is shaped today, whipsawed emotionally on talk shows this way and that in response to the egos of the guests, the desire for ratings by the hosts and the search for profits by media companies and sponsors, historians are especially needed now. They can help remind us of the superficiality of what-happens-today-is-all-that-counts journalism.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line713
__label__wiki	0.537841	0.537841	Following the crowd Ana Nicholls Ana Nicholls, managing editor of Industry Briefing at The Economist Intelligence Unit, explains what crowdsourcing entails and discusses recent success stories. In the near-decade since the term was coined, crowdsourcing has become an established way of generating designs, collecting information, testing ideas or simply getting labour-intensive tasks done. Ana Nicholls, managing editor of Industry Briefing at The Economist Intelligence Unit, explains what crowdsourcing entails and discusses recent success stories. Companies across sectors have seized on the idea of crowdsourcing enthusiastically in the past decade: in September alone, GE has announced that it is using crowdsourcing to develop its next-generation appliances; McDonald’s has said that it is crowdsourcing its next burger; and US retailer, Macy’s, has outlined plans to use a crowdsourced delivery service. The possible benefits in terms of cost-cutting, idea generation and time-savings are clear, but not everyone is a fan. Criticisms of crowdsourcing range from the disputes that it can cause over intellectual property rights, to the sheer workload of sorting through mountains of often amateur submissions. Professions affected by the trend are also concerned by the way it drives down prices and (they argue) quality. A recent study, meanwhile, found that competitive crowdsourcing can lead to malicious behaviour by participants, which may even jeopardise the project. Perhaps the biggest dispute, though, is over what crowdsourcing actually is. The definition has become stretched to cover an ever-widening array of tasks and business models, including competitions with prizes, piecework drawing on mass labour, or collaborative projects based around communities, says Kevin Boudreau, assistant professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Fortunately for the growing number of companies that make their money from facilitating crowdsourcing, that means there are now several sizeable markets for them to choose from. Take design competitions. 99designs, founded by Mark Harbottle of Australia and Matt Mickiewicz of Canada, started out as a free site where web designers could offer their services, but now claims to be the global leader in hosting design competitions. Companies use it to outline what they need, whether it is a new logo, a website or a t-shirt, and invite designers to compete for a cash prize. 99designs has paid out nearly US$84m in prizes so far, and in doing so has helped to create a market niche that others—such as DesignCrowd—have entered. Yet even together, these companies are far from cornering the crowdsourced design market. Threadless, a t-shirt design site, uses an alternative competition model targeted at a different audience. Designs are submitted to win a public vote and a prize, and only the most popular designs get made into t-shirts for sale on the website. Yet other design competitions use peer reviews, or a pre-vetting process, to ensure that quality is kept high. McDonald’s, with its burger design, is using a combination of the two, with both a public vote and a panel of professional chefs to judge the recipes concocted by restaurant-goers. When it comes to open innovation there are also plenty of options. Innocentive relies on companies or organisations setting challenges for researchers and scientists, while Wazoku sells software that allows for a more collaborative approach based on continuous feedback. For information-gathering and labour-intensive work, meanwhile, Samasource allows companies to request work from hundreds of people in low-income countries. It is a not-for-profit organisation, but Zhubajie of China (and its US-based subsidiary, Witmart) plays a similar role on a commercial basis. The challenge, given all these possible models, is knowing which techniques to use when. Different approaches will work for different tasks or companies, and choosing correctly could make the difference between success and failure. Over time, of course, the most successful models will become clearer, attracting the most clients and the greatest number of participants, and creating successful crowdsourcing suppliers in the process. Then, for newcomers to the field, it really will just be a case of following the crowd. This blog is part of a series managed by The Economist Intelligence Unit for HSBC Commercial Banking. Visit HSBC Global Connections for more insight on international business. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article. Ana Nicholls oversees the Economist Intelligence Unit's Industry Briefing services, helped by a team of country and industry analysts. She has worked as a journalist at The Economist Group for 18 years, covering a variety of business sectors, as well as reporting on economic development in. Eastern Europe. She previously edited EMAP business magazines in London before moving to Lithuania to work as an editor at the UN. Ana has a BA and MA in English from Trinity College, Cambridge.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line715
__label__wiki	0.549382	0.549382	Direct Action, New Oil Spill and Increasing Protests All Over the World 100 Russian protesters moved in direct action in protest of the coming Sochi Winter Olympics on Wednesday night, attacking Khimki City Hall with molotov cocktails, bottles and fireworks and spraypainting slogans such as “Save Russian forests” and “No to Khimki forest clearing.” In more traditional enviro-action style, Greenpeace shut down 46 BP Stations in London on Tuesday. Fencing off the petrol stations and putting up snarky signs stating “Moving Beyond Petroleum,” Greenpeace’s protests come at a time of rising anger towards the English company, since 30% of the UK owns BP stock, and the company has just reported over $17 billion dollars of losses due to the Deep Horizon explosion. Greenpeace also lead a demonstration in Canada against the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, which would build a pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia, after an Enbridge pipeline burst in Michigan on Monday. The broken pipeline has already leaked over 819,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, exposing the dangers of Enbridge’s future plans to pump over a million barrels of oil across Canada every day. Back to the nitty gritty: the protest consisted of 4 activists who chained themselves to the entrance doors of the 6th floor offices of Burrard and West Pender, a company invested in the Northern Gateway Project. With oil fresh from the Gulf of Mexico, they scrawled “BC Next” on the glass doors to which they are apparently still locked after over a day of protest! In other protest news, another environmental protest was broken up by police in Eurasia, this time in Armenia as protesters demanded that financial institutions like the VTB Bank stop funding the controversial Teghut copper mine. . This comes just a week after a mass civil disobedience environmental protest was suppressed in Croatia. In India, activists continue to protest the Vedanta AGM mining project in Orissa, in Kansas, an uproar has been raised against a feedlot expansion in an already contaminated area, and in China a propylene pipeline burst, killing 12 and dumping thousands of tons of chemicals into local water supplies. 4.2 million people were without water for a day, marking the latest in a series of disasters, natural and man-made, which have marked this Summer in the ravaged countryside. To give an indication, due to flooding, the 3-Gorges Dam is already at 90% capacity. New York City is planning on killing 170,000 geese, because of a flight that crashed last year. The massacre is opposed by State Senator Adams. BP is beginning construction on an offshore drill in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Libya. Meanwhile, Tony Hayward is stepping down as CEO of BP. Strawmen burn faster when they’re coated with oil. In England, 7 massive machines were sabotaged at the Cutacre Coal Mine. In Stanford, a mass die-in was conducted against the transportation of nuclear waste. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the “Beat the Boreholes” campaign of direct action to stop Shell Oil in Broadhaven Bay was launched, meeting with violence from local police immediately. Zagreb, Croatia, seemed united in common interest as a mass, public demonstration peacefully blocked construction equipment from eliminating a pedestrian area for the sake of a traffic ramp into a parking lot. Police reacted with mass arrests, hauling 140 protesters away regardless of the outcry. The President of Costa Rica is making executive decrees, circumventing forestry laws in order to usher in an open pit Gold Mine in Crucitas, one of the region’s most crucial ecological hotspots. Take action here. And finally, for urban sustainability, rewilding, recycling and community organizing: Wilderness Update, y’all The Cedar Mesa Wilderness Bill seems to be dwindling in government bureaucracy. A new group is forming called Friends of Cedar Mesa, consisting of residents of Blanding, Bluff and Monticello as well as citizens from the Navajo Nation, in order to maintain activism around the wilderness designation of 450,000 acres of high plateau in Southeastern Utah. Cedar Mesa is seen as “one of the richest repositories of pre-Columbian ancestral history” according to Patty Henetz of the Salt Lake City Tribune. A Senate Committee unanimously approved the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Wilderness Act, which would protect 350,000 acres in Do-a Ana County, New Mexico. The bill, which the Obama administration claims to support, contains a 2 mile buffer zone around the wilderness area, but grants Border Patrol the right to conduct operations within the boundary. From atop the Mendocino National Forest all the way down to Lake Berryessa, a 436,077 acre conservation area is being proposed in California. Called the Berryessa Snow Mountain conservation area, the proposed land would include parcels from Glenn, Colusa, Lake, Yolo, Napa, Mendocino and Solano counties. Southwest Regional Rondy Announced Plans are in the works for a Southwest Bio-Regional Earth First! Rendezvous and Organizers’ Conference, August 20-22, in the beautiful San Luis Valley of Colorado. The rendezvous site is near the town of Saguache, in the Rio Grande National Forest. Exact site location and directions will be released some time in early August. We’re seeking teachers and trainers to help facilitate workshops in direct action, civil disobedience, forest defense, eco-defense, and more… We must build the skill sets and face to face relationships of trust and affinity necessary to effectively defend our bio-regions and land bases. The size and organization of this event will in many ways reflect our current state as a force to be reckoned with in the Southwest, which is to say that this will be a small gathering with less structure and organization than other rendezvous in bio-regions where the EF! presence is more established and experienced. Though an informal communal kitchen will be formed, please come prepared for self-sufficiency and inclement weather. Water for filtration or other purification is available on site. Contact southwestearthfirst@riseup.net for more info or to get involved. http://southwestearthfirst.wordpress.com/ Solidarity News The Teamsters teamed up with the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, Clean New York and WEACT for Environmental Justice as well as concerned parents, students and consumer activists to protest plastic toys at Toys R Us. The protest called for an end to the “toxic toy story” of exploitation. First Nations peoples protested the tar sands in northeastern Alberta. The Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations are resisting the tar sands due to the drainage of water resources and the destruction of ecosystems and wildlife among other things. And for those of you who just can’t do without a little bit of direct action, SORRY! the bite back website is down. In other Animal Rights news, however, Jordan Halliday needs your support! He is facing a year in prison for refusing to comply with a grand jury investigation pertaining to an ALF mink farm liberation. Earlier this month, one of the defendants in that investigation, Alex Hall, was served a 21 month prison sentence. And finally, for a long overdue story: five activists were arrested in a daring blockade of a primate research facility in good old Oregon earlier this month. The five are awaiting trial for obstructing traffic to the infamous Oregon National Primate Research Center, guilty of the torture and murder of healthy Rhesus Monkeys in the name of illegal and sadist scientific research. Hugh and Tiga sign plea agreement “Details of the Agreement: Hugh and Gina each pled guilty to 2 counts of trespassing (class A misdemeanor) and were each sentenced to two years non-reporting probation and a $10 fine, plus court costs. According to the deal, if they don’t violate their terms of probation, they will be able to move to have it terminated at 15 months and this motion will be accepted.” see the full article here (Infoshop) or here (Denver ABC) Sochi Protests, News Roundup Protests in Sochi, Russia, have been getting physical, as police and activists have clashed over days of intense action. 4,000 gathered to protest in Sochi as radicals built barricades in the Khimki forests. Two home demonstrations staged against supporters of notorious animal abusers, Hundinton Life Sciences occurred over the weekend in the DC area. Just to keep up with policy issues, the EPA is reassessing fracking and natural gas drilling. Unfortunately, the EPA’s crackdown on coal permits has already brought on a lawsuit from the coal industry. In mysterious news, 530 penguins, numerous sea birds, five dolphins and three giant sea turtles have been found washed up on the shore of Brazil. The University of Sao Paulo is looking into reasons for this strange incidences.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line717
__label__wiki	0.760697	0.760697	A Radical Turn? After reading the first sentence of Deep Green Resistance, I opened a new .doc with the intention of creating a point-by-point analysis and deconstruction of its central arguments. When I got to the third sentence, I realized that my analysis would have to become a sentence-by-sentence, line-by-line destruction of the line of thought carried forward by DGR. In this article, I would like to object particularly to the bedrock of ideological construction in DGR, primarily elaborated upon by Lierre Keith. Although Keith has been attacked for her distaste for vegetarians, trans folks, and anarchists, I would like to engage on a more theoretical level, which will try to contemplate her intellectual method. Steeped in a strange duality of romanticization and rationalism, Keith assesses different movements and mobilizations on the principle basis of efficacy. Efficacy, itself, is not measured in terms of a resistance organization’s eventual domination over the preceding system, but in terms of taking the decisive steps that dismantle that system. The problems latent within Keith’s analysis are borne through a binary analysis that emerges from the very beginning of the book (see below). In this chart, we find a profound categorical confusion that places Liberal and Radical tendencies at opposite ends of a political spectrum, and advances a bifurcated list of oppositional qualities which mark one or the other. Liberalism, we are told, includes Idealism and idealist thought, while Radicalism connotes Materialism. One muses immediately: What is Liberalism as opposed to Radicalism? (We will get to the problematic Euro-centrism of this duality soon.) The modern reader will immediately refer Liberalism to its foundational point of capitalist economics (Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, John Locke, James Mill etc.) as the philosophy that advocates the market-based approach to society and law, rather than a more stringent socially regulatory legal code. After all, it was Adam Smith who wrote Theory of Moral Sentiments, which provided a social sphere totally removed from economic regulation, where morals are to be carried out and enforced through basic manners and norms. For Bentham, society was to become self-regulating (ie, the Panopticon), so that the market could flow as freely as possible without political restraints. Here, Liberalism actually connotes a kind of radical economism—for instance, the English Marxist, EP Thompson, identified “the old Benthamite radicalism” in the letters of Romantic revolutionary William Morris, indicating a confluence between Utopian Socialism, Liberalism, and Radicalism. But let’s look at how Liberalism is juxtaposed with Radicalism for now. Radicalism must be radically defined if it is to have true meaning: a return to the root of a problematic. One can certainly meet a radical capitalist who professes materialist claims as the only philosophical solutions to “underdevelopment.” Ayn Rand was such a figure for many, returning to the basic ideology of capitalism (Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s biography of Rand is subtitled, The Russian Radical). At the same time, one can have a radical materialist, who reduces everything to material conditions and becomes the ultimate vulgarizer of theoretical praxis (Stalin, for instance). Here, does it make sense to draw a line, and insist, “Stalin was not a radical!” or “Rand was not a real radical!”? If we attempt this gesture, we ignore the subjective slides of ideological systems—radicalism is not indication or measure of truth; it is simply a motion of return to the beginnings, the ontological. For this reason, Sartre, the communist thinker, can base his phenomenology on the thought of Heidegger, the Nazi—Heidegger’s Nazism does not negate his radicalism; in fact, as we shall see later, the one may have redoubled the other. The thing that Keith and many on the right wing actually neglect is that Liberalism can be a radical doctrine (as we saw with EP Thompson)—the essence of radicalism returns to the subjectivity of ideology (which Keith confuses with Idealism, but we will get to that soon). Liberalism was, in fact, for many a profoundly emancipatory doctrine of the 18th and 19th Centuries. It is, after all, Noam Chomsky who has professed “fairly traditional anarchist [views], with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism” (see Powers and Prospects, 1996 at chomsky.info). Liberalism, in this case, is split however between aspirations, history, and class consciousness. We find, for instance, the grand tradition of the French Revolution and the Jacobins (Robespierre, Danton, Marat) championed by contemporary radicals, while in England the Liberals were a feared ideological set who sought greater regulation of society and humanity in general (homo economicus) in order to exploit the inchoate proletariat and environment. Just as we should recall Wallerstein’s insistence that the Revolutionary Jacobins did not strive to liberate the colonies, but to compete better with the English in world hegemony (see “The French Revolution and Capitalism—An Explanitory Schema”), we should also remember that the legacy of the Liberal revolt against the land-based enslavement of the European peasantry under the lash of the nobility went on to inspire future anti-Imperialist thinkers. To her credit, Keith touches the truth, insisting that “(a)ny political idea that can bring down theocracy, monarchy, and religious fundamentalism is worth considering, but any ideology that impedes a radical transformation of other equally violent systems of power needs to be rigorously examined and ultimately rejected.” Yet, she misses the mark, first by insisting that Liberalism has done away with “religious fundamentalism.” Might we consider, for instance, that US liberals like Jimmy Carter funneled money and training to the Mujahedeen, or that liberalism itself is perhaps the strongest of what Simon Critchley calls the “political theologies” in which we live and work every day? Keith also fails to distinguish between a working class or peasant-driven Liberalism (eg, Babeuf or Saint-Simone) and the Liberalism of the ruthless industrial bourgeoisie. The industrial economy could easily delink from Liberalism, as was shown during the era of Colbert in France under Louis XIV or during the Keynesian era of the US, but Liberalism could also break it down, as shown during the neo-liberal era of the US. In a similar vein, the Left can delink from the economics of Liberalism while retaining the ideological perspective, which is precisely what happened through the Left’s abrogation of the Hegelian dialectic and the phenomenon of Idealism. Idealism and/or Liberalism Returning to the subject of radicalism with a new dialectic of Liberalism as an intermediary form between Idealism and Materialism, we find that Idealism takes on its own meaning, independant from Liberalism. As is commonly known, Hegel, perhaps the most Idealist of all philosophers, inspired through his method a generation of extreme radicals, such as Max Stirner, Mikhail Bakunin, and of course Marx. Here, the radical turn moves from Liberalism to Idealism; from the philosophy that all men are equal and free to the dangerous insistence that each individual has the power to create their own world for themselves and others. This is not the static reality that Keith states thusly: “Liberalism is idealist, This is the belief that reality is a mental activity.” At no point does Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments come close to Keith’s definition of Liberalism; in fact, Smith’s good friend, David Hume, argued that while we cannot absolutely affirm that reality exists as such. That is why we can and should study the world in an empirical fashion. Hume’s empiricism would present a stark contrast to the Idealism of Bishop Berkeley, who was by no means a Liberal. For continental philosopher Alain Badiou, Idealism “calls upon the subject not as a problem but as the solution to the aporias of the One.” From this perspective, Idealism is not a system of principles, as Liberalism appears to be, but a conceptualization of the subject. John Maynard Keynes was a preeminent, though unorthodox, Liberal of the 20th Century—was he at all known for his overarching philosophy of the unity of truth via the subject? If there is a point at which the Liberal and Idealist schools converge, it is not in thinking that reality is a mental activity, but that existence is relative, or rather, relationship-oriented. Sartre would later attempt to synthesize the philosophical schools of Idealism and Empiricism by appropriating the radical Christian thinker, Kierkegaard, insisting that the leap of “good faith” connects our existence “for-itself” to our existence “for-others” thereby linking our own self-consciousness (always a form of false consciousness immured in the world of capitalism) to that of relative consciousness. Sartre’s radical Idealism would open space for a Materialist analysis that did not abandon Phenomenology. In this space, Emanuel Levinas would posit that “woman is the category of the future, the ecstasy of the future. It is that human possibility which consists in saying that the life of another human being is more important than my own, that the death of the other is more important than my own death, that the Other comes before me, that the other counts before I do… This is the k’dusha (in Hebrew). And in the feminine there is the possibility of conceiving of a world without me, a world which has a meaning without me” (Levinas, “Que dirait Eurydice?” 214, 219-220). It is this world of the feminine, a world of possibility, giving, and otherness, that ecofeminism operates, not at all in a solely Liberal or Idealist sense, but perhaps in both of them, and even then with a possibility of neither. This turn from Liberal to Idealist to Materialist was already achieved, Sartre found, by Marx. We can look, for instance, at Marx’s relentless critiques of Proudhon, in which Proudhon and the French Socialists’ allusions to the absolute categories of Liberty and Equality are challenged as Liberal and Idealistic. Yet Marx retains much of the Liberal tradition in methodology; as Harvey explains, “Marx accepts much of what Smith says but then searches for the gaps or contradictions which, when rectified, radically transform the argument” (see A Companion to Marx’s Capitali, Verso 2010, pg 5). The radical turn here towards a Materialist analysis has already been sublimated within the potentialities of Liberalism (particularly through the analytic of Empiricism and the emancipatory dialectic of Idealism). What differentiates Marx from Proudhon here is the ability to continue thinking through Idealism, to use Idealism beyond Idealism as it were, rather than adhere uncritically to singular ideas or principles. In the final analysis, attempts to build matrices that cleverly define Liberal from Radical will dissolve into an ultimately categorical ratiocination inured to the Enlightenment mentality that it seeks to subdue. What we must do instead is move beyond the strict and harsh borders between ideas that Keith has erected, and acknowledge a more permeable borderspace, an intercursive realm that allows diverse communities to truly thrive. The Function of Fascism Let us turn from Hegel and his influence on the formative generation of radical communism and anarchism to Schiller, perhaps the greatest Idealist of all time. Schiller’s aesthetics rivaled those of Hegel’s, and his plays inspired revolution in even the most intransigent reactionaries. In his letters after the French Revolution, Schiller bemoaned the failure of liberation and proposed that every individual realize their true ideal in the body of the State, and set both their bodily drives and logical minds “free” toward autonomy and spontaneity into the realm of aesthetic play. This was an idea that would become co-opted by Nazi Germany, and many still argue today that its fetishization of statehood exemplify German proto-fascism. How is it that Schiller can at one point seek ultimate totalitarian domination of Statist Idealism while at other points his message becomes so libertarian that his writing is even quoted by Max Stirner, the powerful Hegelian anarchist, on subjects of the environment, the ego, and individual? Here we are met with the difficult problem of Romanticism. Romantics were often aligned against Liberals throughout the 19th Century, yet they did not necessarily attack the bourgeoisie. Romantics were extremely Idealistic, and Schiller was among their top influences, as well as Goethe and Hegel. Keith hints to this complexity through her mention of Gustav Landauer, whom she dubs a “romantic socialist” (122). But for this category to exist, we must recognize the interworkings of Idealism and Materialism as distinct from Liberalism. Even then, we are faced with Keith’s amazing statements, such as “[Romantics’] interest in peasants had nothing to do with the actual conditions of peasants nor with the solidarity and loyalty that the rural poor could have used; it had everything to do with their own privileged desires” (156). To some extent, Keith’s sentiments are true to the history noted by EP Thompson in his excellent biography of the Romantic revolutionary, William Morris. We see in Morris’s romanticism a Utopian ideal far removed from everyday life: “The finest aspirations of the romantic revolt, which aroused [Morris’s] own desires for ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ in his youth, now seemed possible of fulfillment: ‘Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us…’” Those are the words and sentiments of a Romantic revolutionary, along with Morris’s famous book, News from Nowhere, about which Kropotkin declared, “it is an exquisite prose idyll, and is pure Anarchism in conception, but I can hardly conceive of society developing in just that way. There is a poetry of industrial mechanism, of machinery, that Morris never realized” (See “An Intellectual Giant” by Leonard Abbot in Mother Earth, ed: Alexander Berkman, vol. 7, no. 10). Yet one can trace also the speeches of Romantics like Lord Byron to the House of Lords, finding exactly the kind of consideration for the inchoate working class that Keith claims is lacking in Romantics. With regards to the frame breaking rampages of the Luddites, Byron would declare to the Lords of England, “it cannot be denied that [acts of sabotage] have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress: the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings, tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community. They were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them: their own means of subsistence were cut off, all other employment preoccupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be subject to surprise. As the sword is the worst argument than can be used, so should it be the last. In this instance it has been the first; but providentially as yet only in the scabbard.” It is hard to get more radical in one’s analysis of Luddism than this—beyond breaking a frame or two himself, Byron stood strong against the industrialist persecution that hung over the British countryside. Are we not confronted with the problem that the separation between Idealism and Romanticism, like that of Liberalism and Idealism, is simply a radical dialectical turn? Beyond that, we might suggest, the crucial revolution of Marx, Comte, Dilthey, et. al., represents the second radical turn from Idealism toward Materialism, Positivism, Functionalism, etc. It was this final turn of the screw that culminated at the beginning of the last century in the battle between Communism as a far Left tendency and Fascism, which emerged at the time (in Italy and Germany) as a self-proclaimed Centrist movement. By this time, Liberalism was a kind of neutral platform. It had become known for condoning the existence of the state, but its most favored champion was not a capitalist like Bentham, but the well-respected academic, Max Weber, whose own anticapitalist writings had garnered tremendous popularity. It was the blandness of Weber’s Liberal Democrat party and the disingenuousness of the Social Democrat party in Germany that lent itself to the grand appeal of Rosa Luxemburg’s own variety of revolutionary Marxism. Figures aligned with the parliamentary Social Democrats therefore assassinated the leaders of the Luxemburg’s party, including Rosa, herself, throwing the political spectrum into a frenzy that the brutality of the Nazis would pull into its control. The Nazi party was by no means Liberal by today’s standards; however its theoretical apparatus, led by Martin Heidegger, was perhaps most influenced by the progenitor of Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey—the Isaac who begat the 20th Century’s terrible Jacob and Essau. This connection functions as a primary reason for the domination Nazi politics and economics by a kind of polluted Functionalism: bureaucratized state economic control over industry coinciding with a disgustingly reactionary cultural myth of the German folk, free from the tight grips of financial control. In other words, the freedom of the German mythic way of life was predicated, of course, upon the most rigidly controlled and tightly managed bureaucratic machine. As Keith herself admits, “we need to take seriously the history of how ideas which we think of as innately progressive, like ecology and animal rights, became intertwined with a fascist movement” (124). But in this context, Keith completely dismantles her own argument by presenting in total ideological confusion a movement that hinges on an ideological authoritarianism. Along this rather long arc, we find that we do not have to go far from Schiller’s understandings of the aesthetic space of the state and philosophical avenues of Ecology being opened up 100 years later, during the very beginnings of the catastrophic conflicts between radical ideologies. Taken from the root word oikos, or household, Ecology was derived in the late 19th Century as a field of study that determined the human interaction with the environment. Using as its fundamental basis the division between Innenwelt (innerworld) and Umwelt (perceptual environment), the field of Ecology, particularly developed by Jakob von Uexkull’s Theoretical Biology (1926), inaugurated a kind of study of nature over and above objective reality. Each species could be said to have its own Umwelt, its own life-world of instinctive attractions and inhibitions, fields of possible understandings. It is, unfortunately, true that perhaps the most practical Materialists in the world today are not radical ecologists, but graduates of the tradition of Ayn Rand, and researching how to disinhibit consumers from purchasing useless commodities that they know will confine them to an ecology of (sub)urban isolation. Here is, once again, the usurpation of Idealism over Liberalism (the positing of the possibility of multifarious individual worlds colliding at once) within a milieu utterly removed from metaphysics and therefore beyond Idealism, itself (ie, Materialism). It is thus self-evident how Idealism can rise to meet the highest radical challenges of the mind, and then smash them into a kind of vain Materialism that becomes a crude instrument of Liberal, totalitarian power. How many Ecologists are there who remain in the land of Liberalism, convinced by the rhetoric of Liberty that there is nothing more to do than to perfect the system? (See for instance Christian Parenti’s critique of 350.org) The Liberal who is a Naturalist Voluntarist Under Liberalism, according to Keith, we are to find Naturalism and Voluntarism, whereas under Radicalism, those ‘isms’ are substituted with Constructivism and Social Determinism. As all critical theorists from Darwin up to the present roll in their graves, we will try to unravel this awful intellectual tangle. Naturalism, Keith insists, believes that “body exists independently of society/mind” and posits “gender/race as physical body.” Right away, these characteristics are falsely attributed. For Marx, “communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution” (See Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, “Private Property and Communism,” Marxists.org) This notion of Naturalism is hardly a Liberal phenomenon. It is completely against the notion that the body exists independently of society/mind. Marx declares that in a communist society, “Society is therefore the perfected unity in essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature” (Ibid). This idea of common life with nature, the realization of humanity in and through nature could be taken many ways—one of which would be the idea of Man refashioning Nature into his idealized image—but this is not the way that Marx discusses the commune. The commune is instead a working with and through nature; an internal as well as an external work. Over and against Marx, we have Bakunin, whose Hegelian influence drew him toward the notion of voluntarism. Bakunin did not argue against building a commune through general understanding and appreciation of nature, but to do so Bakunin believed that small groups of revolutionaries in every country would have to work within the nation-state to dismantle it through various sets of contradictory revolutionary assemblages. Here, Marx decried the notion of voluntarism professed by Bakunin, since he felt that workers lived within the collective forms of production that provide the consciousness of the path out of capitalism. By existing outside of the proletariat as an antagonist, Bakunin’s volunteer activists would implode the proletariat and create the exact conditions of anomy that capitalists sought after so much. The terrible problem with Keith’s analysis here is that DGR is precisely a voluntarist organization with naturalist pretenses. Again, it is useless to call DGR a “Liberal” organization, but what we can find is far worse: that the movement is a self-defeating intellectual quagmire. Decisions About Colonialism, or Colonial Decisions? How, then, do we look at DGR’s analysis of “decisive” action and “successful” movements? It appears that Keith believes only certain actions can be decisive, and most of those appear to be perfectly executed plots of militant groups or above-ground actions effected by individuals, groups, or organizations. The matrix of possibilities—property damage, assassination, etc.—returns to the question of effect and plausible outcomes further fleshed out by Aric McBay. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassinated intelligence officers, which apparently, according to McBay, led in part to their ultimate success (410). We are, of course, not to forget that the orchestrator of these “deep”, “decisive” actions, Michael Collins, was assassinated in 1922 by the same organization for which he played hitman. But nowhere is it mentioned that the IRA, which in 1917 declared its adherence with founding theorist James Connelly to communist redistribution of the means of production, in 1940 was collaborating with the Nazis to invade the North of England. Not to mention the ultimate failure of the IRA to put into place the vision of Connelly, or to unify the island under one independent republic. Let’s look at a similar case that neither Keith nor McBay mention in any depth: the Soviet Revolution. Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky, two radicals who extolled the anarchy that took effect in peasant communes during the first years of the Soviet Revolution. Trotsky, himself, applauded the Petrograd Soviet, organized almost entirely by anarchists like Voline, and for his part, Serge was an anarchist. The Russian Revolution that had roots in 1905 was strictly aligned with the peace movement, and had many anarchist organizers; the Bolshevik Party took power through a co-optation of the principles of peace along with a simultaneous commendeering of the Russian Army. Soon, both Serge and Trotksy compromised their apparent earlier radical principles by ultimately accepting and even insisting that radicals who complained about the Soviet system had to be purged through State Terror. It did not take long for both of them to be discharged from the USSR; in Serge’s case, his expulsion, brought on by rejection of Stalin’s political relationship with China, involved “failing” to “understand” the exacting and rigorous “principles” of “dialectical materialism”. Materialism, indeed! As we are expected to receive an IRA reimagined through rose-colored glasses, Keith presents the Black Panthers in an almost unflaggingly negative light (75-78, 82). Pursuing the common presentation of sexual deviancy within the Black Panthers, Keith completely fails to offer anything more than a caricature of the people involved in these organizations. There is no mention of Assata Shakur or Angela Davis or Kathleen Cleaver. Why, might we ask, are organizations created by People of Color reduced to the most base condemnations while the IRA is offered as a model of resistance, along with the US Sons of Liberty and Stamp Act rebels (87-92)? Even the paragraph devoted to John Brown in Keith’s passage is resolved in the notion that Brown, himself, was likely a schizophrenic, and the raid on Harpers Ferry led to new laws prohibiting “the education of both enslaved and free blacks and instituting other reductions of civil rights” (102). Forget the common historical notion that the Raid on Harpers Ferry was the first shot in the Civil War—this one led merely to trouble. This is a claim that Aric McBay roundly denies in his section, declaring, “[Brown’s] project ultimately failed. But on the other hand, you could say that it set up much greater things” (276). Keith and company are quite pragmatic when it comes to white resistance movements. In fact, she seems to reduce most resistance movements against colonialism to “mysticism” for “spirit warriors,” wherein “Despite all the suffering of genoicide and depression over centuries, no spirit warriors have ever appeared to save the day. That’s N-E-V-E-R” (101-102). Forget Tecumseh, forget spirituality altogether; Deep Green Resistance must have a totally de-mystified, reasonable reality—a blatantly positivist claptrap that totally contradicts a statement she makes after a few pages (“the black churches have been called the cradle of the civil rights movement; Liberation Theology has been central to prodemocracy struggles in Latin America; and Christian missionaries helped end slavery and the caste system in Karala, India,” pg. 107). What, then, can we say, other than “spirituality only works if it’s Christian, or created by Keith, herself?” All indigenous forms of spiritual resistance are “mystical,” but what about Keith’s own divinations of a “Great Mystery, the Goddess, a Higher Power” that “can lead us out of our personla pain, loss, and exhaustion, and lend us the courage and strength to fight for justice”? (108). Perhaps we can glean the most from DGR work through an engagement with the movements that they do not mention—mostly movements from the Third World. Out of 11 movements analyzed by McBay under a spectrum of success or failure, only three are non-European (469-470). No mention is made, for better or worse, of the early Chinese Communist Party or the Algerian National Liberation Front. What about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Salvandorian FMLN? Unfortunately, most practical examples come from a tragically Euro-centric perspective. The Irish Republican Army, the French Resistance, Holocaust resisters, even British poll tax protestors, and so on. While each movement is hermetically different, they are supposedly united by their likeness to DGR, which remains pinioned by the failure of method. As she shifts from totally different movement to totally different movement, Keith leaves us with small anecdotal connections without any real critical comparison. Keith has replaced combinatoric systems analysis with a kind of retreat into the most vulgar pragmatism, a kind of one-size-fits-all rescaling of the environmental movement by convoluting the strategies and tactics that organically grew out of totally different times and places. At this point, such false identities remain unhelpful, precisely because they are total fictions, figments of a historian’s imagination, better relegated to the cocktail party than the strategy meeting. There is No Other As an organizing tool, the main problem with the DGR schema is that there is no critical intervention in the human subject. The theme bounces from point to point without settling anywhere to hone a truly radical analysis of the human condition in its contemporary settings. We are meant to pick up DGR and at once thrust ourselves into the radical environmental agenda without actually going through an inner transformation. If resistance is the nature of the re, the enforcement against, and the sistare, the redoubling of stare, to stand, the root word of state, then resistance must be the doubling of the subject, its re-enforcement, and in a sense, the construction of a state of being. The resistance begins with a state of things, a subjective correlate to what is seen as the objective world. There is then a split within the subject, not where the subject confronts the object in a new way, but where the object literally transforms into something new, unrecognizable. The subject then re-enstates itself by arriving at terms with the world that has changed. Finally, the subject moves beyond that world by creating new values, new relationships, modalities of life, and so forth. In psychoanalysis resistance comprises any break, disruption, interruption of the free-flow of consciousness. Here it is helpful, instead of relying on the English logic, to use a German word that Freud deploys to describe this process: Wilderstand, which translates roughly as wild state. Resistance as deliverance from the “wild state” is the basis of ego-formation, which is reflexively necessary to present an understanding of the outside world (Umwelt). The problem with DGR is that it relies so heavily on the ego-formation of the triad of leaders—particularly Jensen and Keith—that it fails to open discursive patterns and practices that will actually emancipate or even decolonize. What needs to happen with DGR is an open discussion over real, necessary strategies and tactics that can come from the present conditions at hand. The distortions of the authors promotes a double-resistance: first, against the status quo of dominionism (industrial civilization) and second, against its own readers, as it develops a reactionary assault against open discourse and community through ill-conceived hierarchical model that fails in every historical instance. Oppression and DGR The most blatant problem of subject formation, which creates a cult of personality, stems from the subjective resistance deployed in the castigation of other radical tendencies or groups. Keith is particularly guilty for her attack on anarchists and vegan activists in the text, although through her outside work in the RadFem community, she has also proven to be transphobic. Here we find a populist “Othering” of groups within the movement who appear to be compromising the integrity of the core of resistance, which is to find its focus on wilderness. Vegans, anarchists, and “lesbian sepratists” are categorized as Liberals by Keith insofar as they choose to direct their lifestyles toward alternative cultures, rather than what she calls “oppositional cultures.” For Keith, the key distinction appears to be “Adult values of discernment, responsibility [sic],” where “[l]egitimate authority is accepted and cultivated,” and the “[g]oals are adult concerns: guide the community, socialize the young, enforce norms, participate in larger project of righting the world” (see figure on next page). Opposition is “Idealism tempered by experience.” Here, naturally, we are to ignore the history of “adult” genocide, hatred, and war; the prison industry complex, the military, the unrelenting attack on the liberty and openness of the youth of today by the institutions developed to distort and force the youth’s mental and physical environment into the iron cage of reason. One wonders what “Idealism tempered with experience” might be if it annihilates “youth concerns,” wherein the “legitimate authority” is decided upon by and for the “adult” leaders. Are we not faced with the immediate image of youthful Romantics who have “grown up” and are now forcing the new wave of youthful Romantics to abandon the same ideals once held by their elders? Is this not the cyclical problem of the “generation gap” repeating itself? And what of the notion that “anarchist rewilders” or “vegans” will serve a liberal elite if they do not ascribe to the “Oppositional Culture” defined and circumscribed by self-legitimized elders who seek to “enforce norms” resolved against the very youth whom they wish to absorb? For her part, Keith defies her own argument while discussing Vermont separatism, as she quotes Frank Bryan, a radical democrat, stating, “Hierarchy requires authority, which promotes symmetry, which causes rigidity. The result is awkward, reactionary and (most important) insensitive—and thus inhumane.” Derrick Jensen defines civilization, itself, as hierarchy: “Civilization is a specific, hierarchical organization based on ‘power over.’” Therefor, according to McBay, “Resistance to civilization is inherently decentralized” (460). How, then does DGR become such a hierarchic organization based on the ideologies of three (more like two now, since McBay has left) leaders? Indeed, “awkward, reactionary, and insensitive” might be the best way to describe Keith’s writing. As for inhumane, one has only to glance at Keith’s views that vegans are “ideological fanatics” to see precisely where her ethics lie. To essentialize, attack, and completely exclude a group of people on the basis of their diet—this is no easy task. Here, she is not simply defending a group of oppressors, she is attacking and systematically excusing the oppression of another group. While Keith insists, “[t]he heroization of the individual, in whatever admixture of suffering and alienation, forms the basis of the Romantic hostility to the political sphere,” (130) it appears that this hostility is fostered based on the failure of the so-called “Oppositional Culture” to adequately understand or recognize forms of social power outside of their own designs. According to Aric McBay’s analysis of organization, DGR suggests an above-ground hierarchal structure with an underground, horizontal structure of compartmentalized cells. The implication is that more militant people might solidify into an organization with a strong chain of command, while less subordinate people may gravitate towards looser or more dynamic hierarchies. We might be able to choose who we work with for the time being (as long as we’re under the umbrella of DGR), but then in the end there is a clear hierarchal chain that overdetermines this apparently open structure. It may be wise to recall the common knowledge that anyone who claims to set you free automatically assumes the ultimate control over the conditions of your own self-liberation, and then check out Rachel Ivey on Youtube claiming that, “DGR’s official policy which is not up for debate.” Keith goes on to add that DGR will include a faction called DEW, or Decisive Ecological Warfare, who will launch risky actions that might be shunned by others in the environmental movement and popular media. She insists, “the IRA had Sinn Fein. The abolition movement had the Underground Railroad, Nat Turner, and John Brown, and bloody Kansas… A radical movement grows from a culture of resistance, like a seed from soil.” But there is an important slippage here: Sinn Fein is neither a radical movement nor a culture of resistance; it is a political wing of an armed movement. At one point, Keith awkwardly proclaims, “We need the permaculture wing to be the Sinn Fein” (220), a truly strange comparison between a political party and a group of people who utilize a modish technique of agriculture. No comparison can aptly be drawn, in fact, between Sinn Feinn and John Brown, either. Perhaps Keith might have said “the Civil Rights movement had the NAACP,” but she doesn’t. Keith goes on to say, “The civil rights movement had the redefinition of blackness in the Harlem Renaissance and the stability, and community spirit of the Pullman porters, and then four college students willing to sit down at a lunch counter and face the angry mob” (477). The “redefinition of blackness in the Harlem Renaissance” is already a controversial topic (see the writings of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for instance), but it does not relate to Sinn Feinn. Nor does the Pullman strike or the Woolworths sit-in compare to the IRA, or visa-versa, in any genuine strategic sense. So what is the meaning of this strange assemblage of totally inappropriate comparisons? This confusion is paradigmatic of the convenient self-contradictions that pervade DGR, and suggest that there is something behind the curtain of the appearance of “horizontal resistance networks.” The problem with the model determined by McBay and Keith can be identified within the French Resistance, itself. The Resistance was quite diffuse both ideologically and structurally, until the very end, when Charles de Gaulle uprooted the entire grass roots structure and placed himself at the head of the new militarized nationalist government. De Gaulle would go on to become a symbol of corrupt, ultra-right-wing governance, which would reappear after the worker-student uprising of May 1968 to defuse the autonomous, decentralized movement. Here, the idealism of young militants was brutally subjugated to the “older generation” of the Gaullist right—a stirring example of how the ageism at work within Keith’s ideology plays out in the political terrain of resistance. One has to contemplate why Deep Green Resistance opens with a quote from the White Rose Society—an “alternative culture” of young doves who were executed for disseminating anti-fascist propaganda in Hitler’s Germany—if it really insists on the forced subjugation of the youth to the demands of “adults.” A few pages after insisting that the youth submit to their adult guides, Keith admits that “[t]he number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called ‘dad’” (147). At one point, she declares that “We can reject authoritarianism, conformity, social hierarchy, anti-intellectualism, and religious fundamentalism” (153) as though she had not just laid out a blatantly authoritarian, conformist, hierarchical structure of oppression that seems dangerously similar to a religious cult, wherein leaders, whose authority is not only to be accepted but enjoyed and appreciated, enforce strict norms with an emphasis on socializing the youth. It is in keeping with Keith’s epistemology that she brings up Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, declaring that “in order for oppression to function smoothly, ideology must be transferred from the oppressors to the oppressed” (151). But how has Keith acknowledged this function of reality while insisting that “Oppositional Culture” relies on “adults” to “enforce norms”? Is this not the deliberate bending of hegemony towards the building of an oppressive hierarchic structure? It appears that Keith places “defying conventions” on the “Alternative Culture” (Liberal) side of the matrix, because she does not want the youth to challenge “adult” norms, such as eating meat or generally acting oppressively. It helps to know also from outside documents that Keith’s denunciations extend also to trans folks, whom she believes undermine the authenticity of her own essentialized femininity. This would not be relevant if it did not present a problem of “heroization of the individual” in its concrete form. Here, we strike upon the classic mode of subject forming resistance in the deepest psychological sense: deep-seeded patriarchal attacks on non-binary gender roles. It might be rewarding to look towards Derrick Jensen’s friend, Jane Caputi, who brilliantly marks the female lesbian relationship as a wilderness of gender, an undisclosed, undefinable gender that exists outside of the male gaze (see Truths Among Us, ed: Derrick Jensen, pg 183-187). If this indetermenate gender exists, how should it be that male-bodied people would not be able to renounce the regard for “the male gender” and retreat into the same indeterminate wilderness? So how then, does Keith discuss as radical the concept that a “person is socially constructed,” while decrying as Liberal the notion that the “person is distinct from [the] social group”? Is she not presenting herself, her persona or avatar, as the ultimate “basic social unit”—a person who presides over other social groups and distinguished her own society as opposed to all other persons? If she admitted she was socially constructed, would she not be more open to an “active and critical embrace of group.” Who is Lierre Keith? The question can only be answered from within her own interpolation, which posits itself as an eco-feminist in opposition to the free play of gender and sexuality not only available but present throughout the world, even (or particularly) in indigenous cultures that she idealizes and essentializes almost as much as herself. Civilization is bad and indigenous peoples are good, according to Jensen and Keith’s shallow primitivism, but as Proust shows in Memory of Dead Times, war itself can be seen both as the most primitive and civilized of all human actions; the two are matters of oppositional engagement that pursues a specific determination. When we think of national liberation movements that have worked—the Vietnamese army supported by Ho and Giap, for instance—there was no real glorification of the “uncivilized;” rather, there was a sincere understanding, both among anti-war activists in the North Atlantic and Vietnamese freedom fighters, that there had to be another way beyond these inane categories. This way is that of liberation. After all, we are taught by feminist psychoanalysis like Bracha Ettinger that the productive side of subjective resistance is formation based on transference tied to the phallus, while the Femanine difference, which Bracha Ettinger calls “matrixial,” is “a subjective dimension that is not derived from the exchange of signifiers and does not refer to the phallic field and to the rift of castration. It is a swerve intertwined in borderlinking, the plaiting and interweaving of borderlines, and in the opening of borderspaces created by the interwoven plait (See Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota 2006, pp. 183, 5). The gender essentialism of Keith’s RadFem persona exudes a patriarchal and phallic aura. It is an attempt to define the feminine within the terms of the masculine, which represents, in the words of Griselda Pollack, “the agony of feminist thought caught on its own impossibility” (Ibid, 23, 4). Cease and Resist? What is resistance? What is insurgency? How are the two different? We don’t find the answer in this text; we find a de-velopment of the subject that functions as a fig leaf for the ego formation of its leaders. “The subject desists,” writes Lacoue-Labarthe, “This is why it is fictionable at its very origin and only accedes to selfhood, if it ever does, through being supplemented by a model or models which precede it” (see “The Echo of the Subject” in Typography: memesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed: Chris Fynsk, Stanford University Press 1998). DGR is fundamentally not only the most Idealistic (self-constructed) project possible, but a reactionary one at that. “The problem is probably that desistance resists,” explains Lacoue-Labarthe, but it resists in a dialectical fashion in a struggle against itself to produce an alternate model. Rather than mobilizing within or really acknowledging pre-existing structures of resistance, DGR coins a new struggle and co-opts all the underlying components. Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, small, radical biodiversity groups, even hapless permaculture (which as we saw is to become the new Sinn Fein!). Why exist outside of the leadership of the three enlightened dictators? Instead, however, of adding momentum, DGR alienates the subject, contains it, sets new, abrupt and parameters according to a convenient metric plot that corresponds only internally to DGR’s ideological position, and not externally to those movements that it co-opts. The activists who operate under the DGR banner are not subject to the will or direction of its leaders. There is no purpose in following them under the conditions of such intellectual ineptitude and ossification. A new generation of DGR writers must arise from the backwardness of its current leaders. Rise up, DGR, from the ashes and move towards the fires of global revolution! One Response to “Deep Green Resistance — a critique” Deep Green Transphobia \| Earth First! Newswire - May 15, 2013 […] Deep Green Resistance — a critique […]	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line718
__label__wiki	0.550366	0.550366	Readership Statistics Econ Journal Watch » Authors David W. Findlay The bio below comes from a published article and may now be dated. David W. Findlay is the Pugh Family Professor of Economics at Colby College where he has been a faculty member since 1985. He received his B.A. with Honours from Acadia University (Canada) and his Ph.D. in Economics from Purdue University. Two of his previously published articles examine the effects of player race and ethnicity on election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. A native of New England, he is a lifelong fan of the Red Sox. His email address is dwfindla@colby.edu. Race, Ethnicity, and Baseball Card Prices: A Replication, Correction, and Extension of Hewitt, Muñoz, Oliver, and Regoli Supplement to “Race, Ethnicity, and Baseball Card Prices: A Replication, Correction, and Extension of Hewitt, Muñoz, Oliver, and Regoli” The EJW provides informed and engaging commentary on a broad range of economic issues and makes you think again. — Per Skedinger, Associate Professor of Economics, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Editor of the Journal of the Swedish Economic Association	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line721
__label__wiki	0.917828	0.917828	18171[remove] Director of the Poor1[remove] County1 Federalist1[remove] Quid1[remove] General1[remove] You searched for: Election Type General Remove constraint Election Type: General Office Director of the Poor Remove constraint Office: Director of the Poor Party Federalist Remove constraint Party: Federalist Party Quid Remove constraint Party: Quid Year 1817 Remove constraint Year: 1817 1. Pennsylvania 1817 Director of the Poor, Delaware County Director of the Poor The Quids In Pennsylvania, the Quids, known first as "Constitutionalists", arose out of a split among the Republicans in local Philadelphia politics. The various Republican splinter movements in New York [Burrites, Lewisites and Clintonians] although most had underlying economic and reform issues, they often instead rallied around a central personality. As did most Republican splinter movements in Pennsylvania with exception of the Constitutional Republicans, a movement formed to prevent proposed judicial changes to the Pennsylvania Constitution. In addition to these, there were within Congress a group of individuals who were often classified as Quids. Among this group were congressmen from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, New Jersey and North Carolina. Mainly elected in 1804 and 1806 as Republicans, they began to question some actions and direction of their party. When reaction to the Embargo revitalized the Federalist; New York and Pennsylvania dissident Republican movements moved back into the main party. On the Congressional level, a few remained in opposition, some declined to run for re-election, and others were not re-nominated. "The first evidence of this appeared in reports of a dinner of the 'Democratic Constitutional Republicans' held at the White Horse Tavern in Philadelphia on March 4, 1805, to celebrate Jefferson's second inauguration. A few days later the Freeman's Journal printed a proposal, dated March 14, for forming 'The Society of Constitutional Republicans.' This document recognized the sovereignity of the people, the principle of majority rule, and the right of the people, to alter and abolish their government as they saw fit. However, it described the Pennsylvania Constitution, along with the Federal Constitution, as 'the noblest invention of human wisdom, for the self-government of man' and avowed that it should be changed only when the motives and causes were 'obvious, cogent, general and conclusive.' Great political blessings were enjoyed under the Constitution, and it required no alteration. The list of the society's principles closed with an assertion of loyalty to the existing State and Federal administrations." (The Keystone in the Democratic Arch: Pennsylvania Politics, 1800-1816. Sanford W. Higginbotham. 1952. p 82-83) "Continuing the practice of the preceding year, the Aurora referred to the Constitutional Republicans as Quids. The latter professed to find the title an honorable one. A writer on the Freeman's Journal asserted that a 'tertium quid' was a substance used in pharmacy to transform a poison into a medicine and avowed that there was a great need for such an element in politics. A third party would determine whether there would be 'liberty of despotism.'" (Higginbotham, p 91) "The incident [the Special election of State Senator for District 1 in December of 1805] highlighted one aspect of the dilemma which faced the Pennsylvania Quids so long as they existed - how to avoid becoming a tail to the Federalist kite when the Democratic leaders would not permit them to rejoin their old party." (Higginbotham, p 105) "With McKean ineligible for another term in 1808 and with national issues making union with the Federalists less and less palatable, the great majority of Constitutional Republicans wished to return to the Republican ranks. However, they had no desire to submit to the leadership of Leib and Duane after the many indignities they had suffered at their hands. An alliance with the country Republicans, who were also seeking to rid the party of the domination of Leib and Duane, seemed a logical and natural arrangement." (Higginbotham, p 138) "The election of 1808 was a significant demonstration of the depth and strength of Pennsylvania Republicanism. The Federalists had been favored by many circumstances - Republican disunity over presidential candidates; the Leib-Boileau quarrel among the Democrats; Quid cooperation with them in the three preceding elections; and, most important, the economic hardships of the embargo. Yet they had lost by an overwhelming majority. Republican unity reappeared under the stimulus of a revived Federalism campaigning on national issues. Internal divisions were suppressed, and the Republicans gave undivided support to Madison and Snyder. The stresses of the campaign destroyed the Constitutional Republicans as a third party, though there were vestiges in a few counties." (Higginbotham, p 176) "The strength and nature of this factionalism varied, but it never entirely disappeared. The first stage lasted from 1800 to 1805. Personal and local differences appeared almost immediately as the Federalists virtually abandoned politics. The struggle between Governor McKean and the country Democrats in the legislature over judicial reform and the failure of the attack on the judiciary culminated in the movement for a constitutional convention. Duane and Leib, whose arbitrary control of the party in Philadelphia had produced a violent schism, took sides against the Governor. Aided by the Federalists, the Constitutional Republicans, generally called Quids, were able to defeat the project for a convention and to re-elect McKean." (Higginbotham, p 328) "Adapted from tertium quid, a 'third something,' the name 'Quid' was first prominently used in a political sense in Pennsylvania in 1804, and it was soon affixed to a faction of the Republican party officially calling itself the Society of Constitutional Republicans. The Pennsylvania Quids attracted Federalist support and in 1805 re-elected Governor Thomas McKean, who had been the choice of a united Republican party in 1802 but was opposed by the majority wing of the party in 1805. (fn: Sanford W. Higginbotham. The Keystone in the Democratic Arch: Pennsylvania Politics, 1800-1816, p. 69, 346.)." ("Who Were the Quids?" Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. Vol. 50, No. 2 (Sep. 1963), p. 254) "The use of 'Quid' to refer to various third-party factions which plagued the Jeffersonian Republicans must not, however, be construed to mean that all Quids were part of the same third-party movement. When John Randolph referred to the third party, he was not being accurate. There was no such thing. The Quids in Pennsylvania and in New York - the only states where they represented organized factions - were neither in league with each other nor supporters of Randolph. In both states, the Republican divisions were the products of local controversies over men, offices, and state policies, and the Quid factions had not direct connection with the schism produced in national politics by Randolph's defection." (Cunningham, p 255) "The opponents of the Philadelphia Democrats and their rural allies were called at various times the Rising Sun Party (after a tavern where they first met in 1802), the Third Party, the Tertium Quids (Third Whats), and more often simply the Quids. The Quids hoped to tame popular politics by discrediting the radicalism that they blamed on the Philadelphia Democrats. To do so, they emphasized the nation's future greatness and the prosperity each citizen would enjoy in a vibrant economy with a peaceful representative politics committed to promoting internal economic development. Accepting, even welcoming, democracy in Pennsylvania, the Quids attempted to redefine the term. Popular politics would remain the instrument the citizens used to create the conditions that produced material independence. But democracy would only provide such indepedence of circumstances when Pensylvanians realized that their power should not be used to disrupt or hindred private energies or the use of property." (Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. Andrew Shankman. University Press of Kansas. 2004. p. 96) The Keystone in the Democratic Arch: Pennsylvania Politics, 1800-1816. Sanford W. Higginbotham. 1952. Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. Andrew Shankman. University Press of Kansas. 2004. Director of the Poor: Head position in the poor house. Known in Massachusetts, Ohio and Rhode Island as Overseer of the Poor. 1799 - 1824: Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island Office Scope: County / Town (Rhode Island) Role Scope: County / Town (Rhode Island)	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line722
__label__cc	0.676019	0.323981	Daimler is delivering a fleet of all-electric trucks to Lisbon - Jul. 6th 2018 6:13 am ET The electrification of trucks is happening faster than many predicted and Daimler is at the forefront of it with several recent fleet deliveries. Now the German company’s FUSO brand is delivering a new fleet of “over ten all-electric light-duty FUSO eCanter trucks to the city administration of the Portuguese capital.” The FUSO eCanter is meant for urban routes with a range of only 100 kilometers (62 miles) and a load capacity up to three and a half tons – depending on body and usage. The vehicle is powered by an electric powertrain with six high voltage lithium ion battery packs with 420 V and 13.8 kWh each for a total of ~83 kWh of capacity. Despite its limited capacity, the vehicle is well suited to many applications and can still help reduce local emissions. The city of Lisbon was part of a test program with FUSO’s electric trucks back in 2015 and now they think it offers enough capacity for city work: “The city of Lisbon uses the vehicles for municipal gardening trips and for waste disposal. With the FUSO eCanter, Lisbon is hoping to contribute to the reduction of local noise and emission pollution caused by commercial vehicles used in urban areas.” With this new deployment, the FUSO eCanter is now in use in six cities around the world in Tokyo, New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam as well as Lisbon. In Europe, DHL and several other logistics companies are using the all-electric truck. In the US, UPS has started operating a small fleet in New York as part of its many electrification initiatives. While Daimler is ramping up the FUSO eCanter program, it is only one of several all-electric truck programs from the large truck maker. Under FUSO, it also has the bigger all-electric eTruck, which has a 26 ton capacity, a massive 212 kWh battery pack, and ~125 miles of range. Daimler also recently unveiled new electric truck programs under its Freightliner brand: an electric eCascadia semi truck to compete with Tesla Semi and a smaller electric M2 106. Those trucks are expected to go into volume production in the next few years, but like with the eCanter, Daimler is already starting to deliver small fleets to customers as part of its development program.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line723
__label__cc	0.64428	0.35572	From One Security Nightmare To Another Security managers have boosted antivirus and firewall protection, but enterprises may need to switch gears as new regulations target how enterprises handle personally identifying data By Mathew Schwartz The oldest enemies often seem to be the worst. To wit: Despite the prevalence of host-based and network-based methods for arresting antivirus, IT managers’ most-prevalent fear continues to be viruses and worms. The second-worst threat is employees using resources in unapproved ways, followed by regulatory non-compliance and the effects of spam. Those results come from a January 2005 survey by Forrester of 200 “technology decision-makers” at North American companies. Given these worries, companies are responding in multiple ways, notes Forrester analyst David Friedlander. “Companies are deploying client and gateway antivirus programs, personal and network firewalls, anti-spyware, and host- and network-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) or intrusion protection systems (IPS).” In particular, desktop security is getting a boost. For example, 65 percent of organizations plan to further implement enterprise anti-spyware tools; 80 percent say they currently use anti-spyware tools. In addition, 42 percent of companies will strengthen endpoints by unrolling desktop firewalls, and 31 percent will also add host-based IDS or IPS to their desktops. Of course, from cost, management, and efficiency perspectives, targeting individual desktops may not give the greatest return on investment. As Forrester notes, “Network and gateway security is still one of the best ways to protect the corporate network— it is the organization’s first line of defense to keep malicious code out of the network.” Expect spending to follow suit, with 58 percent of companies implementing network firewalls this year, 43 percent unrolling antivirus in a gateway, and 35 percent implementing network-based IDS or IPS. Given the perceived threat from spam, 53 percent of organizations will bolster content filtering and spam-control tools. Identity Theft Ranks Low Of the nine threats organizations were asked to rank, 68 percent characterized viruses and worms as one of their top-three threats. Given the attention paid to those threats, however, and the installed base for antivirus software—nearly 100 percent of all corporate desktops, according to most research firms—organizations may be neglecting other security threats. For example, on the list of nine concerns organizations were asked to rank, note the one ranked last: identity theft. Only 12 percent of respondents characterized it as one of their top-three threats. Given that digital identity theft is a relatively new problem, could the its low ranking reflect that organizations don’t fully understand the threat, or that there’s no easy to install, off-the-shelf software for mitigating it? To be sure, the threat of identity theft doesn’t affect all industries equally. Yet given the recent high-profile cases of information theft or loss, such as from ChoicePoint and Bank of America, companies may want to revisit their security policies for preventing identity theft. In particular, any organization that buys, sells, or uses consumers’ sensitive information, or which is a bank or other financial organization, get ready for more regulations. Banks Get New Notification Regulations Already, for example, thanks to newly issued guidelines, banks must tell customers when they’ve had a security breach involving customer information. The guidelines, known as “Interagency Guidance on Response Programs for Unauthorized Access to Customer Information and Customer Notice,” were released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision. According to the guidelines, “When a financial institution becomes aware of an incident of unauthorized access to sensitive customer information, the institution should conduct a reasonable investigation to promptly determine the likelihood that the information has been or will be misused.” In addition, “If the institution determines that misuse of its information about a customer has occurred or is reasonably possible, it should notify the affected customer as soon as possible.” Law enforcement agencies with active criminal investigations may, however, delay that notification so as to not disrupt the investigation. Regardless, the financial institution must also notify federal regulators. Congress Gears Up Beyond banks, other industries are under threat of impending legislation. Currently only California requires disclosure when its residents’ information is lost or stolen. On the heels of the theft of information from ChoicePoint, however, and the fact that ChoicePoint notified over 13,000 California residents that their information was stolen, another 19 states’ attorneys general requested ChoicePoint also notify their residents, even though no law required it to. Expect that to change, and for the momentum from recent identity-theft attacks to result in new legislation, predict numerous security experts. While such legislation may start at the state level, experts predict Congress will create a country-wide notification law, so companies don’t have to navigate different laws for every state. Of course, for people whose information has been stolen, that might be seen as a small price to pay. Social Engineering Bypasses Information Security Controls http://www.esj.com/Security/article.aspx?EditorialsID=1308 Microsoft Update Onslaught Targets Spyware, Viruses http://www.esj.com/news/article.aspx?EditorialsID=1284 Mathew Schwartz is a Contributing Editor for Enterprise Systems and is its Security Strategies column, as well as being a long-time contributor to the company's print publications. Mr. Schwartz is also a security and technology freelance writer.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line726
__label__cc	0.744576	0.255424	The European Pillar of Social Rights one year on: growing evidence of the need to address unequal access to health services A new report from the European Commission, just released, demonstrates the serious and persisting problem of inequalities of access to healthcare, leading to wider health inequalities. On the first anniversary of the endorsement of the European Pillar of Social Rights, it responds to principle 16 of the Pillar which stresses the right to ‘timely access to affordable, preventative, and curative health care of good quality’. The report reinforces the need to link health and health inequalities to the European Semester process of economic and fiscal policy coordination. “European action for a healthier, fairer Europe depends on strong leadership, collaboration, and expertise building and sharing on public health in parallel to and enhanced by action on the macro-economic determinants of health’’, said Caroline Costongs, Director EuroHealthNet. “Inequalities in access to healthcare – a study of national policies 2018’’ describes the extent of inequalities in access to healthcare in different European Countries, analyses country-specific challenges, and provides examples of good practices. The report concludes that significant inequalities in access to healthcare persist, both between and within countries. Large shares of the EU population face multiple hurdles and therefore do not obtain the care they need. People on a low income or with low health literacy find it difficult to access healthcare. Geographical mobility can also hinder accessibility. High out-of-pocket payments and lack of protection of vulnerable groups from user charges are among the main challenges identified. Even in countries providing nearly universal population coverage, some specific population groups fall through the safety net. Socio-economic inequalities are also reported in access to health promotion and preventative services such as cancer screening, vaccinations and preventative dental care. The report is complimentary to the ongoing work of DG SANTE on the State of Health in the EU (update to be published this week), on the inclusion people experiencing vulnerability, people experiencing poverty and social exclusion, and on addressing inequalities in health and social outcomes in general. Successful implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights depends on a proactive approach to addressing health inequalities. It must be linked to the economic and fiscal planning through the semester process. It should also be linked to EU funding mechanisms such as the European Social Fund+ and a well-resourced and coordinated future Health Programme.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line727
__label__cc	0.567764	0.432236	Alexander Ipatov: How to conquer fear 6/24/2013 – What is the most dangerous thing you have done as a chess grandmaster? Taking the b2-pawn in a Najdorf? Well, here's a young fellow who is willing to go further. Alexander Ipatov, 19, Junior World Champion, took a bungy leap from the Macau Tower, plunging from the tower's outer rim, 233 meters above the ground. It is all caught in a stomach-churning video. Watch it if you dare. How to conquer fear: bungy jumping from Macau Tower! By Alexander Ipatov A few days ago I did the craziest thing in my life: I jumped from one of the world’s highest bungy jump platform – 233 meters! It was from the Macau Tower, located in the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, just 60 km away from Hong Kong. Here's what Macau Tower looks from the outside The entrance, where lifts zip you up to the different levels The view of Macau from the observation deck... ... and looking down – not something for the faint-hearted At 233 meters, the Macau Tower's tethered "skyjump" by AJ Hackett from the tower's outer rim, is the second highest commercial skyjump in the world (after Vegas' Stratosphere skyjump at 260 meters). What was the reason to jump? I feel like I had more than few reasons, for example: To challenge myself and make my mind stronger: Richard Branson said "Obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge." I’ve been thinking about that phrase and agree that there is no other way to grow as a personality then by constantly challenging ourselves and extending our limits! To make the world understand that professional chess players are not only the guys who spend all their time at chess board. Chess lacks marketing nowadays, so maybe this is one of the ways how to attract sponsor’s attention to chess: a blitz game, jump, one more blitz game, jump, etc? Not for open tournaments, but could have some logic for top closed events. To try completely new experience in my life. I really hope, that similar extremal actions made by chess professionals could attract media’s attention. We have to admit, that our game is boring and we must look for unexplored ways how to get new sponsors and investors for chess. Proving my words: my jump was mentioned on half a page in South China Morning Post, one of the most popular newspapers in English in Hong Kong. Video of the Ipatov jump from Macau Tower We urge you to select HD on your Youtube player (with the little cog wheel on the bottom right) and switch to Full screen mode. If you can connect your computer to a big flat screen that is even better. We watched this video on a 55 inch Panasonic and are still dizzy from the experience. Next time, Alexander: 3D! That will really kill them! And what do you look like immediately after such a jump? Like this. If you are 19. And what do you get for your effort? The above certificate. Special thanks to Caissa Chess Club Hong Kong for sponsoring this jump and my stay in Macau! Last August Alexander Ipatov won the FIDE World Junior Championship in Greece Alexander was born in Ukraine on July 16th 1993. He was four times Vice-Champion of Ukraine among boys under 10 years (2003), under 14 (2007), under 16 and 20 (2008, he was just 14 at the time!). He got titles Master of Sports of Ukraine and International Master at the age of 15, and Grandmaster at 17. His first major feat was the second place at the international chess tournament Le Mans (France, 2008). While commenting the World Chess Championship live in Sofia he won the strong Sofia Blitz Championship and from there his success followed one after the other. A few months later IM Ipatov won a bronze medal and GM norm at Cappelle La Grande (with 573 participants and 80 GMs) and the same year came his final GM norm in Nakhchivan with equal points as Vallejo, Sokolov, and Almasi. Early in 2012 Ipatov was attracted by the Turkish Chess Federation and the same year he brought the first gold from World Junior Championships to the country. Apart from native Russian and Ukrainian languages, speaks fluently in English and Spanish. Visit the blog of Alexander Ipatov, "Traveller & World Junior Chess Champion 2012"	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line730
__label__wiki	0.961175	0.961175	Scotland denies bail to terminally ill man convicted of Lockerbie bombing Lockerbie air disaster memorial Scotland has refused bail to the Libyan man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 despite his terminal cancer, as he can receive treatment in prison. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi was jailed in 2001 for the 1988 bombing of the transatlantic airliner, killing 270 people, but is seeking to have his conviction overturned. Minutes after Edinburgh's Appeals Court rejected bail on compassionate grounds Jim Swire, spokesman for the victim's families who lost his daughter in the disaster, complained about the ruling. "It has never been a goal of our group to seek revenge," said a lawyer outside the court reading from his statement. "The refusal of a return to his family for a dying man whose verdict is not even yet secure looks uncomfortably like either an aspect of revenge -- or perhaps timidity." Al-Megrahi, a former intelligence officer, is 54 and serving a minimum of 27 years for the bombing. He has advanced prostate cancer which is spreading through his body. His request for bail was rejected by Lord Hamilton, Scotland's head judge, who said that as doctors say he could live a few more years he should not be released unless and until after his appeal succeeds or his condition worsens. Should Megrahi have been released? Add or view comments Some other doctors give his time as just months, as the cancer has reached his bones. Hamilton however said that palliative hormone treatment could prolong his life. Hamilton also said Al-Megrahi was not suffering "material pain or disability". The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled last year that the conviction may be a miscarriage of justice. It said there was significant doubts to be raised over several key pieces of evidence in the original trial. "Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to review Pan Am Flight 103 conviction" — Wikinews, June 27, 2007 "Lockerbie bomber Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi is denied bail" — Times Online, November 15, 2008 "No bail for dying Lockerbie bomber" — The Guardian, November 15, 2008 "Scottish court refuses to free Lockerbie bomber" — Associated Press, November 14, 2008 Retrieved from "https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Scotland_denies_bail_to_terminally_ill_man_convicted_of_Lockerbie_bombing&oldid=1508422"	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line731
__label__wiki	0.536626	0.536626	activities that oppose or inhibit corruption For other uses, see Anti-corruption (disambiguation). Anti-corruption (anticorruption) comprise activities that oppose or inhibit corruption. Just as corruption takes many forms, anti-corruption efforts vary in scope and in strategy. A general distinction between preventive and reactive measures is sometimes drawn. In such framework, investigative authorities and their attempts to unveil corrupt practices would be considered reactive, while education on the negative impact of corruption, or firm-internal compliance programs are classified as the former. 1.2 In contemporary society 2 Legal framework 2.1 International law 2.1.1 OECD 2.1.2 United Nations 2.1.3 International organizations 2.1.3.1 International Anti-Corruption Court 2.1.3.2 Existing international organizations 2.1.4 Regulations by continental organizations 2.1.4.1 Americas 2.1.4.2 Europe 2.1.4.3 Africa 2.2 National law 2.2.2 United Kingdom 3 Governmental anti-corruption beyond the law 3.1 Prevention of corruption 3.2 Good governance 3.3 Sanctions 3.4 Public sector procurement 4 Civil society 4.1 Ensuring transparency 4.2 Education on corruption 4.3 Non-state actors in the field of asset recovery 5 Corporate anti-corruption approaches 5.1 Compliance 5.2 Collective action 6 In culture Early history[edit] Among the earliest documented anti-corruption efforts include the code of Hammurabi, dated to around 1754 BC. The code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BC), the Great Edict of Horemheb (c. 1300 BC), and the Arthasastra (2nd century BC)[1] are among the earliest written proofs of anti-corruption efforts. All of those early texts are condemning bribes in order to influence the decision by civil servants, especially in the judicial sector.[2] During the time of the Roman empire corruption was also inhibited, e.g. by a decree issued by emperor Constantine in 331.[3] In ancient times, moral principles based on religious beliefs were common, as several major religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and Taoism condemn corrupt conduct in their respective religious texts.[4] The described legal and moral stances were exclusively addressing bribery but were not concerned with other aspects that are considered corruption in the 21st century. Embezzlement, cronyism, nepotism, and other strategies of gaining public assets by office holders were not yet constructed as unlawfully or immoral, as positions of power were regarded a personal possession rather than an entrusted function. With the popularization of the concept of public interest and the development of a professional bureaucracy in the 19th century offices became perceived as trusteeships instead of property of the office holder, leading to legislation against and a negative perception of those additional forms of corruption.[5] Especially in diplomacy and for international trade purposes, corruption remained a generally accepted phenomenon of the political and economic life throughout the 19th and big parts of the 20th century.[6] In contemporary society[edit] The examples and perspective in this section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this section, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (August 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In the 1990s corruption was increasingly perceived to have a negative impact on economy, democracy, and the rule of law, as was pointed out by Kofi Annan.[7] Those effects claimed by Annan could be proven by a variety of empirical studies, as reported by Juli Bacio Terracino.[8] The increased awareness of corruption was widespread and shared across professional, political, and geographical borders. While an international effort against corruption seemed to be unrealistic during the Cold War, a new discussion on the global impact of corruption became possible, leading to an official condemnation of corruption by governments, companies, and various other stakeholders.[9] The 1990s additionally saw an increase in press freedom, the activism of civil societies, and global communication through an improved communication infrastructure, which paved the way to a more thorough understanding of the global prevalence and negative impact of corruption.[10] In consequence to those developments, international non-governmental organizations (e.g. Transparency International) and inter-governmental organizations and initiatives (e.g. the OECD Working group on bribery) were founded to overcome corruption.[11] Since the 2000s, the discourse became broader in scope. It became more common to refer to corruption as a violation of human rights, which was also discussed by the responsible international bodies.[12] Besides attempting to find a fitting description for corruption, the integration of corruption into a human rights-framework was also motivated by underlining the importance of corruption and educating people on its costs.[13] Legal framework[edit] In national and in international legislation, there are laws interpreted as directed against corruption. The laws can stem from resolutions of international organizations, which are implemented by the national governments, who are ratifying those resolutions or be directly be issued by the respective national legislative. Laws against corruption are motivated by similar reasons that are generally motivating the existence of criminal law, as those laws are thought to, on the one hand, bring justice by holding individuals accountable for their wrongdoing, justice can be achieved by sanctioning those corrupted individuals, and potential criminals are deterred by having the consequences of their potential actions demonstrated to them.[14] International law[edit] Approaching the fight against corruption in an international setting is often seen as preferential over addressing it exclusively in the context of the nation state. The reasons for such preference are multidimensional, ranging from the necessary international cooperation for tracing international corruption scandals,[15] to the binding nature of international treaties, and the loss in relative competitiveness by outlawing an activity that remains legal in other countries. OECD[edit] Main article: OECD Anti-Bribery Convention The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention was the first large scale convention targeting an aspect of corruption, when it came in 1999 into force. Ratifying the convention obliges governments to implement it, which is monitored by the OECD Working Group on Bribery. The convention states that it shall be illegal bribing foreign public officials. The convention is currently signed by 43 countries. The scope of the Convention is very limited, as it is only concerned with active bribing. It is hence more reduced than other treaties on restricting corruption, to increase – as the working group's chairman Mark Pieth explained – the influence on its specific target.[16] Empirical research by Nathan Jensen and Edmund Malesky suggests that companies based in countries that ratified the convention, are less likely to pay bribes abroad.[17] The results are not exclusively explainable by the regulatory mechanisms and potential sanctions triggered through this process but are equally influenced by less formal mechanisms, e.g. the peer reviews by officials from other signatories and the potentially resulting influences on the respective country's image.[18] Groups like TI, however, also questioned whether the results of the process are sufficient, especially as a significant number of countries is not actively prosecuting cases of bribery.[19] United Nations[edit] Main article: United Nations Convention against Corruption A world map depicting international participation in the UNCAC. Ratifiers Not signed 20 years before the OECD convention was ratified, the United Nations discussed a draft for a convention on corruption. The draft on an international agreement on illicit payments proposed in 1979[20] by the United Nations Economic and Social Council did not gain traction in the General Assembly, and was not pursued further.[21] When the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) presented its draft of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in 2003, it proved more successful. UNCAC was ratified in 2003 and became effective in 2005. It constitutes an international treaty, currently signed by 186 partners, including 182 member states of the United Nations and four non-state signatories. UNCAC has a broader scope than the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, as it does not exclusively focus on public officials but includes inter alia corruption in the private sector and non-bribery corruption, like e.g. money laundering and abuse of power. UNCAC also specifies a variety of mechanisms to combat corruption, e.g. international cooperation in detecting and prosecuting corruption, the cancellation of permits, when connected to corrupt behavior, and the protection of whistleblowers. The implementation of UNCAC is monitored by the International Association of Anti-Corruption Authorities (IAACA) International organizations[edit] International Anti-Corruption Court[edit] Main article: International Anti-Corruption Court Mark Lawrence Wolf floated in 2012 the idea to launch an International Anti-Corruption Court, as either a part of the already existing International Criminal Court, or as an equivalent to it. The suggestion was widely discussed and endorsed by a variety of NGOs including Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC), Global Witness, Human Rights Watch, the Integrity Initiatives International (III), and TI.[22] An implementation of the concept is currently not scheduled by any organizations with the authority of conducting such step. Existing international organizations[edit] In 2011, the International Anti-Corruption Academy was created as an intergovernmental organization by treaty[23] to teach on anti-corruption topics.[24] Many other intergovernmental organizations are working on the reduction of corruption without issuing conventions binding for its members after ratification. Organizations that are active in this field include, but are not limited to, the World Bank (such as through its Independent Evaluation Group), the International Monetary Fund (IMF),[25] and regional organizations like the Andean Community (within the framework of the Plan Andino de Lucha contra la Corrupción).[26] Regulations by continental organizations[edit] Americas[edit] Main article: Inter-American Convention Against Corruption The first convention adopted against corruption by a regional organization was the Organization of American States' (OAS) Inter-American Convention Against Corruption (IACAC). The Convention, which targeted both active and passive bribing, came into force in 1997. It is currently ratified by all 34 active OAS-Member States.[27][a] Europe[edit] In 1997 the European Union (EU) adopted the EU Convention against corruption involving officials, which makes it illegal to engage in corrupt activities with officials from the European Union's administrative staff, or with officials from any member state of the EU. It forces the signatories to outlaw both active and passive bribing which involves any aforementioned official. Liability for unlawful actions is extend to the heads of those entities, whose agents were bribing officials.[28] European states also ratified the Council of Europe's Criminal and Civil Law Convention on Corruption, which were adopted in 1999. The former was an addition extended by passing the Additional Protocol to the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption. The two conventions on criminal law were signed by Belarus and all Council of Europe members, with the exception of Estonia, which abstains from the Additional Protocol.[b] The Criminal Law Convention is currently by 48 States, while the Additional Protocol is signed by 44 countries.[29][30] Both conventions are aiming at the protection of judicial authorities against the negative impact of corruption.[31] The convention on Civil Law is currently ratified by 35 countries, all of which are, with the exception of Belarus, members of the Council of Europe.[32] As the name implies, it requires the States Parties to provide remedies for individuals materially harmed by corruption. The individual who was negatively impacted by an act of corruption is entitled to rely on laws to receive compensation from the culprit or the entity represented by the culprit, explicitly including the possibility of compensation from the state, if the corrupt deed was perpetrated by an official.[33] The anti-corruption efforts by the Council of Europe are supervised and supported by the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) as its main monitoring organization. Membership to GRECO is open to all countries worldwide and is not conditional on membership at CoE. Africa[edit] Main article: African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption Since its launch in 2003, the African Union's Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption was ratified by 38 States Parties.[34] It represents the consensus of the signatories on minimal standards for combating corruption. The resolution was criticized in the Journal of African Law for disregarding other aspects of the rule of law, like e.g. data protection and the presumption of innocence.[35] National law[edit] While bribing domestic officials was criminalized in most countries even before the ratification of international conventions and treaties,[36] many national law systems did not recognize bribing foreign officials, or more sophisticated methods of corruption as illegal. Only after ratifying and implementing above mentioned conventions the illegal character of those offenses was fully recognized.[37] Where legislation existed prior to the ratification of the OECD convention, the implementation resulted in an increased compliance with the legal framework.[38] Corruption is often addressed by specialized investigative or prosecution authorities, often labelled as anti-corruption agencies (ACA) that are tasked with varying duties, subject to varying degrees of independence from the respective government, regulations and powers, depending on their role in the architecture of the respective national law enforcement system. One of the earliest precursors of such agencies is the anti-corruption commission of New York City, which was established in 1873.[39] A surge in the numbers of national ACAs can be noted in the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century.[40] Already at the foundation of the United States discussions on the possibility of preventing corruption were held, leading to increased awareness for corruption's threads. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution can be seen as an early anti-corruption law, as it outlawed the acceptance of gifts and other favors from foreign governments and their representatives. Zephyr Teachout argued that giving and receiving presents held an important role in diplomacy but were often seen as potentially dangerous to a politician's integrity.[41] Other early attempts to oppose corruption by law were enacted after the end of World War II. The Bribery and Conflict of Interest Act of 1962 for example regulates the sanctions for bribing national officials, respectively the acceptance of bribes by national officials, and the abuse of power for their personal interest. The Hobbs Act of 1946 is another law frequently applied by US-American prosecutors in anti-corruption cases. Prosecutors are using the act by arguing that the acceptance of benefits for official acts qualifies as an offence against the act. Less frequently laws to prosecute corruption through auxiliary criminal activities include the Mail Fraud Statute and the False Statements Accountability Act.[42] In 1977, the United States of America adopted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which criminalized corrupt interactions with foreign officials. Since its implementation, the law served to prosecute domestic and foreign companies, who bribed officials outside of the United States. As no other country implemented a similar law up to the 1990s, US-American companies faced disadvantages for their global operations. In addition to the legal status of corruption abroad, many countries also treated bribes as tax-deductible. Through applying the law to companies with ties to the United States and by working on global conventions against foreign bribery, the government of the US tried to reduce the negative impact of FCPA on US-American companies.[43] Alongside the FCPA, additional laws were implement that are directly influencing anti-corruption activities. Section 922 of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act for instance extents the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by a new Section 21F that protects whistleblowers from retaliation and grants them financial awards them when collaborating with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Conway-Hatcher et al. (2013) attributed an increase the number of whistleblowers, who are reporting to SEC, inter alia on corruption incidents to the provision.[44] The TI's last report on enforcement of the OECD Convention against bribery published in 2014 concluded that the United States are complying with the convention.[45] The United Kingdom was a founding member of the OECD working group on bribery and ratified the Anti-Bribery Convention, but faced significant problems in complying to its findings and the convention.[46] It was severely affected by the Al-Yamamah arms deal, in which the British company BAE Systems faced allegations of having bribed members of the Saudi royal family to facilitate an arms deal. British prosecution of BAE Systems was stopped after an intervention by than Prime Minister Tony Blair, which caused the OECD working group to criticize the British anti-corruption laws and investigations.[citation needed] The UK Bribery Act of 2010 came into force on July 1, 2011, and replaced all former bribery-related laws in the United Kingdom. It is targeting bribery and receiving bribes, both towards national and foreign public officials. Furthermore, it is assigning responsibility to organizations whose employees are engaging in bribing and hence obliges companies to enforce compliance-mechanisms to avoid bribing on their behalf. The Bribery Act goes in many points beyond the US-American FCPA, as it also criminalizes facilitation payments and private sector corruption inter alia.[47] Heimann and Pieth are arguing that British policy makers supported the Bribery Act to overcome the damage in reputation caused by the Al-Yamamah deal.[48] Sappho Xenakis and Kalin Ivanov on the other hand claim that the negative impact on the UK's reputation was very limited.[49] Transparency International stated in 2014 that the United Kingdom fully complied to the OECD Convention against Bribery.[45] Canada[edit] Canada remained one of the last signatories of the OECD-convention on bribery that did not implement its national laws against bribes for foreign officials.[50] While the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (CFPOA) was passed in 1999, it was often not used to prosecute foreign bribery by Canadian companies, as the bill had a provision that the act of bribery had to have a "real and substantial link" with Canada. Such provision was canceled in 2013 by the Bill S-14 (also called Fighting Foreign Corruption Act). Additionally, Bill S-14 banned facilitation payments and increased the possible punishment for violating the CFPOA.[51] An increase in the maximum prison sentence for bribery to 14 years was one of the increases in sanctioning.[52] According to TI's report from 2014, Canada is moderately enforcing the OECD Convention against bribery.[45] China[edit] In the wake of economic liberalization, corruption increased in China because anti-corruption laws were insufficiently applied.[53] The anti-corruption campaign that started in 2012, however, changed the relation towards corruption. This campaign led to increased press coverage of the topic and a sharp increase in court cases dedicated to the offense. The campaign was primarily led by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), an internal body of the Communist Party and secondarily by the People's Procuratorate.[54] CCDI cooperated with investigative authorities in several ways, such as passing incriminating material detected by its internal investigation, to prosecutors. The underlying legal regulations for the campaign is rooted in provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and the criminal law. Japan[edit] After signing the OECD-Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials[55], Japan implemented the Unfair Competition Prevention Act (UCPA) to comply with the convention. The law states that it is illegal to bribe foreign public officials. The individual who was offering the bribes and the company on whose behalf the bribes were offered may face negative consequences. The Company Act also enables the punishment of senior management if the payment was made possible by their negligence. Transparency International criticized Japan in 2014 for not enforcing the law, hence only complying to the convention on paper and providing no consequences to offenders.[45] Nevertheless, a study conducted by Jensen and Malesky in 2017 provides empirical evidence that Japanese companies are less involved in bribery than companies based in other Asian countries that did not sign the convention.[17] Governmental anti-corruption beyond the law[edit] Prevention of corruption[edit] Values education is believed to be a possible tool to teach about the negative effects of corruption and to create resilience against acting in a corrupt manner, when the possibility of doing so arises.[56] Another stream of thought on corruption prevention is connected to the economist Robert Klitgaard, who developed an economic theory of corruption that explains the occurrence of corrupt behavior by producing higher gains than the assumed punishment it might provoke. Klitgaard accordingly argues for approaching this rational by increasing the costs of corruption for those involved by making fines more likely and more severe. Good governance[edit] As corruption incidences often happen in the interaction between representatives of private sector companies and public officials, a meaningful step against corruption can be taken inside of public administrations. The concept of good governance can accordingly be applied to increase the integrity of administrations, decreasing hence the likelihood that officials will agree on engaging in corrupt behavior.[57] Transparency is one aspect of good governance.[58] Transparency initiatives can help to detect corruption and hold corrupt officials and politicians accountable.[59] Another aspect of good governance as a tool to combat corruption lies in the creation of trust towards state institutions. Gong Ting and Xiao Hanyu for instance argue that citizens, who have a positive perception of state institutions are more likely to report corruption related incidents than those, who espress lower levels of trust.[60] Sanctions[edit] Even though sanctions seem to be underwritten by a legal framework, their application is often lying outside of a state-sponsored legal system, as they are frequently applied by multilateral development banks (MDB), state agencies, and other organizations, who are implementing those sanctions not through applying laws, but by relying on their internal bylaws. World Bank, even though reluctant in the 20th century to use sanctions,[61] turned into a major source of this specific kind of applying anti-corruption measures.[62] the involved MDBs are typically applying an administrative process that includes judicial elements, when a suspicion about corruption in regard to the granted projects surfaces. In case of identifying a sanctionable behavior, the respective authority can issue a debarment or milder forms, e.g. mandatory monitoring of the business conduct or the payment of fines.[63] Public sector procurement[edit] Excluding companies with a track record of corruption from bidding for contracts, is another form of sanctioning that can be applied by procurement agencies to ensure compliance to external and internal anti-corruption rules.[64] This aspect is of specific importance, as public procurement is both in volume and frequency especially vulnerable for corruption. In addition to setting incentives for companies to comply with anti-corruption standards by threatening their exclusion from future contracts, the internal compliance to anti-corruption rules by the procurement agency has central importance. Such step should according to anti-corruption scholars Adam Graycar and Tim Prenzler include precisely and unambiguously worded rules, a functional protection and support of whistleblowers, and a system that notifies supervisors on an early base about potential dangers of conflicts of interest or corruption-related incidents.[65] Civil society[edit] Michael Johnston, among others, argued that non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), and the media can have an efficient influence on the level of corruption.[66] More over, Bertot et al. (2010) extended the list of potentially involved agents of civil society by introducing the notion of decentralized, non-formally organized anti-corruption activism through social media channels.[67] Taking into consideration that precise and comprehensive definitions of corrupt actions are lacking, the legal perspective is structurally incapable of efficiently ruling out corruption. Combined with a significant variety in national laws, frequently changing regulations, and ambiguously worded laws, it is argued that non-state actors are needed to complement the fight against corruption and structure it in a more holistic way.[39] Ensuring transparency[edit] An example for a more inclusive approach to combating corruption that goes beyond the framework set by lawmakers and the foremost role taken by representatives of the civil society is the monitoring of governments, politicians, public officials, and others to increase transparency. Other means to this end might include pressure campaigns against certain organizations, institutions, or companies.[68] Investigative journalism is another way of identifying potentially corrupt dealings by officials. Such monitoring is often combined with reporting about it, in order to create publicity for the observed misbehavior. Those mechanisms are hence increasing the price of corrupt acts, by making them public and negatively impacting the image of the involved official. One example for such strategy of combating corruption by exposing corrupt individuals is the Albanian television show Fiks Fare that repeatedly reported on corruption by airing segments filmed with hidden cameras, in which officials are accepting bribes.[69] Education on corruption[edit] Another sphere for engagement of civil society is the prevention by educating about the negative consequences of corruption and a strengthening of ethical values opposing corruption. Framing corruption as a moral issue used to be the predominant way of fighting it but lost importance in the 20th century as other approaches became more influential.[70][71] The biggest organization in the field of civil societal opposition towards corruption is the globally active NGO Transparency International (TI).[72] NGOs are also providing material to educate practitioners on anti-corruption. Examples for such publications are the rules and suggestions provided by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and TI.[73] Persistent work by civil societal organizations can also go beyond establishing a knowledge about the negative impact of corruption and serve as way to build up political will to prosecute corruption and engage in counter-corruption measures.[74] Non-state actors in the field of asset recovery[edit] Main article: International asset recovery One prominent field of activism for non-state actors (NSAs) is the area of international asset recovery, which describes the activity of returning property to its legitimate owners after it was illegally acquired through corrupt actions. The process describes the whole procedure from gathering information on the criminal offence that initiated the transfer of assets, over their confiscation to their return. While recovery is mandated by UNCAC, it is not an activity singularity conducted by governments but attracts actors with different backgrounds, including academia, the media, CSOs, and other non state actors. In this field of anti-corruption activism, representatives of the civil society are often taking a different stance than in other areas, as they are regularly consulted for assisting administrations with their respective expertise and are hence enabling state actions. Such strong role of NSAs was also recognized by UNCAC's States Parties.[75] Corporate anti-corruption approaches[edit] Compliance[edit] Main article: Regulatory compliance Instead of relying purely on deterrence, as suggested by Robert Klitgaard (see section on prevention), economists are pursuing the implementation of incentive structures that reward compliance and punish the non-fulfillment of compliance rules. By aligning the self-interest of the agent with the societal interest of avoiding corruption, a reduction in corruption can thus be achieved.[76] The field of compliance can generally be perceived as an internalization of external laws in order to avoid their fines. The adoption of laws like the FCPA and the UK Bribery Act of 2010[77] strengthened the importance of concepts like compliance, as fines for corrupt behavior became more likely and there was a financial increase on these fines. When a company is sued because its employers engaged in corruption, a well-established compliance system can serve as proof that the organization attempted to avoid those acts of corruption. Accordingly, fines can be reduced and this incentivizes the implementation of an efficient compliance system.[47] In 2012, the US-authorities decided not to prosecute Morgan Stanley in a case of bribery in China under FCPA-provisions due to its compliance program.[52] This case demonstrates the relevance of the compliance approach. Collective action[edit] Anti-corruption collective action is a form of collective action with the aim of combatting corruption and bribery risks in public procurement. It is a collaborative anti-corruption activity that brings together representatives of the private sector, public sector and civil society. The idea stems from the academic analysis of the prisoner's dilemma in game theory and focuses on establishing rule-abiding practices that benefit every stakeholder, even if unilaterally each stakeholder might have an incentive to circumvent the specific anti-corruption rules. Transparency International first floated a predecessor to modern collective action initiatives in the 1990s with its concept of the Island of Integrity, now known as an integrity pact.[78] According to Transparency International, "collective action is necessary where a problem cannot be solved by individual actors" and therefore requires stakeholders to build trust and share information and resources.[79] The World Bank Institute states that collective action "increases the impact and credibility of individual action, brings vulnerable individual players into an alliance of like-minded organizations and levels the playing field between competitors.[80] Anti-corruption collective action initiatives are varied in type, purpose and stakeholders but are usually targeted at the supply side of bribery.[81] They often take the form of collectively agreed anti-corruption declarations or standard-setting initiatives such as an industry code of conduct. A prominent example is the Wolfsberg Group and in particular its Anti-Money Laundering Principles for Private Banking and Anti-Corruption Guidance, requiring the member banks to adhere to several principles directed against money laundering and corruption. The mechanism is designed to protect individual banks from any negative consequences of complying with the strict rules by collectively enforcing those regulations. The Wolfsberg Group in addition serves as a back-channel for communication between the compliance officers of the participating banks.[82] The World Economic Forum's initiatives against corruption can also be seen in this framework.[83] Other initiatives in the field of collective action include the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Construction Sector Transparency Initiative/Infrastructure Transparency Initiative (CoST) and International Forum on Business Ethical Conduct (IFBEC).[84] Collective action is included in the national anti-corruption statements of the UK[85], France[86] and Ghana[87], delivered at the International Anti-Corruption Conference 2018. The B20 policy interventions are another form of engaging in the anti-corruption discourse, as B20 members are attempting to support the G20 by offering their insights as business leaders, including in regard to strengthening anti-corruption policies, e.g. transparency in government procurement or more comprehensive anti-corruption laws.[88] In 2013, the B20 mandated the Basel Institute on Governance to develop and maintain the B20 Collective Action Hub, an online platform for anti-corruption collective action tools and resources including a database of collective action initiatives around the world. The B20 Collective Action Hub is managed by the Basel Institute's International Centre for Collective Action (ICCA) in partnership with the UN Global Compact. Another tangible outcome of the B20 meetings was the discussion (and implementation as a test case in Colombia) of the High Level Reporting Mechanism (HLRM), which aims to implement a form of ombudsman office in a high-level government position for companies to report possible bribery or corruption issues in public procurement tenders.[89] As well as Colombia, the HLRM concept has been implemented in different ways in Argentina, Ukraine and Panama.[90] Implementation[edit] Sylvie Bleker-van Eyk from VU University Amsterdam sees value in the implementation of strong compliance departments in the respective company.[47] Fritz Heimann and Mark Pieth are described the environment where those departments are working, as being in a best cased monitored from outside experts.[91] Another measure that – according to Heimann and Pieth – supports the work of compliance officers is when the company is joining collective action initiatives.[92] Instruments like ethical codes can serve as underlying documents to promote support for anti-corrupt corporate policies. Seumas Miller et al. (2005) also stress the process of reaching the aspired result, which should include an open discussion among the employees of a company, in order to implement steps that are approved by consent inside of the company.[93] Such shift in culture can be implemented through and accompanied by exemplary behavior by top management, regularly conducted training programs on anti-corruption and a constant monitoring of the development in those sections.[94] In culture[edit] Main article: International Anti-Corruption Day International Anti-Corruption Day has been annually observed on December 9 since the United Nations established it in 2003 to underline the importance of anti-corruption and provide visible sign for anti-corruption campaigns.[95] ^ Cuba was suspended from the OAS from 1962 to 2009. After the ban on Cuba's participation was lifted in 2009, the country elected not to participate. 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ISBN 978-3-7376-5034-2. ^ "Bribery Act 2010". www.legislation.gov.uk. Expert Participation. Retrieved October 7, 2018. CS1 maint: others (link) ^ The Integrity Pact (PDF). Transparency International. 2016. ^ Collective Action on Business Integrity. Transparency International. 2018. ^ World Bank Institute: Fighting Corruption Through Collective Action ^ B20 Collective Action Hub ^ Confronting Corruption, pp. 225 et seq. ^ OSCE Handbook on Combating Corruption. OSCE. 2016. p. 155. ^ Confronting Corruption pp.226-227 ^ Confronting Corruption, pp. 238-239 ^ HLRM case studies on the B20 Collective Action Hub ^ Confronting Corruption p. 233 ^ "Main page of the campaign for an International Anti-Corruption Academy". UNODC. Retrieved August 14, 2018. Bacio Terracino, Julio (2012). The international legal framework against corruption : states' obligations to prevent and repress corruption. Intersentia. ISBN 978-1-78068-092-7. OCLC 810879652. Rose, Cecily (2015). International Anti-Corruption Norms. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-873721-6. OCLC 908334497. Stukalo, Alexey, ed. (2016). OSCE Handbook on Combating Corruption. Vienna: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. ISBN 978-92-9234-192-3. OCLC 964654700. Heimann, Fritz; Pieth, Mark (2018) [2017]. Confronting Corruption. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-045833-1. OCLC 965154105. 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__label__wiki	0.651529	0.651529	Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey Margot J. Schofield, Deborah J. Hennrikus, Selina Redman, Rob W. Sanson‐Fisher EDITORIAL COMMENT: This review contains important data and discussion which should interest all readers. Twenty years ago the increasing prevalence of hysterectomy performed for indications which were not an immediate threat to life provoked cost:benefit analyses which failed to either condemn or justify the trend; the mortality and morbidity of hysterectomy (pulmonary thromboembolism, wound infection/dehiscence, bowel obstruction) seemed to about balance the number of lives saved by prevention of cancer of the cervix, uterine body and ovary. The debate concerning the place of prophylactic oophorectomy at the time of abdominal hysterectomy in pre or postmenopausal women is a separate unresolved question. The rising tide of hysterectomy should be remembered when analyzing the recent changes in incidence of carcinoma of the cervix and the number of deaths from this cause, since an absent organ cannot become cancerous! In recent years the cost of hysterectomy argument has been changed by 2 factors; firstly hospital beds have become a ruinous expense to individual and State, and secondly because endometrial ablation, which has rapidly acquired a host of advocates, offers outpatient care and preservation of the uterus in the very group of patients most likely to become candidates for hysterectomy ‐ 35–40 year‐old multiparas with menorrhagia, uterine enlargement and a need for permanent contraception. It is salutary to note that in the space of 2–3 years the indications for endometrial ablation have changed from a procedure recommended only when a woman had severe menorrhagia but was unfit for major surgery, to an alternative to almost all elective hysterectomies except those associated with severe uterine prolapse. The complications of endometrial ablation (immediate and remote) and their documentation and publication is a matter of importance for hospital Boards of Management when accrediting practitioners to perform this most modern endoscopic surgery. The authors present data suggesting that better educated and higher occupational status women are less likely to have a hysterectomy, indicating the need to investigate aspects of the decision making process leading to hysterectomy. The editorial committee agrees that these findings require further research to confirm these trends. We also wish to draw readers' attention to perhaps the most important unresolved aspect of ‘elective’ hysterectomy, namely whether removal of the cervix and/or uterus influences coital satisfaction (orgasm, lubrication) by the woman. Why is it that the better educated, presumably more vocal woman, is more likely to protest at the suggestion that her reproductive parts be partially amputated? The introduction of endometrial ablation provides the opportunity to perform trials of this method of treatment of premenopausal women with menorrhagia with vaginal hysterectomy or abdominal hysterectomy without oophorectomy. We hope to be offered the results of such studies for publication in this journal. Summary: : A community survey of 8,896 households was undertaken in the Hunter region of New South Wales to assess women's health status. Consent was gained from 5,781 of the 6,361 eligible women between 18 and 69 years of age. The prevalance of hysterectomy in this sample was 16.9%, with 34.2% of women in their fifties having had a hysterectomy. Most hysterectomies (75%) were performed on women between the ages of 30 and 49 years. The demographic variables of parent's country of birth, educational level and employment status predicted recent hysterectomies after controlling for the effect of age. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x Endometrial Ablation Techniques Ovariectomy Uterine Prolapse Vaginal Hysterectomy Educational Status Schofield, M. J., Hennrikus, D. J., Redman, S., & Sanson‐Fisher, R. W. (1991). Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 31(2), 153-158. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey. / Schofield, Margot J.; Hennrikus, Deborah J.; Redman, Selina; Sanson‐Fisher, Rob W. In: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Vol. 31, No. 2, 05.1991, p. 153-158. Schofield, MJ, Hennrikus, DJ, Redman, S & Sanson‐Fisher, RW 1991, 'Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 153-158. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x Schofield MJ, Hennrikus DJ, Redman S, Sanson‐Fisher RW. Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. 1991 May;31(2):153-158. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x Schofield, Margot J. ; Hennrikus, Deborah J. ; Redman, Selina ; Sanson‐Fisher, Rob W. / Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey. In: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. 1991 ; Vol. 31, No. 2. pp. 153-158. @article{c70a50f446a143a4b7c4f9d2395d96f5, title = "Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey", abstract = "EDITORIAL COMMENT: This review contains important data and discussion which should interest all readers. Twenty years ago the increasing prevalence of hysterectomy performed for indications which were not an immediate threat to life provoked cost:benefit analyses which failed to either condemn or justify the trend; the mortality and morbidity of hysterectomy (pulmonary thromboembolism, wound infection/dehiscence, bowel obstruction) seemed to about balance the number of lives saved by prevention of cancer of the cervix, uterine body and ovary. The debate concerning the place of prophylactic oophorectomy at the time of abdominal hysterectomy in pre or postmenopausal women is a separate unresolved question. The rising tide of hysterectomy should be remembered when analyzing the recent changes in incidence of carcinoma of the cervix and the number of deaths from this cause, since an absent organ cannot become cancerous! In recent years the cost of hysterectomy argument has been changed by 2 factors; firstly hospital beds have become a ruinous expense to individual and State, and secondly because endometrial ablation, which has rapidly acquired a host of advocates, offers outpatient care and preservation of the uterus in the very group of patients most likely to become candidates for hysterectomy ‐ 35–40 year‐old multiparas with menorrhagia, uterine enlargement and a need for permanent contraception. It is salutary to note that in the space of 2–3 years the indications for endometrial ablation have changed from a procedure recommended only when a woman had severe menorrhagia but was unfit for major surgery, to an alternative to almost all elective hysterectomies except those associated with severe uterine prolapse. The complications of endometrial ablation (immediate and remote) and their documentation and publication is a matter of importance for hospital Boards of Management when accrediting practitioners to perform this most modern endoscopic surgery. The authors present data suggesting that better educated and higher occupational status women are less likely to have a hysterectomy, indicating the need to investigate aspects of the decision making process leading to hysterectomy. The editorial committee agrees that these findings require further research to confirm these trends. We also wish to draw readers' attention to perhaps the most important unresolved aspect of ‘elective’ hysterectomy, namely whether removal of the cervix and/or uterus influences coital satisfaction (orgasm, lubrication) by the woman. Why is it that the better educated, presumably more vocal woman, is more likely to protest at the suggestion that her reproductive parts be partially amputated? The introduction of endometrial ablation provides the opportunity to perform trials of this method of treatment of premenopausal women with menorrhagia with vaginal hysterectomy or abdominal hysterectomy without oophorectomy. We hope to be offered the results of such studies for publication in this journal. Summary: : A community survey of 8,896 households was undertaken in the Hunter region of New South Wales to assess women's health status. Consent was gained from 5,781 of the 6,361 eligible women between 18 and 69 years of age. The prevalance of hysterectomy in this sample was 16.9{\%}, with 34.2{\%} of women in their fifties having had a hysterectomy. Most hysterectomies (75{\%}) were performed on women between the ages of 30 and 49 years. The demographic variables of parent's country of birth, educational level and employment status predicted recent hysterectomies after controlling for the effect of age.", author = "Schofield, {Margot J.} and Hennrikus, {Deborah J.} and Selina Redman and Sanson‐Fisher, {Rob W.}", doi = "10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x", journal = "Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology", T1 - Prevalence and Characteristics of Women Who Have Had a Hysterectomy in a Community Survey AU - Schofield, Margot J. AU - Hennrikus, Deborah J. AU - Redman, Selina AU - Sanson‐Fisher, Rob W. N2 - EDITORIAL COMMENT: This review contains important data and discussion which should interest all readers. Twenty years ago the increasing prevalence of hysterectomy performed for indications which were not an immediate threat to life provoked cost:benefit analyses which failed to either condemn or justify the trend; the mortality and morbidity of hysterectomy (pulmonary thromboembolism, wound infection/dehiscence, bowel obstruction) seemed to about balance the number of lives saved by prevention of cancer of the cervix, uterine body and ovary. The debate concerning the place of prophylactic oophorectomy at the time of abdominal hysterectomy in pre or postmenopausal women is a separate unresolved question. The rising tide of hysterectomy should be remembered when analyzing the recent changes in incidence of carcinoma of the cervix and the number of deaths from this cause, since an absent organ cannot become cancerous! In recent years the cost of hysterectomy argument has been changed by 2 factors; firstly hospital beds have become a ruinous expense to individual and State, and secondly because endometrial ablation, which has rapidly acquired a host of advocates, offers outpatient care and preservation of the uterus in the very group of patients most likely to become candidates for hysterectomy ‐ 35–40 year‐old multiparas with menorrhagia, uterine enlargement and a need for permanent contraception. It is salutary to note that in the space of 2–3 years the indications for endometrial ablation have changed from a procedure recommended only when a woman had severe menorrhagia but was unfit for major surgery, to an alternative to almost all elective hysterectomies except those associated with severe uterine prolapse. The complications of endometrial ablation (immediate and remote) and their documentation and publication is a matter of importance for hospital Boards of Management when accrediting practitioners to perform this most modern endoscopic surgery. The authors present data suggesting that better educated and higher occupational status women are less likely to have a hysterectomy, indicating the need to investigate aspects of the decision making process leading to hysterectomy. The editorial committee agrees that these findings require further research to confirm these trends. We also wish to draw readers' attention to perhaps the most important unresolved aspect of ‘elective’ hysterectomy, namely whether removal of the cervix and/or uterus influences coital satisfaction (orgasm, lubrication) by the woman. Why is it that the better educated, presumably more vocal woman, is more likely to protest at the suggestion that her reproductive parts be partially amputated? The introduction of endometrial ablation provides the opportunity to perform trials of this method of treatment of premenopausal women with menorrhagia with vaginal hysterectomy or abdominal hysterectomy without oophorectomy. We hope to be offered the results of such studies for publication in this journal. Summary: : A community survey of 8,896 households was undertaken in the Hunter region of New South Wales to assess women's health status. Consent was gained from 5,781 of the 6,361 eligible women between 18 and 69 years of age. The prevalance of hysterectomy in this sample was 16.9%, with 34.2% of women in their fifties having had a hysterectomy. Most hysterectomies (75%) were performed on women between the ages of 30 and 49 years. The demographic variables of parent's country of birth, educational level and employment status predicted recent hysterectomies after controlling for the effect of age. AB - EDITORIAL COMMENT: This review contains important data and discussion which should interest all readers. Twenty years ago the increasing prevalence of hysterectomy performed for indications which were not an immediate threat to life provoked cost:benefit analyses which failed to either condemn or justify the trend; the mortality and morbidity of hysterectomy (pulmonary thromboembolism, wound infection/dehiscence, bowel obstruction) seemed to about balance the number of lives saved by prevention of cancer of the cervix, uterine body and ovary. The debate concerning the place of prophylactic oophorectomy at the time of abdominal hysterectomy in pre or postmenopausal women is a separate unresolved question. The rising tide of hysterectomy should be remembered when analyzing the recent changes in incidence of carcinoma of the cervix and the number of deaths from this cause, since an absent organ cannot become cancerous! In recent years the cost of hysterectomy argument has been changed by 2 factors; firstly hospital beds have become a ruinous expense to individual and State, and secondly because endometrial ablation, which has rapidly acquired a host of advocates, offers outpatient care and preservation of the uterus in the very group of patients most likely to become candidates for hysterectomy ‐ 35–40 year‐old multiparas with menorrhagia, uterine enlargement and a need for permanent contraception. It is salutary to note that in the space of 2–3 years the indications for endometrial ablation have changed from a procedure recommended only when a woman had severe menorrhagia but was unfit for major surgery, to an alternative to almost all elective hysterectomies except those associated with severe uterine prolapse. The complications of endometrial ablation (immediate and remote) and their documentation and publication is a matter of importance for hospital Boards of Management when accrediting practitioners to perform this most modern endoscopic surgery. The authors present data suggesting that better educated and higher occupational status women are less likely to have a hysterectomy, indicating the need to investigate aspects of the decision making process leading to hysterectomy. The editorial committee agrees that these findings require further research to confirm these trends. We also wish to draw readers' attention to perhaps the most important unresolved aspect of ‘elective’ hysterectomy, namely whether removal of the cervix and/or uterus influences coital satisfaction (orgasm, lubrication) by the woman. Why is it that the better educated, presumably more vocal woman, is more likely to protest at the suggestion that her reproductive parts be partially amputated? The introduction of endometrial ablation provides the opportunity to perform trials of this method of treatment of premenopausal women with menorrhagia with vaginal hysterectomy or abdominal hysterectomy without oophorectomy. We hope to be offered the results of such studies for publication in this journal. Summary: : A community survey of 8,896 households was undertaken in the Hunter region of New South Wales to assess women's health status. Consent was gained from 5,781 of the 6,361 eligible women between 18 and 69 years of age. The prevalance of hysterectomy in this sample was 16.9%, with 34.2% of women in their fifties having had a hysterectomy. Most hysterectomies (75%) were performed on women between the ages of 30 and 49 years. The demographic variables of parent's country of birth, educational level and employment status predicted recent hysterectomies after controlling for the effect of age. U2 - 10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x DO - 10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x JO - Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology JF - Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 10.1111/j.1479-828X.1991.tb01806.x	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line741
__label__cc	0.643515	0.356485	(-) Remove (PE) Physical Sciences & Engineering (36) filter (PE) Physical Sciences & Engineering (36) Project acronym 3DMOSHBOND Project Three-Dimensional Mapping Of a Single Hydrogen Bond Researcher (PI) Adam Marc SWEETMAN Summary All properties of matter are ultimately governed by the forces between single atoms, but our knowledge of interatomic, and intermolecular, potentials is often derived indirectly. In 3DMOSHBOND, I outline a program of work designed to create a paradigm shift in the direct measurement of complex interatomic potentials via a fundamental reimagining of how atomic resolution imaging, and force measurement, techniques are applied. To provide a clear proof of principle demonstration of the power of this concept, I propose to map the strength, shape and extent of single hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) interactions in 3D with sub-Angstrom precision. H-bonding is a key component governing intermolecular interactions, particularly for biologically important molecules. Despite its critical importance, H-bonding is relatively poorly understood, and the IUPAC definition of the H-bond was changed as recently as 2011- highlighting the relevance of a new means to engage with these fundamental interactions. Hitherto unprecedented resolution and accuracy will be achieved via a creation of a novel layer of vertically oriented H-bonding molecules, functionalisation of the tip of a scanning probe microscope with a single complementary H-bonding molecule, and by complete characterisation of the position of all atoms in the junction. This will place two H-bonding groups “end on” and map the extent, and magnitude, of the H-bond with sub-Angstrom precision for a variety of systems. This investigation of the H-bond will present us with an unparalleled level of information regarding its properties. Experimental results will be compared with ab initio density functional theory (DFT) simulations, to investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art simulations are able to reproduce the behaviour of the H-bonding interaction. The project will create a new generalised probe for the study of single atomic and molecular interactions. All properties of matter are ultimately governed by the forces between single atoms, but our knowledge of interatomic, and intermolecular, potentials is often derived indirectly. In 3DMOSHBOND, I outline a program of work designed to create a paradigm shift in the direct measurement of complex interatomic potentials via a fundamental reimagining of how atomic resolution imaging, and force measurement, techniques are applied. To provide a clear proof of principle demonstration of the power of this concept, I propose to map the strength, shape and extent of single hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) interactions in 3D with sub-Angstrom precision. H-bonding is a key component governing intermolecular interactions, particularly for biologically important molecules. Despite its critical importance, H-bonding is relatively poorly understood, and the IUPAC definition of the H-bond was changed as recently as 2011- highlighting the relevance of a new means to engage with these fundamental interactions. Hitherto unprecedented resolution and accuracy will be achieved via a creation of a novel layer of vertically oriented H-bonding molecules, functionalisation of the tip of a scanning probe microscope with a single complementary H-bonding molecule, and by complete characterisation of the position of all atoms in the junction. This will place two H-bonding groups “end on” and map the extent, and magnitude, of the H-bond with sub-Angstrom precision for a variety of systems. This investigation of the H-bond will present us with an unparalleled level of information regarding its properties. Experimental results will be compared with ab initio density functional theory (DFT) simulations, to investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art simulations are able to reproduce the behaviour of the H-bonding interaction. The project will create a new generalised probe for the study of single atomic and molecular interactions. Project acronym ADOR Project Assembly-disassembly-organisation-reassembly of microporous materials Researcher (PI) Russell MORRIS Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS Summary Microporous materials are an important class of solid; the two main members of this family are zeolites and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Zeolites are industrial solids whose applications range from catalysis, through ion exchange and adsorption technologies to medicine. MOFs are some of the most exciting new materials to have been developed over the last two decades, and they are just beginning to be applied commercially. Over recent years the applicant’s group has developed new synthetic strategies to prepare microporous materials, called the Assembly-Disassembly-Organisation-Reassembly (ADOR) process. In significant preliminary work the ADOR process has shown to be an extremely important new synthetic methodology that differs fundamentally from traditional solvothermal methods. In this project I will look to overturn the conventional thinking in materials science by developing methodologies that can target both zeolites and MOF materials that are difficult to prepare using traditional methods – the so-called ‘unfeasible’ materials. The importance of such a new methodology is that it will open up routes to materials that have different properties (both chemical and topological) to those we currently have. Since zeolites and MOFs have so many actual and potential uses, the preparation of materials with different properties has a high chance of leading to new technologies in the medium/long term. To complete the major objective I will look to complete four closely linked activities covering the development of design strategies for zeolites and MOFs (activities 1 & 2), mechanistic studies to understand the process at the molecular level using in situ characterisation techniques (activity 3) and an exploration of potential applied science for the prepared materials (activity 4). Microporous materials are an important class of solid; the two main members of this family are zeolites and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Zeolites are industrial solids whose applications range from catalysis, through ion exchange and adsorption technologies to medicine. MOFs are some of the most exciting new materials to have been developed over the last two decades, and they are just beginning to be applied commercially. Over recent years the applicant’s group has developed new synthetic strategies to prepare microporous materials, called the Assembly-Disassembly-Organisation-Reassembly (ADOR) process. In significant preliminary work the ADOR process has shown to be an extremely important new synthetic methodology that differs fundamentally from traditional solvothermal methods. In this project I will look to overturn the conventional thinking in materials science by developing methodologies that can target both zeolites and MOF materials that are difficult to prepare using traditional methods – the so-called ‘unfeasible’ materials. The importance of such a new methodology is that it will open up routes to materials that have different properties (both chemical and topological) to those we currently have. Since zeolites and MOFs have so many actual and potential uses, the preparation of materials with different properties has a high chance of leading to new technologies in the medium/long term. To complete the major objective I will look to complete four closely linked activities covering the development of design strategies for zeolites and MOFs (activities 1 & 2), mechanistic studies to understand the process at the molecular level using in situ characterisation techniques (activity 3) and an exploration of potential applied science for the prepared materials (activity 4). Project acronym ARTTOUCH Project Generating artificial touch: from the contribution of single tactile afferents to the encoding of complex percepts, and their implications for clinical innovation Researcher (PI) Rochelle ACKERLEY Summary Somatosensation encompass a wide range of processes, from feeling touch to temperature, as well as experiencing pleasure and pain. When afferent inputs are degraded or removed, such as in neuropathies or amputation, exploring the world becomes extremely difficult. Chronic pain is a major health issue that greatly diminishes quality of life and is one of the most disabling and costly conditions in Europe. The loss of a body part is common due to accidents, tumours, or peripheral diseases, and it has instantaneous effects on somatosensory functioning. Treating such disorders entails detailed knowledge about how somatosensory signals are encoded. Understanding these processes will enable the restoration of healthy function, such as providing real-time, naturalistic feedback in prostheses. To date, no prosthesis currently provides long-term sensory feedback, yet accomplishing this will lead to great quality of life improvements. The present proposal aims to uncover how basic tactile processes are encoded and represented centrally, as well as how more complex somatosensation is generated (e.g. wetness, pleasantness). Novel investigations will be conducted in humans to probe these mechanisms, including peripheral in vivo recording (microneurography) and neural stimulation, combined with advanced brain imaging and behavioural experiments. Preliminary work has shown the feasibility of the approach, where it is possible to visualise the activation of single mechanoreceptive afferents in the human brain. The multi-disciplinary approach unites detailed, high-resolution, functional investigations with actual sensations generated. The results will elucidate how basic and complex somatosensory processes are encoded, providing insights into the recovery of such signals. The knowledge gained aims to provide pain-free, efficient diagnostic capabilities for detecting and quantifying a range of somatosensory disorders, as well as identifying new potential therapeutic targets. Somatosensation encompass a wide range of processes, from feeling touch to temperature, as well as experiencing pleasure and pain. When afferent inputs are degraded or removed, such as in neuropathies or amputation, exploring the world becomes extremely difficult. Chronic pain is a major health issue that greatly diminishes quality of life and is one of the most disabling and costly conditions in Europe. The loss of a body part is common due to accidents, tumours, or peripheral diseases, and it has instantaneous effects on somatosensory functioning. Treating such disorders entails detailed knowledge about how somatosensory signals are encoded. Understanding these processes will enable the restoration of healthy function, such as providing real-time, naturalistic feedback in prostheses. To date, no prosthesis currently provides long-term sensory feedback, yet accomplishing this will lead to great quality of life improvements. The present proposal aims to uncover how basic tactile processes are encoded and represented centrally, as well as how more complex somatosensation is generated (e.g. wetness, pleasantness). Novel investigations will be conducted in humans to probe these mechanisms, including peripheral in vivo recording (microneurography) and neural stimulation, combined with advanced brain imaging and behavioural experiments. Preliminary work has shown the feasibility of the approach, where it is possible to visualise the activation of single mechanoreceptive afferents in the human brain. The multi-disciplinary approach unites detailed, high-resolution, functional investigations with actual sensations generated. The results will elucidate how basic and complex somatosensory processes are encoded, providing insights into the recovery of such signals. The knowledge gained aims to provide pain-free, efficient diagnostic capabilities for detecting and quantifying a range of somatosensory disorders, as well as identifying new potential therapeutic targets. Project acronym BIOGEOS Project Bio-mediated Geo-material Strengthening for engineering applications Researcher (PI) Lyesse LALOUI Host Institution (HI) ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE Summary Given the increasing scarcity of suitable land for development, soil strengthening technologies have emerged in the past decade and go hand-in-hand with the implementation of the majority of foundation solutions. The goal is to alter the soil structure and its mechanical properties for ultimately securing the integrity of structures. The BIOGEOS project puts the focus on bio-mediated soil improvement, which falls within the broader framework of multi-physical processes in geo-mechanics. The goal of the project is to engineer a novel, natural material under controlled processes, for ultimately providing solutions to real problems in the geo-engineering and geo-energy fields by advancing knowledge around complex multi-physical phenomena in porous media. The bio-cemented geo-material, which is produced by carefully integrating the metabolic activity of native soil bacteria, is produced through the bio-mineralization of calcite bonds, which act as natural cementation for endowing the subsurface with real cohesion and increased resistance. A principal characteristic of the project is its multi-scale approach through advanced experimentation to identify the main physical mechanisms involved in the formation of the bio-mineralized bonds and their behaviour under mechanical loading. The development of such a bio-mediated technology will lead to innovative applications in a series of engineering problems such as the restoration of weak foundations, seismic retrofitting, erosion protection, and the enhancement of heat transfer in thermo-active geo-structures. The project foresees to adopt multiple loading conditions for its laboratory characterization and ultimately pass to the large experimental scale. BIOGEOS further aims to provide new knowledge around the way we perceive materials in relation with their micro-structure by implementing state-of-the-art inspection of the material’s structure in 3D space and subsequent prediction of their behaviour through numerical tools. Given the increasing scarcity of suitable land for development, soil strengthening technologies have emerged in the past decade and go hand-in-hand with the implementation of the majority of foundation solutions. The goal is to alter the soil structure and its mechanical properties for ultimately securing the integrity of structures. The BIOGEOS project puts the focus on bio-mediated soil improvement, which falls within the broader framework of multi-physical processes in geo-mechanics. The goal of the project is to engineer a novel, natural material under controlled processes, for ultimately providing solutions to real problems in the geo-engineering and geo-energy fields by advancing knowledge around complex multi-physical phenomena in porous media. The bio-cemented geo-material, which is produced by carefully integrating the metabolic activity of native soil bacteria, is produced through the bio-mineralization of calcite bonds, which act as natural cementation for endowing the subsurface with real cohesion and increased resistance. A principal characteristic of the project is its multi-scale approach through advanced experimentation to identify the main physical mechanisms involved in the formation of the bio-mineralized bonds and their behaviour under mechanical loading. The development of such a bio-mediated technology will lead to innovative applications in a series of engineering problems such as the restoration of weak foundations, seismic retrofitting, erosion protection, and the enhancement of heat transfer in thermo-active geo-structures. The project foresees to adopt multiple loading conditions for its laboratory characterization and ultimately pass to the large experimental scale. BIOGEOS further aims to provide new knowledge around the way we perceive materials in relation with their micro-structure by implementing state-of-the-art inspection of the material’s structure in 3D space and subsequent prediction of their behaviour through numerical tools. Project acronym COMPLEXORDER Project The Complexity Revolution: Exploiting Unconventional Order in Next-Generation Materials Design Researcher (PI) Andrew GOODWIN Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Summary The fundamental objective of the research described in this proposal is to lay the foundations for understanding how structural complexity can give rise to materials properties inaccessible to structurally-simple states. The long-term vision is a paradigm shift in the way we as chemists design materials—the “Complexity Revolution”—where we move to thinking beyond the unit cell and harness unconventional order to generate emergent states with entirely novel behaviour. The key methodologies of the project are (i) exploitation of the rich structural information accessible using 3D-PDF / diffuse scattering techniques, (ii) exploration of the phase behaviour of unconventional ordered states using computational methods, and (iii) experimental/computational studies of a broad range of materials in which complexity arises from a large variety of different phenemona. In this way, the project will establish how we might controllably introduce complexity into materials by varying chemical composition and synthesis, how we might then characterise these complex states, and how we might exploit this complexity when designing next-generation materials with unprecedented electronic, catalytic, photonic, information storage, dielectric, topological, and magnetic properties. The fundamental objective of the research described in this proposal is to lay the foundations for understanding how structural complexity can give rise to materials properties inaccessible to structurally-simple states. The long-term vision is a paradigm shift in the way we as chemists design materials—the “Complexity Revolution”—where we move to thinking beyond the unit cell and harness unconventional order to generate emergent states with entirely novel behaviour. The key methodologies of the project are (i) exploitation of the rich structural information accessible using 3D-PDF / diffuse scattering techniques, (ii) exploration of the phase behaviour of unconventional ordered states using computational methods, and (iii) experimental/computational studies of a broad range of materials in which complexity arises from a large variety of different phenemona. In this way, the project will establish how we might controllably introduce complexity into materials by varying chemical composition and synthesis, how we might then characterise these complex states, and how we might exploit this complexity when designing next-generation materials with unprecedented electronic, catalytic, photonic, information storage, dielectric, topological, and magnetic properties. Project acronym DECAF Project Deforestation – Climate –Atmospheric composition – Fire interactions and feedbacks Researcher (PI) Dominick SPRACKLEN Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE10, ERC-2017-COG Summary Extensive and ongoing tropical deforestation and degradation have important environmental impacts. Smoke aerosol from deforestation fires degrades air quality, but the effects are poorly quantified. Deforestation alters rainfall through changes in the land surface and through changes to atmospheric aerosol. The magnitude and the sign of the rainfall response is not clear, because of poor process-level understanding and because previous attempts have studied land surface and aerosol responses separately. The impacts of deforestation on atmospheric composition and climate cause a complex set of biosphere interactions resulting in potential Earth system feedbacks. These feedbacks have not yet been quantified and so their importance is not known. The full impact of deforestation on air quality, climate and the Earth System may have been underestimated because there have been no integrated studies of the combined interactions and feedbacks between deforestation and the Earth system. DECAF is the first integrated study of the combined interactions and feedbacks between tropical deforestation, fire, atmospheric composition and climate. To address this important challenge, DECAF will exploit new information from in-situ and satellite observations in combination with state-of-the-art numerical models. DECAF will deliver improved process-level knowledge of the impacts of deforestation on atmospheric composition and climate and a step change in our understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between deforestation, atmospheric composition and climate. New understanding will inform the development of climate and Earth System Models and will facilitate new climate and Earth system assessments. Extensive and ongoing tropical deforestation and degradation have important environmental impacts. Smoke aerosol from deforestation fires degrades air quality, but the effects are poorly quantified. Deforestation alters rainfall through changes in the land surface and through changes to atmospheric aerosol. The magnitude and the sign of the rainfall response is not clear, because of poor process-level understanding and because previous attempts have studied land surface and aerosol responses separately. The impacts of deforestation on atmospheric composition and climate cause a complex set of biosphere interactions resulting in potential Earth system feedbacks. These feedbacks have not yet been quantified and so their importance is not known. The full impact of deforestation on air quality, climate and the Earth System may have been underestimated because there have been no integrated studies of the combined interactions and feedbacks between deforestation and the Earth system. DECAF is the first integrated study of the combined interactions and feedbacks between tropical deforestation, fire, atmospheric composition and climate. To address this important challenge, DECAF will exploit new information from in-situ and satellite observations in combination with state-of-the-art numerical models. DECAF will deliver improved process-level knowledge of the impacts of deforestation on atmospheric composition and climate and a step change in our understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between deforestation, atmospheric composition and climate. New understanding will inform the development of climate and Earth System Models and will facilitate new climate and Earth system assessments. Project acronym DeCode Project Dendrites and memory: role of dendritic spikes in information coding by hippocampal CA3 pyramidal neurons Researcher (PI) Judit MAKARA Host Institution (HI) INSTITUTE OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE - HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Summary The hippocampus is essential for building episodic memories. Coding of locations, contexts or events in the hippocampus is based on the correlated activity of neuronal ensembles; however, the mechanisms promoting the recruitment of individual neurons into information-coding ensembles are poorly understood. In particular, the recurrent synaptic network of pyramidal cells (PCs) in the hippocampal CA3 area, receiving external inputs from the entorhinal cortex and the dentate gyrus, is thought to be essential for associative memory. Current models of the associative functions of CA3 are mainly based on plasticity of these synaptic connections. Recent work by us and others however suggests that active, voltage-dependent properties of CA3PC dendrites may also promote ensemble functions. Dendritic voltage-dependent ion channels allow nonlinear amplification of spatiotemporally correlated synaptic inputs (such as those produced by ensemble activity) and can even generate local dendritic spikes, which may elicit specific action potential patterns and induce synaptic plasticity. Furthermore, dendritic processing may be modulated by activity-dependent regulation of dendritic ion channels. However, still little is known about the active properties of CA3PC dendrites and their functions during spatial coding or memory tasks. The general aim of my research program is to understand the cellular mechanisms that underlie the formation of hippocampal memory-coding neuronal ensembles. Specifically, we will test the hypothesis that active input integration by dendrites of individual CA3PCs plays an important role in their recruitment into specific context-coding ensembles. By combining in vitro (patch-clamp electrophysiology and two-photon (2P) microscopy in slices) and in vivo (2P imaging and activity-dependent labelling in behaving rodents) approaches, we will provide an in-depth understanding of the dendritic components contributing to the generation of the CA3 ensemble code. The hippocampus is essential for building episodic memories. Coding of locations, contexts or events in the hippocampus is based on the correlated activity of neuronal ensembles; however, the mechanisms promoting the recruitment of individual neurons into information-coding ensembles are poorly understood. In particular, the recurrent synaptic network of pyramidal cells (PCs) in the hippocampal CA3 area, receiving external inputs from the entorhinal cortex and the dentate gyrus, is thought to be essential for associative memory. Current models of the associative functions of CA3 are mainly based on plasticity of these synaptic connections. Recent work by us and others however suggests that active, voltage-dependent properties of CA3PC dendrites may also promote ensemble functions. Dendritic voltage-dependent ion channels allow nonlinear amplification of spatiotemporally correlated synaptic inputs (such as those produced by ensemble activity) and can even generate local dendritic spikes, which may elicit specific action potential patterns and induce synaptic plasticity. Furthermore, dendritic processing may be modulated by activity-dependent regulation of dendritic ion channels. However, still little is known about the active properties of CA3PC dendrites and their functions during spatial coding or memory tasks. The general aim of my research program is to understand the cellular mechanisms that underlie the formation of hippocampal memory-coding neuronal ensembles. Specifically, we will test the hypothesis that active input integration by dendrites of individual CA3PCs plays an important role in their recruitment into specific context-coding ensembles. By combining in vitro (patch-clamp electrophysiology and two-photon (2P) microscopy in slices) and in vivo (2P imaging and activity-dependent labelling in behaving rodents) approaches, we will provide an in-depth understanding of the dendritic components contributing to the generation of the CA3 ensemble code.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line743
__label__wiki	0.903453	0.903453	DHS, vendor warn on automotive cyber flaws By Mark Rockwell The Homeland Security cybersecurity response team has notified automobile makers they should take a look at new research illustrating flaws in vehicle control modules to set the systems up for denial-of-service attacks and other mischief. In a July 28 alert, the DHS National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center and Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team said they were tracking research that showed vulnerabilities in certain models of automobiles. The targeted control area network standard is also used in some healthcare systems, they said. The alert said researchers identified a vulnerability exploiting a weakness in the protocol that could allow an attacker to perform a denial-of-service attack. ICS-CERT has notified some affected vendors, primarily auto manufacturers and entities within the healthcare industry, about the report to confirm the vulnerability and to identify mitigations. NCCIC warned that CAN is widely used throughout the critical manufacturing, healthcare and public health, and transportation systems sectors. The warning came just days before a set of McAfee researchers presented a paper on automobile system vulnerabilities at the defcon 2017 hacking conference in Las Vegas at the end of July. A few days earlier, CERT had issued an advisory about telematics control units used in BMW, Ford and Nissan Infiniti vehicles. That research showed vulnerabilities in a control module used by Nissan, Nissan-Infinity, BMW and Ford in on-board telematics modules that allowed remote, unauthorized access to geographic information such as location, destination and other data. The researchers said they had notified the manufacturers, who had pushed out a fix for the problem. "The vulnerabilities McAfee discovered show just how difficult it would be to regulate cybersecurity," said McAfee Chief Scientist Raj Samani in a statement to FCW. "Fundamentally, a car is like a jigsaw puzzle with multiple components, so applying patches to cars the way we would a phone, for example, is not feasible." "The cars we're going to be using in the future will be dependent on technology, and there will always be vulnerabilities as we increase the amount of code in cars," he said. "What needs to happen, fundamentally, is the integration of security and privacy by design, with cybersecurity built-in to all the components of a device. The responsibility is on manufacturers to integrate security." Samani said consumers should also bear some of the responsibility by asking manufacturers about their responses to cybersecurity incidents and vulnerabilities, as well as how they test products to ensure security. Mark Rockwell is a senior staff writer at FCW, whose beat focuses on acquisition, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy. Before joining FCW, Rockwell was Washington correspondent for Government Security News, where he covered all aspects of homeland security from IT to detection dogs and border security. Over the last 25 years in Washington as a reporter, editor and correspondent, he has covered an increasingly wide array of high-tech issues for publications like Communications Week, Internet Week, Fiber Optics News, tele.com magazine and Wireless Week. Rockwell received a Jesse H. Neal Award for his work covering telecommunications issues, and is a graduate of James Madison University. Click here for previous articles by Rockwell. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @MRockwell4.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line749
__label__cc	0.545178	0.454822	Memorial to Felix Pirani. Pictures Thoughts Candles Home Donations Pictures Thoughts Candles Read Stories Contribute Contact Visit the Galleries Lifestories Felix: teacher, mentor, friend Created by Tony on 09/01/2016 When I first went to King’s as a research student, I joined and mixed with a small group of pure maths students. I might never have come to work with Felix, a Professor of Rational Mechanics, but for a twist of fortune. When I applied for a grant, it turned out that the Science Research Council, as it then was, had a residency requirement for its PhD grant holders that I did not meet. (Not only I, but my parents also should have lived in the UK for a number of years.) So I found myself in need of financial support, and the Department stepped in with a “tutorial studentship”, which meant that I had to teach up to six hours a week. Felix happened to be in charge of tutorial organization and so I came into frequent contact with him. In a rather stuffy institution, he was a remarkably unaffected professor. Everything about him seemed different: he was somehow both relaxed, as evidenced by his easy relationships with students, and intense, or intensely rigorous, as one could discover by entering into an argument about politics — by which I mean not British party politics, but the more esoteric reaches of, say, a Marxist approach to the analysis of science and progress through science. For an aspiring mathematician who had never given these matters much thought, this was exhilarating. It was not long before I discovered that he taught a course of interest to me, although in principle it was classified as “applied mathematics”, and I began to attend. He was a highly engaging teacher — not “lecturer” — who consequently demanded a degree of participation from his students. I recall two incidents: once he was leading up to an observation by asking a series of questions, until a frustrated undergraduate said “look, you are the professor, we are the students, just TELL us!” Needless to say, Felix took the trouble to explain why he was teaching the way he was. Another time, he wanted to use the physical space of the classroom to make a point, so he began moving around and chalking arrows — vectors — on the walls. I remember thinking, a student wouldn’t get away with this!! As I got to know him better, I also came to admire Felix’s extraordinary love and evidently unconditional commitment to his children, as each appeared to be carving out a life so different from his: if I learned something from this and been half as good a parent, I should be very proud. Although never officially a member of his research group, I began spending more time in their seminars. He invited me to attend a workshop at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. Much of the scientific content went way over my head, but it was wonderful to feel part of a scientific community. We had a running joke about encountering each other in rarefied places such as this, an expression of surprise at seeing the other and exclaiming YOU?! — so much as to say, or challenge, what on earth could possibly have brought you here? It was so easy to forget that this was a man who had played a significant part in the development of General Relativity! I briefly tried to work with him and Michael Crampin on what became their highly successful book, Applicable Differential Geometry, but there was no way I could keep up. Nevertheless, the experience brought us even closer and after I left King’s we continued to see each other regularly. I especially enjoyed a close friendship with him and Marta over the few years of their life together and shared his deep feeling of loss at her untimely death. Felix’s retirement from King’s signalled also his retirement from mathematics. I was amazed, first at the determination with which he shed this former life, not least in his giving away his library of mathematical books, and second, at the enthusiasm and energy with which he picked up his new activities, especially mosaics. He took me to see his workshops, a succession of them, as he searched for the right environment in which to work, and he proudly showed me his public mosaics on the South Bank. When I last saw Felix, I sensed a frailness that I had not seen, or perhaps not noticed, before. I wondered even then if this would be my last visit. His life has been long, eventful and highly productive. I am sad at his passing, but, much more than that, grateful for his friendship and wisdom over the years. May he long be remembered for what he was, a sharp intellect, a great teacher, a loving friend.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line750
__label__cc	0.692211	0.307789	The Structure of Fencing - Globally and within NZ At the helm of fencing world-wide sits the: Federation Internationale D’Escrime, (FIE) www.fie.ch Who are they?: The FIE was founded in 1913 and has its seat in Lausanne, Switzerland. The FIE is a collective governing body with members from around the globe. Along with the executive committee, there are 134 member federations. The FIE governs and administers fencing throughout the world. They set standards for competitions and equipment, they write and roll out the rules so that everywhere in the world fencing is the same. They organise global competitions, like the World Championships, facilitate coach and referee training and certification and much, much more. The FIE may also provide funding or material support to national bodies. How do they do it?: The FIE governs through the world regional representatives (NZ is part of the Asia / Oceania group) and then through to the country’s national governing body. The national governing body of New Zealand is: Fencing New Zealand (New Zealand Amateur Fencing Association Inc.) Website or Facebook Who are they?: FENZ, in existence since 1938, is a non-profit organisation run by volunteers. The executive committee consists of elected officers and the regional presidents. FENZ enforce the rules of the FIE and regulate and develop fencing in NZ. As such they provide coach and referee training, select national teams to partake in international competitions, run national competitions, maintain NZ rankings, make available competition equipment and much more. How do they do it?: FENZ administers the rules and the sport through the regional governing bodies. See the FENZ Constitution here. …and our regional governing body is: Fencing Central (and other Regional Bodies) New Zealand is divided into 4 fencing regions: Fencing North www.fencingnorth.com Fencing Central (commonly referred to as FenCen.) Fencing Mid South www.fencingmidsouth.org.nz Fencing South This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (no website) Who are they?: The committee members of the regional bodies are affiliated members, nominated by clubs within the region and are elected for a one year term. Again, it is all on a volunteer basis. What do they do?: The regional bodies work closely with the clubs in their region; they facilitate and support, disseminate important information, conduct tournaments and other fencing related events, administer and maintain the fencing assets of the region, fundraise, provide training and development opportunities for coaches, fencers, referees and as well as represent the fencers in the district at a national level. The Fencing Central region has 4 primary clubs and several minor clubs, most of which stem from the primary clubs. The pages on the menu at the left are dedicated to those clubs in our region and serve to inform those interested in our sport about those clubs.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line751
__label__wiki	0.540862	0.540862	Ashford House Nursing Home: Embracing the digital transformation Monday 24 October, 2016 Ashford House Nursing Home is using its high-speed broadband connection to enrich the lives of its residents through technology. Technology isn’t just a luxury of the younger generations. Increasingly, elderly people are incorporating technology to live, learn and connect. Helping its residents do just that is Ashford House Nursing Home in Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. The key to its digital transformation, says centre provider Denise Morrin, is the constant availability of high-speed broadband. “We are a small nursing home but a very progressive nursing home,” she says. “Broadband has definitely made a difference.” In fact, Ashford House has incorporated the digital world into all aspects of care. “We have ended up really embracing technology on every level,” says Denise. “We use it for our residents, their families, our staff, down to our security cameras outside the nursing home. Every element of the nursing home is dependent on high-speed broadband now.” DIGITISING RESIDENT CARE A key benefit of adopting digital technology is the way in which it improves residents’ lives. Denise uses the example of Nancy, a visually-impaired woman in Ashford House. “She used to love reading the paper,” Denise explains. However, as her eyesight deteriorated, Nancy struggled to see the paper. Now, the nursing home’s activities coordinator visits her in the mornings and uses the iPad to read her the latest news. “If there’s something she’s particularly interested in or if there’s a photo, she wouldn’t be able to see it in the newspaper,” continues Denise. “But using the iPad, we can enlarge it and bring it up, so she has much more chance of seeing what we’re actually discussing with her.” Nancy says connectivity is just as vital to Ashford House Nursing Home as it is to anywhere else. “She takes the iPad and reads whatever I want to know from the paper,” she says of her morning updates from the activities coordinator. “I think it’s great. If it’s everywhere else, it needs to be here. We need to keep up with it.” Nancy is just one example of a resident who has benefitted from Ashford House’s digital transformation. “It’s a great way to start conversations, it’s a great form of reminiscence therapy,” says Denise. She adds that it also helps younger visitors bond with the residents. “We have Transition Year students that come in a couple of times a week,” says Denise. “They love the computer and it actually makes life easier for them as well because they are very familiar with computers so they enjoy passing on those skills.” Technology also brings with it faster and more efficient ways of doing things. That allows nursing staff to cut down on laborious paperwork and increase the time they spend with residents. “Our residents’ information and care plans are online and we’re also able to access the pharmacy online,” says Denise. “This enables us to look at our residents’ prescription charts and look at the medicines. We can also scan and upload reports for individual residents. High-speed broadband enables the nurse to have more time for her resident and she is able to just click that button and get her notes going when she’s able to sit down and it has it has made huge differences in time management for staff.” WATCH THE RESIDENTIAL CARE – ASHFORD HOUSE VIDEO	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line752
__label__cc	0.537895	0.462105	Open Access Library Journal 10.4236/oalib.1103783 Microbiological Quality Assessment of Pupuru and Plantain Flours in an Urban Market in Akure, Ondo State, South Western Nigeria Christiana Eleojo Aruwa, Omolola Ogundare Department of Microbiology, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria Copyright © 2017 by authors and Open Access Library Inc. Received: June 28, 2017; Accepted: July 31, 2017; Published: August 3, 2017 Cassava and plantain flours are commonly used in preparation of a variety of food delicacies in South Western Nigeria. These are however sold in open air markets, and are scarcely required to be subjected to safety checks by food safety authorities. A study was designed to assess the microbiological food quality of cassava (pupuru) and plantain flour purchased from different vendors at Oja-Oba, Akure, Ondo state, as well as the antimicrobial profile of microorganisms identified. Microbiological analyses of sixty (60) food samples were carried out. Results showed highest bacterial counts in plantain flour sample F4 (3.0 × 104 cfu/ml) and least for F1 (0.1× 104 cfu/ml). Fungal count was highest (3.1 × 104 sfu/ml) in plantain flour F4; and least in plantain flour samples F5, F10, F12 with fungal count of 0.5 × 102 sfu/ml each. Different samples contained Enterobacter sp., Aeromonas sp., Klebsiella sp., Acinetobacter sp., Campylobacter sp., Corynebacterium sp. and Bacillus subtilis. Fungal isolates include Penicillium crustosum and P. chrysogenum, Rhizopus oryzae and Aspergillus niger. Percentage occurrence of isolates includes Enterobacter sp. (0.99%), Klebsiella sp. (91.12%), Acinetobacter sp. (1.97%), Campylobacter sp. (4.61%), Corynebacterium sp. (0.33%), and Bacillus subtilis (0.99%). Most predominant mould was Aspergillus niger, with a percentage occurrence of 45.5%; and least, Penicillium crustosum (4.5%). Gram positive bacteria showed resistance to cotrimoxazole and ceftriaxone; and Gram negative bacteria to zimnacef. The microbial isolates from these flours could cause different food intoxication and illnesses in humans. While prevailing unfavorable environmental conditions and food form may contribute to their presence in samples; their presence is unacceptable and counts need to be kept minimal for consumer safety. Local authorities need to carry out continued vendor education campaigns, and regular quality checks to assess their safety for consumption. Pupuru, Plantain, Flour, Food Quality, Antimicrobial, Nigeria Microorganisms are microscopically small forms of life mainly organised as single-cell organisms while some may occur multicellular. They ubiquitous in the natural environment (water, soil, air etc.), and can naturally be found in foods or on the surfaces of foods as contaminants during the manufacturing process of food products [1] . Food fermentation is the process for producing ATP using endogenous organic compounds as both electron donors and acceptors. The chemical process of fermentation makes a few ATP molecules in the absence of aerobic respiration [2] . Cassava flour (pupuru) is a fermented cassava meal that is consumed by at least 4 - 6 million people in Nigeria [3] . Plantain flour is the product of dried and pulverised plantain slices. Plantain is a major source of food in many regions throughout Nigeria and sub-Saharan African. Plantain production reaches over 80 million tonnes per year [4] . Plantain flour apart from being used as a substitute for garri especially for diabetic patient, also serves as raw material used in the production of cakes, puff-puff, biscuit, bread and pancakes. Plantain flour is a cheap source of iron, protein, vitamin C (3.0% to 3.5%), and carotene. It could be used in formulating protein supplement diets for both children and adults. The low level of sodium in plantain also makes it a ready source of raw material for formulating low sodium diets [4] . Traditional carbohydrate food such as cassava flour (pupuru) plays a key role in African diet. However, the production processes and sale condition leaves much to be desired as these flours are prone to microbial contamination which may cause food borne illnesses [5] . Food borne illnesses result from consumption of pathogenic bacteria, viruses or parasites that contaminate food, as well as chemical or natural toxins such as those in poisonous mushrooms. The consumption of toxins or microorganisms may cause food poisonings (intoxications) or infections. Contaminating microorganisms enter foods from a variety of sources. Crops carry soil borne bacterial species to the processing plant, and rodents and arthropods transport microorganisms on their feet and body parts as they move about among foods. Human handling of foods also provides a source of contamination. Factors that determine if spoilage will occur include water activity/moisture content of the food stuff, pH, physical structure of the food, presence/absence of oxygen, temperature of storage, food chemical composition [6] . More than 250 different food borne diseases have been described [7] . Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that 9.4 million of the illnesses caused by 31 known food borne pathogens, and that 90% of all illnesses due to known pathogen are caused by seven pathogens: Salmonella, Norovirus, Campylobacter, Toxoplasma, E. coli 0157:H7, Listeria and Clostridium perfringens [7] . All food borne diseases are associated with poor hygiene practices whether by water or food transmission or through faecal-oral route [8] . Often spoilage microorganisms are introduced from the same source as the food; others are introduced as contaminants during transport, storage or preparation. While observable changes to foodstuff are only likely after the microbial population has reached a considerable size, food poisoning can result from the presence of much smaller number of contaminants [9] . Locally, rural women process cassava into pupuru by steeping peeled cassava tubers in stream water and fermenting it for 4 - 6 days. This method of processing fouls the water and increases the level of microbial contaminants in the fermented cassava product [10] . The control and monitoring of conditions in the traditional processing methods are difficult. Another major constraint in the traditional processing of pupuru is the unduly time, as a result of ineffective heat transfer mechanism using the traditional dryer and probably due to the irregular and large sizes of the ball dried. Therefore, proper drying is not achieved and dried balls have the high moisture content, thus the product is susceptible to mold attack as well as developing some off flavor on storage. Also, prolonged drying may institute some changes that could negatively affect some functional properties of the product [11] . Presently in Ondo state of Nigeria, “pupuru” flour is often packaged in polyvinyl chloride container (covered plastic) and stored at ambient temperature (30˚C ± 3˚C). This packaging material does not protect the “pupuru” flour properly from contamination by insect, pests, microbes, dust and environmental moisture [12] . During the entire sequence of food handling, from the producer to the final consumer, microorganisms can affect food quality and human health. Contamination by disease-causing microorganisms can occur at any point in the food-handling sequence [13] [14] . Sources of microorganisms in food include food utensils, food handlers and animal hides [15] . Food borne illness is an international health problem that is common in most developing countries like Nigeria and has led to the death of thousands especially children with low immunity [7] . Screening for microorganisms in pupuru and plantain flour was undertaken to identify possible pathogens and contaminants, determine microbial load and antimicrobial susceptibility pattern of the microbial isolates. Information provided would increase our knowledge of the microorganisms associated with these foods and help in the development of appropriate management protocols to prevent and control associated food borne diseases. Reasons would also be suggested for the comparative distribution of the isolated microbes in the different food samples. A total of sixty food samples (thirty pupuru and thirty plantain flour) purchased from traders in Oja-Oba, Akure Ondo State were used for the study. The samples were collected in sterile polythene bags and transported to the laboratory for microbial analysis [16] . 2.2. Sample Analysis for Microbial Isolation Using the pour plate method of Aruwa and Akinyosoye [16] , the microbial quality of the food sample was determined. About 1 g of each food sample was weighed aseptically into test tubes containing 9 ml of sterilized distilled water. Afterwards, the test tubes were shaken vigorously to allow dislodgement of food sample and even distribution of microorganisms. A four-fold serial dilution of each sample was prepared. 1ml of dilution factor 10−2 and 10−4 were inoculated into sterile Petri dishes containing nutrient agar (NA) and potato dextrose agar (PDA) for bacterial and fungal isolation/growth respectively. Incubation was carried out at 37˚C for 24 hours for bacterial growth, and 25˚C for 48-72 hrs for fungal growth. 2.3. Enumeration and Purification of Microbial Isolates Colonies were counted at end of incubation period to obtain the total viable count. Calculation of colony forming unit (cfu) per ml for the bacteria and the spore forming unit (sfu) per ml for the fungi was done. Distinct colonies were sub-cultured from countable plates using the four-quadrant streak method to obtain pure bacterial cultures. The pure cultures of the bacteria isolated were each maintained in nutrient agar slants and refrigerated at 4˚C. Fungal isolates were purified by the transfer of fungal mycelia plug onto sterile freshly prepared PDA plates. Pure cultures of the fungi isolated were maintained on PDA slants in McCartney bottles and kept in the refrigerator at 4˚C [17] . 2.4. Identification of Bacterial and Fungal Isolates This was carried out according to the method of Cheesbrough [18] and Leboffe and Pierce [19] [20] [21] [22] . Gram’s staining was carried out to ascertain the morphology and Gram’s reaction of the isolates. Other biochemical tests carried out include catalase, coagulase, urease, spore staining and sugar fermentation. Fungal isolates were identified using microscopic and macroscopic mycelial morphologies. 2.5. Antibiotics Susceptibility Assay In order to determine the susceptibility profile of isolates to clinically relevant antibiotics, the plate diffusion technique of Willey et al. [23] was employed. 18 - 24-hour old cultures of the isolated bacterial microorganisms were swabbed on sterile, solidified Muller Hilton agar (MHA) plates using sterile swab sticks. The multiple antibiotic discs were then placed on the agar surface and pressed using sterile forceps to ensure complete contact with agar. All the plates were incubated at 37˚C to 24 hrs. The zone of inhibition was measured at the point which an obvious demarcation between growth and no growth could be seen using a meter rule. The antibiotics used and their corresponding concentrations were pefloxacin (10 μg), chloramphenicol (30 μg), gentamycin (10 μg), ampiclox (30 μg), zimnacef (20 μg), amoxacillin (30 μg), ciprofloxacin (10 μg), streptomycin (30 μg), septrin (30 μg), erythromycin (10 μg), rocephin (25 μg), cotrimoxazole (25 μg) for Gram positive bacteria; and streptomycin (30 μg), chloramphenicol (30 μg), gentamycin (10 μg), cotrimoxazole (25 μg), ofloxacin (5 μg), amoxicillin (25 μg), ciprofloxacin (10μg), erythromycin (5 μg), pefloxacin (5 μg) and ceftriazone (30 μg) for Gram negative bacteria. Descriptive analyses were done with prevalence statistics expressed as percentages; and one-way ANOVA (SPSS version 15) for separation of means and determination of significant relationships with the p set at 0.05 significance level [16] . The total bacteria count and total fungi count from food samples analysed was presented in Table 1. Highest bacterial count was found in plantain flour sample F4 with 3.0 × 104 cfu/ml, and lowest in F1 with 0.1× 104 cfu/ml. The total fungi count was highest (3.1 × 104 sfu/ml) in plantain flour F4 while the least count was observed in plantain flour F5, F10, and F12 with fungal count of 0.5 × 102 sfu/ml. The identities of the bacteria isolated after colonial morphology, direct microscopic examination using Gram stain, and biochemical tests is presented in Table 2. The bacteria identified include Enterobacter sp., Aeromonas sp., Klebsiella sp., Acinetobacter sp., Campylobacter sp., Corynebacterium sp. and Bacillus sp. The fungi identified include Penicillium sp., Rhizopus sp., Aspergillus sp. (Table 3). Klebsiella sp. bacterium was the most prevalent in both pupuru and plantain flour with a percentage prevalence of 72.9% and 94.5% (Table 4) respectively. The least prevalent among the bacteria isolated were Enterobacter sp. with prevalence of 6.3% in pupuru and Campylobacter sp. with 5.1% prevalence in plantain flour. Penicillium crustosum fungus was the most prevalent (66.7%), while Penicillium chrysogenum was the least prevalent (11.1%) in pupuru (Table 5). In plantain flour, Aspergillus niger was the most prevalent (61.5%) and the least prevalence was Rhizopus oryzae with prevalence of 38.5%. Inhibition zones for Gram negative and Gram positive bacteria were presented in Table 6 and Table 7 respectively. Zones of inhibition for different antibiotics against Gram negative bacteria ranged from 11 - 29 mm, with the least zone of inhibition recorded for ciprofloxacin against Klebsiella sp. (11 mm) and Table 1. Mean bacterial and fungal count in pupuru and plantain flour samples. Key: P1-15 = pupuru samples; F1-F15 = plantain flour samples, from different sellers in Oja Oba market. Table 2. Microscopic and biochemical characteristics of isolated bacteria from flour samples. Key: + = Positive, ++ = acidic, − = Negative, +++ = very acidic, + = fairly acidic, A (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) = Probable bacteria, Wu = weak urease, Su = strong urease. Table 3. Morphology of fungi isolated from flour samples Table 4. Prevalence of bacterial isolates from pupuru and plantain flours. Table 5. Prevalence of fungal isolates from pupuru and plantain flours. the higher range recorded for ofloxacin against Enterobacter sp. (29 mm). Zones for Gram positive bacteria, the range was from 7 - 22.3 mm, with higher range recorded for pefloxacin (22.3 mm) against Corynebacterium sp., with the least recorded for pefloxacin against Bacillus subtilis (7 mm). Changes in microbiological quality of a food item determine its safety, acceptability, shelf stability and its fitness for consumption. The array of microorganisms detected in flour samples used in this study may be associated with contaminated packaging materials, water used during processing, sneezing and coughing by handlers and exposure of flours in an open market environment. Production of most traditional food is often associated with unhygienic prac- Table 6. Antibiotics zone of inhibition for Gram negative bacteria. Data are presented as Mean ± S.E (n = 3). Values with the same superscript letter(s) along the same column are not significantly different (P > 0.05). Key: STR = streptomycin (30 μg), CHL = chloramphenicol (30 μg), GEN = gentamycin (10 μg), COT = cotrimozazole (25 μg), OFL = oflaxacin (5 μg), AMX = amoxicillin (25 μg), CPX = ciprofloxacin (10 μg), ERY = erythromycin (5 μg), PFX = pefloxacin (5 μg), CRO = cetriazone (30 μg). Table 7. Antibiotics zone of inhibition for Gram positive bacteria. Data are presented as Mean ± S.E (n = 3). Values with the same superscript letter(s) along the same column are not significantly different (P > 0.05). Key: AM = amoxicillin (25 μg), R = rocephin (25 μg), CPX = ciprofloxacin (10 μg), S = streptomycin (30 μg), SXT = septrin (30 μg), E = erythromycin (10 μg), PEF = pefloxacin (10 μg), CN = gentamycin (10 μg), APX = ampiclox (30 μg), Z = zimnacef (20 μg). tices. This has been documented for these and other food items by Ohenhen et al. [24] , Ogori and Gana [25] and Ojokoh et al. [26] . These food samples contain different bacteria that are opportunistic pathogens. If consumed by individuals with compromised immune systems they can cause several types of food borne diseases. Enterobacter sp., Klebsiella sp., Acinetobacter sp., Campylobacter sp., Corynebacterium sp., and Bacillus subtilis are resident and transient bacteria transferred respectively on hands and associated with poor hygiene practices. The high bacteria counts and high occurrence of Klebsiella sp. and presence of other bacteria in plantain and pupuru flours are indicative of potential public health hazard [25] . Penicillium crustosum, Rhizopus oryzae, Penicillium chrysogenum and Aspergillus nigerfungi which were isolated and identified are common moulds in soil, air and organic matter and are therefore ready contaminants of foods and feeds. Aspergillus sp. and Bacillus sp. are known to be associated with dried food [26] . These moulds are responsible for off flavours and taste in food samples, therefore resulting into food spoilage. Aspergillus spp. and Rhizopus spp. are indigenous to cassava fermentation and indication of public health hazard. A. niger is also known to produce mycotoxins (aflatoxins) [25] . The dominating presence of Aspergillus species on the sampled foods could be due to its rapid sporulation, development and relative adaptability to a wide variety of environmental conditions as compared to other species. It also indicates that unconditioned and unhygienic approaches were used in processing [25] . Aflatoxins are still recognized as the most important mycotoxins. They are synthesized by only a few Aspergillus species, of which Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus niger are the most problematic. Obadina et al. [27] reported the presence of Aspergillus, Rhizopus and Penicillium species in other dried cassava products. Shittu et al. [28] also demonstrated the presence of toxigenic moulds like Aspergillus flavus and Penicillium species, which could constitute a health hazard to consumers and cause pupuru spoilage. Their presence and high counts in the flours sampled could be attributed to favourable environmental condition for their growth. The expression of aflatoxin-related diseases is influenced by factors such as age, nutrition, sex, species and the possibility of concurrent exposure to other toxins [29] . Also in this study, antimicrobial sensitivity test was carried out on microbial isolates and found to be of public health significance, having relatively varied antibiotic resistance profiles. Resistance or susceptibility of microbes to antimicrobial agents are determined by inherent microbial genetic and environmental factors. Some of these factors include kinds of microorganism present, the concentration and nature of the antimicrobial, and length of exposure to the agent etc. The wide antibiotic resistance profile of Campylobacter sp. and Bacillus subtilis is of concern as these microbes can cause food borne illnesses. Hence, the tested antibiotics would not be efficacious in the treatment of food borne diseases that may be caused by these microbes. Microorganisms like these may have acquired or developed the ability to resistance and virulence factors to protect themselves in harsh/dry environments. Such trends constitute significant health problems for the future [30] . The environment plays a critical role in the transmission of infectious agents to humans, with various materials serving as mechanical vehicles. Microbial contaminants may be transmitted directly through hand to hand contact or indirectly via food or other inanimate objects. The present study has focused on the microbiological quality of pupuru and plantain flour and potential health hazard that may arise from consumption of improperly processed flours. Results contribute to ensuring safe food product delivery to meet the demands of consumers now and in future. In order to ensure quality control; prevention of undue food contamination prior to processing, use of adequate and appropriate food pro- cessing techniques to avoid contamination during and after foods processing, quality packaging to keep foods fresh and minimize health risk factors, adequate storage, ideal transportation, and hygienic handling of the finished products cannot be overemphasized. Aruwa, C.E. and Ogundare, O. (2017) Microbiological Qua- lity Assessment of Pupuru and Plantain Flours in an Urban Market in Akure, Ondo State, South Western Nigeria. Open Access Library Journal, 4: e3783. https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1103783 1. Aruwa, C.E., Akindusoye, A.J. and. Awala, S.I. (2017). Socio-Demographic Characteristics and Food Hygiene Level Assessment of Food Handlers in Cafeterias around a Federal University in Nigeria. Journal of Scientific Research and Reports, 14, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.9734/JSRR/2017/33273 2. Pommerville, J.C. (2007) Alcano’s Fundamentals of Microbiology: Food Preservation. 8th Edition, Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc., Sudbury, 769. 3. Daily Independent Newspaper (2016) Pupuru: Local Delicacy from Ondo-Life, Food and Beverages. http://www.dailyindependentnig.com 4. Foraminifera Research (2012) Plantain Production and Processing in Nigeria. http://www.foramfera.com 5. Wakil, S.M. and Benjamin, I.B. (2015) Starter Developed Pupuru, a Traditional African Fermented Food from Cassava (Manihot esculenta). International Food Research Journal, 22, 2566. 6. Pommerville, J.C. (2007) Alcano’s Fundamentals of Microbiology: Food Spoilage. 8th Edition, Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc., Sudbury, 762-764. 7. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2015) Food Borne Germs and Illnesses/Food Safety/CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foodborne-germs.html 8. Willey, J.M., Sherwood, I.M. and Woolverton, C.J. (2009) Prescott’s Principles of Microbiology: Food Borne Diseases. International Edition, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., New York, 816. 9. Stuart, H. (2005) Essential Microbiology: Microbial Spoilage of Food. John Willey and Sons Ltd., Chichester, 427. 10. Oyetayo, V.O. (2006) Nutrient and Antinutrient Content of Cassava Steeped in Different Types of Water for Pupuru Production. Research Journal of Microbiology, 1, 423-427. 11. Famurewa, J.A.V., Oluwamukomi, M.O. and Alaba, J.O. (2013) Effect of Different Drying Method on the Physiochemical Characteristics of Cassava Flour (Pupuru). International Journal of Biological and Chemical Sciences, 7, 333. 12. Daramola, O.A., Idowu, M.A., Atanda, O.O. and Oguntona, C.R.B. (2010) Effect of Packaging Materials on the Quality of “Pupuru” Flour during Storage. African Journal of Food Science, 4, 259. 13. Prescott, L.M., Harley, J.P. and Klein, D.A. (2002) Microbiology: Food and Industrial Microbiology. 5th Edition, McGraw-Hill, Boston, 972. 14. Prescott, L.M., Harley, J.P. and Klein, D.A. (2002) Microbiology: Food and Industrial Microbiology. 5th Edition, McGraw-Hill, Boston, 978-981. 15. Jay, J.M., Loessner, M.J. and Golden, D.A. (2005) Modern Food Microbiology: Primary Sources of Microorganisms Found in Foods. 7th Edition, Springer Science + Business Media, Inc., New York, 33-36. 16. Aruwa, C.E. and Akinyosoye, F.A. (2015) Microbiological Assessment of Ready-To- Eat Foods (Rtes) for the Presence Bacillus Species. Journal of Advances in Biology & Biotechnology, 3, 145-152. 17. Dada, E.O. and Aruwa, C.E. (2016) Asymptomatic Bacteriuria Prevalence among Primary School Children in the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria. Journal of Applied Life Sciences International, 4, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.9734/JALSI/2016/24730 18. Cheesbrough, M. (2005) District Laboratory Practice in Tropical Countries. 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, New York, 38-39. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581304 19. Leboffe, M.J. and Pierce, B.E. (2011) A Photographic Atlas for the Microbiology Laboratory: Endospore Stain. 4th Edition, Morton Publishing Company, Englewood, 61-63. 20. Leboffe, M.J. and Pierce, B.E. (2011b) A Photographic Atlas for the Microbiology Laboratory: Catalase Test. 4th Edition, Morton Publishing Company, Englewood, 73. 21. Leboffe, M.J. and Pierce, B.E. (2011) A Photographic Atlas for the Microbiology Laboratory: Catalase Test. 4th Edition, Morton Publishing Company, Englewood, 75. 22. Leboffe, M. J, And Pierce, B. E. (2011) A Photographic Atlas for the Microbiology Laboratory: Catalase Test. 4th Edition, Morton Publishing Company, Englewood, 106-107. 23. Willey, J.M., Sherwood, I.M. and Woolverton, C.J. (2008) Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, Prescott, Harvey and Klein’s Microbiology. 7th Edition, 835-858. 24. Ohenhen, R.E., Enweani, I.B., Ogiehor, S.I. and Uwabor, K. (2006) Microorganisms Associated with Preparation of Plantain Pudding in Western Nigeria. African Journal of Biotechnology, 5, 2077-2080. 25. Ogori, A.F. and Gana, J. (2013) Microbiological Loads of Road Side Dried Cassava Flour from Cassava Balls and Chunks. American Open Journal of Agricultural Research, 1, 24-39. 26. Ojokoh, A.O., Daramola, M.K. and Ochukwa, A.D. (2014) Studies on the Microbiological, Proximate Composition and Anti-Nutritional Content of Fermented Groundnut and Plantain Blends. Pacific Journal of Science and Technology, 15, 251-258. 27. Obadina, A.O., Oyewole, O.B. and Odusami, A.O. (2009) Microbiological Safety and Quality Assessment of Some Fermented Cassava Products (Lafun, Fufu, Gari). Scientific Research and Essays, 4, 432-435. 28. Shittu, T.A., Edema, M.O., Dada, O. and Atayese, A.O. (2010) Microorganisms Associated with the Spoilage of Pupuru. Food Control, 21, 203-206. 29. Adebayo-Tayo, B.C., Onilude, A.A., Ogunjobi, A.A., Gbolade, J.S. and Oladapo, M.O. (2006) Detection of Fungi and Aflatoxin in Shelved Bush Mango Seeds (Irvingia spp.) Stored for Sale in Uyo Eastern Nigeria. Ejeafche, 5, 1569-1574. 30. Beceiro, A., Tomás, M. and Bou, G. (2012) Antimicrobial Resistance and Virulence: A Beneficial Relationship for the Microbial World? Enfermedades Infecciosas Y Microbiologia Clinica, 30, 492-499. ● OALibJ Subscription ●Most popular papers in OALibJ ●About OALibJ News	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line756
__label__cc	0.728664	0.271336	CONTACT US \| DIRECTIONS TO CHURCH \| About Faith Reconciling Church Wednesday Worship Mission Opportunities Scouting at Faith Kids Connect Mary Martha Circle Weekday Activities Operating Pledge 2020 We’d love to have you visit Faith United Methodist Church and get to know our Faith family. Here are the answers to some questions that visitors to our church frequently ask. Q. What time are your services? A. During the fall, winter and spring, our worship service is at 10:30 a.m. From Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend, we switch to a summer schedule with our worship service at 9:30 a.m. We also have a contemplative worship service at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesdays except during the summer. Q. How can I find your church? A. We’re one block west of Silver Lake Road along 33rd Avenue NE in St. Anthony. If you’re coming from St. Anthony, New Brighton or Roseville, the easiest route is to get on Silver Lake Road and turn west at 33rd Ave. If you’re coming from Columbia Heights or northeast Minneapolis, get on Stinson Blvd. and turn east at 33rd Ave. Here a map showing our location. Q. What type of worship service is it? A. We call it a blended service, combining elements of traditional and contemporary worship. For example, our choir and the Faith Praise Band provide music most Sundays. Additional groups - Faith Praise Singers, the Centennial Bell Choir, small musical groups - as well as mixed media add to the blended nature of our worship services. The services tend to vary from Sunday to Sunday. We generally have Communion on the first Sunday of the month. Q. I’m not a Methodist – can I take part in Communion at your church? A. You need not be a member of Faith or of the United Methodist Church to receive Communion – all are welcome at Christ’s table. Q. Do I have to dress up for church? A. Some people come in suits; some people wear jeans and a t-shirt. Wear what’s comfortable for you. Q. How will I get to meet people? A. When you enter the church, mention to one of our greeters that you’re new to the church and would like to meet some members. The greeter will introduce you to some of the people in the church, and they can introduce you to others. Let them know if you would like to be introduced during the service itself. If you wish, first-time visitors can fill out a card and place it in the offering plate, and a member will follow up with a phone call or visit. Q. Do I have to sit up front? A. On some Sundays our worship center does fill up, but our ushers can always help you find a place where you would like to sit. Q. We’ve got young children – do you have a nursery? A. When you enter the church from our parking lot, you’ll go up a short flight of stairs. The nursery will be on your left, with the worship center to your right, so it is easily accessible from the worship center. Q. I use a wheelchair – is your church accessible? A. An elevator makes all levels of the church fully accessible. We also have several parking places close to the church entrance that are designated for handicapped parking. Q. How can I meet your minister? A. After the service, the Rev. Diane Christianson, along with others who led the service, will greet members and friends as they leave the worship center. Feel free to shake her hand and tell her that you’re a visitor. Q. If I start attending Faith, do I need to become a member? A. We’d love to have you become a member, but you are always welcome as a friend whether or not you join the church. Q. How can I get more involved? A. Music and missions are a big part of our church, and that’s where many people find opportunities to get involved. Check out our Music and Missions pages for more information. Q. Why do Methodists always sing every verse of every song? A. Well, we don’t always do it – but at Faith Church, we enjoy singing! Want to know more about Faith United Methodist Church? Check out the links below. Our church staff Our church newsletter (Call of Faith) News at Faith Special sermon series: Following the journeys of Paul Rev. Diane Christianson and four other members of Faith UMC took part in a tour this fall that followed in the footsteps of Paul as he traveled in Turkey and Greece in the early years of Christianity. Now, during January and February, Pastor Diane will share “Highlights of Paul’s Missionary Journeys” as a special sermon series. A contemplative worship experience on Wednesday evenings The contemplative worship service begins at 6:30 p.m.; it is preceded by a meal at 5:30 p.m. Faith's solar panels are operational For Faith UMC, the long awaited time has come. Our solar panels are now installed and operational. Minnesota Methodist Sunday Faith UMC celebrated Minnesota Methodist Sunday on September 22. © Copyright 2013-2019 - Faith United Methodist Church, St. Anthony, MN 2708 33rd Avenue North East Saint Anthony, Minnesota 55418 Email: faith@faithumchurch.com	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line760
__label__wiki	0.681157	0.681157	Peter V. Brett contest winner! Publié par Patrick on Tuesday, March 31, 2015 Since the book comes out today, here's the lucky bastard who will get his hands on my Advance Reading Copy of Peter V. Brett's The Skull Throne! For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. - Joel Miller, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA Many thanks to all the participants! Extract from Ken Liu's THE GRACE OF KINGS Here's an extract from Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings, first volume in the Dandelion Dynasty series, for you to sample, compliments of the folks at Saga Press. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. Two men rebel together against tyranny—and then become rivals—in this first sweeping book of an epic fantasy series from Ken Liu, recipient of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Wily, charming Kuni Garu, a bandit, and stern, fearless Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke, seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, the two quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures fighting against vast conscripted armies, silk-draped airships, and shapeshifting gods. Once the emperor has been overthrown, however, they each find themselves the leader of separate factions—two sides with very different ideas about how the world should be run and the meaning of justice. Fans of intrigue, intimate plots, and action will find a new series to embrace in the Dandelion Dynasty. MATA ZYNDU FARUN, IN THE TUNOA ISLANDS: THE NINTH MONTH IN THE FOURTEENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN Few would have guessed that the man towering above the noisy crowd at the edge of the town square of Farun was only a boy of fourteen. The jostling townspeople kept a respectful distance from Mata Zyndu’s seven-and-a-half-foot frame, rippling with muscle everywhere. “They’re afraid of you,” Phin Zyndu, the boy’s uncle, said with pride in his voice. He looked up into Mata’s face and sighed. “I wish your father and grandfather could see you today.” The boy nodded but said nothing, looking over the bobbing heads of the crowd like a crane among sandpipers. Unlike the brown eyes most common in Cocru, Mata’s eyes were coal-black, but each held two pupils that glowed with a faint light, a rare condition that many had believed was mythical. Those double-pupiled eyes allowed him to see more sharply and farther than most people, and as he scanned the horizon, he lingered on the slender, dark tower of stone to the north, just outside of town. It stood next to the sea like a dagger stuck into the rocky beach. Mata could just make out the great arched windows near the top of the tower, whose frames were intricately decorated with carvings of the Two Ravens, black and white, their beaks meeting at the apex of the arch to hold up a stone chrysanthemum with a thousand petals. That was the main tower of the ancestral castle of the Zyndu Clan. These days it belonged to Datun Zatoma, commander of the Xana garrison guarding Farun. Mata Zyndu hated to think about that commoner, not even a warrior but a mere scribe, squatting in the ancient, storied halls that rightfully belonged to his family. Mata forced himself back into the present. He leaned down to whisper to Phin, “I want to get closer.” The Imperial Procession had just arrived in Tunoa by sea from the southern part of the Big Island, where rumor had it that the emperor had survived an assassination attempt near Zudi. As Mata and Phin made their way forward, the crowd parted effortlessly and silently before Mata like waves before a ship’s prow. They stopped just short of the front row, and Mata hunched down to his uncle’s height to avoid drawing attention from the emperor’s guards. “They’re here!” the crowd shouted as airships burst through the clouds near the horizon and the tip of the Throne Pagoda rose into sight. While the townspeople cheered the beautiful dancers and applauded the daring soldiers, Mata Zyndu had eyes only for Emperor Mapidéré. At long last, he would set his eyes on the face of the enemy. A wall of soldiers now stood in a circle on top of the Pagoda, arrows nocked, swords drawn. The emperor sat in their midst, and the spectators could only catch occasional glimpses of his face. Mata had imagined an old man grown soft and fat from complacency, but instead, through the wall of soldiers, as through a veil, he saw a gaunt figure with hard, expressionless eyes. How alone he is, high above in his peerless splendor. And how afraid. Phin and Mata looked at each other. Each saw in the other’s eyes the same mixture of sorrow and smoldering hatred. Phin didn’t have to speak aloud. Mata had heard from his uncle the same words every day of his life: Do not forget. Back when Emperor Mapidéré was still only the young King of Xana, and when the army of Xana routed the crumbling forces of the Six States across land, sea, and sky, one man had stood in its way: Dazu Zyndu, Duke of Tunoa and Marshal of Cocru. The Zyndus came from a long line of great Cocru generals. But when Dazu was a young man, he was scrawny and sickly. His father and grandfather decided to send him north, far away from the family’s fiefdom in the Tunoa Islands, to be trained under the legendary master swordsman Médo in the misty isles called the Silkworm Eggs, at the other end of Dara. After one look at Dazu, Médo said, “I’m too old and you’re too little. I taught my last student years ago. Leave me in peace.” But Dazu did not leave. He knelt outside Médo’s house for ten days and ten nights, refusing food or drink except rainwater. On the eleventh day, Dazu collapsed to the ground, and Médo was moved by Dazu’s persistence and accepted him as a student. But instead of teaching the young man sword fighting, Médo used Dazu only as a ranch hand to care for his small herd of cattle. Dazu did not complain. In the cold and rocky mountains, the young man followed the herd everywhere, watching for wolves hiding in the mist and huddling for warmth among the lowing cows at night. When a new calf was born in the spring, Médo told Dazu to carry the baby animal back to his house for a weigh-in each day so that the calf’s legs would not be injured by the sharp stones on the ground. This involved walking many miles. At first the trip was easy, but as the calf gained weight, the trip became more difficult. “The calf is capable of walking quite well now,” Dazu said. “He never stumbles.” “But I told you to carry him back here,” the teacher said. “The first thing a soldier must learn is to obey orders.” Every day, the calf grew a little heavier, and every day, Dazu had to struggle a little harder. He would collapse, exhausted, when he finally got to the ranch, and the calf would bound out of his arms, glad to be able to walk on his own and stretch out. When winter rolled around again, Médo handed him a wooden sword and asked him to strike as hard as he could at the practice dummy. Dazu looked with distaste at the crude weapon with no edge, but he swung obediently. The wooden dummy fell in half, cut clean through. He looked at the sword in his hand with wonder. “It’s not the sword,” his teacher said. “Have you looked at yourself lately?” He brought Dazu to stand in front of a brightly polished shield. The young man could hardly recognize the reflection. His shoulders filled the frame of the mirror. His arms and thighs were twice as thick as he remembered, and his chest bulged over his narrow waist. “A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass. “Now you’re finally ready to learn from me. But first, go thank the calf for making you strong.” Clash of Eagles Publié par Patrick on Monday, March 30, 2015 Imagine a world where the Roman Empire never fell, but instead continued to expand. . . Thus began the back cover blurb of the advance reading copy of Alan Smale's Clash of Eagles. I've never been necessarily too keen on alternate history novels, but this one clearly intrigued me. And since I had yet to read any debut this year, I decided to give it a go. I found the premise quite interesting and full of potential. Mixing an ever-expanding Roman Empire that never crumbled with native American lore and traditions made for a promising debut, or so I believed. If the author pulled it off, that is. And for the most part, Smale writes with aplomb and came up with a truly original tale. Perfect for fans of action-adventure and historical fiction—including novels by such authors as Bernard Cornwell, Steve Berry, Naomi Novik, and Harry Turtledove—this stunning work of alternate history imagines a world in which the Roman Empire has not fallen and the North American continent has just been discovered. In the year 1218 AD, transported by Norse longboats, a Roman legion crosses the great ocean, enters an endless wilderness, and faces a cataclysmic clash of worlds, cultures, and warriors. Ever hungry for land and gold, the Emperor has sent Praetor Gaius Marcellinus and the 33rd Roman Legion into the newly discovered lands of North America. Marcellinus and his men expect easy victory over the native inhabitants, but on the shores of a vast river the Legion clashes with a unique civilization armed with weapons and strategies no Roman has ever imagined. Forced to watch his vaunted force massacred by a surprisingly tenacious enemy, Marcellinus is spared by his captors and kept alive for his military knowledge. As he recovers and learns more about these proud people, he can’t help but be drawn into their society, forming an uneasy friendship with the denizens of the city-state of Cahokia. But threats—both Roman and Native—promise to assail his newfound kin, and Marcellinus will struggle to keep the peace while the rest of the continent surges toward certain conflict. The backdrop of this story revolves around the Mississippian native American civilization which once dominated the lands surrounding the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers. I felt that the author did a great job bringing the city of Cahokia to life. Readers gradually discover more about the city and its inhabitants and their culture, the same way Marcellinus, now a stranger in a strange land, learns more about his new environment and its people. Info-dumps are used on occasions and are a necessary evil, as the Roman is the only POV character and the sole purpose of some scenes/discussions is to relay information to the reader. By and large, Smale's depiction of the native Americans' way of life was probably my favorite aspect of Clash of Eagles. The worldbuilding was original and compelling. The author has set the bar rather high in that regard and it will be interesting to see if he can maintain that level of quality and creativity when he depicts other civilizations such as the People of the Hand and the People of the Sun in future installments. Witnessing the utter destruction of his Legion at the hands of what he considered mere savages humbled Praetor Gaius Marcellinus in a profound way. Sole survivor, he is kept alive so he can share his "modern" knowledge with the people of Cahokia. Shunned at first, with only children as companions, he slowly learns their language and after some time he begins to teach his captors a number of innovations. Simultaneously, he realizes the error of having underestimated the native Americans as uncivilized primitives. As time goes by, Marcellinus is astonished by the wonders that are unveiled. More or less a pariah at the beginning, witnessing Marcellinus spending time with the children to make them learn his language and in turn learn to communicate using theirs makes for an engaging read. Tahtay, Enopay, and Kimimela help shape the sort of man Marcellinus will become in order to earn the trust of the Cahokians. Inevitably, there is a Pocahontas feel to the whole tale, what with his interest in Sintikala, but Smale has a number of surprises up his sleeves. Here's to hoping that there will be additional points of view in the upcoming books, as it would be interesting to get the perspective of other people and not just that of Marcellinus. It would have been fascinating to have the POV of a native American, if only to discover how the Roman's ways and strange ideas are truly perceived by his captors. The Cahokians may not be as technically advanced as the Romans in most regards, but the author came up with a number of surprising inventions that helped them crush the Legion, chief among them the Catanwakuna and the Wakinyan. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that it's with his imagination and ingenuity that Alan Smale truly shines. As a matter of course, in a novel whose premise has to do with a Roman Legion being defeated by native American forces, and in which the main protagonist is kept alive so he can teach the Cahokians how to better defend themselves against the Iroqua, exciting battle scenes and action sequences abound. Maybe a bit too much, if you ask me. Oddly enough, I felt that the pace was more fluid during the "slower" portions of the book. The fight scenes sort of got in the way of the storytelling, or so it seemed to me. It remains to be seen if Alan Smale can imbue subsequent volumes with the same kind of originality and inventiveness. But as things stand, Clash of Eagles finds itself in pole position as far as the fantasy debut of the year is concerned. You can now get your hands on Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker for only 2.99$ here. In America's Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota--and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life. . . In this powerful novel, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a thrilling, fast-paced adventure set in a vivid and raw, uncertain future. You can also download the companion book, The Drowned Cities, for the same price here. Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die. In a dark future America where violence, terror, and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man--a bioengineered war beast named Tool--who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible. This thrilling companion to Paolo Bacigalupi's highly acclaimed Ship Breaker is a haunting and powerful story of loyalty, survival, and heart-pounding adventure. Win a copy of David Walton's SUPERPOSITION I have two copies of David Walton's science fiction technothriller Superposition up for grabs, courtesy of the folks at Pyr. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. Jacob Kelley’s family is turned upside down when an old friend turns up, waving a gun and babbling about an alien quantum intelligence. The mystery deepens when the friend is found dead in an underground bunker…apparently murdered the night he appeared at Jacob’s house. Jacob is arrested for the murder and put on trial. As the details of the crime slowly come to light, the weave of reality becomes ever more tangled, twisted by a miraculous new technology and a quantum creature unconstrained by the normal limits of space and matter. With the help of his daughter, Alessandra, Jacob must find the true murderer before the creature destroys his family and everything he loves. The rules are the same as usual. You need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "SUPERPOSITION." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. New Steven Erikson interview The folks at Nerds of a feather just posted a very interesting interview with Steven Erikson. Here's a teaser: Malazan Book of the Fallen is in many ways a tragic tale, but it is punctuated with some of the most outrageously funny comedy scenes we at ‘nerds of a feather’ have read in a long time. We particularly enjoyed the interplay between the destitute Tehol Beddict and his manservant, Bugg. What do you see as the function of comedy in your series? Is it simply the other face of tragedy, something to lighten the heavy, dark, and gritty load, so to speak? Or do you see comedy as a more poignant way of making a statement about the world in which we live? I would think that comedy serves both the function of relieving pressure and providing another, perhaps more subversive, vehicle for social and political commentary. Tehol and Bugg are good examples of that, as they work to dismantle the rapacious economic structure of their native land. But also, it’s worth bearing in mind that humour often serves as a defense mechanism, both from the author’s point of view and also from that of characters who find themselves in extreme or traumatic situations, so it’s always worth it (when writing fiction) to keep that little pocket of irreverence near to hand for every character in a story. They need a break just like we need a break. They need to cut loose on occasion, same as we do. I would think that no matter how dark a story, or how repressive, humour remains a vital release-valve. And besides, sometimes it pays to impose a little perspective from a creative point of view. Follow this link to read the whole thing! This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 23rd) Publié par Patrick on Saturday, March 28, 2015 Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant is down two positions, ending the week at number 5. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. Patricia Briggs’ Dead Heat is down eight spots, finishing the week at number 16. Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances is down five positions, ending the week at number 18. Andy Weir's The Martian is up two positions, ending the week at number 7 (trade paperback). Dean Koontz's The City is down one spot, finishing the week at number 10. George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones returns at number 15. Jim Butcher's Skin Game is down eight spots, finishing the week at number 20. With all the talks about the movie, you can once again download Ernest Cline's bestselling Ready Player One for only 2.99$ here. It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them. For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig. And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle. Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape. At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, Ready Player One is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed. Win a copy of Kate Elliott's THE VERY BEST OF KATE ELLIOTT Publié par Patrick on Wednesday, March 25, 2015 I have a copy of The Very Best of Kate Elliott up for grabs, courtesy of the folks at Tachyon Publications. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. Strong heroines and riveting storytelling are the hallmarks of groundbreaking fantasy author Kate Elliott (Crown of Stars, Crossroads). Her long-awaited first collection showcases twenty years of her finest work. Captured here are many of Elliott’s previously out-of-print tales, four previously unpublished essays, and a brand new Crossroads story, “On the Dying Winds of the Old Year and the Birthing Winds of the New.” Elliott’s bold adventuresses, complex quests, noble sacrifices, and hard-won victories shine in classic, compact legends. In “The Memory of Peace,” a girl’s powerful emotions rouse the magic of a city devastated by war. Meeting in “The Queen’s Garden,” two princesses unite to protect their kingdom from the blind ambition of their corrupted father. While “Riding the Shore of the River of Death” a chieftain’s daughter finds an unlikely ally on her path to self-determination. Elliott’s many readers, as well as fantasy fans in search of powerful stories featuring well-drawn female characters, will revel in this unique gathering of truly memorable tales. The rules are the same as usual. You need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "ELLIOTT." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Don't know for how long, but you can once again download Tom Lloyd's The Stormcaller for only 2.99$ here. Isak is a white-eye, feared and despised in equal measure. Trapped in a life of poverty, hated and abused by his father, Isak dreams of escape, but when his chance comes, it isn't to a place in the army as he'd expected. Instead, the Gods have marked him out as heir-elect to the brooding Lord Bahl, the Lord of the Fahlan. Now is the time for revenge, and the forging of empires. With mounting envy and malice the men who would themselves be kings watch Isak, chosen by Gods as flawed as the humans who serve them, as he is shaped and moulded to fulfil the prophecies that are encircling him like scavenger birds. The various factions jostle for the upper hand, and that means violence, but the Gods have been silent too long and that violence is about to spill over and paint the world the colour of spilled blood and guts and pain and anguish . . . Brian Ruckey is the author of what just might be grimdark's best-kept secret: The Godless World trilogy. Indeed, I'll never understand why Winterbirth (Canada, USA, Europe), Bloodheir (Canada, USA, Europe), and Fall of Thanes (Canada, USA, Europe) don't get more love these days. Fans of GRRM, Abercrombie, Cook, Morgan, Lawrence, and Lynch, this series is definitely for you! Ruckley's latest, The Free, has been on my pile of books to read since last fall, but something always got in the way of my reading it. It was a bit too heavy to bring with me to the Philippines, so I promised myself that it would be the first book I'd review upon my return. The author's previous work, The Edinburgh Dead, was much different from his first series. But this new novel is a return to the sort of stories with which Brian Ruckley originally made a name for himself. The Free is a cross between Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold and Glen Cook's The Black Company. Fans of the grimdark subgenre should appreciate this fine tale of vengeance. THEY ARE THE MOST FEARED MERCENARY COMPANY THE KINGDOM HAS EVER KNOWN. Led by Yulan, their charismatic captain, the Free have spent years selling their martial and magical skills to the highest bidder -- winning countless victories that have shaken the foundations of the world. Now they finally plan to lay down their swords. Yet when Yulan is offered a final contract, he cannot refuse -- for the mission offers him the chance to erase the memories of the Free's darkest hour, which have haunted him for years. As the Free embark on their last mission, a potent mix of loyalty and vengeance is building to a storm. Freedom, it seems, carries a deadly price. The worldbuilding is not that well-defined this time around, and Ruckley keeps his cards close to his chest for the most part. You get just enough information to know what is going on, but the author seldom elaborates on the world and its people. I was a bit disappointed by that fact, as there are some fascinating concepts in this book. Chief among them the Permanences, those dangerous and powerful manifestations of elemental magic with ominous names such as the Bereaved and the Clamour, and anything that has to do with sorcery. The magical system is quite mysterious. Sorcerers are known as Clevers and their talents always focus on one particular element. The author offers very few details regarding how it all works, other than showing us the heavy toll a Clever must pay for each use of their mystical arts. The more powerful the spell, the heavier the toll on their bodies. The Free focuses on the last days of a legendary mercenary company and as such that plotline takes center stage to the detriment of everything else. But the setting appears to be rich enough to warrant a return to this universe for additional tales in the future. The POVs are all over the place, which can be extremely confusing. You jump from one point of view to the next without any break in the text. One sentence you're in someone's head and all of a sudden you find yourself in another's. I have an advance reading copy, so I'm not sure whether or not this was fixed in the final edition. . . The tale is told from the point of view of two very disparate protagonists. Yulan, experienced captain of the Free, is a battle-hardened man and a keen strategist who has the respect of his entire company. Drann, on the other hand, is young and inexperienced and pretty much in over his head from the very beginning when he's ordered to follow the Free as the contract holder. Other than Hamdan, we don't get to know a whole lot about the other mercenaries. Which is a shame, as most were intriguing, especially Akrana. I was expecting more out of the characterization, probably something akin to that of Cook's Black Company or Erikson's Bridgeburners, which would have allowed us to get to know each member of the company a bit more and perhaps be able to relate to them more as individuals. In addition, the "villains" are a bit too black-and-white, which I felt was a case of the author's taking the path of least resistance. This might be a quest for redemption for Yulan, but at heart The Free is a tale of revenge. There is a lot of action, with enough blood and gore to satisfy grimdark aficionados. There is one truly memorable scene, as Kerig, one of the Free's clevers, is tied up to a tree and uses his arcane arts to help protect the others. That was just plain awesome! Such scenes are the reason why I hope we'll get to learn more about this universe and the way magic works in future novels. Holding back on the worldbuilding keeps the pace moving briskly. The Free is a dark and brutal work that grabs hold of you and keeps you turning those pages. It's a fun and fast read, with characters that remain true to themselves. Even better, it's a stand-alone novel! Although it doesn't show the sort of depth that made the Godless World series such a quality read, The Free is nevertheless another solid effort by Brian Ruckley and is the perfect book to read while you wait for the next GRRM, Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, or Scott Lynch titles. You can now download Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for only 2.99$ here. The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men of its population. The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment's calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid's Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best. Brenda Cooper contest winners! Thanks to the generosity of the folks at Pyr, our winners will get their hands on a copy of Brenda Cooper's Edge of Dark. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. - Bill Mulrenin, from Brooklyn, New York, USA - Brian McCullogh, from Kirkland, Québec, Canada - Sharon Berger, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA Publié par Patrick on Sunday, March 22, 2015 You can now get your hands on the digital edition of Glen Cook's The Swordbearer for only 1.99$ here. A young man’s dreams of warfare and glory turn into a bitter nightmare when an invading army, led by the Dark Champion Nevenka Nieroda and his twelve Dead Captains, the Toal, besieges his father’s feudal fortress. Nieroda and the Toal demand the surrender of an ancient artifact long-believed to be a myth. With the walls breached and his family slaughtered—or worse—Gathrid flees into the wilderness beyond his familiar castle walls. Lost and alone in the woods, hounded by the Dead Captains, Gathrid takes refuge in a vast cavern. There he discovers an ancient sword— Daubendiek, the Great Sword of Suchara, the fabled weapon once wielded by the legendary tragic hero of an ancient age, Tureck Aarant. Daubendiek, a restless and thirsty blade, promises Gathrid the ability to claim his vengeance. But as he begins to take that vengeance, Gathrid starts to understand the terrible price that the sword will exact of him. Enemies soon become allies and strange bedfellows abound as the prophesies of an age swirl into chaos. Brandon Sanderson's PERFECT STATE You can now pre-order Brandon Sanderson's new novella, Perfect State, for only 2.99$ here. The novella will be released on March 31st. From the author of Legion and the #1 New York Times bestselling Stormlight Archive comes an action-filled novella about privilege, culture clash, and expectations. God-Emperor Kairominas is lord of all he surveys. He has defeated all foes, has united the entire world beneath his rule, and has mastered the arcane arts. He spends his time sparring with his nemesis, who keeps trying to invade Kai's world. Except for today. Today, Kai has to go on a date. Forces have conspired to require him to meet with his equal—a woman from another world who has achieved just as much as he has. What happens when the most important man in the world is forced to have dinner with the most important woman in the world? You can now download Marcus Sakey's Brilliance for only 1.99$ here. A 2013 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Paperback Original. In Wyoming, a little girl reads people’s darkest secrets by the way they fold their arms. In New York, a man sensing patterns in the stock market racks up $300 billion. In Chicago, a woman can go invisible by being where no one is looking. They’re called “brilliants,” and since 1980, one percent of people have been born this way. Nick Cooper is among them; a federal agent, Cooper has gifts rendering him exceptional at hunting terrorists. His latest target may be the most dangerous man alive, a brilliant drenched in blood and intent on provoking civil war. But to catch him, Cooper will have to violate everything he believes in—and betray his own kind. From Marcus Sakey, “a modern master of suspense” (Chicago Sun-Times) and “one of our best storytellers” (Michael Connelly), comes an adventure that’s at once breakneck thriller and shrewd social commentary; a gripping tale of a world fundamentally different and yet horrifyingly similar to our own, where being born gifted can be a terrible curse. You can also get your hands on the second volume, A Better World, for the same price here. This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 16th) Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant debuts at number 3. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. Patricia Briggs’ Dead Heat debuts at number 8. Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances is down four positions, ending the week at number 13. Kevin Hearne's Star Wars: Heir to the Jedi debuts at number 17. Andy Weir's The Martian is down two positions, ending the week at number 9 (trade paperback). Dean Koontz's The City is up three spots, finishing the week at number 9. Jim Butcher's Skin Game debuts at number 12. Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance debuts at number 18. Publié par Patrick on Thursday, March 19, 2015 You can now download Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven for only 2.99$ here. An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it. You know I'm always on the lookout for some discounted ebook deals to share with you. I recently discovered that all the Breaking Bad boxsets could be bought on the cheap in Canada and I sure did take advantage of that sale! So I checked in the USA to see if Amazon was offering the same sort of deal and I'm pleased to report that you can get your hands on every single season of Breaking Bad for as much as 67% off! - Breaking Bad, Season 1 - Breaking Bad, The Final Season Here's the blurb for the first season: Emmy® Award winner Bryan Cranston stars as Walter White, a down-on-his-luck chemistry teacher struggling to make ends meet for his wife (Anna Gunn) and physically challenged son (RJ Mitte). Everything changes when Walter receives a startling diagnosis: terminal lung cancer. With only a few years to live and nothing to lose, Walter uses his training as a chemist to cook and sell crystal meth with one of his former students (Aaron Paul). As his status grows, so do his lies, but Walt will stop at nothing to make sure his family is taken care of after he’s gone, even if it means putting all their lives on the line. Executive produced by Vince Gilligan and Mark Johnson. Joe Abercrombie content winner! This lucky winner will get his hands on my Advance Reading Copy of Joe Abercrombie's Half the World! For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. - Sean Porter, from Providence, Rhode Island, USA For a limited time, you can get your hands on the digital edition of Robin Hobb's The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince for only 1.99$ here! One of the darkest legends in the Realm of the Elderlings recounts the tale of the so-called Piebald Prince, a Witted pretender to the throne unseated by the actions of brave nobles so that the Farseer line could continue untainted. Now the truth behind the story is revealed through the account of Felicity, a low-born companion of the Princess Caution at Buckkeep. With Felicity by her side, Caution grows into a headstrong Queen-in-Waiting. But when Caution gives birth to a bastard son who shares the piebald markings of his father’s horse, Felicity is the one who raises him. And as the prince comes to power, political intrigue sparks dangerous whispers about the Wit that will change the kingdom forever… Internationally-bestselling, critically-acclaimed author Robin Hobb takes readers deep into the history behind the Farseer series in this exclusive, new novella, “The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince.” In her trademark style, Hobb offers a revealing exploration of a family secret still reverberating generations later when assassin FitzChivalry Farseer comes onto the scene. Fans will not want to miss these tantalizing new insights into a much-beloved world and its unforgettable characters. Win a copy of Alan Smale's CLASH OF EAGLES Thanks to the folks at Del Rey, I have three copies of Alan Smale's Clash of Eagles up for grabs. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. I'm more than halfway through this books and so far it's been an engaging read! The rules are the same as usual. You need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "EAGLES." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. If you have never given this celebrated author a shot, a number of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels can be downloaded for 3.99$ each: - The Color of Magic - Pyramids - The Light Fantastic - Guards! Guards! - Reaper Man - The Last Continent - Mort - Equal Rites - Sourcery - The Fifth Elephant - Night Watch - Going Postal - Making Money - Jingo - Thud! And you can also download Good Omens, which he wrote with Neil Gaiman, for only 4.99$ here. This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 9th) Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances maintains its position at number 9. Andy Weir's The Martian maintains its position at number 7. Dean Koontz's The City debuts at number 12. D.J. Molles’ The Remaining: Allegiance debuts at number 15. George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones is down six spots, finishing the week at number 18. RIP: Terry Pratchett From bbc.com: Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has died aged 66 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. "The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds," said Transworld Publishers' Larry Finlay. Sir Terry, best known for the Discworld series, wrote more than 70 books over his lengthy career. He was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007, but continued writing, completing his final book last summer. The author died at home, surrounded by his family. Mr Finlay said he was "deeply saddened" by the news of Sir Terry's death. "In over 70 books, Terry enriched the planet like few before him. As all who read him know, Discworld was his vehicle to satirize this world: He did so brilliantly, with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention. "Terry faced his Alzheimer's disease (an 'embuggerance', as he called it) publicly and bravely. Over the last few years, it was his writing that sustained him. His legacy will endure for decades to come. "My sympathies go out to Terry's wife Lyn, their daughter Rhianna, to his close friend Rob Wilkins, and to all closest to him." For a limited time, you can once again get your hands on Neal Stephenson's awesome Cryptonomicon for only 1.99$ here. With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy—is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702—commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia—a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity. Male authors on feminism in SFF Just saw this on SFSignal.com: Here's the description: The purpose of a woman” in ’50s science fiction “was to make the man look good,” laments Todd McCaffrey, son, co-author, and biographer to his mother, revered science fiction and fantasy author Anne McCaffrey. He goes on: “And scream when the bug-eyed monsters came in. My mother hated that trope; and she said, you know, ‘If a bug-eyed monster was invading my home, I’d find the nearest frying pan and beat the crap out of him!’” Along with McCaffrey, Science Fiction Grand Master Samuel R. Delany, Joe Haldeman, Simon R. Green, Ian R. MacLeod, and Ian McDonald discuss how women have been portrayed in science fiction, in light of the He for She movement. These men also share their thoughts about their female role models in the genre; groundbreaking female science fiction authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and Andre Norton. “The most important political problem in the modern world is the position of women…” says Samuel R. Delany. “Something has got to be done about it.” Last fall, for some unknown reason, I felt the need to read an "old" Stephen King title. Most of the 2014 SFF releases failed to make a good impression on me and I was looking for something tried, tested and true. Like most genre readers my age, I spent my teenage years reading King's many classics. And yet, somehow I never read the first collaboration between Stephen King and Peter Straub. Hence, The Talisman appeared to be just what the doctor ordered. So I bought the book and put it on the pile and it became part of the rotation. When I received confirmation that I'd be spending the month of February traveling around the Philippines, the novel immediately went into my suitcase. I was wondering if this 30-year-old work had aged well and would "wow" today's readers the way it did when it was originally published in 1984. For this was considered by some critics to be the most extraordinary fantasy novel of our time. The fantasy genre was a much different place back in the early 80s. This was the time of the Tolkien clones, when writers like Terry Brooks and David Eddings dominated the bestseller lists. Only Stephen R. Donaldson and a few other authors wrote "adult" fantasy books, which is probably why The Talisman made such an impression back in the day. In today's market, I'm not sure such a work would meet with the same critical success. Be that as it may, this novel makes for compulsive reading! Other than some musical and cultural references from the 60s, 70s, and early 80s which may not ring any bell with some younger readers, this 921-page doorstopper work has aged particularly well. Many of King's early bestsellers share that special "timelessness" which explains how they can still sell so well decades after being released. King and Straub's The Talisman definitely falls into that category. Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, is about to begin a most fantastic journey, an exalting, terrifying quest for the mystical Talisman—the only thing that can save Jack’s dying mother. But to reach his goal, Jack must make his way not only across the breadth of the United States but also through the wondrous and menacing parallel world of the Territories. In the Territories, Jack finds another realm, where the air is so sweet and clear a man can smell a radish being pulled from the ground a mile away—and a life can be snuffed out instantly in the continuing struggle between good and evil. Here Jack discovers “Twinners,” reflections of the people he knows on earth—most notably Queen Laura, the Twinner of Jack’s own imperiled mother. As Jack “flips” between worlds, making his way westward toward the redemptive Talisman, a sequence of heart-stopping encounters challenges him at every step. An unforgettable epic of adventure and resounding triumph, The Talisman is one of the most influential and highly praised works of fantasy ever written. The tale takes place in our own world and in another dimension known as the Territories. I found it interesting that something occurring in the Territories, even something innocuous, could have grave repercussions in our own universe. Young Jack quickly realizes that he must be extremely careful while he travels through the Territories. Though I enjoyed how the Territories were depicted, I would have liked the authors to be more forthcoming with their revelations regarding this parallel universe and how it works. More information regarding how and why some people can travel between both dimensions would also have been appreciated. I reckon readers get to learn more in the sequel, Black House, but it would have been nice to see them elaborate a bit more on the various fascinating concepts and ideas inherent to the Territories. Understandably, the principal POV character is 12-year-old Jack Sawyer, who must journey to the Territories to find the only thing that can help save his dying mother, and by doing so save the parallel universe as well. I found young Jack to be a well-drawn and genuine protagonist. Morgan Sloat, on the other hand, was too "evil" and just a generic bad guy. The occasional points of view of Lily, Jack's mother, and Richard, his best friend, allow readers to see events unfold through the eyes of other people. And the supporting cast is made up of a few memorable characters, chief among them Wolf, Speedy Parker, and Sunlight Gardener. The size of this book had me concerned about pacing issues. I was afraid that the pace would drag in certain portions of the story. But in the end, the rhythm remains more or less fluid throughout the novel. Sure, there are parts in which everything slows down a bit. And yet, the tale picks up soon afterward, so that's never a problem. Stephen King and Peter Straub's collaboration captures your imagination early on and refuses to let go. Hence, though The Talisman weighs in at more than 900 pages, I found myself going through it much more rapidly than I ever thought I would. Following Jack's quest for the Talisman is one grand adventure that keeps you turning those pages, over and over again! There was no clash of writing styles that I could perceive as I read the book. Though it was written by two successful writers that were at the time at the top of their game, the prose flows well and there is no sign that this work was produced by two men with different narrative voices. If you are looking for a big, sprawling fantasy novel that pretty much delivers on all fronts, The Talisman is definitely for you! Win a copy of Sebastien de Castell's KNIGHT'S SHADOW I have two copies of Sebastien de Castell's Knight's Shadow for you to win, compliments of the folks at Jo Fletcher Books. For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. Falcio Val Mond, First Cantor, with the help of fellow Greatcoats Kest and Brasti, has completed his King’s final task: he has found his Charoites - well, one at least, and she was not quite what they expected. Now they must protect the girl from the many who would see her dead, and place her on the throne of a lawless kingdom. That would be simple enough, if it weren’t for the Daishini, an equally legendary band of assassins, getting in their way, not to forget the Dukes who are determined to hold on to their fractured Kingdoms, or the fact that the heir to the throne is only thirteen years old. Oh, and the poison that is slowly killing Falcio. That’s not even mentioning the Greatcoat’s Lament . . . Perfect for fans of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawerence this epic fantasy series of sword fights, intrigue, heroes and traitors is the follow up to the most biggest debut fantasy novel of 2014. The rules are the same as usual. You need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "KNIGHT." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. Brandon Sanderson's novella Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell is now available as an ebook for 2.99$ here. Originally appearing in the Dangerous Women anthology and now available as a solo ebook, Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell is a chilling novella of the Cosmere, the universe shared by Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series and the #1 New York Times bestselling Stormlight Archive. When the familiar and seemingly safe turns lethal, therein danger lies. Amid a forest where the shades of the dead linger all around, every homesteader knows to follow the Simple Rules: "Don't kindle flame, don't shed the blood of another, don't run at night. These things draw shades." Silence Montane has broken all three rules on more than one occasion. And to protect her family from a murderous gang with high bounties on their heads, Silence will break every rule again, at the risk of becoming a shade herself. God knows I'm not a Taylor Swift fan. But I love the 80s vibe of this tune's beat. . . If you have always wanted to give Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels a shot, right now you can download The Skies of Pern for only 1.99$ here. Thanks to Anne McCaffrey, millions of readers have soared the skies on dragonback, shared the thoughts and dreams of the great dragons of Pern, and risked life and limb to safeguard the planet from the deadly threat of falling Thread. With the Dragonriders of Pern, McCaffrey has given us more than just an extraordinary masterwork of imagination. She has given us a whole world--and has taught us to fly. Now, in this triumphant return to Pern, Anne McCaffrey takes us on an adventure as surprising and unforgettable as any that has come before . . . It is a time of hope and regret, of endings and beginnings. The Red Star, that celestial curse whose eccentric orbit was responsible for Thread, has been shifted to a harmless orbit, and the current Threadfall will be the last. Technological marvels are changing the face of life on Pern. And the dragonriders, led by F'lessan, son of F'lar and Lessa and rider of bronze Golanth, and Tia, rider of green Zaranth, must forge a new place for themselves in a world that may no longer need them. But change is not easy for everyone. There are those who will stop at nothing-- not even violence--to keep Pern and its people pure. And now a brand-new danger looms from the skies . . . and threatens a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Once again, the world looks to the dragons and their riders to solve the crisis and save the world. But now, as the friendship of F'lessan and Tia begins to bloom into something more, unforeseen tragedy strikes: a tragedy destined to forever change the future--not just of the two young lovers, but of every human and dragon on Pern . . . Win an Advance Reading Copy of Peter V. Brett's THE SKULL THRONE Since I won't get to read it before pub date, I'm giving away my Advance Reading Copy of Peter V. Brett's The Skull Throne to one lucky winner! For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe. The first three novels in New York Times bestselling author Peter V. Brett’s groundbreaking Demon Cycle series—The Warded Man, The Desert Spear, and The Daylight War—set a new standard for heroic fantasy. The powerful saga of humans winnowed to the brink of extinction by night-stalking demons, and the survivors who fight back, has kept readers breathless as they eagerly turned the pages. Now the thrilling fourth volume, The Skull Throne, raises the stakes as it carries the action in shocking new directions. The Skull Throne of Krasia stands empty. Built from the skulls of fallen generals and demon princes, it is a seat of honor and ancient, powerful magic, keeping the demon corelings at bay. From atop the throne, Ahmann Jardir was meant to conquer the known world, forging its isolated peoples into a unified army to rise up and end the demon war once and for all. But Arlen Bales, the Warded Man, stood against this course, challenging Jardir to a duel he could not in honor refuse. Rather than risk defeat, Arlen cast them both from a precipice, leaving the world without a savior, and opening a struggle for succession that threatens to tear the Free Cities of Thesa apart. In the south, Inevera, Jardir’s first wife, must find a way to keep their sons from killing one another and plunging their people into civil war as they strive for glory enough to make a claim on the throne. In the north, Leesha Paper and Rojer Inn struggle to forge an alliance between the duchies of Angiers and Miln against the Krasians before it is too late. Caught in the crossfire is the duchy of Lakton—rich and unprotected, ripe for conquest. All the while, the corelings have been growing stronger, and without Arlen and Jardir there may be none strong enough to stop them. Only Renna Bales may know more about the fate of the missing men, but she, too, has disappeared. . . The rules are the same as usual. You need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "SKULL." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy. This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 2nd) Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances is down three spots, finishing the week at number 9. Dean Koontz’s Saint Odd is down four positions, ending the week at number 17. Andy Weir's The Martian is up one spot, finishing the week at number 7. George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones maintains its position at number 12. Stephen King's Mr. Mercedes is down one spot, finishing the week at number 19 (trade paperback). You can now download Jim C. Hines Libriomancer for only 1.99$ here. Isaac Vainio is a Libriomancer, a member of the secret organization founded five centuries ago by Johannes Gutenberg. Libriomancers are gifted with the ability to magically reach into books and draw forth objects. When Isaac is attacked by vampires that leaked from the pages of books into our world, he barely manages to escape. To his horror he discovers that vampires have been attacking other magic-users as well, and Gutenberg has been kidnapped. With the help of a motorcycle-riding dryad who packs a pair of oak cudgels, Isaac finds himself hunting the unknown dark power that has been manipulating humans and vampires alike. And his search will uncover dangerous secrets about Libriomancy, Gutenberg, and the history of magic. . . Publié par Patrick on Friday, March 06, 2015 You can get your hands on the digital edition of Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Century for only 1.99$ here. Inspector Vissarion Lom has been summoned to the capital in order to catch a terrorist --- and ordered to report directly to the head of the secret police. A totalitarian state, worn down by an endless war, must be seen to crush home-grown terrorism with an iron fist. But Lom discovers Mirgorod to be more corrupted than he imagined: a murky world of secret police and revolutionaries, cabaret clubs and doomed artists. Lom has been chosen because he is an outsider, not involved in the struggle for power within the party. And because of the sliver of angel stone implanted in his head. This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 23rd... Win a copy of Kate Elliott's THE VERY BEST OF KATE... This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 16th... This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 9th)... Win a copy of Sebastien de Castell's KNIGHT'S SHAD... Win an Advance Reading Copy of Peter V. Brett's TH... This week's New York Times Bestsellers (March 2nd)... S. G. Redling contest winners! Wild Cards: ACES ABROAD contest winners! Cover Reveal: THE THORN OF EMBERLAIN by Scott Lync... Extract from Alan Smale's CLASH OF EAGLES Extract from Kazuo Ishiguro's THE BURIED GIANT	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line761
__label__wiki	0.971717	0.971717	Emergency alerts delivered intelligently By Dibya Sarkar Emergency responders and public health officials in southwest Pennsylvania have dealt with their share of catastrophes and crises in recent years. On Sept. 11, 2001, the region's first responders raced to a field in Somerset County, where United Airlines Flight 93, one of four airplanes hijacked by terrorists that day, crashed. A year later, emergency workers rescued nine coal miners trapped 240 feet below the surface in Quecreek Mine. And last fall, they dealt with one of the state's worst hepatitis A outbreaks, which originated in Beaver County and resulted in 15,000 inoculations. Formed in 1998, the Pennsylvania Southwest Emergency Response Group — also known as Region 13 — is recognized as having one of the nation's best cross-jurisdictional emergency response arrangements. The region, with a population of 1.3 million, comprises 13 counties and the city of Pittsburgh. Despite the maturity of the counties' mutual aid relationships, there are still challenges, said Robert Full, chief of emergency services for Allegheny County. He said first responders needed an interoperable communications tool that would reliably contact and better deploy them in emergencies, provide intelligence so they're more prepared when entering a situation and disseminate better information to the public or specific groups, such as school districts. Full, who heads Region 13's Anti-Terrorism Task Force, said the group's technical committee evaluated several emergency management products and chose Pittsburgh-based Evoxis Inc.'s Prodigent for Emergency Management, which it successfully tested in mid-March. Prodigent is an intelligent, multichannel, scalable notification system that immediately tracks down first responders in the event of an emergency and delivers real-time information, Evoxis officials said. The current model for sending emergency messages is a one-to-many format, in which a basic message is sent to everyone responding to an event, said Mohan Ramani, co-founder and chief executive officer of the 3-year-old company. However, with Prodigent, users can tailor messages, which are constantly updated as an event progresses, for each emergency, whether it's a tornado, hazardous-material spill or bomb threat. Providing more relevant, updated information helps emergency workers understand a situation they're entering. The system also serves as an emergency management center that tracks such information as who is responding, their arrival time and where they're being deployed. "If you have highly skilled people, the better information you can get to them, the better off they'll be," Ramani said. Officials refer to the core technology as Silly Putty, meaning it is so flexible it can be molded to an organization's or area's particular needs. The software operates across a variety of platforms and integrates with any personnel system. Menu-driven, it can be hosted at Evoxis data centers, at centers run by managed service providers or configured for a client's site. When an event occurs, the system, which can create a distribution list dynamically, automatically sends customized messages to first responders' listed communication devices. The system might first call a responder's home phone if that's normally where the individual is after work hours. If it gets an answering machine — the system can distinguish a human voice from voice mail — Prodigent might then contact the responder's wireless phone, pager or e-mail, depending on the person's contact profile. The system also can contact all the various messaging devices at the same time. When a message is delivered, a responder calls a telephone number, authenticates his or her identity and listens to an interactive, customized message that can be up to two minutes long. Full said the system can notify off-duty personnel and alert hospital personnel of arriving casualties requiring a certain type of treatment. Emergency messages can say, for example, " 'If you're able to respond to this emergency, press 1, or if you can't respond, press 2,' " he said. " 'Now enter in military time how many minutes it will take you to arrive on a scene.' " The software's price depends on customer requirements but generally ranges from $35,000 for a small solution hosted on-site at customer facilities to $700,000 for a large, multiyear solution hosted by Evoxis. The number of users is unlimited. Region 13 is implementing the system in phases at an initial cost of $500,000 through a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant. Full said officials from other jurisdictions and the Homeland Security Department have inquired about the system but added that the county wouldn't have been able to buy it if it weren't for the approval of the three dozen county commissioners. "The strength of the organization is the sum of its parts," he said. Although she has not yet seen a demonstration of the product, Jocelyn Young, public-sector research director at the analyst firm Datamonitor, said such solutions are compelling when they are equally useful for daily operations in addition to during large-scale emergencies. However, a challenge for Evoxis officials will be getting the message to fragmented state and local agencies that are struggling for funds for new technologies, she said.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line763
__label__wiki	0.711085	0.711085	7 shootings in less than 12 hours during violent night in Indianapolis Posted 5:24 AM, July 11, 2018, by FOX59 Web, Updated at 03:08PM, July 11, 2018 View Gallery (11 images) Inline INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – Multiple investigations are underway following a violent night and morning in Indianapolis. Police say seven people were shot in different locations, all within a matter of hours, and two of those people are dead. The most recent shooting occurred around 3:30 a.m. A person walked into Eskenazi Hospital with a gunshot wound, but it’s unclear at this time how that person was shot. Just before that around 2:30 a.m. a person was shot on the near northwest side at the intersection of North Harding Street and Burdsal Parkway. Police say two men were arguing – one man was in a car, the other was on foot. “The male in the vehicle drove on south around the block, came up again to continue the argument, and ended up shooting the victim one time in the upper torso,” said IMPD Captain Robert Troutt. The suspect drove off after the shooting, and the victim, 25-year-old Sean Hamilton, was taken to Eskenazi Hospital, where police say he died from his injuries. Homicide detectives are investigating. Also this morning, two people were shot on Bavarion West Drive on the far east side shortly after 1 a.m. One person was shot in the leg, and the other was shot in the arm. Around the same time, a man was shot on Jefferson Avenue on the near east side. Police say that man was hit in the back and behind. He told police he was in the house, heard gunshots, then realized he’d been shot. He was taken to Eskenazi in stable condition. A fatal shooting occurred Tuesday night on the near north side. Police were called to the 400 block of East 38th Street, near Meridian Street, shortly after 6 p.m. When officers arrived, they found a man who had been shot, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. The victim was identified as Michael Brown, 59. A man was arrested in that case but later found not guilty. Another man was shot Tuesday evening around 6:30 p.m. on the west side in the 1300 block of South Lynhurst Drive near Washington Street. It is unknown at this time how seriously that person was injured. If you have any information on any of these shootings, police ask that you call Crime Stoppers at 317-262-TIPS (8477). Man injured after downtown Indianapolis bar fight ends in shooting Off-duty officer shoots suspect who wounded victim during robbery Man shot in car on near east side of Indianapolis Man badly wounded in Indianapolis police shooting Woman shot while driving on I-70; state police investigate Alleged accidental shooting by sibling leaves teen in hospital Homicide investigation underway after woman found dead on Indy’s near northwest side 3 killed, 1 injured in span of 9 hours during violent Sunday in Indianapolis IMPD investigate 2 people shot on Indy southwest side Court docs: Man charged after firing shots at Uber driver’s car to ‘intimidate’ passengers 1 critically injured after shooting on Indy’s northeast side 2 people injured after shooting on Indy’s east side Pregnant woman shot on east side of Indianapolis	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line770
__label__wiki	0.752582	0.752582	City of Bostwick City of Bostwick News 97 businesses in Morgan County had between five and nine employees in 2016 By Local Labs News Service \| Jan 13, 2020 There were 97 businesses with addresses in Morgan County zip codes that had between five and nine employees in 2016, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. 261 businesses in Morgan County had fewer than five employees in 2016 There were 261 businesses with addresses in Morgan County zip codes that had fewer than five employees in 2016, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. 10 businesses in Morgan County had between 100 and 249 employees in 2016 There were 10 businesses with addresses in Morgan County zip codes that had between 100 and 249 employees in 2016, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. 11 businesses in Morgan County had between 50 and 99 employees in 2016 There were 11 businesses with addresses in Morgan County zip codes that had between 50 and 99 employees in 2016, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. Two businesses in Morgan County had between 250 and 499 employees in 2016 There were two businesses with addresses in Morgan County zip codes that had between 250 and 499 employees in 2016, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. Median business size in Morgan County in 2016: less than 5 employees Median-sized businesses in Morgan County zip codes in 2016 have less than five employees, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. Total OASDI widow and parent beneficiaries in Georgia ZIP 30623 stay unchanged in 2018 There were 5 total OASDI widow and parent beneficiaries in Georgia zip code 30623 in 2018, the same number as in 2017, according to the official Social Security Administration website. Total OASDI retired beneficiaries in Georgia zip 30623 increases in 2018 There were 90 total OASDI retired beneficiaries in Georgia zip code 30623 in 2018, a 5.9 percent increase over 2017, which had only 85 total retired beneficiaries, according to the official Social Security Administration website. Census Bureau reports Bostwick population was 348 in 2017 By Local Labs News Service \| Nov 29, 2019 Bostwick, Georgia had a population of 348 people in 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau data obtained by the Georgia Business Daily. Total OASDI disabled beneficiaries in Georgia zip 30623 remains the same in 2018 There were 10 total OASDI disabled beneficiaries in Georgia zip code 30623 in 2018, which is unchanged from 2017, according to the official Social Security Administration website. 13.5% of households in Bostwick received food stamps in 2017 Bostwick ranked 439th in Georgia for the percentage of households receiving food stamps in 2017, according to data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau in August. 34.1% unemployed in Bostwick in 2017 By Local Labs News Service \| Oct 21, 2019 34.1 percent of Bostwick residents between 16 and 65 years old were unemployed in 2017, according to data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau. Census Bureau: More men than women in Bostwick in 2017 By Local Labs News Service \| Oct 9, 2019 Of the 348 people living in Bostwick in 2017, 42.2 percent (147) were women and 57.8 percent (201) were men, according to U.S. Census Bureau data obtained by the Georgia Business Daily Two businesses in 30623 had fewer than five employees in 2016 There were two businesses in Georgia zip code 30623 that had fewer than five employees in 2016, according to County Business Patterns (CBP) statistics provided by the United States Census Bureau. Census Bureau: Bostwick, Georgia saw more residents between ages 55 and 64 in 2017 Of the 348 people residing in Bostwick, Georgia in 2017, the median age was 39, according to U.S. Census Bureau data obtained by the Georgia Business Daily. Census Bureau: 72.13% of people in Bostwick were old enough to vote in 2017 Of the 348 citizens living in Bostwick in 2017, 251 were old enough to vote as of Aug. 2, according to U.S. Census Bureau data obtained by the Georgia Business Daily. Census Bureau: 1.1% of people in Bostwick identified as multi-racial in 2017 Of the 348 citizens living in Bostwick in 2017, 98.9% said they were only one race while 1.1% said they were two or more races, according to U.S. Census Bureau data obtained on Aug. 2 by the Georgia Business Daily. Bostwick ranked 97th in state for resident earnings in 2017 Bostwick ranked 97th among cities in Georgia by annual earnings per resident, according to data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau in August.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line771
__label__wiki	0.777376	0.777376	H.E. Mrs. Yldiz Pollack-Beigle, Minister for Foreign Affairs YLDIZ POLLACK-BEIGLE, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Suriname, said a rules‑based world order with the United Nations at its centre is needed to address global concerns. Noting that the mitigation of climate change requires the mobilization of funds, she pointed out that Suriname is among the most threatened countries that are directly impacted by the rise of sea levels. Approximately 80 per cent of its population resides in the coastal area, where its main productive activities are also concentrated. The forces of nature which recently struck again in the Caribbean and elsewhere are evidence the international community must move beyond the rhetoric and take immediate action. As a commodity‑based export economy, Suriname is facing economic challenges, she noted. The downturn in gold and oil prices three years ago and the closure of the century‑old bauxite operations in 2016 have caused the economy to contract. The Government lost a third of its fiscal revenue. It put in place significant reforms that have borne fruit, but the country still faces obstacles that are unjustifiable, notably its classification as a middle‑income country. This classification based on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita does not reflect her country’s vulnerabilities. “We strongly reject this unrealistic classification which disregards the full set of challenges that we face,” she stated. Underlining that access to concessional financing is critical, she said an atmosphere of trust and political will is crucial to address all matters of concern through dialogue. Suriname contributes significantly to the mitigation of the effects of climate change through its high forest cover and low deforestation rate, she pointed out. Yet, global commitments based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities have yet to be materialized. What is more, Suriname does not fully benefit from global arrangements associated with sound forest management even though it stores 18 per cent of tropical forest carbon. In that context, her country will host a high‑level conference on climate finance mobilization in February 2019, aiming to initiate and implement new models of eco‑sustainability to improve the quality of life for all. Due to its open borders, Suriname is strengthening its cooperation with adjacent and other countries to effectively combat transnational organized crime and its consequences, she continued. International cooperation has been solicited to protect her country’s unique biodiversity that is threatened by poaching and the illegal trade in endangered species. Regarding trade, she said it is reprehensible that economically powerful countries resort to unilateral sanctions when they encounter ideological, political or trade differences, and voiced disapproval for the continuation of the financial and commercial embargo against Cuba and its people. Reaffirming that multilateralism remains essential, she stressed the need to make the United Nations more relevant by making it more democratic, transparent and accountable. H.E. Ms. Yldiz Pollack-Beighle H.E. Ms. Niermala Badrising H.E. Mrs. Niermala Badrising H.E. Mr. Winston Lackin H.E. Mr. Winston G. Lackin H.E. Mr. Desiré Delano Bouterse H.E. Mr. Ramdien Sardjoe	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line772
__label__wiki	0.981145	0.981145	Nintendo Download 8-26-2019: holiday indie sale! by: Sean Colleli - posted: 12/29/2019 7:28:00 PM More On: Nintendo Download Nintendo is rounding out 2019 with an indie sale for this week's Nintendo download. You can get up to 40% off on select indie titles, many of which are featured in the 2019 indie retrospective below. Also new on the eShop this week is 2048 CAT, Akuto: Showdown, Pulstario, Roll'd, and a little magic from one of the late great Satoru Iwata's earliest NES games, Arcade Archives VS. Baloon Fight. Switch had a pretty solid 2019 as far as indie releases go but I'm hoping Switch Year 4 really blows us away in 2020. Nintendo Download: Indie Games Sale! REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Nintendo eShop sales: Arcade Archives VS. BALLOON FIGHT will be available on Dec. 27 (Photo: Business Wire) Save on Indies – For a limited time, get up to 40% off select digital indie games in Nintendo eShop. Check out the full list of deals available this week at https://www.nintendo.com/games/sales-and-deals. From heart-warming stories to action-packed adventures, there’s something for everyone this holiday. Click here to check out the best-selling indie games that came out during 2019 on Nintendo Switch. Also new this week in Nintendo eShop on Nintendo Switch: 2048 CAT Akuto: Showdown Arcade Archives VS. BALLOON FIGHT – Available Dec. 27 Demon Pit Gunma’s Ambition -You and me are Gunma- Pulstario Roll’d Roombo: First Blood Sheep Patrol In addition to video games available at retail stores, Nintendo also offers a variety of content that people can download directly to their systems. Nintendo adds new games weekly to Nintendo eShop, which offers a variety of options for the Nintendo Switch console, the Wii U console and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems. Nintendo eShop is a cash-based service that features a wide variety of content, including new and classic games, applications and demos. Users can add money to their account balances by using a credit card or purchasing a Nintendo eShop Card at a retail store and entering the code from the card. All funds from one card must be loaded in Nintendo eShop on Nintendo Switch, Wii U or the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, but can be used in any Nintendo eShop if the systems are linked to a single Nintendo Account. Customers in the U.S. and Canada ages 18 and older can also link a PayPal account to their Nintendo Account to purchase digital games and content for the Nintendo Switch system both on-device and from the Nintendo website. Once the accounts are linked, users may also use PayPal as a payment option when buying digital content for the Wii U or Nintendo 3DS family systems from the Nintendo website. My Nintendo members can earn Gold Points on eligible digital purchases. Already have Gold Points? Redeem them toward your next digital purchase of Nintendo Switch games and DLC on Nintendo eShop, or on discount rewards for select Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software. Visit https://my.nintendo.com/reward_categories for more details. Remember that Nintendo Switch, Wii U, Wii, New Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS XL, Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 2DS XL and Nintendo 2DS feature parental controls that let adults manage some of the content their children can access. Nintendo 3DS players who register a Nintendo Network ID gain access to free-to-start games and free game demos from Nintendo eShop, and also get the latest news and information direct from Nintendo. For more information about this and other features, visit http://www.nintendo.com/switch, http://www.nintendo.com/wiiu or http://www.nintendo.com/3ds.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line774
__label__wiki	0.796434	0.796434	War Without End 9: Clearing Up Before Clearing Out Posted by Jim_and_Gerry in Herbert Hoover, Hiding Sources, Uncategorized, Versailles Peace Treaty One final task was required before these elites could safely move forward. They had to ensure that all the evidence of their complicity in deliberately starting the war in 1914 and prolonging it beyond 1915, was removed. The consequences had been horrendous but the blame had to be diverted elsewhere. The truth had to be buried. This task fell to Herbert Hoover, a trusted placement, who also had a proprietary interest in hiding his own fraudulent involvement in the Commission for Relief in Belgium. (see blogs on Belgian Relief) On the basis that his involvement was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate a great heist of documentary evidence pertaining to the war and its true origins, from countries across Europe and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Had Adams been genuine, or cared about protecting the original sources so precious to academic historians, he would have had no need for confidentiality. Indeed at the start of his secret mission he appeared to recognise that he had been given a wonderful opportunity to capture a unique experience for future researchers. Adams resolved to keep a diary, detailing the names of those whom he met and what they brought with them, but stopped after a week on the spurious excuse that he was making too many contacts and the work was too interesting ‘to suffer interruption by recording them.’ [1] The task had to be undertaken immediately. Speed was of the essence. Adams was in Paris by 11 June with no plan of action, other than follow Hoover’s instructions that all the stolen or illegally procured documentation was sent to Stanford University in California. It was about as distant a destination from the European theatre as could be imagined. Nothing was too unimportant. Decisions about relevance were left to a later date. Two years later Adams still hadn’t even begun the process of creating a catalogue of the treasures he had syphoned off, on the rather spurious basis that doing so too early led to ‘disappointment and vexation’. [2] In Belgium, for example, access to government records was facilitated by ‘M. Emile Francqui, mining engineer and a banker of world reputation’. [3] Of course it was. Who else knew where all of the skeletons from the Belgian Relief scandal were buried? Francqui, whose all-powerful Belgian bank, the Societe Generale, ended the war cash rich and thriving beyond its dreams, [4] was the one man who knew exactly what evidence had to be removed immediately. Why have historians and investigative journalists failed to unmask this charade? Hoover and Francqui orchestrated the removal of documents that enabled the myth of Belgian Relief to flourish while masking its sinister role. Hoover had many powerful friends. He persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his ‘humanitarian’ relief agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest. They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium. They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [5] He recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [6] Hoover donated a $50,000 ‘gift’ for the task. That would only have paid for around seventy of these agents for a year. It has not proved possible for us to discover from what source the remaining nine-hundred men were paid. Hoover’s backers claimed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’. According to Ephraim Adams, Hoover himself estimated that the process of ‘collecting’ would go on for twenty-five years [7] but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue the material. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace’. [8] How convenient. The official propaganda insisted that the work was urgent, but it would take a millennium to catalogue. The secret removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem for the Secret Elite, and, once the Bolsheviks had taken control, access to Russian documents proved straightforward. Professor Miliukov, foreign minister in the old Kerensky regime, informed Hoover that some of the czarist archives from the origins of the war had been concealed in a barn in Finland. Hoover later boasted that ‘Getting them was no trouble at all. We were feeding Finland at the time.’ [9] The Secret Elite thus took possession of a mass of evidence from the old czarist regime that undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on Sarajevo and Russia’s secret mobilisation. Likewise, damning correspondence between the Russian foreign ministry and its representatives in Paris and Belgrade has been ‘lost’ to posterity. All Russian diplomatic papers from 1914 were removed from their archives by an unknown person. These were documents of momentous importance that would have proved that Germany had not caused the First World War. It might at first appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove 25 carloads of material from Petrograd. [10] According to the New York Times, Hoover’s team bought the Bolshevik documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash, [11] but there were darker forces at play. As we have previously documented, the Bolshevik leaders were beholden to American bankers closely linked to the Secret Elite and were in the process of selling off the best of Russian resources to them. The removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’, a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’, [12] but the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s people also acquired 6,000 volumes of court documents covering the complete official and secret proceedings of the Kaiser’s preparations for war should France and Russia mobilise against her. Where then is the vital evidence to prove Germany’s guilt? Had there been proof it would have been released immediately. There was none. By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ was so packed with documentary material that it was legitimately described as the largest in the world dealing with the First World War. [13] In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authorisation and a key to the padlock were allowed access. In 1941, 22 years after Hoover began the task of secreting away the real history of the First World War, selected documents were made available to the public. What was withheld from view or destroyed will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed, it is a startling fact that few if any war historians have ever written about this illicit theft of European documents relating to arguably the most crucially important event in European and world history, and their concealment in California. Why? They were stealing history to protect themselves. In a sense this whole protracted world war, justified by lies, prolonged by profiteers and politicians with hidden agendas, subjected to false histories, suffered by nations in debt and by ordinary people through irreparable loss, did not end. All of the consequences of war were sucked into the vortex of a grossly unfair peace. Furthermore, the ‘hidden powers’, the ‘money-power’, ‘the power behind the curtain’ who had ordained the war were more secure in their control of the developed world by the end of 1919. Versailles did not mark the end. It provided a forum for the new elite to regroup and draw breath. Worse was to come. 1. Ephraim Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California; a report and an analysis, (1921), p. 7. https://archive.org/details/cu31924031034360. 3. Adams, The Hoover War Collection , (1921), p. 36. 4. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/generale-bank-générale-de-banque-history/ 5. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/%5D 6. New York Times, 5 February 1921. 7. Adams, The Hoover War Collection, p. 5. 8. Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041. 9. Chambers, Hoover Library at http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/ 11. New York Times, 5 February 1921. 12. Chambers, Hoover Library, as above.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line776
__label__wiki	0.625392	0.625392	Category Archives: Kaiser Wilhelm II Posted by Jim_and_Gerry in Belgian Relief, Carroll Quigley, Gallipoli, Georges Clemenceau, Herbert Hoover, Kaiser Wilhelm II, President Woodrow Wilson, Secret Elite, Wall Street, Zionism, Zionism This is the second blog about the recently published Prolonging The Agony. In a single volume, the real History of how the First World War was deliberately prolonged to the benefit of the charlatans, profiteers, and the Secret Elite can be fully understood. It is impossible to pick any single scandal above the others, but one which has been studiously ignored by the history boys is the Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium. This one time American mining engineer and future President of the United States, previously criticised for rampant dishonesty by the courts in London, was chosen by the Secret Elite to head an international fraud which was paid for by the Allies and underwritten by the U.S.government. It claimed to provide food for the exclusive use of the population of Belgium and Northern France which were occupied by the German army. What we have uncovered is an enormous double-deal whereby not only did food go to Belgium, food that was often sold for profit, but supplies also went to Germany directly down the River Rhine. We know that Edith Cavell saw what was happening. As an avid letter writer whose letters were printed in the Times, she threatened to expose the scandal. This is a story of money, bankers and producers colluding to reap millions from the desperation of a hungry Europe, and in so doing prolonged the bloody war. Yet another scandal was the complete farce of the Gallipoli campaign. Because the Russians had suffered such vast losses on the Eastern Front, the Czar demanded evidence that war was worthwhile. The promise of Constantinople was the prize which animated him most, and the Gallipoli campaign was concocted by the Secret Elite to make it appear that a serious effort was underway to attack Turkey and win Constantinople for Russia. It was set up to fail. You may think this impossible, but Prolonging the Agony provides detailed evidence that the campaign was an orchestrated farce from start to finish. But it convinced the Russians and kept them in the war. The Secret Elite had no intention of ever giving the strategically vital port of Constantinople to Russia. Ever. The story and the needless sacrifice is a disgrace. Indeed Gallipoli was an outrageous and deliberate failure, but it prolonged the war, as was required. Your reaction to this statement may well be……it can’t be true. Please read the chapters on this crucial event. They will make you uncomfortable. And there could have been peace, several times over. But peace was not on the Secret Elite agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so costly and embarrassing some key players in the British government were willing to talk about peace and discuss what that might mean. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be ditched. Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in France. The unelected European leaders had one common bond. They would fight Germany until she was crushed. Prolonging the Agony details how the secret cabal organised the change of government without a single vote being cast. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics. Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America. The only end they had in mind was Germany destroyed. The entry of America into the war changed everything. The money men were covered by the Federal Reserve System. They could print dollars and finance their war in safety. Loans were guaranteed by governments. The American economy was literally underpinned by the war spending, and all on the back of the ordinary citizens and taxpayers. Millionaires blossomed. Poverty for the many grew. Even the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1916 was tainted by doubt. The manner of his re-election is ignored in mainstream accounts. It all hinged on California and the recount was itself tainted with corruption. We examine the emergence of Zionism as a factor in the political world. From the first years of the twentieth century we have unmasked the close relationship between Zionism and the British and French Rothschilds. The background to the Balfour Declaration shows how far the British cabinet was willing to support the Zionist ambitions for Palestine. This was NOT, as it is portrayed, a simple message from the British Foreign Secretary to the head of the Rothschild family in Britain. It was the product of years of scheming and political pressure that eventually won there backing of the Secret Elite. And prolonging the war here was also important. Before the Zionist claim over Palestine could have any pertinence, they had to buy time to establish institutions and boost investment. The immense duplicity the British government and the connivance of the American administration is explained in full. And it raised serious questions about loyalties. While the Russian Revolution might appear to have little to do with prolonging the war, it did. Did you know that the last foreign politician to meet the Car before he abdicated was Secret Elite leader Alfred Milner? Co-incidence? What transpired between the two? Milner’s behaviour and report when he returned to London was so strange that one has to conclude that he had much to hide.What promises were whispered to Czar Nicolas before he abdicated? Worse was to follow. The raping of Russia by the money-men who financed the Bolsheviks, links Wall Street to the Kremlin… and of course, since Russia had decided to end the war with Germany, the promise of Constantinople was revoked. For ever. How convenient. When Germany surprisingly sought an Armistice to find grounds for Peace in 1918, it was on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The myth history here is deplorable. Historians and journalist continue to this day to claim that the First World War ended on 11 November, 1918. It did not. Germany was undefeated on the field of battle. Beaten but not crushed. In a move which has been airbrushed from official history, the Allies, mainly Britain, continued to apply a full and complete blockade of Germany so that for the next eight months hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of their women and children were starved to death. The rise of Bolshevism in Germany became so dangerous that even war hawks like Lloyd George realised that Germany had to be allowed to survive in a much reduced state. Finally the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, never ratified by the American Congress, were so damaging that the causes of the Second World War were literally sewn into the fabric. Prolonging the Agony is unique. It details the lies and malpractice through which an evil war was prolonged. The old order in Europe was swept aside and it shows how the new order emerged from a joint Anglo-American Establishment. It merged the Secret Elite in Britain with the Morgan-Wall street powers through joint policy making by a self-appointed group of ‘right-thinking’ men. We name them. We also acknowledge the impressive work of Professor Carroll Quigley in initially exposing the machinations of the evil men who aimed to take over the new world order. And then they stole our history. Literally. All of the evidence of the gross malpractice, the profiteering, the lies and the propaganda about the cause of the war and about the running of the war was swept up and taken away from its European roots. All of the pre-war papers and documents which would have shown how far the Kaiser went to try to avoid war, disappeared. The vast quantity of international permits and papers about the running of the American Relief in Belgium, high-jacked. The key Russian diplomatic evidence sold for a pittance was removed to America. Taken under instruction by the organisation set up by Herbert Hoover, it was removed to Stanford University and there what remains of the evidence lies under lock and key. Our history. Our truth. To be fair, our governments also burned, redacted, removed, shredded and otherwise abused the historical fact by destroying evidence of their malpractice and lies. Prolonging the Agony details as much of this destruction of history as we currently know. Breve and persistent journalists continue to push for sight of all documents. Historians do not. You have to give time to this frank exposure. You will have questions to ask. You will be angered at the waste of life and the selfishness of the rich and the powerful dynasties. You will want to ask again and again how they managed to sweep such a litany of wrong-doing under the proverbial carpet. You will be alarmed at the manner in which we have been lied to; at the stolen history; at the way in which you have been misled. After ten years of constant research and inquiry, we still are. Prolonging the Agony puts into your hands the awful truth behind a war which could have been brought to a reasonable conclusion in 1915. The cost in human terms of all that transpired from 1915-1919 is so horrendous, that it has been studiously kept from us. Even 100 years later, the lies persist. Read this book. There is much more to it than has been outlined here. Consider the implications. Be angry. Now available from Trineday Publications in the USA and though Amazon across the world. We are delighted to announce that our German publishers, Kopp Verlag will undertake a translation in German, and our French publishers, Editions Nouvelle Terre, are currently considering a similar decision.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line777
__label__wiki	0.771531	0.771531	Gun Violence Spiked — And Arrests Declined — In Chicago Right After The Laquan McDonald Video Release Apr. 11, 2016 , at 3:53 PM By Rob Arthur and Jeff Asher Filed under Crime Chicago police officers on Dec. 18 watch demonstrators protesting the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. Joshua Lott / Getty Images CHICAGO — The severe spike in gun violence Chicago is experiencing can be dated to the release of the video in the Laquan McDonald case, a FiveThirtyEight analysis of crime data shows. The same analysis shows that the city has seen a significant drop in arrests made for homicides and nonfatal shootings, as well as other crimes, since the video’s release on Nov. 24. This suggests a decline in law enforcement activity that may be contributing to the rise in gun crime. McDonald, a black 17-year-old, was shot 16 times and killed by a white police officer in October 2014, but video of the incident was not made public until a judge ruled that it had to be released more than a year later. Intense protests, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, and calls for the resignation of the police chief and mayor followed. Chicago police officers have said they are confused by public scrutiny in the wake of the video’s release and have pointed to new and burdensome paperwork as discouraging them from making street stops and engaging in other “proactive policing.” Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi acknowledged that officers might have been more uncertain since the release of the video but suggested that the majority of the change was due to the paperwork requirements. Late last month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed a new interim police chief, Eddie Johnson, in the hopes of improving department morale. Johnson faces the prospect of the bloodiest year since at least 2003: Chicago is on pace for roughly 570 homicides and nearly 2,100 nonfatal shooting incidents, numbers that could be even higher if the violence increases with warmer weather. After some cities saw a rise in crime last year, police chiefs and even the head of the FBI suggested that the United States was experiencing a “Ferguson effect”: Police officers sensitive to public scrutiny in the wake of protests over the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were pulling back on police work, the theory went, and emboldened criminals were seizing their chance. The evidence for any such effect nationally was mixed — our colleague Carl Bialik analyzed crime data from 60 major cities in September and found an increase in homicides in some places, but a decrease in others. Chicago had seen a 20 percent increase in homicides from the year before, but, as Carl noted, crime statistics are volatile. The spike in gun violence in Chicago since the end of November, though, is too sharp to be explained by seasonal fluctuations or chance. There have been 175 homicides and approximately 675 nonfatal shooting incidents1 from Dec. 1 through March 31, according to our analysis of city data.2 The 69 percent drop in the nonfatal shooting arrest rate and the 48 percent drop in the homicide arrest rate since the video’s release also cannot be explained by temperature or bad luck. Even though crime statistics can see a good amount of variation from year to year and from month to month, this spike in gun violence is statistically significant, and the falling arrest numbers suggest real changes in the process of policing in Chicago since the video’s release. News coverage of the recent spike in violence has so far focused on the murder count since the beginning of the year. But using Chicago’s open data portal, we were able to pinpoint the start of the increase in gun violence — and the concomitant policing slump — to the wake of the release of the video showing McDonald’s slaying. The increase in gun violence starting in December is especially notable for a time of year when there are typically fewer homicides and nonfatal shootings. After a summer that saw a level of gun violence that was roughly in line with those over the last decade, Chicago has had its worst winter3 for gun violence since 2003. Nonfatal shooting incidents and homicides over this period were up about 73 percent and 48 percent, respectively, from the same period a year ago. Higher temperatures are associated with more violence for a variety of reasons. But although Chicago experienced an unusually warm winter,4 historical data suggests that this would move the rate of violence only slightly. For example, the winter of 2012 was even warmer than this year’s, but we observed no similar spike in gun violence then. And warmer weather would do nothing to explain the drop in arrest rates.5 Data from Chicago’s incident reports shows that arrests for all crimes fell moderately6 each of the last three winters compared with the previous winter, before plummeting 31 percent this season compared with last year. Arrest rates for nonfatal shooting incidents showed the biggest drop. Narcotics arrests were also down, a trend that began earlier in 2015 but accelerated at the beginning of December, about a week after the video’s release. The trend of rising crime and falling arrests has been most dramatic with respect to gun violence. We can see this by looking at how often arrests are made in homicide7 and nonfatal shooting incidents. Chicago police made a relatively steady number of arrests per homicide and nonfatal shooting incident each year from 2001 through 2014. But the ratio of arrests for each fell in the immediate aftermath of the video’s release and then plummeted even further in March. Only seven of more than 500 nonfatal shooting incidents (about 1.4 percent) and 24 of 143 homicides (16.7 percent) in the first three months of 2016 have led to an arrest.8 By comparison, an arrest was made in 16 of 166 nonfatal shooting incidents (9.6 percent) and 7 of 30 homicides (23.3 percent) in October, the month before the video’s release. The average murder clearance rate for large cities is 61 percent, according to the most recent FBI statistics. It’s possible that some of the recent decrease in the arrest rate for homicides and nonfatal shootings is because officers have had less time to investigate the most recent crimes and make arrests. Indeed, examination of older data shows that the arrest rate is depressed in the period closest to the most recent available records. But in Chicago we have still seen a dramatic drop in the arrest rate before the most recent month of data, and it’s implausible that this effect explains the full decline since December. In fact, the change in arrests for gun violence began at least four months ago, around the time the video was released, and arrest rates have continued dropping to a level unseen since at least 2001, the earliest year of available data. Guglielmi, the department spokesman, said in an interview that several measures of policing had risen in March and noted that the pace of the homicide increase had slowed. “Clearances are something we certainly acknowledge are a problem,” he said. He placed some of the blame for the decline in arrests on people involved in shooting incidents “not cooperating.” A similar decline in police activity and increase in violence occurred in Baltimore after protests over the death of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. Likewise, police activity in New York City slowed down dramatically after police killed Eric Garner. In the case of the New York Police Department, some news outlets suggested that the slowdown was a large-scale, organized protest against interference by the mayor. In Chicago, there is little concrete evidence of an organized police slowdown. But in both public statements and private conversations, former and current Chicago police officers, crime analysts and journalists have described a climate of low morale and hesitation among officers that has led to fewer arrests. The president of the police union told NPR last month that “no one wants to be on that next video,” and Guglielmi echoed that language: “No police officer wants to be the next viral video,” he said. (The Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.) Jamie Kalven, a journalist whose reporting brought attention to the McDonald case and who knows several Chicago police officers, is skeptical that there is any mass protest among police, even if some individual officers may be deliberately slowing down. Instead, Kalven thinks Chicago police are bewildered by a more hostile public. He pointed to a slogan that has become increasingly popular among police, shared on police blogs and even sold on T-shirts: “Stay Fetal,” a reference to comments from the mayor, who said officers had gone “fetal” to avoid trouble. There is “a genuine lack of clarity about the job description, the parameters of the job, and who will have their back in ambiguous situations,” Kalven said. Roseanna Ander, an executive director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, agrees that the police are uncomfortable. One likely consequence, she said, is a drop in the kind of “proactive” policing that is meant to prevent crime, including street stops, as officers seek to cut down on their discretionary interactions with civilians. “Certainly they’ll respond to 911 calls … but if you have a group of guys on the corner and you think you have probable cause to stop them and see if one of them has a gun, you’re probably not going to do that,” Ander said. Ander stressed that proactive policing comes with significant social costs and only rarely leads to arrests in shooting incidents. But data on arrests for crimes that often fall within the category of proactive policing, in particular narcotics arrests, support the notion of a decline in police activity. Narcotics incidents (essentially synonymous with narcotics arrests9) dropped by 29.6 percent in December from November, by far the largest one-month drop since 2001. Guglielmi said that police activity had resumed in mid-February. He added in an emailed statement, “Several metrics show an increase in police activity in March — including an increase of gun arrests by nearly 10 percent as well as investigative stops that are up by 30 percent.” The data on narcotics incidents seems to support this assertion. Narcotics incidents fell another 22.9 percent from December to January before rebounding slightly in February and March, though they are still occurring at about half of the 2015 level. Guglielmi placed much of the blame for the decline in proactive policing on a new form that must be filled out after some interactions with members of the public, a result of the city’s August 2015 settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union over the department’s “stop and frisk” program. The form, called an investigatory stop report, is much longer than the contact cards it replaces and can take hours to complete after some encounters. Officers told the Chicago Sun-Times in January that an “ACLU effect” was driving a reduction in police activity. “The rules of the game changed on Jan. 1,” Guglielmi said. Although the ISR may be playing a minor role in curbing proactive policing, it doesn’t appear to be the major reason behind the downward trend in arrests. The ISR was implemented on Jan. 1, 38 days after the release of the Laquan McDonald video. In that five-week span, the overall arrest rate fell from 26 percent to 19 percent. Since Jan. 1, the overall arrest rate has risen slightly. The onset of the decline in arrests significantly predates the ISR, and arrests have actually increased since it was introduced, though they are occurring less frequently than they did in 2015. Ander noted that several less controversial crime prevention and intervention resources in Chicago have had their funding cut recently because of a state budget crisis in Illinois, perhaps contributing to violence in the most troubled neighborhoods. Whatever combination of factors explains the opposing trends in gun violence and arrests, it’s not clear how to contain Chicago’s crime wave. With higher summer temperatures approaching, the gun violence may get worse before it gets better. Chicago provides victim data on homicides and incident data on all other crimes, so a nonfatal shooting can have multiple victims but be counted as one incident. The public city data we used does not differentiate nonfatal shootings from other types of batteries, so we’ve used aggravated battery with a handgun or firearm to approximate nonfatal shooting incidents. This provides a daily count of nonfatal shooting incidents that tracks very closely with the periodically reported official numbers. Here defined as Dec. 1 through February. According to the National Weather Service, the temperature from Dec. 1 to Feb. 29 in Chicago averaged almost 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Throughout this article, we refer to “arrest rate,” which measures what the Chicago Police Department calls “clearance rate” in its data. Clearance of a given case occurs when at least one person is arrested for a crime or the crime is considered cleared by exceptional means. This occurs in cases where a perpetrator is identified and located but cannot be taken into custody because of circumstances outside of the agency’s control, for example if the perpetrator has died or is facing charges in another jurisdiction that will not extradite him. Between 4 percent and 16 percent. About 85 percent of Chicago homicides since 2012 were carried out using a firearm, according to a Chicago gun-violence tracking website. These arrest rates were calculated using data available through April 9. Roughly 99 percent of narcotics incidents in Chicago involve an arrest, according to the city’s data. Rob Arthur is FiveThirtyEight’s baseball columnist and also writes about crime. @No_Little_Plans Jeff Asher is based in New Orleans and used to work for the city as a crime analyst. He currently does crime analysis for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and runs the NOLA Crime News data analysis blog. @Crimealytics Crime (26 posts) Police (13) Chicago (11) Laquan McDonald (1)	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line779
__label__cc	0.712698	0.287302	If You Stop Thinking Of Exercise As A Way To Lose Weight, You May Actually Enjoy It Jan. 30, 2018 , at 9:00 AM By Katherine Hobson Filed under Fitness For years, I thought of exercise in terms of calories in and calories out: Eat too much pizza on Saturday night, take an extra spin class. Skip an hourlong run, skip a bagel the next day. Train for a triathlon, eat whatever I want — because, hey, wasn’t I burning like a zillion calories a day? This approach had two problems. First, it didn’t work. My workout load seemed to have no bearing on my weight, and this isn’t just anecdotal; studies have shown that exercise isn’t a particularly effective way of losing weight. Second, it seriously screwed up my relationships with both food and exercise, two things that I inherently enjoy. I worked out way past the point of fun because I felt I had to make up for the previous day’s overindulgences — which I hadn’t really enjoyed because I was already anticipating the need to burn them off.1 My lightbulb moment came when I no longer had time for the longer workouts I’d done in my relative youth. I’d try to shoehorn them into my schedule, but I couldn’t keep that up for long, so my exercise life became inconsistent and guilt-ridden. Finally, I decided that just regularly doing something, even if it was only a short run or throwing a few weights around, was better than the all-or-nothing cycle I’d settled into. Running 20 minutes most days of the work week didn’t feel like a big burden, but it added up to much more exercise than one failed attempt to run for 50 minutes every two weeks. As it turns out, my shorter routine was already pretty much meeting the recommendations for preventing heart disease, diabetes, cancer and early death. And because I knew my new regimen wasn’t burning a ton of calories, I started paying more attention to my eating habits. Exercise became a way to achieve better health, not control my weight. This shift in thinking has profoundly changed my life. When I stopped leaning on exercise to save myself from my dietary habits, it became more fun and doable. I had visions of a self-help book empire based on this insight, but alas, it turns out I wasn’t the first to have it. Yoni Freedhoff, a family physician and medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, has spent years pushing for “detaching exercise from weight loss and reattaching it to health.” As he likes to say, regular exercise is the single best thing you can do for your health. Evidence suggests that it can lower cholesterol and blood pressure, reduce deaths from heart disease, prevent and treat Type 2 diabetes, improve respiratory fitness in people with asthma, and help with depression, among other things. As many experts have observed, if exercise were a pill, it would be the most beneficial medication on the market. Yet despite all its health benefits, exercise is not a particularly effective tool for weight loss. One review from 2014 found that unless you’re doing an awful lot of aerobic exercise, you’re not likely to lose a lot of weight. Without caloric restriction, most people who are overweight and obese can expect to lose up to about 4 pounds with exercise, the authors wrote. That’s not the same as saying it’s totally useless — it isn’t. It appears to help, albeit modestly, lessen weight gain over the long term. And it seems to reduce the chances that lost weight will creep back. But we actually don’t burn a ton of calories when we exercise, Freedhoff said. If we did, we wouldn’t have survived as a species during the majority of human history when calories were scarce. That’s especially true in relation to the food we eat. For example, a 155-pound person burns 298 calories in 30 minutes of running at a 12-minute-mile pace. But the same person burns 42 calories in a half-hour of sitting around reading a book, so the net burn is closer to 256. That barely covers a half-cup of Ben & Jerry’s, depending on the flavor.2 There are also studies suggesting that even when we increase activity, our overall caloric expenditure holds steady, for reasons not fully understood. Perhaps we unconsciously compensate for workouts by being less active during the rest of the day. Of course, there will always be exceptions, but in general, exercise has a “disappointing” influence on weight, Freedhoff said. If you’re exercising with the expectation that you’ll lose weight, you may be discouraged and tempted to quit when the pounds don’t peel off, he said. There is even research suggesting that people who believe obesity is caused by a lack of exercise rather than a poor diet are more likely to be overweight and to eat more. On the other hand, if your goal is general health, there is plenty of evidence that exercise is effective. Public health groups, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine, are in consensus: Aim for a minimum of about 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise, such as brisk walking; 75 per week of more intense exercise, such as running, aerobics or fast cycling; or some combination of the two. Why 150 minutes? “It’s the magic number because according to the epidemiological research, that’s the critical point where you start to see more substantial changes in the risk of disease and mortality,” said Carol Ewing Garber, a professor of movement sciences at Columbia University and an author of the ACSM’s guidelines. There’s a benefit at lower levels of activity — something is definitely better than nothing — but the 150-minute-mark weekly is where you start getting a better bang for your buck, she said.3 Public health groups also recommend regular strength and flexibility training, something that I had a much easier time fitting in when I wasn’t trying to aerobicize myself into a smaller pants size. Strength training is particularly important to fight off the loss of muscle mass as you age. Of course, public health recommendations for entire populations aren’t going to fit everyone. Individual response to exercise varies, and some people need more than others to get to the same level of fitness, Garber said. And diseases may require different amounts of exercise for prevention. A meta-analysis published in 2015 suggested that to substantially lower the risk of heart failure, people needed to exercise two or four times the current public-health recommendations. Again, though, even though “more is consistently better” with heart failure prevention, anything is better than nothing, said Ambarish Pandey, a cardiology fellow at UT Southwestern Medical Center and an author of the study. More exercise than the minimum is definitely associated with “additional and more extensive health benefits,” according to the CDC. So if you’re happily exercising beyond the current recs, great! But that’s not strictly necessary: You can do something really great for your health by simply meeting the exercise guidelines, even it it’s not the best way to tackle your weight. If you’re like me, that reframing may even make exercise more pleasant and rewarding. This wasn’t an eating disorder but may qualify as disordered eating. And come on, no one eats just a half-cup at a time. I don’t mean to minimize the time and resources necessary to meet even these requirements, a point Freedhoff has made. People have many responsibilities and obligations that can make regular exercise difficult to pull off. Katherine Hobson is a freelance health and science writer in Brooklyn, New York. Exercise (10 posts) Fitness (8) diet (1)	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line780
__label__cc	0.592084	0.407916	A Favorite Son by Uvi Pozansky This story is a present-day twist on the biblical story of Jacob and his mother Rebecca plotting together against the elderly father Isaac, who is lying on his deathbed, in order to get their hands on the inheritance, and on the power in the family. This is no old fairy tale. Its power is here and now, in each one of us. Listening to Yankle telling his take on events, we understand the bitter rivalry between him and his brother. We become intimately engaged with every detail of the plot, and every shade of emotion in these flawed, yet fascinating characters. He yearns to become his father’s favorite son, seeing only one way open to him, to get that which he wants: deceit. “What if my father would touch me,” asks Yankle. In planning his deception, it is not love for his father, nor respect for his age that drives his hesitation—rather, it is the fear to be found out. And so—covering his arm with the hide of a kid, pretending to be that which he is not—he is now ready for the last moment he is going to have with his father. How is Writing In Your Genre Different from Others? Would you believe that writing biblically inspired books is a risky proposition? Let me suggest to you that it is. Why? Because some of your readers may have only a vague recollection of the reference material, back from their days in Sunday school. Others may be totally unfamiliar with it, because they may come from a different culture altogether. So you have to introduce enough of the original story to the readers, and you better do it in a fresh way, one that highlights the immediacy of its meaning. Here, for example, is the voice of Yankle (based on the biblical Jacob) in my book A Favorite Son: “When I sprinkle my secret blend of spices; here, take a sniff, can you smell it? When I chop these mouthwatering sun-dried tomatoes, add a few cloves of garlic for good measure, and let it all sizzle with lentils and meat—it becomes so scrumptious, so lipsmacking, finger-licking, melt-in-your-mouth good! There is a certain ratio of flavors, a balance that creates a feast for the tongue and a delight for the mind; and having mastered that balance, with a pinch of imported cumin from the north of Persia, a dash of Saffron from the south of Egypt, I can tell you one thing: When the pot comes to a full bubbling point, and the aroma of the stew rises up in the air—it would make you dribble! Drive you to madness! For a single bite, you would sell your brother, if only you had one!” By design, his voice is a direct and intimate one, letting you get close enough to taste, or at least to smell the aroma of his lentil soup. Not only that, but the ‘you’ in this passage is not just the preverbial you. Rather (as is revealed later) it is a character with a complex emotional relationship to the main character: his firstborn, who at the conclusion of the story is just about to fool Yankle in a most devastating way, by letting him believe that Joseph, his favorite son, has been devoured by a wild beast. No wonder Yankle has a dark side. Here he is, pondering the bitterness of sibling rivalry, and the abuse of an elderly father by his son, which perpetuate themselves here from one generation to the next: “It is an odd feeling. Have you ever faced it? Being dead to someone you envy; someone you miss, too; someone who knows you intimately and, even worse, has the chutzpa to occupy your thoughts day in, day out. It grinds down on your nerves; doesn’t it? Trust me, being dead to your brother is not all that it is cracked up to be, but it does set you free—oh, don’t act so surprised! It frees you from any lingering sense of obligation. Brother, you say to yourself. What does it mean, Brother? Nothing more than a pang, a dull pang in your heart. You have betrayed him. Accept his hate. You need not talk to him ever again. For the rest of your life, you are free! A stranger— that is what you are. A stranger, visited from time to time by dreams: Dreams about the mother you will never see again, and the father you left behind, on his deathbed. Dreams of waiting, waiting so eagerly for the next day, to meet your brother at the end of an endless exile. Dreams of grappling with him all night long, until the crack of dawn. Until your ankles give way. Until you lose your footing on the ground. Then, rising up to take you is the darkness of the earth; which is where you wake up at sunrise to find yourself alone.” Some of your readers may be well versed with the reference material, and for them, you better offer an extra layer of meaning. For example, in the passage above, the sentence “Dreams of grappling with him all night long, until the crack of dawn. Until your ankles give way“ is an allusion to Jacob grappling with the angel, the night before he meets his brother after years of estrangement. In the biblical story, this is symbolic of Jacob struggling with God. But in my modern interpretation, this is symbolic of Yankle struggling with his curse, the loneliness in which is he is stranded, now that his brother is his enemy. A Favorite Son does not amplify what the bible says. In fact, it offers a secular point of view, and a mirror to our souls. To me, the bible is rife with drama, sex, and violence, which makes it a rich source, a place to explore the truth about ourselves, about our struggle between the angels and demons inside all of us. My Yankle is no hero, no one you might want to revere. Instead, he is a rebellious teenager, a sly smart-ass about to cheat his father. Which may well offend some readers, especially those who make the mistake to expect nothing more that an expansion of the original story. To such readers, my book may be seen as nothing less than blasphemy. So? What do you think? Is writing biblically inspired books is a risky proposition? Uvi Poznansky is a California-based author, poet and artist. Her writing and her art are tightly coupled. “I paint with my pen,” she says, “and write with my paintbrush.” She earned her B. A. in Architecture and Town Planning from the Technion in Haifa, Israel. During her studies and in the years immediately following her graduation, she practiced with an innovative Architectural firm, taking part in the design of a large-scale project, Home for the Soldier. At the age of 25 Uvi moved to Troy, N.Y. with her husband and two children. Before long, she received a Fellowship grant and a Teaching Assistantship from the Architecture department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she guided teams in a variety of design projects; and where she earned her M.A. in Architecture. Then, taking a sharp turn in her education, she earned her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. During the years she spent in advancing her career—first as an architect, and later as a software engineer, software team leader, software manager and a software consultant (with an emphasis on user interface for medical instruments devices)—she wrote and painted constantly. In addition, she taught art appreciation classes. Her versatile body of work can be seen on her website, which includes poem, short stories, bronze and ceramic sculptures, paper engineering projects, oil and watercolor paintings, charcoal, pen and pencil drawings, and mixed media. In addition, she posts her thoughts about the creative process on her blog, and engages readers and writers in conversation on her Goodreads Q&A group. Uvi published a poetry book in collaboration with her father, Zeev Kachel. Later she published two children books, Jess and Wiggle and Now I Am Paper, which she illustrated, and for which she created animations. You can find these animations on her author page on Amazon, and her author page on Goodreads. Apart From Love (published 2012) is an intimate peek into the life of a strange family: Natasha, the accomplished pianist, has been stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her ex-husband Lenny has never told their son Ben, who left home ten years ago, about her situation. At the same time he, Lenny, has been carrying on a love affair with a young redhead, who bears a striking physical resemblance to his wife—but unlike her, is uneducated, direct and unrefined. This is how things stand at this moment, the moment of Ben’s return to his childhood home, and to a contentious relationship with his father. Home (published 2012), her deeply moving poetry book in tribute of her father, includes her poetry and prose, as well as translated poems from the pen of her father, the poet and author Zeev Kachel. A Favorite Son (published 2012), her novella, is a new-age twist on an old yarn. It is inspired by the biblical story of Jacob and his mother Rebecca, plotting together against the elderly father Isaac, who is lying on his deathbed. This is no old fairy tale. Its power is here and now, in each one of us. Twisted (published 2012) is a unique collection of tales. In it, the author brings together diverse tales, laden with shades of mystery. Here, you will come into a dark, strange world, a hyper-reality where nearly everything is firmly rooted in the familiar—except for some quirky detail that twists the yarn, and takes it for a spin in an unexpected direction. Rise to Power is the story of David as you have never heard it before: from the king himself, telling the unofficial version, the one he never allowed his court scribes to recount. In his mind, history is written to praise the victorious—but at the last stretch of his illustrious life, he feels an irresistible urge to tell the truth. With the exception for her new release, Rise to Power, these books are available in all three editions (audiobook, print and ebook.) Link To Buy A Favorite Son http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5758946.Uvi_Poznansky http://www.facebook.com/uviart https://twitter.com/UviPoznansky http://pinterest.com/uviart/ Filed Under: *Bargain Books Under $3, Historical Tagged With: Blessing, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, Uvi Poznansky	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line781
__label__cc	0.569943	0.430057	Crime, Depravity, Nihilism, Resistance, Violence Why We (Now) Fight American director Frank Capra, among others, was responsible for the Why We Fight series of films during the Second World war. The films helped American soldiers understand what was at stake in a war with the Axis powers. At bottom, it wasn’t Capra’s talent (although he was talented) that supplied the answer to the question why America was fighting; it was America’s violent and fanatical enemies who supplied that answer through their own depravity. Likewise in our time, as we now face a domestic threat from a bigoted nationalism, we find that it is our adversaries who by their depravity justify our fight in opposition and resistance. Steve King, a lumpen Congressman from Iowa, shows us through his perverse the imperative of a relentless resistance: DES MOINES, Iowa — U.S. Rep. Steve King on Wednesday defended his call for a ban on all abortions by questioning whether there would be “any population of the world left” if not for births due to rape and incest. Speaking before a conservative group in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, the Iowa congressman reviewed legislation he has sought that would outlaw abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. King justified the lack of exceptions by questioning how many people would be alive if not for those conceived through rapes and incest. “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” King asked, according to video of the event, which was covered by The Des Moines Register. “Considering all the wars and all the rape and pillage that’s taken place … I know I can’t certify that I’m not a part of a product of that.” Via Rep. Steve King says rapes, incest helped populate the world. (It’s significant that anti-abortion activists, themselves, don’t make the vile claim that there is a practical instrumentality to rape and incest: “This year, several candidates have said they will challenge King for the Republican nomination, including conservative state Sen. Randy Feenstra. Scholten also recently announced he’d again run for the seat. After King’s comment Wednesday, Feenstra said in a statement, “I am 100% pro-life but Steve King’s bizarre comments and behavior diminish our message & damage our cause.”) There was never a time when rape or incest was justified, and no humane person on either side of the abortion debate would imply that population increases from immoral and criminal violence against women make that violence somehow more acceptable. A world where King’s views would hold sway – and they don’t yet have such influence – would not be a pro-choice, pro-life, pro-abortion, or anti-abortion world. It would be a world of nihilism, of moral emptiness stretching to the farthest horizon. That’s why we now fight. ← Public Officials Should Not Be Reporters 2 comments for “Why We (Now) Fight” It’s worthy of consideration that Steve King didn’t get to congress, or doesn’t get re-elected every two years, because of election fraud. This is not an isolated event for King. He got elected, and gets re-elected, because he accurately represents the bigotry and moral emptiness of his constituents. He’ll likely get re-elected for the same reasons. The rot in the GOP is not coming from the head. It started at the toes and metastasized to the head. Which is why un-electing Trump and Yertle is not going to fix the problem. It’s way deeper than that… That is the unsettling truth of this – that one man has been the choice of so many others.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line782
__label__cc	0.697043	0.302957	Glenn Durden Musings and other Mental Wanderings The Garden, Chapter X gdgdurden Depression, Friendship, Gardening, reconciliation March 3, 2017 25 Minutes Charlie sat back deeply into the love seat in the cottage behind D’Andra’s house. As usual, D’Andra was finishing a kitchen project when he arrived. Today it was scones, which she pronounced ‘skons’. “A British lady working at a tea parlor pronounced it that way,” she told him. “Can’t argue with anyone with a British accent” she said with a smile. “I wouldn’t have a clue” he had replied. “I’ve never been west of Colorado.” A pot of tea, wrapped in a cloth tea cozy, already rested on the small table which sat between the love seat and the chair adjacent to it. D’andre had chosen that chair for today and Salome the cat had already claimed the cushion at the far end of the love seat. Charlie found that he didn’t mind sitting so close to D’Andra. This was their fourth meeting and the first which he would pay for, and she had not bitten him or pushed him too far in the three previous. In fact, he found that he liked her very much. At last D’Andra emerged from the kitchen with a plate of the triangular pastries. She placed them between his teapot and hers, and invited him to dig in. Charlie did so with gusto. After a few minutes of tea and ‘skons’ and polite conversation D’Andra began to earn her pay. “Well, Charlie. How have you been this week. Have you begun your job?” “Yes, at last!” he replied. “I have the permits and we tore out all of the old kitchen. Stripped it to the studs and subfloor. Everything that I can’t recycle is in a dumpster in the driveway.” “You said ‘we.’ I believe that you told me you don’t have a partner or an employee. Who is this ‘we?’” “Oh, Carolyn, the homeowner. She is either gone or busy in her office most of the time, but when she has some free moments she puts on her gloves and goggles and pitches in. She’s a good worker and puts her back into it. She says she enjoys the physical effort; says it gives her brain a rest. I certainly know how that works! Frankly, I’m ahead of schedule because of her help. I know that it won’t last though. Never does. Those things always get behind schedule, no matter how hard you try.” “That’s great Charlie. I’m glad to hear it.” D’andre paused a moment and then continued. “Tell me, how do you like working with somebody? How does it feel to be doing something as important as your job is and having another person involved in it? Or, maybe I should say ‘depending on somebody else,’ even if only to keep you ahead of schedule?” Charlie had learned by now to think before answering D’Andra’s questions. At first he had tried to think of what was the ‘right’ answer; the one that she wanted to hear, rather than give her what truly was the right answer. After a minute’s thought he responded. “It felt good. I like my work, and I appreciate that she likes and values it too. When we pulled down the cabinets and tore out the counters and flooring I enjoyed the feeling of being on a team. It’s my job, and it will get done because I do it, but I liked doing some of it together with someone.” “Did you feel the same way before your trouble began, Charlie? Did you enjoy being part of a team then?” “Uh, well, no. I can’t say that I did. I knew, or at least I thought, that it was all my show. I built the business from the ground up. I thought that I was a pretty OK boss to work for, as such things went, but I was still the boss. I thought that I could do everything better than anyone else, and even now I still believe that. It’s just that now it’s not so important to me whether I can or can’t.” D’Andra smiled broadly at his answer. She took a bite of a scone and washed it down with a swallow of tea. “Charlie, you’re making my job easy. That can be the hardest thing to learn. Can you tell me how this change came to be?” Charlie paused and then replied “No, I can’t. Not really. I guess I first noticed it at the garden. You know, the community garden where I met Rachael. My relatives live in San Diego, where I grew up. They would fly up here to try and help out after the accident, but they didn’t help much. Couldn’t, I guess. Anyway, they suggested that I get into the dirt and begin to garden, like I did as a kid. My sister-in-law is a hippie earth-muffin and felt that ‘reconnecting with Mother Earth’ would be good for the soul.” Charlie paused again, thinking about the advice that he unexpectedly took from this unlikely source. “And I take it that it really was good for your soul?” “Yeah. Funniest darned thing. I got into it. And the best part was meeting Rachael and this other guy, Walt. Rachel is easy to like, as you know, and Walt is a bit more of a challenge. But they’ve been a real help to me. We’ve been helping each other with our garden plots and I found that I enjoy being there with them, even if we’re not speaking. I don’t want to get dramatic, but I think they might have saved my life.” “Have you told them that?” “No. It never occurred to me. Do you think I should tell them?” “That’s for you to decide, Charlie. Listen to your heart on that one. Now, let’s shift gears a little. Will you be comfortable talking about your family now?” “You mean Maureen and Jack? No. Not really. But I WILL talk about them whether it’s comfortable or not.” Charlie smiled wanly at D’Andra. “I guess that’s what I’m paying you for.” D’Andra smiled back and said “We’ll stop any time you must. Now, if I may ask, how did your relationship with your wife differ from that of your employees?” Charlie stared at her for a moment before responding. “Well, I didn’t have any children with my employees,” he said drily. D’Andra laughed lightly. “I’m sure that was a comfort to your wife. But what I’m interested in was how your wife and you related to each other on a day to day basis.” “Yeah. OK. Maureen. I called her ‘Mo’, which I don’t believe she liked all that much. I don’t know now why I thought it was funny to do that. Anyway, we worked pretty well as a team. For a while she would pay attention to all the business details; you know, payroll, accounts payable and receivable, contracts, permits. Stuff like that. I did all of that at first, and by the end of things we had accountants and lawyers and such to do all of that grunt work. She was really good at interacting with the human cogs though while I ran the rest of the machine.” “So, did you ever feel that Maureen was like another employee?” “No, of course not.” Charlie prepared to dispute this further but the memories of his relationship with Maureen began to trickle into his mind. In fact, he always did believe that he could have done Maureen’s job too, and perhaps better, even though many of his business contacts periodically suggested otherwise. “Well, maybe sometimes, I guess.” “Take your time and think about this topic, Charlie. There is no judgement here. You know that. You are not on any witness stand, and if you feel that way at any time, you just say so. I think that it will be good for you to sort these feelings out in order to get to some truths that may be buried or hidden, but if you are having trouble with it today we can put it off until another time. In fact, we can not touch it at all if that’s your wish. You remember, Charlie. You are not just some kind of a case study here. I want to work together with you to get the most out of this that we can for you and you only. I’ll be back in a minute or two.” D’Andra rose up out of her chair and carried the empty plate into the kitchen. Meanwhile, Charlie sat and thought about his relationship with Maureen in a clear manner for the first time in years. D’andre’s question prompted him to remember how he had been the head of the family economy, while he had allowed Maureen to be the head of the house as a subsidiary of what was virtually “Hamer Family, Inc.” She ran the home while he was running the business, although she was an important part of the business too. In fact, she was engaged in the home AND the business while he was truly focused on only one of those activities. He thought that he was the head of the household, but what happened when the household exploded? What happens when your daughter dies and you don’t have a friggin’ clue what to do? How do you manage that? How can you expect your wife to manage that and also manage the wreck that you’ve become? D’Andra re-entered the room and sat in her chair. Salome got up, stretched, and walked into Charlie’s lap. He stroked the cat’s coat and scratched behind her ears as she tested his lap for the perfect spot, circled two or three times and the lay down to purr and accept Charlie’s distracted attention. “You know, I think I may have been a less than perfect husband.” “My Shelby would tell you ‘Welcome to the club.’” “Yeah. I guess it’s a big club. You know, I think I kept a few doors closed; a few rooms in my life were off-limits to others. Stephanie had a way of getting into some of them – you have no idea what an angel from heaven that girl was to me – but I kept everyone else out.” “How long have you kept those rooms closed, Charlie?” “Huh! All of my life, I guess. Least ways, as long as I can remember. I’ve always thought that it was the right thing; ‘a guy has to have some space to himself.’ Well, I’ve had most of the last two years in a space of my own, and I don’t think that I like it much.” “Do you have any contact with Maureen now?” “Naw. When we settled and she got the proceeds from the liquidation of my business she disappeared. I have no idea where she is.” “Charlie, I do want to tell you here that your conduct in the divorce speaks very well of you. I realize that there was a web of different and conflicting feelings and emotions swirling there, but I don’t see it as you just not caring what became of your business. I believe that your love for Maureen and Jack was genuine and deep, and you sacrificed everything; gave everything that you knew how to give, to make sure that they were taken care of. You may not feel it, but I believe that it was apparent to your wife, and your son too, that you cared for them very much. That may be a new thought to you Charlie, but I wish that you would give it some time and consideration. So, when your family entered into a crisis, your understanding of how to deal with such a blow was insufficient. Don’t let that make you feel like a loser Charlie. I can’t honestly tell you how I would deal with such an event. Nobody can predict a thing like that. It seems as if your employer/employee model of relationship, to whatever extent that describes your marriage, was not adequate to permit you to console your wife, much the same as you could not comfort your mother when she would experience melancholy after her disappointment with your father. Would that be accurate Charlie?” Charlie took his time to think about that one. He put Salome back on the cushion next to him, excused himself and went to the restroom, more to be alone with his thoughts than to empty his bladder. D’andre had picked at a scab, and he wondered if it was about to bleed. He had indeed loved Maureen, but had always kept her at some distance from his core. “Do I still love her?” he asked himself. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I still love her. It’s not like love or an absence of love was ever the problem. Maureen never did anything to intentionally hurt me. Things just melted down and I couldn’t feel my way through my own pain to go and be any help to her in hers. No, I don’t feel ill-will toward Maureen; not by a long shot. I did resent her need for my comfort, especially as I needed comfort myself when the shit hit the fan, but how could I expect her to do that when I kept my last door or two closed to the outside world?” Frustrated, he washed his hands and returned to the love seat. D’andre sipped at her tea and waited patiently for Charlie to be ready to continue. At last, he did. “Yeah, that would be accurate. There were obstacles between us that kept us from being there for each other, and I’m afraid that they were all on my part.” “Well, that’s good to see, Charlie. And it’s not an easy thing to see at that. I do want to point out to you right here though that things are seldom a one-way street. Maureen is a human, just like you are. She, too, is not perfect, as I am sure she would admit if she was here. She undoubtedly has obstacles of her own. That’s where the real heavy lifting of marriage, or any close relationship, begins. Charlie, I would like for you to do something for the next week. I would like for you to consider making contact with your ex-wife in order to tell her what we have talked about today. Perhaps it would be healing for you to express to her your understanding of your obstacles, and maybe apologize for not being able to overcome them, or even recognize them in that time of pain. I believe that it would be healing for you and, who knows, Maureen may need to hear that to help with healing of her own.” Charlie sat still as a statue as D’Andra finished speaking. “No fucking way!” he thought. “That page is turned; that body is in the ground and I’ll not be digging up any bones.” “I don’t think that I could do that. It was pretty clear that Mo didn’t want to see me again and Jack hates me. I don’t think that I need to be hit over the head with that brick again.” D’Andra was unruffled by the vehemence of his response. “It’s OK. You needn’t do anything today. I’m only asking that you think about what we’ve discussed and consider the possibility of reaching out to Maureen. You must decide for yourself what is right to do. I’m only here to help you with the process. Will you think about this.” Charlie was only half-way honest when he finally answered ‘Yes.’ D’andre seemed to be satisfied with his answer though, and took the conversation in a new direction. “Have you moved yet?” “No, I’ll do that next week. I haven’t got much to move, really. Billy’s house has all of the stuff I need, so I’ll leave my dishes and that sort of thing for the next tenant.” “How do you feel about living with somebody else after being on your own for so long?” “I’ll admit, it’s a bit unnerving. Billy’s a nice guy, and he really is pretty quiet. It’ll be weird having to share a kitchen and shower though. I’ve gotten out of the habit, I’m afraid.” “Well, we can talk about that as things come up, like they almost always do. Ah, look! The hour’s up. Too bad. I enjoy talking with you Charlie. I am very encouraged by the progress I see you making and it gives me joy. Alas, I have to get ready for my next visit. Salome, you’ll have to let Mr. Hamer go on about his business.” Salome had crawled back into Charlie’s lap and was ignoring D’Andra, as cats like to do, so Charlie gently lifted the offended feline and once again laid her back on the cushion next to him. She glared at him crossly and then jumped down onto the floor, stalking away with injured pride towards a back room. Charlie rose up out of his seat and walked toward the door. D’andre opened the door and stood by it. As he prepared to pass through it she said “Please consider what I’ve spoken of. I won’t mention it again unless you bring it up first.” Charlie gave her a noncommittal nod and walked out into the bright sunshine of a Vancouver summer day. Charlie had slept late this day, something that he rarely did, and had taken a pass on cooking breakfast. There was cereal in the kitchen but he had not wanted to be full when he arrived at D’Andra’s cottage. The little baked snacks that she always brought out of the kitchen were delicious and he had resolved to enjoy them fully today. “She’ll just send the rest home with me, so I might as well eat them here.” He had met Shelby, D’Andra’s husband, the previous week, and could not believe how trim he was. “How do you stay in such good shape? he had asked. Shelby had laughed and answered “With a whole lot of work.” The scones had been delicious, but now Charlie wanted a real meal. Leroy’s was a lunch spot as well as breakfast, and he hadn’t talked with LuAnn for what now seemed like a long time. Having walked to D’Andra’s cottage today, Charlie began to walk back in the direction of the restaurant. The sun was bright and warm, summer having finally erupted over the Pacific Northwest. Charlie walked along sidewalks buckled by the enormous roots of ancient maples and elms which lined the downtown streets. Today the trees, and the 100 year old houses that he passed, gave Charlie a feeling of solidity and place in a cycle of life, instead of the sense of alienation that he had so recently felt all of the time. Back then, it was as if the trees and buildings were saying “I was here decades before you were born and will be here decades after you die, so your comings and goings are nothing to me.” Meanwhile the victorian houses that now housed lawyers and bail bondsmen would tell him “Babies were born in me and grandparents have died here. Dinners were cooked and games played at the table. I’ve hosted life; what do you know of such things?” Today, as Charlie walked along the shaded sidewalks towards the cafe near the train tracks and the river, the homes and trees were more friendly. “Stay under my shade and I’ll keep you cool in the heat of the day” the trees said, and instead of cringing from the censure of the houses, Charlie now extended sympathy to them. “You were once the home where families grew and loved. Now you house only lawyers and their squabbling clients.” These thoughts, and others even more pleasant, filled his mind as he left the area of shade and houses and entered the concrete and asphalt world of downtown Vancouver. It is not a big city, so no more than six blocks of the urban landscape separated him from a hot meal and, what was better, conversation with LuAnn. The cafe was almost empty when Charlie walked through the door. Two tables were occupied but LuAnn was not in sight. He sat at the counter on the stool closest to the window into the kitchen. Within a minute LuAnn came through the swinging door in the back of the room, carrying an armload of napkins and boxes of salt and pepper. “Here” he said as he rose from his seat. “Let me help you with that.” “Why, thank you dearie” she said, willingly giving up her burden. “I would use our cart to bring this stuff out here but it threw a wheel this morning. I guess all of us old parts around here are wearing thin.” Charlie could see tiredness in Lu’Ann’s face, and it surprised him. She always seemed to be cheerful and above the things that troubled the rest of the world. “Is there more back there that I can help with?” he asked. There was, and for the next few minutes he was busy bringing out condiments and coffee and silverware while LuAnn placed those items where they went. “Thank you and bless you, Charlie” she said as the task was completed and Charlie regained his perch on the stool at the counter. “I believe that you’ve earned your lunch today.” “Thanks for the offer,” he replied. “But I don’t think so. I’ll pay, and if you want you can apply the money to the next spare part who wanders in.” “I’ll do that” she said, “and I’ll thank you for your help and generosity.” Charlie chuckled and replied “Now who would I have learned such a thing from?” LuAnn’s tired face brightened a little at that, and then she asked “And what will you be having today?” Fifteen minutes later Charlie was left alone to enjoy a meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes with thick, rich brown gravy, and a medley of vegetables, followed by a slice of cherry pie. “I’m going to turn into a blimp if I keep this up” Charlie thought. “But what a way to go!” After he had finished his meal LuAnn poured a cup of coffee and sat down next to him. The two parties that were in the cafe when Charlie arrived had left and nobody had come in to take their place. “So how have you been, young man?” she asked. Charlie really did want to talk about how he was doing; had in fact prepared himself to answer just such a question. Now, after seeing her tired and more vulnerable face he didn’t know exactly what to say. “I’ve been doing pretty good.” he said at last. “How about you?” LuAnn sighed and replied “Well, it’s been a little tough. My old man had a bad spell a couple of days ago. He got dizzy and couldn’t stand up. His leg never is very good but that day it didn’t want to work at all. Worse thing was that he just couldn’t seem to get his words out. Vomited all over the kitchen floor, too. Good thing there’s linoleum there.” “Oh, my god!” Charlie exclaimed. “Is he going to be OK?” “Uh, well, I don’t know. We called 911 and an ambulance got him to the hospital really quickly. I gave him some aspirin before they got to our place – they say it’s good to do that sometimes. He got all of his faculties back in a couple of hours and they said he had something called a T I A. They told me what that stands for but I can’t remember. Doctors like to say stuff in Latin and Greek. I think they figure they can charge more that way.” LuAnn laughed at her own joke, and the simple joy in that cigarette-damaged voice was like music to Charlie. Even in tough times she could let herself see the lighter side of things. Charlie’s regard for LuAnn grew as she completed her story. “Duane had some tests before they let him come home and they found that he has an artery in his neck that’s just about plugged up. They’re going to put him under the knife next week and clean him out. Peggy will be taking over duties here while I’m out.” “Well, I’ll make sure that I don’t come then,” Charlie said, and then immediately regretted it. “Not really,” he continued. “You guys are good people. I’ll still come.” “Thank you. I’ll consider it a personal favor if you do.” “But the tip will really suck.” LuAnn’s laugh was music once again. “That’s your business dearie.” Now, enough about my problems. You haven’t said a word about yourself.” Charlie thought again about all that he would like to talk about, but only the last part of D’Andra’s conversation stuck out as being important. He therefore brought it up. “Well, as you know, I’ve been talking with a lady about some of the stuff going on in my life and she’s raised a question for me. I’ve told you a little about my story, but I should probably tell you a bit more before I go on.” Charlie then told LuAnn more about his recent history. She listened attentively as Charlie spoke of the death of his daughter and the dissolving of his family. He then told her of D’Andra’s suggestion that he think about contacting his ex-wife. “What do you think?” he asked. LuAnn thought for a while before answering. Before she could give a response a couple entered and took their seats at a table. “Hold that thought” she said and she held up her index finger. Soon, after getting water and coffee for the couple and placing their orders on the wheel in the window she returned. “Why did she think that you should do this?” she asked. “Well, this last few years I’ve not dealt with the accident and divorce well.” Charlie chuckled sardonically at this. “Like, how are you supposed to handle the death of your daughter and the destruction of your life? Anyway, she’s pointing out that I might be seeing things that aren’t really there, or if they are, they might not be exactly the way that I think they look from where I’m standing. She thinks that it might be a good thing to communicate with my ex, just to clear up any misconceptions that might continue to be dragging me down. She said that maybe they could be dragging her down too, and so it might benefit us both. Maybe it’ll help us both see things a little more clearly.” LuAnn whistled softly. “Get in touch with your ex! That can be a pretty dicey proposition. You think you could do that without a fight?” “Yeah, there’d be no fights. We didn’t split up that way. I just don’t know that she’d want to do any of this again. We’re over and done. If she’s moved on better than I have, why would she want to look back?” “Well, I don’t know. Is this lady you’re seeing a smart person?” “Order up!” A voice came from the window. “Hold that thought” LuAnn said, holding up her finger once again. Soon, she was back. “So, is she?” Charlie’s thoughts had strayed elsewhere while LuAnn was bringing the food to her customers. “Is she what?” “Is she smart? I thought you were going to hold that thought.” “Oh, yeah. I was. Guess it got away. Anyway, yeah, she’s smart.” “Good. I wouldn’t want you to take advice from a dummy. Present company excluded, that is. So she thinks you should maybe contact your ex in order to see if there’s anything that you should clear up. Is that it?” “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” “And is there?” “Is there what?” “is there anything to clear up?” “Uh, I don’t know. Two months ago I would have said ‘No’. Hell, two weeks ago I would have said ‘No.’ Now I’m not sure. My counselor said that we might have seen things differently, got tangled up in the misperceptions and followed paths guided by the wrong assumptions. Something like that.” “Is she trying to get you to think about restarting the marriage?” “I doubt it. There’s not much likelihood of that anyway. No. No likelihood of that. I don’t know if she would even want to talk to me, and I know that my son wouldn’t. I’m pretty sure that my counselor just wants me to let my ex know what really happened between us instead of what maybe I just think happened. It’s best to know the truth if possible, and not just what I think is true.” “Well, that makes sense to me. Of course, I’m not the one who’ll have to do it.” “And I don’t even know if it can be done. I have no idea where she lives. I got on very well with her parents though, and they might help. Then again, they might not. I’ll have to think a lot more about all of that. And then there’s Jack.” LuAnn put a hand on Charlie’s arm and said “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.” She went to the table where her customers were eating and refilled water glasses and coffee mugs, took orders for desert and cleared the dishes. Charlie was glad to have the time to collect his thoughts. This time when she returned, Charlie had held that thought. “Jack was devastated by Stephanie’s death. I think he loved her more than I even did. He came to me after we heard about what had happened, and I was so absorbed in my own pain that I had no room for his. Or anyone else’s for that matter. So he went to his mother and found comfort there. As Mo and I grew apart, he grew even further apart. Buy the time we finally separated I hadn’t been alone with Jack for months. He wouldn’t stay in the same room with me. I didn’t even see him the last week or two before I left the house.” “Did you make any attempt to see him?” Charlie thought back to that awful time. “No,” he finally said. “Did your son ever say that he hates you? Children aren’t that shy about saying such things. Some of ‘em, anyway.” Charlie thought about that question for a little longer while LuAnn went to receive the pay from the customers. The transaction took only a little bit of time and LuAnn returned, leaving the dirty dishes on the table. “Well,” Charlie continued. “No, he never actually said that he hates me. But he couldn’t stand to be in a room with me. He didn’t talk to me at all.” “How much did you try to talk to him? “How much of an effort did you make to talk to Jack, Charlie? I’m not trying to criticize you; I’m just trying to help you figure this out.” Charlie fought the impulse to shut down and not think about that painful time. That’s what he had done for more than two years, and it’s what he knew to do. But now he was learning that that was not the best path to go down. In fact, it wasn’t even a good one, so he let his mind play over the final weeks and months of his marriage. There were blow-ups over stupid things with Maureen. Nothing loud or violent but definitely isolating. Those would be followed by peevish days of icy silence. But he could not remember interactions with Jack. He didn’t try to start them, and neither did Jack. He told this to LuAnn. “Well, I can’t imagine being in your shoes, Charlie, so what I have to say should be taken with a grain of salt, OK?” Charlie nodded his assent. “Seems to me that the boy was wrapped in his own blanket of pain, just like you were. And you weren’t able to get out of your blanket in order to help him, right? Now don’t get me wrong here; like I just said, I can’t imagine what you went through. I don’t know that I would handle such a thing any better. If anything happens to my Duane, I don’t know how I’ll make it- – -.” LuAnn stopped talking as tears of fear for her husband welled up in her eyes. She gulped a couple of times and reached for a napkin to dab at her eyes with, and then continued. “But Charlie. If you hurt so much that you couldn’t reach out from your blanket of pain, how on earth could an eleven year old boy do it?” They both sat still and silent on their stools. The front door opened and closed, but LuAnn paid no attention to it. Charlie sat on his stool, stunned by the thought that Jack’s silence and remoteness might have been more about his own pain and not about hating Charlie at all. “Did Jack ever actually say that he hated you?” LuAnn repeated. “No,” Charlie finally replied. “No. I don’t remember that he ever did.” “Well, then, I’d say that the book is still open on that question. You may have a boy who’s still waiting for his Dad to come and comfort him. But like I said, what do I know? I’m just a waitress at a crummy downtown restaurant.” LuAnn smiled and patted Charlie on the arm. “Gotta go to work. I’ve got medical bills to pay now.” She rose from the stool and began to make up for ignoring her new customers, fussing over them like a mother hen. Charlie sat hunched over his cold cup of coffee and thought about what he had just heard. He had believed that his son hated him for over two years, and that had grown to be a greater source of pain than the emptiness he felt without Maureen. In one day he had heard it suggested that he might at least try to make some peace with Maureen and perhaps give her some peace too. Even more astounding, it was possible that his son did not hate him at all, or at least didn’t two years ago. This was something that would require thought, but now Charlie had to go to work. He was to meet Carolyn at an appliance showroom and begin to select the stove and refrigerator and dishwasher that was to go into her new kitchen. Evaluating the virtues of one stove versus another would be a welcome release from the thoughts with which he was wrestling now, but he knew that he was dealing with things that must be touched at long last. Charlie knew pretty close to what the price for lunch would be. He fished easily twice that amount out of his wallet and slid it under his plate. Pulling a napkin out of the dispenser, he took a pen out of his shirt pocket and began to write. “It looks like I’ve enjoyed the blessing of two smart women today. ‘Just a waitress’ my ass! Keep the change. I hear you have some medical bills to pay.” Charlie got up and waved at LuAnn as he opened the door. She waved back and he walked out into the sunlight. “Life doesn’t feel a whole lot easier,” he thought as he walked the two books to where his truck was parked. “But it feels like it might make more sense than I ever thought it could. I’ll be grateful today for that.” Published by gdgdurden I am an ultrasound technologist in the Pacific Northwest who grew up listening to the stories that the grown-ups told in living rooms and around fires. I love a well-told story and try to continue that art. 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__label__wiki	0.503898	0.503898	Commentary. The Declaration did not distinguish between civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It did not differentiate between the necessity to realize the right to food and ensure the right to freedom of expression. Human rights at 70: Unless we fight for everything, we will have nothing written by Kumi Naidoo Also filed under commentary On Dec. 10, we will mark a historic milestone: It will be 70 years since 48 countries came together at the United Nations in Paris to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—widely hailed as the world’s bill of rights. The adoption of the Declaration marked the first time that countries agreed on the freedoms and rights that deserve universal protection in order for every individual to live their lives freely, equally and in dignity. We have come a long way since those powerful 30 rights and freedoms in the Declaration were agreed. I encourage you to take the short time to read it if you have yet to do so because, even today, these principles set out the most progressive vision of what our world could look like. Today, as we near the 70th anniversary of this remarkable bill, I should be writing a celebratory piece about how much we have achieved together in these decades—which undoubtedly, we have—in making this vision a reality. The truth is, however, that in 2018, we see rising intolerance, extreme inequality and a failure by governments to take desperately needed collective actions to address global threats. We are in exactly the situation that the governments who adopted the Declaration had promised to prevent. Far from being a moment of celebration, I believe we should be using this historic milestone to take stock and refocus the fight to make human rights a reality for everyone. The second article of the Universal Declaration explains that these rights belong to all of us—whether we are rich or poor, whatever country we live in, whatever sex or whatever color we are, whatever language we speak or whatever we think or believe. That universality has not translated into reality and we see that this core principle, that underlies all human rights, is under severe attack. We and other human rights organizations have repeatedly highlighted how narratives of blame, hate and fear have taken on global prominence to a level not seen since the 1930s. Jair Bolsonaro’s victory at the polls in Brazil at the end of October—despite his openly anti-human rights agenda—vividly illustrates the challenges we face. His election as Brazil’s president poses a huge risk to Indigenous Peoples and quilombolas, traditional rural communities, LGBTI people, black youth, women, activists and civil society organizations, if he is allowed to turn the dehumanising rhetoric he made on the campaign trail into public policy. We have to ask why we now find ourselves in the exact situation that the Declaration tried to prevent, in which human rights are being attacked and rejected as protecting the ‘other’ rather than all of us? The reasons for this are complex but one thing is clear. At least part of the blame lies in our failure to treat human rights as an inherently linked and indivisible package that is relevant to everyone. The Declaration did not distinguish between civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It did not differentiate between the necessity to realize the right to food and ensure the right to freedom of expression. It recognised the reality that—we now know well—the two are intrinsically linked. In the decades that followed, governments created the split between the two sets of rights and an imbalance in how they were perceived and protected. International human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, must also take some responsibility for this imbalance. We are most widely known as an organization that campaigns for prisoners of conscience—someone who is imprisoned because of who they are or what they believe—and for our work on torture, ending the death penalty and freedom of expression. We only began to actively monitor and campaign on economic, social and cultural rights in the 2000s. We have since developed a global body of work challenging violations of the rights to adequate housing, health, and education. We know that much more needs to be done. The starkest example of why this is so important as a human rights issue is the long-burning aftermath of the global financial crisis. The experience of many European countries has shown just how vulnerable or practically non-existent our basic social protections are. To make the situation worse, legal protections for economic and social rights are often limited in these countries, meaning people are not able to mount a legal challenge even if their rights are violated. In several countries, governments have chosen to respond to financial crises by introducing austerity programs. These programs have had devastating human costs and have undermined people’s access to basic necessities, including health care, housing and food. Spain is a prominent example of this, given the government reduced public spending, including on health care, following the financial crisis. This led to quality health care becoming less accessible and more expensive. It has had particularly negative impacts on people with lower incomes, especially those with chronic health conditions, people with disabilities and on mental health care. One man we interviewed for our report into the issue told us he was forced to choose between buying food or buying medicine, because health care had become so expensive: “I cannot live with the pain, I need to take my medicines. Either I take my medicines, or I kill myself [because of the pain] … so if I have to starve myself, I do it, because I must buy medicines.” How governments have chosen to respond to public mobilization against austerity measures also proves the indivisibility of civil and political and economic, social and cultural rights—you cannot have one without the other. In Chad, we know that austerity measures implemented by the authorities were pushing people into deeper poverty. They undermined access to necessary health care and put education beyond most people’s reach. There have been widespread protests and strikes across Chad in response to the impact of the government’s austerity measures. Instead of listening to the public, the government chose instead to respond by shutting down any dissent. It used excessive force against protesters and arrested them, thereby undermining their right to peaceful assembly. But while the global financial crisis may seem like it is firmly behind us, we are still dealing with the social and economic ramifications years later. People’s experiences of inequality, corruption, unemployment and economic stagnation have proven a ripe breeding ground for divisive leaders to spread their message of division and hate. This has had explosive consequences. French President Emmanuel Macron has tried to position himself against the rise of this breed of divisive politics that is taking root. “Europe is tipping almost everywhere toward extremes and again is giving way to nationalism. We need all our energy to succeed. I have confidence in us,” said Macron in a public address in October. Yet in France, people are raising serious concerns regarding Macron’s policies on labor rights, pensions and access to university education. Amnesty International has previously documented how the French authorities curtailed people’s right to protest under the cover of the state of emergency laws. As a result, we have seen environmentalists, labor rights campaigners and others unjustifiably banned from taking part in protests. In 2018, protests calling for laws that respect economic, social and cultural rights are at best ignored by the French president, or at worst repressed violently by the police. It is a pattern that we see all over the world. We urgently need to make governments accountable for their failure to implement their obligations in relation to all rights, no matter how they are categorized. If we are going to succeed in making this a reality, we must go beyond campaigning purely for their right to speak out and protest, we must also look at why they are speaking out in the first place. Take Jamal Khashoggi, the now world-famous Saudi Arabian journalist who was brutally murdered in October in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. Like many human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia, he was targeted by the state because he chose to exercise his freedom of expression—to say publicly what he thinks. In his final article for The Washington Post, he wrote about how his fellow Arabs are unable to openly discuss the issues affecting their day-to-day lives, because of a clampdown on freedom of expression: “We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.” Khashoggi perfectly captured exactly why human rights are a package. Free speech is essential because it enables us to demand our other rights—but having freedom of expression alone is not enough. That is exactly why during the Arab Spring in 2011, people came out under the banner “bread, freedom and justice.” What we still fail to appreciate today is something that was so painfully obvious for the people standing in Tahrir Square in Egypt seven years ago—that human rights truly are all or nothing. You are either able to exercise all of your rights, or you have nothing. What needs to happen next if we are to make a breakthrough in making human rights a reality for everyone then is obvious and urgent. As a human rights movement, we not only have to continue standing up for the rights of people to speak freely and protest, we must connect the dots between the economic and financial decisions our governments make and their impact on human rights. We need to collaborate with partner organizations to demand accountability for where the money is going, to challenge corruption, illicit financial flows and weak global tax structures. As Khashoggi said, we have to challenge the structural issues our societies are facing. This is an enormous undertaking, and only possible if we all join hands and build coalitions with friends and partners across movements—human rights activists, lawyers, trade unions, social movements, economists and faith leaders. And with our friends across regions, we must ensure that the voices of those who need to be heard are loudest and amplified. Only through solidarity can we realize a world without inequality and injustice and which lives up to the commitments made in the Declaration. Kumi Naidoo is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. Copyright Le Monde diplomatique. Kumi Naidoo	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line793
__label__cc	0.615434	0.384566	Home > Threatened Trees > Magnolia grandis Magnolia grandis Other Names: Manglietia grandis, Michaelia grandis Family: Magnoliaceae Natural Range: Southern China and northern Vietnam Magnolia grandis is one of the world’s most threatened trees with a total population of fewer than 120 adult trees. It is also one of the most beautiful, boasting dark red fragrant flowers and long leathery leaves. Habitat loss and illegal logging is thought to be largely responsible for the species’ decline. Until recently the species was thought to occur only in Southern China, with fewer than 50 trees restricted to a few patches of limestone forest equivalent to less than 10km2 in area. However, Global Trees Campaign surveys carried out in 2014-15 have found 61 mature trees in three protected areas in northern Vietnam, providing hope that there may yet be more individuals to be discovered for this incredibly rare species. Magnolia grandis in flower. Credit: Hieu Nguyen/CPC Vietnam The discovery was made by Center for Plant Conservation Vietnam who are now working with local people to protect these rare trees. Community conservation teams regularly patrol the remaining populations and also collect seed from the trees which are then sown in local nurseries. Seedlings are then cared for until they are ready to be planted back out into the forest. Local people in three villages are now helping to boost the future population size of this highly threatened species. During 2015 and 2016, more than 1,000 Magnolia grandis trees were planted back out into three community forests. Magnolia seedlings ready for planting in northern Vietnam. Credit: Hieu Nguyen/CPC Vietnam Community conservation teams are now protecting these young trees to ensure that they grow and survive. Botanic gardens in China are also working to ensure that backup populations exist ex situ. The species is currently found in five ex situ conservation collections. Nearly half of the world’s Magnolia species are threatened with extinction. See the new publication here Conservation of rare trees in northern Vietnam	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line795
__label__cc	0.739112	0.260888	The Global Network of Director Institutes (GNDI) international network of 21 director institutes and was established in December 2012 to foster closer cooperation between its members, who are each recognised as the leading institute for directors and governance in their respective country. GNDI collectively represents more than 150,000 individual directors and governance professionals. We assist directors worldwide to stay abreast of emerging governance issues and we collaborate to strengthen the voice of directors in advocating for good governance policies and practices. We focus on the shared issues of interest to governance stakeholders around the world to develop and promote leading practices and programmes that enhance the capability of directors to drive sustainable performance for the benefit of shareholders, the economy and society. Through its international network of Director Institutes, to become the recognised global leader on corporate governance and provide guidance to elevate board effectiveness. To strengthen corporate governance and director development and thought leadership through collaboration among the world’s leading director organisations.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line796
__label__wiki	0.863528	0.863528	One slice of the zoology narrative: a portrait of Louis Agassiz Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray by Thomas Burnett Nothing can be prettier than the smaller kinds of jellyfishes. Their structure is so delicate, yet so clearly defined, their color so soft, yet often so brilliant, their texture so transparent, that you are tempted to say that nature has done her finest work in the sea rather than on land." — Elizabeth Agassiz Any discussion of American science must include Louis Agassiz, the most prominent scientist in North America during the 19th century. Originally born in Switzerland, Agassiz moved permanently to the United States in 1848 after Harvard University offered him a professorship of Zoology and Geology. At the founding of the National Academy of Sciences, Agassiz was named one of its charter members and served as its foreign secretary from 1863-73. Like George Ellery Hale many decades later, Agassiz was a great institution builder. He tirelessly raised funds to construct the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a research museum that recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. Agassiz was also a charismatic lecturer who inspired two generations of Americans to study natural history. He had an impressive track record of training graduate students, many of whom became future leaders of their fields. At the same time, Agassiz had a strong and inflexible personality that caused conflict and consternation within the scientific community. Despite his great legacy of institution building and teaching, Agassiz was also “an egotist who appropriated the work of others and refused to give up an obsolete worldview.” Relationship to Asa Gray During his 25 years at Harvard, Agassiz was colleagues with botanist Asa Gray. Though they were both leaders of their respective fields, these two men were strikingly different. Agassiz spent a great deal of time giving popular lectures to general American audiences, which garnered him a great deal of fame, but did not endear him to his scientific colleagues. Gray took the opposite approach, rarely speaking publically and instead focused his energy on discourse within the scientific community. Most strikingly, Agassiz was a fierce opponent of Darwin’s theory and maintained this position until his death in 1873. Asa Gray, on the other hand, helped evolutionary theory gain support among the American scientific community from the very beginning. In addition to their conflict over scientific matters, Agassiz and Gray had strong differences in personal philosophies. Whereas Asa Gray maintained the common ancestry of all human beings, Agassiz denied the common origin of our species, arguing instead that different races were separately created. Regardless of Agassiz’s intent, it played directly into the hands of pro-slavery advocates. Given his strong opposition to evolution, Agassiz was a strong ally of conservative Christian critics of Darwin. But their alliance was strange because Agassiz himself was a Unitarian, a religous community that denied the central tenets of Christianity, including the divinity of Christ. Asa Gray, on the other hand, accepted traditional Christian theology as well as Darwin's evolutionary theory. Though Agassiz spoke often of the role of the Creator in the development of organisms, he was not at all interested in a literal reading of the book of Genesis. One of his students noted, in April 1860, "Splendid lecture by Prof this morning on the absurdity of believing that Adam and Eve were the first created and the only ones. It was a masterly lecture and was listened to with great attention." Louis Agassiz should therefore not be associated with "scientific creationists" of our day. It would not be fair to treat Louis Agassiz simply as an adversary to the scientific progress of evolutionary theory. Among his many contributions, he was the first scientist to propose that the Earth had experienced a great ice age. In 1840, his two volume work Etudes sur les glaciers (study on glaciers) explained the movement and effects of glaciers in the European Alps. This theory has become a central tenet of the modern earth sciences. During Agassiz’s tenure at Harvard, the 10-year period from 1854 to 1864 was the most fruitful of his career. His "Essay on Classification" (1857) established a framework to better understand the relationships between diverse species. Two years later Agassiz founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859 as the center of his classification research initiative. When we think about science museums, most of us imagine a space where schoolchildren experience the majesty of nature, then return to tell their parents that they want to study dinosaurs. Public museums such as these are important centers of informal science education, but Louis Agassiz’s research museum was designed for a very different audience: professional scientists. Agassiz’s vast array of specimens and fossils were organized in a way to better understand morphology, embryology, and geographical distribution. His museum provided a foundation for scientific research of the highest quality. Agassiz preached endlessly on the great things that could be achieved through his museum if only he received sizable funding for specimens, books, assistants, curators, collecting trips, and heavily-illustrated publications. He convinced philanthropists, college administrators, state legislators, and hundreds of citizens to financially support his vision, variously appealing to their religious sensibilities, patriotism, hunger for novelty, and the desire for scientific progress. Alepocephalus at the Museum of Comparative Zoology Great mentor of students While directing his museum, Agassiz trained a generation of young scientists to carry on his vision. He insisted that his students learn to think for themselves rather than rely on previous research or an authority like Agassiz. One of his former students recalled that when he first began working with Agassiz, his mentor brought him a rusty tin pan containing a fish. Agassiz told him to study the fish, but not to read anything about it or speak to anyone. He sat alone for an entire week before Agassiz asked him to explain what he saw. After listening to him for an hour, Agassiz simply said, "That is not right," and walked away. Though this incident is rather extreme, this style of teaching became known as the "case study method" and widely adopted throughout educational institutions. Agassiz stressed the importance of direct observation, both in the museum and in the field. For his students, zoology was not simply an indoor study of dead specimens, but a living enterprise of scientific exploration throughout the world. Agassiz knew that by employing students instead of full-time staff, he could get highly qualified workers at bargain rates. But the students also benefitted from this arrangement, since they would learn far more in a research environment than from a lecture or textbook. To take just one example, Agassiz's student Joseph LeConte was asked to join the faculty of the newly founded University of California in 1869. LeConte became UC-Berkeley's first professor of geology, natural history, and botany, and held this position for the rest of his life. Natural classification schemes In Agassiz's “Essay on classification,” he states that when classification is done correctly, it reveals the connections between the great varieties of life scattered across the planet. Agassiz insisted that his groupings were not artificially constructed for human convenience, but represented naturally occurring relationships between species. To distinguish between natural and artificial classification schemes, let’s consider an example from geography. “States” and “countries” are purely human inventions that we ascribe to our environment. On the other hand, “islands” and “mountains” are natural features of the earth. In a similar fashion, Agassiz believed that there were four naturally occurring types of animals: vertebrates (those with backbones), molluscs (such as clams and mussels), articulates (segmented bodies like centipedes), and radiates (symmetrical creatures like jellyfish). Individual species of animals fell into one of these categories, and each group shared many characteristics. Not only did Agassiz discover shared traits between seemingly unrelated creatures, he also found links between the embryonic forms of one species to embryos and adults of other species, including extinct fossil forms. Agassiz's entire museum was arranged by these patterns of organic similarity, as shown by morphology, embryology, paleontology, and geographic distribution. Clearly, there were underlying forces in Nature that unified the species on our planet. Discovering the cause of these forces was the great challenge of 19th century biology. How should we judge Louis Agassiz’s legacy? Since he rejected Darwin’s theory, many critics have dismissed him as a close-minded conservative who hindered scientific progress. But as we have seen here, this view is simplistic and historically inaccurate. Agassiz was a powerful institution builder and popularizer of science. His specimen collection was vast and his research program was robust. When evolutionary theory supplanted his worldview, thousands of “facts” that Agassiz had established were reinterpreted and subsumed into the next generation of scholarship. Though he obstinately opposed the innovative theories of his peers, Louis Agassiz’s prodigious research was not in vain. The lumpiness of science There is a strong tendency to exalt scientists who formulate powerful theories—Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein have achieved immortality in our culture. At the same time, we tend to forget investigators like Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray who spent most of their careers conducting empirical research. In doing so, we distort our understanding of science. Without painstaking commitments to experiments, collections, and other highly repetitive activities, it is impossible to determine whether bold scientific theories are supported by facts or by fiction. Historian Mary Winsor characterizes science in an insightful way: "Science is a lumpy mixture of activities that range from the fact-collecting end of the scale to the theorizing end. Individual scientists may work at different points of the scale at different times. Far from being destroyed, the scale is made richer by the recognition that there can be no bare fact not infected by theory, and no pure theory independent of facts. Balance is achieved, as always with human affairs, imperfectly, through struggle and contradiction, through opposition and compromise.” Just as challenges and obstacles spark technical innovation, confusion and conflict among scientists promote creative understanding of perplexing phenomena. Agassiz made his mark by building a research institution at Harvard that has endured for 150 years, and he assembled a massive amount of data that the scientific community had to account for. Louis Agassiz remains a controversial figure, but his conflicts with his peers challenged them to assemble massive empirical support for their new theories and push biology into a new era. — Thomas Burnett Authors's Note: I am greatly indebted to the research of historian Edward Lurie, particularly his biography Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, from which I relied heavily in this essay.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line798
__label__cc	0.72418	0.27582	TOEFL® Internet-based Test (iBT) As an ETS (Educational Testing Service) partner, the Language Center of the University of St.Gallen is an officially certified testing centre for the TOEFL® Internet-based Test (iBT). The TOEFL®, Test of English as a Foreign Language, is a standardised language test and an internationally recognised instrument for evaluation of English language proficiency in the university sector. Our test center is located at Gatterstrasse 3, 9010 St. Gallen (see Directions & Campus Map). PLEASE NOTE THAT ANOTHER TEST CENTER IS LOCATED IN ST. GALLEN AT VADIANSTRASSE 7. PLEASE CHECK THE ASSIGNED TEST LOCATION IN THE CONFIRMATION E-MAIL OF THE ETS! Every semester, we offer custom preparation courses to help you get ready for the TOEFL® iBT. You can find detailed information about our TOEFL preparation courses in our course overview on the right. Additionally, 8 modern computer workstations equipped with the current versions of the TOEFL® iBT and official preparation materials are available for students in our multimedia room. Test Structure The test consists of four parts, the majority of which are multiple choice: Writing Comprehension Maximum number of points: 120 Duration of validity: 2 years More information about the test can be found on the official ETS TOEFL® homepage (see link on the right). TOEFL Test Information TOEFL Test Procedure Layout of the US Keyboard TOEFL - Preparation Courses Official ETS TOEFL® Homepage Directions & Campus Map	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line800
__label__wiki	0.937232	0.937232	‘House of Cards’ Debuts Season 4 on Netflix By Leigh Haugh on March 5, 2016 No Comment House of Cards, the Netflix original series that helped establish the streaming service as a benchmark of entertainment, debuted its fourth season on March 4. The political drama added another 13-episode installment to entertain fans and keep viewers wanting more. The series centers around political mastermind Frank Underwood, played by veteran actor Kevin Spacey (American Beauty), and his equally formidable wife, Claire, portrayed by accomplished actress Robin Wright (A Most Wanted Man), who is also his frequent co-conspirator. All four seasons of House of Cards are now available for streaming on Netflix. When House of Cards initially launched in 2013, Congressman Underwood was bent on revenge against those who wronged him. As the series progressed, the audience saw the Underwoods exacting revenge and climbing the political ladder all the way to the White House by Season 3. As Season 3 wrapped, comeuppance was beginning to rear its head and Claire Underwood was growing restless regarding the couple’s constant machinations in order to maintain power. They had lied, cheated, manipulated, and even committed murder in their quest for revenge and the Oval Office. While they had achieved their destination, the question of the collateral damage involved in their pursuit was weighing heavily upon them. As Season 4 of House of Cards debuted on Netflix, the action picks up from where the Netflix series left off at the end of Season 3. For those who are new to the series or recently introduced to it, viewers should watch from the beginning before embarking on the new season. It is important for viewers to understand the sequence of events and everything that has transpired, in order to fully appreciate what happens in Season 4. It is certainly a season of comeuppance, and rightly so, given all the drama and bloodshed that has occurred, thanks to the Underwoods and their entourage. The events of Season 4 are gripping but not all that surprising, if viewers have watched the series from the beginning. It was only a matter of time before the Underwoods’ actions came back to haunt them. In this technological age, and an election year no less, the sins of the father are bound to surface sooner rather than later. Whether the Underwoods have been served their proper comeuppance, or if they will manage to come through it relatively unscathed, remains to be seen. In this technological age, and an election year no less, the sins of the father were bound to surface sooner rather than later. Whether the Underwoods have been served their proper comeuppance, or if they will manage to come through it relatively unscathed, remains to be seen. With movie and TV director David Fincher as well as noted playwright Beau Willimon playing pivotal roles behind-the-scenes, the acclaimed incarnation that is based on a BBC series of the same name is expected to continue exceeding all expectations. Credit must be given to the showrunners and creative staff who continue to parallel timely world events and domestic policies to that of the show’s plotlines. It is almost uncanny how often they get it right or a close approximation at least. In addition to Spacey and Wright returning as the Underwoods, Michael Kelly (Everest) is back as President Underwood’s henchman, Doug Stamper, Jayne Atkinson (Criminal Minds) as Secretary of State Catherine Durant, and Elizabeth Marvel (Burn After Reading) as Heather Dunbar, a Republican who runs against Democratic Underwood for the presidency. New cast additions for Season 4 include Neve Campbell (Party of Five), who plays a political strategist and befriends the Underwoods, Joel Kinnaman (The Killing) as Governor Will Conway, another Republican candidate running for president, and Dominique McElligott (The Astronaut Wives Club), who plays Gov. Will Conway’s wife, Hannah. A few familiar faces also re-appear during Season 4, including Kate Mara (Transcendence) as Zoe Barnes, the ambitious investigative reporter who has not been seen since her famous departure from House of Cards in Season 2. On March 4, House of Cards officially debuted Season 4 on Netflix. The Netflix original series that helped make the streaming service Must-See TV has added another 13 episodes of the political thriller to keep viewers enthralled and wondering what will happen next. All four seasons of House of Cards are now available for streaming anytime on Netflix. Opinion and Edited by Leigh Haugh Netflix–House of Cards Huffington Post–Neve Campbell Says ‘House Of Cards’ Is ‘Wonderful’ to Older Actresses IMDb–House of Cards Bustle–Who Is Hannah Conway on ‘House Of Cards’? Will’s Wife Could Be Pulling Some Strings of Her Own house of cards, netflix, politics, spot, streaming media, Tv ‘House of Cards’ Debuts Season 4 on Netflix added by Leigh Haugh on March 5, 2016	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line801
__label__cc	0.747085	0.252915	Category: Quito #Goal11 City Levels Green, Amber or even Red #Goal11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. It is thus incumbent upon states and societies to foster policies that help make cities and human settlements more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, as SDG number eleven states. In this cross-national comparison we look at two aspects that can be ascribed to this complex and multidimensional goal. The first indicator refers to air pollution and potential health stresses caused by high particulate matter concentrations. Figure 11.1 shows the respective proportion of the population whose exposure to “PM2.5” is above the WHO threshold of 15 micrograms per cubic meter. In 17 OECD member states, including several small countries such as Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Slovenia, but also some large countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, the population is on average not exposed to particulate matter concentrations exceeding this threshold. However, in the other half of the OECD nations, the picture looks different. In the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Belgium, for instance, more than 50 percent of the population is on average exposed to particulate matter levels above the threshold. These three countries lag farthest behind. And also countries such as Germany (25 percent of the population), Switzerland (28 percent), the Netherlands (32 percent), Austria (32 percent), and Italy (35 percent) still have some catching up to do. The second indicator used here and portrayed in figure 11.2 refers to potential overcrowding as measured by the average number of rooms in a dwelling per person. The indicator thus Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. It is thus incumbent upon states and societies to foster policies that help make cities and human settlements more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, as SDG number eleven states. In this cross-national comparison we look at two aspects that can be ascribed to this complex and multidimensional goal. The first indicator refers to air pollution and potential health stresses caused by high particulate matter concentrations. Figure 11.1 shows the respective proportion of the population whose exposure to “PM2.5” is above the WHO threshold of 15 micrograms per cubic meter. In 17 OECD member states, including several small countries such as Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Slovenia, but also some large countries such Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable 11.1 Particulate matter provides some information on housing conditions in terms of space. The top five countries in this respect are Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Australia, and Belgium, where the respective room per person ratio is between 2.3 and 2.5. The midfi eld comprises a number of countries with on average 1.6 to 1.8 rooms per person. Countries such as Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, Austria, Portugal, and Switzerland belong to this group. At the bottom of the league table, however, we find several countries where a person has – on average – only one room at his or her disposal: Mexico (1.0), Turkey, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary (all 1.1). Further indicators which could be relevant to this goal include, but are not limited to, widespread access to public transport or the number of people killed in road accidents. These domains are particularly relevant outside the OECD nations since 90 percent of global road deaths, for instance, occur in low- and middle-income countries. Source: SDG Index and Dashboards – Global Report Author HabitatCO2lutionsPosted on 21st July 2016 21st July 2016 Categories #2050, #Goal11, #NewUrbanAgenda, #SDGs, population, Quito, SurabayaTags #2050, #Goal11, #NewUrbanAgenda, #SDGs, Population, Quito, SurabayaLeave a comment on #Goal11 City Levels Green, Amber or even Red Cities are, by their very nature, dynamic places that grow, evolve and develop at a fast pace, particularly in the developing world. In that sense urban development itself needs little assistance: urban areas will grow and develop out of their own momentum. The challenge is to ensure that this development is sustainable and inclusive. As we all know, sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without undermining the opportunity for future generations to meet their own needs. Inclusiveness means meeting the needs and aspirations of all urban dwellers; the poor as well as the rich, migrants and marginalized as well as established residents. This is the challenge that needs careful thought, planning and collaborative effort. The many comments and submissions in this discussion have proposed a range of ideas and suggestions for how to make urban development more sustainable and inclusive. Balancing these various options and approaches requires that we acknowledge the many trade-offs that development brings. As city leaders, residents and entrepreneurs struggle to respond to the dynamic growth of cities, it is easy to fall into the trap of meeting the needs of the present at the cost of the future (e.g. by making short-term choices in infrastructure development) or by neglecting the needs of the poor and marginalized while trying to meet the demands of those with stronger voices (especially elites). Sustainable and inclusive development means that we should resist these pressures as much as possible and take a more inclusive, longer-term view of urban development. This is the challenge that the New Urban Agenda will need to meet. Our thanks for the many contributions you have made to help us create such a sustainable and inclusive agenda. We look forward to seeing what comes out of the intergovernmental process, and the negotiations that will take place in Surabaya in two weeks’ time. The New Urban Agenda that is agreed at Habitat-III will only be the start of the journey. We look forward to continuing that journey with all of you, and the many others committed to sustainable urbanization. Joseph D’Cruz, Urbanization Task Team Lead, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Author HabitatCO2lutionsPosted on 12th July 2016 12th July 2016 Format QuoteCategories Quito, SurabayaTags Quito, Surabaya1 Comment on #H3PrepCom3	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line806
__label__wiki	0.871119	0.871119	RESOURCES SUPPORT INSPIRATION HLM Articles Careers in Law Enforcement Enlisted To Entrepreneur Veterans In Transition Legal Business Tips Military & Veteran Friendly Colleges & Universities EDU Articles Veteran Resources and Organizations Nonprofit Initiative Program CLIMBING BACK TO SUPPORT VETERANS Buy Generic Levaquin Without Prescription Buy Generic Viagra Without Prescription Buy Generic Nolvadex Without Prescription Buy Generic Diamox Without Prescription Buy Generic Amoxil Without Prescription Buy Generic Moduretic Without Prescription Buy Generic Benicar Without Prescription Buy Generic Cipro Without Prescription Buy Generic Aciphex Without Prescription FIGHTING PTSD 0 U.S. AIR FORCE MAJOR (RET.) ELIZABETH STEVENS CLIMBS BACK FROM TBI TO OPEN PRIVATE PSYCHIATRIC PRACTICE SUPPORTING VETERANS by Barry Smith Boot Campaign From a very early age, U.S. Air Force Major (Ret.) Elizabeth Stevens had a burning desire to be a medical professional. She wanted to help soldiers and veterans get their minds and lives back together if the traumas of war knocked them off track. Now, as a board-certified psychiatrist, she has an advantage as a treatment provider: the personal experience of a debilitating traumatic brain injury (TBI) that nearly robbed her of her life-long career passion. “I knew that I wanted to help military members since I was in middle school,” recalls Dr. Stevens, a product of Indianapolis, Ind. “I was inspired by my family members and their sacrifices to serve our country, and I know how much trauma can dismantle people’s lives. I wanted to be part of post-traumatic growth and help people tap into their resilience.” Serving as her role models, Stevens’ grandfather Paul Sherron fought for the U.S. Army in World War II and her uncle Fred Walker also served in the Army as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Their courage inspired her to enter the military after receiving her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis. Stevens enlisted in the USAF in 2007. She went on to complete officer training school, aerospace medicine training and medical school at Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences. Medical school rotations at the 59th Medical Wing’s Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center in 2009 and the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in 2010-11 helped narrow her career focus. “I decided to go into Psychiatry because, as a physician, I wanted to treat the whole person, and not just put a Band-Aid on the issues,” explains Dr. Stevens, a former college basketball player and outdoor enthusiast, who enjoys hiking, rock climbing, mountain climbing and even tornado chasing. “I love figuring things out and getting to the heart of the matter. In psychiatry, I have been able to see dramatic transformations happen working with a patient to help chip away at the layers and see holistic healing happen.” Her career was taking off as she started her general psychiatry combined residency in 2011 at the San Antonio Military Medical Center (SAMMC) and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA). She received their Resident of the Year award for her second-year work in 2013 and was later offered a scholarship for a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry. She transferred to Buckley Air Force Base in Denver where she started the fellowship via the University of Colorado – Denver. Then in 2015, one year after starting her Colorado fellowship, Stevens suffered a traumatic brain injury during a non-military hiking accident in Rocky Mountain National Park. The TBI knocked her career trajectory immediately off course to the point where all her training, experiences and future aspirations in the field of psychiatry could have been rendered useless. “I was medically retired from the military after having sustained a TBI and the complications associated with daily migraines, insomnia, and the inability to read without getting a migraine due to vestibular migraines and my eyes not tracking correctly,” reports Dr. Stevens, whose 10-year military career officially ended in 2017. “I was unable to read for almost three years without having a crippling migraine, which prevented me from practicing as a psychiatrist,” she adds. “I felt helpless, hopeless, and in despair. Every morning I would wake up thinking that maybe something would change, but it never did. My desire is to help people, and I felt a strong sense of worthlessness and shame.” Fortunately, thanks to the recommendation of a friend she met at a TBI treatment center, her road to recovery took a positive turn in early 2018 when she was accepted into the Health and Wellness Program of Texas-based national military non-profit Boot Campaign. The program specializes in working with veterans struggling with TBI and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and partners with top-tier treatment and training providers across the country. “I learned about Boot Campaign from a friend, Matt Bessler, who spoke very highly of this program,” she reflects. “I was hoping to be able to start back to work after the program, gain confidence in my physical abilities, and experience a better quality of life.” Her first step in that direction was a six-day trip to Dallas, Texas, to see neurologists for specialized brain evaluation through UT Dallas and UT Southwestern. The next phase of her Boot Campaign treatment program continued with a 30-day stay in Virginia Beach, Va., where specialists at Virginia High Performance customized a program for her to address her strength training, nutrition, relaxation and sleep techniques. “When I went to Virginia, I was able to become stronger and more physically fit,” says Dr. Stevens. “I actually gained over 10 pounds of muscle in a month, which I did not think was possible. The food was really good and healthy, and my sleep improved.” She returned to Dallas for 16 days of further work with neurologists who she says discovered, on top of her regular migraines, she was having vestibular migraines that can include a number of debilitating vertigo-causing symptoms affecting the ears, vision and balance. Doctors set her up with a highly effective non-drug, non-invasive migraine treatment device called a “Cefaly” to help prevent and abort the frequent migraine attacks. psychiatrist has launched her own part-time practice, Eden Psychiatry, in the Denver area, and is excited for the opportunity to share her brand of mental health and wellness care with more of the military community moving forward. “I no longer blame myself or God, and I can see the entire situation as a means for growth, empowerment, and equipping me to help others through their struggles and trauma,” says Dr. Stevens. “The Boot Campaign program was a vessel to help me find my way back to the life I was meant to lead. “I feel more equipped than ever to care for veterans and those who have suffered trauma, and emotional and physical distress,” she adds. “Right now, half of my patients are veterans, but I would love for my entire practice to be veterans one day.” Learn more about Boot Campaign and its Health and Wellness Program at www.BootCampaign.org The New Year is here (Transitioning 2020) -... A Warrior Finds New Purpose in Yoga Resolution Solutions Exciting Research - Chronic pain and/or headaches Homeland Magazine Real stories from real heroes: service members, veterans, the wounded and the families that keep it together. info@homelandmagazine.com © 2016. All Rights Reserved. Homeland Magazine	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line809
__label__wiki	0.843735	0.843735	Barclays named as one of Stonewall’s 2018 Top Global Employers Barclays has been praised as one of the Top Global Employers by leading lesbian, gay, bi and trans equality charity, Stonewall. At an event held in London last night, Barclays received their commendation from Ambassador of the United Kingdom in Ukraine, Judith Gough CMG. Barclays was just one of 13 organisations to be recognised with this prestigious accolade. Stonewall’s Top Global Employers list celebrates the pioneering efforts of leading organisations to create inclusive workplaces and advance equality for LGBT people wherever they are in the world. It is compiled from submissions to the Global Workplace Equality Index (GWEI): a powerful benchmarking tool used by employers to create inclusive workplaces across the international markets in which they operate. Mark McLane, Barclays’ Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion said: “We are incredibly proud to have been named by Stonewall as one of their Top Global Employers for a 6th consecutive year. We are want to ensure that all colleagues across our business feel comfortable in bringing their whole selves to work and feel included, empowering them to contribute fully to Barclays vision and goals. To be consistently named on this exclusive list is testament to our commitment of driving greater LGBT+ equality in the workplace.” Ruth Hunt, Chief Executive, Stonewall said: “Barclays have demonstrated a real commitment to ensuring that all their lesbian, gay, bi and trans staff and stakeholders feel included at work. These businesses truly are at forefront of driving global LGBT inclusion in the workplace, and between them reach nearly 900,000 people. “There is so much left to do to ensure that lesbian, gay, bi and trans employees feel able to be themselves at work, no matter where they are. We’re proud to work with Barclays, who operate in some extremely difficult contexts, to create workplaces that are inclusive and supportive of LGBT people and equality.” The full report by Stonewall can be found here. Pia-Louise Stephenson	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line817
__label__wiki	0.652716	0.652716	Dean Lewis’ “Be Alright” Enjoys 3rd Week As Australia’s #1 Song BTS’ “IDOL” is this week’s top new entry. Dean Lewis - Be Alright Video \| UMG by Brian Cantor Sep 1, 2018, 3:27 am Dean Lewis’ “Be Alright” adds another week to its reign as Australia’s hottest song. The single enjoys a third consecutive week atop the ARIA Australian Top 50 Singles Chart. Its closest competition again comes from Benny Blanco, Halsey & Khalid’s “Eastside.” 5 Seconds Of Summer’s “Youngblood” rises one place to #3, while Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You (featuring Cardi B)” climbs one spot to #4. Down two places, Drake’s “In My Feelings” takes #5. Other notables on this week’s chart: — Calvin Harris & Sam Smith’s “Promises” jumps sixteen places to #14. — Bazzi’s “Beautiful” rises four spots to #18. — Marshmello & Bastille’s “Happier” soars twenty-three places to #25. — BTS’ “IDOL” debuts at #35. Not simply the chart’s top new entry, “IDOL” also achieves a career-best peak for BTS. — David Guetta’s “Don’t Leave Me Alone (featuring Anne-Marie)” re-enters at #48. — Post Malone’s “Psycho (featuring Ty Dolla $ign)” re-enters at #49. — Jason Derulo x David Guetta’s “Goodbye (featuring Nicki Minaj & Willy William)” debuts at #50. be alrightbtsdavid guettadean lewisgoodbyeidoljason derulonicki minajwilly william Dean Lewis’ “Be Alright” Earns 5th Week At #1 In Australia Jason Derulo & David Guetta’s “Goodbye,” Weezer’s “Africa” Reach Top 30 At Pop Radio Brynn Elliott’s “Might Not Like Me” Ranks As Hot AC Radio’s Most Added Song Jason Derulo, David Guetta, Nicki Minaj & Willy William’s “Goodbye” Makes Top 40 At Pop Radio Songs By YoungBoy, Bas & J. Cole, Logic, Jason Derulo & David Guetta Debut On Bubbling Under Hot 100 Jason Derulo, David Guetta, Nicki Minaj & Willy William’s “Goodbye” Also Leads Rhythmic Add Board in Album Sales, Music News, New Music Eminem’s “Music To Be Mudered By” Projected For 110-125K US Sales, 300-325K Total US Units Anne-Marie’s “2002” Scores 2x Platinum Certification In Australia Six Tracks From Eminem’s “Kamikaze” Earn Top 10 Positions On US Spotify Chart	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line818
__label__cc	0.554484	0.445516	What is the immune system? The immune system works to keep germs out of the body and destroy any that get in. It's made up of a complicated network of cells and organs. It protects the body from infection. The Immune System - Click to Enlarge Lymph nodes are part of the immune system. They send out lymphocytes. These are a certain type of white blood cell that fights infection. The blood vessels and lymph vessels carry the lymphocytes to and from different areas in the body. Each lymph organ plays a role in making and activating lymphocytes. Organs in the lymph system include: Adenoids. Two glands at the back of the nasal passage. Blood vessels. The arteries, veins, and capillaries that blood flows through. Bone marrow. The soft, fatty tissue found inside bones where blood cells are made. Lymph nodes. Small organs shaped like beans. They are found all over the body. They connect through the lymphatic vessels. Lymph vessels. A network of channels all over the body that carry lymphocytes to the lymph organs and bloodstream. Peyer's patches. Lymph tissue in the small intestine. Spleen. A fist-sized organ located in the left side of the belly (abdomen). Thymus. A small organ behind the breastbone. Tonsils. Two oval masses in the back of the throat. What are lymphocytes? Lymphocytes are a type of white blood cell that fights infection. They are vital to a healthy immune system. How are lymphocytes formed? Blood cells and immune cells are made in the bone marrow. Certain cells will become part of the group of lymphocytes. Others will become part of another type of immune cell called phagocytes. Once the lymphocytes are formed, some will continue to grow in the bone marrow and become B cells. Other lymphocytes will finish growing in the thymus and become T cells. B and T cells are the 2 major groups of lymphocytes that recognize and attack germs. Once mature, some lymphocytes will stay in the lymph organs. Others will keep moving around the body through the lymphatic vessels and bloodstream. They will also move into the organs and tissues of the body. How do lymphocytes fight infection? Each type of lymphocyte fights infection differently. But the goal of protecting the body from infection remains the same. The B cells make specific antibodies to fight germs. The T cells kill the germs by killing the body cells that are affected. T cells also release chemicals (cytokines). These are cellular messengers. Other types of white blood cells are engulfing cells (phagocytes) and natural killer cells (cytotoxic cells). These cells actually destroy the germs. What are disorders of the immune system? When the immune system doesn't work correctly, it leaves you at risk for disease. Allergies and being very sensitive to certain substances are both considered immune system disorders. The immune system also plays a role in rejecting transplanted organs or tissue. Other examples of immune disorders include: Autoimmune diseases. These include juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and certain types of anemia. Immunodeficiency diseases. These include AIDS and severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). What is an infectious disease? An infectious disease is a condition caused by 1 or more of the following types of germs: Infectious diseases can range from common illnesses such as a cold to long-term (chronic) treatable conditions such as HIV infection and herpes. They also include often deadly illnesses such as rabies and Ebola. Depending on the disease-causing germ, an infectious disease can be spread through some or all of the following ways: Sexual contact, including vaginal, anal, and oral sex Breathing in airborne droplets of the disease after an infected person coughs or sneezes Contact with infected blood, such as when sharing hypodermic needles Contact with an infected area on the skin Insects such as mosquitoes or ticks. These draw blood from an infected host and then bite a healthy person. Eating contaminated food Contact with contaminated water Other methods that can pass on a disease In developed countries, most infections are spread through sexual contact, airborne, bloodborne, and direct skin contact. How do antibiotics work against infections? Antibiotic medicines are used to treat bacterial infections. Antibiotics don't work against viral infections. For some infections, no antibiotics will work any faster than what the body can do on its own. Other infections may not have an antibiotic known to work against them. Antibiotics that work for one type of germ may not work for others. Overusing or misusing antibiotics can lead to bacteria that can't be stopped by an antibiotic (antibiotic resistance). It is important to take antibiotics correctly. That means taking them as directed and for the full length of the prescription. Doing this will fully treat the infection. Allergies and the Immune System Home Page - Infectious Diseases	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line821
__label__cc	0.717894	0.282106	Vincenzo Bollettino Rob Grace Susan Tannehill Lessons Learned? The Role of Humanitarians in Protection Response (Humanitarian Assistance Webcast 16) http://atha.se/content/lessons-learned-role-humanitarians-protection-response-hu... The performance of the international humanitarian system has been under the scrutiny of a number of evaluative reports in recent months – particularly in relation to its actions and inactions in Sri Lanka, 2009. Notably, the reports present a steadfast recognition that lessons must be learned within and across organizations. However, how such conclusions will be integrated in practice still remains unclear. Faced with a state apparatus determined to dictate the parameters of access while simultaneously unable or unwilling to protect the population, the international humanitarian community has often been unable to act in a strategic, coordinated manner. Fingers have been pointed at staff that “had insufficient political expertise and experience in armed conflicts and in human rights,” and were “not given sufficient policy and political support.” Ensuring that field-based staff has the necessary skills and support to make tough choices is, of course, of great importance. NGOs’ Rights and Responsibilities for Humanitarian Access Responding to the Refugee Crisis in Europe	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line827
__label__wiki	0.859513	0.859513	exploring philadelphia's urban landscape Ask Hidden City Little Clubs On A Wooden Street March 7, 2014 \| by Harry Kyriakodis Camac Street’s famous wood blocks \| Photo: Bradley Maule Since the earliest decades of the 20th century, Philadelphians have had an almost obsessive infatuation with Camac Street. And why not? The narrow thoroughfare is known as the “The Little Street of Clubs,” home to the Plastic Club, the Sketch Club and the Franklin Inn Club. And as if that isn’t quaint enough, the 200 block of Camac is also the only street in Philadelphia paved with wooden blocks. Camac Street, from the July 1931 issue of World’s Work magazine. Indeed, Philadelphians have been finding Camac Street quaint for more than a hundred years, and have worked to keep it that way for almost as long. The wood blocks themselves were an anachronistic and genteel touch installed early in the 20th century, shortly after the arrival of the little clubs, because they made less noise than horse hooves and carriage wheels on Belgian (granite) blocks. Wood block streets had enjoyed a brief heyday in the mid-19th century, but were rarely replaced because they wore out too quickly and absorbed horse urine, which made them smell bad. According to Bob Skiba at GayborhoodGuru, the two block length of Camac Street running from Walnut to Spruce was developed much earlier than surrounding blocks. About 1813, the street appears in directories as Hazel Alley, then Dean’s Alley and Dean Street. This bit of street took the name “Camac” in 1898 or so because it was in line with Camac Street in North Philadelphia, named after Captain Turner Camocks (various spellings of the name were used), a wealthy Irish copper mine owner who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1804 and was related to the Penn family through marriage. About a half dozen other streets on either side of Center City have been absorbed into Camac since then. Camac Street south of Market Street was initially a modest little avenue with numerous small homes sporting tiny gardens. The Venture Inn—now a gay bar and restaurant—was built as a tavern long ago but was later used as a stable for the carriages of wealthy Philadelphians. Meanwhile, Camac Street kept its pleasant respectability until it entered a period of decline around 1880. The street during that era is pungently described in the 1937 WPA Guide to Philadelphia: A Guide to the Nation’s Birthplace as “the scene of brawls by day and crimes by night, requiring at times an entire squad of the city’s police to maintain order. For twenty years the street, lined with brothels and taverns, rotted in a mire of debauchery.” Photo: Bradley Maule The movement of art and scholarly clubs onto the street began when the Philadelphia Sketch Club moved into 235 S. Camac in 1902. The street’s biggest cheerleader was Karl Bloomingdale, president of the Poor Richard Club, which moved to 239 S. Camac in 1906. Bloomingdale and other members of the club started lobbying for the street, wishing to resuscitate the feeling of old-time Philadelphia, however Camac wasn’t fully restored until the early 1920s in preparation for the Sesquicentennial. Image conscious city officials considered the dirty and neglected streets of Old City and Society Hill an embarrassment to the city, so they spruced up and promoted the 200 block of South Camac Street as a charming colonial thoroughfare that visitors could see. The revival of Elfreth’s Alley followed. The Sesquicentennial improvements included the installation of lampposts of colonial design and the addition of hitching posts, like those used in Revolutionary days, in front of each house on the street. The houses themselves were outfitted with flower boxes in the windows and sidewalks were also improved. From Our Philadelphia (1914), by Elizabeth Pennell (Illustrated by Joseph Pennell) This revamping of a city street was something new in Philadelphia. Besides showing Philadelphians the charm of small urban streets, the 1920s refurbishment heralded larger neighborhood restorations that came with urban redevelopment in the mid-twentieth Century. The colonial-inspired streets and alleys of Society Hill, in particular, are prime examples of this. And to this day, the local reverence for small neighborhood streets and alleys throughout Old City, Northern Liberties, Southwark (Queen Village) and the rest of Philadelphia can trace its roots back to the rehabilitation of South Camac. In fact, there is a group dedicated to preserving, repairing and restoring them–the Philadelphia Society of Small Streets, founded in 2011. When Camac was repaved in 1997-98, the Philadelphia Department of Streets wanted to replace the deteriorated blocks (which had miraculously survived since the early part of the century) with a more durable material, but local residents persuaded the city to keep this section of the street in historical condition. Local legend has it that Camac is the only wood block street in the country, but that turns out not to be true. There are examples in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and perhaps in other cities as well. Camac Street had been included in a 1993 survey of historically significant streets in the city, and since then, the lane’s 200 block has been protected by the Philadelphia Historical Commission as one of the many streets in a “thematic district” of historically significant streets that cannot be altered without the commission’s approval. And when a street within such a thematic district requires repairs, damaged pieces must be replaced in kind. The Poor Richard Club on Camac Street. From Frank H. Taylor, Poor Richard’s Dictionary of Philadelphia (1916 Maintaining a wood block street turned out to be trickier than anyone realized, however. In the late 1990s, the Streets Department failed to use an adhesive to attach the wooden blocks to the underlying sand foundation. When wet weather came (including the September 1999 rains of Hurricane Floyd), the wooden cubes expanded more than anticipated, loosened and came out. (A modicum of dampness, previously supplied by horse urine, had apparently kept the original blocks of Camac Street snug over its gravel or sand bed for decades.) After a few blocks were dislodged, the resulting holes caused more blocks to loosen. Some people walked off with a few of the blocks, while someone apparently tried to set others on fire. Part of the problem was that the last wooden streets in Philadelphia were constructed in the 1920s and modern contractors did not know the proper procedures for laying down a street made of wood cubes. Further, the Department of Streets had problems finding wood that was sufficiently dense. It finally located a Pennsylvania mill that would cut the 1,000 oak blocks needed for the replacement job. The wooden blocks were properly installed in 2000 and then again apparently in 2008. Tags: Gayborhood Midtown Village North Philadelphia South Philadelphia Temple University Harry Kyriakodis Harry Kyriakodis, author of Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront (2011), Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward (2012) and The Benjamin Franklin Parkway (2014), regularly gives walking tours and presentations on unique yet unappreciated parts of the city. A founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides, he is a graduate of La Salle University and Temple University School of Law, and was once an officer in the U.S. Army Field Artillery. He has collected what is likely the largest private collection of books about the City of Brotherly Love: over 2700 titles new and old. Thank you for this; this street is the best! Would really love to hear (and see) more about how the bricks are laid. Davis says: The curent Venture Inn was built in 1670? That would make it the oldest building in the city. Sounds wrong to me… I love that little street and always loved those blocks – was it intended to cut down on noise do you think? Harry Kyriakodis says: Good point. Maybe I should remove the date, as it’s not really important for the article… James F. Clark says: Good article. I remember, albeit vaguely, my parents often talked about Camac Street. I believe we had a relative who lived on it. R. Gatto says: What happened to the Camac Steam Baths? Jay Schwartz says: What is the oldest building in the city? The Hop Angel Brauhaus restaurant in Fox Chase was supposedly built in 1683, so it must be in the running. I had found this elsewhere and it’s a good candidate: “Boelson (Boelsen) Cottage, on West River Drive, is thought by some to date to 1660. In any case, it appears to be the oldest recognized building still standing in Philadelphia.” MDS Chill says: I’m pretty sure that Van Pelt between Chestnut and Sansom is also paved with wooden blocks, although they are mostly buried under asphalt. (I lived there in the late 90’s and it’s possible they’re gone now, what with the new building right there.) Bob Skiba says: Thanks for the story, Harry and the shout out. The only place I’ve ever found it stated that the Venture Inn was ever a tavern in the early 19th century was in advertising published by the Venture Inn itself. As far as I can tell, the structure began life in the early to mid 19th century as a humble stable for the townhouse at 1217 Locust St. I find it amusing that from the 1920s through WWII, those two tiny blocks of Camac St. were promoted as “Philadelphia’s Greenwich Village.” (Greenwich Village was touted as the home of “those long haired men and short haired women.) As for the wooden blocks, several attempts were made as early as the 1830s to pave streets with them, but they disintegrated much too quickly. Later, with the use of creosote as a preservative, an attempt was made again in the early 20th century. All of lower Market Street was covered with wood, prompted by the repaving that was necessary after 1908 and the construction of the subway. According to an old Inquirer article, there were once over 90 miles of wooden street in Philadelphia. This tiny piece of Camac is one of the last remnants. Marlborough between Allen and Richmond is wood block under the asphalt, although now that the one spot has been exposed the blocks are coming out. Kostis Kourelis says: Through serendipity, we were blogging about the same thing at the same time: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2014/03/leonora-herman-camac-street-1924.html A painterly footnote to your post, from Franklin & Marshall College’s college museum So I see… But it seems that every Philly blog covers Camac Street eventually! Danielle Macke says: Where did you get the information that the street was named after Turner Camocks? I believe it was named after Dr. William Camac. http://www.enjoyingphiladelphia.com/philadelphia_zoo.html Well, I got that from here and there… Here’s what I had (before editing), which shows the connection to Camac Lane, named after Turner Camocks… According to GayborhoodGuru (http://thegayborhoodguru.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/and-what-about-the-venture-inn/), the two block length of Camac Street running from Walnut to Spruce was developed much earlier than surrounding blocks. About 1813, the street appears in directories as Hazel Alley, then as Dean’s Alley and Dean Street. This bit of street was took the name “Camac” in 1898 or so because it was in line with Camac Street in North Philadelphia. That street was named after Captain Turner Camocks (1751-1830), a wealthy Irish copper mine owner who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1804 and was related to the Penn family through marriage. Mr. Camac built the first ice houses in Philadelphia and started a line of wagons to bring fish daily from the New Jersey coast to Philadelphia. He was reportedly buried in Christ Church burying ground. The original Camac Street started out as a tiny byway, Camac Lane, that passed unevenly through the Camac estate (a.k.a. Camac’s Woods). This property once made up much of the southwestern part of the district of Kensington. The Turner Camac House, at about 11th Street and Montgomery Avenue, was once an early landmark of Philadelphia. The estate was swept away by the expanding city in 1870. Kathy Camac says: Thanks for the information, very interesting. My surname is Camac. I have always been under the impression that the street was named after my ancestor, Dr William Camac. ….http://www.enjoyingphiladelphia.com/philadelphia_zoo.html ‘Many prominent civic leaders coalesced behind the idea of the creation of a Zoo. The movement was led Dr. William Camac, a well-regarded physician, and for whom Camac Street in Center City is named.’ Are you familiar with his contributions? I am seeking some clarity of information. Your article states the street was named after another gentlemen, I’d like to know where the name originates. Thank you I think you are correct Kathy. The Camacs were a distinguished and well known family. I have no doubt the street, even though it jumps about, was named for one of them. © 2011-2020 Hidden City Philadelphia	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line828
__label__cc	0.737913	0.262087	[R3037 : page 202] GOD FIRST—IN THE DECALOGUE. —EXOD. 20:1-11.—JULY 13, 1902.— Golden Text:—"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart."—Luke 10:27 . AFTER LEAVING ELIM, in our last lesson, the journey of the Israelites led to Mt. Sinai; but before reaching it their faith in the Lord was tested severely by a conflict with the Amalekites, a warlike tribe of the desert. Unused to military matters and encumbered with their families, flocks and herds, the men of Israel were forced to a conflict, and, strange to say, their leader, Moses, who some forty years previously had been a notable Egyptian general, did not attempt now to take charge of the battle, but entrusted it to Joshua, while he went to the top of a hill overlooking the field of battle, and there in the sight of the contending peoples, engaged in prayer with uplifted hands. It was here that Aaron, Moses' brother, and Hur, his brother-in-law (husband of Miriam), upheld the hands of Moses in prayer; because it was noticed that the Lord's special blessing attended the Israelites when Moses' hands were upheld. Thus Israel vanquished the foe, and thus it was demonstrated that it was the Lord who fought with Israel and conquered their enemies. No doubt Israel learned a lesson of faith in the Lord, and through Moses' example learned to trust, not in Moses, but in the Lord as their Leader. And the humble conduct of Aaron and Hur in this incident became the groundwork of a great lesson of helpfulness in the Lord's service—showing how assistance in the service is recognized of the Lord and such co-operation acceptable. So with spiritual Israelites. In all the trials and conflicts with our Adversary and his deluded followers, we are to learn distinctly the lesson that all our trust is to be in the Lord, our Leader, the antitype of Moses, Captain of our Salvation; who does not, in an earthly sense, actually lead us in the conflict, but is in the Mountain, in the Kingdom: his merit prevails for our blessing and succor, and all of his faithful servants in turn recognize themselves as merely co-operating with him. Another incident worthy of notice occurred about this time: Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, came to meet him here, bringing Moses' family (Ex. 18); moreover, the Lord used this man for giving Moses some valuable suggestions respecting the government of the Israelites; and Moses was humble enough to receive such instruction as of the Lord, notwithstanding the fact that it came from an Ethiopian, one who was not of the seed of Abraham, and who did not join himself to them. Thus God sometimes even now uses outsiders to give suggestions and lessons to his covenant people; and wise is the man or woman humble enough to receive instruction from any quarter—when found to be in [R3037 : page 203] harmony with the divine will. The advice given to Moses,—that he should no longer attempt to be the law-giver for the people in all the minutiae of their affairs, but a sort of supreme judge, and Mediator between God and the people, was a wise suggestion, evidently from the Lord, by whomsoever given. So also was the next suggestion, that the people be organized according to their tribes and families, and that each tribe should thus have, in itself, its own proper servants and officers and judges for minor details. Of this arrangement some one has said, "This [arrangement] became the basis (Kalisch) of Alfred the Great's Saxon constitution, and thus the basis of the constitution of modern England and America"—a government of the people, by the people, through their own representatives. THE GIVING OF THE LAW. The transaction at Mt. Sinai was so arranged as deeply to impress all who were present. It was to be another lesson for the people respecting God, his right to control them and his will concerning them. Boundary marks were fixed around the mountain, which was declared holy because of the Lord's presence in it; a man or beast trespassing upon it was subject to death: meantime the mountain shook with earthquakes, and fire and smoke, thunders and lightnings, and trumpet-like sounds and voices manifested to the Israelites the importance of the event at hand. But if the Lord thus impressed them by the solemnity of their surroundings with the importance of the covenant which he was about to make with them, his message to them, introducing the commandments, was very gracious and gentle. In this preamble he reminds them that he, the Lord, had brought them out of the land of Egypt: they had by this time gotten beyond any desire to return to Egypt; they were learning to trust in the Lord, to realize his care and protection and deliverance from enemies and from want. Meantime, the people, in obedience to the Lord's direction, had purified themselves, their clothing and their camp; and, as directed, they were endeavoring to abstain from all impurities, as a prerequisite to their meeting with and entering into covenant relationship with the Lord of Hosts. The spiritual Israelite also has something analogous to this. First he must realize the justice of God and the greatness of God, and his own unworthiness and weaknesses; he must see something of the terrors of Sinai before he will be in the proper condition to receive the favors which our Lord desires to bestow. Properly, he too will seek to purge himself so far as possible from all filth of the flesh; properly also, he will seek a mediator, and as the Israelites said to Moses, so will he say to Christ, "Entreat the Lord for us, that we may speak to thee, and speak thou to him." We realize our need of a mediator through whom the Word of the Lord will come to us, and by whose merit and grace we shall be helped in satisfying the demands of the divine law. But a greater lesson is included in this type. In this still larger view Moses typified Christ Jesus the Head, and the Church, his body, complete; in this larger view Israel typifies so many of the world of mankind as are desirous of entering covenant relationship with God; in this larger view the fire and smoke and voices and trumpets and earthquakes of Mt. Sinai represent the great time of trouble and manifestations of divine power which are to come in the end of this Gospel age to convince the world of its need of the Lord's help and to make the world ready to enter into the New Covenant. In this larger view the three days of purification, setting bounds about the Mount, etc., represent the period of this Gospel age from the first advent down to the glorification of the Church—typified in the going up of Moses into the mountain, to be the representative of the people, to receive the Lord's Law and to bring it down to the people. Thus counting the matter according to the days of the week,—a thousand years to each day,—our Lord's first advent occurred early on the fifth day;—the fifth day has passed, the sixth day has passed, and we are now in the early morning of the seventh or "Millennial" day; and it is in this third day "early in the morning" that the antitypical Moses [Christ and the Church] is to ascend into the mountain, Kingdom of the Lord. It is in this third day, and very shortly now we believe, that the great and terrible manifestations of divine dignity and majesty are to be made known to the world in general. This is in full accord with the statement of the Apostle referring to this time, and to this same type. (Heb. 12:22-29.) For some time the Lord has been dealing with the world with a view to the bringing in of this New Covenant. Two (thousand year) days ago we approached the mountain, the Kingdom of God; there God, through the antitype of Moses, began to mark out the bounds of the Kingdom class, who might and who might not approach, come into the Kingdom. From that time the proclamation of purification has been made, the people being commanded to cleanse themselves; or, as the Apostle again says, "The times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent: because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained"—Christ.—Acts 17:30,31. The instruction to purify and to get ready has been more or less heard and more or less heeded throughout the world; and now, shortly, we may expect the marshaling of the people as described in Ex. 19:17-20, so graphically described by the Apostle as picturing the events with which the present age is to close: "Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven." He explains that in the great changes now at hand the transformation will be a complete one, which will thoroughly shake out and remove everything in connection with the civil, religious and social affairs of man that is not in harmony with the laws of the Kingdom—the Millennial Kingdom. Only the faithful who shall constitute the Kingdom-class shall stand the shaking of this time.—Heb. 12:26-28. THE FIRST FOUR COMMANDMENTS. The law delivered to Moses was upon two tables of stone. Although not so specified, it is a generally accepted opinion that the first four commandments were upon one stone and the remaining six upon the other. This would make about an even division as respects the matter; but more particularly it divides as between the duties of Israel toward God and toward men. Although the Decalogue (the law in ten commandments) was given to fleshly Israel and not to spiritual Israel, nevertheless, the latter may learn from it some very valuable lessons respecting the divine will. God does not address the house of Sons as he addresses the house of servants,—ours are not commands as to what we shall not do; ours is one command respecting our duty toward God, and it is so comprehensive that it takes in all that was said to Israel in the ten commandments, and as we shall presently see, much more. (1) "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The thought is not that they were prohibited from having other gods before Jehovah, in the sense of superiority, implying that they might have some gods on an equality with or inferior to him. Rather, the thought is that they should have no other gods in his presence—that so long as they recognized Jehovah as their God, none others were to be recognized in any sense or degree. (2) The Second Commandment is an elaboration of the first, lest the people might say, 'We will have no other gods, but we will make for us images to represent our one God so that they may help the mind through the eye. But the Lord prohibits this, and we can readily see the wisdom of the prohibition. Many Christian people have felt that they could pray before pictures of the Lord or while looking at a crucifix, better than without such an aid: indeed we know that Greek and Roman Catholics throughout the world (nearly three times as numerous as those termed Protestants) continually use images, pictures, beads, etc., as reminders and helps to the mind and faith; but we believe that the effect has been seriously injurious; the tendency downward rather than upward, and that this, to some extent, accounts for the fact that the races using images, etc., are inferior to those not using them, but practicing the higher and purer worship of God which recognizes no intermediary, no crucifix, no image, no picture, but communes directly with the Lord. The Gospel Church has a still higher thought than was given to the Jews on this subject. Our Master's words suggest that even fathers and mothers and wives and children might intrude upon our love and devotion and take the place of the Lord in our affections; and that this must not be permitted by any who would be of the elect. In comparison we must love less than God all other beings, so that the first strength of our love and devotion may be given to our Creator. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul and strength." This would also include the thought that wealth, or self or ambition must not be permitted to take the chief place in those who would be the Lord's. Many seem to be in danger along these lines. We cannot read their hearts, but the vast majority not only of the world, but of those who profess devotion to the Lord, are bowing themselves down to idols of wealth, social ambition, personal ambition, etc., and serving these with all the strength and time and means and knowledge which they have consecrated to the Lord. We are not saying a word against the procuring of "things needful" in a manner "honest in the sight of all men;" we refer to something beyond this,—the attempt to lay up riches, honor, etc., with the time and knowledge and talents consecrated to the Lord. Is not this idol worship from the standpoint of the New Covenant? The Lord announces himself as a jealous God who wants all of our affections, all of our confidence, our entire trust. He wants that we should be so fully in accord with him that his will shall be supreme in all the affairs of life. This is not to be considered selfishness on the part of the Almighty; because this, under his overruling providences, means to his creatures the largest amount of happiness, the largest amount of success in the duties and affairs of the present life, and the largest amount of preparation for the blessings which the Lord has prepared for and promised to those who love him. The declaration that the Lord will visit the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those that hate him, and show mercy unto thousands of them that love him and keep his commandments, does not represent anger, bitterness, resentment, selfishness;—rather these words express the law of nature, under which in wisdom God has placed humanity. Every one who uses his mind and his talents in accord with the Lord's will, brings a blessing not only upon himself but extends, in a natural way, that blessing to his children and theirs. On the contrary, those who live contrary to the Lord, who mind earthly things, become more and more "earthly", "sensual," "devilish," and surely transmit these groveling and deficient tendencies to their children, influencing and injuring them unto the third and fourth generation, in a perfectly natural manner. The Apostle points out to us that this is the secret of the extreme degradation that we see about us in various parts of the world today. There was a start to all this degradation. Of course the original start to degradation and sin was in the disobedience of father Adam, and in the death-sentence upon him. But in proportion as people since have disregarded the Lord's will and arrangement and laws, so far as they knew them, in the same proportion have they injured and degraded themselves and their posterity. The Apostle's words are, "When they knew God they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to fourfooted beasts and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, [R3038 : page 205] to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator."—Rom. 1:21-31. It has been suggested that the original of vs. 6 might be rendered a thousand generations, and that this would imply a continuation of present conditions of imperfection and need for divine mercy for a period of at least 20,000 years, instead of one thousand—the Millennium. We disagree with such an interpretation entirely, suggesting that in a very proper sense of the word every child is generated, and hence might not improperly be spoken of as a generation. This is in accord with the translation given in the common version which we approve. The command to the Israelite that he should not take God's name in vain, did not signify that he should not name the name of the Lord, yet going to an extreme in the matter the Israelites avoided the covenant name of God,—Jehovah. The expression, "in vain," evidently signified lightly, frivolously or in any other than a sacred or reverential manner. No such command is needed by the "new creature in Christ." How could he willingly or intentionally speak lightly or irreverently of his Heavenly Father, after being begotten of the holy spirit? To have a will to speak otherwise than reverently would be sure indication that he had not been begotten of the holy spirit;—that he was a bastard and not a son. However there is a sense in which we may well take a lesson from this command to Israel, a sense in which it is applicable to spiritual as well as natural Israel. As a people Israel had taken God's name,—they had professed themselves to be God's people, under his guidance and leadership; it was their duty to see to it that this should not be a vain, empty, or meaningless covenant, or agreement; that it should be carried out to the full. So with us spiritual Israelities, we have entered into a covenant with God; we have named the name of the Lord upon us, calling ourselves his people, claiming him as our Father, and confessing Jesus as our Redeemer. It is proper for us to remember that this solemn profession or obligation or covenant is not a vain, frivolous matter; that it should be entered into with solemnity, and with full appreciation of its importance and of our responsibilities under it. The Lord will not hold us guiltless, if, having taken his name upon us and receiving his benediction as his children, we then either sin wilfully or in any degree reflect dishonor upon him whose name we bear. "REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY." The fourth commandment designates the seventh day of the week for rest, not only for the head of the family but for every member of it, including servants and cattle and visitors. It was made the duty of the head of the family to see to it that this divine command was carried out in his home, for the blessing of himself as well as for the comfort and good of those under his care. The new law, Love, the basis of the New Covenant into which we spiritual Israelites, as the "house of sons," have entered, has no command respecting the seventh day of the week, nor indeed respecting any day. If it was good that the Israelites should rest, would it not be good also that we should rest one day in the seven? Yes, surely; on general principles it is advisable that all men observe such a rule of physical rest from toil one day in seven. Is there any reason why we should object to the seventh day of the week for such a rest? None whatever so far as the Christian is concerned. Being left without a specific law on the subject, he is at liberty to make such arrangements for his rest as will be most profitable to him under the general law of Love. Being without a specific law on the subject Christian people, desiring to have one day of seven for worship, gradually fixed upon the first day of the week as being the one which to them would have the largest meaning, because of its being the Memorial of the Lord's resurrection, and hence, the Memorial of the Christian's joy and faith and hope with respect to the eternal life promised through our Redeemer. Do you consider the choice of the first day of the week a good one? We [R3039 : page 205] certainly are glad that throughout the civilized lands the first day of the week is so observed; we are glad, too, that it is not observed according to the Jewish law, merely as a day of physical rest, but rather that it is much used by Christians as a day of fellowship of spirit and growth in grace, knowledge and love. But why did the Lord not put in the law of the New Covenant some mention respecting some day of the week, first, seventh or some other day? We answer because the entire law is a "Law of Liberty,"—designed to test by its liberty those to whom it is given. It leaves each one unfettered that he may the more abundantly show the kind and extent of his devotion to the Lord. Instead of demanding one day of the seven the Law of Love really controls, regulates our entire time; seven days in the week we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; and seven days of the week we are to love our neighbor as ourselves; and seven days in the week we are to rest also—rest from our own works—rest by faith in the finished work of Christ—rest in the love of God—rest in the peace of God which passeth all understanding, ruling in our hearts continually. The seventh day commanded to the Jew as his rest day, while it was beneficial to him, was also typical: it typified the Christians' rest of faith, this heart relationship to the Lord, in which, as children of God, all such may continually rejoice—every day and every night. So the Apostle explains the matter (Heb. 4:4-11), declaring further that there is a still larger rest remaining; namely, the eternal life condition to be entered into on the great seventh day,—the Millennial age. Some have suggested that in the expression "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy" the word remember implies that the Sabbath day had been previously instituted and commanded; and that this was merely a reminder of it. From this we dissent. There was no law given previous to Israel's arrival at Sinai; there was no mention of the keeping of a Sabbath previous to Israel's arrival [R3039 : page 206] at the wilderness of Sin of which Mt. Sinai is the center. It was instituted in connection with the giving of the manna. (Exod. 16:23.) We are not to read into the Lord's Word what is not there. The words of the text signify that Israel should be careful continually to remember this injunction put upon them, respecting the seventh day, and that thenceforth it should be kept holy, sacred, free from work, as unto the Lord. All this is implied further in the declaration of the 11th verse respecting God's having rested on the seventh day; and the explanation is that similarly, now, in the giving of the law, God was blessing the seventh day and honoring it as a reminder of the six days of creation, and the seventh day in which God rested from creative work. We have heretofore explained why the days of creation should not be understood as literal days of twenty-four hours each, but as larger days of seven thousand years each; and this subject we hope to treat still more at length (D.V.) in Millennial Dawn, Vol. 6. We merely note here, that the seventh day which God observed was one of these larger days of seven thousand years; and that it began just after the creation of our first parents and that since then God has rested from any creative work, and has merely permitted, as far as earth is concerned, that things already created should take their course;—many of them a downward course, as in the case of man in his fall from primeval perfection into sin and death. The Apostle explains that God is still resting, and waiting for something,—leaving a further work for the Lord Jesus to do,—the work of redemption and restitution. The redemptive work he has already accomplished; the restitution work he will begin as soon as the election of his Church—the "bride," the "Lamb's wife" is accomplished. Meantime God rests, leaving the matter in the hands of him whom he hath ordained to be "Lord of all," and to whom he has decreed all things shall be subject, for the purposes of restitution,—so far as possible. And as God is thus resting and leaving the matter in the hands of Christ, so all who come to a knowledge of the truth, to a knowledge of God's plan, are to rest similarly,—leaving the case in the hands of our glorious Redeemer and seeking so far as we may be able, not to direct him, not to do the work for him, but to co-operate with him in the work which he is now doing in selecting the Church; and by and by, to co-operate as he has promised we may, in the work of blessing and restoring all the families of the earth who will hear his voice and become obedient to his law.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line833
__label__cc	0.596126	0.403874	Urban Church Planters: Don’t Punk Out On Race Issues! Published July 16, 2016 July 17, 2016 by Ernest Cleo Grant, II in Mission Shortly after celebrating our nation’s independence, the clouds of racism cast their dark shadow over this country. Over the span of 3 days, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile died at the hands of police officers and a deranged shooter gunned down 5 patrolmen at a #BlackLivesMatter protest in Dallas causing a social media firestorm. These events reignited a nationwide conversation about systemic injustice, racial inequality, the unfair targeting of minorities in inner cities by police officers, and the use of excessive force by those sworn to protect and serve. The confluence of opinions has not been limited to social media; it’s made its way into the church as well. Sadly, many local congregations are in disarray. Parishioners, holding dissenting, and often-contentious opinions, have been sharply divided over philosophical lines, and the recent tragedies, along with the combustible climate of the political election season, has caused a disruption of peace and unity in countless churches across this country. Church Planting Handcuffs Because of this, urban church planters have found themselves in a precarious position. For the most part, conservative, white evangelical churches have funded their efforts, and some are hesitant to step into the tension and speak candidly on the issues of race for fear of losing financial support. While the vast majority of urban planters have done well to avoid flippant Facebook and Twitter posts that garner strife, most are still searching for practical ways to thoughtfully engage racial issues in ways that are biblically faithful and strengthens rather than sabotages gospel bonds. Maybe that’s you. You’re outraged about the recent events but are apprehensive about tackling issues of systemic injustice and racism for fear of loosing financial supporters. Well, here are 3 practical ways urban pastors can challenge social issues 1. Make The Distinction Between Partners and Supporters While supporters and comprehensive gospel partners are vital to the financial well-being of the church, we need to make a clear distinction between the two. Comprehensive gospel partnership consists of two churches with deep relational connectivity using their resource and expertise to cross-train leaders, mutually plant churches, host missions trips, and cultivate deep bonds. From my experience, it’s quite difficult to disrupt relationship with gospel partners because conversations about race, economics, police brutality, systemic racism, etc. have been discussed preemptively. The partner churches have engaged in difficult conversations on race issues in their congregations and often display both empathy for the plight of minorities and demonstrate cultural fluency. What’s refreshing is that many gospel partners are on the frontlines fighting against such systemic injustice alongside their urban counterparts by engaging in conversations with their churches, hosting conferences on racial reconciliation, and showing a commitment to displaying minority leadership in their churches. Supporters, on the other hand, are a bit different than partners. While they tend to give financially or materially (i.e. web design, construction, legal counsel, etc.), and even invite the lead pastor of the urban plant to preach at their church, the deep cross-ecclesia relational component may not be present. They often support the mission and vision of the church planter, but because of the superficial relational bond, when the planter speaks on social issues they tend to shy away from supporting. It’s important to make this distinction because while supporters often fall away, comprehensive gospel bonds remain strong through turbulent times. Supporters will withdraw finances when church planters escape their social confines, but comprehensive gospel partners will remain unmovable. As urban planters, it’s incumbent upon us to build enduring relational bonds so that supporters will become comprehensive partners and serve alongside us when tackling touchy social issues. 2. Educate Supporters of Systemic Issues of Racism The racial fault lines between blacks and whites in the United States is more vast than any other people groups, and since in the post-Civil Rights area, that expanse has only grown. Our white brothers and sisters tend to view the deaths of black men like Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police as isolated incidences. While whites tend to believe that racism is a product of fractured, individual relationships and sin, blacks, on the other hand, see these incidences as a large overarching effect of systemic racism.[1] Systemic racism describes forms of racism that are structured into political and social institutions; therefore, race matters profoundly for differences in life experience, life opportunities, and social relationships.[2] In other words, “we live in a society that allocates differential economic, political, and social, and even psychological rewards to groups based along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.” [3] This institution results in hostility between blacks and whites; unequal treatment, conflict, and compromised life opportunities for people of color. The effects of systemic racism are seen in wealth gap, employment, housing discrimination, incarceration, and other portions of our society. For example, a 2010 study showed that while blacks comprise 13% of the population, they only posses 2.7% of the wealth, and while the median white family has a net worth of $134,000, blacks are typically worth $11,000.[4] This disparity can be seen largely in the employment of blacks and whites, as well. On average, black unemployment is about twice that of whites and when African-Americans graduate with college degrees, they are twice as likely to be unemployed as compared to their white counterparts.[5] Housing discrimination has also been prevalent in the history of this country. Because of redlining, racial steering, restrictive covenants, and zoning restrictions that prevented blacks from purchasing property, we were unable to accumulate wealth at the same rate as whites, causing further economic dissonance. Policing is not excluded from the institutional racism equation. According to the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project and US Dept. of Justice’s “Police Behavior During Traffic and Street Stops” report of 2011, blacks are two times as likely to be pulled over as whites, and although statistics show that blacks and whites use marijuana at a relatively equal rate, the ACLU’s “War on Marijuana Report in Black and White” reports that blacks are 4x more likely to be arrested than whites.[6] Institutional racism occurs in other sectors, such as healthcare, media reaction to controversial music, as well. Ultimately, such prejudice has become interwoven into the fabric of our daily operations, and because it avoids using direct racial terminology, it is largely invisible to whites. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon urban church planter to inform supporters of such systemic issues and be able to express opinions from an informed position. 3. Remind Them That Addressing Social Issues is a Gospel Issue. For many conservative evangelicals, preaching Christ from our pulpit is sufficient to rectify society’s ills. It’s not. Preaching Christ in the comfortable pulpit of homogenous churches without the practice of justice is not the Gospel at all. Preaching Christ without challenging sinful societal norms is an oxymoron (Ps. 89:14; Pro. 21:3). Our knowledge of Jesus should illicit sincere concern and a genuine cry for even-handedness in the face of oppression, especially for black and Latinos who have struggled for respect and equality in America.[7] According to Dr. Tim Keller’s Generous Justice, the most basic meaning of justice is to treat people with equity and impartiality regardless of race or social status. [8] It’s described as taking up the care and cause of the poor, marginalized, immigrants, orphans, and widows, who’ve sadly been most taken advantage of at an institutional level. Jesus embodies these principles. He stresses the sanctity of life, the importance of evangelism, and being born again, which is a hallmark of right-wing politics, and says that Jews and modern Gentiles should stay in community together to serve the poor because it was central to his mission, which is more progressive. Jesus’ mission is the personification of preaching and practicing the gospel. So, why should we fight against issues of social injustice? Because it’s what Jesus did when he pushed for the upheaval of the Pharisaic system that neglected the poor (Matthew 23:23). Furthermore, from an institutional vantage point, these issues stem from evil, fallen hearts and a healthy understanding of the Gospel forces Christians dealing with them from a systemic level no matter how entrenched those systems may be.[9] Urban church planter, do not punk out! Don’t shrink back on issues of race and systemic injustice by prostituting your morals for money. If supporters decide to withdraw funds from you because of your biblical stance you can be assured that it wasn’t Gospel partnership but penance to soothe their conscience for forsaking your context for so long. That’s all I got for now. Talk to you soon. [1] Emerson, Michael O., and Christian Smith. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 7. [2] Ibn, 7. [3] Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, unfinished manuscript. [4] http://www.demos.org/blog/11/5/13/racial-wealth-gap [5] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/african-americans-with-college-degrees-are-twice-as-likely-to-be-unemployed-as-other-graduates/430971/ [6] https://www.aclu.org/report/war-marijuana-black-and-white [7] Brooks, Christopher W. Urban Apologetics: Why the Gospel Is Good News for the City, 2014, 131. [8] Keller, Timothy. Generous Justice. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010. [9] Loritts, Bryan C. A Cross-shaped Gospel: Reconciling Heaven and Earth. Chicago: Moody, 2011, (Kindle: Loc 703) Previous Post Previous post: Tips For Non-Lead Pastors 2.0 Next Post Next post: Don’t Punk Out On Political Issues In The Urban Church!	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line841
__label__wiki	0.516892	0.516892	Policing, Protesting, & Patriotism: Navigating Kaepernick & Crutcher (Pt. 1) Published September 23, 2016 September 24, 2016 by Ernest Cleo Grant, II in Culture While his play on the field has suffered considerably over the past two seasons, causing him to lose his starting position, Colin Kaepernick, the once revered quarterback, famous for his flamboyant, bicep-bulging touchdown celebrations, has managed to remain a fixture in the media spotlight. During the pre-game ceremony of the singing the national anthem, the quarterback remained seated, and in the post-game interview he spoke candidly about not standing “… up to show pride in a flag of a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” He was silently protesting what he deemed as unfair treatment and wrongdoings committed against African-Americans and other minorities in this country, stating that he would continue to do so until issues of systemic racism, economic inequalities, mass incarcerations, and the murder of unarmed blacks at the hands of police were addressed. His protest was met with mixed sentiments. On one hand, NFL personnel, as well as coaches and players from the collegiate and high school level, have followed suit by kneeling or raising fists of solidarity during the Star-Spangled Banner at sporting events. On the other hand, his protest has been met with vitriol, with some critics challenging his patriotism, claiming that kneeling during the national anthem is both unpatriotic and an affront to the troops who’ve served our nation. But is this a fair critique of his peaceful protest? This nation, while grappling with its hypocrisy of slavery, was founded on a protest. Was the Boston Tea Party unpatriotic in their protest of Mother England? Were the 200,000 men and women that descended on Washington on August 28, 1963, to hear Dr. King deliver the famed “I Have A Dream” speech to protest injustices unpatriotic? What about the woman’s suffrage movement that fought to grant women rights to vote? No, these groups are revered for protesting the indignities of oppressed people groups. More than anything else, he’s exercising a constitutional right that many of his ancestors weren’t afforded, and rarely are social protests welcome by the dominant culture. Without a doubt, we, who enjoy the freedoms of America, owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought, sustained injury and died serving this country. Sadly, since the founding of this nation, millions of Americans have lost their lives to preserve the freedoms of the U.S. While we may not like the manner of his protest, those who served our country did so for people like Kaepernick to enjoy the privilege of protesting against what they feel to be unjust. While we may not like his methodology, we must respect that his rights have been insured by the courageous men and women that served this country. The Lapel-Grabbing Truth While some will continue to challenge his patriotism and the sincerity of his motives, we cannot ignore the lapel-grabbing truthfulness of his message – vulnerable people of color are systemically oppressed in the United States through what the Princeton scholar Dr. Imani Perry calls “post-intentional racism.” It’s a contemporary understanding of racism that isn’t reduced to intentional acts of bigotry, subconscious prejudice, or the faulty belief of human determinism, but it’s a bird’s eye view of racism through a structural, institutional, and psychological lens. This form of systemic racism is based upon a particular set of assumptions and narratives that are socially constructed. From an institutional perspective, consider Nixon and Regan’s failed War on Drugs campaign that disproportionally targeted men of color. Because of their failed efforts, drug use has remained relatively the same since it’s inception, but the likelihood of men of color spending time behind bars is exponentially higher than whites. While blacks and whites use marijuana at the same rate, blacks are 3 times more likely to be arrested for possession. Economically speaking, black people have the highest rate of poverty among any people group in the United States, and black families possess 2.7 percent of the wealth of the typical white family. This disparity can be seen in housing, employment, and most glaringly in the disproportionate number of unarmed African-Americans killed by police. In 2015 alone, policed killed 102 unarmed black people, and despite comprising only 13 percent of the population, unarmed blacks represented 37 percent of the total number of people killed by police. Unarmed blacks are killed at 5 times the rate of unarmed whites. One of the most disturbing findings of the studies discovered that only 10 of the 102 cases of unarmed blacks killed resulted in an indictment of police officer, and of those 10, only 2 of those cases resulted in convictions of the officers involved. 1 of those officers received jail time for their conviction and was allowed to serve the one-year sentence exclusively on the weekends. The Killing of Unarmed People of Color Has Continued This year bears striking similarities. In 2016, 780 people have been killed by police with 193 – or approximately 25 percent of them were African-American. Since Kaepernick’s protest began, 15 African-Americans have been killed by police, with the most recent being Terence Crutcher. Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma released videos that showed the 40-year-old Crutcher, with his arms above his head when police shot and killed him in the street as he returned to his car. While the details are still forthcoming, the video discredits the officer’s original claim that he’d ignored the officer’s warning to raise his hands, leading to the officer being charged with 1st degree manslaughter. The recent incidences of Philado Castillo, Alton Sterling, Korryn Gaines, and Keith Lamont Scott, along with the statistics, demonstrate the deep need for police reform and accountability in America. Kaepernick isn’t kneeling to the chagrin of the valiant troops that served our country heroically; he’s kneeling to protest that the freedoms they fought for that haven’t been actualized for certain people groups. While you may not agree with his means of protest, we have to commend him on continuing to keep these issues at the forefront of this nation’s conversation. Next time we’ll discuss police reform, and some actionable steps to see the change in our communities. Until then, let’s mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep until justice is realized. Photo credit: Chris Carlson/AP Previous Post Previous post: The Epistle of Pitbulls: How God Used Dog Breeding To Save Souls In America’s Worst City. Next Post Next post: 5 Types of People You Need On Your Team	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line842
__label__cc	0.578608	0.421392	IdeasWatch is temporarily in a read-only mode while we migrate the website to the new servers. Sorry for the inconvenience. You are not signed in. Welcome to do everything anonymously, but to engage with other like-minded Ideators, please sign in: Startup inspiration from the crowd Share Browse Team up I would like to see on the market: Lacking inspiration? Do you want to take credit for the idea and receive an email when it's realized?" Your idea will be shared as soon as you sign in. Log in or Log in ... no, just share it anonymously" Keep in mind we won't be able to let you know when your idea is published. Your idea is waiting for a review! It usually takes about a week or two. 24 hr review guarantee only for $19 Share another idea Your idea was not sent! Edit your idea and send again Search startup ideas 855 - 868 of 3387 Sort by: Date \| Popularity \| Comments \| Categories: Online ideas \| Mobile ideas \| Service ideas \| Social business ideas Lyrics from online radio Privacy Control by Perry Oostdam E-Commerce Service Comparison by sagar Gmail Ganitor by Vincent Burg by John Lee Unified platform for electronic bills by Alejandro Ayuso Expat connector by Adil Hussein by Amit Jain friends plans app by Cole Trumbo bet on the go! by sulymon ibrahim Aviation Ecosystem in India by Rohit Tomar Fill to Print / Fill2Print by Arjun Kumar by Dumitru Lisita Sports League / Coach / Ref Super Console by Adam Kinsley Abernethy Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 Next Media \| Privacy \| Terms \| Help © 2020, Maintop Businesses Share startup idea \| Browse new business ideas \| Cofounders	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line845
__label__cc	0.736747	0.263253	Avoid touching any sores you have. If you do, wash your hands with soap and water. You should avoid sex while you have sores, and use a male or female condom or dental dam with your partner if sex occurs despite intentions to not have sex. Herpes is most contagious during an outbreak, but it’s also possible to spread herpes when no symptoms are present. HSV-2 is commonly referred to as genital herpes because it usually causes cold sores to erupt around the genitalia. In fact, genital herpes is the No. 1 cause of genital ulcers worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and affects up to 1 in 3 adults (although most who are infected don’t even know it). (5) Both types of herpes viruses are highly contagious, and both can cause cold sores in either area of the body (or sometimes both). HSV infection causes several distinct medical disorders. Common infection of the skin or mucosa may affect the face and mouth (orofacial herpes), genitalia (genital herpes), or hands (herpetic whitlow). More serious disorders occur when the virus infects and damages the eye (herpes keratitis), or invades the central nervous system, damaging the brain (herpes encephalitis). People with immature or suppressed immune systems, such as newborns, transplant recipients, or people with AIDS, are prone to severe complications from HSV infections. HSV infection has also been associated with cognitive deficits of bipolar disorder,[13] and Alzheimer's disease, although this is often dependent on the genetics of the infected person. Human herpes virus 1 (HHV1) is also known as herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1). It is typically the cause of cold sores around the mouth. HHV1 can also lead to infection in the genital area causing genital herpes usually through oral-genital contact, such as during oral sex. HHV1 infections are contagious and are usually spread from skin-to-skin contact with an infected person through small breaks in the skin or mucous membrane. The HHV1 virus is more likely to be spread through things like sharing eating utensils, razors, and towels from a person who has an active lesion. To reduce the chance of acquiring HSV-1, avoid touching saliva, skin, or mucous membranes of people who have HSV-1 lesions. Prevention of genital HSV may be accomplished by latex condoms, but protection is never 100%. Spermicides do not protect against HSV. Some clinicians recommend using dental dams (small latex squares) during oral sex, but like condoms, they are not 100% protective. “Herpes is caused by sexual intimacy and contact with a person who is actively shedding the herpes virus,” says Cullins. If you have HSV-1, that shedding could happen through the mouth or a cold sore, which means that the virus can be transmitted through kissing, or just sharing a drink. If you have herpes that affects the genitals, it can be transmitted from sharing sex toys, grinding, or even mutual masturbation — any activity where the virus can be transmitted from one person to another through skin-to-skin or mucosal contact. Oral herpes is also known commonly as cold sores and fever blisters but is different entity from oral canker sores although canker sores may sometimes be associated with HSV infection. Canker sores occur solely inside the mouth. Oral herpes occurs inside and around the mouth. Most of the time HSV-1 causes mouth symptoms and in a minority of cases it may also be responsible for genital symptoms. The opposite is true for HSV-2 – it causes genital symptoms in the majority of cases while only a few cases of HSV-2 infection will result in mouth symptoms. HSV-1 infection may be seen in all ages, including children, but when genital herpes is seen in children, sexual abuse needs to be a consideration. Human herpes virus 8 (HHV8) was recently discovered in the tumours called Kaposi's Sarcoma (KS). These tumours are found in people with AIDS and are otherwise very rare. KS forms purplish tumours in the skin and other tissues of some people with AIDS. It is very difficult to treat with medication. HHV8 may also cause other cancers, including certain lymphomas (lymph node cancers) associated with AIDS. The fact that these cancers are caused by a virus may explain why they tend to occur in people with AIDS when their immune systems begin to fail. The discovery also provides new hope that specific treatments for these tumours will be developed that target the virus. It should not be confused with conditions caused by other viruses in the herpesviridae family such as herpes zoster, which is caused by varicella zoster virus. The differential diagnosis includes hand, foot and mouth disease due to similar lesions on the skin. Lymphangioma circumscriptum and dermatitis herpetiformis may also have a similar appearance. A scary finding is that more cases of genital herpes than ever before are now being caused by HSV-1 (the type most people assume only causes mouth sores), and about 85 percent of people with genital herpes don’t even know it. (7) Studies show that about 50 percent of the new genital herpes infections in young adults are due to HSV-1 and about 40 percent in older adults. The fact that most people don’t ever find out they’re infected is one of the reasons that transmission rates are steadily climbing.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line848
__label__cc	0.714388	0.285612	Scientific activity is an intellectual creative activity aimed at obtaining and using of new knowledge. Its main forms are basic and applied scientific research (the Law of Ukraine «On scientific and scientific and technical activity»). As it is known, scientific work along with educational and training processes are an integral part of any educational institution. At the University the scientific work is carried out since the early days of its creation. In accordance with the priorities basic tasks in the field of scientific activity were identified and implemented: Organization and conduction of the scientific research aimed at implementing of the priority directions of science, technology, science intensive technologies and education, use of all opportunities to improve the relevance of scientific work at the University as the basis of staff training and scientific, socio-economic and cultural development of the country; Training of scientific and pedagogical staff; Engaging of talented students in scientific research; Creation of necessary conditions which stimulate scientific activities; Organizational and methodical management of international and patent-license activity; Organization of scientific conferences, seminars, exhibitions, presentations, etc.; Preparation of monographs, manuals and textbooks, scientific-methodological and other literature according to the subject of the University. The main areas of scientific research of the University are issues of economics, law, economic security, international economic relations, legal regulation of economic relations, criminal and legal protection of the economy, organizational, economic and legal psychology, psychological support of enterprise financial and economic security. Today, scientific and teaching staff of the University is working on topics of the research «Problems of the Information Society Development: Economic, Administrative, Legal, International, Humanitarian and Technological Aspects» (state registration in UkrISTEI 0109U005026). Results of scientific research of scientists and young researchers may be published in professional journals of University like «Scientific Notes of «KROK» University» You are here: Home Research	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line851
__label__wiki	0.571477	0.571477	Parenting/Caregiver Advice and Support By Alison Gurley, M.A., Psy.D., William James College, Newton, MA and Heather Byrns, LMHC, Operations Director, William James INTERFACE Referral Service Sexual orientation and gender identity are broad identity terms that are often confused and used in reference to a community of individuals with diverse identities. Individuals who belong to a minority sexual orientation or gender identity groups are often lumped together despite the fact that these are very different identities. Sometimes, this community is referred to as the LGBTQ community, although this acronym excludes many identities and is thus controversial for some. For the purposes of this article, the term queer community will be used to refer to this broad group of people. Below are listed some foundational terms to be familiar with: Sexual orientation: An individual’s identity in relation to the gender to which they are sexually or romantically attracted. Most contemporary theorists view sexual orientation as occurring on a continuum (not categorical, but rather an issue of degree) and as fluid (it may or may not change over time). Biological Sex: A person’s biological sex refers to an individual’s anatomy as male, female or intersex. Characteristics of biological sex include sex organs (such as the penis, ovaries, vagina), chromosomes and hormones. Most individuals are assigned to one of the biological sex categories at birth based on their external sex organs. Gender Identity: A person’s inner concept as male, female, both or neither. It refers to individuals’ internal experience of their own gender. Gender identity can be the same or different than biological sex and is also thought of as occurring on a continuum and fluid by most contemporary theorists. Read more about Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity » Customize Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity resource listings for your community Resource Organizations » Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity » Medway Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition http://berkshirestonewall.org/ Hotline(s): Crisis Hotline: (800) 252-0227, LGBTQ Adult Hotline: (888) 340-4528, LGBTQ Youth Helpline: (800) 850-8078 Email: info@berkshirestonewall.org The aim of the Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition is to promote the well-being of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people from the Berkshire County area through communication, networking, support, education, political action, and fun. BSCC activities include discussion panels, speakers, infosocials, support groups, community action, social events and the publication of a bi-monthly calendar. Health Imperatives: LGBTQ SUPPORT / BrAGLY http://healthimperatives.org/lgbtq-support-bragly/ Hotline(s): 888-293-7273, 508-588-8255 Email: BrAGLY@HealthImperatives.org We provide crisis counseling and advocacy services for LGBTQ youth who have experienced trauma, including sexual or relationship violence, bullying, or harassment. We also offer a weekly support group for Brockton area youth called BrAGLY. BrAGLY is a weekly youth group open to LGBTQ and allied youth ages 14-18. We are a part of the GLBT Youth Group Network of Massachusetts. BrAGLY meets every Thursday from 6-8pm at 111 Torrey Street in Brockton. This location is accessible by BAT 3, 9, and 13. Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) of Greater Boston http://www.gbpflag.org/ Hotline(s): Helpline: 866-427-3524 Greater Boston Office: 781-891-5966 National: 202-467-8180 Email: info@gbpflag.org Greater Boston PFLAG works to create environments of understanding so that all people can live with dignity and respect through: Support: to cope with an adverse society Education: to enlighten the public Advocacy: to end discrimination and to secure equal civil rights Greater Boston PFLAG provides opportunity for dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity, and acts to create a society that is healthy and respectful of human diversity. Find a Chapter The Network / La Red http://tnlr.org/en/ Hotline(s): Hotline: 617-742-4911, 800-832-1901 (Toll-Free) The Network/La Red is a survivor-led, social justice organization that works to end partner abuse in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, BDSM, polyamorous, and queer communities. Rooted in anti-oppression principles, their work aims to create a world where all people are free from oppression. They strengthen communities through organizing, education, and the provision of support services. Survivors, their friends and family can call the Hotline 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to receive emotional support, information, referrals to resources and assistance in making safety plans. The Network/La Red provides emergency safehome for survivors of partner abuse for up to 4 weeks stay as well as support group offerings. http://www.biresource.org/ Email: brc@biresource.net The Bisexual Resource Center envisions a world where love is celebrated, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression. Because bisexuals today are still misunderstood, marginalized and discriminated against, the BRC is committed to providing support to the bisexual community and raising public awareness about bisexuality and bisexual people. Boston Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Youth (BAGLY) http://www.bagly.org Email: info@bagly.org The Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth, is a youth led, adult supported social support organization, committed to social justice, and creating, sustaining and advocating for programs, policies and services for the LGBTQ youth community. Boston Gay, Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (BOSTONGLASS) https://jri.org/services/health-and-housing/health/boston-glass Email: mtamanaha@jri.org Boston GLASS (Gay & Lesbian Adolescent Social Services) provides a continuum of services to LGBTQQ+ youth of color and their allies in the Greater Boston area. As a leader in LGBTQ+ youth services, they also provide education and consultation to other providers and community organizations. An average of 25-30 youth go to GLASS each night to meet friends, talk to staff, or participate in formal programming. Boston GLASS provides counseling, advocacy and referrals for health care services and housing to LGBTQQ+ teens and young adults. Boston LBGT ELDER Info http://www.elderinfo.org/Links/LGBT%20Resources.pdf Boston ElderINFO assists elders, disabled individuals and their families in accessing a comprehensive range of services that address health care needs. Boston ElderINFO is a program of the Elder Care Alliance. The Elder Care Alliance is a not for profit collaboration of three Boston home care agencies, also known as Aging Services Access Points (ASAPs): Boston Senior Home Care, Central Boston Elder Services and Ethos. For more than 25 years, we have provided the information, guidance and support necessary to identify, plan and secure alternatives that help make living independently possible for elder individuals with disabilities. Fenway Community Health Center, Help Line and Peer Listening Line http://fenwayhealth.org/care/wellness-resources/help-lines/ LGBT Peer Listening (25 & under): 800-399-7337 LGBT Helpline (25+): 888-340-4528 Email: jwisch@fenwayhealth.org Fenway's helplines are anonymous and confidential phone lines that offer lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning adults and young people a “safe place” to call for information, referrals, and support. Their trained volunteers are available six days a week to talk about safer sex, coming out, where to find gay-friendly establishments, HIV and AIDS, depression, suicide, and anti-gay/lesbian harassment and violence. No matter what is on your mind, they are there to encourage and ensure you that you are not alone. Fenway Community Health Center: Violence Recovery Program https://fenwayhealth.org/care/behavioral-health/violence-recovery/ Email: information@fenwayhealth.org The Violence Recovery Program (VRP) at Fenway Community Health was founded in 1986. The VRP provides counseling, support groups, advocacy, and referral services to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) victims of bias crime, domestic violence, sexual assault and police misconduct. Other services include a support group for LGBT domestic violence survivors, the region's only support group for male survivors of rape and sexual assault, advocacy with the courts and police, and assistance with victim compensation. We offer counseling and advocacy in both English and Spanish. Fenway Health: LGBT Aging Project http://fenwayhealth.org/the-fenway-institute/lgbt-aging-project/ The LGBT Aging Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender older adults have equal access to the life-prolonging benefits, protections, services and institutions that their heterosexual neighbors take for granted. Fenway Health: LGBT Family & Parenting Services http://fenwayhealth.org/care/wellness-resources/lgbt-family-services/ Fenway was one of the first in the nation to offer alternative insemination services to lesbians and today they continue to provide medical alternatives for achieving conception, as well as a support network, education, and advocacy. Fenway also provides resources, information, and educational services to LGBT-headed families. They hold educational presentations where parents can network. They offer adoption resources, legal referrals, surrogacy resources and other information for prospective LGBT parents. Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) Massachusetts Chapter Email: massachusetts@chapters.glsen.org The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is a national organization making schools safer for ALL students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. GLSEN strives to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. They believe that such an atmosphere engenders a positive sense of self, which is the basis of educational achievement and personal growth. Since homophobia and heterosexism undermine a healthy school climate, they work to educate teachers, students, and the public at large about the damaging effects these forces have on youth and adults alike. GLESEN recognizes that forces such as racism and sexism have similarly adverse impacts on communities, and they support schools in seeking to redress all such inequities. GLSEN seeks to develop school climates where difference is valued for the positive contribution it makes in creating a more vibrant and diverse community. GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defender (GLAD) http://www.glad.org Email: gladlaw@glad.org Founded in 1978, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) is New England's leading legal rights organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation, HIV status and gender identity and expression. GLAD has a full-time legal staff who focus on providing litigation, advocacy, and educational work in all areas of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civil rights and the rights of people living with HIV. Through strategic litigation, public policy advocacy, and education, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders works in New England and nationally to create a just society free of discrimination based on gender identity and expression, HIV status, and sexual orientation. HBGC (Hispanic Black Gay Coalition) http://www.hbgc-boston.org Email: jsurlavargas@hbgc-boston.org HBGC (Hispanic Black Gay Coalition) is one of few non-profit organizations in Boston dedicated to the unique and complex needs of the Black, Hispanic and Latino LGBT community. Founded in 2009 to unite and give a voice to LGBT individuals of color, HBGC works to inspire and empower Hispanic, Latino and Black LGBT individuals to improve their livelihood through activism, education, community outreach, and counseling. Keshet Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender (GLBT) http://www.keshetonline.org Email: info@boston-keshet.org Keshet seeks to create a fully welcoming and inclusive Jewish community for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Jews in Greater Boston. Keshet develops leadership for change among GLBT Jews and allies to affect concrete changes in Jewish institutions' policies and cultures. Keshet also creates opportunities for GLBT Jews to come together, celebrate, and explore their Jewish identities in an affirming environment. Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) http://www.masstpc.org Email: info@masstpc.org The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition is dedicated to ending discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. They envision a world where persons of all genders are treated with respect and fully participate in all areas of society, free from fear of prohibition, harassment or violence based on their gender identity and/or expression. To that end they educate the public, advocate with state, local, and federal government, engage in political activism, and encourage empowerment of community members through collective action. North Shore Alliance of GLBTQ Youth https://www.nagly.org/about-us Email: Steve@nagly.org nAGLY is a place where youth can discuss issues of importance to them, to explore their identities, to build self-awareness, and to learn skills for being safe and healthy. Through group building and community service opportunities, the youth and staff at nAGLY have created a strong community which promotes respect for self and for others. Youth of all sexual orientations, gender identities, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, classes, and abilities are welcome and celebrated. Young people who are unsure or questioning are supported as they remain in transition or examine possibilities carefully and in a developmentally appropriate manner. nAGLY is run by both peer leaders and trained adult advisors who are mandated reporters and are trained to refer participants to outside resources. Queer Asian Pacific Alliance http://www.qapa.org/ Email: qapa@qapa.org Founded in 1979, QAPA, formerly AMALGM, is the oldest Asian queer organization in the United States. QAPA is committed to providing a supportive social, political, and educational environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning people of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage (this is inclusive of A/PIs, A/PI Americans and those who are of mixed A/PI heritage) in the Boston and New England area. We currently have over 200 active members in the New England area, plus many more ex-members spread around the world. SpeakOUT Boston https://www.speakoutboston.org/ Email: info@speakoutboston.org SpeakOUT is a community of speakers working to create a world free of homo-bi-trans-phobia and other forms of prejudice by telling the truths of our lives. They do so by conducting educational programs about LGBTQIA* lives and issues, training individuals and organizations to use public speaking as a means of creating positive cultural change, and sharing their lives and experiences publicly in order to support those struggling with sexuality and gender identity. They engage audiences in honest dialogue, and in keeping with their motto "Ask Us Anything," invite any questions that may challenge harmful stereotypes and misconceptions. TransCEND (Transgender Care and Education Needs Diversity) http://www.masstpc.org/get-help/resources/transcend/ TransCEND (Transgender Care and Education Needs Diversity) is a program of AIDS Action Committee and is affiliated with Fenway Health. Founded in 2005, TransCEND is Boston’s first program by and for Transgender Women. In addition to connecting Trans clients to culturally competent health care, they do HIV, HCV, and STI counseling and testing, prevention counseling services, needle exchange for hormones, housing search, homelessness support, legal and mental health referrals, and transition advice, including navigating the fast-changing trans-inclusive health insurance coverage options in Massachusetts. They also help clients learn to negotiate social settings and safer sex. TransCEND offers one-on-one support, group support, and appointment accompaniment for medical care and legal name change. TransCEND primarily serves Trans Women and their partners, but always welcome all people regardless of how you identify on the gender spectrum. TransCEND also offers information and support for medical and mental health professionals, educators, and allies interested in supporting transgender clients. Drop-ins welcomed, appointments recommended. LGBT National Help Center http://www.glbtnationalhelpcenter.org Hotline(s): All Ages National Hotline: 888-843-4564, SAGE Elder Hotline: 888-234-7243 LGBT National Youth Talkline: 1-800-246-7743 Email: help@LGBThotline.org The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) National Help Center, founded in 1996, is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that provides vital peer-support, community connections and resource information to people with questions regarding sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Utilizing a diverse group of LGBT volunteers, they operate three national hotlines, the LGBT National Hotline, the LGBT National Youth Talkline, and the SAGE LGBT Elder Hotline as well as private, volunteer one-to-one online chat, that helps both youth and adults with coming-out issues, safer-sex information, school bullying, family concerns, relationship problems and a lot more. The National Help Center also maintains the largest collection of resources for the LGBT community in the United States, with 15,000 local resources for cities and towns across the country. http://www.sageusa.org/ Hotline(s): SAGE LGBT Elder Hotline - 1-888-234-SAGE (7243) Email: info@sageusa.org Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) is the country's largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) older adults. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources for LGBT older adults and their caregivers, advocates for public policy changes that address the needs of LGBT older people, and provides training for aging providers and LGBT organizations, largely through its National Resource Center on LGBT Aging. With offices in New York City, Washington, DC and Chicago, SAGE coordinates a growing network of 28 local SAGE affiliates in 21 states and the District of Columbia. SAGE operates a hotline where older adults can call and talk to supportive, non-judgmental peer. Hours are: Monday to Friday: 4pm-midnight ET and Saturday: Noon-5pm ET. http://www.thetrevorproject.org/ Hotline(s): 866-488-7386 1-202-304-1200 (Text Line) Email: info@thetrevorproject.org Founded in 1998 by the creators of the Academy Award®-winning short film TREVOR, The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young people ages 13-24. In addition to providing a 24/7 national crisis intervention and suicide prevention lifeline for LGBTQ youth, the organization also provides TrevorChat, a free confidential, secure instant messaging service available from 3-9pm ET, and TrevorText, where youth can text a trained Trevor counselor for support and crisis intervention on Fridays from 4-8pm at 202-304-1200. Trans Lifeline http://www.translifeline.org/ Hotline(s): (877) 565-8860 , Canada (877) 330-6366 Email: contact@translifeline.org This line is primarily for transgender people experiencing a crisis. This includes people who may be struggling with their gender identity and are not sure that they are transgender. Their goal is to prevent self-harm; however, they welcome the call of any transgender person in need. They will help connect the caller with services that can help them meet that need. Campus Pride http://www.campuspride.org Email: info@campuspride.org Campus Pride represents the leading national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization for student leaders and campus groups working to create a safer college environment for LGBTQ students. The organization is a volunteer-driven network “for” and “by” student leaders. The primary objective of Campus Pride is to develop necessary resources, programs and services to support LGBTQ and ally students on college campuses across the United States. Campus Pride Index http://www.campusprideindex.org/ Since 2007, the Campus Pride Index has been the premier LGBTQ national benchmarking tool for colleges and universities to create safer, more inclusive campus communities. The FREE online tool allows prospective students, families/parents and those interested in higher education to search a database of LGBTQ-friendly campuses who have come out to improve the academic experience and quality of campus life. The Campus Pride Index sets the bar higher for LGBTQ-inclusive policies, programs and practices. The index is owned and operated by Campus Pride, the leading national nonprofit organization for student leaders and campus groups working to create safer, more LGBTQ-friendly learning environments at colleges and universities. The index is supported under the Campus Pride Q Research Institute for Higher Education as well as benefits from strategic partnerships with professional organizations in higher education and related LGBTQ nonprofit organizations. Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE) http://www.colage.org (828) 782-1938 (Kaley-Program & Chapter Inquiries) Email: colage@colage.org COLAGE is a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) parents. This origanization builds community and works toward social justice through youth empowerment, leadership development, education, and advocacy. They envision a world in which youth with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) parents are connected to a broad community of peers and mentors, are recognized as the authorities of their shared experiences, belong to respected and valued family structures, and have the tools and support to create and maintain a just society. http://forge-forward.org/ Email: AskFORGE@forge-forward.org FORGE is a national transgender anti-violence organization, founded in 1994. Since 2009, FORGE has been federally funded to provide direct services to transgender, gender non-conforming and gender non-binary survivors of sexual assault. Since 2011, FORGE has served as the only transgender-focused organization federally funded to provide training and technical assistance to providers around the country who work with transgender survivors of sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking. In addition to providing over 50 hours of recorded webinars on a variety of topics, visitors to their website can find a range of information including how to receive more education as a professional. Survivors, family members, friends and other supporters can find a range of information about finding support locally or find information about how to support their loved one. http://www.genderspectrum.org Email: info@genderspectrum.org Gender Spectrum’s mission is to create a gender-inclusive world for all children and youth. To accomplish this, they help families, organizations, and institutions increase understandings of gender and consider the implications that evolving views have for everyone. Gender Spectrum offers resources to empower individuals' relationships, work, and interactions with youth and children. From how-to guides, to respected research, to sample training materials, this wesbite provides the tools necessary to create gender inclusive environments in homes, offices, and communities. It Gets Better Project http://www.itgetsbetter.org/ The It Gets Better Project's mission is to communicate to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth around the world that it gets better, and to create and inspire the changes needed to make it better for them. Growing up isn’t easy. Many young people face daily tormenting and bullying, leading them to feel like they have nowhere to turn. This is especially true for LGBT kids and teens, who often hide their sexuality for fear of bullying. Without other openly gay adults and mentors in their lives, they can't imagine what their future may hold. In many instances, gay and lesbian adolescents are taunted — even tortured — simply for being themselves. The It Gets Better Project was created to show young LGBT people the levels of happiness, potential, and positivity their lives will reach – if they can just get through their teen years. The It Gets Better Project wants to remind teenagers in the LGBT community that they are not alone — and it WILL get better. http://www.lambdalegal.org Founded in 1973, Lambda Legal is the oldest and largest national legal organization whose mission is to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work. Lambda Legal’s Help Desk provides information and resources regarding discrimination related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and HIV status. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, they do not charge their clients for legal representation or advocacy, and they receive no government funding. They depend on contributions from supporters around the country. National Resource Center on LGBT Aging http://www.lgbtagingcenter.org/index.cfm Email: info@lgbtagingcenter.org The National Resource Center on LGBT Aging is the country's first and only technical assistance resource center aimed at improving the quality of services and supports offered to lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender older adults. Established in 2010 through a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Resource Center on LGBT Aging provides training, technical assistance and educational resources to aging providers, LGBT organizations and LGBT older adults. The center is led by SAGE, in collaboration with 18 leading organizations from around the country. Point Foundation http://www.thepointfoundation.org/ Email: info@thepointfoundation.org The Point Foundation provides financial support, mentoring and hope to meritorious students who are marginalized due to sexual orientation, gender expression or gender identity. T-VOX http://t-vox.org/ The advice site is the main focus of T-Vox. The primary goal of T-Vox is to create an extensive library of topics that cover every aspect of subjects relating to genderqueerness, intersexuality and transsexuality. They now have over 500 pages of information and resources and recently launched their advice blog to provide more in-depth advice and information on specific topics of interest to users’ real lives. True Colors - Sexual Minority Youth & Family Services http://www.ourtruecolors.org/ True Colors is a non-profit organization that works with other social service agencies, schools, organizations, and within communities to ensure that the needs of sexual and gender minority youth are both recognized and competently met. The organization trains more than 2400 people annually, organizes the largest LGBT youth conference in the country with more than 3000 attendees and manages the state’s only LGBT mentoring program. True Colors has been spotlighted by both national and local media for their expertise in LGBTI youth issues. Recent articles about Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity More transgender youth seeking care in U.S. military health system, by Will Boggs, MD, Reuters , Mar 26 2019. Fresh Challenges To State Exclusions On Transgender Health Coverage, by Keren Landman, NPR , Mar 12 2019. One in four pre-teen suicides may be LGBT youth, by Lisa Rapaport , Reuters , Feb 21 2019. More publications on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity American Academy of Pediatrics. (2015). Victims of bullying fare worse in the long run than maltreated children. American Society for the Positive Care of Children. (2015). Bullying Statistics and Information. American Psychological Association. 2012. APA on children raised by gay and lesbian parents. Durso, L.E., & Gates, G.J. (2012). Serving Our Youth: Findings from a National Survey of Service Providers Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth who are Homeless or At Risk of Becoming Homeless. Los Angeles: The Williams Institute with True Colors Fund and The Palette Fund. Gates, G. (2013). LGBT parenting in the United States. The Williams Institute. Human Rights Campaign. (2010). Workplace Discrimination Laws and Policies. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. (2015). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected hate violence in 2014.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line853
__label__wiki	0.758068	0.758068	More Evidence That Youthful Blood Can Reverse The Effects Of Aging Filed to:longevity A few years ago, scientists from Stanford discovered that it's possible to reverse cognitive decline in old mice by injecting them with the blood of the young. Now, researchers have isolated the mechanism responsible for this rejuvenation — and it's a protein that's found in humans as well. Back in 2012, when Stanford University scientist Saul Villeda showed that young blood has rejuvenating qualities, he wasn't entirely sure how it reversed the effects of cognitive decline — but he suspected that it has something to do with the limited production of stem cells as we get older. Could injecting yourself with blood of the young reverse the aging process? It would appear that the Slovak-Hungarian "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Báthory may have been on to… Supercentenarian's Blood Provides Clues To Extending Human Life Prior to her death at the tender age of 115, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was the world's oldest… And now, two new studies suggest he was on the right track. Recharging Body and Brain The independent research papers, one from Harvard and one from Stanford, are reporting that injections of a protein, or growth factor, known as GDF11 is capable of rejuvenating a number of seemingly unrelated physiological aspects. Above: Reconstructions of blood vessels in an old mouse's brain (left) and in an old mouse that received young mouse blood. Lida Katsimpardi. The Harvard study, which now appears in Science, used the protein to improve the exercise capability and skeletal muscle function of mice (tests showed improvements in recovery from muscle injury, along with improved performance on running and grip strength tasks). The Stanford researchers showed that the transfusions encouraged the growth of new blood vessels and improved the function of the olfactory region of the brains of older mice, allowing them to detect smells just as well as younger mice. The injected mice were also shown to perform better on memory tests than mice of the same age that hadn't received the youthful blood plasma. Previously, GDF11 was shown to make the failing hearts in aging mice appear more like those of young healthy mice. As noted, humans have this protein, too. According to Amy Wagers and Lee Rubin of Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (HSCRB), barring unexpected developments, they expect to have GDF11 in human clinical trials within three to five years. The goal is to develop interventions that treat neurodegnerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. In a prepared statement, HSCRB co-chair Doug Melton said that he couldn't recall a more exciting finding to come from stem cell science and clever experiments. This should give us all hope for a healthier future. We all wonder why we were stronger and mentally more agile when young, and these two unusually exciting papers actually point to a possible answer: the higher levels of the protein GDF11 we have when young. There seems to be little question that, at least in animals, GDF11 has an amazing capacity to restore aging muscle and brain function. It's definitely an amazing discovery — and the first example of a rejuvenation factor that's naturally produced by our own bodies, one that's capable of reversing (or slowing) aging in multiple tissues. Restoring Stem Cell Function Both research teams examined the effect of GDF11 in two ways. First, they created a parabiotic system in which two mice were surgically joined, so that the blood of the younger mouse could circulate through the older mouse. The second method involved direct injections of the protein into the older mice. Subsequent tests, along with comparisons to control groups, revealed the therapeutic effects of the procedure. Previous studies have shown that GDF11 works by regulating and restoring stem cell activity. This protein is abundant in young organisms, but drops off as animals age. After the experiments, 3D reconstructions of the brain and fMRI scans showed more new blood vessels and more blood flow, both of which are normally associated with younger, healthier brain tissue. The researchers speculate that GDF11 improves vascularity and blood flow, which is associated with increased brain re-growth. "However, the increased blood flow should have more widespread effects on brain function," noted Rubin. "We do think that, at least in principle, there will be a way to reverse some of the cognitive decline that takes place during aging, perhaps even with a single protein. It could be that a molecule like GDF11, or GDF11 itself, could [reverse the damage of aging]." Rubin says that a potential drug is not "out of the question." Treating Humans To date, the only other interventions known to reverse or slow aging have been caloric restriction, rapamycin, and the administration of nicotinamide mono nucleotide (NMN). But one of the primary advantages of GDF11 is that it's found naturally in the blood. Writing in ScienceNews, Jocelyn Kaiser discusses the potential for human applications: Harvard has filed for patents on GDF11, and Wagers says she and her colleagues are "in the process of talking with people" about commercializing it to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's and heart disease. Giving GDF11 itself "would require huge amounts of protein," Wagers says, so it may be better to use a modified form or to target the GDF11 pathway with a different molecule. "These are tractable problems," Wagers says. "The most important hurdle was figuring out a pathway to go after." Temple agrees that GDF11 has therapeutic promise, but she says she will remain cautious until more is known about GDF11's mechanism. She also notes that some of the "old" mice in the Harvard brain studies were only middle-aged, and whether the effects would hold up in elderly people is unclear. "It's a matter of where you can step in," she says. Nor have any studies yet shown that the treated mice live longer. Additional info via ScienceNow & Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Top image: The Moth Diaries.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line855
__label__wiki	0.572842	0.572842	Sarah Connor's Worst Nightmares All Come True Filed to:Sarah Connor Chronicles recap Well, I didn't see that coming. Any of that, really. My jaw dropped multiple times during last night's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, an episode I had to watch twice in a row. Spoiler rampage! I've been a huge fan of T:SCC since its beginnings, but last night's episode felt like a whole new level. It was the first time I really thought this show might go down in history as one of the best science fiction shows of all time. We're approaching Battlestar Galactica/The Prisoner levels of greatness. If the show gets a third season - which seems unlikely, since its ratings took a dive again, after a few weeks of positive trends - we could be looking at a whole new era of brilliance. You know a show is doing something right when the startling twists, like a character dying or another character getting arrested in a high-profile way, aren't the thing your brain buzzes about afterwards. For me, it was the scene above: John Henry knows he's surrounded by robots. He's seen two robots fighting, and he's known for some time that Catherine Weaver is not human. He's learned to lie, and he's learning to sacrifice human life when necessary. But at the same time, the survival of the human race may depend on him. And then Weaver hits us with the really big left turn: instead of being Abel to Skynet's Cain, John Henry may actually be God. (Which would mean that Skynet is in competition with a third A.I.? And John Henry is going to judge them both? That would make sense, if this competing A.I. sent Catherine Weaver back from the future to create John Henry. And yet, the mind boggles.) I can already see how this might turn out: John Henry is the potential savior of humanity, an A.I. with a conscience, however flawed. And now he's on John Connor's radar, which means he and his pet Terminator are going to do their level best to wipe him out. If Connor succeeds, he may be dooming humanity to the same fate he's been struggling to prevent all these years. So yes, Derek died last night - my favorite character on the show - and it was done in a way television deaths never happen. Randomly, without fanfare, and in the middle of an episode. Just when you least expect it, in other words. It's set up, very slightly, by the scene in the graveyard where he and John talk, once again, about how everyone dies for John. (Which is also well handled, because at this point, it's a conversation Derek and John have had so often, they don't even need to go over it again.) But of course, in the end, Derek doesn't die for John. If anything, he dies for Savannah Weaver. It was a great death, but at the same time, I'm going to miss Derek if this show comes back without him. It's interesting that Skynet sent humans to kill the Connors, but then it anted up and sent a Terminator after Savannah. Maybe because it knew that Savannah's mom was one of the high-end Terminators herself? I'm left wondering if this is Future Skynet, or Present Skynet, orchestrating this new wave of destruction. It was Present Skynet that launched the worm that attacked John Henry last week, so it's implied that Present Skynet is also behind the other mayhem. As John Henry was wondering about his "brother," I was wondering what Skynet would make of such a powerful A.I. being hooked up to a human avatar - in some ways, it seems like a major downgrade, forcing all that intelligence to interact through such a narrow-bandwidth portal. The new and improved, smarter John Connor - the one who figured out Riley's secret - was in full effect last night, tracking down Savannah in time to save her, and then figuring out who/what John Henry was and what Cromartie's body was doing, before Sarah or Cameron did. Sarah was on the verge of walking into a major trap - even worse than the one she actually did walk into - before John realized that Zeira Corp. was creating a Skynet-esque A.I., and Catherine Weaver was at the center of all this. (Although Cameron was right - they never should have let Ellison get away with stealing Beastwizard's body. I loved her "I don't want to kill everybody. Just him.") Speaking of Ellison, he apparently still doesn't know that Catherine Weaver is a Terminator, but he definitely has an inkling about what she's up to - or what she's apparently up to. He's become quite a slippery character, handling a suspicious cop with ease. And look at the way he played Sarah Connor - "Oh my. I was just minding my own business, and wherever I turn, there you are." Ellison is in this up to his neck, but he still manages to act like he's just passing through. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had called the cops to come get Sarah Connor - since he knows what she would do to John Henry - and then lied about it to John. For all his Bible thumping, he's a bit of a cynic, and maybe that's the point: John Henry needs a dash of realism mixed in with his ethics. (Oh, and I loved the whole thing about Savannah's teacher thinking John Henry is a MySpace predator.) The conversation between the cop and Catherine Weaver, about her pet eel, was pretty revealing. It seemed like the cop was trying to size up Weaver, and everything he found out about her eel applied to her too. She stays in hiding, she only attacks when provoked. (Or when someone tries to pee on her.) She's willing to kill her own kind, when necessary. As for Sarah herself, she seemed even harder hit by the deaths of Charley and Derek than John was. She's lost weight - which could be due to stress, instead of cancer - and even now that her breast lump turned out to be a false alarm, she's still contemplating her own mortality. With Derek and Charley both out of the picture, John is running out of protectors if anything happens to Sarah - which, of course, it just did. (Of course, one of the promo stills from next week's episode shows Sarah and John entering Zeira Corp. with James Ellison, so she's not staying locked up forever.) Too late, Sarah is realizing that John's going to be left alone with Cameron - the fate Jesse tried so hard to prevent. Maybe Jesse was right after all?	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line856
__label__cc	0.722276	0.277724	A Common Basis for Dialogue October 15, 2018 admin No Comments Sarojini Henry does a great job in offering useful suggestions for deepening the science-religion conversation The Encounter of Faith and Science in Inter-Religious Dialogue By Sarojini Henry Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Delhi 221 Pages, Rs. 200 Reviewed by A Staff Writer Interfaith dialogue has today become an existential necessity for global peace and prosperity. Such dialogue requires some basic common ground. In this fascinating book, Indian Christian scholar Sarojini Henry proposes the encounter between religion/theology and science as a common basis for dialogue between people from different faith backgrounds. Partnership Between Science and Religion Henry remarks that for a long time, under the influence of modern thinking, science was assigned a cognitive superiority because its tenets were said to be subject to verification, while religion, which was often taken to be subjective, was dismissed by many as irrational. But things are changing today. Henry notes that in recent decades the conversation between science and religion has become a prominent discourse, engaging the attention of scientists, philosophers and theologians. There have been several attempts to establish a partnership between science and religion in the hope that this may provide greater understanding of the reality in which we live. This partnership needs to take into account diverse religious faiths—each of them has something useful to contribute to the discussion. In the opening chapter, Henry explores diverse ways of envisaging the relationship between science and religion. An earlier model posited them as being in conflict. In contemporary times, however, this model’s appeal has declined, Henry suggests. Today, there is a growing tendency to recognise religion and science as partners, a trend that Henry considers as “one of the most exciting and controversial intellectual projects of our time.” Findings of Contemporary Science The partnership model is becoming increasingly acceptable especially given ‘limited questions’ that arise in science but that cannot be answered by it—questions that often express our wonder at the mystery of life, such as: Why is the world the way it is? Why is there a world at all? Why are the laws of nature as they are? What is the origin of things? Likewise, many theologians are now aware that they cannot pursue their theological commitments and formulate their religious beliefs without taking into account the findings of contemporary science. In other words, today many people realise that science and religion are complementary to each other, a far cry from the earlier model that posited them as being in conflict. Henry sees the growing positive relationship between religion and science as undermining the claims of scientism—the idea that the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge. Scientism, she tells us, is often coupled with materialism, which claims that matter is the only reality of the universe and that there are no supernatural forces—which makes it basically the same as atheism. Today, many scientists have recognized the falsity of this perspective, and, in the climate of growing cognitive pluralism, recognize the value of other forms of knowledge, including religious. This trend has been bolstered by the challenges posed by ‘Postmodernism’, which dismisses all authoritarian claims, including of scientific and religious absolutism, and argues that all forms of knowledge are socially conditioned. In a climate when scientism’s narrow view of rationality has come to be increasingly challenged, more people, including scientists, are open to diverse forms of rationality, including those supplied by religion and spirituality. This opens up a more integrated model of knowledge. The science-religion relationship, Henry contends, can contribute significantly to inter-religious conversation. It can provide a good common round for inter-religious meetings. Henry identifies certain common themes in the science-religion interface that can be employed in this regard. One of these is cosmology—perspectives on the origin of the universe. Another is eschatology, or the end times. Yet another is the concept of the human person. Henry provides a brief account of some teachings on these issues in five different religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism—as well as in science. She also highlights teachings from various religions in relation to some crucial ethical challenges posed by modern technology. This exploration suggests that religions can provide a moral framework for guiding scientific research and technology. Inspired by wisdom from their own religious traditions on this large range of issues and sharing this wisdom with others, people from diverse religious backgrounds can meaningfully work for the common good—of not just the human species but of all creation: That is one major lesson from this truly beautiful book. Henry does a great job in offering useful suggestions for deepening the science-religion conversation and for expanding the common ground for interfaith dialogue and inter-community solidarity. Rooh-e-Rumi: Seeking God is Seeking Love Reviewed by Qalamdar Name of the Book: Rooh-e-Rumi: Seeking God is Seeking Love Author: Mamta Sehgal Published by Notion... More Talaash: A Search for the True Meaning of Life Reviewed by Qalamdar Name of the Book: Talaash: A Search for the True Meaning of Life Author: AiR (Atman in Ravi) Publis... More The Major Task In this booklet, Maulana Sahib explains various terms associated with this mission, such as shahadah (or ‘witnessi... More A Jesuit Among Sufis Name of the Book: A Jesuit Among Sufis Author: Paul Jackson Published by Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, Anand ([email protected] More A Delightful Book for Children Written with young hearts in mind, this short, easy-to-read book is a wonderful way to introduce children to the prayers... More Making of a ‘Great’ Scientist In this wonderful book, author Joseph Mani documents the personal life of nine well-known men and women who have played ... More Prev Post The Amazing Saudi Women Scientists You Need To Know Next Post Muslims in Kolkata Find a Place to Call Home The Abrahamic Reunion King Salman’s Extravagant Morocco Trip	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line858
__label__cc	0.549479	0.450521	2015 September 28 Contemporary Designer Jewels Signature AuctionAuction #5232 Diamond, Platinum Necklace, Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co.. ... Diamond, Platinum Necklace, Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co. The necklace features a round brilliant-cut diamond weighing approximately 0.25 carat, set in platinum, marked Peretti, Tiffany & Co. Gross weight 2.50 grams. Length: 15-3/4 inches Condition Report*: Designer: Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co. Diamond Average Color: G-H-I Diamond Average Clarity: VS Diamond Shapes: Round Brilliant-cut Diamond Count: 1 - 25 Overall Condition: Very Good Notes: Marked: Tiffany & Co. Pt950 33193696 © Peretti. A classic necklace. A signed Tiffany & Co. pouch accompanies the necklace. Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co.: One of a handful of designer’s permitted to utilize their name in association with Tiffany & Co., Elsa Peretti joined the firm in 1974. She brought to them a reputation for sleek, elegant designs honed from her work as an established designer for Halston. She achieved great fame for her “diamonds by the yard” and “bean” lines designed for Tiffany & Co. She has won the COTY Award, Counsel of Fashion Designers Award, and an honorary Doctorate from the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 2009, the British Museum honored her with an exhibition and included her in their permanent 20th Century Collection.	cc/2020-05/en_head_0059.json.gz/line859

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