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Hypnosis is the process of putting people into a highly suggestive trance like state by using various verbal commands and thought processes. There is a huge amount of debate about the amount of influence a hypnotist can have on someone and on exactly what happens to the brain when someone is hypnotized However it is widely accepted that hypnosis cannot make people perform actions that they would not be consciously willing to do. (So all those stage performer hypnotists you may have seen have some serious questions to answer).
Cally uses hypnotherapy to help people feel empowered in mind and body. Hypnotherapy can be integrated into your health care to address sleep problems, stress relief, general anxiousness, freedom from smoking, weight management, pain management, self-confidence, and fears that get in the way of daily life. Cally will teach you self-hypnosis, provide you with a list of strategies and resources for relaxation, and a digital audio file for reinforcement at home.
This coaching is for a minimum of six months up to one year. The focus is to identify and prioritize developmental issues and goals with an action plan. The coach will gather data via a client questionnaire, a 360 degree feedback process, and/or other diagnostic assessments such as Myers-Briggs, Strength Finders, etc. The coach is responsible for working with the executive to determine the plan, its implementation and subsequent follow-up. The coach also lends support to the client in addressing and focusing on strategic issues of the organization, while simultaneously addressing personal developmental issues.
Sometimes I think of a story for a teaching example later, and I’m unable to contact the client for permission. In these situations, I change identifying details. This can be tricky, because simply omitting the name, time, and place of the event you’re describing is not enough to ensure that someone who knows the client well would not recognize the story. Certain details, like a unique physical trait combined with a sport or interest could be enough to identify the client. Therefore, I change those types of details as well.
We don’t aim to use scare tactics because research from the field of neuropsychology has shown that scaring smokers doesn't help them stop (1) In fact what most smokers do when they’ve been scared is…reach for the cigarettes. Scary anti-smoking pictures of, for example, diseased lungs have been show not to deter smoking but stimulate a part of the brain known as the “craving spot.” (1) (2)
Some popular beliefs attached to weight loss have been shown to either have less effect on weight loss as commonly believed or are actively unhealthy. According to Harvard Health, the idea of metabolism being the "key to weight" is "part truth and part myth" as while metabolism does affect weight loss, external forces such as diet and exercise have an equal effect.[43] They also commented that the idea of changing one's rate of metabolism is under debate.[43] Diet plans in fitness magazines are also often believed to be effective, but may actually be harmful by limiting the daily intake of important calories and nutrients which can be detrimental depending on the person and are even capable of driving individuals away from weight loss.[44]
Many of the clucking chicken images are the result of hypnosis’s forefather, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). Mesmer believed that there was an invisible force, a cosmic energy, that could be harnessed by one person to influence another person’s behavior. While his theory was wrong, the techniques he used were effective. These techniques were picked up on and developed over the coming years for therapeutic and medical purposes. Sigmund Freud, for instance, used hypnosis techniques. In the mid-1900s, hypnotherapy as we know it evolved. Milton Erickson (1901-1980) pioneered “indirect hypnosis,” during which therapists work with individual patients to shift their perceptions of themselves and their issues.
A person with depression experiences a wide variety of emotions. According to the University of New Hampshire, hypnotherapy can help a person learn to reduce and/or better control feelings of anxiety, stress, and sadness. Hypnotherapy is also used to treat negative behaviors that could be worsening a person’s depression. These behaviors may include smoking and poor eating and sleeping habits.
Often, when an executive coach is engaged, business transformation is top of mind. Executive coaching efforts often focus on change management, yielding important results. It is common for organizations to seek out executive coaches who are adept at developing new business practices, implementing new technologies, or adopting new strategies. The tangible organizational benefits of executive coaching are manifold. Research by Performance Sales Executive Council found that effective coaching directly increased sales performance. On average, executive coaching of core sales representatives resulted in an 8 percent performance increase. A study published in the Manchester Review that primarily investigated executives from Fortune 1000 companies reported that executive coaching leads to improved customer service (39 percent frequency), cost reduction (23 percent) and increased bottom-line profitability (22 percent).
“Learning hypnotherapy does not commit you to drastically changing your therapy practice,” says hypnotherapist Catherine Reiss. “The training will allow you to more quickly and effectively get to the cause of your clients’ unwanted behaviors and the feelings they present with it, but it also facilitates the use of trance in more traditional formats.”
It might take the full 10 years, but coaching will begin to rise in popularity over consulting. Aging demographics will demand a vast transfer of institutional, industry and professional wisdom. Consulting augments gaps in knowledge, but coaching emphasizes the transfer of wisdom. Smart young leaders will seek to learn, as talent becomes harder to "rent." - Jim Vaselopulos, Rafti Advisors, Inc.
With the emphasis on sports and exercise in society, it’s no wonder that sports psychology is a growing specialty within the broader field psychology. Sports psychologists examine the interrelation between human psychology and athletic performance, applying their skills and knowledge to enhance performance and maximize the benefits of physical activity.
Specialists in this area commonly work alongside other professionals who make up the team support system, such as coaches, trainers, physical therapists and game strategists. In a corporate setting, sports psychologists may be called upon by HR managers or department heads to develop team-building strategies for colleagues of a particular business or organization.
Across all business sectors and areas of professional practice, workers confront significant transitions. When transitioning into leadership roles, they cannot rely on their old ways of conducting themselves. They must transform their mindset and behavior patterns in order to succeed in the new role. Technical skills and know-how are no longer sufficient. They must also learn to collaborate with C-suite executives, develop novel business opportunities, and inspire their colleagues and direct reports with a well-articulated vision of success.
Consider Jim Mirabella, an executive earmarked for leadership at an electronic games manufacturer. Ever since the CEO had promoted him to head of marketing, Mirabella had become impossible to work with. Colleagues complained that he hoarded information about company strategy, market indicators, sales forecasts, and the like. The theory circulating through the grapevine was that Mirabella’s aim was to weaken junior executives’ ability to make informed contributions during inter-divisional strategic-planning sessions. He was assigned an executive coach.
Luke O’Neil for The Atlantic reviewed quit smoking hypnotherapy when he tried the treatment himself. He said “I left the session feeling noticeably different. I sat in my car outside for a half hour and did not smoke. I went to dinner nearby and sat, and had a drink, and did not smoke. Eventually I caved in to the craving, but I didn't like it. I'm still smoking, I just don't enjoy them anywhere near as much as I used to anymore.”
I have no prior experience with hypnosis. I went into this with no expectations, but I did have the willingness to quit smoking. I have tried nicoderm patches, nicoderm gum, Chantix, Wellbutrin, cold turkey, weaning off, etc...for the last two years. The most I ever got were 28 agonizing days. The cravings never went away. Then I met with Rita Black and here I am 6 weeks later to share how amazed I am with the success of our 1 meeting! I walked out of Rita's office a non-smoker in every way. Rita explained to me how to manage the "cravings" if and when they come. I have totally regained my power against smoking. I highly recommend this life saving service (not to mention, financial savings).
As the practice of sport psychology expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s, some practitioners expressed concern that the field lacked uniformity and needed consistency to become "a good profession."[25] The issues of graduate program accreditation and the uniform training of graduate students in sport psychology were considered by some to be necessary to promote the field of sport psychology, educate the public on what a sport psychologist does, and ensure an open job market for practitioners.[26] However, Hale and Danish (1999) argued that accreditation of graduate programs was not necessary and did not guarantee uniformity. Instead, these authors proposed a special practicum in applied sport psychology that included greater contact hours with clients and closer supervision.[27]
“With hypnosis, you might help someone stop smoking by suggesting the taste or smell of cigarettes is worse than it actually is. But a hypnotherapist can also use age regression to examine the impulse that fuels the client’s habit and discover old conclusions and behaviors. The healing will take place when the client creates new conclusions about old memories and chooses new behaviors rather than smoking.”
This video will last for 8 hours and will allow you to enjoy a full night of high quality sleep. Simply turn on the video when you go to bed, lay back, relax, and fall asleep. The affirmations in the recording will be absorbed by your subconscious as you sleep, producing fantastic results. At the end of the recording an alarm will sound, and you'll wake up full of positive energy and ready to start your day.
Health coaching is becoming recognized as a new way to help individuals "manage" their illnesses and conditions, especially those of a chronic nature.[21] The coach will use special techniques, personal experience, expertise and encouragement to assist the coachee in bringing his/her behavioral changes about, while aiming for lowered health risks and decreased healthcare costs.[22] The National Society of Health Coaches (NSHC) has differentiated the term health coach from wellness coach.[22] According to the NSHC, health coaches are qualified "to guide those with acute or chronic conditions and/or moderate to high health risk", and wellness coaches provide guidance and inspiration "to otherwise 'healthy' individuals who desire to maintain or improve their overall general health status".[22]
During the next year, Nelson suggested a number of personnel changes. Since those came with the CEO’s backing, the HR director accepted them, no questions asked. Because she was afraid to buck the CEO’s handpicked adviser, the personnel director also said nothing about the problems that ensued. These stemmed from Nelson’s exclusive reliance on his profiling system. For example, in recommending the promotion of one East Coast store manager to regional director of West Coast sales, Nelson ignored the man’s unfamiliarity with the region and the people he was appointed to manage. Not surprisingly, that move—and many of Nelson’s other ill-conceived selections—bombed. To compound the problem, word of Nelson’s status and his often horrific recommendations circulated through the company like wildfire, leading many people to both fear and resent his undue influence over Garvin. The negative emotions Nelson generated were so intense that underperforming, newly promoted managers became the targets of an undeclared, but uniformly embraced, pattern of passive-aggressive behavior by the rank and file. Such behaviors ranged from not attending meetings to botching orders to failing to stock goods in a timely manner.
While coaching has become a recognized intervention, sadly there are still no standards or licensing arrangements which are widely recognized. Professional bodies have continued to develop their own standards, but the lack of regulation means anyone can call themselves a coach. [...] Whether coaching is a profession which requires regulation, or is professional and requires standards, remains a matter of debate.
"Coaching works when it's systematic," says Babson's Hunt, and many organizations use coaching as an integrated part of a larger leadership development program. Increasingly, firms incorporate "360-degree" feedback, using the results to indicate areas in which an executive might benefit from working with a coach. Has your feedback revealed an area in which you would like to improve? Is it a skill you need to refine in order to advance through the organization? Would you benefit from an outside perspective? The answers to these questions help gauge the potential value of coaching.
The link between exercise and psychology has long been recognized. In 1899, William James discussed the importance of exercise, writing it was needed to "furnish the background of sanity, serenity...and make us good-humored and easy of approach."[68] Other researchers noted the connection between exercise and depression, concluding a moderate amount of exercise was more helpful than no exercise in symptom improvement.[69] Additionally, meeting exercise requirements can also aid in alleviating symptoms of avoidance disorders and anxiety, while also providing a higher quality of life for the patient in terms of physical health. [70]
While there is a multitude of different tangible benefits associated with executive coaching, many benefits don't appear as line items on financial statements. Executive coaching often focuses on leadership skills and relationships with managers, direct reports, co-workers, and other stakeholders. In these cases, executive coaches focus on teamwork, problem solving, decision making, and conflict resolution skills. The results can be transformative. A survey reported by Clear Coaching Limited found that executive coaching resulted in improvements in work relationships within a team (50 percent frequency), employees' abilities to see others' perspectives (47 percent), and improved atmosphere (40 percent). In a world where the strength of an organization's culture is increasingly trumping salary levels in terms of importance to employees, these intangible benefits are more relevant than ever.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) William James (1842–1910) Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Edward Thorndike (1874–1949) Carl Jung (1875–1961) John B. Watson (1878–1958) Clark L. Hull (1884–1952) Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Gordon Allport (1897–1967) J. P. Guilford (1897–1987) Carl Rogers (1902–1987) Erik Erikson (1902–1994) B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) Donald O. Hebb (1904–1985) Ernest Hilgard (1904–2001) Harry Harlow (1905–1981) Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) Neal E. Miller (1909–2002) Jerome Bruner (1915–2016) Donald T. Campbell (1916–1996) Hans Eysenck (1916–1997) Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) David McClelland (1917–1998) Leon Festinger (1919–1989) George Armitage Miller (1920–2012) Richard Lazarus (1922–2002) Stanley Schachter (1922–1997) Robert Zajonc (1923–2008) Albert Bandura (b. 1925) Roger Brown (1925–1997) Endel Tulving (b. 1927) Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) Ulric Neisser (1928–2012) Jerome Kagan (b. 1929) Walter Mischel (1930–2018) Elliot Aronson (b. 1932) Daniel Kahneman (b. 1934) Paul Ekman (b. 1934) Michael Posner (b. 1936) Amos Tversky (1937–1996) Bruce McEwen (b. 1938) Larry Squire (b. 1941) Richard E. Nisbett (b. 1941) Martin Seligman (b. 1942) Ed Diener (b. 1946) Shelley E. Taylor (b. 1946) John Anderson (b. 1947) Ronald C. Kessler (b. 1947) Joseph E. LeDoux (b. 1949) Richard Davidson (b. 1951) Susan Fiske (b. 1952) Roy Baumeister (b. 1953)
“We brought Performance Consultants International in to Mubadala to help us launch and deliver an Executive Coaching programme to the top tiers of our organization. We maintained constant contact throughout the set-up phase. We had a true partnership with Performance Consultants who helped us every step of the way, from concept to launch to implementation and ongoing tracking. The launch event wildly exceeded expectations and the ongoing support I needed was always there. I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending them for an Executive Coaching framework in any ambitious organization”
But coaching is not just for tackling new assignments. It can also play an invigorating role. Coaches can help executives "develop new ways to attack old problems," says Vicky Gordon, CEO of the Gordon Group coaching practice in Chicago. "When efforts to change yourself, your team, or your company have failed—you are frustrated or burned out—a coach can be the outside expert to help you get to the root cause and make fundamental changes."
Intentional weight loss is the loss of total body mass as a result of efforts to improve fitness and health, or to change appearance through slimming. Weight loss in individuals who are overweight or obese can reduce health risks,[1] increase fitness,[2] and may delay the onset of diabetes.[1] It could reduce pain and increase movement in people with osteoarthritis of the knee.[2] Weight loss can lead to a reduction in hypertension (high blood pressure), however whether this reduces hypertension-related harm is unclear.[1][not in citation given]
One obvious risk to patients is the insufficiently trained therapist. The inadequately trained therapist can cause harm and distort the normally pleasant experience of hypnotherapy. A second risk for patients is the unscrupulous practitioner who may be both inadequately trained and may have some hidden agenda. These rare individuals are capable of causing great harm to the patient and to the profession. As mentioned above, the patient should carefully scrutinize their chosen therapist before submitting themselves to this dynamic form of therapy.
Sports lovers will likely find the field of sports psychology interesting, but choosing it as a career involves practical considerations—in other words, what’s the job outlook, and what’s the bottom line? As with most jobs, financial compensation largely depends on experience and education level, but as a growing field, sports psychologists have a generally good outlook.
This course examines organizational coaching and surveys the foundational disciplines on which the practice of organizational coaching is based, applicable theories and methods. Coaching will be explored as an intervention and developmental technology. Students are introduced to the practice of coaching and coaching conversation models as well as coaching-related skills including contracting, listening, questioning, designing actions, planning and goal setting, and managing progress and accountability.
Just recently have sport psychologists begun to be recognized for the valuable contributions they make in assisting athletes and their coaches in improving performance during competitive situations, as well as understanding how physical exercise may contribute to the psychological well-being of non-athletes. Many can benefit from sport psychologists: athletes who are trying to improve their performance, injured athletes who are looking for motivation, individuals looking to overcome the pressure of competition, and young children involved in youth sports as well as their parents. Special focus is geared towards psychological assessment of athletes. Assessment can be both, focused on selection of athletes and the team set up of rosters as well as on professional guidance and counseling of single athletes.
According to many sources including the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) which is part of the United States National Library of Medicine and a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hypnosis is scientifically proven to help relieve both mental challenges and physical pains. Hypnosis can alleviate stress and reduce pain after surgeries, has been shown to relieve anxiety in children in the emergency room, and can be useful for managing pain associated with everything from arthritis to migraines. Hypnosis is non-invasive and gives you a way to control pain or discomfort that might otherwise seem out of your hands. Hypnosis shouldn’t be used as a substitute for medical care, but may be an excellent complementary tool that is best provided by a trained therapist or licensed medical provider. The University of Maryland Medical Center shares many conditions for which hypnosis can be useful:
“Hypnosis is a different state of mind associated with four major characteristics,” he said. First is a “highly focused attention on something.” It could be an issue you're having, or a problem you want to address. Second is disassociating oneself from the immediate physical environment. “You focus on the beach in Florida in the middle of a Boston winter,” he said, anticipating my particular winter-addled frame of mind perfectly. “Instead of traveling there, you go there with your mind, and you're fully focused on the beach.”
Some therapists use hypnosis to recover possibly repressed memories they believe are linked to the person's mental disorder. However, the quality and reliability of information recalled by the patient under hypnosis is not always reliable. Additionally, hypnosis can pose a risk of creating false memories -- usually as a result of unintended suggestions or the asking of leading questions by the therapist. For these reasons, hypnosis is no longer considered a common or mainstream part of most forms of psychotherapy. Also, the use of hypnosis for certain mental disorders in which patients may be highly susceptible to suggestion, such as dissociative disorders, remains especially controversial.
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Utah Annual Performance Voice Conference
By admin United States
Description: Attendees learned about the science behind clinical and pedagogical approaches to prevent or care for voice problems affecting performing artists. Topics included the contribution to assessment and care of the injured performing artist by a team of healthcare professionals. Speakers offered scientific and clinical expertise regarding voice science, clinical psychology, speech-language pathology, vocal coaching/singing instruction, and pedagogical instruction on connecting the speaking and singing voice of the actor. Learning Objectives Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to: Identify and describe the roles and contributions of healthcare professionals and singing instructors to the injured voice of the performing artist. Identify and describe the scientific and clinical perspectives on the neuromuscular effects of vocal training on aging and voice production. Identify and describe the impact and strategies for managing anxiety affecting the voice of professional voice users. Identify and describe optimal clinical and pedagogical approaches for connecting the speaking and singing voice of actors.
City/place: Salt Lake City, UT Venue address: University of Utah Eccles Broadcast Center Dumke Conference Room 101 S Wasatch Drive Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
Performer/s: Jonathan Cox, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and associate clinical professor in the Counseling and Psychological Services department at Brigham Young University. He works with many clients with anxiety disorders, and has personal experience with a voice problem. Financial Disclosures: Dr. Cox is employed by Brigham Young University and his registration was waived in association with his participation in this conference. Non-Financial Disclosures: Member of the Utah Psychological Association, and the American Group Psychotherapy Association. Marshall Smith, MD, is a professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. He is a board certified otolaryngologist, Fellowship-trained Pediatric Otolaryngologist, and medical director of the Voice Disorders Center. Dr. Smith’s expertise involves evaluation, medical and surgical care of the voice. Financial Disclosures: Dr. Smith is employed by the University of Utah and his registration was waived in association with his participation in this conference. Dr. Smith is a co-investigator on NIH research grants related to voice and voice disorders. Non-Financial Disclosures: Dr. Smith is a member of the American Laryngological Association. Aaron M. Johnson, MM, PhD, CCC-SLP, is a researcher and speech–language pathologist at the New York University Voice Center. His research examines the effects of vocal training on aging laryngeal muscles. A former professional singer and teacher of singing, his clinical focus is treating voice disorders in performing artists. Financial Disclosures: Dr. Johnson is employed by NYU Langone Health and his registration and travel expenses were provided in association with his participation in this conference. Non-Financial Disclosures: Dr. Johnson has conducted research on the topic of neuromuscular effects of vocal training and aging on the muscles involved in voice production. Tiffany Lyon, MS, CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist at the Voice Disorders Center at the University of Utah. She has specialized in assessment and treatment of individuals with disorders affecting the voice, airway, and swallowing for several years. She enjoys performing with a local choral organization and learning wheel-thrown pottery. Financial Disclosures: Ms. Lyon is employed by the University of Utah Health system and her registration was provided in association with her participation in this conference. Non-Financial Disclosures: Ms. Lyon is a member of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Brian Manternach, DMus, is on the voice faculty of the Department of Theatre at the University of Utah. He holds a Doctor of Music in vocal performance from Indiana University, has been published in the Journal of Singing and Classical Singer, and currently serves as Utah NATS District Governor and PAVA Western Regional Governor. Financial Disclosures: Dr. Manternach is employed by the University of Utah and his registration and travel expenses were provided in association with his participation in this conference. Non-Financial Disclosures: Dr. Manternach is the Utah NATS District Governor and PAVA Western Regional Governor. Lynn Maxfield, PhD, is the Associate Director for the National Center for Voice and Speech (NCVS), Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the School of Music, and Team Vocal Coach for the Voice Disorders Center at the University of Utah. He also conducts research funded by the NIH related to voice physiology. Financial Disclosures: Dr. Maxfield is employed by the University of Utah and his registration was provided in association with his participation in this conference. Non-Financial Disclosures: Dr. Maxfield is a member of the Pan American Vocology Association. Mary Saunders Barton is Professor Emeritus in Musical Theatre Voice and Voice Pedagogy at Penn State, Chair of the AATS, and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Shenandoah’s CCM Institute. She produced two teaching videos and is co-author of “Cross Training in the Voice Studio: A Balancing Act” with Norman Spivey. Financial Disclosures: Ms. Saunders Barton receives royalties from the book, “Cross Training in the Voice Studio: A Balancing Act” by Plural Publishing. Registration and travel expenses were provided in association with Ms. Saunders Barton’s participation in this conference. Non-Financial Disclosures: Saunders Barton is the Chair of the American Academy of Teachers of Singing (AATS)
Web: https://medicine.utah.edu/surgery/otolaryngology/performance-voice-conference/
Contact: Julie Barkmeier-Kraemer: JulieB.Kraemer@hsc.utah.edu, or Lexi Midgley: lexi.midgley@hsc.utah.edu
« Interview “What a blessing to speak”
Vocal trainings of Saina, Honoured Singer of Saha Republic »
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Cheng Pei-Pei
The Queen of wuxia pian in Lyon
In the 1960s, she became the great master of martial arts movies, a genre previously dominated by men, performing her own stunts. Chinese actress Cheng Pei-Pei, one of the festival's guests of honor, introduced Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and King Hu's A Touch of Zen yesterday at Lumière.
She inspired a generation of fearless action film heroines, portrayed by Michelle Yeoh or Zhang Ziyi. Trained at the famous Shaw School, Cheng Pei-Pei started in 1965, at the age of 19, playing a male role in The Lotus Lamp, opposite superstar Linda Lin Dai. The following year, her career took off thanks to her performance as the Golden Swallow in King Hu's work, Come Drink with Me. This costumed detective story in the era of Imperial China, with fantastic and melodramatic accents, proved a great success in 1966.
Copyright Institut Lumière / Chassignole
A dancer, Cheng delivered a performance full of grace and agility, while revolutionizing combat choreography. She then made a string of sentimental films: The Rock, Song of Orchid Island, shot in Taiwan, before signing a contract with Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers, filming with King Hu, Chang Cheh, Lo Wei, Ho Meng-hua or Umetsugu Inoue. Along the way, she became the first female star of "wuxia pian," martial arts movies of Chinese chivalry.
In 1971, she emigrated to the United States. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, she was inspired by the Asian film movement and its new generation of directors. Nostalgic for the cinema of his childhood, Ang Lee paid homage to Cheng Pei-Pei by offering her the role of Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2014, she participated in the British film by Hong Khaou, Lilting. with Ben Whishaw She will be starring in a remake of the animated movie Mulan, to be released in 2020.
Rébecca Frasquet
Categories: Lecture Zen
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Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 953. page
2016-02-20 23:03:03 Post No.7722254
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7 KB,
Anonymous 2016-02-20 23:03:03 Post No. 7722254 [Report] [View thread]
>would of
Anonymous 2016-02-20 23:11:00 Post No.7722276
Anonymous 2016-02-20 23:11:00 Post No.7722276 [Report]
> doggy dog world
I read this one in a paper that I recently graded:
>the ability to be able to
Oh lawdy. I actually lol'd at that. People don't actually say this do they?
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Am I about to get memed?
Daily IJ thread I guess.
DFW's intelligence and work are really depressing
>tfw you'll never be a genius who smokes weed on a daily basis
The book is profoundly sad. It's very enjoyable too, and lots of the episodes are excellent pieces of writing unto themselves.
I'm 60 pages into it and, no offense, but I have yet to encounter an interesting scene. Approximately when does it get good?
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Is it true that "world building" is just a crutch for bad fantasy or is an intergral part of the book?
Is it true that "good prose" is just a crutch for bad fantasy or is it an integral part of the book?
>what did he mean by this?
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Is this worth reading?
nigga u spying on me? i literally just torrented the audiobook and started playing it one second before i refreshed the page,shit seems pretty patrish so far, "story of civilization" tier epic history
>audiobook
Too long. Try the 500 p one by johnson.
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Hey I'm pretty average intelligence (think somewhere between 105 and 115 IQ). Is reading literature a waste of my time? You guys seem like you're a cut above most other boards in terms of intelligence no homo
No it isn't, IQ has nothing to do with it.
Whoever tells you that intelligence is innate is lying.
Read literature, read philosophy, learn a language! You can be as smart as the best of mankind if you apply yourself intellectually. Man does not become brilliant by nature, but by habit.
You don't need to be intelligent to read
Just look at /lit/
Jailbird
My life circa 2014 2016-02-22 01:49:33 Post No.7727027
My life circa 2014 Jailbird 2016-02-22 01:49:33 Post No. 7727027 [Report] [View thread]
Wrote this in an hour, Talk to me /lit/erati... pls.
After drinking a liter of boxed merlot, I had smoked pack of Camel Blues and watched enough Chopped to give a lecture on how much Food Network
is too much. The light buzz achived from the cheap red wine had worn down to the point where I had started feeling sorry for myself again and
even jerking off for a solid hour to soft-core internet porn could not cut the sting. And it's only 11 o' clock, fuck.
Cool blog.
it's bad
wanna know why?
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What the hell happened to young adult literature? It turned from "books for 13-17 year olds that adults could also enjoy" to "books for children". Not only is most of it bad, it's so vanilla and safe.
Most of the best writers for it died or moved on.
Now the kids who read nothing but YA are adults writing YA, so it has no real elevation or depth.
>Ender's Game
>vanilla and safe
u wot m8
Ender's Game fits in the former category, back when YA was good; look at good YA fiction of the 80s and 90s, they had sex, swearing, violence, they'd never be labeled YA by today's pussy standards.
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Is theology dead? Most living philosophers appear to be Atheists.
Can anyone recommend some books on contemporary theology, please?
oh my god, Dick! what happened? no pun intended anywhere
Jesus of Nazareth trilogy by Joseph Ratzinger and Scholastic Metaphysics and Scholastic Essays by Edward Feser.
Theology is pretty much undergoing the same fate as astrology.
It's still there but intelligent people pay no mind to it.
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Do you listen to music while reading? What do you listen to?
bossa nova,classical,field recordings Pink floyd and felt
/mu/ shit like tim hecker Is horrible especially for reading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF_Ekf6nHj8
Schnabel plays Beethoven
>in b4 music major autism
Hey there, not OP here, just checking in to tell you you're a pleb
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I like Nietzsche too much.
What are some other philosophers somewhat similar to him with other interesting ideas?
I have already read Stirner.
Heidegger is Nietzsche's true heir. Read him.
Stirner is quite bad and his fanboys don't read.
Aristotle is better than both.
There's literally nothing in Nietzsche or Stirner that disproves Aristotelian teleology.
I found similarities between him and the fabricated aesthete of Either/Or.
Because Nietzsche is best read as aristotlean
Read some Katsafanas.
File: Eco.jpg (173 KB, 1000x1127) Image search: [iqdb] [SauceNao] [Google]
Umberto Eco just died
is Foucalt Pendulum worth reading? Seen it on some postmodern chart
holy fucking shit, not him, he's one of my favourite writers
I'm just waiting for Gene Wolfe to die
Ulysses Reading Group 2016-02-19 22:02:25 Post No.7717710
Ulysses Reading Group Anonymous 2016-02-19 22:02:25 Post No. 7717710 [Report] [View thread]
okay guys i'm worried you forgot so i'm starting the thread.
p.s. i know we agreed to ~15 pages a day but i don't like to stop reading midway through a paragraph so i stopped at p.23.
doubledactyl Malachi Mulligan is fucking flesh and bone, man. i can't believe I waited so long to read this book.
>Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.
>--Down, sir. How dare you, sir?
absolutely brilliant.
get in here guys
also i was thinking this would make a good schedule for the next 4 days:
because these are sensible stopping points and they average about 15 pages anyway. idk how well it'll hold up when we get going but it seems better this way. (p.s. i'm using Vintage edish)
what do you all think?
That's weird, I just got the book yesterday and I just got up to that part, didn't even know about the reading group
I'm gonna admit it, I'm struggling with it, not really sure what's going on and the French and Latin is annoying. Is there a good guide online that I can read along with?
Just read the fucking book you weirdos, there's enough to chew on mentally based on how it feels you don't need several hundred versions of a dictionary to check every word
But whatever, one of my favorite parts at the beggining is the milk math word problem where bucky gets the bill from the milkwoman
Science Fiction and Fantasy General 2016-02-19 17:34:20 Post No.7716502
File: fetish-injection.png (226 KB, 750x1091) Image search: [iqdb] [SauceNao] [Google]
Science Fiction and Fantasy General Anonymous 2016-02-19 17:34:20 Post No. 7716502 [Report] [View thread]
Weird Fetishes Edition
>Fantasy
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/4chanlit/images/a/a8/1307836551252.jpg
(For the Computer illiterate) http://i.imgur.com/igBYngL.jpg
>Sci-Fi
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/4chanlit/images/a/a6/Scifilit.jpg
(For the Computer illiterate) http://i.imgur.com/gNTrDmc.jpg
http://imgur.com/r55ODlL
http://imgur.com/A96mTQX
>What you are you currently reading?
>Are you for...
Can you have a space opera with a small amount of characters?
op that comic is insensitive, first it marginalizes people with unusual sexual interests, and it stereotypes dark skinned ppl as violent thugs prone to hate crimes, u need to write an apology or i'm going to put u on blast on twitter and tumblr
File: ralph.jpg (42 KB, 800x600) Image search: [iqdb] [SauceNao] [Google]
File: 1447689418742.jpg (326 KB, 784x1214) Image search: [iqdb] [SauceNao] [Google]
What are some books which explore the struggle against zenophobia?
3 KB, 124x125
god I hate that guy
Zenophobia? Why would somebody be afraid of that shitty philosopher and his non-paradox?
>being this pedantic
File: Alan-Moore-009.jpg (957 KB, 2060x1236) Image search: [iqdb] [SauceNao] [Google]
Who has better taste in comics, /lit/ or /co/?
I don't read comics, so /lit/ has better taste.
do adults read comics?
if I saw a grown man reading a comic book I would point and laugh tbqh
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SEVENTH REGIMENT INFANTRY..
Compiled from original sources by Col. Charles E. Phelps, Brevt. Brig. Gen. U. S. V., at the request of the Commissioners, under the Act of 1896, Ch. 134, "to provide for the completion of the records of the soldiers, etc., accredited to the State of Maryland in the late Civil War, etc."
This regiment was recruited from the northern line of Maryland counties, under the call of July 1, 1862, for "three years or the war.'' Toward the end of August, 1862, nine companies had been enrolled and mustered in Baltimore, and went into " Camp Harford," a spot now included within the limits of Druid Hill Park. The aggregate strength of the regiment at that time was 784 officers and men. Pressing exigencies of the service hurried it into the field before it had received its tenth company, the men recruited for which were mustered into other regiments. The tenth Company, K , was composed of the re-enlisted men of the Tenth Maryland (a six months' organization), and joined the regiment in April, 1864.
Material of the Regiment.
There were very few foreigners in this regiment. Most of the line officers and men were substantial farmers, mechanics and laboring men from the rural districts. Very shortly after they had come to know each other, a unanimous preference for the mounted service took shape in a formal but unsuccessful application to the War Department for transfer to the cavalry.
Two companies (C and H) were raised in Harford County, one (D) in Baltimore County, and one (F) in Carroll. Three (B, E and G) were recruited in Frederick County, and two (A and I) in Washington County. There was no city company in the Seventh until joined by company K, above mentioned, and this company was composed of young active men, clerks, etc., from Baltimore.
The Seventh Regiment was raised and originally commanded by Colonel Edwin H. Webster, of Harford County, a representative from Maryland in Congress. Lieut.-Colonel Charles E. Phelps, subsequently promoted Colonel, and later Brigadier-General by brevet, was a member of the Baltimore bar, and had been Major of the "Maryland Guard," somewhat celebrated just before the war as a thoroughly drilled volunteer battalion, most of whose members went South. Major William H. Dallam was a prominent and highly esteemed lawyer of Harford County, and enjoyed the confidence of the entire community in which he lived. He had served the public in the capacity of Clerk of the Circuit Court and for many years as State's Attorney.
Adjutant George L. Tyler and Quartermaster Thomas S. Nesbitt were young gentlemen of prominent families in Frederick and Washington counties respectively. Surgeon James H. Jarrett and Assistant Surgeon (afterwards Surgeon) Robert K. Robinson were well-known practitioners of Harford County. The line officers, as a rule, were all highly respected citizens of their several counties. Two of the captains, Edward M. Mobley, of Washington County, and David T. Bennett, of Frederick County, were subsequently promoted in succession to the command of the regiment, made vacant by casualties of service. Captain Daniel Rinehart, of Carroll County, was a brother of the world-renowned sculptor.
First Service.
Early in September, 1862, the advance of Lee's army into Maryland occasioned frequent reports of the immediate proximity of his cavalry. The streets or Baltimore were barricaded, and before the Seventh had progressed so far in its tactics as the battalion drill, it was, on several occasions, ordered into line in expectation of a raid.
Maryland Brigade.
On the 8th of September, 1862, it was brigaded with the 1st, 4th, 6th and 8th Regiments of Maryland Infantry and Alexander's Battery of Baltimore Light Artillery, under the command of Brigadier-General John R. Kenly. From that time on, until muster out at the end of the war, the military history of the Seventh is mainly identified with that of the famous Maryland Brigade, composed of the organizations just named, with the exception of the Sixth and Alexander's Battery, subsequently assigned elsewhere.
The Maryland brigade continued a part of the 8th Army Corps nominally, although serving successively under General Franklin, General Couch and General French, either as an independent brigade or in detachments, until on the 11th of July, 1863, it was definitely assigned to the Army of the Potomac as the 3d Brigade, 3d Division, 1st Army Corps.
In January, 1864, it became the 2d brigade of the same division. Upon, the reorganization of the Army of the Potomac under Lieutenant-General Grant, in March, 1864, the old first corps was merged in the fifth, and the Maryland brigade was then designated 3d Brigade, 2d Division, 5th Army Corps. After the Battle of the Wilderness and the first engagement at Spottsylvania, this division was so shattered that it was broken up, and most of its regiments assigned to other commands, the Maryland brigade serving temporarily as an independent organization, reporting to corps headquarters. Upon the reorganization of the division in June, 1864, the Maryland brigade finally became the 2d Brigade, 2d Division, 5th Army Corps, until mustered out May 31, 1865.
At the Front.
As soon as the result of the battle of Antietam was known, the Maryland brigade, which, until that time had been required to guard and picket the approaches to the city, was ordered to the front. Its first service in the presence of the enemy was between Hagerstown and Williamsport, where they found General Reynolds with a body of raw, un-uniformed Pennsylvania militia, engaged in trying to hold in check a force of the enemy's cavalry. Much to the relief of the militia, the Marylanders were promptly deployed in their front, and, upon their advance, the opposing force withdrew, their artillery covering the retreat with a few inaccurate shots. This was on the 19th of September, 1862.
From that time on, until the 29th of October, the Maryland brigade remained in camp in the vicinity of Williamsport, guarding the fords of the Potomac; the cavalry videttes of the enemy, Wade Hampton in command, being in sight on the other side. After some days of excitement, forming line of battle, marches and counter-marches, the routine of drill again began, and this growing tedious, many of the men took advantage of the lull to go home on short visits without leave, after failing to receive furlough. They called this taking a "french," and indignantly disclaimed the idea of desertion. Numbers, in fact, were so near their homes that they could easily make the round trip between tattoo and reveille.
The Upper Potomac.
On the 29th of October, 1862, the Seventh Regiment was ordered on detached duty, guarding a river front of about five miles from McCoy's Ferry to Dam No. 5, headquarters at Four Locks. McCoy's Ferry was the point where Stuart's cavalry had broken through on their famous raid, a few days before, surprising and capturing the signal station on Fair View Mountain, close by. One of the most interesting points in the vicinity was " Old Fort Frederick," built as a defense against Indians, and at that time one of the few remaining structures to be found in this country worthy to be called a "ruin."
Refugees.
From the summit of Fair View could be seen three States, the encampment of McClellan's army at Harper's Ferry and Lee's encampment at Martinsburg. This lookout was at that time a great resort for Union refugees from Virginia. Many of these had served on the other side as unwilling conscripts. They were naturally very much wanted, and they knew it. As our army advanced into the sacred soil, back went the refugees, some piloting our columns as guides. These men were the most vigilant of videttes, keenly snuffing the southern air for the dreaded cavalry raid.
The belt of Virginia soil immediately in front of the Seventh Maryland was almost entirely inhabited by the families of these refugees, and the great rendezvous of the refugees themselves was Fair View. Here they watched from day to day their deserted homes across the river, sometimes witnessing with their own eyes their hogs and sheep taken, often exchanging signals with their families, and when signals were satisfactory, stealthily crossing in skiffs or wading the ford.
Many of the younger refugees had enlisted in Maryland cavalry regiments, and under the command of such men as Cole, Vernon, Russell, Firey and others, did good service as scouts and guides. Their presence and influence contributed materially to impress upon those organizations the character for vigilance, enterprise and daring for which they were distinguished.
But to the older and more timid refugees the regiment was indebted for many panicky rumors, startling announcements, hasty "falling's in." It was characteristic of the men upon every such occasion that they never became skeptical, but took
each alarm as it came, in perfect good faith, always "falling in" with as much alacrity as if the crash of battle were sounding in their ears.
Substitutes.
Early in December, the regiment received its first installment of " substitutes,'" an accession of less than doubtful value. There were fifty or more in this batch, of all nationalities, most of them suspiciously well drilled. These disinterested patriots were brought up under guard, with their $300 or $400 each in their pockets. Some had "jumped" the guard on the cars, quite a number vanished the first night, most of them afterwards deserted, and a half dozen or so turned out reliable soldiers. On the 12th of December, 1862, the Seventh returned to Williamsport, finding there only the Eighth, the First having gone to Maryland Heights and the Fourth to Baltimore.
Cordiality of Citizens.
The feeling of the people of Western Maryland towards the soldiers was, with very few exceptions, cordial and thoroughly sympathetic. In return, the instances of invasion of private right on the part of the soldiers were extremely rare, they were discountenanced by the men, and promptly punished when discovered.
Maryland Heights.
On the 21st of December, 1862, the Seventh and Eighth, with Alexander's Battery, started for Maryland Heights, where the whole brigade was finally settled in winter quarters.
West Virginia Campaign.
On the 4th of April, 1863, the Seventh crossed the river and encamped on Bolivar Heights, and on the 27th the Seventh and Fourth were transported by rail to Oakland, under orders which indicated a campaign in West Virginia, then much exercised by a dashing raid under Imboden and Jones. On the morning of the 29th, the Seventh left knapsacks behind at Oakland in charge of the Fourth, and made a forced march all that day and most of the night across the Alleganies, the memory of which was destined to become a standard of comparison in all future campaigns of the Seventh. For several weeks the regiment remained in the vicinity of Rowlesburg, the several companies being so disposed as best to guard the railroad bridge on Cheat river and the high trestles near by. There was practically but one sentiment among the West Virginians here—all were zealous Unionists, and everywhere officers and men found themselves at home. Nothing could be more primitive than the life of these mountaineers. The clothes they wore, the food they ate, the beverages they drank, everything was home-made. Much use was made of maple sugar in a variety of forms; spinning and weaving their own flax and wool, they dyed with madder or black oak bark.
Bolivar and Maryland Heights.
On the 16th of May the West Virginia campaign was closed, the men turning their backs with regret upon the wild freshness and romance of mountain life, and finding their old tents on Bolivar Heights just as they had been left, guarded by the sick and crippled.
For some days the Seventh was the only Union force on the Virginia side of the Potomac, except a few cavalry. Guerrillas were reported in front, and the regiment was much weakened by heavy details for picket and scout duty. On the 23d of May an unfortunate incident occurred at an outpost on the Blue Ridge, where several demonstrations had been made on the pickets of the Seventh. Lieutenant Gorrell, of Company H (Harford County), was in command of this outpost of twenty men, and ventured beyond his advanced sentries on a private reconnoissance. Returning, he failed to hear the challenge of the sentry, who failed to recognize his officer in the1 darkness. He was shot through the lung and disabled for further service. A few days after, a personal difficulty between two non-commissioned officers resulted in a severe pistol wound to one of them. The shooting was clearly a case of self-defense.
'On the 5th of June, 1863, the Seventh moved across the river to its old drill ground on Maryland Heights, and the brigade was once more united.
Gettysburg Campaign.
A new and eventful chapter in the history of the Civil War was now upon the eve of development. The air, which for several days past had been heavy with rumor, now, on the 14th of June, throbbed with distant cannonading in the direction of Winchester. The flash of the guns and shells could be seen after dark. The next day the tongue of rumor was busy with a thousand startling reports, all of which centered around the established fact that Milroy's command at Winchester had been crushed by an over-whelming force of the enemy on their march to transfer the seat of war to the Northern States. We heard with especial regret that our old comrades of the Sixth Maryland and Alexander's Baltimore Battery had shared in the general disaster, but without loss of reputation.
Toward the end of June, Hooker came and ordered Maryland Heights to be abandoned. The troops were in line ready to march. It was then reported that the order had been countermanded by Halleck. They did not march. The next report was that Hooker was out and Meade in command. By his order, General French, a regular and a Marylander, made his appearance and took command of the troops on Maryland Heights, comprising the Maryland brigade, some heavy artillery and the wreck of Milroy's command.
On the 30th of June the position was abandoned. Big guns were spiked or hauled down to the canal, and ammunition which could not be removed was destroyed. During this process, while the troops were moving down, an accidental explosion in the magazine of a thirty-pounder battery filled the air with fragments, killing and wounding twenty-one men.
Under French to Frederick.
On the 1st of July the two brigades of French's column, Kenly's and Morriss', continued the march through the Middletown Valley to Frederick, the heavy firing of the first day's battle of Gettysburg being at times audible on the left. On the 2d of July a ringing order was issued with the announcement that "any officer, no matter how high his rank, or soldier who fails of his full duty at this crisis, will suffer death, under immediate trial by drum-head court." This order was followed up by a choleric visit from French to every regiment and picket post, the deliberate design of which seemed to be to exasperate the entire command to the fighting pitch. Such, at least, was its effect. On the next day (July 3d), the command was paraded through town in column of platoons equalized, field music playing, on the march to Monocacy Junction. At the corner of Market and Patrick streets the column passed General French in review, and at all
points was loudly cheered by the citizens. On each of these days, especially the third, the sound of artillery continued from the direction of Gettysburg.
It was understood that French was acting as the reserve of Meade's army, keeping open its line of communication and covering Washington and Baltimore. In the event of Meade's defeat, it is easy to see that his task would have been one of vital importance.
On the 4th day of July, 1863, the news of a great victory at Gettysburg flew like wildfire, followed up by long trains of captured wagons and prisoners, escorted by cavalry. All was activity and vigilance, constant marching and counter-marching, posting of pickets and calling them in again, with hourly expectation of something important to happen immediately. Late in the day the Seventh was counter-marched back to its old bivouac on Rizer's farm, west of Frederick, on the Harper's Ferry road.
In the early dawn of the 6th, as the field officer of the day was riding along the out-posts, he descried an object swinging from the limb of a tree, surrounded by a force of cavalry. They reported that the body was that of a spy, caught with the evidence in his boots, and hung by drum-head court by order of General Buford. He was easily recognized as a former visitor to the camp of the Maryland Brigade, offering various small articles for sale and getting up ornamental company rolls.
Army of the Potomac.
General French was then assigned to the command of the third corps, and Kenly's brigade hurried back to Maryland Heights. The Seventh being on picket at the time, did not start with the brigade, which had a skirmish as they occupied the Heights. As soon as the Seventh was relieved by its namesake, the famous Seventh New York Militia, National Guard, it rejoined the brigade, which, on the 10th of July, moved out through Pleasant Valley to a point near Boonsboro. The march was directly toward the sound of cannon. The march was a forced one of seventeen miles, the day was hot and sultry, and many of the best men fell out from sheer exhaustion. The straggling was excessive and much of it was unavoidable; most of the stragglers came up during the night.
Here the Maryland brigade brought up against the Army of the Potomac and reinforced its weakest corps, being designated as the 3d Brigade, 3d Division, 1st Corps. General Newton commanded the corps, Kenly the division and Colonel Dushane, of the first Maryland, commanded the brigade.
The next day the brigade took its place in the corps line of battle, drawn up in a field along the Hagerstown pike. The men opened their eyes as the reserve artillery thundered by, battery after battery, the heavy Parrot guns drawn by ten or twelve horses each. From the time they struck the Army of the Potomac, they had found themselves in an atmosphere of novelty and wonder. The thinned ranks of many of the regiments, shrunken by losses in battle to the proportions of a company or so, the tattered and bullet-ridden colors, and those queer-looking badges worn by men and officers, of various devices, shapes and colors, corresponding with the conspicuous standards borne by mounted orderlies, following every movement of the general officers, formed the principal
subjects of curiosity and topics for discussion among the men of the Maryland brigade. Many are still living who will remember the thrill of pride with which, on that day, the brigade and division standards were received, and the corps badges attached.
Skirmish at Funkstown.
After several changes of position, on the 12th of July the Maryland brigade was brought into contact with the enemy near Funkstown. The Seventh being called on for a company to relieve the skirmishers of the sixth corps in its front, it happened to be the turn of company I to go on that duty. This company (Captain E. F. Anderson) was raised in the neighborhood, and most of the men had harvested or hunted over the ground. Ridges of limestone cropping out here and there furnished accidents of position of which the skirmishers of both sides made it a point to avail themselves quite liberally. Lee was at that moment preparing to withdraw his army across the Potomac, a fact unknown to our side, and he was holding his entrenchments only to cover the retreat. Accordingly, the work of our skirmishers went on prosperously and they advanced gradually, pressing back the enemy's skirmishers. The next morning Company I, with a loss of only one man wounded (Scoffin), was relieved on the skirmish line by Captain Bennett, Company E.
A marksman on the other side had been observed to make several close shots, one of which had grazed Captain Bennett's ear and drawn blood. The latter stationed one of his best shots behind a wheat stack, with directions to shoot that man the next time he showed his head above the rifle pit. The captain then lifted his cap slightly on the point of his sword, and instantly the Confederate marksman showed himself, but before he had time to pull, Corporal Mahaney, of Company E, resting his rifle through the stack, had anticipated him, and he was seen to leap from out of the rifle-pit and fall forward upon his face. The corporal was afterwards killed in the Wilderness.
One of the incidents of this skirmish was a struggle for the possession of Stover's barn, which was finally carried by our men, when the barn was opened on by the enemy's artillery. After this, the enemy sent out a flag of truce to get the body of one of their officers.
Retreat of Lee.
During that night the retreat of Lee's army was ascertained by the pickets of the Maryland brigade, who captured a number of stragglers. The next day, 14th of July, 1863, the 1st Corps, following the sixth, marched through the two strong lines of earthworks just abandoned by the enemy, the men noticing the fresh graves of a number of Confederates who fell during the two days' skirmish.
On the 15th the march was resumed to Crampton's Gap, some twenty-five miles, passing a brigade of prisoners captured at Falling Waters. Another day's march brought the corps to Petersville, where the wagon trains came up, and a brief interval was employed in resting and refitting.
Advance into Virginia.
On the 18th the Potomac was crossed at Berlin on a pontoon bridge, and Middleburg was reached on the evening of the 20th, where the officer in charge of the brigade picket experienced the luxury of posting pickets after dark in a strange country, among woods tangled with under-growth, and meadows treacherous with ditches and swamps. The command stayed at Middleburg all the next day, indulging in blackberries to an unlimited extent, which, as a sanitary measure, was a success.
Rappahannock Station.
The march was resumed through White Plains and Warrenton Junction, reaching Rappahannock Station on the 3d of August, 1863, where a brisk cavalry skirmish was in progress, indicating renewed contact with Lee's army, now at the end of its retreat. This fight between Buford and Stuart was plainly visible across the Rappahannock, and it was watched with interest, because it was taken to be the prelude of another pitched battle. It turned out to be only a reconnoissance in force.
The Seventh was at this time separated from the Maryland brigade, and it was understood that it, together with some regiments from other brigades, constituted the reserve of the 1st Corps. Among the many rumors in constant circulation was one to the effect that the Seventh Regiment was to be detailed as "sharpshooters." It had been reported that during the two days' skirmishing at Funkstown the fire of our Companies I and E had been especially effective. It had been learned officially (so went the rumor) that the enemy's loss during that skirmish in front of the Maryland brigade alone had been eight killed, including a captain, and fifteen wounded. In point of fact, nothing was certainly known about anything.
It was mysteriously whispered in select circles as a particularly choice tit-bit of rumor that "we" had learned to read the enemy's signals, with many cautions to be very careful of the secret, lest the rebels should get hold of it and immediately change their signal code. There was but little incident of any kind to vary the monotony of camp life at Rappahannock station. Deserters were occasionally shot under sentence of court-martial in some of the neighboring camps, and it was the accepted policy to make these executions as public and ceremonious as possible, to strike terror into the substitutes and bounty-jumpers.
Quite in contrast with the dull monotony of the camps in rear, the picket line or extreme front in contact with the enemy is always interesting. Our division outposts at that time occupied a front of over two miles, the line between the two armies had not been straightened out, and the opposing sentries were within hailing distance, in some cases. This situation sometimes gave occasion for ludicrous mistakes. A too sociable disposition was at times indulged, resulting in the trading of newspapers, coffee, tobacco, etc., but this intercourse was always promptly repressed by the authorities as soon as discovered.
About the middle of September a division of cavalry, supported by the second corps, pushed on as far as Culpeper, not without resistance and loss. A rumor prevailed that we had captured colors, a large number of prisoners and ten guns, reduced afterwards to three.
Advance to the Rapidan.
Early on the morning of the 16th of September, 1863, the long expected order came, and after a march of ten or twelve miles through Brandy and Stevensburg, tents were pitched about half way between that place and Culpeper Courthouse, on Mountain Run. The march was toward the sound of cannon, and many dead and crippled horses were passed.
Here the paymaster made his appearance, and several officers were informed that their pay had been stopped until their regulation "ordnance returns" were duly forwarded. As Government officials became more experienced, greater strictness and more "red tape" was used, and many obscure and neglected "army regulations," which had been a mystery to inexperienced officers and the despair of department clerks, were revived and peremptorily enforced by the quick stimulus of "stopping pay." The next move was to a piny old field on Potato Run, near Stewart's house, where, towards the end of the month, the division was paraded on three sides of a square to witness the shooting of a substitute deserter from the Fourth Maryland. He followed his coffin around the square with unmoved expression and steady step, keeping time to his own dead march, and, after the execution, the troops were marched in review past the bloody remains.
On the 27th of September, 1863, another move was made about four miles westerly to Summerduck Run, and on the morning of the 29th, just after the brigade guard had been mounted, with the assistance of the brigade band, there was another move west to a point near Cedar Run, guarding Raccoon Ford, of the Rapidan. The division was here masked by a dense forest of heavy timber. Blazing trunks of solid hickory, piled with reckless extravagance, cheered the men with a genial air of home comfort and lighted the path of mounted orderlies.
Meade's Retreat.
Another active campaign was now at hand, to counteract a rapid flank movement of Lee's army toward Meade's rear. The movement commenced, so far as the Seventh was concerned, at two o'clock on the morning of October 10, 1863, by a forward demonstration of the 1st Corps upon Morton's Ford of the Rapidan. From this point the retreat commenced that night, and the Rappahannock was re-crossed at Kelly's Ford. It was at this time a frequent subject of remark among the men that they had often heard firing in front and on the flank during a march, but never before in the rear. From a hill above the ford, looking back, could be distinctly seen every shell as it burst in the air, the distant Blue Ridge forming a dark background for the puffs of white smoke. The hot cavalry fighting which had been going on all day did not end with it, and there continued to be seen the flash of the guns and of the bursting shells until long after dark.
At one o'clock on the morning of October 13, 1863, began the heaviest march yet made, from Kelly's Ford to a point beyond Bristoe Station, some twenty-seven or eight miles, carrying eight days' rations. If the private soldiers of the Seventh had been polled, their verdict would have been that this eight days' ration business was a fraud. There was never more than about four or five days eating in them; the balance was a dead loss to the men as well as to the Government, spoiled by mixture, by wet, by perspiration, by dirt, by mildew, sometimes by bugs, until the revolting pasty garbage would be heaved out on the roadside. The only parties benefited were the contractors, for, as a rule, a reissue of three days' rations, when attainable, was an absolute necessity.
It was nearly ten o' clock at night when the Seventh bivouacked a mile or so beyond Bristoe, in a place selected for purely military reasons, with no reference, of course, to convenience or comfort. Those whose good luck it was to stretch themselves under the warm shelter of some level spreading pine, upon ground softly padded with fragrant leaves, soon forgot the toils and burdens of that march. Those whose misery it was to be detailed for picket, must be left to their own reflections, aching backs, and blistered feet.
Centreville.
At daylight of the 14th, the 1st Corps resumed the march northward, and the Maryland brigade took its turn in guarding the ammunition train. It was now apparent that the two armies were running a foot-race on parallel lines for the strongly fortified and commanding position at Centerville. Bull Run was crossed at Blackburn's Ford at noon, and the Heights of Centerville were gained two and a-half hours later, just half an hour ahead (so the rumor went) of Lee's advance. Marching over the old Bull Run battle ground, the solid earth quaked and shuddered, and the air throbbed with the sound of cannonading from Bristoe in rear, and from Thoroughfare Gap on left front.
At about four P. M. the firing from Bristoe reached its climax and continued until after dark, the flash of each gun being plainly seen from Centerville Heights, and the firing becoming both more distant and desultory until about eight o'clock, when it ceased. This was shortly afterwards understood to mean a gallant and successful fight of the second corps under Warren, with A. P. Hill's corps, which was defeated, with the loss of five guns and four hundred and fifty prisoners.
The next day the division was drawn back to a point near Chantilly and thrown in (as was said) between the other divisions of the first corps and the sixth. Here the men were again put into a state of expectancy by a very lively fusillade and some cannonading south and southwest. Two hours later this firing grew more distant, and bore more to the west. The cause was not explained. Probably another cavalry reconnoisance.
Lee's Retreat.
After being countermarched to Centerville early on the 19th of October, 1863, the 1st corps marched south, in pursuit of Lee's now retreating army, crossed Bull Run at the Stone Bridge, heard heavy firing directly in front, formed column of brigades on a ridge upon the other side of Bull Run, and loaded. The corps then resumed its march over the ground of the first and second Bull Run battles, and about 3 P. M. went into camp at or near a burnt out village named Haymarket.
Skirmish, at Haymarket.
The whole Seventh Regiment was then ordered to picket the front from the Leesburg pike on the right to the Thoroughfare Gap pike on the left, with a strong post well advanced on each road, a mile and a-half in front of Haymarket. Before the posting had been completed, a lively skirmish suddenly commenced between the advanced post on the left and Stuart's cavalry.
It appeared that during the cavalry fight at Buckland Mills, Kilpatrick had thrown one of his brigades (Davies') forward into a bad position, where it was confronted by Stuart, outflanked by Fitzhugh Lee, and routed. It was hotly pursued, and in
steeple chase style dashed through the picket line of the Seventh Maryland. The small outpost on the Gap road promptly opened fire and brought the foremost riders to a stand. But being rapidly reinforced every moment, they soon displayed a front, which threatened the capture of the entire outpost, several of whom had fallen. Captain Makechney then fell back with his little command before the cautious advance of the enemy for some two hundred yards, when he was met by Colonel Webster and posted by him on the picket line, which had retained its position, and now again opened fire upon the advancing force, which was again brought to a stand. In the meantime the delay afforded by the check had enabled a battery of horse artillery with Davies' brigade to get into position on a ridge in rear of our picket line, and the battery was promptly supported by the 143d Pennsylvania, under Colonel Dana, moved up by order of General Kenly. After a few rounds from the battery and some more skirmishing along the picket line, night fell, the enemy's cavalry withdrew, and the battery, with the rest of Davies' brigade, retired to the rear.
By some oversight on the part of the officer in command of the picket line of the division, which was to have connected on our left, an interval was left between the Gap road and a stream some little distance southwest. Through this opening a dash was made by the enemy's cavalry after dark, and a number of our pickets cut off and captured. The renewed firing on the picket line caused General Kenly to order up the 1st Maryland (Colonel Wilson) to the support of the Seventh, and a round or two from the 1st Maryland ended the affair. The fight commenced just before sunset and ended about 8 P. M. There were only the three left companies of the Seventh engaged, all from Frederick County (B, G and E). Loss—one killed, five wounded, sixteen prisoners, including Lieutenant Hagan, of Company G. Colonel Webster received a ball through his clothing and narrowly escaped capture, being at the time of the last dash in the act of inspecting his pickets, when the enemy's cavalry charged past and within a few yards of him.
Bristoe Station.
Several days were then passed at Thoroughfare Gap, and on the 24th of October,1863, the 1st corps made a heavy mud march, the men wading Broad Run and other swollen streams to Bristoe Station, where it entered upon the duty of guarding the railroad and picketing its approaches.
On November 6th the resignation of Colonel Webster, consequent upon his re-election to Congress and the demands of his political friends for his active aid in the pending struggle for emancipation in Maryland, was accepted, and on the following day he took leave of the regiment. A meeting of the officers was held and resolutions were adopted expressing the appreciation of the regiment of the many admirable qualities of their late commander, and their regret at the separation. Lieut.-Colonel Phelps was thereupon commissioned Colonel, and Capt. E. M. Mobley, Major, vice Major Dallam, permanently disabled by illness, the result of exposure.
Guarding Prisoners to Alexandria.
A brilliant charge of General Russell, at Rappahannock Station on the 7th, had resulted in the capture of four guns and 1600 prisoners, and on the same day a dash ordered by General French at Kelly's Ford secured over 400 more. Before the trains containing these prisoners reached Bristoe on their way to the rear, under a small provost-guard, on the afternoon of the 9th, despatches had been received by Col. Dushane, commanding the Maryland brigade, indicating an attempt by a strong force of the enemy to intercept the trains and effect, if possible, a rescue. The colonel of the Seventh was ordered to be in readiness with his regiment, reinforced by a company of the 1st Maryland, to board the train upon their arrival at Bristoe, and guard them to Alexandria. There were two trains of eighteen freight cars each. The first train did not arrive until long after dark, and, owing to mistake or panic, dashed by without slackening speed. A few minutes later the second train arrived, but made such a short stop that numbers of the officers and men were not able to reach their places on the roofs of the cars. Dr. Jarrett, surgeon of the 7th, made for the only open door he saw, probably supposing, in his innocence, that some inside accommodation had been reserved for at least the "field and staff," and was immediately and not at all ceremoniously pulled in by the guard. In the darkness and confusion, the inside guard (of the 20th N. Y.) mistook him for a prisoner who had been trying to escape, and rejected all his protestations as "weak inventions" of the enemy. The doctor found himself in a car densely crowded with Louisiana Irishmen, where he was closely watched by the guard inside as a specially intelligent and dangerous prisoner, capable of framing very plausible stories. The train reached Alexandria at two o'clock in the morning. The prisoners were then turned over to a guard in waiting and marched to the old capitol prison, and the Maryland boys, relieved of all further responsibility, found (to them) sumptuous quarters at "Soldier's Rest."
Soldier's Rest.
The spacious enclosure which contained the various buildings was stockaded to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, with banquettes and loop holes for musketry. The first impression, naturally, was that this stockade was only designed to check our hungry and misguided Southern brethren in case any portion of them, with force and arms, should desire to participate in the hospitalities of the place. The next idea that suddenly presented itself to the astonished minds of our boys, after they had duly washed, eaten, drank, rested, and frankly sought to penetrate into the external world, was, that the same stockade answered equally "well to keep them in. All the outlets were guarded by armed men in the Frenchy, sky-blue uniform of the ''Invalid Corps." The officer on duty was a polite young fellow who had left an arm at Gettysburg, and at his invitation the field and staff spread their blankets on the floor of the guard room, adjoining the large hall where the men slept.
Bristoe Again.
The next morning, the necessary preliminaries for transportation having been easily arranged (and nothing was ever found easier or less encumbered with red-tape than getting transportation to the front), the Seventh exchanged the romance of soldiering for the reality, and in due time was found once more at Bristoe, taking its share of duty with the rest of the Maryland brigade in picketing the railroad and its approaches from Manassas Junction to Kettle Run.
Rappahannock Again.
The Maryland brigade left Bristoe on the 23d, and marched some twenty miles to a point near the Rappahannock, and three days later moved camp to the bluffs on the north bank, near the railroad bridge. Meade's demonstration upon Mine Run occupied the closing days of this month, during which Kenly's division was held in reserve, guarding the line of communication.
Paoli Mills.
As soon as things began to look settled again, the men occupied themselves in putting up winter quarters, but were not allowed to begin even to feel at home in them. The 3d of December, 1863, was a day of stir and bustle, troops and trains coming back from the front, and on the next day the Maryland brigade marched before daylight, crossing the river to a point on Mountain Run, near Paoli Mills. This was another of those dark, forced marches, leaving wagons behind and halting on the way to load. One of the rumors was that Lee had crossed the Rapidan, and we were going to meet him halfway. Sunrise dissipated these rumors, and the rest of the march was more leisurely conducted, as though we had found out that all Lee wanted was to be "let alone."
To compensate the men for their unprofitable investments in real estate, they now walked into, and literally hung up their hats in, ready-made substantial log cabins, well roofed with heavy oak slabs. For these accommodations, as well as for the bunks and other trimmings, they were indebted to the kind forethought of unknown friends in General Lee's army, probably some of the very men who afterwards received the polite attentions of the regiment in helping them to Alexandria.
Culpeper C. H.
The day before Christmas the snug log cabins at Paoli were vacated, and the 1st corps again marched forth into the unknown. Crossing the railroad at Brandy Station, we soon came in sight of our old friend Mount Pony, and, passing through Culpeper, Kenly's division bivouacked on a hillside a half mile or so south. After one or two changes the Maryland brigade, on New Year's Day, 1864, finally settled down in winter quarters upon the slope and crest of a ridge east of the railroad, between Culpeper and Mount Pony, Colonel Phelps being, at this time, temporarily in command of the brigade, now designated, by the consolidation of the other two brigades, 2d Brigade, 3d Division, 1st Army Corps.
For two or three months, or until the arrival of General Grant, the history of the Army of the Potomac is one of mere drill and routine. Early in February there was a cavalry reconnoissance across the Rapidan, and the whole first corps marched down to Raccoon Ford in support. The detail of this movement was but a repetition of previous experiences—the same picket firing in front, the same interesting prospect of immediate battle, the same lying out in the rain and tramping back in the mud to the same old quarters.
Army Routine.
The Seventh Regiment had long since found itself a comparatively insignificant unit in a vast and complex organism. Tied in meshes of red tape, it was subject at every turn to the innumerable minute and rigid exactions which could alone secure the symmetry of the colossal system. It will be found suggestive to glance over the musty files in some regimental headquarter's desk—that of the Seventh, for instance. Here are, to begin with, orders—no end of orders; orders from the War Department, from army headquarters, from corps headquarters, from division, brigade and regimental headquarters; here are infinite reports, returns, requisitions, receipts, abstracts, vouchers, blanks in duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate; here are applications "approved and respectfully forwarded," applications returned with disapproval and endorsements of all sorts; here are details for courts-martial, courts of inquiry and military commissions; here are endless details for guard, for picket, for police, for the pioneer corps, for the ambulance corps, for the quartermasters', commissary and ordnance departments, details as orderlies, guards and provost-guards at the several headquarters, details for fatigue and working parties ; an occasional detail for recruiting service (a rare and soft thing); leaves of absence and furloughs granted, ditto refused; here are circulars, certificates, discharges, descriptive lists of recruits, descriptive lists of deserters, inventories of the effects of deceased soldiers, abstracts of unserviceable ordnance stores, boards to assess value of officers' private horses, pay rolls, muster rolls, muster in and muster out rolls; and here are inspection reports, criticising one regiment for unsanitary condition, another for neglect of military courtesy in saluting, a third for want of schools of tactical instruction. And so on through the whole tedious catalogue, and all this mechanism requiring the consumption of tons of stationery, acres of printed blanks, the tugging this way and that of many thousands of braying mules, and the incessant galloping to and fro of staff officers, mounted orderlies and couriers, always with an intense air of the utmost importance.
Regimental Routine.
This was about the life of the army in brief, looking at it as an organism. Taking
a nearer view, the history of one regiment was about that of every other regiment, and the history of one day pretty much the same as that of every day. Reveille at daylight, police call fifteen minutes after, surgeons' call, breakfast, guard-mount, drill, recall, dinner, drill again, recall again, first call for parade and company inspection, second call and dress parade with retreat at sunset, tattoo about nine P. M., with taps twenty minutes later; so began, continued and ended the soldier's day. On Saturdays there was a special inspection of quarters, and the coverings of the tents, weather permitting, were removed. On Sundays drills were omitted, regimental inspections preceded guard-mount, and the men were assembled for divine service, for which, unfortunately, the Seventh was compelled to depend upon the chaplains of other commands. On the last day of the month was inspection and muster, and muster for pay when the paymaster came.
Drill.
The afternoon was devoted to battalion and the morning to company drill. Brigade and division drill, and evolutions of the line were 'specially appointed. The evenings were all supposed to be devoted by the officers to "recitations in tactics and revised army regulations," either at regimental or brigade headquarters, and the hours appointed for drill were, by express order, "to be employed in exercise and not in resting." Particular attention was required to the skirmish drill, and target practice. The penalty for inattention and blundering in drill was the "awkward squad," whose "balance step," "goose step," "shanghai step," and other gymnastic eccentricities, sometimes with loaded knapsacks, never failed to cause sufficient diversion to outsiders.
In the Seventh, it was the invariable practice to close every battalion drill with the "rally on the colors." Ranks were broken, the companies mixed, and as much confusion and disorder made as possible. While this was going on, the colors were advanced or retired over the rise of a neighboring hill, as much out of view as practicable, and markers posted. At the drum signal, the color-guard loudly cheered, and the men raced, with a great shout, to find their places in line or in column, according to the position of the markers. The men greatly enjoyed this exercise, and its value was soon practically illustrated in the Wilderness campaign.
There was never much trouble in the discipline of the Seventh. So far as the men were concerned, ordinary guard-house discipline sufficed for the common run of petty offenses. The few deserters who were caught and brought back were, of course, turned over to general court-martial for more serious punishment. There had not been a single officer court-martialed down to this period of its history, although one had resigned on request, and two were marked as deserters, with whom it would have fared badly if they had been caught. Neither of these three could be said properly to have belonged to the regiment, in the sense of being identified with the society from which it came. At the time the regiment crossed the Rapidan in May, two of its officers marched in the rear under arrest and charges, one of them, by express order from the War Department, for some technical breach, but at the first heavy firing in the Wilderness they were both ordered to resume their swords and expect no other trial than that which awaited them in the woods.
Gen. Grant—Consolidation.
So matters went on, or rather stood still, until the last week in March, when the Army of the Potomac was struck as if by lightning. In the general reorganization ordered on the 23d of March, the old First Corps was "consolidated" out of existence, its 3d division was broken up, and the Maryland brigade was assigned to Warren's Fifth Corps and became the 3d brigade of its 2d division, under Gen. John C. Robinson, a regular army officer of distinction. The brigade was allowed to wear its old badges. Gen. Kenly, in taking leave of his command, was greeted with a hearty expression of good will and regret. Lieutenant-General Grant was at Culpeper, and the saying among the men was that they were being "lieutenant-generalized." Twice they were ordered out to be reviewed by him, and each time came back with- out that satisfaction, the men calling him "Un Seen Grant." At last, on the 29th of March, Grant himself, assisted by Meade and Warren, did actually review the 2d and 4th divisions of the 5th Corps, comprising the consolidated three divisions of the old First.
It is now admitted that this consolidation, the reason for which was the reduced strength of infantry regiments, was an unfortunate move to be made at the outset of a sharp campaign. Among the organizations whose prized record and associations were thus ignored, and whose cherished identity was lost, there was naturally at first some soreness and wounded esprit de corps. (Humphrey's Va. Campaign, 3.) The ceremony was like ail others of the kind, except that the marching past in review was dispensed with. There was no cheering as the conqueror of Donaldson and Vicksburg uncovered before each stand of regimental colors. He rode slowly, in a business like, quiet manner, along the front of the massed battalions, looking critically as he passed, not at the buttons, but at the faces, which, in turn, looked critically at him. The men agreed that they saw nothing at all striking about him or his outfit; nothing for effect, no self-consciousness, further than a sort of shy, half embarrassed, half-bored look, on the surface, and behind it a certain depth of expression, as of reserve force, grit, pluck, will power, energy, and masterful grasp.
Camp Talk.
The following, from a letter from camp written at about the same time, throws some light upon the topics then engaging the attention of the men : " For some time past rumors have been afloat that our brigade is to be ordered home to vote on the 6th of April. Of course, the men who have failed to obtain furloughs are in ecstacies at the idea. One report goes so far as that we are to be permanently detached from this army. It would not be honest to deny that this prospect is also immensely popular. The discipline is severe, the marching heavy, duty tough and quarters rough, and, whatever the newspapers may say, all men are not spoiling for a fight all the time. No furloughs, no frenches, no hen-roosts, no whiskey, not a pig. They look back wistfully upon the good old days of the upper Potomac and West Virginia, and think they left there the flesh pots of Egypt to come and perish in this wilderness, where the quails are regulation salt pork, and the manna moldy hard tack. There are some of us, however, who would, if the choice were presented to us, decide to take our chances with this army. On the eve of the fourth campaign of the Civil War, we have hopes that it will be the decisive one. There are battles to be fought, and our ranks will be thinned, but if we fall, it will be no more than we bargained for when we volunteered, and if we survive there will be satisfaction, glory and promotion—perhaps. The steadiest, oftenest tried, best disciplined and most unfortunate army in the world is about being led by the ablest and most successful general of the war. We feel a faith that it will at last be led to victory. And to have participated in a victorious and conclusive campaign of the Army of the Potomac would be an experience and a record that we would not exchange for milk and maple sugar."
Furlough.
The brigade was not ordered home to vote, but the Seventh was fortunate enough to have a friend "at court," and, after failing in his efforts in behalf of the whole brigade, Col. Webster at length succeeded in obtaining for his old regiment a furlough from the 1st to the 8th of April, with transportation to Baltimore. Upon arriving there the regiment was practically disbanded, and the men went home. The confidence thus reposed was not abused, except in a very few instances. Promptly, upon the day named, the regiment reassembled in Baltimore. There was no loss by desertion, but, on the contrary, the handsome acquisition was made of 144 first-class recruits from Baltimore, almost enough to make up all the losses which the regiment had ever sustained. These men had all
served their time in the 10th Maryland, a six months' organization, and had re-enlisted for the war for that regiment, which failed to reach the required strength; and upon application made by them through their officers, the War Department ordered that the re-enlisted portion thereof, composed of one company of eighty-seven men with their officers, and a squad of fifty-seven men with one officer, be transferred and assigned to the Seventh Maryland. With this cheering reinforcement, the Seventh resumed its old quarters, where times had continued as dull and quiet as ever.
Stripping for Fight.
Soon, however, every sign began to indicate that the great army was at last stripping for fight. Transportation was being reduced, surplus baggage was packed off to the rear, and, as if the work was not going on fast enough, on the afternoon of the 2d of May, a tornado struck the camp, tore off all the tent roofs, demolished many of the cabins, blew down many trees and covered everything with red dust. The Seventh was out on battalion drill at the time ; field and staff had to dismount; men were actually lifted off their feet. On the whole, it was a pretty strong hint to leave
The camps of a cavalry division now made their appearance in front near the base of Mount Pony, and one of their preliminary movements was a raid upon the private horses of the Seventh, and the capture, while innocently grazing, of a valuable horse belonging to the Adjutant, and a spare horse of the Colonel's. The latter was seen a few days later crossing the Rapidan on a pontoon bridge; no time then for swapping horses, or claiming stolen ones.
Behind camp, and between it and Culpeper, glittered the bright pieces of Wainwright's artillery brigade of our corps. On the crest of a ridge back of this, a red line of earthworks was being industriously thrown up, in full view of the enemy's signal station on Clark's Mountain. What those banks were made for, just on the eve of an advance, was one of those mysteries that still remain unexplained, unless for the purpose of deluding the enemy into the belief that we intended to stay behind them for "three years or the war," or run back to them after defeat.
The Rapidan Crossed.
Heavy weights thrown off, weather not unfavorable, roads as good as ever they were likely to be, all are waiting for the word "go," when, on Tuesday, 3d of May (1864), the general officer of the day goes out to order in the picket line, and advanced copies of Meade's printed address to the army, dated 4th May, are handed around and read at dress parade. Following that came the order to be ready to move at midnight, with a caution against making unusual fires.
The rolls of the Seventh at this time show an aggregate of 794, and its effective fighting strength, on the morning of the first battle in the Wilderness, was 556, including 26 officers, with Colonel Phelps in command. Early on the morning of May 4 the Fifth Corps had pulled out, and at noon crossed the Rapidan at Germanna Ford. Flankers were thrown out on the right, and, after a cautious progress of some five miles or more, the Maryland brigade bivouacked for the night in a piny old field near the old Wilderness tavern.
Wilderness—First Day.
At daylight of the 5th the Maryland brigade (Colonel Denison), now acting separately, took position on the high clearing near the Lacy House, from which were seen heavy columns of troops disappearing in the thicket, and the skirmishing fire playing around the unseen heads of these columns as they deployed. After some marching and counter-marching, as if prospecting for a good location, the brigade deployed along an edge of small timber facing west or northwest, in what might be called the right center of the general position, and advanced in line, brigade front, through the woods, brush and undergrowth. After some 500 yards or more of such scrambling, the ragged line suddenly stumbled upon another line of somebody else's skirmishers, waiting for something to turn up. It was then discovered that these were the skirmishers of the "Iron Brigade" of western regiments, which had the right of way, soon came up from the rear, passed through intervals formed for the purpose, swept forward, through the woods, skirmishers ahead, and in a few minutes became hotly engaged. Their battle for some time prospered, hundreds of prisoners were sent to the rear, with several colors, and considerable ground was gained. Then the tide turned, the first symptoms being the suspicious numbers of supernumerary attendants upon the wounded, soon followed by stragglers with the usual discouraging reports. An aid, galloping from the front, wanted to know who commanded these troops, and was referred to Colonel Denison. He said he had no time to go to him; "tell him the rebels are driving our right, and there is no support on that flank." This message was promptly communicated to Denison, who remarked with great composure that he had just received an exactly similar report about the left. The Seventh held the left of the brigade, its left emerging from the woods into a clearing of the Hagerson farm, south of the Orange Pike. Near the edge of this clearing a venerable mounted officer, unattended, said to be General Wadsworth, his white locks streaming, was shouting, "Where is my second line? Bring up my second line !'' Before any response could have been given, the crisis came ; the Iron brigade had fairly broken to the rear, the enemy close upon their heels, charging after colors, picking up prisoners, until they rushed impetuously up to the very muzzles of the leveled pieces of the Maryland brigade (at some points of the line), our men having held their fire to the very last minute so as not to injure our, retreating friends. Then followed a hot and bloody duel at close range, which lasted nobody knew exactly how many minutes, but long enough, at all events, to clear the front of the Seventh, at least, from every sign of alive Confederate. The fire slackened on both sides, but it appeared at a glance that this was but a lull in the storm. All that now remained of the brigade was the Seventh and a fraction of the Eighth on its right. The entire right wing of the brigade, formed of the Fourth and First, with most of the Eighth, had been flanked and "fell back, rather irregularly, about a mile." (Camper and Kirkeley, page 128.)
It should be noted that only a small battalion of the 1st Maryland is here referred to; the majority of that regiment, having lately re-enlisted, were on "veteran furlough," under Colonel Dushane. There was nothing now in front of the Confederate force but the small command of Phelps, just referred to, which found itself isolated, left flank "in the air," right flank in the bush. When the attack was shortly after renewed, there was also a mischievous fire from fugitives who had rallied some distance back in the thicket, and who doubtless supposed, in good faith, that everything had fallen back when they did. Under these discouraging circumstances some of the rank and file began to grow unsteady, and the utmost exertions of the officers were required to keep the line firmly in place, seconded by the dauntless bearing of the color guard. By a hot and well-directed file fire the position was stubbornly maintained, until at last Denison rode up and ordered Phelps to "fall back steadily." The movement was executed by word of command as if on drill, the men reloading while marching by the rear rank, then halting, facing front and firing at short intervals. Some men, it is true, were lost at each halt, but, from the difficult character of the ground, nothing else could have been expected.
The same difficulties equally obstructed the rapid advance of the enemy in anything like good order, and the deliberate and steady punishment they were getting warned them of the inconvenience of approaching in bad order. At all events, they did not deem it prudent to follow up their cautious pursuit for more than one or two hundred yards, and, as soon as the command reached a small stream where a good defensive position was found, they were effectually checked, and the men were given a halt to blow and cool off by its side in the heart of the Wilderness.
After a short rest, the command was visited by an aid and conducted still further to the rear, and occupied a line of breastworks near the Lacy House, connecting with Crawford's Division. It was about noon when the battle opened, and about 3.30 P. M. when the breastworks were occupied. They had been hastily thrown together of logs. The dry leaves had taken fire from the burning cartridge papers, and the flames had caught the works. After putting out this fire, a field return was taken, showing but 278 of the Seventh present. These, with about one company of the Eighth, included all that was left of the Maryland brigade, until the missing regiments and men came up from the rear later in the evening, surprised to find their comrades alive. There being no space for them in the line as formed, they were placed in a second line.
Loss.
The loss of the Seventh Regiment on the first day of the Wilderness (5th May, 1864) was eleven killed, two officers and forty-one men wounded, and seventeen missing. The missing included men killed or wounded, but not heard from, and a few prisoners taken. The officers wounded were Capt. David T. Bennett and Adjutant George L. Tyler. Sergeant Noble H. Creager, afterwards first lieutenant, was twice wounded before retiring. These three were all from Frederick County. Colonel Phelps had several bullets through clothing and horse killed under him. Captain Bennett, for conspicuous gallantry in this action, was promoted lieutenant-colonel. He was shot in the face while engaged in a revolver duel with a Confederate officer, both in advance of their lines, and refused to leave the field until ordered to the rear by the colonel. The loss of the entire Maryland brigade (including the 7th) was two officers and eighteen men killed, six officers and ninety-three men wounded, and one officer and sixty men missing. The brigade went into action about 1300 strong.
Wilderness—Second Day.
Before daylight of the 6th of May, the Maryland brigade was relieved in the works by the Pennsylvania Reserves, and stacked arms in close column by regiment (Seventh, as usual, by wing) on the Lacy clearing, near Grant's headquarters. About 7 A. M. a New York regiment, the 14th Brooklyn, came up from guard, duty in the rear, and by order reported to the Maryland brigade, its Colonel (Fowler), by seniority, taking command. He commanded the brigade for that day only, his regiment being then ordered elsewhere. It was thought at the time to be an extraordinary performance—in the midst of a great pitched battle, to place an entire stranger, with a strange staff, in command of troops, who had been ably handled the day before by their own commander (Denison), who had shown himself brave, self-possessed, cool-headed and judicious. It was an error, and in direct consequence of it, later in the day, the command narrowly escaped a great disaster, as will shortly appear.
In Support of Hancock.
After several changes of position and reinforcing the troops engaged on the Orange Pike on the right, about 3 P. M. the Maryland brigade was hurried over to the left to support Hancock on the Brock road, and was formed by General Robinson in two lines in rear of his first brigade to right of Birney's division. In this position the Fourth, First and Eighth formed a second line, and the Fourteenth Brooklyn and Seventh Maryland a third, the left of the Eighth and Seventh being both projected into a swamp. The young timber here was dense and choked with undergrowth. The third line was some 25 yards in rear of the entrenchments along the Brock road, a short distance north of its intersection with the Orange plank road, about midway between it and Germanna plank road.
Very soon after the brigade got into position, the fight on this part of the field reached its climax. The log breastworks along Hancock's front took fire from the burning leaves, the direction of the wind favored the enemy, Hancock's first line was driven out of the works, the fight to regain them was going on. While this was taking place on our near left, not within sight, because nothing could be seen through the thicket, the Maryland brigade, the Seventh regiment in particular, was going through a very extraordinary experience.
Scarcely had the brigade got fairly into position, when the din of battle upon the left rapidly drew nearer. Not only so, but it soon appeared to pass beyond our left, to get behind that flank into our left rear. As before stated, the Seventh held the left of the third line, and so dense was the brush that but a few files could be seen at once. The firing increased in volume, individual exclamations could be distinctly heard, the screaming and exploding of shell in quick succession rose above the continuous crash of musketry, stragglers and fugitives were seen to burst through the bushes. Every sign indicated the necessity for a prompt change of front to meet the impending attack upon the rear. General Robinson, at the right of the line, was notified, and erroneously explained that the line made a sharp angle on the left. The officer who had communicated this information was on his way back, when he met General Birney, riding hastily from Han- cock's front to General Robinson with precisely the same information, followed by an orderly, who was at that moment shot from his horse and killed. Immediately after Birney communicated with Robinson, the second and third lines were faced to the rear.
An Awkward Fix.
And now rides up a stranger, purporting to be a staff officer, with a verbal order to the Colonel of the Seventh, "Swing your right around immediately." Being faced to the rear, our proper right was then our left. To be certain, "Which right was meant ?" The officer replied that he gave the order just as he had it from Colonel Fowler. He was asked whether the order meant a "change front forward on Tenth Company," the effect of which would be to swing around our proper right, but our then left, and the precise movement dictated by the situation. He said "I suppose so," and rode off. The tactical command for this movement was given : “By company, right half wheel, etc.," the Tenth Company established on the new line, and the Ninth as it came up, but when the next was partly in position, some hesitation and confusion were noticed towards the centre of the regiment. The other companies were not following up the movement. Riding up to see what was wrong, the Colonel found the right wing engaged in executing an entirely different movement under the direction, as it afterwards appeared, of some staff officer who had faced those companies about and was trying to bring them by a flank to a "Change front to rear on First Company."
At that moment, the situation of the regiment was such, that by no fault of any one connected with it, but through the improper interference of a blundering staff officer, a total stranger, it was broken into fragments, lost from each others' sight in the bushes, the left companies forming on one line, the right companies somewhere else, and the centre nowhere. The roar of battle in the immediate vicinity was deafening, nobody could be heard, nobody that was wanted could be seen, and, to make confusion worse confounded, a panic struck some of the troops of the second line who, fell back in disorder upon the Seventh whilst in the predicament above described, bewildered by conflicting orders and false movements.
In the midst of this scene the Colonel of the 14th Brooklyn, whose temporary staff officer had done the mischief, rode up to the Colonel of the Seventh, while in the act of repairing it, and used some hasty expressions, which were afterwards handsomely withdrawn when the facts were understood. In fact, the accident would have been avoided had the latter's suggestion been acted on and the captains of companies been notified of the precise movement to be made by inversion in the dense thicket.
The Rally on the Colors.
Fortunately for such an emergency, the Seventh had been specially drilled in getting mixed up and straightened out again. A simple "rally on the colors" brought order out of chaos, as if by magic. It was only needed to find the color company (Company C, Harford County, Captain Bouldin), face it square to the nearest racket, and a round of hearty cheers promptly attracted the broken files from either flank. The men fell into ranks by the instinct of habit, and the line was re-established in much less time than had been required to dislocate and scatter it. It was then an easy matter to adjust its alignment to that of the other regiments, which was done under the supervision of General Robinson.
Meanwhile, an attack had been made upon the breastworks in the immediate front held by the other brigade of the division, and this attack had been repulsed. The troops of the second line had been rallied into position, and all was now steadiness and confidence where, but a few moments before, there was disorder fast verging upon wreck. The men were ordered to lie down (on account of shell), and all awaited the expected onslaught, whether its main fury should burst upon front or rear.
The storm, however, had reached its height and spent its energy; our brave allies of the second corps, driven from their first line of works, had rallied and retaken them, and, although repeatedly attacked, were not to be driven again. By five o'clock, the enemy was completely repulsed at all points on Hancock's front, with heavy loss.
Later in the evening, the Maryland brigade was thrown into the second line. Skirmishing, more or less heavy, continued until night fell, and, indeed, to some extent throughout the night. The loss of the Seventh on this second day of the Wilderness was slight, there being but three men wounded, one from each of the three left companies. Worn out with the long day's work, the men had scarcely settled for sleep when an order came to build a second line of works, fifty paces in rear of the first. The companies were divided into reliefs, and all night long the woods resounded with the music of axes, picks and spades, fires being allowed along the line. These two parallel lines of works are distinctly visible to this day.
Wilderness—Third Day.
Daylight came, but not the expected attack. The morning was occupied mainly in clearing brush and timber in front of the works thrown up during the night, in strengthening the position, and in burying the dead. As the heat of the sun increased, the men began to spread their shelter tents, and to construct brush arbors. Here they slept awhile, waking up now and then as the skirmish firing came closer and hotter, suddenly swelling at times into a volume like that of a line of battle, and then subsiding to a scatter.
It is an interesting fact that fighting caused little interruption in the postal service, and mails were, with more or less regularity, collected and distributed on the battlefield. About 10 A. M. the brigade mail carrier collected letters from the different regimental headquarters. A hasty note from those of the Seventh said : "As I write, our skirmishers are engaged about 500 yards to the front, and heavy firing is heard on the right. My trust is in the mercy of God. If we are defeated, I have no wish to survive so immense a disaster. If we are victorious and I should fall, I shall be satisfied to have my memory associated with so glorious a triumph."
Later in the day the brigade was moved back to an edge of the clearing before mentioned, in the vicinity of a fine strong spring, where arms were stacked and beef slaughtered and distributed. The battle of the Wilderness had passed into history, as a "wild, weird struggle, where 200,000 men were mixed up, like a hole full of snakes, with their tales intertwined" (F. Lee's "Life of Lee"). In the quaint words of an old English ballad :
"They both did fight, they both did beat,
They both did run away;
They both quick marched,—again to meet,
The quite contrary way."
The Famous Night March.
Soon after eight o'clock began the historic forced night march to turn Lee's right.
The movement was by the left flank, fifth corps leading ; Robinson's division and Maryland brigade in advance, which was thus the leading infantry brigade of the army.
At first, nobody knew whether it was advance or retreat. Soon, the apparent direction, jubilant spirit and extreme rapidity of the movement gave currency to the flattering rumor that Lee's whole army was in full retreat, and that Grant was after him, hot foot. The double lines of Hancock's Corps, through which we were being rushed, rapturously cheered our advance as conclusive proof, and their cheers, in turn, confirmed our confidence.
The first halt was to throw out flankers on the right, when, after an hour or more of hard marching, the long lines of works were at last cleared. Plunging into the mysterious gloom of a deep cut and washed out road, men occasionally tumbled into rocky furrows, or stumbled over carcasses. At intervals, darkness would be made visible on the right by a blazing brand dropping from some distant tree-trunk, still aglow in the depth of the Wilderness, like a signal-light of goblins. The low, damp air, reeked with the pungent, acrid snuff of horse and human slaughter.
Combat with Fitz Lee.
Shortly before daylight (Sunday, 8th of May, 1864), the head of column emerged into the open country around Todd's Tavern, where a cavalry division was found, and a halt was ordered. No sooner were arms stacked than the men dropped, falling asleep directly they touched ground. Before, however, they had fairly stretched themselves, they had to be punched, kicked and shaken up to learn that more fighting was in order, before either lodging or breakfast. The crack-crack of carbines, reverberating in the forest glades ahead, closed up yawning jaws and put snap into numb legs. Merritt's cavalry division, on the road to Spotsylvania Court House, was meeting a serious obstacle in Fitzhugh Lee, and, after considerable dismounted fighting, got out of the way of the infantry, which had been annoyed by the shifting movements of the led horses. The Maryland Brigade was then deployed on both sides of the road, the Fourth on the skirmish line. Successive barricades of felled timber across the road were struck and carried, the enemy making a stand at each obstruction. In the language of the Confederate courier who bore the verbal message from Stuart to Fitz Lee, informing him of the march of Anderson's Corps to his relief and "urging him to hold out to the last at any sacrifice," it was of the "last importance that Fitz Lee should delay the advancing column and cover the position at Spotsylvania Court House as long as possible. His division of cavalry encountered the head of the Federal column of infantry near Todd's Tavern, about four miles from the Court House, and, dismounting his men and fighting with carbines, fell slowly and stubbornly back. The fighting was dreadfully severe, and many of the flower of Virginia's youth went down before the terrific volleys of the Federal infantry." The same writer then gives a spirited account of the reckless daring with which the horse artillery was handled by Major Breathed in covering the retreat, to which he attributes great importance in retarding the advance of the Maryland brigade, which led the Federal column, until the arrival of Anderson's Corps.
(In Memoriam—Major James Breathed, No. 3.)
Substantially the same account of this action is given by Stuart's chief of staff, who calls it "one of the severest conflicts in which Fitz Lee's division was ever engaged." (McClellan's "Campaigns of Stuart's Cavalry," 407.)
While this was the way the affair looked to the cavalry, their infantry opponents,
whose loss was trifling, took it much less seriously. In fact, compared with what was to immediately follow, it seemed to them more like a picnic.
Parallel March of Anderson's Corps.
All this time nothing whatever was known of the parallel and unobstructed march upon an inside track of Anderson's (late Longstreet's) Corps for the same objective point. Nothing of it appears to have been learned by the Union cavalry, although the routes pursued by the opposing forces were but one or two miles apart. Meade and Sheridan had some hot words over it later on, each holding the other responsible. (Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. I, p. 367.)
Lee's whole army in full retreat to Richmond ! Nothing in front but a rear guard of cavalry and horse artillery trying to cover his retreat! Whereat, there was extreme elation. Foot-sore, famished, jaded as the men were, on that theory they felt as if they could have kept on to Richmond, if necessary. Unhappily, that was not the situation, but quite otherwise.
General Stuart's Compliments.
While about three miles of stubbornly contested ground were being thus wrested from Fitz Lee's cavalry, another force, under Stuart in person, was engaged in throwing up a hasty but sufficient line of timber defenses, and Anderson's leading division, under Kershaw, was taking position behind them, with artillery somewhat advanced on his right, to enfilade an attacking column. Here Stuart remained to witness the expected assault. (Southern Hist. Soc. Papers, March, 1879; 67 War Records, 1036-1056.)
These important works commanded the fork of the Brock Road, one branch leading to Spotsylvania Court House, one and a-half miles southeast, and the other leading to the old Court House, about two miles south, the Block House being about half way. Both roads directly or indirectly pointed to Richmond. Since the war, a small settlement has made its appearance at the fork, with a post office, called "Sunlight."
General Warren's Speech.
Reaching the high clearing about Alsop's farm, Warren saw this line of works in a skirt of woods along the ridge of Laurel Hill, and energetically addressed his troops as they came up. While the Seventh was passing his white horse, he was heard to exclaim, with an impulsive gesture, at each sharp, crisp sentence : "Never mind cannon ! Never mind bullets ! Press on and clear this road. It's the only way to get your rations."
Formation for Assault.
Robinson's three brigades were promptly formed in three parallel columns of attack, column by regiment, the Seventh, as usual, doubled by wing, and in rear of the Eighth and the battalion of the First. The Fourth made the charge with another brigade to left. The Maryland brigade formed on the right of the division, near the spot where General Sedgwick fell the following day, indicated now by the Sedgwick monument. A battery took position on the right of the Maryland brigade and opened fire, but was not allowed time to get the range, and made no impression upon the works, which could have been easily breached by a few well-directed shell.
The formation was in an edge of timber, about four hundred yards from the works, the intervening space being an undulating, open field. These works on Spotsylvania Ridge, otherwise Laurel Hill, are still to be seen, in fair preservation, together with the epaulement for the advanced battery on the Block House road, to their right.
At first, the men generally failed to take in the gravity of the situation. Their senses were simply stupefied by sleepless overwork. They had been temporarily braced up by the intoxicating excitement of combat and pursuit, but, when massed in close column, they acted as if they supposed the next order would be to stack arms and rest, preparatory to throwing up entrenchments, as in the days of McClellan and Meade.
First Assault at Spotsylvania, or Battle of Laurel Hill.
Instead of that, came the startling command : "Battalions Forward ! Guide Center!" The men responded with a hearty cheer and at the word "March !" stepped off with life, with no music but that of their own voices. There were ringing yells of defiance from the works as the enemy's picket line drew in. Most of the field and staff hastily dismounted as the movement began, and left their horses behind. General Robinson led his division; that is, he rode abreast of the front rank of the Maryland brigade on its right, followed by Colonel Denison, also mounted.
The enemy opened with shell, followed by canister and then double canister, from the crossfire guns on their right. Kershaw's veterans, behind the works, lost no time in proceeding to business. Their fire increased in intensity as the attack advanced. In addition to the advantage of position, they were in better shape physically than their assailants. It is true they also had made a ha,rd night march, but it was a peaceable one, and the delay interposed by Fitz Lee, as already stated, had enabled them not only to get in ahead, but had given them margin enough for what breakfast they had and a good rest, while the jaded Federals were expending what little energy they had left in more marching and fighting. They had even found their breast works ready made for them. The shooting, however, of the defendants was not as good as might have been expected under the circumstances. The best shots had been carefully picked out for the battalions of sharpshooters attached to Kershaw' s division. The sharpshooters had done extra work all night in flanking the exposed left of Anderson's column, and were late in reaching the battle-ground. Still, it must be admitted that the shooting, although not ideal, was good enough practically, and the other side have no right to complain. Had those sharpshooters been present, it is probable that this particular narrative would not have appeared. (Kershaw's Chief of Staff, Col. E. L. Costin.)
There was, of course, no skirmish line in advance of the assaulting columns, as has been erroneously stated. (Humphrey's Va. Campaign, 60, an incorrect account from a very high authority.) The men had not been required to remove caps from the nipples of their pieces, no caution against firing had been given.
Naturally enough, the front rank was goaded into a return fire; individual progress was as naturally retarded by the act of aiming and reloading; men from the rear pressed impatiently forward to repeat the process. In this way, ranks and regiments soon became intermingled, straggling was made easy, the time of exposure was fatally prolonged. The Seventh, which was in the rear when the movement commenced, soon found itself working up to the front, but in a rather mixed condition. The rattle and crash were such that no commands could be heard, and this mischievous return fire, which was helping that of the enemy to destroy the impetus and solidity of the charge, could not be stopped.
Fall of Commanders.
At the distance of about fifty yards from the works General Robinson was shot from his horse and borne from the field, with the loss of a leg. Many years after, in 1895, he received a "medal of honor" from the War Department for conspicuous gallantry on this occasion. Colonel Denison, commanding the Maryland brigade, was about the same time shot from his horse, and assisted to the rear with the loss of his right arm. He was brevetted Brigadier for this action, was again wounded later in the campaign, and brevetted Major-General.
A Forlorn Hope.
Upon the fall of these two ranking officers, the command of the division, or what there was of it in sight (the two left brigades having been repulsed or mingled with the Maryland Brigade), was promptly assumed by the Colonel of the Seventh Maryland. The situation, at that moment, was very plainly that of a forlorn hope, calling for nothing but quick and reckless work. What remained of the movement was no longer a column, but a bunched and ragged line. At points where the enemy's fire was most concentrated,
the drone of bullets blended into a throbbing wail, like that of a sonorous telegraph wire pulsing in a strong wind, punctuated by the pert zip of the closer shots. The din and racket were such that but few could have heard the commands: "Hold your fire! Double quick !" What was plainly seen in front, was the sudden appearance of the new commander, pointing with sabre to the breastworks, and trotting up towards them, until horse and rider came down. Following closely, was Captain Anderson, of the Seventh, and when he fell, or possibly before he fell, all was over.
The unordered retreat left these two officers lying within ten paces of the works, Anderson having stopped three bullets while taking a step forward, just after an unsuccessful attempt to extricate Phelps from the weight of his dying horse. Anderson was well in the lead of everything when he fell, and for his conspicuous gallantry on this occasion, and in the Wilderness, was subsequently brevetted up to lieutenant-colonel. He commanded one of the Washington County companies (Co. I).
Capture and Rescue.
After two hopeless attempts at escape, in one of which he was severely wounded and in the other waylaid and robbed by stragglers, Phelps was taken back to a Confederate field hospital, where he had not only proper but exceptional treatment, and the next day was recaptured, together with over three hundred Union prisoners, by Sheridan's cavalry at Beaver Dam Station. He was present at the battle of Yellow Tavern where General Stuart was mortally wounded, and at the battles of Meadow Bridge and Mechanicsville, where the enemy, commanded by Bragg and under the eye of the Southern President, Jeff. Davis, made a desperate fight for the defense of Richmond. Returning to Baltimore by the James River route, he was honorably discharged in September, 1864, upon resignation and surgeon's certificate of disability, brevetted Brigadier-General, and elected to Congress. Among the prisoners recaptured as above were Lieutenant Lightner of Company F (Carroll County) and Sergeant Walton of Company K (Baltimore City).
The loss of the Maryland Brigade in this action was one hundred and ninety-two killed, wounded and missing. Its present effective was about one thousand and fifty; but of this number, the Fourth Maryland, as before stated, made the charge with another brigade, and company D of the Seventh was detached in support of a battery. The actual charge was made by about seven hundred men. The loss of the Seventh was ten killed, two officers and thirty-seven men wounded, and six prisoners. Among the killed was the brave color sergeant, George Stockham, of Harford County, and two color corporals, Solomon Rohrer of Co. I, and S. M. Dick of Co. H. Two color corporals were wounded, but the colors were saved. From first to last, the enemy's fire appeared to be mainly concentrated upon the mounted officers and color bearers; of these, not one escaped.
Assault Renewed.
Griffin's division came up shortly after Robinson's, and went in on his right. Their attack was repulsed with even greater loss. One regiment in particular, the gallant Eighty-third Pennsylvania, which had several men bayonetted inside the works, actually lost fifty-seven in killed and mortally wounded alone.
Crawford's division, coming up after Griffin, had, at first, more success on the left, driving the enemy (Humphrey's brigade) for some distance and taking many prisoners. It was this temporary success, which encouraged Colonel Phelps, at that time wounded and under guard to the rear, to make the last of those attempts at escape, before mentioned. But Humphrey, being reinforced by Ramseur, regained the lost ground and drove back the Pennsylvania Reserves (Crawford's division) to the main line, which was speedily entrenched.
Practical Suggestions.
Such was the first assault upon the enemy's works at Spotsylvania, 8th of May, 1864, sometimes called the battle of Laurel Hill. It was the first of a long series, almost uniformly with similar result, well illustrating the cardinal maxim of war, "Never do exactly what your enemy wants." It is questionable whether, with the modern improved fire-arms, any such assault will be ever again attempted. If it should be, the following principles of common sense are suggested by the practical experience above mentioned :
1. The supreme effort should not be exacted of men in bad physical condition,
when such condition is one of extremity.
2. The works should be breached in places by artillery before the infantry attack.
3. No dismounting of individual officers should be allowed, unless in the discretion of the general it is proper for all to dismount, which will probably be the case hereafter.
4. The men should be told beforehand exactly what is expected of them, and how many minutes they will be exposed, provided they keep moving and hold their fire. They should be especially cautioned that the delay of aiming and firing only increases the risk, and should be encouraged to hope that great celerity of movement, the exhibition of bayonets fixed, and a bold front, may demoralize the enemy, cause him to shoot high, and in all ways diminish their own risk.
5. The standing order against quitting the ranks to help wounded off the field should, in all such cases, be strictly and literally enforced by a provost guard conspicuously present, supplemented by an ambulance corps known to be at hand, and known to be adequate.
6. If such conditions cannot be had, any officer who orders an attack in front? Upon steady troops behind cover, should be held strictly responsible for the resulting disaster, and should not be allowed to throw the blame upon his men.
7. The movement, if undertaken, should be personally and closely watched by the general who ordered it, and his staff, and praiseworthy efforts of individuals should be noticed and suitably acknowledged.
8. Any color sergeant who does his duty and survives should be made a commissioned officer at once. In fact, such should be the understood rule as to every engagement where the casualties amount to ten per cent, or over.
Subsequent History.
The several actions which have thus been partially and imperfectly described, from the fifth to the eighth of May, 1864, inclusive, were typical of the whole Virginia campaign of 1864 and 1865, during which the Seventh Maryland shared the fortunes and losses of the Maryland Brigade—a story already sufficiently told by Camper and Kirkley, in their "Historical Record of the First Maryland Veteran Infantry."
To this it is only necessary to add that the command of the Seventh Regiment devolved upon Major Mobley, until the return of Lieutenant-Colonel Bennett, upon his recovery from his wound in July, 1864. Colonel Bennett was again wounded in action, April 1, 1865, at the battle of Five Forks, and thereupon Major Mobley continued in command until the muster out; was wounded at Weldon Railroad, 18th of August, 1864, and was brevetted Colonel "for faithful and gallant service." The strength of the regiment having been reduced below the regulation standard, the vacant colonelcy was never filled.
The story of this long and bloody campaign is one of constant marching and fighting, and yet there is hardly an important event of all those later experiences which does not find its counterpart in some incident of the battles in the Wilderness, the forced night march out of it, the protracted combat with retreating cavalry, or the assault upon the works at Spotsylvania.
Dark days of disaster were relieved by occasional flashes of victory, as at the battle of Weldon Railroad on 21st of August, 1864, and of Five Forks, on the 1st of April, 1865. And finally, with many sad memories of fallen comrades, the few fortunate survivors had the proud satisfaction of participating in the crowning glory of Appomattox.
Whatever well-meant but costly mistakes may have swelled the "butcher's bill" of this sanguinary campaign, they were all eclipsed by the dazzling surrender of Lee, and the peerless magnanimity of Grant, that did him even greater honor than his magnificent success.
There can be claimed for the Seventh Maryland one distinction, that although accidental, is unique. It so happened that this regiment was to furnish the last man wounded in the Army of the Potomac. His name is Robert N. Weller, Corporal, Company E (Frederick County). He was struck by a piece of shell, fired by the First North Carolina battery, on the 9th of April, 1865, just before the surrender, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. (C. and K., 1st Md. Infantry, p. 203.)
This incident will recall to mind that the first blood to be shed in the Civil War was that of Maryland, mingled with the blood of Massachusetts, in the streets of Baltimore, on the 19th of April, 1861; and that the last blood spilled in the Revolution was that of an officer of the Maryland Line, Captain William Wilmot, killed in a skirmish on John's Island, S. C., November 14, 1782.
The casualties in the Seventh Regiment were as follows: Killed in battle, one (1) commissioned officer and seventy-eight (78) enlisted men—total, seventy-nine (79); died of disease, etc., one (1) commissioned officer and one hundred and nine (109) enlisted men—total, one hundred and ten (110); or an aggregate death list of one hundred and eighty-nine (189).
The marches of the Seventh Regiment aggregated 1137 miles, and it was transported by rail 803 miles, a total distance of 1940 miles.
The Seventh Regiment took part in the following engagements, etc.: Skirmish at
Funkstown, Md., July 12, 1863; skirmish at Haymarket, Va., October 19, 1863; reconnoissance from Culpeper to Raccoon Ford, Va., February 6 and 7, 1864 ; battle of the Wilderness, Va., May 5 to 7, 1864; skirmish with cavalry and battle of Laurel Hill, Va., May 8, 1864; battle of Spotsylvania, Va., May 9 to 20, 1864 ; battle of Harris' Farm, Va., May 19, 1864; battle of North Anna, Va., May 23 to 27, 1864; battle of Shady Grove, Va., May 30, 1864; Bethesda Church, Va., May 31 to June 1, 1864; Cold Harbor, Va., June 2 to 5, 1864; assault on Petersburg, Va., 1864-'65; Weldon Railroad, Va., August 18 to 21, 1864; Poplar Spring Church, Va., September 30, 1864; Chapel House, Va., October 1 to 3, 1864; Peebles Farm, Va., October 7 to 8, 1864; Hatchers Run, Va., October 27, 1864;
raid to Hicksford, Va., December 7 to 12, 1864; Dabneys Mill, Va., February 6, 1865; White Oak Road, Va., March 31, 1865; Five Forks, Va., April 1, 1865; Surrender at Appomattox, Va., April 9, 1865.
Copyright . 7th Maryland Regiment. All rights reserved.
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NFL: Week 2
Broncos’ McKinley found dead in home
Associated Press / September 21, 2010
Denver Broncos wide receiver Kenny McKinley was found dead in his home yesterday in an apparent suicide.
Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said authorities were called to McKinley’s home in Centennial, Colo., at 3:35 p.m. local time and found his body in the second-floor master bedroom. He said detectives believe McKinley, 23, was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Robinson said authorities were called by a female friend of McKinley’s who discovered the body after returning from an errand with his child. The sheriff declined to say if authorities found a suicide note.
“It’s still part of our investigation and probably nothing we’ll talk about right now,’’ he said.
McKinley’s death is the latest in a series for tragedies for the Broncos in recent years. Cornerback Darrent Williams was slain in a drive-by shooting on New Year’s Day 2007, and three months later backup running back Damien Nash collapsed and died after a charity basketball game in St. Louis.
“Everyone with the Broncos is shocked and saddened by the loss of Kenny McKinley,’’ team owner Pat Bowlen said in a statement. “He was part of the Broncos’ family and will be greatly missed by our organization. My most heartfelt condolences go out to Kenny’s family and friends.’’
The Broncos said coach Josh McDaniels would meet with the media today.
In a statement, McDaniels said: “Kenny had a promising future on the football field, but more importantly, he was a great teammate whose smile and personality could light up the room. This is a tragic loss for our football team, and his family is in all of our thoughts and prayers during this difficult time.’’
McKinley was a second-year pro who was on the team’s injured reserve list because of a knee injury. He played in eight games as a rookie in 2009 with seven kick returns for 158 yards before going on injured reserve Dec. 29.
McKinley was a fifth-round draft choice out of South Carolina in 2009. He attended South Cobb High in Austell, Ga.
Clausen named starter
A day before his 23d birthday, Jimmy Clausen received a job promotion he seemed destined for since before he entered high school: NFL starting quarterback.
In a rapid ascension made possible by Matt Moore’s six turnovers and Carolina’s 0-2 start, Panthers coach John Fox announced the second-round pick from Notre Dame will start Sunday’s game against Cincinnati.
“I’ve dreamt it for my whole life, to be a starting quarterback in the National Football League,’’ said Clausen, who went unbeaten in high school and was one of the nation’s top college recruits before playing in the Notre Dame spotlight. “It’s real exciting, but at same time it’s a job. You’ve got to go prepare.’’
Clausen, whose stunning fall to 48th overall pick amid concerns about his attitude was one of the top stories of April’s draft, will take over the NFL’s 28th-rated offense as Carolina seeks to avoid a second straight 0-3 start.
“We’ve just not been getting it done,’’ said Fox, facing his own uncertainty in the final year of his contract. “Jimmy is a guy we think highly of. I thought he made the most of his opportunities Sunday. We’ll see how it goes this week.’’
Clausen’s promotion was accelerated by Moore’s dismal start to the season, a steep fall from his strong 4-1 finish as a starter last season that helped pave the way for seven-year starter Jake Delhomme’s release in March.
“I’m not happy with it. I understand, I accept it. But it’s definitely not what you want to hear as a player,’’ Moore said. “I’ll be behind Jimmy as the weeks go on.’’
Kolb in, Vick out for Eagles
Michael Vick is more likely to begin the game at wide receiver than quarterback this week.
Eagles coach Andy Reid said Kevin Kolb will be the starting quarterback at Jacksonville Sunday, despite a pair of impressive performances by Vick.
Kolb has been cleared to practice after missing the second half of a season-opening loss to Green Bay and Sunday’s win over Detroit because of a concussion. So he’ll start unless he has a setback this week.
Vick still will play in Philadelphia’s version of the wildcat offense. In the first play of the season, he lined up as a receiver.
“I think it’s a beautiful situation,’’ Reid said yesterday. “I’ve got two quarterbacks that can play at a very important position.’’
Vick threw for 175 yards and one touchdown and ran for 103 in a 27-20 loss to the Packers, nearly rallying the Eagles from a 17-point deficit. He had 284 yards passing and two TDs in a 35-32 win over the Lions in his first start in almost four years.
Titans stick with Young
Jeff Fisher said there’s no quarterback controversy in Tennessee, and Vince Young will start Sunday against the New York Giants and for the rest of the season. Fisher benched Young for the final quarter of the Titans’ 19-11 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers . . . Raiders coach Tom Cable said he has a good idea of who will start at quarterback this week — but isn’t ready to announce it. Cable pulled ineffective starter Jason Campbell after the first half Sunday. Bruce Gradkowski came in and rallied the Raiders (1-1) to a 16-14 victory over the St. Louis Rams . . . Quarterback Byron Leftwich has re-signed with the Steelers after being released to create a roster spot for a defensive lineman. Leftwich might start Sunday’s game at Tampa Bay. Meanwhile, the Steelers aren’t saying yet how long quarterback Dennis Dixon will be out with the left knee injury he suffered in Sunday’s victory over Tennessee . . . The Jaguars have lost backup quarterback Luke McCown for the season because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, suffered at San Diego Sunday.
Revis not out — yet
The New York Jets’ shutdown cornerback isn’t being shut down just yet. An MRI exam revealed that Darrelle Revis has a strained left hamstring, but he would not rule himself out of New York’s game at Miami Sunday night. “They just said it’s strained and it could take one to two weeks, or it could take a week,’’ Revis said. “It depends on how my body recovers.’’ Revis, who was limited in practice last week because of tightness in the hamstring, immediately grabbed at his leg after Randy Moss made a spectacular, one-handed 34-yard touchdown grab with 53 seconds left in the first half of New York’s 28-14 win over New England. “I’m not going to step out on the field until I actually feel 100 percent,’’ Revis said . . . Meanwhile, Washington’s DeAngelo Hall, another of the NFL’s shutdown cornerbacks, has a solution for his team’s defensive shortcomings: He should cover each opponent’s top receiver. And Hall doesn’t really seem to care what defensive coordinator Jim Haslett thinks of that plan. “Don’t matter what he say. This is my team; this is my defense,’’ Hall said. Texans quarterback Matt Schaub threw for a franchise-record 497 yards and three touchdowns in Houston’s 30-27 overtime victory Sunday against the Redskins.
Witten expects to return
Cowboys tight end Jason Witten said he feels fine and expects to play this weekend at Houston. Witten said he had no headaches yesterday, a day after hitting his head on the turf during the loss to Chicago and being held out of the rest of the game by team doctors . . . Redskins coach Mike Shanahan said an MRI on starting left tackle Trent Williams’s injured left knee showed no structural damage, and his status for Washington’s game against the Rams won’t be known until later in the week . . . Rams tight end Billy Bajema will be sidelined two to four weeks because of a knee injury and defensive lineman Darell Scott has a high ankle sprain that also could put him out for as long as a month.
Jacobs rumors quashed
Giants coach Tom Coughlin said disgruntled running back Brandon Jacobs has neither asked to be traded nor requested a meeting to define his role. Rumors that Jacobs asked for a trade started circulating in the wake of the Giants’ 38-14 loss to the Colts Sunday. Jacobs was limited to four carries in the game and did not play after accidentally tossing his helmet about 10 rows into the stands behind the Giants’ bench after being stopped on a second-half run. Stadium security officials had to retrieve the helmet . . . Veteran Chad Clifton remains the Packers’ starting left tackle. That doesn’t mean he’ll start against the Chicago Bears next Monday night. Clifton was benched in favor of first-round rookie Bryan Bulaga during Sunday’s victory over the Buffalo Bills, and Packers coach Mike McCarthy said he made the move because Clifton “didn’t look healthy.’’ . . . Browns center Alex Mack accused Kansas City defensive lineman Shaun Smith of grabbing his private parts during Sunday’s game. Mack said Smith, who played two seasons for the Browns before he was released last year, committed the dirty play in the second quarter. “I don’t have no comment,’’ Smith said. “I don’t recall doing anything like that.’’ . . . Authorities say Ravens assistant offensive line coach Andy Moeller is facing drunken driving charges. Maryland State Police said the coach was arrested after being pulled over for speeding on the Maryland beltway early Saturday.
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Found 3 collections related to Forty-second Street
Stewart, Michael, 1929-1987
Michael Stewart scores, 1870-1984
15 linear feet (13 boxes)
Michael Stewart (nee Rubin), librettist, lyricist, playwright, and novelist, was born in New York City, where he attended Queens College. He received a Master of Fine Arts in drama from Yale in 1953. Prior to his work on Broadway, Stewart wrote... more
Michael Stewart (nee Rubin), librettist, lyricist, playwright, and novelist, was born in New York City, where he attended Queens College. He received a Master of Fine Arts in drama from Yale in 1953. Prior to his work on Broadway, Stewart wrote for television and contributed sketches and lyrics to revues. His first effort on Broadway, Bye Bye Birdie, opened in 1960 and won Stewart his first Tony as its author. During his career in the musical theater Stewart also worked on Carnival!, Hello, Dolly!, 42nd Street, George M!, Barnum, I Love My Wife, Mack and Mabel, and The Grand Tour. Among his collaborators were the writer Mark Bramble, and the composers Cy Coleman, Jerry Herman, Bob Merrill and Jule Styne. less
Forty-Second Street, Book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, Music by Harry Warren, Lyrics by Al Dubin » Songs by Harry Warren and/or Al Dubin » Forty-Second Street
Forty-Second Street, Book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, Music by Harry Warren, Lyrics by Al Dubin
Forty-Second Street, Book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, Music by Harry Warren, Lyrics by Al Dubin » Songs by Harry Warren and/or Al Dubin
Tucker, Sophie, 1884-1966
Sophie Tucker collection of performance material, 19--
The Sophie Tucker Collection contains materials used in performance of her songs and acts.
Series 1: Manuscript performance materials » Forty-second Street.
Burrows, Abe, 1910-1985
Abe Burrows papers, 1904-1993
50 linear feet (97 boxes, 29 volumes and 3 oversized folders)
This collection of personal papers, correspondence, production files, radio scripts, autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, articles, songs, clippings, photographs and visual materials provides a wealth of documentation on the personal... more
This collection of personal papers, correspondence, production files, radio scripts, autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, articles, songs, clippings, photographs and visual materials provides a wealth of documentation on the personal and professional life of Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, lyricist, director, screenwriter, comedian and play doctor, Abe Burrows. less
Series III: Production Files » Sub-series 1 - By Title » Forty-Second Street book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, based on the novel by Bradford Ropes
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America and Canada
Through the Caucasus
Across the Middle East
Life in Belgium
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Pepper and Mint
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With a Graph and a Map RSS
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Galapagos Islands (4)
homophobia (21)
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romantic moments (7)
science careers (16)
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Entries in Jordan (3)
Roman ruins in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 at 8:34AM
The Dead Sea and Amman
The day after Petra we left for the Dead Sea. The shore of the Dead Sea is the lowest dry land in the world, at 396m below sea-level. It is quite interesting, because when plates are pulled apart they split to form three rifts which become deep trenches, then eventually seas/oceans. The centre of tearing of the African place, focused on Ethiopia, has split to form the Great African Rift Valley/Lake Victoria, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden. The Dead Sea lies in the continuation of the Red Sea rift (about 14km wide and 72km long). The desert lake has dried since then from the desert heat, so it is now so salty it is 33% solids (20x bromine of sea water, 15x magnesium, 10x iodine), and 'dead', since no fish can survive.
The Dead Sea was great, so much fun. We all went for a swim at the local beach, and bobbed around on the surface of the water. It was actually tough to stand up, since our legs floated up so well. I tried to work out how much lead I would need to scuba there, I am guessing about 60kg. The water was so salty it tasted vile and burnt our lips and eyes, but it was so much fun floating around that it was worth it. The salt was precipitating out on rocks and safety ropes in the water, which became sharp enough to cut my legs when I brushed past them, and I had really picked the wrong day to shave :) After floating, we covered each ourselves in Dead Sea mud (I got called naughty for slapping mud on Andy when he was trying to clean off), which was nice messy, gooey fun.
After the Dead Sea we drove to Amman, during the drive Michelle cut my hair with a Swiss Army knife, it turned out well even with the bumpy road. Amman has been continually occupied since 3500 BCE, called Rabbath Ammon ‘Great City of the Ammonites’, then Philadelphia after it was taken by Herod for Rome in 30 BCE. It fell to Persian Sassanians in 614 CE, and reduced in size and importance, only regrowing as the capital of Jordan.
Jerash
The following day we drove to Jerash. Jerash became a major city under Alexander the Great (333 BCE), and was conquered by Pompey for Rome in 64 BCE, (when it was renamed Gerasa). Gerasa became a city of the Decapolis (a league of major commercial cities), reaching its peak in 3rd century CE with a population of 15 000 Romans. The ruins have now been restored are were magnificent to wander through, newly restored.
We entered the city through Hadrian’s Arch, built in 129 CE for the visit of Emperor Hadrian. The enterence leads to the main market place, a huge round paved area surrounded by columns (all still standing). Small stalls for butchers and merchants were arranged around the market place, and from it lead the Cardo maximus, the main street (with an underground sewage system). The city contained a Nymphaeum (public fountain), Hippodrome (seating 15 000 for chariot races), a Temple to Zeus (built 162 CE) and a Temple of Artemis (the Goddess of the hunt was the patron goddess of Jerash). The columns are the Temple of Artemis are famous as one is a moving column - it sways gently in the wind (I couldn't see the sway, but when I stuck my finger in a crack I could feel it being squashed). There was also a magnificent theatre, with the acoustics designed to allow everyone inside to clearly hear the person in the middle (with amplifiers surrounding the theatre, and all the design calculated to move the sound from the centre to the audience). They demonstrated the acoustics for us with an Arab marching band playing 'Yankie Doodle' on bagpipes, which was quite odd.
I enjoyed being in a city which invested so much in its public buildings, with beautiful carvings designed to last thousands of years.
In the afternoon we drove across the Syria. Syria was a similar history to Jordan, since Lebannon and Jordan were a part of Syria, except after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire France was given the mandate over Syria, rahter than the British (until independence after WWII). So now they have excellent desert pastries and people ask if I am French.
Before the rise of Islam, the chief religion here was Zoroastrianism, the worship of Ahura Mazda revealed by Zoroaster three or four thousand years ago. Under the Sassanians in the Middle East it was quite a savage religion, persecuting other religions and worshipping fire. It was lead by the Magi, about which Herodotus had to say; The Magi are a peculiar caste, quite different from the Egyptian priests and indeed from any other sort of person. The Egyptian priests make it an article of religion to kill no living creature except for sacrifice, but the Magi not only kill anything, except dogs and men, with their own hands but make a special point of doing so; ants, snakes, animals, birds – no matter what, they kill them indiscriminately. Well, it is an ancient custom, so let them keep it. They fled to India in the eighth century when they were persecuted during the Islamic conquest and conversion of the Middle East. Jadav Rana, the Hindu king of Sanjan, accepted them on the condition that they don’t try to convert anyone, so now they remain a very small religion (they still don’t proselytise). I think this humbling experience has been good for them, because they now focus on education and arriving at moral positions through self-reflection, so their religion has the highest literacy and tertiary education rate of any religion. Also, they firmly believe in the equality of all people, regardless of religion, race or gender, they are environmentally conscious, believe in charity, and condemn all oppression or cruelty towards people or animals.
Anyway, we didn't get to do much in Syria that day, because the border crossing took so long. We went to Damascus (Ash-Sham), the oldest continually inhabited city in the world (7000 years), in the Ghouta oasis on the Barada River. Damascus has been a captial for a long time, being a major city in the Persian, Greek and Roman Empires, then the Arab empire after it fell to Islam in 635 CE. In 1200 it was sacked by Ghengis Khan and the Mongols, then ruled by the Mamluks and Ottomans before world war I. We had dinner in the historic walled Old City in the centre, a great mezze of vegetarian food and excellent mint lemonade. The cafe was right by Umayyad Mosque, which is a bit of a floosy of religions, starting out as a Temple of Jupiter thousands of years ago, before converting to a Byzantine cathedral and then a mosque in 705 CE. It is where Saladin is buried. We went shopping in the souk (market), one of the best in the Middle East, an enormous network of covered shopping streets, and had Arab icecream, which was great :)
On a banner in the souk: From Syria the country of peace and loving to the aggressive Israel and ally America... We are in Syria and the country of self-estiem and home-bred. We refuse to your democracy after what we had seen happened in Iraq and Palastine and now your democracy build on peoples bodies which you bombed on civilians innocents, and when the matter reached the council of security in the United Nations and how you used the rejection right (the veto) to save Israel for only a suspicious matter, and how American pushed the council of security to issue a decision against Syria followed by new decision even Syria executed the first one, but the Syrian people not afraid what ever the difficulties could be, and they are resistant by leadership dearest the President Bashar Al-Assad.
Yesterday we paid a flying visit to Lebanon. We visited Baalbek first, which contains an ancient temple to the Phoenician god Baal (Baalbek means City of Baal). Baalbek was renamed Heliopolis (City of the Sun, it has 300 sunny days a year on average) by the ancient Greeks), and Baal was turned into Jupiter (and the temple converted) by the Romans. Baalbek also has later built temples to Venus, the Goddess of Love, and Bacchus, the God of Wine (who alone of the Roman gods has no gender). The temple was magnificent, enormous stones rising up to look over the snow covered mountains. It contains the famous six columns of Baalbek, which have never fallen over the 2000 they have stood there (since they were imported from Aswan in Egypt, being shipped to Beirut and then rolled 1000km through the mountain passes to Baalbek), with the Lion head gargoyles overlooking the site. Baalbek has the largest carved stones in the world, three enormous sandstone pieces at 100000 tonnes each, a fourth was carved, but at 120,000 tonnes was too heavy to shift, remaining in the quarry as The Stone of the Pregnant Woman.
Driving over the pass to Beirut, I was delighted to regain my hearing in my left ear, which had been gone since Dehab. I guess I just needed negative pressure. Beirut was great, originally known as Beryte, a modest port in Phoenician times (2000 BCE) which rose during Roman times with one of the first three Schools of Law. The city was largely destroyed during the civil war, but has been recently rebuilt. Now the city if obviously rich, with the main streets looking like they belong in New York, and expensive cars driving around. Yet there were still bombed out buildings that have been left, the old surviving churches have bullet holes in them, and the beggar children have no hands.
Our guide left us in Beirut, so I lead Andy, Katho, Tamara, Ruth and Ken on a list of highlights that I wanted to see. Andy and Katho made up a theme song to 'Map Man', and we got to see Downtown, which was a beautiful cafe district (we had icecream). We saw a Knights Hospitaller Church converted to a mosque a thousand years ago, St George's Cathedral, the Grand Serile (an enormous Ottoman era building) and the Roman bathes. The city was very friendly, when we looked lost we had people coming up to us to offer directions, they all chatted for awhile. Katho asked for directions from one guy, who asked if we could ask again in Arabic or French, because his English wasn't very good, and a security guard ended up showing us to the Roman bathes. Tamara said it was the second best Roman bathes she had seen (after Bath), and told us how the stone pillar in the bath were built to support the floor of the sauna. The fires would have been lit beneath, and every night the slaves would have to crawl under the floor to clear out the ash.
Today we drove from Damascus to Palmyra, stopping at the Bagdad Cafe near the Iraqi border. Palmyra (Tadmor) was an Assyrian Caravan town 4000 years ago (built on an oasis 200km from the Euphrates River, vital as a watering hole in the desert crossing), and an important outpost in the Greek Empire. It was annexed by Rome in 217 CE, and became amazingly wealthy through taxing trade, with a population of over 200 000 people. As the most eastern part of the Roman empire it was only tenuously held, and when Zanobia became ruler of Palmyra in 267 CE after her husband Odenathus suspiciously died, she claimed descent from Cleopatra and rose up against Rome. She had early success, but the city was sacked by Emperor Hadrian in 273 CE, and has since been buried in sand.
We first visited Fakhredin al Maany Citadel, which was built only 800 years ago after the Islamic conquest of the region. It was a lovely little castle, I wandered around it by myself, poking into small passageways and admiring the view over Palmyra from the highest towers, cheering me up a lot. The castle was extended about 300 years ago, by a noble with visions of independence from the Ottomans. He made peace with them eventually, and the Sultan invited him and his sons to Constantinople to seal the peace, then hung them.
The city itself was amazing. It isn't strictly Roman, being rather Nabataean under Roman rule, with the Nabataean fusion of styles. It was an enormous city, with a 6km wall surrounding it, and a 1.3km main street, lined with columns (many of which are still standing). Only 30% has been uncovered from the sand, with the work still underway, but they have already revealed a Senate, bathes, temples and a small theatre. We saw the columns with Zanobia's titles carved on them, with one of her titles (Empress?) removed by the Romans after her defeat. The main street has an unusual double arch at the end, where the street needs to turn to the Temple of Bell (Roman architecture likes straight streets, so two archways were built, each perpendicular with the road they faced, and slight askew from each other, to give the impression of a straight road).
The Temple of Bell was very impressive, still largely intact. Bell/Baal was the most important God in the Palmyrene pantheon), although Zanobia was also a convert of Mani, the Babylonian prophet (210-276 CE) who formed the major religion Manichaeism which tried to peacefully fuse together Christianity, Buddhism, Judaisim and Zoroastrianism into a pacifist religion (which lasted a thousand years before dying out). The Temple was converted to Jupiter under Roman rule, and later used as Church and Mosque, with fresco of Gabriel and St George, and a mark cut to indicate the direction of Mecca. The temple gate was impressive, carved with olives (the symbol of fertility), grapes (the symbol of immortality) and poppy (the symbol of medicine). The whole complex looked pockmarked, as the Ottomans cut out the rock to extract the bronze dowls used in the construction. A really wonderful site...
Adrian Liston | tagged Jordan, Lebanon, Syria in History, Travel | Post a Comment | Share Article
Friday, March 17, 2006 at 8:28AM
A rose-red city, half as old as time (actually Burgon retracted the ‘rose-red’ afterwards, when he visited and thought it was more salmon-pink).
I spent the entire day wandering through Petra with Tamara. The ancient city was beautiful and wonderful. It was built by the Nabataeans when they moved from north-western Arabia to southern Jordan around the 3rd century BCE. They built Petra to control the spice, silk and slave trade routes through Middle East. It was a thriving empire, ruling most of the Middle East until 106 CE when it was conquered by the Romans. This was only just found out, when a letter from a Roman solider to his wife in Egypt was discovered, talking about his time in Petra. The Romans had to cut off the water supply to the city and siege it for three years before they could conquer it. Once the Romans conquered Petra they shifted the trade routes through Palmyra, but Petra was still lived in until 555 CE, when a massive earthquake destroyed most of the residential caves (but left the tombs intact).
Petra is built in a series of valleys through craggy faulted sandstone. Gentle hills hit steep cliffs at the edge of Petra, we walked in along the 1.2km long, 2m wide siq (a rock cleft created by an earthquake). The Nabateans were a very technologically advanced people, with hydraulic engineering, iron smelting and copper refining. Along the walls of the siq were two troughs (which used to be covered with clay lids), one to pipe water into the city, and one to pipe sewage out. At intervals there were stairs up to the pipe, where sewage traps were placed to keep the system clean. The sandstone walls are very colourful, mostly red, but with swirls of green and yellow, where the dominant oxide changes from iron to copper or sulphur. There were icons to the gods of trade carved out along the route, and a fossilised fish in the wall at one point. The road through still retains the original Roman paving in places, with large rounded pavestones. At several points offshots of the siq were damned, the original damns were destroyed by earthquakes, but the Nabataeans used them to control the winter floods.
As the siq ends, the Treasury (Al-Khazneh) peaks through the gap, and we came out to the beautiful facade of the tomb to a Nabataean king 56 BCE. The facade is 30m wide and 43m tall, and is beautifully carved straight out of the mountain in a fusion of Nabataean with Hellenistic, Egyptian, Roman and Persian influences. The carvings are beautifully intact (the carvers started at the top and worked down, so as not to destroy their work), except for the central cylinder, which locals thought was filled with Egyptian or pirate treasure (hence they called it the Treasury), and tried to open by shooting their rifles at it, and a few of the gods which were obliterated by Christians. The actual tomb inside the massive facade was quite small, the opposite of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, with no facade and elaborate chambers carved into the mountains.
Past the Treasury we walked along the Street of Facades, with rows of Nabataean tombs carved into the mountain, each with a stairwell carved on top (the symbol of eternal life). Past the Street of Facades we entered the main residential valley, with hundreds of small houses, each carved out of the mountain. The entire mountain face with peppered with doorways, each with a carving of a stairwell above. From the residential valley was a long colonnaded street, with columns running along the road, and the ruins of shops and stores that used to sell their wares here. The road runs to the amphitheatre, which was carved out as a meeting place for business and religion in the 1st century CE, seating 3000 people, then expanded under Roman rule to seat 7000 for entertainment.
From the amphitheatre we walked several kilometres and climbed up the 800 steps to get to the Monastery (Ad-Deir), another amazing tomb facade (or a temple, it isn't sure). We walked back and visited the Lion Triclinium, Al-Habis Fortress (built by the Crusaders when they controlled Petra) and the Royal Tombs. The Royal Tombs used to be similar to the Treasury and Monastery, but are more eroded, leaving less detail, but still the imposing structures. The sandstone was impressively coloured in this region, such that some facades looked like polished marble, or abstract Aboriginal rock paintings, with the brightest swirls of colour meandering across the surface. I spent all my money on my first souvenir in the Middle East (and probably last), three old coins found at Petra, an Ottoman Turk coin (maybe 500 years old), a Roman coin (1500 years old), and a 2000 year old Nabataean coin.
On the way back we climbed up to the High Place of Sacrifice, with spectacular views of Petra and the mountains, and a sacrificial alter and table for religious ceremonies.
Turkish baths
Coming back from Petra I went straight in for a Turkish bath. We started out with a steam for half an hour, very different from a Banya or Sauna since it is not as hot, but so steamy you can only see about 50cm. It was glorious to feel the sweat pouring out, especially after eight solid hours of hiking. Then I lay on a heated marble slab for ten minutes, followed by a shower and a scrub by a Jordanian guy using a cleaning glove. After the scrub came a spa, which was too hot, and made me feel a little ill (I had to have a lie down because I felt like fainting), another shower and a massage (which I don't like, but everyone else loved).
Adrian Liston | tagged Jordan in Travel | Post a Comment | Share Article
Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 8:26AM
Yesterday we crossed into Jordan. While the day was painfully slow (waiting for immigration and the ferry across the Gulf of Aqaba), it does feel amazing to now be in a place with such history, in the Arabian peninsular, the very cradle of civilisation. Jordan saw the rise and fall of all the great empires, first the various Persian and Mesopotamian empires that fluctuated across Arabia, then the Greek empire, after Jordan was conquered by Alexander the Great in 333 BCE. When Alexander the Great died his wife was pregnant. His generals got together to discuss the fate of his empire, and decided to wait to see if the child was a boy or girl. A boy would get the empire intact, a girl and the generals would split it between them. Ptolemy, the general who took Egypt once the daughter was born also took Jordan. The Jordan region was later ruled by the Persian Seleucids and Sassanians before the Turkish Byzantines took over, and was then conquered by Islamic empires in 7thcentury, first the Umayyad Empire, then the Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuk Turks (in 1037 CE). The region was captured in 1099 during Pope Urban II’s Crusades, and recaptured in the 12thcentury by Nur ad-Din, Saladin and the Mamluks. Jordan was ruled by the Ottoman Turks from 1516 until WWI, where the Turks fought with Germany, prompting England to send Lawrence of Arabia to convince the Arabs to rise up against the Turks on the promise of independence after the war. They did, but England broke the promise, and ruled Transjordan as a League of Nations colony until after WWII, when it finally became independent.
Last night was painful with a cold desert camp and an ear-nose-throat infection, but I got to wake up in the Wadi Rum, the desert valley where Lawrence of Arabia was based. He got first class Honours for his thesis on Crusader Architecture. This morning was spent on a jeep safari across the Wadi Rum. The desert is a yellow sandy desert between barren mountains, but the unusually heavy rains recently have caused startlingly bright green plants to blossom from the sand. When the hills roll just so, the plants line up and the desert looks beautiful and green.
We drove to a cleft in a mountain crag, squeezed in through the siq and found a 2500 year-old Persian map carved into a stone table, outlining water pools and tracks through the desert. We then drove through to see some natural rock bridges, Wadak Rock Bridge, Umm Fruth Rock Bridge and Burdah Rock Bridge, which I looked at and Michelle climbed. We saw a few camels, and some normadic Bedouin with herds of goats. There was much for the goats to eat right now, with the rains, and they have some very clever ways to survive the dry years. One of the mountains we saw rising out of the desert contained an 18m deep stone well, craved straight into the mountain. The entire mountain was then landscaped with funnels and walls to divert all rainflow into the well. I walked up and down a tall sand dune (very tough), Hudson would be proud of Michelle for following the Wiggles advice and running up and then rolling down the sand dune.
Petra tomorrow.
Adrian Liston | tagged Jordan in History, Travel | Post a Comment | Share Article
Copyright © 2011, Adrian Liston. All rights reserved.
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First Look Fair: Clannad After Story
By gendomike / October 4, 2008
You throw like a girl
Welcome back to the moe? An episode that served more like a reintroduction to all the major characters shows some subtle differences from the first season, differences that may point to a difference of approach this time around.
The first thing to note is that, as far as I can tell–the first episode of this season is very much a standalone one, not part of an arc. This is probably because the entire After Story consists of a single arc, as far as I know. My expectation that they would begin the story when the characters were already out of school turned out to be wrong, probably because I was basing it off my viewing of the Clannad movie. There, it shifts to that time period almost immediately after Nagisa’s play, which is the arc that ends season 1 of the TV show. (I never properly blogged or reviewed the latter half of the first season, I know. I’ll try to keep writing these consistently from now on.) Having a single arc finally would allow all the characters to work as an ensemble, and presumably to keep the romantic stuff focused only on Nagisa and Tomoya.
Yes, you succeeded in making me watch this show again
Which leads me to this: one welcome thing about this show, and the process started in the first season but seems to be continuing into the current one, is that it certainly no longer feels like a harem comedy. This, in spite of the names of the various girls being printed in the opening credits just like in the first season, and just like in the game. The dynamic is quite different than many game adaptations of its ilk, one that I was willing to accept in spite of my prejudices against this genre of anime. While I wouldn’t necessarily start someone with a Key production if he or she is a skeptic of the genre–I’d start with Kimikiss instead–Clannad features a lot less of the things that would irritate a newcomer.
This episode, too, continues a small tradition of sports-themed episodes, and the biggest surprise to me was to see that the ragtag team was actually not a total washout. They are believably mediocre with some players having flashes of real talent, as opposed to being comically overmatched or comically super-talented. Of course, sports movie formula demands that the underdogs win, which is what happens at the end–and I found the very end of the episode to be directed in a rather unique way. The “sad” music that was played so much in the first season plays as Tomoya takes the bat, and we get what is either a flash forward or a hopeful imagining of what it would be like to win the game, and as the ball flies in the air, it’s juxtaposed with the heretofore underexplained alternate world with the patchwork robot. The writers are skilled enough to leave the personal-triumph-over-the-injuries-of-the-past subtext of the scene unspoken. It’s a nice artistic touch that I didn’t quite expect from this sort of show, and it’s appreciated.
If Stanley Kubrick were a KyoAni director...(ref: jump cut in 2001)
I watched this after having watched the rather bizarre Hyakko episode 1, and I laughed more in Clannad. I don’t know what that means, really; it’s far too early to cast any judgment (remember what I said after watching only a couple of episodes of Lucky Star?), but episode 1 at least reconfirms that the general competence and solidity of Clannad has carried over into the current season. It was never exceptional, mind you, and it had its low points; the second half of the first season in particular was noticeably weaker than the first half. But it was always easy on the eye and easy to take, even for people like me with a relatively low tolerance for moe. In that regard, nothing’s changed. It’s still solid otaku entertainment with great animation and I should have no problem following this show alongside ef.
gendomike
Michael lives in the Los Angeles area, and has been into anime since he saw Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1999. Some of his favorite shows include Full Metal Alchemist, Honey and Clover, and Welcome to the NHK!. Since 2003 he has gone to at least one anime convention every year. A public radio junkie, which naturally led to podcasting, he now holds a seminary degree and is looking to become Dr. Rev. Otaku Bible Man any day now.
Michael can be reached at mike.huang@animediet.net. You can also find his Twitter account at @gendomike.
Tags: Clannad, Clannad After Story, drama, moe, romance
Casshern Sins episode 1– This is one to watch
Hyakko 1 (Ray)
4 thoughts on “First Look Fair: Clannad After Story”
FF says:
Nice start to the season.
Despite the name of the show, the director seems to have decided to spend some time with the sub-character stories before moving onto the main meal, so don’t expect the true “After Story” to start until episode 9 or so. After that it should be much smoother sailing, having as you said dispensed with the previous need to ragtag different stories into a single cohesive narrative.
@FF: ah, so that’s it–there’s some ways to go before the “real” plot starts. I guess that means this is is going to go on for 24-26 episodes, then? Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the room for stuff like that.
Yeah, 24 eps has been confirmed by people in the know.
it’s interesting how a team of misfits will somehow win the game in the end. ^^;
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Gujarat Local Acts
Telangana Local Acts
Chandigarh Local Acts
Karnataka Local Acts
Rajasthan Ministers Salaries and other Facilities Act, 1956
1. Short title.
2. Interpretation.
3. Salaries of Ministers.
4. Sumptuary allowance.
5. Residence and conveyance.
5A. Concessions on account of electricity and water.
6. Travelling and daily allowances.
7. Medical treatment, etc. to Ministers.
7A. Advances to Ministers for purchase of motor cars.
7B. Salaries, allowances and amenities to Parliamentary Secretaries.
7BB. Facilities to former Chief Ministers.
7C. Power to make rules with retrospective effect.
8. Repeal and savings.
9. Regulation of certain payments on account of concessions.
10. Regulation of certain payments on account of concessions.
11. Regulation of certain payments on account of facilities to former Chief Ministers.
The Rajasthan Ministers Salaries and other Facilities Act, 1956
Act No. 43 of 1956
Last Updated 24th May, 2019 [rj1006]
[Received the assent of the Governor on the 28th of December, 1956; Assent first published in Published in Rajasthan Government Gazette, Part 4-A (Extraordinary), dated 31-12-1956]
LEGISLATIVE HISTORY 6
As amended subsequently by the following Rajasthan Acts:
Rajasthan 26 of 1957
Rajasthan 3 of 1968
Rajasthan Act 5 of 1981
Rajasthan 4 of 1989, w.e.f 6-4-1989
Rajasthan 10 of 1990, w.e.f. 3-7-1990
Rajasthan 14 of 1994, w.e.f. 28-4-1994
Rajasthan 4 of 1998, w.e.f. 30-3-1998
Rajasthan 9 of 1999, w.e.f. 7-5-1999
Rajasthan 17 of 1999, w.r.e.f. 28-6-1999
Amended by Rajasthan Act No. 25 of 2017, dated 17.5.2017
Amended by Rajasthan Act No. 12 of 2005, dated 7.5.2005
An Act to provide for the salaries [and other Facilities] of the Ministers of the State of Rajasthan.
Whereas it is expedient to provide for the salaries of the Ministers of the State of Rajasthan and for other matters connected therewith:
Be it enacted by the Rajasthan State Legislature In the Seventh Year of the Republic of India as follows:-
1. Short title. - This Act may be called the Rajasthan Ministers Salaries [and other Facilities] Act, 1956.
Object & Reasons6
Statement of Objects and Reasons. - For last some time the former Chief Ministers of Rajasthan are being provided, by executive orders of the State Government, certain facilities in addition to the pension and facilities available to them as a former member of the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly. These facilities are intended to be as a part of the pension benefits for their past services as a Chief Minister. It is deemed proper to give the aforesaid executive orders of the State Government statutory backing. Provision is also proposed to regularize the payments made or to be made under the executive orders of the State Government, until the coming into force of the proposed amendment.
It is proposed that a former Chief Minister who has served as such for an uninterrupted term of five years shall, for reminder of his or her life, be provided the facilities enumerated in the proposed clauses (a) to (d) of sub-section (1) of section 7-BB. These facilities shall be available to him only to the extent to which such facilities are not available to him or her from any of the sources enumerated in the proposed sub-section (1) of section 7-BB.
It is also proposed that a former Chief Minister who was receiving any facility under any-rule or order of the State Government immediately before coming into force of the amendment proposed in this Bill shall continue to ayail such facilities for the remainder of his life even if he has not served as the Chief Minister of Rajasthan for an uninterrupted term of five year as required by the proposed section 7-BB.
Opportunity is also availed to amend the title and long title of the principal Act to extend the scope of the Act so as to cover therein the facilities other than the salaries provided in the Act. The Bill seeks to achieve the aforesaid objects.
Hence the Bill.
Statement of Objects and Reasons (Act No. 20 of 2012). - Looking to the present level of price, the existing salary and sumptuary allowance payable to the Chief Minister, Minsters, Ministers of State, Deputy Minister and Parliamentary Secretaries appeared to be inadequate. Under these circumstances, it has been considered expedient to increase the salary and sumptuary allowance payable to Chief Ministers, Ministers, Ministers of State, Deputy Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries, and therefore, necessary amendment in sections 3, 4 and 7-B of the Rajasthan Ministers' Salaries Act 1956 (Act No. 43 of 1956) have been respectively proposed vide clauses 2, 3 and 4 to the Bill.
The Bill seeks to achieve the aforesaid objectives.
Statement of Objects and Reasons (Act No. 9 of 2006). - Looking to the present level of prices, the existing sumptuary allowance payable to the Chief Minister, Ministers, Ministers of State appeared to be inadequate. Under these circumstances, it has been considered expedient to increase the sumptuary allowance payable to Chief Minister, Ministers, Ministers of State and, therefore, necessary amendment in Sections 4 of the Rajasthan Minister's Salaries Act, 1956 (Act No. 43 of 1956) have been respectively proposed vide clause 2 of the Bill.
This Bill seeks to achieve the aforesaid objective. Hence the Bill.
Statement of Objects and Reasons (Act No. 11 of 2005). - The Parliamentary Secretaries have been given the status of a State Minister. In order to give the Parliamentary Secretaries salary and sumptuary allowance equivalent to those of the State Ministers, Section 7-B of the Rajasthan Ministers� Salaries Act, 1956 needs to be amended accordingly. Therefore sub-Sections (1) & (3) of the said section are proposed to be substituted.
The Bill seeks to achieve the aforesaid objective.
Published in the Rajasthan Gazette, Extraordinary, Part III-A, dated 17.2.2005 at page 33(3).
2. Interpretation. - (1) In this Act, unless the subject or context otherwise requires,-
(a) "appointed day" means the first day of November, 1956;
(b) "Minister" means a minister of the State of Rajasthan and save as otherwise expressly provided, includes the Chief Minister [a Minister of State and] a Deputy Minister of that State;
(c) "State" means the new State of Rajasthan as formed by section 10 of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 (Central Act, 37 of 1956).
(2) The provisions of the Rajasthan General Clauses Act, 1955 (Rajasthan Act 8 of 1955), in force in the pre-reorganisation State of Rajasthan shall as far as may be, apply mutatis mutandis to this Act.
[3. Salaries of Ministers. - There will be paid with effect from the [1st April 2017] or with effect from the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office whichever may be later-
(a) a salary of [fifty five thousand rupees] per mensem to the Chief Minister.
(b) a salary of [forty five thousand rupees] per mensem to a Minister other than a Minister of State and a Deputy Minister:
[(bb) a salary of ten thousand five hundred rupees per mensem to a Deputy Chief Minister;]
(c) a salary of [forty two thousand rupees] per mensem to Minister of State, and
(d) a salary of [forty thousand rupees] per mensem to a Deputy Minister.]
4. Sumptuary allowance. - [(1) In addition to the salary payable under section 3, there shall be paid to the Chief Minister with effect from the [1st April 2017] or with effect from the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office, a sumptuary allowance of [fifty five thousand rupees] per mensem.]
[(1 A) In addition to the salary payable under section 3, there shall be paid to a Deputy Chief Minister with effect from the date of commencement of the Rajasthan Ministers Salaries (Amendment) Act, 1998 (Act No.4 of 1998) or with effect from the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office, a sumptuary allowance of six thousand rupees per mensem.]
[(2) In addition to the salary payable under section 3. there shall be paid with effect from the [1st April 2017] or with effect from the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office, to every Minister, other than the Chief Minister, a Minister of State, and a Deputy Minister, a sumptuary allowance of [fifty thousand rupees] per mensem].
[(3) In addition to the salary payable under section 3. there shall be paid, with effect from [1st April 2017] or with effect from the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office, to every Minister of State, a sumptuary allowance of [fifty thousand rupees] per mensem].
[(4) In addition to the salary payable under section 3. there shall be paid, with effect from the date of commencement of the Rajasthan Ministers Salaries (Amendment) Act, 1998 (Act No. 4 of 1998) or with effect from the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office, to every Deputy Minister a sumptuary allowance of two thousand five hundred rupees per mensem.]
5. Residence and conveyance. - (1) With effect from the date referred to in section 3, each Minister shall also be entitled [from the State Government] without payment of rent or other charge, to the use. throughout his term of office, of-
(a) [an official residence and furniture in Jaipur, and]
(b) a State car.
and no charge shall fall on the Minister personally in respect of the maintenance of [such residence, furniture or car:]
[Provided that each Minister shall be entitled to [an official residence and furniture without payment of rent or other charge] in Jaipur upto a period of two months from the date he ceases to be a Minister].
[Explanation. - For the purpose of this section and section 5-A, the expression "official residence" means a residential building the staff quarters, out house and other building ground and garden appurtenant thereto set apart by the State Government for residence of a Minister and the members of his family and his servant including all fixtures and fittings for electric and water supply and for sanitary purposes.]
[x x x]
[Provided further that each Minister shall immediately after the expiration of the period referred to in the foregoing proviso vacate such official residence, failing which, notwithstanding anything contained in the Rajasthan Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1964 (Rajasthan Act 2 of 1965) or any other law for the time being in force, an officer authorised by the State Government in this behalf may take possession of the official residence together with the furniture and may for the purpose use such force as may be necessary in the circumstances] [and in case any delay in so taking possession is caused due to any resistance offered by the Minister or anybody on his behalf, whether on the strength of any order or otherwise, for so long as the residence continues, the Minister shall be liable to as damages for the use and occupation of the official residence, such amount not exceeding five thousand per month as may be notified by the Government from time to time.]
[Explanation. - For the purpose of this sub-section 'Minister' includes a person who has ceased to be a Minister, and also includes a person who was given the status of a minister.]
[(2) The use and maintenance of the official residence, furniture and State car referred to in sub-section (1) shall be regulated by rules made in this behalf by the Governor.]
[(3) A Minister shall be paid a monthly allowance of-
[(a) two hundred in pees, if he avails himself of the use of official residence provided to him in Jaipur or lives in his own house or in the house owned by his spouse in Jaipur or lives in a rented house in Jaipur, but does not avail himself of the use of furniture to which he is entitled under sub-section (11)
(b) three thousand rupees, if he does not avail himself of the use of an official residence provided to him in Jaipur but lives in his own house or in the house owned by his spouse in Jaipur or lives in a rented house in Jaipur and avail himself of the use of furniture to which he is entitled under sub-section (1), at such house:
(c) ten thousand rupees, if the State Government fails to provide Government accommodation to him in Jaipur and he lives in his own house or in the house owned by his spouse in Jaipur or in a rented house in Jaipur and avails himself of the use of furniture to which he is entitled under sub-section (1). at such house: and]
(d) [five thousand rupees], if he does not avail himself of the use of a State car.]
[5A. Concessions on account of electricity and water. - Every Minister shall, irrespective of whether or not he avails himself of the use of [an official residence] in Jaipur to which he is entitled under-section 5, be further entitled to the concessions of payment by Government for him and on his behalf throughout his term of office [and upto a period of two months from the date, he ceases to be a minister], [of all charges due from him on account of consumption of electricity and water at his residence: provided that such payment shall not exceed such limits as may be specified in the rules made in that behalf by the Governor] .]
6. Travelling and daily allowances. - (1) Every Minister shall further be entitled to receive, in accordance with rules made by the Governor in that behalf.-
(a) travelling allowances for himself and the members of his family for the transport of his and his family effects-
(i) in respect of the journey to Jaipur from his usual place of residence outside Jaipur for assuming office: and
(ii) in respect of the journey from Jaipur to his usual place of residence outside Jaipur on relinquishing office: and
(b) Travelling and daily allowances in respect of journeys [including journeys outside India] undertaken by him in the discharge of his official duties or in the public interest.
(2) Any travelling allowance paid to a Minister under this section may consist either of a payment in cash or of free official transport.
7. Medical treatment, etc. to Ministers. - [(1)] Subject to any rules, made in this behalf by the Governor, a Minister and the members of his family shall be entitled free of charge to accommodation in hospitals maintained by Government and also to medical treatment.
[(2) Subject to any rules, if any, made in this behalf, the Minister may be granted by the Governor in appropriate cases anv concession or a special facility' including the re-imbursement thereof, outside the State for the following items-
(i) medical treatment;
(ii) medical attendance or travelling allowances for such journey Performed by him; and
(iii) accommodation including diet for the purposes of such treatment.]
[7A. Advances to Ministers for purchase of motor cars. - There shall be paid to a Minister, by way of a repayable advance, such sum of money for the purchase of a motor car and on such terms as the Governor may, by rules, determine in order that he may be able to discharge conveniently and efficiently the duties of his office.]
[7B. Salaries, allowances and amenities to Parliamentary Secretaries. - [(1) With effect from the date of commencement of the Rajasthan Ministers� Salaries (Amendment) Act, 2005 (Act No. 11 of 2005) or the date on which he may thereafter enter upon his office there shall be paid to a Parliamentary � Secretary a salary of twelve thousand rupees per mensem and such travelling and other allowances as may be prescribed. and]
(2) A Parliamentary Secretary shall be entitled to such medical facilities for himself and for members of his family and to such housing, conveyance, telephone, postal and other facilities as may he prescribed.
[(3) In addition to the salary and other allowances payable under sub-Section (1), there shall be paid to every Parliamentary Secretary, with effect from the date of commencement of the Rajasthan Ministers' Salaries (Amendment) Act, 2005 (Act No. 11 of 2005) or with effect from the date he may thereafter enter upon his office, a sumptuary allowance of seven thousand rupees per mensem.]]
[7BB. Facilities to former Chief Ministers. - (1) Subject to any rules that may be made in this behalf, a person who has served as the Chief Minister of Rajasthan for an uninterrupted term of five year shall, for remainder of his life, be entitled-
(a) to a Government residence of the same type, and with same facilities and concessions, to which a Minister is entitled to under this Act, which may be provided at option of such person either at Jaipur or at any other District Headquarters in Rajasthan:
Provided that if such Government residence is not available for allotment or if such person does not avail of the use of Government residence, he may be reimbursed a fixed monthly amount to be specified in the rules;
(b) to a State car for his own use or for the use of members of his family for transport in respect of journey within or out side of the State, as may be specified in the rules;
(c) to the use of telephone with all facilities of communication at his Government residence subject to such limit as may be specified in the rules;
(d) to the following numbers and categories of secretarial and other staff at his Government residence to be provided by the State Government in consultation with such person on such terms and conditions as may be specified in the rules, namely:-
(i) one Private Secretary;
(ii) one Personal Assistant or Stenographer, and if this facility is not availed of, to a fixed monthly amount to be specified in the rules;
(iii) one Clerk Grade I:
(iv) two Informatics Assistant, and if this facility is not availed of, to a fixed monthly amount to be specified in the rules;
(v) one driver, and if this facility is not availed of, to a fixed monthly amount to be specified in the rules;
(vi) three Class IV employees, and if this facility is not availed of, to a fixed monthly amount to be specified in the rules:
Provided that in special circumstances to be mentioned in the order, the State Government may, on the request of such person, provide additional staff of any of the above categories temporarily to meet the circumstances.
(2) Where such person is also entitled to any of the facilities specified in clauses (a) to (d) of sub-section (1), for the time being as the President. Vice-President. Governor or Lieutenant Governor of any State or the Administrator of any Union Territory or as Member of Parliament or any State Legislature, or from the Central Government or any State Government or any Corporation owned or controlled by the Central Government or any State Government or any local authority under any law or otherwise, he or she shall not be entitled to that facility to that extent under this section.]
[7C. Power to make rules with retrospective effect. - The rules under this Act may be made so as to have retrospective effect from such date, not earlier than the date of the commencement of this Act, as the Governor may, by notification in the Official Gazette, appoint.]
8. Repeal and savings. - (1) The Rajasthan Ministers' Salaries Ordinance 1956 (Rajasthan Ordinance 11 of 1956). is hereby repealed.
(2) Such repeal shall affect the rules and orders made or deemed to be made under the Rajasthan Ministers' Salaries Act. 1951 (Rajasthan Act. XIX of 1951) in force in the pre-organisation State of Rajasthan and the said rules and orders as in force immediately before the appointed day shall, until varied or superseded by competent authority, be deemed to have been made under this Act and shall as such continue to be in force as from the appointed day throughout the State.
[9. Regulation of certain payments on account of concessions. - Notwithstanding anything contained in the Rajasthan Ministers' Salaries Act. 1951 (Rajasthan Act XIX of 1951) of the pre- organisation State of Rajasthan all sums of money paid or payable for and on behalf of a Minister whose salary and allowances were governed by the said Act on account of the consumption of electricity and water at his residence shall, subject to the limits specified and section 5-A, be deemed to have been properly and lawfully paid or payable no demand shall be made on the Minister for the refund of the whole or any portion of such payments.]
[10. Regulation of certain payments on account of concessions. - Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act. all sums of money paid or payable for and on behalf of a Minister, who ceased to be a Minister for a period of two months and whose salary and allowances were governed by the provisions of this Act on account of the consumption of electricity and water at his residence, shall, subject to the limits specified in section 5-A, be deemed to have been properly and lawfully paid or payable and no demand shall be made on the Minister for the refund of the whole or any portion of such amount.]
[11. Regulation of certain payments on account of facilities to former Chief Ministers. - (1) Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act or any other law for the time being in force, all sums of money paid or payable, until the commencement of the Rajasthan Ministers' Salaries (Amendment) Act. 2017 (Act No. ... of 2017), on account of any facilities provided to a former Chief Minister under any rule or order of the State Government shall be deemed to have been properly and lawfully paid or payable and no demand shall be made on such Chief Minister for the refund of the whole or any portion of such payment.
(2) Notwithstanding anything contained in section 7-BB, a former Chief Minister who was receiving any facility under any rule or order of the State Government immediately before the commencement of the Rajasthan Ministers� Salaries (Amendment) Act, 2017 (Act No. ...of 2017) shall continue to avail such facilities for the remainder of his life even if he has not served as the Chief Minister of Rajasthan for an uninterrupted term of five year.]
[Notification dated 10-7-1990, Published in Rajasthan Government Gazette part 4-C (Extraordinary), dated 10-7-1990, page 407]. - In pursuance of sub-section (1) of section 5, the State Government has authorised Collector or an officer nominated by him, not below the rank of an Additional Collector, to remove unauthorised occupation of State residence by ex-ministers even after expiry of fixed period-Translation from Hindi].
[Notification dated 27-5-1992, Published in Rajasthan Government Gazette part 4-C (Extraordinary), dated 28-5 1992, page 81]. - In pursuance of proviso to sub-section (1) of section 5, where ministers do not vacate State residence in the fixed period even after resigning from office, the amount of Rs.3,000/- per months is fixed to be recovered as damages - [Translation from Hindi].
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‹ The Pre-Christian History of Slane Hill • Did the Irish Discover North America? Surprising New Theories! ›
Why Do the Irish Swear So Much? (And Why You Shouldn’t be Too Quick to Take Offense.)
September 6, 2013 in Ireland, Life in Ireland, Traveling in Ireland | Permalink
Swearing is rife in Ireland. No, that’s an understatement, swearing is epidemic in Ireland. It used to be that swearing was reserved for all-male gatherings, or certain places (like sporting events or the school yard), but in recent years swearing has become much more common, uni-sex, and offensive.
Some people find rude Irishmen like Declan in Leap Year romantic figures, others not so much…
Before we discuss why this is, consider that we Irish have always admired masters of the art of conversation. While poets and writers are all very good and are greatly respected, they practice their art on the page and only reveal their wit and wisdom after much contemplation. Verbal dexterity and a quick wit are among the most-prized attributes in Irish life, the best poets often can’t raise a candle to the person with a ready quip. In place of real wit or wisdom, the average person can arm themselves with a devil-may-care attitude, cynical putdowns, and well-timed oaths. Shock value is often substituted for originality, and sadly a lot of people wouldn’t know the difference anyway (not that that is unique to Ireland…).
While there can be a particular poetry to a creative and amusing oath or dash of spirited invective, the problems occurs when swearing becomes an unconscious part of everyday language. Listen to any group of young drinkers at an Irish pub any night of the week, and you’ll hear a steady stream of fucks and fuckin’s used adjectively without any rancor or malice. (Among older groups in parts of the country the fucks will be reduced to fecks, out of either regional habit or a sense that feck is milder and more polite.)
Why has swearing become so commonplace and unremarkable to Irish ears? I’ll offer a couple of reasons, though everyone may not agree.
Distrust of Authority
First of all, the Irish personality is to instinctively be suspicious of authority. Even though we’ve long thrown off the “shackles of colonial oppression” (as Tom Branson might put it), the attitudes of resentment towards authority remain, and are often expressed through vulgar language. The attitude is that we don’t trust our politicians and consider all civil servants corrupt, but since they’re Irish we’ll confine ourselves to a gruff tone and salty language.
Cult of the “Big Fella”
Secondly, we worship the “big man.” Irish politics in the twentieth century bears witness to the cult of the big man, the fixer, the influence peddler, the modern-day Celtic chieftan who takes care of his tribe of friends and family and attempts to rule with an iron fist. Kids pick up on this young, and try to affect the swagger and air of authority that the local “big men” — fathers, elder brothers, and local sports stars — seem to possess. A relaxed attitude to swearing is simply another marker that the speaker doesn’t care for convention; the message is they make their own rules.
Some young men have that idea beaten out of them by strict parents, but over time parents seem to have become less concerned and children of course become adept at picking their battles as they grow up.
As the property bubble grew many ordinary people began to find themselves paper millionaires, and the rush to enjoy the material trappings of success was on. Alongside this newfound prosperity, the unconscious attitudes of defiance and a desire to appear important festered, and found expression in some serious attitude.
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly nails the excesses of new money Ireland in his satirical novels, and captures the speech patterns of everyday Dublin, including the rampant swearing, to hilarious effect.
So, when I hear people declare that the reason for all this swearing is a lack of education, I feel they’ve missed the point. While poor education and simply not knowing any better may be a contributing factor in some poorer communities, the main reason is a disrespect for education rather than the lack of it. It’s a consequence of the old class consciousness that there’s as much a concept of people getting “above themselves” in Ireland as there is in England (Ireland just doesn’t make Masterpiece Theater serial dramas about it). Attitudes to education are mixed: while it’s valued as a means to a better income, those who do well and enjoy their education are often the target of resentment: from simple bullying in school, to career advice that counsels not reaching too far or “getting above yourself.” A lot of lip service is paid to education in Ireland, but the educated can be resented. It’s an old prejudice, from when only the Protestant (i.e. English) gentry could be educated. And, that’s not to say people can’t turn the swearing off at work or when they need to, but they slip easily back into the common speech patterns after work, like into a comfortable pair of shoes. Nowadays, swearing simply marks them out as part of the tribe, part of the group, and that’s always preferable to being an outsider.
My own experiences with swearing have been enlightening. I left Ireland in my early twenties and went to work with children in America. I knew from the first that I’d have to moderate my language, and schooled myself to drop all casual swearing. It wasn’t difficult, as being around impressionable children in an environment different from your home tends to make you more aware of what and how you speak. When I later began college in the US, I expected to no longer have to school my language quite so consciously. I was wrong, mainstream American life is no different from a children’s summer camp — unless you’re using sex to sell things, but that’s business, and all things seem to be excused in the pursuit of money… Many people look uncomfortable when a swear word is dropped casually into conversation, to swear at work is never casual, and those who use swear words a lot in bars are clearly outsiders. In short, it’s very much the opposite of Ireland today (although class divisions and the desire to appear more powerful are still factors).
This, of course, has made me notice the swearing much more when I’m at home. What used to be so common as to be unremarkable is now glaringly obvious. I can easily see the shock and disappointment of many tourists when confronted with effin’ and blindin’ wherever they go. And, I can understand how they can mistake casual swearing for an expression of distaste or antipathy. The class-consciousness of Ireland is a taboo subject, particularly as it’s bound up with religion, so the importance of iconoclasm and self-aggrandizement to the Irish psyche is not fully appreciated or articulated. Attitude and speech patterns can convey an active, positive self-image that is all the more important because it may not actually tally with an individual’s economic power in the current economic climate.
None of this is to excuse boorish behavior or foul language as a matter of course, but it’s important to understand why casual swearing is commonplace in Ireland, and that it’s not hostile, personal, or a reflection of poor education or values. Centuries of oppression and a lack of self-determination or economic opportunities leave scars, and the flip-side of our national readiness to welcome everyone and party at the drop of a hat is a certain gruffness of expression and that sense of fatalism that we wear as armor.
WB Yeats put it all so well when he wrote that “being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
*I intended to write a light-hearted piece about swearing in Ireland, something that many regard as a bit of an art form. However, after doing a little research, I discovered there’s no shortage of humorous pieces on Irish swear words around the internet, but there are a lot of people who are genuinely shocked and offended by the level of routine bad language in Ireland. So, what’s really required is some explanation.
Tags: Ireland, Irish travel
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Bulgarian Society of Construction Law
The European Society of Construction Law Master Thesis Prize 2018
On the 26th of October 2018 during the last day of the Annual Conference of the European Society of Construction Law (ESCL) in Bucharest, Romania, the winners of the seventh Master Thesis Prize 2018 were honored in an award ceremony.
The President of this year’s thesis prize edition was dr. Ovidiu Dumitru (president of the Romanian Society of Construction Law). He appointed Professor dr. Benoît Kohl (Professor, University of Liège and University of Paris II – Counsel, Stibbe Brussels) and Professor dr. Anthony P. Lavers (Counsel, White & Case LLP, London – Visiting Professor of Law, King’s College London) and Professor dr. M. Hugues Périnet-Marquet (Professor, University of Paris II) as jury members.
For the 2018 Thesis Prize, the jury has come to a decision to award one first and two second prizes.
This year’s winner was Giuseppe Giancarlo Franco from Bocconi University, Milan with his thesis titled: “Dispute boards: A comparative study of international practice”.
The joint second prize was awarded to Yu Gao from the Technical University of Delft and to Edwina Elena Udrescu from Kings’ College London.
Yu Gao wrote a thesis with the title: “Early Warning of NEC3 ECC, A Solution for Dutch Design and Build Construction Problem Solving?”.
Edwina Elena Udrescu wrote a thesis titled: “What legal and contractual issues can determine the success or failure of a PPP project?”.
More information on next years’ competition will soon be placed on the ESCL website https://www.escl.org/.
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Category Archives: Brothers & Sisters
Snapped! Luke Macfarlane onstage in “The Jazz Age”
Posted on February 10, 2009 by Greg Hernandez
You don’t expect the handsome and talented Luke Macfarlane to spend all of his time being Scotty to Matthew Rhys’ Kevin on ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters” do you?
Luke is moonlighting these days as F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Blank Theatre Company’s production of Allan Knee’s play “the Jazz Age” which runs through.March 22. Also starring are Jeremy Gabriel as Ernest Hemingway and Heather Prete as Zelda Fitzgerald.
The new play goes inside their minds to fantasize on the question of “inspiration”. Punctuated by the pulsating beat of a live jazz trio and asks the question “Why do we do what we do?”
The play is directed by Michael Matthews, and Grammy Award winner Ian Whitcomb and his Bungalow Boys accompany the play with an original score by Whitcomb.
The Blank Theatre Company is located at 6500 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90038. For tickets or more information call 323-661-9827 or visit www.TheBlank.com.
To see more terrific photos from this production, go to BroadwayWorld.com.
Posted in Brothers & Sisters | 1 Reply
Face-to-Face with Rachel Griffiths of “Brothers & Sisters”
Posted on October 27, 2008 by Greg Hernandez
I sure like this picture of Rachel Griffiths… Maybe it’s because I took it! She was at last weekend at AIDS Walk Los Angeles. It was so nice to see her and all. Rhen a minute or so later, when I did an interview with her, things got dicey for a minute there.
The first two episodes of “Brothers & Sisters” had been, in my opinion and to many other people, a bit annoying with silly plotlines (Kitty’s book?) and a lot of full-on family fights. When we chatted, it was before episodes three and four aired and I wondered how the actress who plays Sarah on the show felt about the feelings of fans.
“I didn’t know they were saying that!” she said.
” I’ve been having just great feedback from people,” Griffiths added. “From my litmis test at the supermarket, I’ve had the most uncritical enthusiasm for the show of all the seasons so far. People are saying, ‘Love the premiere! Loved the show last night!’ It’s news to me.”
Okay then. Let’s move on.
Twice nominated for an Emmy for her performance on “Brothers & Sisters,” Rachel is one of the few performers who has successfully segued from one beloved series to another. She played Brenda on HBO’s “Six Feet Under” for five seasons winning the Golden Globe for her work and earning two Emmy nods. (She also was Oscar-nominated for her role in the film “Hillary & Jackie” and had roles in such films as “Muriel’s Wedding,” “Step Up,” “The Rookie” and “Me, Myself and I.”)
On the “Brothers & Sisters” front, Sarah very dramatically quit her job at the family company after just one too many battles with her late father’s mistress who, through a string of circumstances, became a partner.
“I have a great season where I get involved with this start-up company,” she said. “We’re also really hit with this economy and it becomes this very precarious thing where she’s taking on a risk at a time that turns out to be the worst financial crisis in American history so it’s great. She’s not immune to this and she’s not immuned to taking on a second mortgage on her house and really feeling like they might not make it and they might be moving back with her mother. So it’s a really real story which I love.”
“The great thing is, you kind of see her excitement for business again which she kind of lost. She went into Ojai (Foods) because she thought it would be fun and it’s just been two years of quite painful business decisons. So you see why the girl got an MBA.”
With the vote on Prop. 8 just weeks away, I wanted to talk about her feelings on gay marriage (on-screen brother Kevin (Matthew Rhys) had a commitment ceremony with his partner Scotty (Luke Macfarlane) at the end of last season.
“I’m just hoping that the younger voter who doesn’t feel that gay people getting married is a threat to their ever getting married, doesn’t feel the same way as the older generation. Sometimes you’re just not going to get them to stop washing the tin foil. The truth is, it could be a generational thing. Just as my grandmother found it very difficult to not have a visceral reaction to an interracial situation. It was a lot of messages that she was given when she was growing up, as much as she knew that was wrong in her later life. I think it is going to change over time.”
She thinks her show might be helping educate as well as entertain: “I love that the voice of our show is the political through the personal. The greatest way to change people’s thinking is to make them familiar and care about people who are gay or who have AIDS. Not to be told anything but to just fall in love and say, ‘Oh my God, I really love this character and he’s gay and I really want him to get married and it kind of shocks me. You find yourself just wanting the best for that character just like you would your own son.”
Posted in Brothers & Sisters | Leave a reply
Brothers & Sisters: A new Scotty and Kevin picture…
Posted on October 9, 2008 by Greg Hernandez
I love ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters” as you all know. But the truth is, I could use a lot more Kevin and Scotty and a lot less Walker family fights. The first two episodes have featured all-out brawls over A) Tommy firing Kevin as the attorney for the struggling family business and B) Kitty writing a book about her husband’s presidential bid in which she seems to malign every member of the family.
It’s too much! Can’t they just all get along?
I was glad to see some Scotty (Luke Macfarlane) and Kevin (Matthew Rhys) pics on AfterElton.com from the Oct. 26 episode. Go to the site to see the others. I believe thec couple is having dinner with Scotty’s parents. If you recall from last season, Scotty’s mom is not cool with the gay thing.
“Brothers & Sisters” returns with lots of drama – too much…
Posted on September 29, 2008 by Greg Hernandez
OMG I’m exhausted.
Sunday night’s season premiere of “Brothers & Sisters” had more Walker family drama than usual with just too much packed into one episode, too much to process. I’m guessing it’s because last season was cut short and storylines had to be moved forward but the only characters that had any really sweet and thoughtful scenes (except for one shared by Justin and Rebecca at the end) were our gay newlyweds Kevin and Scotty whose getaway weekend in Laguna ended up being overrun by Walkers.
The scenes I did enjoy were between Sally Field and Patricia Wettig which were very Krystal and Alexis from “Dynasty” and it was cool, and very out of character, the way Sally’s Nora dropped the bit of info to Patricia’s Holly that late family patriarch William Walker had another child with another woman.
Holly: “I don’t believe you.’
Nora (smiling smugly): “Yes you do.”
Okay, I’m still hooked. But slow it down! Sheesh.
Video: The return of Kevin and Scotty…
Season three of “Brothers & Sisters” begins Sunday night. Between that and last night’s return of “Lipstick Jungle,” I just don’t know how much more happy and complete my life could be. Here is a scene featuring Kevin (Matthew Rhys) and Scotty (Luke Macfarlane). We’ve missed you guys!
Gearing up for the return of Scotty and Kevin…
Posted on September 9, 2008 by Greg Hernandez
Season three of “Brothers & Sisters” is right around the corner and that means lots of fresh material on Kevin and Scotty, the couple played by Luke MacFarlane (above) and Matthew Rhys. It’s been a wonderful storyline for the show, for viewers and for society – especially with the scary Sarah Palin’s of the world fighting against equal rights for gays. Kevin and Scotty on prime-time TV and Luke and Noah on daytime’s “As the World Turns” and the just married Ellen DeGeneres put us into people’s living rooms in a way that is positive and real and not shame-based.
What’s even better about Luke Macfarlane is that after two years of playing Scotty, he came out publicly as a gay man in an interview with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.
I had a wonderful chat with Luke last spring and he said of coming out: “I’ll say that I decided to do that interview, I decided to answer those questions in an effort to make my life simpler and that’s going to contunue to be my motto.”
There are more Kevin and Scotty photos at AfterElton.com.
Earlier posts:
— Exclusive: Matthew Rhys and Luke Macfarlane on their Television Nuptials— Kevin and Scotty are Hitched in Beautiful Ceremony
— Videos: My Favorite Kevin and Scotty Scenes
— The “Brothers & Sisters” Siblings Talk About the Union of Kevin and Scotty
Posted in Brothers & Sisters | 2 Replies
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Ph.D. in Economics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), B.S. in Economics (Universidade Católica Portuguesa), Catarina Reis is the Academic Director of…
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Erythraean Sea
"Erythrean Sea" redirects here. For the ancient name of the Red Sea, see Red Sea.
The Erythraean Sea (Greek: Ἐρυθρὰ Θάλασσα, Erythrà Thálassa, lit. "Red Sea") was a maritime designation of ancient Greek geography that always included the Gulf of Aden between Arabia Felix and the Horn of Africa and was frequently extended—as in the famous 1st-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea—to include the present-day Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean as a single maritime area.
Ἐρυθρὰ Θάλασσα
Map showing the Erythraean Sea off the Horn of Africa. Drawn by James Rennell, 1799.
Northwestern Indian Ocean
12°0′N 55°0′E / 12.000°N 55.000°E / 12.000; 55.000Coordinates: 12°0′N 55°0′E / 12.000°N 55.000°E / 12.000; 55.000
Basin countries
Yemen, Somalia
NameEdit
The Greeks themselves derived the name from an eponymous King Erythras, knowing that the waters so described were deep blue.[1][2][3]
Modern scholars sometimes attribute the name to seasonal blooms of the red-hued Trichodesmium erythraeum in the Red Sea.[4]
UseEdit
The name "Erythraean Sea" has been or is still used for the following places:
In the opening sentences of Herodotus's history, written in the 5th century BC, he refers to the Phoenicians having come originally from the Erythraean Sea.
In the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in the 1st century AD, as well as in some ancient maps, the name of the sea refers to the whole area of the northwestern Indian Ocean, including the Arabian Sea.[5]
In centuries past, the name "Erythraean Sea" was applied by cartographers to the NW part of the Indian Ocean, mainly the area around Socotra, between Cape Guardafui and the coast of Hadhramaut. This appellation has now become obsolete and the name Gulf of Aden is used, although for a smaller area. In maps where the NW Indian Ocean is named thus, the Red Sea appears as "Arabian Gulf".
The name "Erythraean Sea" was used as well to refer to some gulfs attached to the Indian Ocean, specifically, the Persian Gulf.[6]
As a name for the Red Sea, especially after the 19th century. The modern country of Eritrea was named after this ancient Greek name.
Since 1895, the name has also been applied to a large dusky region on the surface of planet Mars, known as Mare Erythraeum.
Names, routes and locations of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
17th-century map depicting the locations of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
Indo-Roman trade relations
Sea of Zanj
^ Agatharchides.
^ Wilfred H. Schoff, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, notes on §1.
^ Flavius Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Book III, chapter 50.
^ "Red Sea". Encyclopædia Britannica Online Library Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
^ 1794, Orbis Veteribus Notus by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville
^ Schoff, Wilfred H. (Wilfred Harvey) (1912-01-01). The Periplus of the Erythræan sea; travel and trade in the Indian Ocean. New York : Longmans, Green, and Co. p. 50 – via Internet Archive.
The Periplus of the Erythrean sea, containing an account of the navigation of the ancients, from the sea of Suez to the coast of Zanguebar, William Vincent (ed.), 2 voll., London, 1800, vol. 1, vol. 2.
William H. Schoff, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), with additional commentary including alternate spellings or translations from Lionel Casson's more recent edition.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erythraean_Sea&oldid=885635591"
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September 6, 2016 September 8, 2016 Stephanie Hernandez News
Queensland’s native vegetation remains threatened with decline following vote in Parliament
Queensland’s Vegetation Management Act, 1999 was constituted to address growing concerns over the effects of broad-scale clearing of native vegetation, but also to encourage the ecologically sustainable use of land and maintain regional biodiversity. The Act largely dictates the aegis under which land clearing can occur by regulating clearing of vegetation communities (mapped as “regional ecosystems”). Due to historical land clearing, 224 of Queensland’s 1,383 regional ecosystems are listed as endangered (less than 10% of original vegetation cover remaining) and 569 are listed as of-concern (10-30% of original vegetation cover remaining). Many of these regional ecosystems occur on fertile soils, where extensive land clearing for agricultural development has occurred.
In 2013, the Newman Government passed the Vegetation Management Framework Amendment Bill, 2013, lifting a previous ban on broad-scale clearing (or broad-acre cropping). Since the passing of the amendments, clearing rates have soared, greenhouse gas emissions have doubled, and water quality in the Great Barrier Reef’s lagoon has deteriorated. A government report found that between 2013 and 2014, 290,000 ha of remnant vegetation was cleared per year, almost double the amount between 2011-12 (153,640 hectares per year ).
The Conservation Planning Lab is currently assessing scenarios of land-use change under varying policy frameworks to investigate the potential impacts of changing legislation on land clearing. We found that over 9 million ha of remnant vegetation are available for renewed clearing following the 2013 amendments. We also found the amendments allowed for 2,125,000 ha of remnant vegetation on watercourses to be available for clearing.
Following an election promise, the Palaszczuk Labor Government introduced the Vegetation Management (Reinstatement) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill, 2016 on 17 March 2016. The objectives of this Bill were to reinstate effective clearing policy, reduce clearing rates, protect vegetation adjacent to water bodies, and reinstate environmental offset requirements. This Bill was debated in Parliament on 17-18 August 2016, and the proposed amendments under the Bill were not agreed (44 to 42). Consequently, no changes to the 2013 amendments will be implemented and very extensive areas of Queensland’s native vegetation remain vulnerable to clearing.
The Palaszczuk Government has committed to passing its reinstatement legislation if re-elected with a majority, and these controls will be crucial to meeting Australia’s climate change targets and maintaining the Great Barrier Reef’s World Heritage status, as well as protecting Queensland’s remaining biodiversity.
WWF Drone footage and satellite imagery shows thousands of hectares of cleared vegetation in Central Queensland.
Published by Stephanie Hernandez
View all posts by Stephanie Hernandez
Governance across the land-sea interface: Challenges & opportunities
Investigating stakeholder perceptions of resource decline: a case study from the Danajon Bank, Philippines
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European Dispatch: Getting to Know Timothe Luwawu (+Full Interview)
This article was originally published on the Vertical on February 15th. Find it here in it's original format.
Jonathan Givony went on an 11-day trip through seven countries to evaluate most of the top NBA draft prospects in Europe. On the final day of the trip, he visited Zagreb, Croatia, to watch projected first-round pick Timothe Luwawu.
More European Dispatches:
European Dispatch: Getting to Know Isaia Cordinier (+Full Interview)
Getting to Know: Furkan Korkmaz
Getting to Know: Paul Zipser
Getting to Know: Dragan Bender
Getting to Know: Blaz Mesicek
Paul Zipser Video Interview
Furkan Korkmaz Video Interview
Dragan Bender Video Interview
Luwawu, 20, is part of a wave of French players who left their home country for Serbia in search of playing time, development and exposure. He grew up in Antibes in southern France and spent many years in the youth system of the local club there, earning his first pro minutes in late 2012 at age 17. The club bounced back and forth between the second (Pro B) and first (Pro A) divisions, and after helping the club earn a promotion back to Pro A last June, he elected to terminate his contract and join Mega Leks in Belgrade, Serbia.
Mega Leks is a very unique club in Europe, as almost their entire rotation is built around players under the age of 22. Every player (as well as the coaching staff) is also represented by the same agency, Beobasket, who essentially built the club from the ground up as a means of developing their young talent, providing them with minutes, opportunity and all the off-court resources they need to reach their full potential. The results have been very quick to come, as the club had three players drafted in 2014 (including rookie sensation Nikola Jokic), and is in the midst of a spectacular season, currently sporting a 16-7 record and being just one game out of second place in the Adriatic League (behind two Euroleague clubs), which is shocking considering their budget and lack of experience.
Averaging 76 possessions per game, Mega Leks plays at one of the fastest paces of any team in high-level European basketball according to our database, aided by their full-court pressing style. Their head coach, Dejan Milojevic (a budding star in his own right now), borrows quite a bit from NCAA basketball he told us, as he elected to implement a Pack Line half-court defensive scheme similar to the one employed by Tony Bennett at Virginia.
Luwawu has benefited tremendously from this wide-open style of play, as he's been one of the biggest breakout performers in European basketball, going from averaging 7 points per game in France's second division to 15.5 points (second best in the league), 5 rebounds, 3 assists and 2 steals while shooting 39% for 3 in the Adriatic League.
It is very very very nice on this team. Everyone is young, everyone is on the same page. We have very good chemistry. And that's the fact on the court. We all improve each other together. Everyone is on the same page. By ourselves we made the hierarchy. By myself I am taking leadership. I think I also improved this year. I am playing a lot. I have responsibilities and time to spend on the court. For me it's the best. I am improving in practice. It is very nice. Here I have more responsibilities, and you can make mistakes. In France it's not the same, I was a young player, and if I made a mistake I needed to go to the bench. Here I am one of the oldest players. I have more responsibilities. In the beginning of the season I made mistakes, some turnovers, but I stayed on the court. Now I improved and I don't lose so many balls. Every young player needs to think about Mega Leks.
Luwawu has pretty much everything you look for in a two-way role-playing NBA wing. He has strong physical attributes for a shooting guard or small forward, standing (in his words) 6'7 without shoes, 205 pounds, with a 6'11 wingspan, and excellent athletic ability. He is very smooth and fluid, and can play above the rim with ease, sometimes in highlight reel fashion.
Luwawu has made huge strides as an outside shooter, upping his 3-point percentage this season from 29 to 39%, while tripling his total number of attempts. He's been extremely reliable shooting the ball with his feet set this season (43% in catch and shoot situations according to Synergy Sports Tech), and has also shown some flashes of being capable of coming off screens. He's also developing his ability to pull-up off the dribble, something he has the freedom to experiment quite a bit with at Mega Leks.
Luwawu is also a very good passer, demonstrating strong court vision, and the ability to distribute with either hand in drive and dish situations. He can operate at different speeds, has a powerful first step and long strides as a driver, and thus has strong potential in the pick and roll and attacking closeouts.
Perhaps Luwawu's most NBA ready attribute is his defense. He showed the ability to stay in front of point guards, shooting guards and small forwards in the game we attended, thanks to his quick feet, long arms and ability to get over screens. Mega Leks likes to utilize him at the top of their full-court press, and Luwawu has wreaked quite a bit of havoc in the Adriatic League this year with his very quick hands.
I improved everywhere this season, passing, shooting, going to the basket with contact, without contact, defense also. I improved everywhere, and I think everybody sees it.
NEEDS IMPROVEMENT:
Luwawu is still working on his ball-handling ability, as he's struggled at times utilizing advanced moves and being forced to react to changing defenses on the fly. He's very reliant on his jump-shot, and is not finishing around the basket at a great rate this season, at least relative to his physical tools, posting a fairly underwhelming 43% 2P%, partially due to his inconsistency as an off the dribble shooter. His feel for the game is still catching up to his natural ability, as he suffers from mental lapses at times and can be somewhat turnover prone. His awareness on both ends of the floor leaves something to be desired as well, although part of this can be attributed to his lack of experience at the highest levels of professional basketball.
While he's been shooting the ball extremely well this season, and shows fluid and consistent mechanics that should lend to strong results, this hasn't always been the case throughout his career. Luwawu is just 138/419 (33%) from beyond the arc in all competitions we have data from historically, so there are some question marks about whether he can keep to shoot the ball at such a blistering rate when he doesn't have the same type of green light and breakneck pace he's enjoying this season.
What I need to improve is not committing turnovers. My pull-up shooting after dribbling. I can improve everything, but in particular this.
Luwawu already entered the draft last year, but didn't get much love from NBA scouts, as he was very lightly scouted in Pro B, and thus forced to withdraw. The fact that his season ran extremely late, up until mid-June, and he was unable to attend the adidas EuroCamp to showcase himself didn't help matters. Luwawu actually had a plane ticket in hand to fly to Treviso, Italy to conduct a private workout in front of an army of NBA scouts on an off day from the Pro B playoffs, but was forced to cancel it due to the fact that his ID had expired and he was not let through airport security.
That was likely a blessing in disguise, as the phenomenal season he's had in the Adriatic League seems to have catapulted his stock well into the first round, to the point that he will likely be getting looks from teams drafting in the lottery this June.
Of course my goal first is to go to the NBA. I want to be the best French player there. And why not become an all-star in the NBA.
Full Interview:
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Costa-Hawkins, Q&A
Q & A: Is My San Francisco Condominium Subject to Rent Control?
“Is My San Francisco condominium subject to rent control?”
This is an interesting question, and the answer is surprisingly complicated. First, some general principles. Cities may constitutionally impose rent control ordinances, so long as they provide fair returns to property owners. San Francisco’s Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance applies to all “rental units” – a term that includes basically all dwelling units with certificates of occupancy issued before its effective date, June 13, 1979.
However, Costa-Hawkins, effective as of January 1, 1996, exempted certain kinds of dwelling units from local price controls, including those that were “alienable separate from the title to any other dwelling unit” (namely, single-family homes and condominiums). San Francisco eventually amended the Rent Ordinance in 2000 to respect the interplay between state and local law.
In the years after Costa-Hawkins’ enactment, some property owners were claiming the benefits of condominium conversion without actually selling any of them as separately alienable units. Essentially, the owner of an apartment would get final map approval to be able to sell the individual units in a (former) apartment building, using this as a pretext to increase rents on existing tenants. In 2001, the California Legislature identified this as a “loophole” in Costa-Hawkins and passed SB 985, amending Costa-Hawkins to exempt condos only under certain circumstances.
Effective January 1, 2002, these particular separately alienable units only deregulate when each is “sold separately by the subdivider to a bona fide purchaser for value” (or, where each other one is sold separately except a single unit that the subdivider keeps as a primary residence).
Now, as a technical matter, the Rent Ordinance was never amended again to impose this additional requirement, so arguably, condos are only required to be “separately alienable” and not also “sold to a bona fide purchaser for value”. (If the Rent Ordinance doesn’t seek to regulate the unit in the first place, an owner wouldn’t need the help of state law.) However, in this author’s experience, neither the Rent Board nor the Superior Court favor this reading.
City of West Hollywood v. 1112 Investments Co., the principal authority on SB 985 and the 2002 Amendment, notes that the “bona fide purchaser” requirement only applies prospectively. So, if your building was condo-converted before January 1, 2002, it does not need to have been sold separately. (Although, Costa-Hawkins does not extend this exemption where the preceding tenancy was terminated for a non-fault basis (like an Owner Move-In eviction), so arguably, this could subject a condo to rent control for the following five years (under the Jane Kim Amendment) as to the next tenancy.
Costa-Hawkins does not define “subdivider”, but it probably means that the current owner of the would-be exempted condo cannot have been a co-owner of the multi-unit building during the subdivision or an owner of an entity that performed the subdivision. “Bona fide” is also undefined, and that term is notoriously amorphous in different legal contexts. It probably means that there is a notion of “arms-length” negotiating, but it could potentially include selling to a family member, and even “giving them a deal”, as long as they pay some kind of non-trivial consideration for the property.
It is also important to note that a dwelling unit can be exempt from rent control yet still subject to eviction controls. While San Francisco’s definition of “rental unit” excludes units “to the extent such dwelling or units are partially or wholly exempted from rent increase limitations by the Costa-Hawkins Residential Housing Act”, it only excludes units entirely if they are “new construction” – those with certificates of occupancy issued after the effective date of the Rent Ordinance.
Previous PostSB 985 – Closing the “Loophole” in Costa-HawkinsNext PostRent Board Publishes Minutes of Its Regular May 2017 Meeting
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Karl van der Plas: Mens rea under the Animal Welfare Act
He aha te kai ō te rangatira? He Kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero.
What is the food of the leader? It is knowledge. It is communication.
At BVA The Practice we strive to be leaders in our field and share our knowledge with the community. This article is part one of two regarding the significance of mens rea under the Animal Welfare Act 1999. Part one will outline the issues, interpretations and potential implications of the SPCA v Powers case.
Background on the Animal Welfare Act 1999
Our legal system acts as a guardian to ensure that all animals receive fair and proper treatment. Essentially, the purpose of the Animal Welfare Act 1999 is to create obligations and minimum standards for owners and people in charge of animals to ensure that the physical, health, and behavioural needs of those animals are met. Along with creating expectations and duties for the care of animals, the Animal Welfare Act 1999 is used in prosecuting inadvertent, reckless, and wilful ill-treatment of animals. The Act defines the physical, health, and behavioural needs of an animal as including proper and sufficient food and water, adequate shelter, opportunity to display normal patterns of behaviour, physical handling in a manner which minimises the likelihood of unreasonable or unnecessary pain or distress and, protection from, and rapid diagnosis of, any significant injury or disease.
Karl van der Plas, BVA The Practice lawyer, is writing a journal article which confronts the issues with proving mens rea under the Animal Welfare Act 1999. Before the publication of this article in early 2019, this article offers an introduction to the complex issue that is determining recklessness in terms of mens rea under the Act. Through a brief case summary of SPCA v Power, this article will suggest some issues and implications that have arisen from the judicial decision.
Each animal welfare offence falls onto a spectrum; from inadvertent to intentional. Therefore, it is vital that the Animal Welfare Act 1999 can comprehensively cover the full range of offending towards animals, recognising the differences in culpability and assigning the proper sentences. There are three main ill-treatment offences within the Animal Welfare Act, strict liability, reckless, and wilful. The latter two of those offences, reckless and wilful, are mens rea offences. Mens rea is Latin for a guilty mind. In other words, mens rea is the thought one must have had to be guilty of this type of offence.
SPCA v Power
In SPCA v Power, Ms Power’s horse, Pip, a 32-year-old gelding, died after what the District Court Judge described as “a long period of pain and starvation”. Ms. Power maintained that she watched Pip from a distance for the 10 days prior to his death, but the Court mentioned that if she had checked on Pip, she would have noticed his deteriorated state and urgent need for medical attention. Originally, Ms. Power was convicted under section 28A for recklessly ill-treating animals. However, on appeal, the High Court disagreed with the District Court Judge’s views on recklessness. The Court’s interpretation of reckless was that Ms. Power would have had to acknowledge that her actions would have caused death or serious injury.
Implications of conviction
This decision raises multiple questions. How does this ruling impact on prosecuting for reckless conduct in future? Does it raise the bar too high? Does it impact on wilful ill-treatment? Does it capture the full range of ill-treatment offending?
It could be argued that not many people have an appreciation that death or serious injury could flow from their actions, unless they intended to cause such a high degree of harm. It could also be argued that the legislation fails to capture offending toward the middle of the spectrum, where a person was reckless, but not to the extent of causing death or serious injury. This reiterates the importance of mens rea under the Animal Welfare Act.
In Part Two of this article, these questions will be discussed in detail, along with further implications of this ruling.
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Mechanics & Farmers Bank was founded in 1907 in Durham, N.C. The bank has since used its business to support black businesses and minorities' finances throughout North Carolina. Photo by Bruce dePyssler/Campus Echo Adviser
The rise of minority banking in Durham, Mechanics & Farmers Bank
Published on September 27, 2016 by Justin L. Brodie
For 109 years, the Mechanics & Farmers Bank has been a staple in the Durham community.
Founder of N.C. Central University, James E. Shepard, had a hand in developing the bank into what it is today. Originally located on Durham’s Parrish Street, the Mechanics & Farmers Bank was an intricate part of Black Wall Street. Mechanics & Farmers Bank provided African Americans opportunities in Durham that weren’t available during the Great Depression.
On their online minority banking timeline, Partnership for Progress wrote that “it provided a secure place for depositors to accumulate wealth, a place sensitive to the needs of the community, and a place committed to helping the community become self-supporting.”
The bank has changed its leadership several times over its lifespan. Kim Saunders, an NCCU alumna, served as CEO for seven years before James H. Sills III was handed the reigns.
Sills is in his second year as CEO and President of Mechanics & Farmers Bank. He also has over 30 years of minority banking under his belt. An alumnus of Morehouse College, Sills served as Secretary of the Department of Technology and Chief Information Officer for the State of Delaware before transitioning to Mechanics & Farmers Bank.
Sills estimated that 70 percent of his bank’s assets are from minorities, which he said could “definitely improve.” He is looking to expand the diversity of his clientele.
“Minority banks recycle 80 percent of its deposits into the community it serves. We’re aiming for economic viability across Durham and our other locations,” said Sills.
Most of North Carolina’s wealth at the turn of the 20th century was based on the ownership of real property and farmland. Now with that style of living behind us, how does the community build back up that wealth?
“60 percent of our customers are 60 years old and above. … The future for us is the consumer that is 35 to 55.” Sills told the News & Observer in 2015.
NCCU alumnus Charles Hunt H Jr., 26, said it’s important to support black-owned businesses and make smart decisions in finance.
“I hope to take my own advice, and set up a business account with Mechanics & Farmers because they need more community support,” he said.
“With me owning a business now, I feel like funneling that money back into my hometown and through a black bank is a winning situation for everyone.”
With 7 locations in North Carolina and over $300 million in total assets as of 2015, Mechanics & Farmers Bank is the 8th largest financial institution in the United States.
To keep up with the bigger banks, Mechanics & Farmers now features online accounts, mobile banking, and check scanning through smart phones.
“We’re making a big push for minority deposit accounts across the state,” Sills said. “If we don’t who will?”
Sills said there has been a “promising surge” of new account activity in the past eight weeks.
“I’m with State Employees Credit Union myself, but I’ve opened up an account for my great granddaughter with Mechanics & Farmer,” Durham resident Hazel Parker said. “I had an account years ago and just loved everything about it.”
Having lived in Durham for more than 60 years, Parker has seen Mechanics & Farmers Bank withstand the test of time.
Mechanics & Farmers Bank is the only bank that received a Community Development Financial Institution designation (CDFI), according to its website.
The CDFI is funded by the U.S. Treasury Department and aims to aid communities in low income, low wealth, and other disadvantaged situations. The program finances small community businesses, nonprofit organizations, affordable housing, and job growth.
Mechanics & Farmers Bank offers several community outreach programs. Programs such as the Financial Literacy Initiative, the Money Smart program, and the Teach Children to Save program have been fundamental in the bank’s outreach to the community.
“We hope that we are making all the right decisions to be around for the next 100 years,” Sills said.
According to the bank’s website, “Mechanics” derived from the legal term, “mechanics lien,” which grouped the occupations and the trades the founders and customers represented. “Farmers” derived from owning farmland since in the 20th century that equated to wealth.
“The greatest value the past has to offer is not just a historical record, it is how history lights the way for the future,” Sills said.
Tags: Black businessesdurhamfinancejames e. shepardjustin brodiejustin l brodiemechanics and farmers bankminority bankingnccu
From Eagle to oysters
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Justin L. Brodie
22 year old junior studying Mass Communications with a focus in Broadcast. I aspire to work for ESPN, Bleacher Report, or in the front office of an NBA franchise.
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Portrait of an "Ugly American"
[William Lederer, Peacham, Vermont, June 27, 1996]
A 97-year-old ugly American was buried today at Arlington. He wasn’t physically “ugly.” He was “ugly” in the ironically positive sense of the enduring catch phrase he and the late Eugene Burdick contributed to the American lexicon. He was William Lederer, a retired Navy captain and co-author of The Ugly American.
Published at the height of the Cold War, in 1958, The Ugly American is an interlocking set of stories about a group of American innocents abroad losing the Cold War contest for hearts and minds in a thinly veiled Vietnam Lederer and Burdick call “Sarkhan.” Their principal targets were the Foreign Service professionals and political appointees alike who were “ugly Americans” in the commonly understood sense of the term. These were the officials who couldn’t be bothered to learn the language or honor the customs of the countries to which they were assigned and who isolated themselves in American enclaves. Their opposite number was the title character of the book, a physically unattractive and unassuming man who committed himself to making a difference by living and working alongside the Sarkhanese on their own terms.
The Ugly American, Lederer and Burdick claimed in a prefatory note, was a “rendering of fact into fiction.” The claims of venality and malfeasance, to be sure, were exaggerated. And the book did rest on a dubious neo-colonial premise—that “all over Asia . . . the basic American ethic is revered and honored and imitated when possible.” Today, we know better. But, for those of us of a certain age, to reread The Ugly American is to feel a nostalgic longing for a time when we really believed that “truth, justice, and the American way” was a redundant phrase and that America would never torture or start a preemptive war.
In June of 1996, I had the honor of interviewing William Lederer in Peacham, Vermont. He was 85 at the time and still in good shape, mentally and physically. But he was generally wary of interviewers by then. More than one researcher had suggested that he and Burdick belonged in the same literary camp as Harriet Beecher Stowe--“the little woman” whom Lincoln reportedly charged with “starting the great big war.” Lederer clearly resented the insinuation that he and Burdick were in any sense responsible for the Vietnam War. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that “The Ugly American was about incompetence in the Foreign Service—period! “
I found Lederer to be just as defensive about the veracity of The Ugly American. He told me a colorful but disingenuous story about the genesis of the book. Supposedly, he and Burdick had first written an actual exposé, complete with names, dates, and places. But, dissatisfied with that first attempt, they decided that fiction would have a greater impact. On the spur of the moment, Lederer claimed, they burned all the copies of the manuscript, along with their documentation. This colorful account, unfortunately, is at odds with certain letters and other documents I found among his papers housed at the University of Massachusetts.
Books, unfortunately, do have a way of taking on a life of their own—often one quite apart from that which their authors anticipate. There was widespread concern in those post-Sputnik days that Americans were going soft and that we needed to stand up and be counted. The Ugly American inadvertently contributed to the general sense of urgency and helped to make Vietnam seem like our theater of opportunity,
Still, The Ugly American is a call to action, not a call to arms. Lederer and Burdick insisted that we could not prevail in Asia with “guns and money alone.” It would take individual commitment at the grass-roots level. Then-Senator John F. Kennedy was so impressed by the book that he bought a copy for each of his fellow senators. The book’s legacy was the Peace Corps, not the Vietnam War.
Lederer and Burdick, however, were well-connected. They could see that some in high places had a different Vietnam agenda. Their next novel, Sarkhan, published on the eve of our direct involvement in 1965, was a fictionalized account of behind-the-scenes manipulation in order to justify a large-scale military intervention.
One of the saddest fates that can befall a once prominent and influential man, I have come to realize, is to outlive his time. Such was Captain William Lederer’s fate-- a warrior who understood that the pen could indeed be “mightier than the sword” and an “ugly American” in the best sense of the term. --EFP
Labels: Cold War, Eugene Burdick, Kennedy, Peace Corps, Sarkhan, The Ugly American, Vietnam, William J. Lederer
Graffiti--Western Washington Style
Caught in the Act!
The Palm-Print of the Day
The U.S. Postal Service Revisited
Toyota's Troubles
Sarcastic Sarah Strikes Again!
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Revisited
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You are here: Cran World » Archives for January 2013
One-year anniversary contest (update #2)
January 28, 2013 | Comments Off on One-year anniversary contest (update #2) | by Camille | Other News
Last update about our one-year anniversary contest:
First, we’d like to thank all those who participated, you were more than expected!!
The answer to the question was of course “Ode To My Family”, which most of you got right, although many got confused with “Roses”, a song Dolores dedicated to her father. One of you also answered “No Need To Argue”, a 1994 song which is very likely to be written about Dolores’ relationship with first boyfriend Mike Mahoney (although it has never been confirmed by any of the band members).
Click here to read the interview excerpt we posted in November in which Dolores explains she can’t sing “Ode To My Family” anymore because the song reminds her too much of her father.
Brest poster – Winners will receive it shortly
Anyway, congratulations to our 10 winners. Note that one of them decided to let someone else have his poster which had us drawing an 11th name by lot.
Beauvais & Brest posters are now all ready for shipping. Feel free to take pictures of them hanging on your walls once they reach you, and send those to us 😉
Here is the final list of our winners:
Andrea from Italy
Anna from Poland
Carmen from Argentina
Diana from Italy
Hélène from France
Javi from Spain whose poster thus goes to Lu from Uruguay
Lionel from the USA
Paul from France
Sean from the USA
Virginie from France
Again, thanks to Anne @ Ginger and Aude @ GDP
“Fire & Soul” is the third single… in Russia
January 27, 2013 | 2 Comments | by Jury | The Cranberries
It looks like some of the local labels distributing The Cranberries’ new album didn’t give up on a promotion of “Roses” in some regions. Ten months after the album release, “Fire & Soul” becomes the third promo single in Russia.
According to TopHitRu.com (a website that officially provides new promo singles for Russian radio stations and aggregates an information about the rotation of every single on Russian radios), “Fire & Soul” was made available for broadcasting on Russian radio stations on December 5, 2012. Since then it was played on 32 stations (for example, “Tomorow” was played on 44 stations). Full statistics of the track’s rotation is available here. (link no longer available)
Two previous promo singles from “Roses” released in Russia (Tomorrow and Show Me) were aimed for the rock radio stations, but never got much attention. Unlike them, “Fire & Soul” is aimed for the radios playing in CHR format (Contemporary Hit Radio) which means that, maybe, the local distributor is trying to showcase a different side of The Cranberries’ talent.
“Roses” is distributed by Soyuz Music in Russia. The album peaked at #24 on the Russian charts.
“Fire & Soul” joins other songs from “Roses” released as promo singles in different regions. Last spring “Raining In My Heart” was chosen as the second single in Italy and Ireland (and maybe other countries?) and “Waiting In Walthamstow” was released as promo single in the United Kingdom last summer. “Show Me” also got some airplay in the United States, Greece, Poland and Russia. And, of course, “Tomorrow” was the first official single released in many countries all over the world.
If you’ve heard The Cranberries’ songs from “Roses” in your country, let us know in the comments!
The official community closed again (?)
January 25, 2013 | 4 Comments | by Luc | The Cranberries
The Cranberries official community is not accessible since yesterday.
Technical problem or second shut down in less than a year?
The community website first closed last June after the band went on a summer break due to Dolores health problems. The site was put back online in September, few weeks before the band’s European tour. It is unknown if this accessibility problem is due to the a technical problem or if the band decided to shut down the site once again. The community did not seem to recover from the first shut down as few people joined the discussion forum since September. Is this the end, time will tell…
Thanks to Javi for the info.
One-year anniversary contest [update]
January 24, 2013 | 3 Comments | by Camille | Other News
Well, well, well… 6 other posters were given to us (a big thank you to Aude @ GDP) so that we can please a total of 10 winners. These 6 more are actually posters from the concert in Brest instead of Beauvais. And they are huge, about 120×160 centimeters which makes something like 47×62 inches.
How cool!!!
We’re thus sending over 6 new emails to those of you whose name was drawn by lot.
Check your mailboxes.
To recap these 6 new winners will receive a Brest poster when the very first 4 winners (already emailed 3 days ago) will receive a Beauvais one.
Complete list of winners & photo of the new poster soon…
“Live 2012” to be re-released in March
Just like the “Live in Paris 2010”, the London show will get a wide commercial CD release. Originally the show which took place at The Hammersmith Appolo on October 2, 2012 was available for order only on the Concert Live website as a special limited CD-set release. In December 2012 the show got a digital release and was made available for download on iTunes and other digital music stores.
London Live 2012 re-release
You can pre-order the “Live 2012” CD-set re-release for £12.84 on Amazon.co.uk or other retailers.
Cranberries World’s one-year anniversary!
Dear ‘Berries fans,
Cranberries World is one year old!
We’re quite happy on how things have been going so far and are determined to go on like this.
To celebrate, we thought we could launch a small contest to give away a couple of unused posters we managed to get on the last Cranberries tour (Thanks to Anne).
So if you’re interested in winning a large 120×80 centimeters (about 47×32 inches) poster of the concert in Beauvais, just email us the answer to the following question to contest[at]cranberriesworld[dot]com before January 20th:
Which song Dolores did not feel like singing on the European leg of the Roses tour due to the recent death of her father?
We’ll then draw lots to determine the winners who we’ll contact by email.
Beauvais 2012 – Poster to win (sorry for the bad quality pic!)
Now to leave you with a funny news on this special day, we recently discovered on YouTube an unusual video of The Cranberries gig in Caen (France) which was filmed in 3D by a member of the audience. One song only. Some of us tried to watch it with “anaglyph” glasses (simple red and cyan ones), and it worked!
We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.
Thank you for your support during this first year, we are truly grateful.
Cranberriesly Yours,
CW Team
“Dreams” in 3D (special glasses needed) – Caen 2012
Unreleased Mono Band “Track 29” revealed
January 3, 2013 | 2 Comments | by Luc | Mono Band
A never-heard-before Mono Band song entitled “Track 29 (demo edit)” was posted today on SoundCloud by the man himself, Noel Hogan.
“Track 29”, a collaboration with vocalist Richard Walters, was most likely recorded in the period of time between the first Mono Band album and the Arkitekt project.
Other songs posted today on Noel Hogan’s SoundCloud include “Army of Mice” (2005), “Track 26” (2006) and “Pacing (acoustic version)” (2009), all recorded with Richard Walters. The first two tracks were briefly posted on Mono Band’s MySpace page in the mid-2000’s while the latter was released on Arkitekt’s “14 Days” single.
Thanks to Noel for this lovely New Year’s surprise!
Source: Noel Hogan’s SoundCloud page
(ALL TRACKS NO LONGER AVAILABLE)
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30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music
30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music (1993)
http://cuttingsarchive.org/images/2/2b/1993-11_Film_Score_Monthly.jpg
Publication: Film Score Monthly
Date: issue 39 (November 1993)
Author: Jeff Szpirglas
November 23, 1993 marks the 30th anniversary of everybody's favorite Time Lord. Doctor Who. Over the show's long. 26 year run, just about every aspect of the show has changed (including the lead actor—several times), except his time/space machine, the TARDIS, and of course the wonderful theme music by Ron Grainer.
When I talk about Doctor Who with friends, the usual remark is, "Oh yeah. that show with the creepy music that used to scare me," or "I couldn't stand to watch the beginning, it was so creepy." Indeed, what made those beginnings so frightening to young children were the strange visual effects and Grainer's classic theme, which has even gone so far as to inspire a T-shirt some years back. (The caption went something like, "Diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum... woooo weeee ooh!")
In the '60s. much of the show's music was old BBC stock music (as some of the episodes had their incidental music borrowed from the BBC audio department), but finally. the show moved away from stock music and Dudley Simpson began his long reign as the Doctor's incidental musician. Simpson would usually use a small, five or six piece group, a method of scoring that would continue through most of the serials for several years.
In 1973, incidental musician Malcom Clarke was hired to score the classic Sea Devi& serial. using the then "new" technology over at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The result was an abstract, almost bizarre approach using synthesizers, getting mixed reviews from fans. A suite of the music was issued on 1983's Doctor Who - The Music album. recently re-released by Silva Screen on CD under the title of Earthshock. Dudley Simpson continued to write his "orchestral" music for several years. until 1981 when the Radiophonic Workshop took over completely.
The show's theme, which had remained more or less the same since 1963, was now radically changed and updated by newcomer incidental musician Peter Howell. It was totally electronic, reflecting producer John Nathan-Turner's idea of revamping the show to bring it "with the times." Similarly, a new group of musicians were now at the Radiophonic Workshop creating the incidental music. In addition to Howell, composers included Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb. Richard Gibbs. and Malcom Clarke, whose score for Earthshock is one of the best scores to be heard on the show.
After the eighteen month hiatus of 1985, things changed once again for Doctor Who's music. A new theme was introduced by composer Dominic Glynn, who would provide incidental music in the following seasons.
The next year, the theme was updated yet again by Keff Mcullough, who was the start of the next wave of incidental musicians. Together with Dominic Glynn and newcomer Mark Ayres, the next three years of the show shared a similar feel—electronic, but sounding almost orchestral at times. (This effect can be heard on some of the cues from Ayres' Curse of Fenric score, also available from Silva Screen.)
Over the years. it hasn't been just the Radiophonic Workshop who contributed music to the series. The Beatles appeared on the show in a small clip, and "Paperback Writer" was used in the story Evil of the Daleks. Though not usually on the show, there has been a touch of '50s and '60s music, most notably in the score for Delta and the Bannermen.
In 1989, after its 27th season, the BBC decided to rest Doctor Who. Nothing new has happened since then. For the 30th anniversary, fans have been promised a new special, but it seems like it will not happen. As far as releases of the show's music. however, things couldn't be going better. Silva Screen has released several CDs in the past couple of years, and BBC Audio has just released 30 Years at the Radiophonic Workshop, a collection of music and sound effects commemorating the anniversary.
Seeing as how the merchandise and soundtracks continue to be produced and purchased, it seems as if Doctor Who isn't as dead as the BBC suspected. Perhaps one day well all be watching new episodes of the classic British show. and listening to that wonderful signature tune once again....
DOCTOR WHO (DW) ON CD Compiled by DAVID HIRSCH
The Best of DW: Vol. l: The Five Doctors Silva America SSD 1014
DW: Earthshock Classic Music from BBC Rad. Work. Vol. I Silva FILMCD 709
DW: The Five Doctors Classic Music... Vol. 2 Silva Screen UK FILMCD 710
DW: Pyramids of Mars Classic Music from Tom Baker Era Silva FILMCD 134
DW 25th Anniversary Album BBC Records UK BBC CD 707
DW: Variations on a Theme Silva Screen UK FILMCD 706
Score Albums Silva Screen UK FILMCD 087
DW: Curse of Fenric Silva Screen UK FILMCD 133
DW: Ghost Light Silva Screen UK FILMCD 114
DW: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Silva Screen UK FILMCD 707
Recorded Drama BBC Records BBCCD 847 BBC Records BBCCD 871
DW and the Pescatons
Essential Science Haim Sound Effects
30 Years at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
APA 6th ed.: Szpirglas, Jeff (issue 39 (November 1993)). 30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music. Film Score Monthly p. 14.
MLA 7th ed.: Szpirglas, Jeff. "30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music." Film Score Monthly [add city] issue 39 (November 1993), 14. Print.
Chicago 15th ed.: Szpirglas, Jeff. "30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music." Film Score Monthly, edition, sec., issue 39 (November 1993)
Turabian: Szpirglas, Jeff. "30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music." Film Score Monthly, issue 39 (November 1993), section, 14 edition.
Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/30_Years_Of_Doctor_Who_and_Its_Music | work=Film Score Monthly | pages=14 | date=issue 39 (November 1993) | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=19 July 2019 }}</ref>
Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=30 Years Of Doctor Who and Its Music | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/30_Years_Of_Doctor_Who_and_Its_Music | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=19 July 2019}}</ref>
Retrieved from "http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php?title=30_Years_Of_Doctor_Who_and_Its_Music&oldid=23826"
Music and FX
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CGN’s overseas assets prosper with B&R Initiative
CGN, China’s largest and the world’s third largest nuclear power enterprise, has operated its business in more than 20 countries. Its overseas assets and revenue have reached 16 and 20 percent of the total respectively under the Belt & Road Initiative.
Chinese president Xi Jinping proposed the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in his visit to Central Asia and Southeast Asia in 2013. The BeIt & Road Initiative upholds the spirit of opening-up and mutually beneficial cooperation, and echoes the trend of world multipolarization, economic globalization, cultural diversity, and societal informatization. It has an ever-growing international influence, bringing cooperation between countries along the route to a wider scope and higher level.
By taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the Belt & Road Initiative, CGN has made major breakthroughs in the fields of nuclear power, nuclear fuel, and new energy. It has seen its nuclear power plant digital I&C system and non-dynamic nuclear technology go global.
Nuclear power, one of China’s calling cards on par with high-speed railway trains, represents the core competitiveness of the country. A suite of agreements were signed by CGN, Electricité de France, and the British government on Sept 29, 2016, a historic breakthrough in China’s nuclear power’s global expansion.
The Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C, and Bradwell B projects in Britain were hailed as flagship projects inaugurating the golden age of Sino-British cooperation by Xi. The Bradwell B project, with CGN as its controlling shareholder, uses China’s Generation-III nuclear technology, HPR1000.
Two evolutionary power reactors (EPR) will be built under the Hinkley Point C project. The construction site covers an area the size of 245 football fields, the largest in Europe by far. There are 5,600 workers at the site every day during the peak period. The project will use a total of 3 million tons of concrete, 75 times the amount that was used in the UK’s Millennium Stadium, and 230,000 tons of rebar, the same amount used to build a railway from London to Rome.
Upon completion, the Hinkley Point C project will satisfy 7 percent of electricity demand in Britain, reduce 9 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, and hire about 900 employees. A total of 25,000 jobs will be created during the construction, which will play a significant role in French and British employment, talent cultivation, and nuclear industrial chain formation.
The industrial chain is an essential part of Belt & Road cooperation. Multiple memorandums of understanding in civil engineering, installation, digital I&C, and radiation monitoring have been signed between Chinese and Britain enterprises.
In addition to the British projects, CGN has inked memorandums of understanding and letters of intent with enterprises and government departments from more than 20 countries around the world. It also plans to tap into the Central and Eastern European, Southeast Asian, West Asian, and African markets in the future.
Nuclear fuel is the foundation for nuclear power development. CGN has made outstanding achievements in the development of uranium resources overseas. It has teamed up with Kazatomprom to explore the Irkol and Semizbai uranium deposits in Kazakhstan. Their joint venture for nuclear fuel assemblies commenced construction in 2016 and is expected to come into operation in late 2020. As a signature project in clean energy cooperation between the two countries, it will elevate Kazakhstan’s nuclear fuel industry to the upstream of the industry.
The Husab project in Namibia is China’s largest entity investment project in Africa. It can provide 6,000 jobs during its construction period and 1,600 after it begins operation. It will help Namibia become the world’s second largest natural uranium producer and exporter, while increasing their export value by 20 percent and GDP by 5 percent.
In the Husab Project, CGN has taken localization as the path to realizing internationalization. It invested more than 200 million yuan ($29.68 million) in local staff training to propel the sustainable development of the company. The number of Chinese personnel was less than 15 percent of the total during the construction period, and the proportion of local staff has now reached 95 percent.
New energy, including wind power, solar power, hydroelectric power, gas power, combined heat and power, biomass energy, and fuel cell, is an important business sector of CGN’s. To date, the company’s clean energy projects have spread across Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, North America, and South America. As of March, the installed capacity of CGN-held projects under construction or in operation had reached 13.91 GW.
CGN acquired the Edra projects in November 2015 to become the largest independent power producer in Egypt and Bangladesh, the second largest independent power producer in Malaysia, and the one of the largest Chinese energy company in terms of overseas installed capacity.
Unit 1 of the 2.24-GW Malacca gas power generation project, the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia, saw its major part complete concrete pouring in December 2018. The 50MWac solar power station in Kedah was CGN’s first overseas large photovoltaic greenfield project that connected to the grid.
CGN established the CGN European Energy Company in June 2014. Over the past few years, the subsidiary has become the fifth largest clean energy operator in France. It has acquired nearly 1.6 GW of wind power and solar power assets in Britain, France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Sweden through mergers, acquisitions, and independent development.
Currently, CGN owns the largest onshore wind farm in Belgium, Esperance, and won the bid for the first offshore floating wind power project in Europe, Groix. In July 2018, it acquired a 75 percent stake of the Swedish North Pole wind power project, the largest single onshore wind farm in Europe, which can satisfy the electricity demands of 400,000 households. In addition, it is also the largest Chinese investor in Ireland.
On March 29, the Brenig onshore wind power project in Wales, the first overseas wind power project independently developed by CGN, was put into commercial operation. With a total installed capacity of 37,600 kilowatts, it can provide electricity for 39,000 households in the UK annually and boost the local economy.
CGN also has made great strides in going global with its non-dynamic nuclear technology. CGN Nuclear Technology Development Co Ltd was China’s first A-share listed enterprise that engages in non-dynamic nuclear technology and is China’s largest manufacturer of industrial electron accelerators. It not only develops the core technology of key parts, but also realizes automated production.
The company has successfully developed the SSRC accelerator and exported it to be applied in major Brazilian sci-tech projects. Its electron irradiation accelerator has entered nearly 10 counties including the US, India, Thailand, South Korea, Pakistan, Brazil, and Indonesia.
CGN Nuclear Technology Development will cooperate with AERIAL in the application of nuclear technology in fruit preservation, food irradiation, and dose detection under the memorandum of understanding signed on April 3 during the 19th International Meeting on Radiation Processing in Strasbourg.
As for modified polymers, CGN Nuclear Technology Development has already operated business in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and Russia, with plans to enter Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine.
CGN will make full use of its experience accumulated in the nuclear power, new energy, and environmental protection industries over the past 30 years and actively participate in the clean energy development and environmental protection in countries along the Belt & Road Initiative with the goal of building a community with a shared future for humanity.
CGN European Energy rising with prospects and opportunities
CGN-initiated national-local joint engineering research cent...
CGN partners EC in sewage treatment
CGN and AERIAL cooperate in civil-use non-power nuclear tech...
CGN awes visitors at nuclear power industry exhibition
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20 Filming Mistakes That Were Made In The Marvel Movies
Image: via YouTube/First Blast
Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Studios has been on a roll, creatively and commercially. And with the likes of Captain America, The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy raking in billions, it seems like the studio can do no wrong.
However, that’s not to say Marvel’s Cinematic Universe is entirely faultless. And upon closer inspection, each film features a surprising number of errors that have made it into the final cut. From conspicuous crew members to dodgy research, these embarrassing blunders are enough to put the studio to shame.
Image: via YouTube/RADAS Productions
20. Crew members reflected in glass – Iron Man
With its very first cinematic outing, Iron Man, Marvel proved that it could make superhero movies beyond compare. However, while the 2008 film was undeniably great, it was also rife with gaffes. Most notably, the film crew can be seen reflected in picture frames in the movie’s post-credits scene.
Image: via Amino Apps
19. Union Flag hanging upside down – Captain America
As a patriotic representative of the United States, Captain America should show an awareness for other nations’ customs and cultures. However, his first outing in 2011 made a grave misstep in international relations by featuring a shot of the U.K.’s Union Jack hanging upside down. And we thought he’d be an expert on flags.
Image: via YouTube/Mohamed Yasser
18. German cops in Romania – Captain America: Civil War
While misrepresenting flags is bad enough, the Captain America films have made other glaring mistakes in depicting national identities on screen. For example, the Bucharest cops who chase Cap and Bucky in Civil War have the German word “Polizei” written on their vests instead of the Romanian word “Politia.”
Image: via YouTube/Movie House
17. German police cars have the wrong lights – The Avengers
Based on the previous example, Marvel seemingly has a hard time correctly identifying the German police force. Besides mistaking the Politia for the Polizei, 2012’s Avengers sees Loki attacking cop cars in Stuttgart that feature amber lights. In reality, German police vehicles use blue lights.
Image: via Imgur/RaptureRecords
16. Star-Lord’s impossibly awesome mix tape – Guardians of the Galaxy
One of Guardians of the Galaxy’s most memorable features was its retro soundtrack, which came courtesy of Star-Lord’s “Awesome Mix Vol. 1” on cassette tape. Nevertheless, the prop tape used in the 2014 film illustrates a lack of research on Marvel’s part. Though given to Star-Lord in 1988, this particular brand of cassette was actually introduced in 1993.
Image: via Imgur
15. Spelling error on the front cover of Forbes – Iron Man
Spelling is an important point for any publishing business. So Marvel should have known that a magazine like Forbes – which features a fictional mock cover in the original Iron Man – would have written “Tony Stark takes reins” and not “reigns.” Whoops!
14. Spelling error on a S.H.I.E.L.D. monitor – Thor
Clearly, spelling isn’t Marvel’s forte, and three years after Iron Man the company made a similar blunder in Thor. During S.H.I.E.L.D.’s reconnaissance of the title character’s hammer, the word “perimeter” is spelled as “perimiter” on a video screen. Come on, guys, spell check only takes a second.
Image: via Internet Movie Firearms Database
13. Anachronistic APCs – Captain America: The First Avenger
When making a movie set in the past, filmmakers have to ensure that the period details are all present and correct. But for all their good work on the World War II-set Captain America, the producers overlooked some important details regarding military equipment. Specifically, Hydra operatives can be seen using FV432 APCs, a vehicle that first entered service some 20 years after the conflict’s end.
Image: via YouTube/RezzzoLute
12. Over-armed F-35B – The Avengers
In addition to messing up bygone military vehicles, Marvel also has a habit of getting current hardware wrong. After the Hulk goes on a rampage onn board the Helicarrier in The Avengers, an F-35B fighter opens fire with two cannons. However, the real-life jet has just one gun, which is mounted underneath the aircraft.
Image: via YouTube/Fairy Tale
11. Incorrect longitude – Captain America: The Winter Soldier
During the course of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, GPS co-ordinates appear on screen whenever the film introduces a new location. But although they may look cool, these co-ordinates are often wildly inaccurate. For example, this set-up of the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters lists the building’s longitude – which refers to co-ordinates on an east/west axis – as being in a southerly direction.
Image: via Movie Mistakes
10. Incorrect co-ordinates – Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Likewise, this follow-up caption from The Winter Soldier lists both longitude and latitude as north. However, upon further inspection the shot features another hidden error. While pertaining to an area in the Indian Ocean, the co-ordinates actually point to a location in the Arabian Sea.
Image: via YouTube/Tony Stark
9. Bullet hole in an Air Force One window – Iron Man 3
Being the personal transport of the leader of the free world, the planes that act as Air Force One naturally come equipped with heavy protection. Bulletproof windows are just one such defensive feature. However, the producers of 2013’s Iron Man 3 ignored this real-life detail. Indeed, during a shootout on the president’s plane, a stray round actually pierces what should be impervious glass.
8. The Triskelion is missing from the D.C. skyline – Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Towards the finale of 2014’s Winter Soldier, the Triskelion – a.k.a. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Washington headquarters – meets an explosive end. But eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed the building missing from the D.C. skyline earlier in the film. Specifically, when Steve Rogers goes on his morning run in the film’s opening, the structure is noticeably absent from view.
7. Driver disappears from a crashed car – The Avengers
Safety is paramount when conducting breathtaking stunts, yet sometimes this comes to the detriment of a film’s credibility. To illustrate, The Avengers’ opening scene features a gripping car chase that culminates in a vehicle being flipped. However, the effect is ultimately ruined, as a subsequent shot shows the overturned vehicle to be completely empty.
Image: via Disney Wiki
6. Steve Rogers’ wind-resistant hair – The Avengers
Of course, saving the planet is important, but looking good takes top priority among the Avengers’ ranks. Certainly, Steve Rogers puts so much care into his hairstyle that his locks remain unruffled by the wind as he rides his motorcycle at the end of the team’s first cinematic outing. Obviously, S.H.I.E.L.D. has invested in some strong hair gel.
Image: via Blogspot/Venkkayam
5. Reflected light screen – Iron Man 2
By all means, film crews do a great job of ensuring that their work stays hidden behind the camera. However, there are instances when keeping a low profile isn’t possible. For instance, this scene from 2010’s Iron Man 2 is flawless except for the enormous light screen reflected in Black Widow’s car window.
Image: via PandaWhale
4. Stunt double switcheroo – The Avengers
While Scarlett Johansson played Black Widow to a tee, most of her tougher action scenes fell on stunt double Heidi Moneymaker. And although they generally blend seamlessly into one in Marvel’s set pieces, there is a noticeable switch between the two near the beginning of The Avengers. Just look out for Black Widow’s bulkier biceps during the character’s first scene.
Image: via YouTube/Movieclips Trailers
3. No strings attached – Avengers: Age of Ultron
Steve Rogers may be a genetically enhanced super soldier but actor Chris Evans is alas only a man. And like any fragile film star, Evans requires a little extra safety when performing his fight scenes. Indeed, when Captain America fights the Avengers: Age of Ultron’s titular villain on the back of a speeding truck, a safety cable can be seen holding the actor securely in place.
2. Bucky’s conflicting date of birth – Captain America: The Winter Soldier
One of the MCU’s most enigmatic figures, Bucky Barnes seemingly died in World War II before being resurrected as the Winter Soldier. So mysterious is this character that even Marvel gets confused about his origins. Indeed, Barnes’ Smithsonian tribute in The Winter Soldier actually lists his date of birth as being in both 1916 and 1917.
Image: via YouTube/Lucía Fernández
1. Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor stops glowing – The Avengers
Over the course of Marvel’s movies, Tony Stark – a.k.a. Iron Man – is notable for having a glowing Arc Reactor fixed in his chest. However, eagle-eyed viewers will note that the life-saving orb sometimes shifts around or turns off entirely. Most notably, the Reactor’s light is completely absent during Stark’s confrontation with Loki near the conclusion of The Avengers. We can only imagine that Stark is wearing an extra thick T-shirt… or is having an Arc attack.
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Mind, Matter, Mathematics, & Mortality: Meditations on a Momentous Metaphysical Theory
Published: Unknown
Publisher: Dr. Nun Amen-Ra
Lovell's Progressive Readers, No. 4
Author(s): John Epy Lovell
Categories: Readers
Mind and Nature
Author(s): Hermann Weyl
Categories: Mathematics
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Hermann Weyl (1885-1955) was one of the twentieth century's most important mathematicians, as well as a seminal figure in the development of quantum physics and general relativity. He was also an eloquent writer with a lifelong interest in the philosophical implications of the startling new scientific developments with which he was so involved. Mind and Nature is a collection of Weyl's most important general writings on philosophy, mathematics, and physics, including pieces that have never before been published in any language or translated into English, or that have long been out of print. Complete with Peter Pesic's introduction, notes, and bibliography, these writings reveal an unjustly n...
The Interpretation of Cultures
Author(s): Clifford Geertz
Categories: Social Science
In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.
Author(s): Yuval Noah Harari
New York Times Bestseller A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold...
Type: Magazine
Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist
Author(s): Patrick Juola, Stephen Ramsay
Scholars of all stripes are turning their attention to materials that represent enormous opportunities for the future of humanistic inquiry. The purpose of this book is to impart the concepts that underlie the mathematics they are likely to encounter and to unfold the notation in a way that removes that particular barrier completely. This book is a primer for developing the skills to enable humanist scholars to address complicated technical material with confidence. This book, to put it plainly, is concerned with the things that the author of a technical article knows, but isn't saying. Like any field, mathematics operates under a regime of shared assumptions, and it is our purpose to elucidate some of those assumptions for the newcomer. The individual subjects we tackle are (in order): logic and proof, discrete mathematics, abstract algebra, probability and statistics, calculus, and differential equations.
10 Good Questions About Life And Death
Author(s): Christopher Belshaw
Categories: Philosophy
10 Good Questions about Life and Death makes us think againabout some of the most important issues we ever have to face. Addresses the fundamental questions that many of us ask aboutlife and death. Written in an engaging and straightforward style, ideal forthose with no formal background in philosophy. Focuses on commonly pondered issues, such as: Is life sacred?Is it bad to die? Is there life after death? Does life havemeaning? And which life is best? Encourages readers to think about and respond to the humancondition. Features case studies, thought-experiments, and references toliterature, film, music, religion and myth.
Author(s): R.R. Bowker company
Author(s): David Foster Wallace
Categories: Fiction
Publisher: Back Bay Books
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
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TriCounty
Britney Jordan was a three-time Journal Star Class AA girls basketball player of the year. As a senior, the Woodruff guard averaged 28 points and earned McDonald's and Parade all-America recognition. She now plays at Temple.
Marian "Gabby" Kneer
Marian "Gabby" Kneer has devoted her life to athletics and education. Now a resident of Western Springs, a Chicago suburb and a retired professor from the University of Illinois-Chicago, Kneer was called the "worldí's greatest softbaIl catcher" in the late 1940's. And for a long time, people didn't even know her first name, just calling her "Gabby" Kneer - maybe because of the way she continually chirped encouraging words to her teammates.
A graduate of Woodruff High School and Illinois State University with a doctorate in physical education from the University of Michigan, Kneer was a tireless promoter of sports for girls in Illinois high schools, and was a co-founder and leader for permitting competitive interscholastic sports.
Marian taught at East Peoria High School from 1949 until 1968, going from there to the University of Illinois-Chicago. She gave up sports to concentrate on her teaching career. Her sports honors included membership in the Illinois State University Athletic Hall of Fame, the Illinois Softball Hall of Fame, and Illinois Coaches Association for Girls and Women Hall of Fame. A catcher for ten years, her sports career also included basketball, field hockey, and coaching girl's basketball.
A .323 lifetime hitter, she caught for five state and three world championship teams as a member of the Caterpillar Dieselettes. Kneer played basketball locally for the Dieselettes and Gipps Brewery teams. Her professional experience includes numerous publications pertaining to physical education on the State, National, and International levels. She co-authored "Softball-Fast and Slow Pitch" with Chuck McCord, previous Hall of Fame Inductee - now in its fifth edition.
Kneer served in every elective position of the Illinois Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation as well as with the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. Currently a Professor Emeritous from the University of Illinois-Chicago, she is a consultant for Physical Education..
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Home > Vol 27, No 1 (2016) > Bell
Gustavo Castro Witnessed the Murder of Berta Castro. That means his life is in danger. in the face of the silence from washington, the clinton-backed coup government in honduras is mopping up activists for democracy and indigenous rights
Beverly Bell, "Gustavo Castro Witnessed the Murder of Berta Cáceres. That Means His Life Is in Danger.
In the face of silence from Washington, the Clinton-backed coup government in Honduras is mopping up activists for democracy and indigenous rights,"
Republished from Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), http://fpif.org/gustavo-castro-knows-killed-berta-caceres-means-life-danger/, March 22, 2016.
qThe sole eyewitness to Honduran social movement leader Berta Cáceres' assassination on March 3, 2016 has gone from being wounded victim to, effectively, political prisoner.
qNow Gustavo Castro Soto may also be framed as the murderer of his long-time friend.
qMexico's ambassador to Honduras, Dolores Jiménez, and Castro himself are worried that the Mexican national will be charged by the government for the killing, they told the National Commission of Human Rights of Honduras on March 16.
A writer and organizer for environmental and economic justice, Castro has been forbidden by local authorities from leaving the country to return to his native Mexico until April 6, at least. Since being released from several days in Honduran government custody, he has been forced to take refuge in the Mexican embassy in Tegucigalpa. The protection of the Mexican Embassy "does not mean that my life is no longer in danger," Castro wrote to some friends and colleagues on March 4. As long as he is on Honduran soil, he remains in peril. Ambassador Jiménez called the risk he is running "an objective fact."
Castro – who, as the lone witness to the murder, is able to identify Cáceres' killer – is an impediment to the plan that the Honduran government is clearly advancing, which is to pin the murder on members of the group which Cáceres founded and ran: the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations, or COPINH. So the fraudulently elected Honduran regime may dispense with Castro by charging and arresting him.
The government may also charge COPINH members with the killing of their leader, in the hopes of eliminating them from the body politic. Authorities tried to incriminate three of them just after the murder.
Prominent COPINH organizer Aureliano Molina was imprisoned for two days on suspicion of a "crime of passion," though he was two hours away from La Esperanza, the location of the killing, on the night of March 3. Two other COPINH leaders, Tomas Gómez and Sotero Echeverria, were interrogated for days, during which time the government denied their request for accompaniment by their lawyers. On March 15, Echeverria was threatened with arrest.
The Real Assassins
Cáceres was a tireless organizer for accountable government, participatory democracy, indigenous peoples and their territories, human rights, and women's and LGBTQ rights. For many years, she was subject to threats, attempted violent attacks, legal prosecution for being a "continual danger to the nation," and other persecution.
During the three-month period prior to Cáceres' murder, human rights accompaniers tracked 11 threats and attempted assaults by national and local government officials, police, soldiers, employees of the Agua Zarca dam project (which Cáceres and others were fighting), and unidentified men. And within 10 days of Cáceres' death, Agua Zarca released incendiary public email announcements blasting the alleged "falsehoods of Berta Cáceres" and COPINH.
Those who have witnessed the price Cáceres has paid for her decades of advocacy have no doubt who is culpable in her murder. Her four grown children and mother stated publicly on March 5, "We hold DESA" – the company behind the dam – and "the international financial organizations backing the project responsible" for the "constant death threats against Berta, us, and COPINH. We hold the Honduran state responsible for obstructing Berta's protection and for contributing to her persecution, criminalization, and murder."
Castro's Ordeal
Many elements of the government's so-called collection of evidence from Castro have been irregular at best, and illegal at worst.
Beyond being inconvenient for knowing too much, the eyewitness falls into the repressive government's category of public enemy. Like Cáceres, Castro has been a vocal opponent of dam construction on indigenous rivers, as well as of the broad powers given to transnational corporations and the local elite to undermine democracy and plunder the riches of nature.
Castro is coordinator of the group Otros Mundos/Friends of the Earth Mexico. He cofounded – and sits on the governing bodies of – many anti-mining and anti-damming networks, as well as the U.S.-based organization Other Worlds. In his interrogation, the public prosecutor asked Castro about his environmental organizing and history of activism.
Following the killing in Cáceres' home in the town of La Esperanza, Castro was detained for days in the local public prosecutor's office for interrogation. On March 5, having been told the questioning was complete, he was transported by the Mexican ambassador and consul to the airport in Tegucigalpa so that he could return to his homeland. As he approached the migration checkpoint, Castro was set upon by multiple Honduran police, who attempted to grab him. The Mexican ambassador stopped them.
The government has since forbidden Castro from leaving Honduras for 30 days, or until April 6. When Castro appealed the order, the judge in the case ruled against it, even while admitting that there is no legal provision for a 30-day restraint for witnesses or victims.
The judge also suspended the license of Castro's lawyer, Ivania Galeano, for 15 days. The stated reason was that Galeano had requested a copy of Castro's file – which, according to Honduran law, was her right.
Even in the Mexican embassy, almost three weeks after the killing, Castro continues to be interrogated by the Honduran prosecutor.
Hearing No Protest from the U.S., Honduran Government Ramps Up Repression
The U.S. State Department put out a brief, generic statement of condolence the day after Cáceres was assassinated. At the same time, according to email communications, the State Department confirmed that it is cooperating with the Honduran government in the investigation, with various U.S. agencies actively participating in it.
The Obama administration has failed to raise questions about the Honduran government's role in the murder, despite its persistent, well-documented targeting of Cáceres over the years, and its transparent attempts at a cover-up by fingering Cáceres' close colleagues. U.S. military assistance to the illegitimate Honduran coup government continues to flow.
On March 17, 62 U.S. congressional representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry calling for an independent investigation of the assassination and urging the secretary to immediately stop U.S. security funding pending a review. Representative Hank Johnson, co-sponsor of the letter along with Representative Keith Ellison, said, "It's time for our government to leverage security assistance and multilateral loans so as to put real and lasting pressure on the Honduran government to protect its activists and pursue those responsible for these hideous crimes."
Meanwhile, the silence from the administration has given the Honduran government a green light for repression.
That repression was aggressively escalated on March 15. On that single day, Honduran soldiers and police coordinated assaults against 10 activists from four geographic regions and three separate organizations. Nelson García, a COPINH leader, was assassinated during a violent government eviction of the community of Rio Chiquito. In the capital, three hit men shot and wounded Christian Mauricio Alegría, who works with the global peasant movement La Via Campesina. His uncle, Rafael Alegría, is a deputy in the national parliament from the opposition Libre Party, and is former secretary general of La Via Campesina. José Flores, head of the United Movement of the Peasants of the Aguan (MUCA), was temporarily arrested along with family members in the town of Tocoa.
The message was clear to all. No matter where one is or with whom one works, activists are not safe in Honduras.
From the Mexican embassy on March 15, Castro sent out a note of condolence and support to the Honduran people. He closed the missive this way: "Soon there will be justice."
*Beverly Bell is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and Coordinator of Other Worlds.
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SCO Secretary-General meets with CTO Under-Secretary-General
On 20 September 2017, SCO Secretary-General Rashid Alimov met with Under-Secretary-General of the UN Counter-Terrorism Office Vladimir Voronkov on the sidelines of the general debate of the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly at the UN Headquarters in New York. The meeting was also attended by SCO Regional Antiterrorist Structure (RATS) Director Yevgeny Sysoyev. Mr Voronkov noted the SCO&...
SCO Ambassadors Club at Great Silk Road’s “golden intersection”
On 4-6 July 2017, the Ambassadors Club of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) member states held its regular offsite session, this time in China's Gansu province which is rightfully considered the "heart of the Great Silk Road." Taking part were ambassadors extraordinary plenipotentiary of the SCO member states to China and representatives of diplomatic missions: from China &mdas...
Statement of the Secretariat of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the terrorist attack in Kabul
It is with shock and sadness that we have learned about the explosion in Kabul's diplomatic district on 31 May, in which many Afghans and also foreign citizens were killed or wounded. There is no justification for this act of violence, which is, regrettably, one of many. The SCO Secretariat extends its sincere condolences to the government and people of the Islamic Republic of Afgh...
New Silk Way: Yuzhnouralsky logistics center
The construction of the Yuzhnouralsky transport and logistics center has begun in the Uvelsky district of the Chelyabinsk region. This is an ambitious project that has been endorsed by the SCO. Its fundamental goal is to allow increasing the trade turnover between Russia and China. When it is inaugurated, time needed to deliver cargoes will be reduced to ten days. At present, it takes almost two months by sea and a month by the Trans-Siberian railway. As they say, the game is worth the candle
Conference of Ministers of Transport of the SCO Member States
China Economy and Business
The Fourth Conference of Ministers of Transport of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization member states took place in Beijing. Ministers of transport and Ministers' representatives of the SCO member states - Kazakhstan, China, Kirghizia, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and those of the observer states – India, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan took part in it , as well as the specially invited representative of Afghanistan...
Experts Preparing the SCO Agreements on Automobile Transportation Facilitation
The tenth workshop panel on preparation of an intergovernmental agreement of the SCO member states on international automobile transportation facilitation will be held in Moscow on June 2-4. The agreement must create a legal framework for the development of multilateral international automobile communications, both between the SCO member states, and in the China-Europe direction along the transpor...
The Working Group Session on the SCO Transit Potential Development was Held in Beijing
On the base of the SCO Secretariat the Fifth Special Working Group Session on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization member states’ transit potential development was held in the Chinese capital city. In the course of the meeting the progress of the pilot projects implementation was discussed - synchronous construction, reconstruction and rehabilitation of motor road sections en Е-40 rout...
Dmitry Mezentsev Went on a Working Trip to the SCO countries
Vice Chairman of the Federation Council of Russia, Chairman of the Board of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Business Council Dmitry Mezentsev went on a working trip to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries. The schedule includes visit to China, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. There meetings with Presidents of the National Parliaments and National parts...
Sergey Lavrov: Russia and Afghanistan are Disposed to Develop Mutual Cooperation
Afghanistan Politics
Head of the Russian foreign policy department Sergey Lavrov spoke at the at joint press conference following talks with his Afghan colleague Rangin Dadfar Spanta...
Visit to Afghanistan of Russian
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, paid a working visit to Kabul on March 16, where he was received by the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (IRA), Hamid Karzai, held talks with Minister of Foreign Affairs Rangin Dadfar Spanta, and met with Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, Upper House Speaker Sebghatollah Mojaddedi and Lower House Speaker Yunus Q...
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Sign up for the First World Summit on its special site
Fri, 04/11/2014 - 00:14 — Editor3
The International Council for Cultural Centers is accepting participants for the First World Summit of Community Arts Centers and Networks, between September 24-27th, 2014, in the old historic city of Veliko Tarnovo.
For more information and signing up for the event, please visit our special website for the World Summit at worldsummit.international3c.org, or directly contact us at office@international3c.org.
The realization of the First World Summit is under the official patronage of the President of the Republic of Bulgaria, Mr. Rossen Plevneliev. We are expecting the participation of about 50 countries from 5 continents.
The theme of the event is “Creativity and Well-being for All: Changing the Future!”, inspired by the overall impact of these networks to society and as a continuity to an international project where I3C is a partner. The topic addresses the role of the arts and creativity for sustainable community development and the rising demand for policies, including cultural policies, supporting what people themselves characterize as their well-being. In a time of economic and moral crisis, the Summit aims to contribute concrete new approaches and programs that enhance the role of the networks of community arts and cultural centers towards social well-being as direct mediators between people’s demands and public politics.
The First World Summit aims to bring together experts from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and North America, as each participating country could bring two or more representatives, who are: a) representatives of Ministries of Culture, which coordinate the sectors of community arts and/or if there is a national network of community cultural centers (often called “house of culture”); and b) representatives of thenon-governmental organizations, associations, or networks of the above-mentioned community cultural centers/community arts organizations. These networks may be: 1) governmental institutions; 2) NGOs; or 3) a hybrid system of two coordinating bodies (both NGO and Ministry), in which case we invite representatives of the two organizations per country.
The accommodation and food for all participants is covered by the generous support of the Municipality of Veliko Tarnovo.
The goals of the event are:
- To bring together for the first time and establish beneficial contact and sustain cooperation between national networks/associations of community cultural centers
- To provide a platform for the exchange of good practices in the field of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding and community arts for social transformation
- To help strengthen and capacity-build each national network by facilitating new national programs and joint projects across countries
- To facilitate the meeting and strengthening of 3 continental cultural networks (European Network for Cultural Centers, African Arterial Network, Latin American Network of Arts for Social Transformation) and support the development of new national and continental networks (such as Asian and North-American)
- Contribute to the development of policies towards better future and wellbeing
- Develop the principles of membership in I3C’s inter-continental network/platform
- Initiate the development of a long-term program for strategic international cultural cooperation in the field of community arts and social transformation and their respective cultural policies
The International Council for Cultural Centers (I3C) is looking forward to welcome you at the First World Summit of Community Arts Centers and Networks!
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in participating or could recommend a relevant partner!
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Civil servant goes to prison for stealing farm
Case highlights extent to which corrupt officials easily manipulate the land reform process. -
Fred Kockott and Thabiso Goba - GroundUp -
Former Department of Rural Development and Land Reform official, Patrick Masoka, awaits transfer to prison to begin serving a ten-year sentence. Photo: Fred Kockott -
A former state official entrusted with land claims and redistribution has been sent to prison for ten years for stealing a farm and livestock that had been awarded to a labour tenant family.
Ten years after the Shabalalas were awarded the Ladysmith farm where they had lived and worked all their lives, they are still waiting for the government to transfer ownership to them and to provide assistance, in line with land reform policy.
“It must be placed on record that this is not even in the pipeline,” said Durban Commercial Crimes Court magistrate Judy Naidoo on Monday, referring to the lack of progress towards transferring ownership to the Shabalalas.
Masoka was found guilty earlier this year of fraud and two counts of theft amounting to R5.3 million.
The court heard that in working for the department as a project manager in northern KwaZulu-Natal, Masoka had devised a simple but blatantly corrupt scheme where he and his family took over ownership and control of a commercially viable farm, Kuickvlei, near Ladysmith.
In terms of the land claim settlement, the Shabalala family were to not only become the rightful owners of the commercially viable farm, but should have also got grants and assistance in line with government’s objective to support emerging farmers.
Instead, Masoka took over the farm and proceeded to remove cattle and sheep as if they were his own. He did this by creating a trust deed that omitted the Shabalalas as the new owners.
He also amended a host of documents that enabled him and his family to move into the main homestead of Kuickvlei farm and benefit from agricultural development grants for livestock purchase, farm implements and livestock handling facilities. Masoka ended up defrauding the state and the Shabalalas of more than R5.3 million.
Through subsequent plundering of its assets, Kuickvlei farm soon deteriorated to such an extent that it was no longer the viable farming entity it was when sold by the previous owner, Gerhardus Van Zyl, to the government in 2008 for land reform purposes.
Although the farm was later seized by the Asset Forfeiture Unit and taken back by the state, it has since become even more dilapidated, said Naidoo.
Naidoo said the case highlighted the extent to which corrupt officials have easily been able to manipulate the land reform process in defrauding rightful beneficiaries.
According to evidence presented in court, the Kuickvlei case was just one of 28 similar cases that had occurred in KwaZulu-Natal.
Naidoo said properties such as Kuickvlei could have been used to uplift the socio-economic circumstances of previously disadvantaged people, but had ended up in the wrong hands: corrupt and greedy state functionaries.
“The Shabalalas,” said Naidoo, “were totally unsophisticated and had the wool pulled over their eyes when the accused appropriated the farm for himself and his family. The Shabalalas accepted this because they knew no better of their rights and because he was an official with land affairs.”
“The head of the family, Wilson Shabalala, is very old and had to travel all the way from Ladysmith to testify. He was very emotional and even cried when testifying. In his twilight age, he needs to have some security and reassurance that he and his family would be given what was rightfully theirs – land they have lived on since birth,” said Naidoo.
She said that in considering an appropriate sentence, the court also needed to take into account the exorbitant costs incurred by the state in rectifying the wrongs of government officials in cases like this.
In this instance, the forensic investigation had cost R1.3 million, with a further over R335,000 spent in preserving the farm’s assets, ultimately to no avail.
“The Shabalalas are still left in in limbo regarding their ownership of the property,” said Naidoo. They also deserved the assistance that had been promised them, she said.
She said when it came to land, people were getting fed up with the slow pace of reform and the associated corruption.
“As we read about the government’s new policy of expropriation of land without compensation, one sincerely hopes that the policies and procedures implemented will be more streamlined and effected in the interests of the community and not left to greedy individuals who only seek to uplift themselves at the expense of more needy people,” said Naidoo.
While Masoka’s defence attorney, Madoda Nxumalo, had appealed for the court’s leniency in light of Masoka’s disability – he uses crutches to walk – Naidoo said Masoka was a fully functional member of society who did not deserve preferential treatment, but rather punishment for his crime.
She rejected the defence argument that a non-custodial sentence and associated correctional supervision would be a suitable sentence.
“It would be tantamount to a mere slap on the wrist and send a wrong message to other people,” said Naidoo.
After sentencing, Nxumalo indicated that he will apply for leave to appeal Masoka’s conviction. Pending this application, the court ordered that Masoka immediately start serving out his jail sentence.
Produced for GroundUp by Roving Reporters. Goba is a Durban University of Technology final year journalism student enrolled on Roving Reporters’ training programme. Kockott is the director of Roving Reporters.
© 2018 GroundUp.
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ADVENTURE TOURISM BRINGS $ MILLIONS $ TO THE APPALACHIAN COALFIELDS OF EAST KENTUCKY
Posted in Events of Interest, Kentucky at 9:59 pm by Thomas
This year’s Knott County Fall Trail Ride attracted over 10,000 people and 7,000 horses. The event has now grown into one of the largest equestrian events in the state! People spent on average $234.22 in the area creating an economic impact on the region of somewhere between $2.3 million and $2.8 million dollars.
Knott County Fall Trail Ride 2009
Located in the heart of Elk Country, the Trail Ride started out three years ago as a three day event. But this year, campers and trailers started pouring in the Sunday before and stayed all week. By Tuesday morning, three days prior to the event even starting, there were over 400 campers already set up. “This is no longer a weekend event”, says Knott County Judge Executive Randy Thompson. “People from all over the U.S. are taking a week’s vacation to ride the mountain trails of east Kentucky”. Riders came from 17 different states including Michigan, Connecticut and Texas.*
Many people come up early to ride the trails. Others come just to hear the elk bugle. “With over 11,000 elk roaming free in the eastern coalfields of Kentucky, it is an amazing experience and the landscape is absolutely breathtaking”, says one camper from South Carolina.
The event has grown so much that last year the campsite was relocated to a large coal reclamation site on a portion of land owned by Western Pocahontas Land Company and International Coal Group. “With over 50,000 acres in which to camp and develop trails, there is always room for more” says Judge Thompson.
The Knott County Trail Ride takes place twice a year with a ride in both Spring and Fall.
Details and hundreds of photos can be found at knottcountyadventure.com
*This year’s Fall Ride attracted riders from Georgia, South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado, Texas, Utah, Connecticut, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio, North Carolina and, of course, Kentucky.
Contact: Debby Spencer
WMTH Corporation
Bowling Green KY 42102
info@knottcountyadventure.com
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November 13, 1995: Al-Qaeda Bombing in Saudi Arabia, US Realizes Bin Laden Is More than Financier
Destruction at the Saudi National Guard training center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. [Source: CNN]Two truck bombs kill five Americans and two Indians in the US-operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda is blamed for the attacks. [Associated Press, 8/19/2002] The attack changes US investigators’ views of the role of bin Laden, from al-Qaeda financier to its leader. [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 150] The Vinnell Corporation, thought by some experts to be a CIA front, owns the facility that has been attacked. [London Times, 5/14/2003]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Central Intelligence Agency, Al-Qaeda, Vinnell Corporation
Category Tags: Warning Signs, Saudi Arabia
November 13, 1995: Islamic Jihad Kills Egyptian Official Investigating Al Taqwa Bank
Egyptian diplomat Alaa al-Din Nazmi is shot and killed as he is returning to his house in Geneva, Switzerland. While he is officially said to be negotiating with the World Trade Organization on economic matters, the Independent will later report, “Political sources suggested that Nazmi was working under diplomatic cover, and that his real job was to track down members of Egyptian Islamist armed groups in Europe who have sworn to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Nazmi’s murderers [say] as much two days later,” when they take credit for the killing, using an alias for Islamic Jihad. [Independent, 12/6/1995] Swiss authorities seem uninterested in vigorously pursuing political connections to the murder, which is never solved. However, it will later be reported, “According to various sources close to the investigation, the Egyptian diplomat had been handling several sensitive files relating precisely to the financial resources of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which $200 to $500 was managed by various financial organizations” in Switzerland. The diplomat had played a major part in an attempt to recover these funds. He was focusing on the Al Taqwa Bank on the Swiss-Italian border, known to be a major bank for the Muslim Brotherhood. [Labeviere, 1999, pp. 63-68] A few months earlier, Nazmi apparently had been in secret discussions with the Egyptian militant Talaat Fouad Qassem, who was then abducted by the CIA and executed in Egypt (see September 13, 1995). So Nazmi’s assassination is seen as revenge for the death of Qassem. [Labeviere, 1999, pp. 70-71]
Entity Tags: Alaa al-Din Nazmi, Al Taqwa Bank, Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Talaat Fouad Qassem
Category Tags: Terrorism Financing, Al Taqwa Bank, Alleged Al-Qaeda Linked Attacks
November 19, 1995: Islamic Jihad Attacks Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan
Rescue workers removing bodies from the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. [Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]The Islamic Jihad blows up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Two cars filled with explosives crash through the embassy gates, killing the bombers and sixteen others. Ayman al-Zawahiri will later write in a book, “The bomb left the embassy’s ruined building as an eloquent and clear message.” Islamic Jihad is already closely tied to al-Qaeda by this time. [New Yorker, 9/9/2002] The Egyptian government had recently dispatched up to 100 government agents to London with the task of eliminating militants opposed to the Egyptian government. The Independent will later report, “Sources in Cairo said that several of the dead embassy officials were working under cover as diplomats to help the Pakistani authorities track down” militants. In the wake of the attack, plans to send more Egyptian government agents to Pakistan to hunt militants in that region are scuttled. [Independent, 12/6/1995] Some of the money for the bombing operation was apparently raised by al-Zawahiri on a fundraising trip to the US (see Late 1994 or 1995). One suspect, a Canadian citizen named Ahmed Said Khadr, will be arrested in Pakistan a short time after the bombings. He will soon be released at the request of the Canadian prime minister, but will later be revealed to be a founding member of al-Qaeda (see January 1996-September 10, 2001).
Entity Tags: Ayman al-Zawahiri, Ahmed Said Khadr, Islamic Jihad
Category Tags: Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Alleged Al-Qaeda Linked Attacks
Late 1995: Bin Laden Said to Consider Asylum in Britain
Michael Howard. [Source: BBC]Osama bin Laden is said to be unhappy with his exile in Sudan, where authorities are making noises about expelling him. Consequently, he requests asylum in Britain. Several of his brothers and other relatives, who are members of the bin Laden construction empire, own properties in London. He has already transferred some of his personal fortune to London, to help his followers set up terror cells in Britain and across Europe. Bin Laden employs Khalid al-Fawwaz, a Saudi businessman described as his “de facto ambassador” in Britain (see Early 1994-September 23, 1998), to assess his chances of moving there. British Home Secretary Michael Howard later says, “In truth, I knew little about him, but we picked up information that bin Laden was very interested in coming to Britain. It was apparently a serious request.” After Home Office officials investigate bin Laden, Howard issues an immediate order banning him under Britain’s immigration laws. [London Times, 9/29/2005] Bin Laden ends up going to Afghanistan instead in 1996 (see May 18, 1996). There are also later press reports that bin Laden travels frequently to London around this time (see Early 1990s-Late 1996), and even briefly lived there in 1994 (see Early 1994).
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Michael Howard, Khalid al-Fawwaz
Category Tags: Hunt for Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden, Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism
(Late 1995): Al-Qaeda Leader Allowed to Live in Britain Despite Being Wanted for Attempting to Assassinate Egyptian President
In June 1995, al-Qaeda sponsors a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (see June 26, 1995 and Shortly After June 26, 1995). Some time in 1995, al-Qaeda leader Anas al-Liby moves to Britain and applies for political asylum. Not long after he arrives, Egypt asks the British government to extradite him for his alleged role in the assassination attempt. They send a detailed file on him, including information on how he had fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and then moved with him to Sudan. But the extradition request is refused. British officials question whether al-Liby could get a fair trial in Egypt and fear he could face the death penalty. The next year, British intelligence hires al-Liby, a Libyan, to assassinate Libyan ruler Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi (see 1996). Al-Liby will continue to live openly in Britain until 2000 (see Late 1995-May 2000 and May 2000). [Times (London), 1/16/2003]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Anas al-Liby, Hosni Mubarak, Al-Qaeda
Category Tags: Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism, Counterterrorism Action After 9/11
Late 1995-September 11, 2001: Bin Laden’s Brother-in-Law Khalifa Still Active in Southeast Asia
Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, apparently continues to visit Southeast Asia and fund militant attacks there. Khalifa had run a number of charity fronts in the Philippines (see 1987-1991) until he was arrested in the US in late 1994 (see December 16, 1994) and then let go in 1995 (see April 26-May 3, 1995). It has been widely assumed that he did not risk returning to the Philippines after that, but a 2006 book on terrorism funding will state that he “returned occasionally [to the Philippines] and was often seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia.” [Burr and Collins, 2006, pp. 191] Presumably, these travels come to an end shortly after 9/11 when the Saudi government prohibits him from leaving the country until 2007 (see January 30, 2007). [Guardian, 3/2/2007] Khalifa is also is frequent phone communication with militant groups in the Philippines and elsewhere, at least through the late 1990s (see Late 1990s).
Entity Tags: Mohammed Jamal Khalifa
Category Tags: Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Philippine Militant Collusion, Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia
Late 1995 and After: Spanish Intelligence Merely Watches Madrid Cell Commit Variety of Crimes to Raise Money for Al-Qaeda
Spanish intelligence is monitoring an al-Qaeda cell in Madrid led by Barakat Yarkas (see 1995 and After). By late 1995, Spanish authorities discover the cell members are taking part in a variety of criminal acts, including credit card theft, stealing bank account numbers, and selling stolen cars. Some of the money raised is being used to send recruits to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. However, the authorities are content to merely watch this criminal activity and collect information. None of the cell members will be arrested until after 9/11, six years later. [Irujo, 2005, pp. 23-40]
Entity Tags: Al-Qaeda, Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, Barakat Yarkas
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Al-Qaeda in Spain, Remote Surveillance
(Late 1995-Spring 1996): French Intelligence Money Used to Purchase Weapons for Militants’ Training
While training at al-Qaeda’s Afghan camps (see Mid 1995-Spring 1996), French intelligence informer Omar Nasiri uses money given to him by his handler to purchase supplies for the training camps. Nasiri received $16,500 from the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) for the mission and gives much of this to Khaldan camp leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi for food, ammunition, and other supplies. [Nasiri, 2006, pp. 99, 178-9, 249]
Entity Tags: Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, Omar Nasiri, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Algerian Militant Collusion, Other Possible Moles or Informants
December 1995: Caspian Sea Said to Contain Two-Thirds of World’s Known Oil Reserves
The American Petroleum Institute asserts that the states bordering the Caspian Sea, north of Afghanistan, contain two-thirds of the world’s known reserves, or 659 billion barrels. Such numbers spur demand for an Afghan pipeline. However, by April 1997, estimates drop to 179 billion barrels. [Middle East Journal, 9/22/2000] This is still substantial, but the estimates continue to drop in future years (see November 1, 2002).
Category Tags: Pipeline Politics, US Dominance
December 1995: British Domestic Intelligence Tells Police that Islamist Militant Threat Is ‘Greatly Exaggerated’
A memo from MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, to the heads of police Special Branches says: “Suggestions in the press of a world-wide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated.… The contact between Islamic extremists in various countries appears to be largely opportunistic at present and seems unlikely to result in the emergence of a potent trans-national force.” [Daily Telegraph, 10/5/2009] MI6 is Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, and presumably, it would be more knowledgeable and concerned about Islamist militants world-wide than MI5 is.
Entity Tags: UK Security Service (MI5)
December 1995: Bin Laden and KSM Travel to Brazil Together
Bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) apparently travel to Brazil together. After KSM will be captured in 2003, documents in his possession will show he had a twenty-day visa to Brazil during December 1995. Brazilian intelligence sources will later claim that bin Laden travels with KSM, and is caught on video at a meeting in a mosque in the Brazilian town of Foz do Iguacu. This town is in the tri-border area of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, which has the largest Muslim population in South America and has long been known to be a haven for criminal activity. Bin Laden is said to appear in the video with a goatee instead of his usual full beard. [Agence France-Presse, 5/4/2003] In 1996, US intelligence will learn that KSM and bin Laden traveled together to a foreign country in 1995 (see 1996). It is not known if that is a reference to this trip or if they made other trips together. The Brazilian government will later claim that it told the US about this trip in late 1998. [Reuters, 3/18/2003]
Entity Tags: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Osama bin Laden
Category Tags: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Osama Bin Laden
Late 1995-May 2000: Al-Qaeda Leader Connected to British Intelligence Lives Openly in Britain
Anas al-Liby. [Source: FBI]Anas al-Liby, member of a Libyan al-Qaeda affiliate group called Al-Muqatila, lives in Britain during this time. He had stayed with bin Laden in Sudan (see May 18, 1996). In late 1995, he moves to Britain and applies for political asylum, claiming to be a political enemy of the Libyan government (see (Late 1995)). He is involved in an al-Qaeda plot (see Late 1993-Late 1994) that will result in the bombing of two US embassies in Africa in 1998 (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998). The British government suspects he is a high-level al-Qaeda operative, and Egypt tells Britain that he is wanted for an assassination attempt of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (see (Late 1995)). In 1996, he is involved in a plot with the British intelligence agency to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi (see 1996), and presumably his ability to live in Britain is connected to cooperation with that plot. [Observer, 11/10/2002; Times (London), 1/16/2003] After the failed assassination attempt in 1996, the British allegedly continues to support Al-Muqatila—for instance, the group openly publishes a newsletter from a London office. [Brisard and Dasquie, 2002, pp. 97-98] Whistleblower David Shayler, a British intelligence agent, gives British authorities details of this Libya plot in 1998 and again in 1999, and later will serve a short prison sentence for revealing this information to the public (see November 5, 2002). [Observer, 8/27/2000] In late 1998, al-Liby is monitored calling an al-Qaeda operative in the US and discussing their ties to one of the African embassy bombers, but this results in no action against al-Liby (see Shortly After August 12, 1998). He lives in Manchester until May of 2000. In 2002, it will be reported that he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. [Observer, 11/10/2002] However, in a 2011 book, FBI agent Ali Soufan will claim that al-Liby actually was arrested and then let go (see May 2000). His asylum application will still be under review at the time of his arrest. [Times (London), 1/16/2003] An important al-Qaeda training manual is discovered in the raid on his Manchester residence (see May 2000). The US will later post a $25 million reward for al-Liby’s capture. [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2002; Observer, 11/10/2002]
Entity Tags: United Kingdom, Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Osama bin Laden, Anas al-Liby, Al-Muqatila, Al-Qaeda, David Shayler
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, 1998 US Embassy Bombings, Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism
Shortly After November 19, 1995: Key Al-Qaeda Charity Front Closed in Pakistan, but Operations Continue Under New Names
Shortly after Islamic Jihad blows up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan in November 1995 (see November 19, 1995), Makhtab Al-Khidamat/Al-Kifah, a very crucial al-Qaeda charity front based in Pakistan, is shut down. This entity is not only helping to fund al-Qaeda, but is also involved in sending recruits to training camps in Afghanistan. But there are no arrests and activities are redirected to other charity fronts. As one book will later note, “[the] recruiting and military training circuit, perfected during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, was never dismantled, neither at the end of the war nor after the office was officially closed.” [Jacquard, 2002, pp. 59]
Entity Tags: Maktab al-Khidamat
Category Tags: Terrorism Financing, Al-Kifah/MAK
December 9-12, 1995: Bojinka Plotter Arrested in Malaysia, Rendered to US
Bojinka plotter Wali Khan Amin Shah is arrested in Malaysia and rendered to the US. Shah had been on the run in Asia for almost a year, since escaping a Philippine jail (see January 13, 1995). He is missing three fingers on his left hand, and someone notices this and alerts the authorities. [Ressa, 2003, pp. 43] The FBI had hunted him through around half a dozen countries. After his arrest by Malaysian authorities, at the FBI’s request, he is rendered to the US. He will later be given a long prison sentence for his role in the Bojinka plot. [New York Times, 12/13/1995; Lance, 2004, pp. 326-7; Grey, 2007, pp. 245] Before his arrest, leading Southeast Asian militant Hambali had supplied Khan with a new identity and cover in Malaysia, where he lived on the resort island of Langkawi using the alias Osama Turkestani. However, a 2002 article will say that officials claim they only learn this “years later.” [Los Angeles Times, 2/7/2002]
Entity Tags: Hambali, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wali Khan Amin Shah
Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives
Category Tags: Hambali, 1995 Bojinka Plot
December 14, 1995: Militant Leader’s Death Reveals Links between Bosnian Government and Al-Qaeda Leaders
Anwar Shaaban, an Islamist militant in charge of logistics for mujaheddin fighting in Bosnia, is killed in Croatia. Shaaban had been based at the Islamic Cultural Institute mosque in Milan, but managed to avoid arrest when it was raided (see Late 1993-December 14, 1995). On December 14, 1995, the same day a peace accord is signed ending the Bosnian war, Shaaban is killed by Croatian troops in what mujaheddin claim is an ambush. Shaaban’s diary is found, and it cites regular meetings between al-Qaeda leaders and leaders of the Bosnian Muslim government, including General Staff Chief Rasim Delic and Interior Minister Bakir Alispahic. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 216-217] Shaaban, a leader of the Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya militant group, had been in regular contact with Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman and al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 163-164]
Entity Tags: Rasim Delic, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Anwar Shaaban, Omar Abdul-Rahman, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bakir Alispahic
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Al-Qaeda in Italy
December 14, 1995: Dayton Accords Brings End to Bosnian War
In the front row from right to left: Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegovic, sign the Dayton accords. In the back row stands, from right to left, Felipe Gonzalez, Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Helmut Kohl, John Major and Viktor Tchernomyrdine. [Source: Reuters] (click image to enlarge)A peace agreement between the Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs fighting in Bosnia is signed in Paris. Known as the Dayton Accords, the agreement was hammered out in Dayton, Ohio, the month before (see November 1-22, 1995). As part of the agreement, thousands of NATO troops begin arriving in Bosnia immediately to help keep the peace. UN peacekeepers turn their job over to NATO forces on December 20. The peace does hold in the Bosnia and Croatia regions, thus ending a war that began in 1992 (see April 6, 1992). It claimed more than 200,000 lives and made six million people homeless. [Time, 12/31/1995] Fifty-one percent of Bosnia goes to an alliance of Muslims and Croats and 49 percent goes to a Serbian republic. [New York Times, 10/20/2003] As part of the deal, all foreign fighters are required to leave Bosnia within 30 days. In practical terms, this means the mujaheddin who have been fighting for the Bosnian Muslims (see January 14, 1996). [Washington Post, 3/11/2000]
Entity Tags: Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Croatia
Late 1995: Illness of Saudi King Generates Long-Term Power Struggle
Crown Prince Abdullah. [Source: Corbis]King Fahd of Saudi Arabia suffers a severe stroke. Afterwards, he is able to sit in a chair and open his eyes, but little more. He slowly recovers from this condition. The resulting lack of leadership begins a behind-the-scenes struggle for power and leads to increased corruption. Crown Prince Abdullah has been urging his fellow princes to address the problem of corruption in the kingdom—so far unsuccessfully. A former White House adviser says: “The only reason Fahd’s being kept alive is so Abdullah can’t become king.” [New Yorker, 10/16/2001] This internal power struggle will continue until King Fahd dies in 2005 and Abdullah becomes the new king (see August 1, 2005).
Entity Tags: Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz
1996: British Intelligence and Al-Qaeda Allegedly Cooperate in Plot to Assassinate Libyan Leader
Al-Muqatila, a cover for a Libyan al-Qaeda cell, tries to kill Libyan leader Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi. Al-Qadhafi survives, but several militants and innocent bystanders are killed. [Dawn (Karachi), 10/30/2002] According to David Shayler, a member of the British intelligence agency MI5, and Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, authors of the controversial book The Forbidden Truth, the British intelligence agency MI6 pays al-Qaeda the equivalent of $160,000 to help fund this assassination attempt. Shayler later goes to prison for revealing this information and the British press is banned from discussing the case (see November 5, 2002). [New York Times, 8/5/1998; Observer, 11/10/2002] Anas al-Liby, a member of the group, is given political asylum in Britain and lives there until May 2000 despite suspicions that he is an important al-Qaeda figure (see Late 1995-May 2000). He is later implicated in the al-Qaeda bombing of two US embassies in Africa in 1998 (see Late 1993-Late 1994; 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998). [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2002; Observer, 11/10/2002]
Entity Tags: Al-Muqatila, UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi, United Kingdom, Al-Qaeda, UK Security Service (MI5)
1996: Radical London Imam Bakri Establishes Organization Later Linked to Terror Attacks
London imam Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed establishes the radical Islamist organization Al-Muhajiroun, which will go on to be linked to several terror attacks (see Early 2003-April 6, 2004 and April 30, 2003). Bakri, who works as an informer for British intelligence at some point (see Spring 2005-Early 2007), had fled Syria in 1982 after taking part in a failed Muslim Brotherhood rising against the government and had been expelled from Saudi Arabia as an Islamist dissident in 1985. He had previously headed the British branch of the international movement Hizb ut Tahrir, but had split with its international leaders. Al-Muhajiroun becomes known for touring university campuses and shopping precincts to look for recruits and also for holding marches and rallies across Britain. In addition, Bakri establishes Britain’s first Shariah court, which has no legal standing, but which enables him to settle disputes for a fee. [O'Neill and McGrory, 2006, pp. 105-107]
Entity Tags: Al-Muhajiroun, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed
Category Tags: Omar Bakri & Al-Muhajiroun, Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism
1996: Asian Countries Unite to Counter US Influence
The “Shanghai Five” is formed in Shanghai with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan as its founding members. Its purpose is to resolve old Soviet-Chinese border disputes between the countries and ease military tension in the border regions. An agreement titled “Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions” is signed at this time. The five members are said to be bound together by mutual distrust of US hegemony in the region. [BBC, 6/21/2001; Jane's Intelligence, 7/19/2001; GlobalSecurity (.org), 7/4/2005] In early 2001 the group will morph into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (see June 14, 2001).
Entity Tags: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
Category Tags: US Dominance
1996: 9/11 Hijacker Atta Appears to Participate in Petty Fraud
9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and some of his associates appear to participate in financial fraud in Germany. The Chicago Tribune in 2004 claims that in 1995 Atta gives a Muslim baker named Muharrem Acar living in Hamburg, Germany, roughly $25,000 to help him open his own bakery. The newspaper calls this “noteworthy act of generosity to someone he barely knew.” However, the Wall Street Journal in 2003 presents a completely different story. Acar was sued and ordered to pay $6,500 in 1996. Atta and Acar worked together to backdate documents and manage a bank account to make it appear that Atta had loaned Acar over $20,000. This allowed Acar to claim he had no money and a large debt to Atta, and thus couldn’t pay the money he owed as part of the lawsuit against him. The Wall Street Journal notes Atta’s behavior conflicts with his media representation as “an ideologically pure Islamic extremist” and concludes, “It is increasingly evident that Mr. Atta and the other young men in Hamburg were typical of Islamist extremists in Europe, engaging in petty crime and fraud to make ends meet…” [Wall Street Journal, 9/9/2003; Chicago Tribune, 9/11/2004]
Entity Tags: Mohamed Atta, Muharrem Acar
Category Tags: Mohamed Atta, Key Hijacker Events
1996: Chechen Rebels Threaten to Fly Airplane into Kremlin
Movladi Udugov. [Source: Public domain]According to Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russian intelligence, “In 1996, one of the ideologists of Wahhabism, Movladi Udugov stated that an air attack on the Kremlin was possible and even then we treated that statement seriously.” Udugov is considered the chief public spokesperson for the Chechen rebels. He threatens that the rebels would hijack a civilian airplane and then have a suicide pilot fly it into the Kremlin to protest Russian actions in Chechnya. Fighting between Russia and the rebels is particularly intense in 1996, which is the end of the first Chechen war from 1994 to 1996 (see December 11, 1994 and August 1996). [United Press International, 9/15/2001] The Chechen rebels and al-Qaeda are loosely linked at the time, especially through Chechen leader Ibn Khattab (see 1986-March 19, 2002).
Entity Tags: Nikolai Patrushev, Movladi Udugov
Category Tags: Warning Signs, Islamist Militancy in Chechnya
1996: Germans Start Money Laundering Investigation into Al-Qaeda Hamburg Cell Figures Darkazanli and Zammar
In 1996, German authorities begin investigating Mamoun Darkazanli, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, and four others for money laundering. The investigation apparently begins with Darkazanli and four unnamed others, and grows to incorporate Zammar. Darkazanli and Zammar are friends, and both are closely linked to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell. The investigation is run by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Germany’s federal crime investigation agency. In late 1998, Darkazanli will be increasingly suspected for various other terrorism ties. But in early 2000, chief federal prosecutor Kay Nehm will refuse to initiate terrorism investigation proceedings against him, saying there is not enough evidence. Prior to 9/11, German law makes it hard to convict anyone for a terrorism offense unless it can be proven they were involved in an attack on German soil. However, Der Spiegel will later note that while that was true, Darkazanli could have been charged with money laundering instead. The money laundering investigation will resume shortly after 9/11. [Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 10/29/2001]
Entity Tags: Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Kay Nehm, Bundeskriminalamt Germany, Mamoun Darkazanli
Category Tags: Mamoun Darkazanli, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Al-Qaeda in Germany
1996: FBI Fumbles Flight School Investigation; Murad and Eleven Other Al-Qaeda Pilots Trained in US
Finding a business card for a US flight school in the possession of Operation Bojinka plotter Abdul Hakim Murad, the FBI investigates the US flight schools Murad attended. [Washington Post, 9/23/2001] He had trained at about six flight schools off and on, starting in 1990. Apparently, the FBI closes the investigation when they fail to find any other potential suspects. [Insight, 5/27/2002] However, Murad had already confessed to Philippine authorities the names of about ten other associates learning to fly in the US, and the Philippine authorities had asserted that they provided this information to the US. Murad detailed how he and a Pakistani friend crisscrossed the US, attending flight schools in New York, Texas, California and North Carolina. The Associated Press reports, “He also identified to Filipino police approximately 10 other Middle Eastern men who met him at the flight schools or were getting similar training. One was a Middle Eastern flight instructor who came to the United States for more training; another a former soldier in the United Arab Emirates. Others came from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. None of the pilots match the names of the 19 hijackers from Sept. 11.” An assistant manager at a Schenectady, New York, flight school where Murad trained later recalls, “There were several [Middle Eastern pilot students] here. At one point three or four were here. Supposedly they didn’t know each other before, they just happened to show up here at the same time. But they all obviously knew each other.” However, US investigators somehow fail to detect any of these suspects before 9/11, despite being given their names. [Associated Press, 3/5/2002]
Entity Tags: Abdul Hakim Murad, Al-Qaeda, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Category Tags: Warning Signs, 1995 Bojinka Plot
1996: Vulgar Betrayal Investigation Launched
Vulgar Betrayal, the most significant US government investigation into terrorist financing before 9/11, is launched. This investigation grows out of investigations Chicago FBI agent Robert Wright had begun in 1993 (see After January 1993), and Wright appears to be the driving force behind Vulgar Betrayal. He later will say, “I named the case Vulgar Betrayal because of the many gross betrayals many Arab terrorists and their supporters” committed against the US, but the name will later prove to be bitterly ironic for him. Over a dozen FBI agents are assigned it and a grand jury is empanelled to hear evidence. Wright will be removed from the investigation in late 1999 (see August 3, 1999), and it will be completely shut down in early 2000 (see August 2000). [Federal News Service, 6/2/2003; Chicago Tribune, 8/22/2004; LA Weekly, 8/25/2004; Judicial Watch, 12/15/2004] The investigation will first identify suspected terrorism financier Yassin al-Qadi as a target in 1997, but it will run into many obstacles in investigating him and others. Assistant US attorney Mark Flessner, the lead prosecutor for Vulgar Betrayal, will later claim that supervisors at the Justice Department’s headquarters obstructed the investigation because it appeared to trace terrorism financing to important figures in Saudi Arabia, a key US ally. Wright will later state that had the leads into al-Qadi and others been fully investigated, “I believe the FBI could have identified other significant links to Osama bin Laden, links which may have been addressed to prevent future attacks against the United States by bin Laden and his terrorist trainees.” [Federal News Service, 6/2/2003; Chicago Tribune, 8/22/2004]
Entity Tags: Mark Flessner, Robert G. Wright, Jr., Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, Vulgar Betrayal
Category Tags: Robert Wright and Vulgar Betrayal, Terrorism Financing, Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11
1996: Mossad Supposedly Plans to Kill Bin Laden
Israeli spy agency Mossad supposedly plots to kill Osama bin Laden. According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth, it recruits a female confidante of his and assigns her the mission of killing him. Mossad has been trailing bin Laden while assisting the US and Egypt in investigating a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (see Shortly After June 26, 1995). But the plan is aborted due to tensions between Israel and the woman’s country. [Associated Press, 1/27/2006]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks (Mossad)
Category Tags: Hunt for Bin Laden, Israel
1996: US Intelligence Learns that KSM and Bin Laden Have Traveled Together
Prior to this year, US intelligence has been uncertain whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) is connected to al-Qaeda. But this changes when a foreign government shares information that bin Laden and KSM had traveled together to a foreign country the previous year. [US Congress, 7/24/2003] The country may have been Brazil, since it has been reported that KSM and bin Laden traveled to Brazil together in 1995 (see December 1995).
Entity Tags: US intelligence, Osama bin Laden, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al-Qaeda
1996: Attempted Supression of Bin Laden WMD Report Leads to Division between CIA’s Bin Laden Unit and CIA Leaders
CIA leadership allegedly suppresses a report about Osama bin Laden’s hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and only disseminates the report after pressure. After the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Alec Station, is created in early 1996 (see February 1996), one of its first tasks is to see if bin Laden is attempting to acquire WMDs.
Bin Laden a Bigger Threat than Previously Realized - Michael Scheuer, head of the unit in its early years, will later say that the unit soon discovers bin Laden is “much more of a threat than I had thought.… It became very clear very early that he was after [WMDs], and we showed conclusively at that point that he didn’t have them. But we had never seen as professional an organization in charge of procurement.” Scheuer will later tell Congress that when the unit finds detailed intelligence in 1996 on bin Laden’s attempts to get a nuclear weapon, superiors in the CIA suppress the report. Only after three officers in the CIA knowledgeable about bin Laden complain and force an internal review does the CIA disseminate the report more widely within the US intelligence community.
Incident Leads to Bunker Mentality - The incident contributes to a bunker mentality between the bin Laden unit and the rest of the CIA (see February 1996-June 1999). According to Vanity Fair, the CIA’s “top brass started to view Scheuer as a hysteric, spinning doomsday scenarios.” Some start referring to him and the bin Laden unit as “the Manson family,” in reference to mass murderer Charles Manson and his followers. [Vanity Fair, 11/2004]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Alec Station, Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Scheuer, US intelligence
Category Tags: Hunt for Bin Laden, Counterterrorism Policy/Politics
1996: Tip from Turkey Points German Intelligence to Hamburg Cell Member Zammar
Mohammed Haydar Zammar. [Source: Knut Mueller]Turkish intelligence informs Germany’s domestic intelligence service that Mohammed Haydar Zammar is a radical militant who has been traveling to trouble spots around the world. Zammar has already made more than 40 journeys to places like Bosnia and Chechnya, and in 1996 he pledges his allegiance to al-Qaeda during a trip to Afghanistan (see 1991-1996). Turkey explains that Zammar is running a dubious travel agency in Hamburg, organizing flights for radical militants to Afghanistan. As a result, by early 1997, German intelligence will launch Operation Zartheit (Operation Tenderness), an investigation of Islamic militants in the Hamburg area. The Germans will use a full range of intelligence techniques, including wiretaps and informants. [Stern, 8/13/2003; Vanity Fair, 11/2004] Operation Zartheit will run for at least three years and connect Zammar to many of the 9/11 plotters (see March 1997-Early 2000).
Entity Tags: Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz
Category Tags: Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Al-Qaeda in Germany, Islamist Militancy in Chechnya
1996: Radical Imam Abu Hamza Obtains Foothold in Small British Mosque
Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was present in both Afghanistan and Bosnia during the wars there (see 1991-Late 1993 and 1995), is given his first regular preaching slot in Luton, a town to the north of London. Authors Sean O’Niell and Daniel McGrory will comment: “Luton gave him a base, and he launched himself like a hurricane on the Islamic circuit. Young men flocked to hear him and his reputation grew, drawing students from the Islamic societies of London universities to his Friday sermons.” [O'Neill and McGrory, 2006, pp. 32-33]
Category Tags: Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism, Abu Hamza Al-Masri
1996: FBI Agent Begins Building File on Ali Mohamed
FBI agent Jack Cloonan is given the task of building a file on double agent Ali Mohamed. Mohamed is living openly in California and has already confessed to working for al-Qaeda (see May 1993). He has been monitored since 1993 (see Autumn 1993). [Lance, 2006, pp. 138] Cloonan is part of Squad I-49, a task force made up of prosecutors and investigators that begins focusing on bin Laden in January 1996 (see January 1996). Mohamed has been an informant for FBI agents on the West Coast of the US (see 1992 and June 16, 1993), though when he stops working with them exactly remains unknown. Cloonan and other US officials will have dinner with Mohamed in October 1997 (see October 1997), but Mohamed will not be arrested until after the 1998 African embassy bombings (see September 10, 1998).
Entity Tags: Ali Mohamed, Jack Cloonan, I-49
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Ali Mohamed
1996: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia Said to Make Secret Deals with Taliban and Al-Qaeda
In June 2004, the Los Angeles Times will report that, according to some 9/11 Commission members and US counterterrorism officials, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia cut secret deals with the Taliban and bin Laden before 9/11. These deals date to this year, if not earlier, and will successfully shield both countries from al-Qaeda attacks until long after 9/11. “Saudi Arabia provid[es] funds and equipment to the Taliban and probably directly to bin Laden, and [doesn’t] interfere with al-Qaeda’s efforts to raise money, recruit and train operatives, and establish cells throughout the kingdom, commission and US officials [say]. Pakistan provide[s] even more direct assistance, its military and intelligence agencies often coordinating efforts with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, they [say].” The two countries will become targets of al-Qaeda attacks only after they launch comprehensive efforts to eliminate the organization’s domestic cells. In Saudi Arabia, such efforts won’t begin until late 2003. [Los Angeles Times, 7/16/2004] However, such allegations go completely unmentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s final report, which only includes material unanimously agreed upon by the ten commissioners. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004]
Entity Tags: Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Pakistan
Category Tags: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the ISI, Terrorism Financing
1996: Spanish Intelligence Links Al-Qaeda Leader to Hamburg Cell
Mustafa Setmarian Nasar. [Source: Public domain]Spanish intelligence learns that al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a.k.a. Abu Musab al-Suri, has visited Mamoun Darkazanli in Hamburg this year. Darkazanli is an associate of the 9/11 hijackers living in Hamburg. The Spanish are aware of Nasar due to his links to Barakat Yarkas, as Yarkas and his Madrid cell are being monitored (see 1995 and After). It is unknown if the Spanish realize that Nasar is an important al-Qaeda leader at this time, but they do learn that he met Osama bin Laden. [National Review, 5/21/2004; Brisard and Martinez, 2005, pp. 109-110, 195] Nasar receives $3,000 from Darkazanli while living in Britain in 1995 through 1996. This is according to German police documents, and it is unknown if German and/or Spanish authorities are aware of this link at the time. [Chicago Tribune, 7/12/2005] In 1998, the Spanish will discover that Darkazanli and Yarkas are in frequent phone contact with each other. They share their information with the CIA (see August 1998-September 11, 2001). Nasar leaves Britain in 1996 after realizing the British authorities suspect his involvement in a series of 1995 bombings in France (see July-October 1995). [National Review, 5/21/2004] He will be arrested in Pakistan in 2005 after the US announces a $5 million reward for his capture (see October 31, 2005).
Entity Tags: Barakat Yarkas, Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, Mamoun Darkazanli
Category Tags: Mamoun Darkazanli, Al-Qaeda in Germany, Al-Qaeda in Spain, Remote Surveillance
1996: Saudi Regime Goes to ‘Dark Side’
The Saudi Arabian government, which allegedly initiated payments to al-Qaeda in 1991 (see Summer 1991), increases its payments in 1996, becoming al-Qaeda’s largest financial backer. It also gives money to other extremist groups throughout Asia, vastly increasing al-Qaeda’s capabilities. [New Yorker, 10/16/2001] Presumably, two meetings in early summer bring about the change. Says one US official, “[19]96 is the key year.… Bin Laden hooked up to all the bad guys—it’s like the Grand Alliance—and had a capability for conducting large-scale operations.” The Saudi regime, he says, had “gone to the dark side.” Electronic intercepts by the NSA “depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country’s religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.” US officials later privately complain “that the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration, is refusing to confront this reality, even in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.” [New Yorker, 10/16/2001] Martin Indyk, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, will later write, “The Saudis had protected themselves by co-opting and accommodating the Islamist extremists in their midst, a move they felt was necessary in the uncertain aftermath of the Gulf War. Since Saddam Hussein remained in power, weakened but still capable of lashing out and intent on revenge, the Saudis could not afford to send their American protector packing. Instead, they found a way to provide the United States with the access it needed to protect Saudi Arabia while keeping the American profile as low as possible.… [O]nce Crown Prince Abdullah assumed the regency in 1996 (see Late 1995), the ruling family set about the determined business of buying off its opposition.” Saudi charities are “subverted” to help transfer money to militant causes. “[T]he Clinton administration indulged Riyadh’s penchant for buying off trouble as long as the regime also paid its huge arms bills, purchased Boeing aircraft, kept the price of oil within reasonable bounds, and allowed the United States to use Saudi air bases to enforce the southern no-fly zone over Iraq and launch occasional military strikes to contain Saddam Hussein.” [Foreign Affairs, 1/1/2002]
Entity Tags: Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, National Security Agency, Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Bush administration (43), Saudi Arabia, Clinton administration
1996: Mayor Giuliani Creates Office of Emergency Management
Jerome Hauer [Source: Public domain]New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani establishes the city’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM). This is tasked with coordinating the city’s overall response to major incidents, including terrorist attacks. [Gotham Gazette, 9/12/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 83-284] It will also be involved in responding to routine emergencies on a daily basis. [9/11 Commission, 5/18/2004 ] OEM comprises personnel drawn from various City agencies, including police and fire departments, and emergency medical services. It begins with a staff of just 12, but by 9/11 this will have increased to 72. Its first director is counterterrorism expert Jerome Hauer. [New York Times, 7/27/1999] Richard Sheirer will take over from him in February 2000 and will be OEM director on 9/11. [New York Magazine, 10/15/2001; Jenkins and Edwards-Winslow, 9/2003, pp. 12 ; 9/11 Commission, 5/18/2004 ] OEM is responsible for improving New York’s response to potential major incidents by conducting regular training exercises involving various city agencies, particularly the police and fire departments (see 1996-September 11, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 283] According to Steven Kuhr, its deputy director from 1996 to 2000, one of the key focuses of the office is counterterrorism work, “responding to the consequence of a chemical weapons attack, a biological weapons attack, or a high-yield explosive event.” [CNN, 1/16/2002] Furthermore, OEM’s Watch Command is able to constantly monitor all the city’s key communications channels, including all emergency services frequencies, state and national alert systems, and local, national, and international news. It also monitors live video feeds from New York Harbor and the city’s streets. [9/11 Commission, 5/18/2004 ; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 283, 542] In June 1999, Giuliani will open the OEM’s Command Center on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7 (see June 8, 1999).
Entity Tags: Rudolph (“Rudy”) Giuliani, Office of Emergency Management, Jerome Hauer, Richard Sheirer
1996: Al-Qaeda Supposedly Loses Trust in Ali Mohamed
The New York Times will later report that Ali Mohamed “[runs] afoul of the bin Laden organization after 1995 because of a murky dispute involving money and [is] no longer trusted by bin Laden lieutenants.” This is according to 1999 court testimony from Khaled Abu el-Dahab, the other known member of Mohamed’s Santa Clara, California, al-Qaeda cell (see 1987-1998). [New York Times, 11/21/2001] Another al-Qaeda operative in another trial will claim that in 1994 al-Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef refused to give Mohamed information because he suspected Mohamed was a US intelligence agent (see 1994). However, despite these accounts, it seems that Mohamed continues to be given sensitive assignments. For instance, later in 1996 he will help bin Laden move from Sudan to Afghanistan (see May 18, 1996), and he will be in contact with many of operatives in Kenya planning the US embassy bombing there until 1998, the year the bombing takes place (see Late 1994). The Associated Press will later comment that it is “unclear is how [Mohamed] was able to maintain his terror ties in the 1990s without being banished by either side, even after the Special Forces documents he had stolen turned up in [a] 1995 New York trial.”(see February 3, 1995) [Associated Press, 12/31/2001]
Entity Tags: Ali Mohamed, Al-Qaeda
Category Tags: 1998 US Embassy Bombings, Ali Mohamed
1996: Saudi Government Refuses to Help CIA Capture High-Ranking Hezbollah Figure
Imad Mugniyah, holding gun, in a 1985 TWA hijacking. [Source: ABC News]The CIA gains intelligence that could lead to the capture of Imad Mugniyah, one of the world’s most wanted people, but the Saudi government refuses to help. Mugniyah is a leader of the Hezbollah militant group and is wanted for a role in bombings that killed US soldiers in Lebanon (see April 18-October 23, 1983). He also allegedly met Osama bin Laden in 1994 (see Shortly After February 1994). In 2008, counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke will claim that in 1996, the CIA learns that Mugniyah has boarded a commercial airplane in Khartoum, Sudan, that is due to stop in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. US officials appeal to Saudi officials to arrest him when he arrives, but the Saudis refuse. Clarke will claim: “We raised the level of appeals all the way through Bill Clinton who was on the phone at three in the morning appealing to [Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah] to grab him. Instead, the Saudis refused to let the plane land and it continued on to Damascus.” Mugniyah will remain free until 2008, when he will be assassinated. [ABC News, 2/13/2008]
Entity Tags: Richard A. Clarke, Hezbollah, Imad Mugniyah, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud
1996: Al-Qaeda Linked Financier Reportedly Gives Money to Bosnian Muslim President Izetbegovic
In 2006, popular Sarajevo magazine Slobodna Bosna will report that Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic received nearly $200,000 from Yassin al-Qadi, who will later be officially designated a terrorist financier (see October 12, 2001). Bosnian authorities reportedly discovered the money transfer from a British bank while investigating the Muwafaq Foundation, a charity headed by al-Qadi. The investigation also learned that Muwafaq channeled $15 to 20 million to various organizations, and at least $3 million of that went into bank accounts controlled by Osama bin Laden. [AKI, 9/8/2006] Muwafaq reportedly helped finance the mujaheddin during the Bosnian war, especially supporting a mujaheddin brigade fighting for Izetbegovic’s government that was also called Muwafaq (see 1991-1995).
Entity Tags: Alija Izetbegovic, Muwafaq Foundation, Yassin al-Qadi
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Terrorism Financing
1996-2000: Bin Laden Visits Friendly Government Officials in Qatar
Bin Laden reportedly visits Qatar at least twice between the years of 1996 and 2000. He visits Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, the country’s religious minister who later becomes the interior minister. [New York Times, 6/8/2002; ABC News, 2/7/2003] In 1999, the New York Times reports that bin Laden visited al-Thani “in Qatar twice in the mid-1990s.” [New York Times, 7/8/1999] Presumably one of these times is in May 1996, when bin Laden stops by Qatar while moving from Sudan to Afghanistan, and is reportedly warmly greeted by officials there (see May 18, 1996). Former CIA officer Robert Baer will later claim that one meeting between bin Laden and al-Thani takes place on August 10, 1996. [Baer, 2003, pp. 195] Al-Thani is known to shelter Muslim extremists. For instance, the CIA narrowly missed catching al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mohammed Atef at his farm in May 1996 (see January-May 1996). Al-Thani is a member of Qatar’s royal family, but ABC News will later report, “One former CIA official who preferred to remain anonymous said the connection went beyond al-Thani and there were others in the Qatari royal family who were sympathetic and provided safe havens for al-Qaeda.” [New York Times, 6/8/2002; ABC News, 2/7/2003] Al-Thani will reportedly shelter al-Qaeda leaders like KSM even after 9/11 (see March 28, 2003), but the US has not taken any action against him, such as officially declaring him a terrorism financier.
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Robert Baer
Category Tags: Hunt for Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden, Other Government-Militant Collusion
1996-1997: Ptech Begins to Get US Government Contracts
Ptech logo. [Source: Ptech]Ptech is a Boston computer company connected to a number of individuals suspected of ties to officially designated terrorist organizations (see 1994). These alleged ties will be of particular concern because of Ptech’s potential access to classified government secrets. Ptech specializes in what is called enterprise architecture. It is the design and layout for an organization’s computer networks. John Zachman, considered the father of enterprise architecture, later will say that Ptech could collect crucial information from the organizations and agencies with which it works. “You would know where the access points are, you’d know how to get in, you would know where the weaknesses are, you’d know how to destroy it.” Another computer expert will say, “The software they put on your system could be collecting every key stroke that you type while you are on the computer. It could be establishing a connection to the outside terrorist organization through all of your security measures.” [WBZ 4 (Boston), 12/9/2002] In late 1996, an article notes that Ptech is doing work for DARPA, a Defense Department agency responsible for developing new military technology. [Government Executive, 9/1/1996] In 1997, Ptech gains government approval to market its services to “all legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the federal government.” Beginning that year, Ptech will begin working for many government agencies, eventually including the White House, Congress, Army, Navy, Air Force, NATO, FAA, FBI, US Postal Service, Secret Service, the Naval Air Systems Command, IRS, and the nuclear-weapons program of the Department of Energy. For instance, Ptech will help build “the Military Information Architecture Framework, a software tool used by the Department of Defense to link data networks from various military computer systems and databases.” Ptech will be raided by US investigators in December 2002 (see December 5, 2002), but not shut down. [Wall Street Journal, 12/6/2002; CNN, 12/6/2002; Newsweek, 12/6/2002; Boston Globe, 12/7/2002] A former director of intelligence at the Department of Energy later will say he would not be surprised if an al-Qaeda front company managed to infiltrate the department’s nuclear programs. [Unlimited (Auckland), 12/9/2002] Ptech will continue to work with many of these agencies even after 9/11. After a Customs Department raid of Ptech’s offices in late 2002, their software will be declared safe of malicious code. But one article will note, “What no one knows at this point is how much sensitive government information Ptech gained access to while it worked in several government agencies.” [WBZ 4 (Boston), 12/9/2002]
Entity Tags: White House, US Department of Defense, US Department of the Air Force, US Department of the Navy, US Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, US Postal Service, Federal Aviation Administration, US Department of the Marines, Internal Revenue Service, US Congress, Ptech Inc., John Zachman, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, US Congress
Category Tags: BMI and Ptech, Terrorism Financing
1996-1997 and After: Bin Laden’s Brother-in-Law Khalifa Said to Fund Al-Qaeda Linked Group in Yemen
Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, helps fund a militant group in Yemen that will later take credit for the 2000 USS Cole bombing. The group, the Islamic Army of Aden, is apparently formed in 1996 or 1997, but is not heard from until May 1998, when it issues the first of a series of political statements. The group will kidnap 16 mainly British tourists in December 1998 and four of the tourists will be killed during a shootout with police. The remaining hostages are rescued. [Yemen Gateway, 1/1999] Evidence ties Khalifa to the 1995 Bojinka plot and other violent acts, though he has denied all allegations that he is linked to terrorist groups. Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, later claims that not only did Khalifa fund the Islamic Army of Aden, but that 9/11 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar had ties to the group as well. (A San Diego friend of Almihdhar’s will later say that Almihdhar told him he was a member of the group (see Around October 12, 2000).) [Wall Street Journal, 9/19/2001] Cannistraro further notes that Khalifa went on to form the group after being deported from the US in 1995. “He should never have been allowed to leave US custody.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 10/24/2001] The group praises bin Laden and uses a training camp reportedly established by him in southern Yemen. But the group is more clearly tied to Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, a handless, one-eyed Afghan war veteran living and preaching openly in London. [Washington Post, 9/23/2001]
Entity Tags: Vincent Cannistraro, Abu Hamza al-Masri, Islamic Army of Aden, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Khalid Almihdhar
Category Tags: Abu Hamza Al-Masri, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, 2000 USS Cole Bombing, Terrorism Financing, Yemeni Militant Collusion, Bin Laden Family
1996-2001: 1989 Speech by Milosevic Wildly Distorted by Western Media
Slobodan Milosevic speaking in Kosovo on June 28, 1989, to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. [Source: Tomislav Peternek/ Polaris] (click image to enlarge)Professor Gil White will point out in 2002 that Slobodan Milosevic’s 1989 speech in Kosovo in front of a huge crowd is consistently misrepresented as a call to ethnic war, when in fact it was the exact opposite—a call for racial tolerance and reconciliation. [Gil-White, 2/9/2002] In the speech itself, Milosevic said, “Equal and harmonious relations among Yugoslav peoples are a necessary condition for the existence of Yugoslavia… Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is its advantage. The national composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalilties, religions and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully… Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it.” Milosevic ended the speech, saying “Long live peace and brotherhood among peoples!” [National Technical Information Service, 6/28/1989; BBC, 6/28/1989] In 1996, the New York Times describes this speech as follows: “In a fervent speech before a million Serbs, [Milosevic] galvanized the nationalist passions that two years later fueled the Balkan conflict” [New York Times, 7/28/1996] On the anniversary of the speech in 1998 the Washington Post reports, “Nine years ago today, Milosevic’s fiery speech [in Kosovo] to a million angry Serbs was a rallying cry for nationalism and boosted his popularity enough to make him the country’s uncontested leader.” [Washington Post, 7/29/1998] In 1999, the Economist described this as “a stirringly virulent nationalist speech.” [Economist, 6/5/1999] In 2001, Time Magazine reported that with this speech, “Milosevic whipped a million Serbs into a nationalist frenzy in the speech that capped his ascent to power.” [Time (Europe), 7/9/2001] Also in 2001, the BBC, which in 1989 provided the translation of Milosevic’s speech quoted above, claims that in 1989, “on the 600-year anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, [Milosevic] gathered a million Serbs at the site of the battle to tell them to prepare for a new struggle.” [BBC, 4/1/2001] Richard Holbrooke repeats these misrepresentations in his 1999 book, referring to the speech as “racist” and “inflammatory.” Holbrooke even calls Milosevic a liar for denying the false accusations. [Holbrooke, 1999, pp. 29]
Entity Tags: Slobodan Milosevic, Richard Holbrooke
1996-1999: Albanian Mafia and KLA Take Control of Balkan Heroin Trafficking Route
Albanian Mafia and KLA take control of Balkan route heroin trafficking from Turkish criminal groups. In 1998, Italian police are able to arrest several major traffickers. Many of the criminals involved are also activists for the Kosovo independence movement, and some are KLA leaders. Much of the money is funneled through the KLA (see 1997), which is also receiving support and protection from the US. The Islamic influence is obvious in the drug operations, which for example shut down during the month of Ramadan. Intercepted telephone messages speak of the desire “to submerge Christian infidels in drugs.” [Agence France-Presse, 6/9/1998; Corriere della Sera (Milan), 10/15/1998; Corriere della Sera (Milan), 1/19/1999] Testifying to Congress in December 2000, Interpol Assistant Director Ralph Mutschke states that “Albanian organized crime groups are hybrid organizations, often involved both in criminal activity of an organized nature and in political activities, mainly relating to Kosovo. There is evidence that the political and criminal activities are deeply intertwined.” Mutschke also says that there is also strong evidence that bin Laden is involved in funding and organizing criminal activity through links to the Albanian mafia and the KLA.(see Early 1999) [US Congress, 12/13/2000 ]
Entity Tags: Kosovo Liberation Army, Ralph Mutschke, Osama bin Laden
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Drugs
1996-2001: Moussaoui Recuits Muslims to Fight in Kosovo and Chechnya
In 1996, Zacarias Moussaoui begins recruiting other young Muslims to fight for Islamic militant causes in Chechnya and Kosovo. [Time, 9/24/2001] He recruits for Chechen warlord Ibn Khattab, the Chechen leader most closely linked to al-Qaeda (see August 24, 2001). Details on his Kosovo links are still unknown. For most of this time, he is living in London and is often seen at the Finsbury Park mosque run by Abu Hamza al-Masri. For a time, Moussaoui has two French Caucasian roommates, Jerome and David Courtailler. The family of these brothers later believes that Moussaoui recruits them to become radical militants. The brothers will later be arrested for suspected roles in plotting attacks on the US embassy in Paris and NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. [Scotsman, 10/1/2001] David Courtailler will later confess that at the Finsbury Park mosque he was given cash, a fake passport, and the number of a contact in Pakistan who would take him to an al-Qaeda camp. [London Times, 1/5/2002] French intelligence later learns that one friend he recruits, Masooud Al-Benin, dies in Chechnya in 2000 (see Late 1999-Late 2000). Shortly before 9/11, Moussaoui will try to recruit his US roommate at the time, Hussein al-Attas, to fight in Chechnya. Al-Attas will also see Moussaoui frequently looking at websites about the Chechnya conflict. [Daily Oklahoman, 3/22/2006] Moussaoui also goes to Chechnya himself in 1996-1997 (see 1996-Early 1997).
Entity Tags: Abu Hamza al-Masri, Masooud Al-Benin, Hussein al-Attas, Ibn Khattab, David Courtailler, Jerome Courtailler, Zacarias Moussaoui
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Zacarias Moussaoui, Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism, Abu Hamza Al-Masri, Islamist Militancy in Chechnya
1996 and After: Many Yemeni Government Officials Allegedly Assist Al-Qaeda and Other Militant Groups
Many high-ranking Yemeni government officials help al-Qaeda and other militants, beginning in 1996, according to Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman, a Yemeni official who will be captured after 9/11 and sent to the US prison in Guanatanamo, Cuba. Abdulrahman is a section chief in Yemen’s Political Security Organization (PSO), the Yemeni equivalent of the FBI, until his arrest in 2002 (see September 2002). His 2008 Guantanamo file will state: “Detainee stated that since 1996, numerous high-ranking employees in the Yemeni government and PSO were involved in aiding al-Qaeda and other extremists through the provision of false passports and by giving them safe haven out of the country under the guise of deportation. These PSO officials included detainee; Mohammed al-Surmi, deputy chief of the PSO; Ghalib al-Qamish, director of the PSO; Colonel Ahmad Dirham, commander of the Deportation Department in the PSO; and Abdallah al-Zirka, an officer in the Yemeni Passport Authority. According to detainee, the second highest ranking person in the Yemeni government, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, was aware of the involvement of al-Surmi and al-Qamish in these activities since at least 1999.” An analyst notes in the file that Mohsen is the (half) brother of Yemeni President Saleh. [US Department of Defense, 9/24/2008] Note that this is based on Guantanamo files leaked to the public in 2011 by the non-profit whistleblower group WikiLeaks. There are many doubts about the reliability of the information in the files (see April 24, 2011). However, it should also be noted that other information corroborates the charges, including the involvement of some names mentioned by Abdulrahman (for instance, see Spring-Summer 1998, After July 1994, December 26, 1998, and April 27, 2005).
Entity Tags: Ghalib al-Qamish, Abdallah al-Zirka, Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, Mohammed al-Surmi, Ahmad Dirham, Yemeni Political Security Organization
Category Tags: 2000 USS Cole Bombing, Yemeni Militant Collusion
1996 and After: Al-Qaeda Revives Bosnia Connections through Saudi Government Charity; US Fails to Shut Charity Down
Saber Lahmar. [Source: Public domain]Author Roland Jacquard will later claim that in 1996, al-Qaeda revives its militant network in Bosnia in the wake of the Bosnian war and uses the Saudi High Commission (SHC) as its main charity front to do so. [Jacquard, 2002, pp. 69] This charity was founded in 1993 by Saudi Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz and is so closely linked to and funded by the Saudi government that a US judge will later render it immune to a 9/11-related lawsuit after concluding that it is an organ of the Saudi government. [New York Law Journal, 9/28/2005]
In 1994, British aid worker Paul Goodall is killed in Bosnia execution-style by multiple shots to the back of the head. A SHC employee, Abdul Hadi al-Gahtani, is arrested for the murder and admits the gun used was his, but the Bosnian government lets him go without a trial. Al-Gahtani will later be killed fighting with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 143-144]
In 1995, the Bosnian Ministry of Finance raids SHC’s offices and discovers documents that show SHC is “clearly a front for radical and terrorism-related activities.” [Burr and Collins, 2006, pp. 145]
In 1995, US aid worker William Jefferson is killed in Bosnia. One of the likely suspects, Ahmed Zuhair Handala, is linked to the SHC. He also is let go, despite evidence linking him to massacres of civilians in Bosnia. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 263-264]
In 1997, a Croatian apartment building is bombed, and Handala and two other SHC employees are suspected of the bombing. They escape, but Handala will be captured after 9/11 and sent to Guantanamo prison. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 266]
In 1997, SHC employee Saber Lahmar is arrested for plotting to blow up the US embassy in Saravejo. He is convicted, but pardoned and released by the Bosnian government two years later. He will be arrested again in 2002 for involvement in an al-Qaeda plot in Bosnia and sent to Guantanamo prison (see January 18, 2002).
By 1996, NSA wiretaps reveal that Prince Salman is funding Islamic militants using charity fronts (Between 1994 and July 1996).
A 1996 CIA report mentions, “We continue to have evidence that even high ranking members of the collecting or monitoring agencies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan - such as the Saudi High Commission - are involved in illicit activities, including support for terrorists” (see January 1996).
Jacquard claims that most of the leadership of the SHC supports bin Laden. The SHC, while participating in some legitimate charitable functions, uses its cover to ship illicit goods, drugs, and weapons in and out of Bosnia. In May 1997, a French military report concludes: ”(T)he Saudi High Commission, under cover of humanitarian aid, is helping to foster the lasting Islamization of Bosnia by acting on the youth of the country. The successful conclusion of this plan would provide Islamic fundamentalism with a perfectly positioned platform in Europe and would provide cover for members of the bin Laden organization.” [Jacquard, 2002, pp. 69-71]
However, the US will take no action until shortly after 9/11, when it will lead a raid on the SHC’s Bosnia offices. Incriminating documents will be found, including information on how to counterfeit US State Department ID badges, and handwritten notes about meetings with bin Laden. Evidence of a planned attack using crop duster planes is found as well. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 129, 284] Yet even after all this, the Bosnian government will still refuse to shut down SHC’s offices and they apparently remain open (see January 25, 2002).
Entity Tags: Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, Al-Qaeda, Paul Goodall, Ahmed Zuhair Handala, Central Intelligence Agency, William Jefferson, Abdul Hadi al-Gahtani, Saber Lahmar, Saudi High Commission
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism Financing
Early 1996: KSM Said to be Building a Bomb
In early 1996, while US officials are waiting from approval from officials in Qatar so they can arrest Khalid Shaikh Mohammmed (KSM) there, the Qatari government tells the US that it fears KSM is constructing an explosive device. They also say that he possesses more than 20 different passports. [Los Angeles Times, 12/22/2002] By this time, the US is aware of KSM’s involvement in the 1995 Bojinka plot involving explosives (see January 6, 1995) and his role in the 1993 WTC bombing (see March 20, 1993).
Entity Tags: Qatar, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
Category Tags: Warning Signs, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
Between 1996 and September 11, 2001: FBI Directly Monitors Militants in Afganistan with Hi-Tech Phone Booth
I-49, a squad of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors that began focusing on bin Laden in 1996 (see January 1996), is upset that the NSA is not sharing with them data it has obtained through the monitoring of al-Qaeda. To get around this, the squad builds a satellite telephone booth in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for international calls. The FBI squad not only monitors the calls, but also videotapes the callers with a camera hidden in the booth. [Wright, 2006, pp. 344] It has not been revealed when this booth was built or what information was gained from it. However, the New York Times will later paraphrase an Australian official, who says that in early September 2001, “Just about everyone in Kandahar and the al-Qaeda camps knew that something big was coming, he said. ‘There was a buzz.’” Furthermore, also in early September 2001, the CIA monitors many phone calls in Kandahar and nearby areas where al-Qaeda operatives allude to the upcoming 9/11 attack (see Early September 2001).
Entity Tags: I-49, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Osama bin Laden
Category Tags: Remote Surveillance
January 1996: Richard Perle Says Arming of Bosnians Is of ‘Vital Interest’ to US; Suggests Turkey Should Help
Prominent neoconservative Richard Perle tells the Turkish Daily News that the arming and training of Bosnian Muslims is of “vital interest” to the US and suggests that “among the NATO allies Turkey is [the] number one candidate for the job.” He says that Turkey would need perhaps $50 million in financing to do the work. [Turkish Daily News, 1/22/1996]
Entity Tags: Richard Perle
January 1996: CIA Report Exposes Militant Charity Fronts in Bosnia; Ties to Saudi Arabia and Other Governments Discovered
International Islamic Relief Organization logo. [Source: International Islamic Relief Organization]The CIA creates a report for the State Department detailing support for terrorism from prominent Islamic charities. The report, completed just as the Bosnian war is winding down, focuses on charity fronts that have helped the mujaheddin in Bosnia. It concludes that of more than 50 Islamic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in existence, “available information indicates that approximately one-third… support terrorist groups or employ individuals who are suspected of having terrorist connections.” The report notes that most of the offices of NGOs active in Bosnia are located in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Zenica, and Tuzla. There are coordination councils there organizing the work of the charity fronts. The report notes that some charities may be “backed by powerful interest groups,” including governments. “We continue to have evidence that even high ranking members of the collecting or monitoring agencies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan - such as the Saudi High Commission - are involved in illicit activities, including support for terrorists.” The Wall Street Journal will later comment, “Disclosure of the report may raise new questions about whether enough was done to cut off support for terrorism before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001… and about possible involvement in terrorism by Saudi Arabian officials.” [Central Intelligence Agency, 1/1996; Wall Street Journal, 5/9/2003] The below list of organizations paraphrases or quotes the report, except for informational asides in parentheses.
The International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). “The IIRO is affiliated with the Muslim World League, a major international organization largely financed by the government of Saudi Arabia.” The IIRO has funded Hamas, Algerian radicals, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (a.k.a. the Islamic Group, an Egyptian radical militant group led by Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman), Ramzi Yousef, and six militant training camps in Afghanistan. “The former head of the IIRO office in the Philippines, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, has been linked to Manila-based plots to target the Pope and US airlines; his brother-in-law is Osama bin Laden.”
Al Haramain Islamic Foundation. It has connections to Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and helps support the mujaheddin battalion in Zenica. Their offices have been connected to smuggling, drug running, and prostitution.
Human Concern International, headquartered in Canada. Its Swedish branch is said to be smuggling weapons to Bosnia. It is claimed “the entire Peshawar office is made up of [Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya] members.” The head of its Pakistan office (Ahmed Said Khadr) was arrested recently for a role in the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan (see November 19, 1995). (It will later be discovered that Khadr is a founder and major leader of al-Qaeda (see Summer 2001 and January 1996-September 10, 2001).)
Third World Relief Agency (TWRA). Headquartered in Sudan, it has ties to Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. “The regional director of the organization, Elfatih Hassanein, is the most influential [charity] official in Bosnia. He is a major arms supplier to the government, according to clandestine and press reporting, and was forced to relocate his office from Zagreb in 1994 after his weapons smuggling operations were exposed. According to a foreign government service, Hassanein supports US Muslim extremists in Bosnia.” One TWRA employee alleged to also be a member of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya carried out a suicide car bombing in Rijeka, Croatia (see October 20, 1995).
The Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA). Based in Sudan, it has offices in 30 countries. It is said to be controlled by Sudan’s ruling party and gives weapons to the Bosnian military in concert with the TWRA. (The US government will give the IARA $4 million in aid in 1998 (see February 19, 2000).)
Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) (the report refers to it by an alternate name, Lajnat al-Birr al-Islamiyya (LBI)). It supports mujaheddin in Bosnia. It mentions “one Zagreb employee, identified as Syrian-born US citizen Abu Mahmud,” as involved in a kidnapping in Pakistan (see July 4, 1995). [Central Intelligence Agency, 1/1996] (This is a known alias (Abu Mahmoud al Suri) for Enaam Arnaout, the head of BIF’s US office.) [USA v. Enaam M. Arnaout, 10/6/2003, pp. 37 ] This person “matches the description… of a man who was allegedly involved in the kidnapping of six Westerners in Kashmir in July 1995, and who left Pakistan in early October for Bosnia via the United States.”
Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), a.k.a. Al-Kifah. This group has ties to Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, and possibly Hezbollah. Both the former director of its Zagreb office [Kamer Eddine Kherbane] and his deputy [Hassan Hakim] were senior members of Algerian extremist groups. Its main office in Peshawar, Pakistan, funds at least nine training camps in Afghanistan. “The press has reported that some employees of MAK’s New York branch were involved in the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993].” (Indeed, the New York branch, known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center, is closely linked to the WTC bombing and the CIA used it as a conduit to send money to Afghanistan (see January 24, 1994).
Muwafaq Foundation. Registered in Britain but based in Sudan, it has many offices in Bosnia. It has ties to Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and “helps fund the Egyptian Mujahedin Battalion in Bosnia” and “at least one training camp in Afghanistan” (see 1991-1995).
Qatar Charitable Society, based in Qatar. It has possible ties to Hamas and Algerian militants. A staff member in Qatar is known to be a Hamas operative who has been monitored discussing militant operations. (An al-Qaeda defector will later reveal that in 1993 he was told this was one of al-Qaeda’s three most important charity fronts (see 1993)).
Red Crescent (Iran branch). Linked to the Iranian government, it is “Often used by the Iranian [intelligence agency] as cover for intelligence officers, agents, and arms shipments.”
Saudi High Commission. “The official Saudi government organization for collecting and disbursing humanitarian aid.” Some members possibly have ties to Hamas and Algerian militants (see 1996 and After).
Other organizations mentioned are the Foundation for Human Rights, Liberties, and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) (a.k.a. the International Humanitarian Relief Organization), Kuwait Joint Relief Committee (KJRC), the Islamic World Committee, and Human Appeal International. [Central Intelligence Agency, 1/1996]
After 9/11, former National Security Council official Daniel Benjamin will say that the NSC repeatedly questioned the CIA with inquiries about charity fronts. “We knew there was a big problem between [charities] and militants. The CIA report “suggests they were on the job, and, frankly, they were on the job.” [Wall Street Journal, 5/9/2003] However, very little action is taken on the information before 9/11. None of the groups mentioned will be shut down or have their assets seized.
Entity Tags: Muwafaq Foundation, Muslim World League, National Security Council, Saudi High Commission, Red Crescent (Iran branch), Qatar Charitable Society, US Department of State, Third World Relief Agency, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Islamic World Committee, Islamic African Relief Agency, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, Ahmed Said Khadr, Benevolence International Foundation, Central Intelligence Agency, Daniel Benjamin, Elfatih Hassanein, International Islamic Relief Organization, Kuwait Joint Relief Committee, Human Appeal International, Foundation for Human Rights, Hamas, Saudi Arabia
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Robert Wright and Vulgar Betrayal, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism Financing, Al-Kifah/MAK, BIF
Between 1996 and August 1998: FBI Squad Threatens to Build Antenna Because NSA Won’t Share Monitoring of Bin Laden’s Phone Calls
I-49, a squad of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors that began focusing on bin Laden in 1996 (see January 1996), is upset that the NSA is not sharing its monitoring of bin Laden’s satellite phone with other agencies (see December 1996). The squad develops a plan to build their own antennas near Afghanistan to capture the satellite signal themselves. As a result, the NSA gives up transcripts from 114 phone calls to prevent the antennas from being built, but refuses to give up any more. Presumably, this must have happened at some point before bin Laden stopped regularly using his satellite phone around August 1998 (see December 1996). [Wright, 2006, pp. 344] Also presumably, some of these transcripts will then be used in the embassy bombings trial that takes place in early 2001 (see February-July 2001), because details from bin Laden’s satellite calls were frequently used as evidence and some prosecutors in that trial were members of I-49. [CNN, 4/16/2001]
Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, I-49, Osama bin Laden
January 1996: Muslim Extremists Plan Suicide Attack on White House
US intelligence obtains information concerning a suicide attack on the White House planned by individuals connected with Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman and a key al-Qaeda operative. The plan is to fly from Afghanistan to the US and crash into the White House. [US Congress, 9/18/2002]
Entity Tags: US intelligence, Al-Qaeda
January 1996: Squad Uniting Prosecutors and FBI Agents Begins Focusing on Bin Laden
Jack Cloonan. [Source: PBS]The Justice Department directs an existing unit called Squad I-49 to begin building a legal case against bin Laden. This unit is unusual because it combines prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, who have been working on bin Laden related cases, with the FBI’s New York office, which was the FBI branch office that dealt the most with bin Laden -related intelligence. Patrick Fitzgerald effectively directs I-49 as the lead prosecutor. FBI agent Dan Coleman becomes a key member while simultaneously representing the FBI at Alec Station, the CIA’s new bin Laden unit (February 1996) where he has access to the CIA’s vast informational database. [Lance, 2006, pp. 218-219] The other initial members of I-49 are: Louis Napoli, John Anticev, Mike Anticev, Richard Karniewicz, Jack Cloonan, Carl Summerlin, Kevin Cruise, Mary Deborah Doran, and supervisor Tom Lang. All are FBI agents except for Napoli and Summerlin, a New York police detective and a New York state trooper, respectively. The unit will end up working closely with FBI agent John O’Neill, who heads the New York FBI office. Unlike the CIA’s Alec Station, which is focused solely on bin Laden, I-49 has to work on other Middle East -related issues. For much of the next year or so, most members will work on the July 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, because it crashed near New York and is suspected to have been carried out by Middle Eastern militants (July 17, 1996-September 1996). However, in years to come, I-49 will grow considerably and focus more on bin Laden. [Wright, 2006, pp. 240-241] After 9/11, the “wall” between intelligence collection and criminal prosecution will often be cited for the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks. But as author Peter Lance will later note, “Little more than ten months after the issuance of Jamie Gorelick’s ‘wall memo,’ Fitzgerald and company were apparently disregarding her mandate that criminal investigation should be segregated from intelligence threat prevention. Squad I-49… was actively working both jobs.” Thanks to Coleman’s involvement in both I-49 and the CIA’s Alec Station, I-49 effectively avoids the so-called “wall” problem. [Lance, 2006, pp. 220]
Entity Tags: Mike Anticev, Tom Lang, US Department of Justice, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Kevin Cruise, Dan Coleman, Carl Summerlin, Alec Station, Louis Napoli, Mary Deborah Doran, John Anticev, Jack Cloonan, I-49, Federal Bureau of Investigation
1996-Early 1997: Probe of Suspicious Company with Saudi Ties Is Stalled
A 1996 CIA report shows that US intelligence believes that the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), a Saudi charity with strong ties to the Saudi government, is funding a variety of radical militant groups (see January 1996). However, no action is taken against it. Also in 1996, Valerie Donahue, a Chicago FBI agent who is presumably part of Robert Wright’s Vulgar Betrayal investigation, begins looking into Global Chemical Corp., a chemical company that appears to be an investment fraud scheme. The company is jointly owned by the IIRO and Abrar Investments Inc. Suspected terrorism financier Yassin al-Qadi has investments in Abrar Investments and he is also director of its Malaysian corporate parent. Donahue finds that Abrar Investments gave Global Chemical more than half a million dollars, and the IIRO gave it over $1 million. Further, the Saudi embassy has recently sent $400,000 to the IIRO. The president of Global Chemical is Mohammed Mabrook, a Libyan immigrant and suspected Hamas operative. Mabrook had previously worked for a pro-Palestinian group led by Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk. (Marzouk is in US detention from 1995 to May 1997, but he is apparently merely held for deportation and not questioned about matters like Global Chemical (see July 5, 1995-May 1997).) Donahue discovers that Global Chemical is keeping a warehouse full of highly toxic chemicals, but they do not seem to be selling them. In late 1996, a chemical weapons expert examines the chemicals and opines that they appear to be meant for a laboratory performing biochemistry or manufacturing explosives. While no direct evidence of bomb making is found, investigators know that a Hamas associate of Marzouk, Mohammad Salah, had previously trained US recruits to work with “basic chemical materials for the preparation of bombs and explosives.”(see 1989-January 1993) In January 1997, the FBI raids Global Chemical and confiscates the chemicals stockpiled in the warehouse. Mabrook is questioned, then let go. He moves to Saudi Arabia. Abrar Investments vacate their offices and cease operations. In June 1999, Mabrook will return to the US and will be prosecuted. He will be tried on fraud charges for illegal dealings with the IIRO and given a four year sentence. Meanwhile, the IIRO ignores an FBI demand for accounting records to explain how it spent several million dollars that seem to have gone to the IIRO and disappeared. In January 1997, Donahue requests a search warrant to find and confiscate the records, saying that she suspect IIRO officials are engaged in “possible mail and wire fraud… and money laundering.” Apparently, the probe stalls and the financial records are never maintained. Some investigators believe the probe is dropped for diplomatic reasons. [Wall Street Journal, 11/26/2002; Wall Street Journal, 12/16/2002; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 10/29/2003] Investigators will later be prohibited from investigating a possible link between al-Qadi and the 1998 US embassy bombings (see October 1998). After 9/11, the US will apparently have ample evidence to officially label the IIRO a funder of terrorism, but will refrain from doing so for fear of embarrassing the Saudi government (see October 12, 2001).
Entity Tags: Valerie Donahue, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mohammed Mabrook, Global Chemical Corp., International Islamic Relief Organization, Yassin al-Qadi, Vulgar Betrayal, Abrar Investments
Category Tags: Robert Wright and Vulgar Betrayal, Terrorism Financing
January-May 1996: US Fails to Capture KSM Living Openly in Qatar
Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani. [Source: Fethi Belaid/ Agence France-Presse]Since Operation Bojinka was uncovered in the Philippines (see January 6, 1995), many of the plot’s major planners, including Ramzi Yousef, are found and arrested. One major exception is 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM). He flees to Qatar in the Persian Gulf, where he has been living openly using his real name, enjoying the patronage of Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Qatar’s Interior Minister and a member of the royal family (see 1992-1996). [ABC News, 2/7/2003] He had accepted al-Thani’s invitation to live on his farm around 1992 (see 1992-1995). The CIA learned KSM was living in Qatar in 1995 after his nephew Ramzi Yousef attempted to call him there while in US custody (see After February 7, 1995-January 1996). The Sudanese government also tipped off the FBI that KSM was traveling to Qatar. Some CIA agents strongly urged action against KSM after his exact location in Qatar was determined, but no action was taken (see October 1995). In January 1996, KSM is indicted in the US for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing, and apparently this leads to an effort to apprehend him in Qatar that same month. FBI Director Louis Freeh sends a letter to the Qatari government asking for permission to send a team after him. [Los Angeles Times, 12/22/2002] One of Freeh’s diplomatic notes states that KSM was involved in a conspiracy to “bomb US airliners” and is believed to be “in the process of manufacturing an explosive device.” [New Yorker, 5/27/2002] Qatar confirms that KSM is there and is making explosives, but they delay handing him over. After waiting several months, a high-level meeting takes place in Washington to consider a commando raid to seize him. However, the raid is deemed too risky, and another letter is sent to the Qatari government instead. One person at the meeting later states, “If we had gone in and nabbed this guy, or just cut his head off, the Qatari government would not have complained a bit. Everyone around the table for their own reasons refused to go after someone who fundamentally threatened American interests….” [Los Angeles Times, 12/22/2002] Around May 1996, Mohammed’s patron al-Thani makes sure that Mohammed and four others are given blank passports and a chance to escape. A former Qatari police chief later says the other men include Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s number two and number three leaders, respectively (see Early 1998). [Los Angeles Times, 9/1/2002; ABC News, 2/7/2003] In 1999, the New York Times will report that “Although American officials said they had no conclusive proof, current and former officials said they believed that the Foreign Minister [Sheik Hamed bin Jasim al-Thani] was involved, directly or indirectly” in tipping off KSM. [New York Times, 7/8/1999] KSM will continue to occasionally use Qatar as a safe haven, even staying there for two weeks after 9/11 (see Late 2001).
Entity Tags: Ramzi Yousef, Mohammed Atef, Hamed bin Jasim al-Thani, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Louis J. Freeh, Osama bin Laden
Category Tags: Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Other Government-Militant Collusion
1996-Early 1997: Moussaoui Fights with Militants in Chechnya
According to British intelligence, Zacarias Moussaoui fights in Chechnya with Islamist militants there. Using previously gained computer skills, he mostly works as an information specialist. He helps militants forge computer links and post combat pictures on radical Muslim websites. It is not known when British intelligence learns this. [USA Today, 6/14/2002] Moussaoui also helps recruit militants to go fight in Chechnya (see 1996-2001). He likely assists Chechen warlord Ibn Khattab, the Chechen leader most closely linked to al-Qaeda (see August 24, 2001).
Entity Tags: Ibn Khattab, Zacarias Moussaoui
Category Tags: Zacarias Moussaoui, Islamist Militancy in Chechnya
1996-August 2000: Ahmed Alghamdi and Other Hijackers Reportedly Connected to US Military Base
After 9/11, there will be media accounts suggesting some of the 9/11 hijackers trained at US military bases (see September 15-17, 2001). According to these accounts, four of the hijackers trained at Pensacola Naval Air Station, a base that trains many foreign nationals. One neighbor will claim that Ahmed Alghamdi lived in Pensacola until about August 2000. This neighbor will claim that Alghamdi appeared to be part of a group of Arab men who often gathered at the Fountains apartment complex near the University of West Florida. She will recount, “People would come and knock on the doors. We might see three or four, and they were always men. It was always in the evening. The traffic in and out, although it was sporadic, was constant every evening. They would go and knock, and then it would be a little while and someone would look out the window to see who it was, like they were being very cautious. Not your normal coming to the door and opening it.” [New York Times, 9/15/2001] It is not known when Alghamdi is first seen in Pensacola. However, he uses the address of a housing facility for foreign military trainees located inside the base on drivers’ licenses issued in 1996 and 1998. Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami also list the same address as Ahmed Alghamdi on their drivers license and car registrations between 1996 and 1998. Other records connect Hamza Alghamdi to that same address. However, the Pensacola News Journal reports that “The news articles caution that there are slight discrepancies between the FBI list of suspected hijackers and the military training records, either in the spellings of their names or in their birth dates. They also raise the possibility that the hijackers stole the identities of military trainees.” [Washington Post, 9/16/2001; Pensacola News Journal, 9/17/2001] It is unclear if these people were the 9/11 hijackers or just others with similar names. The US military has never definitively denied that they were the hijackers, and the media lost interest in the story a couple of weeks after 9/11.
Entity Tags: Hamza Alghamdi, Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alnami
Category Tags: Other 9/11 Hijackers, Alleged Hijackers' Flight Training
1996-December 2000: Majority of 9/11 Hijackers Attempt to Fight in Chechnya
A young Ahmed Alnami in Saudi Arabia. [Source: Boston Globe]At least 11 of the 9/11 hijackers travel or attempt to travel to Chechnya between 1996 and 2000 (see 1999-2000):
Nawaf Alhazmi fights in Chechnya, Bosnia, and Afghanistan for several years, starting around 1995. [Observer, 9/23/2001; ABC News, 1/9/2002; US Congress, 6/18/2002; US Congress, 7/24/2003 ]
Khalid Almihdhar fights in Chechnya, Bosnia, and Afghanistan for several years, usually with Nawaf Alhazmi. [US Congress, 6/18/2002; Los Angeles Times, 9/1/2002; US Congress, 7/24/2003 ]
Salem Alhazmi spends time in Chechnya with his brother Nawaf Alhazmi. [ABC News, 1/9/2002] He also possibly fights with his brother in Afghanistan. [US Congress, 7/24/2003 ]
Ahmed Alhaznawi leaves for Chechnya in 1999 [ABC News, 1/9/2002] , and his family loses contact with him in late 2000. [Arab News, 9/22/2001]
Hamza Alghamdi leaves for Chechnya in early 2000 [Washington Post, 9/25/2001; Independent, 9/27/2001] or sometime around January 2001. He calls home several times until about June 2001, saying he is in Chechnya. [Arab News, 9/18/2001]
Mohand Alshehri leaves to fight in Chechnya in early 2000. [Arab News, 9/22/2001]
Ahmed Alnami leaves home in June 2000, and calls home once in June 2001 from an unnamed location. [Arab News, 9/19/2001; Washington Post, 9/25/2001]
Fayez Ahmed Banihammad leaves home in July 2000 saying he wants to participate in a holy war or do relief work. [Washington Post, 9/25/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 9/27/2001] He calls his parents one time since. [Arab News, 9/18/2001]
Ahmed Alghamdi leaves his studies to fight in Chechnya in 2000, and is last seen by his family in December 2000. He calls his parents for the last time in July 2001, but does not mention being in the US. [Arab News, 9/18/2001; Arab News, 9/20/2001]
Waleed M. Alshehri disappears with Wail Alshehri in December 2000, after speaking of fighting in Chechnya. [Arab News, 9/18/2001; Washington Post, 9/25/2001]
Wail Alshehri, who had psychological problems, went with his brother to Mecca to seek help. Both disappear, after speaking of fighting in Chechnya. [Washington Post, 9/25/2001]
Majed Moqed is last seen by a friend in 2000 in Saudi Arabia, after communicating a “plan to visit the United States to learn English.” [Arab News, 9/22/2001]
Clearly, there is a pattern: eleven hijackers appear likely to have fought in Chechnya, and two others are known to have gone missing. It is possible that others have similar histories, but this is hard to confirm because “almost nothing [is] known about some.” [New York Times, 9/21/2001] Indeed, a colleague later claims that hijackers Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and would-be hijacker Ramzi Bin al-Shibh wanted to fight in Chechnya but were told in early 2000 that they were needed elsewhere. [Washington Post, 10/23/2002; Reuters, 10/29/2002] Reuters later reports, “Western diplomats play down any Chechen involvement by al-Qaeda.” [Reuters, 10/24/2002]
Entity Tags: Hamza Alghamdi, Ahmed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami, Marwan Alshehhi, Fayez Ahmed Banihammad, Mohand Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Khalid Almihdhar, Ziad Jarrah, Nawaf Alhazmi, Waleed Alshehri, Salem Alhazmi, Wail Alshehri, Majed Moqed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh
Category Tags: Other 9/11 Hijackers, Islamist Militancy in Chechnya
After 1995: Algerian Militant Group GIA Gains Influence in Key Al-Qaeda Mosque in Italy
The Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) gains more influence in the Islamic Cultural Institute, a militant mosque in Milan, Italy, following the death of its former head, Anwar Shaaban. Under the leadership of Shaaban, who died in the Bosnian war, the mosque had been built up into a key European logistics center for militant Islamists. [Chicago Tribune, 10/22/2001] The mosque is described as “the main al-Qaeda station house in Europe” (see 1993 and After), but the GIA is said to be infiltrated by government informers at this point and is losing strength in Algeria due to the penetration (see October 27, 1994-July 16, 1996).
Entity Tags: Groupe Islamique Armé, Islamic Cultural Institute
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Italy, Algerian Militant Collusion
Mid-Late 1990s: Pakistani-Based Proliferation Network Begins to Use Turkish Fronts in US
A Pakistani-based proliferation network centered around nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan and the ISI intelligence agency begins to use Turkish fronts to acquire technology in the US. This move is made because it is thought Turks are less likely to attract suspicion than Pakistanis. At one point the operation is headed by ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed. According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, intercepted communications show Mahmood and his colleagues stationed in Washington are in constant contact with attachés at the Turkish embassy. Edmonds will also say that venues such as the American Turkish Council (ATC), a Washington-based lobby group, are used for handovers, and packages containing nuclear secrets are then delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington. Edmonds will also allege: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.” [Sunday Times (London), 1/6/2008]
Entity Tags: Pakistan Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, American-Turkish Council, Mahmood Ahmed, Sibel Edmonds
Category Tags: Sibel Edmonds, Pakistan and the ISI, Pakistani Nukes & Islamic Militancy, Mahmood Ahmed
Mid-Late 1990s: French Ask British Authorities to Ban Militant Newsletter, British Decline
At some point in the mid-to-late 1990s, French authorities ask their counterparts in Britain to ban the militant newsletter Al Ansar, which is published in Britain by supporters of the radical Algerian organization Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). Authors Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory will describe the newsletter: “This was handed out at mosques, youth clubs, and restaurants popular with young Arabs. It eulogized atrocities carried out by mujaheddin in Algeria, recounting graphic details of their operations, and described in deliberately provocative language an attack on a packed passenger train and the hijacking of a French airliner in December 1994 which was intended to be flown into the Eiffel Tower.” They add that its past editors “read like a who’s who of Islamist extremists,” including Abu Hamza al-Masri, an informer for the British authorities (see Early 1997 and Before October 1997), Abu Qatada, another British informer (see June 1996-February 1997), and Rachid Ramda, the mastermind of a series of attacks in France who operated from Britain (see 1994 and July-October 1995). The newsletter is also linked to Osama bin Laden (see 1994 and January 5, 1996). However, British authorities say that the newsletter cannot be banned. [O'Neill and McGrory, 2006, pp. 112-113]
Entity Tags: Groupe Islamique Armé
Category Tags: Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism, Algerian Militant Collusion
1996-September 11, 2001: New York Office of Emergency Management Practices for Terrorist Attacks, but Not Using Planes as Missiles
New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) holds regular interagency training exercises in the years preceding 9/11, aiming to carry out a tabletop or field exercise every eight to 12 weeks. Mayor Rudy Giuliani is personally involved in many of these. The exercises are very lifelike. Giuliani will later recall, “We used to take pictures of these trial runs and they were so realistic that people who saw them would ask when the event shown in the photograph had occurred.” Scenarios drilled include a sarin gas attack in Manhattan, anthrax attacks, and truck bombs. One exercise, which takes place in May 2001, is based on terrorists attacking New York with bubonic plague (see May 11, 2001). Another, conducted in conjunction with the New York Port Authority, includes a simulated plane crash. Just one week before 9/11, the OEM is preparing a tabletop exercise with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to develop plans for business continuity in New York’s Financial District—where the World Trade Center is located—after a terrorist attack (see (September 4, 2001)). OEM staffers are actually preparing for a bioterrorism exercise on the morning of 9/11 (see (Shortly After 8:46 a.m.) September 11, 2001 and September 12, 2001). Jerome Hauer, OEM director from 1996 to February 2000, will recall, “We looked at every conceivable threat that anyone on the staff could think of, be it natural or intentional, but not the use of aircraft as missiles.” He will tell the 9/11 Commission: “We had aircraft crash drills on a regular basis. The general consensus in the city was that a plane hitting a building… was that it would be a high-rise fire.… There was never a sense, as I said in my testimony, that aircraft were going to be used as missiles.” [Time, 12/22/2001; Giuliani, 2002, pp. 62-63; Jenkins and Edwards-Winslow, 9/2003, pp. 15, 30 ; 9/11 Commission, 5/19/2004; 9/11 Commission, 5/19/2004 ] The OEM was created in 1996 by Giuliani to manage New York’s response to major incidents, including terrorist attacks (see 1996). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 283-284]
Entity Tags: Office of Emergency Management, New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Rudolph (“Rudy”) Giuliani, Jerome Hauer
Category Tags: Military Exercises, Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11
1996-September 11, 2001: Enron Gives Taliban Millions in Bribes in Effort to Get Afghan Pipeline Built
The Associated Press will later report that the Enron corporation bribes Taliban officials as part of a “no-holds-barred bid to strike a deal for an energy pipeline in Afghanistan.” Atul Davda, a senior director for Enron’s International Division, will later claim, “Enron had intimate contact with Taliban officials.” Presumably this effort began around 1996, when a power plant Enron was building in India ran into trouble and Enron began an attempt to supply it with natural gas via a planned pipeline through Afghanistan (see 1995-November 2001 and June 24, 1996). In 1997, Enron executives privately meet with Taliban officials in Texas (see December 4, 1997). They are “given the red-carpet treatment and promised a fortune if the deal [goes] through.” It is alleged Enron secretly employs CIA agents to carry out its dealings overseas. According to a CIA source, “Enron proposed to pay the Taliban large sums of money in a ‘tax’ on every cubic foot of gas and oil shipped through a pipeline they planned to build.” This source claims Enron paid more than $400 million for a feasibility study on the pipeline and “a large portion of that cost was pay-offs to the Taliban.” Enron continues to encourage the Taliban about the pipeline even after Unocal officially gives up on the pipeline in the wake of the African embassy bombings (see December 5, 1998). An investigation after Enron’s collapse in 2001 (see December 2, 2001) will determine that some of this pay-off money ended up funding al-Qaeda. [Associated Press, 3/7/2002]
Entity Tags: Atul Davda, Enron Corporation, Taliban, Central Intelligence Agency
January 2, 1996: New Republic Editors Say Bosnian Intervention Aimed at Increasing US Influence in Middle East
The New York Times publishes an op-ed piece by Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind titled, “The Third American Empire,” in which the authors assert that US military involvement in the Balkans should not be seen as the assertion of US influence in Europe, but as part of a strategy to exert US dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia. “[W]e should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America’s rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East,” they write. [New York Times, 1/2/1996]
Entity Tags: Jacob Heilbrunn, Michael Lind
Category Tags: Al-Qaeda in Balkans, US Dominance
January 5, 1996: British Newspaper Links Bin Laden to 1995 Wave of Militant Attacks in France
Rachid Ramda. [Source: Public domain]The London Times publishes one of the first Western newspaper articles about Osama bin Laden. The article says, “A Saudi Arabian millionaire is suspected of channeling thousands of pounds to Islamic militants in London which may have bankrolled French terrorist bombings.” Bin Laden is referred to as “Oussama ibn-Laden.” It says that he sent money to Rachid Ramda, editor in chief of Al Ansar, the London-based newsletter for the radical Algerian militant group the GIA. However, government sources say that the money ostensibly for the newsletter was really used to fund a wave of militant attacks in France in 1995 (see July-October 1995). Ramda was arrested in London on November 4, 1995 at the request of the French government. [London Times, 1/5/1996] Two other people working as editors on the Al Ansar newsletter in 1995, Abu Qatada and Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, will later be found to be important al-Qaeda leaders (see June 1996-1997 and October 31, 2005). It will take ten years for Britain to extradite Ramda to France. He will be tried in France in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1995 French attacks. [BBC, 10/26/2007] Bin Laden may have met with Ramda while visiting Britain in 1994 (see 1994). It will later be revealed that the 1995 attacks in France were led by an Algerian government mole (see July-October 1995), and the GIA as a whole was run by a government mole (see October 27, 1994-July 16, 1996).
Entity Tags: Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, Osama bin Laden, Groupe Islamique Armé, Rachid Ramda, Abu Qatada
Category Tags: Osama Bin Laden, Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism, Algerian Militant Collusion, Abu Qatada
January 1996-September 10, 2001: Canada Takes No Action Against Founding Al-Qaeda Leader, Despite Evidence Against Him
Ahmed Said Khadr in a hospital bed during his hunger strike, being visited by journalists. [Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]In late 1995, Ahmed Said Khadr is arrested in Pakistan for a suspected role in the November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in that country (see November 19, 1995). Khadr was born an Egyptian and became a Canadian citizen, and is an employee of Human Concern International (HCI), a Canadian-based charity. [Burr and Collins, 2006, pp. 276-277]
Smuggling During the Afghan War - The Canadian government was already aware of Khadr’s militant ties before the bombing. In the late 1980s, a federal Canadian official was asked by a diplomat in Pakistan about Khadr. The official did not know who that was, so the diplomat explained that Khadr was involved in smuggling Saudi money into Afghanistan while using HCI as a cover. This person further said that, “For months, the Afghan scene in Islamabad buzzed with this and other information” about Khadr. This was passed on to other parts of the Canadian government, but no action was taken. [National Post, 9/6/2002]
Khadr Released Due to Hunger Strike - After his late 1995 arrest, Khadr begins a hunger strike from within a Pakistani prison. In January 1996, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien visits Pakistan and, in response to popular pressure caused by the hunger strike, asks the Pakistani government to release him. Khadr is released several months later. He returns to Canada and stops working with HCI, but starts a new charity called Health and Education Project International. [Burr and Collins, 2006, pp. 276-277]
HCI Linked to Al-Qaeda - A January 1996 CIA report claims that the entire Peshawar, Pakistan, HCI branch that Khadr heads is staffed by Islamist militants and that its Swedish branch is smuggling weapons to Bosnia (see January 1996). In a June 1996 interview with an Egyptian weekly, Osama bin Laden surprisingly identifies HCI as a significant supporter of al-Qaeda. [Emerson, 2006, pp. 398, 423]
Monitoring Khadr's Associates - Also around 1996, the Canadian intelligence agency CSIS begins monitoring several suspected radical militants living in Canada. The CSIS will later call one of them, Mahmoud Jaballah, an “established contact” of Khadr. [Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2/22/2008 ] Another, Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, will also be called a contact of Khadr. [Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2/22/2008 ] The CSIS has yet to reveal details of when such contacts are made, except in the case of Mohamed Harkat. It will be mentioned that in March 1997 Harkat is recorded saying that he is about to meet Khadr in Ottawa, Canada. [Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2/22/2008 ]
Wanted Again in Pakistan - On September 5, 1998, the Globe and Mail will report that Khadr is wanted in Pakistan again for his role in the Egyptian embassy bombing. A Pakistani official says that Khadr is living in Afghanistan, has contacts with Osama bin Laden, and is using his charity as a cover for smuggling and banking transactions. The executive director of HCI tells the newspaper that Khadr was last seen in Ottawa, Canada, about three months earlier, and, “We do learn once in a while that he was in Pakistan or Canada or moving back and forth.” [Globe and Mail, 9/5/1998]
Listed by UN - In January 2001, the United Nations places Khadr on a list of those who support terrorism associated with bin Laden. [Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2/22/2008 ]
But despite all this, there is no evidence the Canadian government attempts to arrest or even indict him before 9/11. (The Egyptian government does pressure the Pakistani ISI to capture him in the summer of 2001 (Summer 2001).) Khadr will be killed in Pakistan in October 2003. It will eventually emerge that he was a founding member of al-Qaeda and an important leader of that group (see October 2, 2003).
Entity Tags: Ahmed Said Khadr, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Health and Education Project International, Jean Chretien, Al-Qaeda, Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Jaballah, Human Concern International, Mohamed Harkat
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Remote Surveillance
January 14, 1996: Mujaheddin Required to Leave Bosnia by This Date
As part of the peace agreement ending the Bosnian war (see December 14, 1995), all foreign fighters are required to leave Bosnia by this time, which is thirty days after the signing of the peace agreement. Effectively this refers to the mujaheddin who have been fighting for the Bosnian Muslims. [Time, 12/31/1995] However, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic kicks out the Serbians living in the small village of Bocinja Donja 60 miles north of the capital of Sarajevo and gives the houses there to several hundred mujaheddin. Most of them marry local women, allowing them to stay in the country (see January 2000). [Washington Post, 3/11/2000]
Entity Tags: Alija Izetbegovic
Shortly Before February 1996: CIA Already Aware of Term ‘Al-Qaeda’ as It Sets Up Bin Laden Unit
David Cohen. [Source: Ting-Li Wang / New York Times]David Cohen, head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, wants to test the idea of having a “virtual station,” which is a station based at CIA headquarters and focusing on one target. He chooses Michael Scheuer to run it. Scheuer is running the Islamic Extremist Branch of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center at the time and had suggested creating a station to focus just on bin Laden. The new unit, commonly called Alec Station, begins operations in February 1996 (see February 1996). The 9/11 Commission will later comment that Scheuer had already “noticed a recent stream of reports about bin Laden and something called al-Qaeda.” [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 109] It has been widely reported that US intelligence was unaware of the term al-Qaeda until after defector Jamal al-Fadl revealed it later in 1996 (see June 1996-April 1997). But Billy Waugh, an independent contractor hired by the CIA to spy on bin Laden and others in Sudan in 1991 to 1992, will later claim that the CIA was aware of the term al-Qaeda back then (see February 1991- July 1992). And double agent Ali Mohamed revealed the term to the FBI in 1993 (see May 1993). The term will first be used by the media in August 1996 (see August 14, 1996).
Entity Tags: Michael Scheuer, Counterterrorist Center, Central Intelligence Agency, Al-Qaeda, Alec Station, David Cohen
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, Counterterrorism Policy/Politics
February 1996: CIA Forms New Counterterrorism Bin Laden Unit
The CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center creates a special unit focusing specifically on bin Laden. It is informally called Alec Station. About 10 to 15 individuals are assigned to the unit initially. This grows to about 35 to 40 by 9/11. [US Congress, 9/18/2002] The unit is set up “largely because of evidence linking [bin Laden] to the 1993 bombing of the WTC.” [Washington Post, 10/3/2001] Newsweek will comment after 9/11, “With the Cold War over, the Mafia in retreat, and the drug war unwinnable, the CIA and FBI were eager to have a new foe to fight.… Historical rivals, the spies and G-men were finally learning to work together. But they didn’t necessarily share secrets with the alphabet soup of other enforcement and intelligence agencies, like Customs and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they remained aloof from the Pentagon. And no amount of good will or money could bridge a fundamental divide between intelligence and law enforcement. Spies prefer to watch and wait; cops want to get their man.” [Newsweek, 10/1/2001] Michael Scheuer will lead the unit until 1999. He will later become a vocal critic of the US government’s efforts to combat terrorism. He later recalls that while bin Laden is mostly thought of merely as a terrorist financier at this time, “we had run across bin Laden in a lot of different places, not personally but in terms of his influence, either through rhetoric, through audiotapes, through passports, through money-he seemed to turn up everywhere. So when we [created the unit], the first responsibility was to find out if he was a threat.” [Vanity Fair, 11/2004] By the start of 1997, the unit will conclude bin Laden is a serious threat (see Early 1997).
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Michael Scheuer, Alec Station, Al-Qaeda, Counterterrorist Center
February 1996-June 1999: CIA’s Bin Laden Unit Has Conflicts with CIA Superiors and Other Intelligence Agencies
During Michael Scheuer’s time as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit Alec Station from 1996 to 1999 (see February 1996 and June 1999), the unit has conflicts with other parts of the US intelligence community. Scheuer has an angry and dogmatic style that sometimes alienates people.
Conflict with Counterterrorism 'Tsar' Clarke - Scheuer and Richard Clarke, the US counterterrorism “tsar,” do not get along, even though both are among the first people in government to take the Osama bin Laden threat seriously. Clarke can also be abrasive. One former CIA insider will later say, “I can say that, among individuals that I tend to trust, Clarke was regarded as more serious about terrorism in the 1990s than just about anybody else in the US government, but he was a truly painful individual to work with.” Clarke will later similarly criticize Scheuer, saying: “Throwing tantrums and everything doesn’t help.… [You shouldn’t be] so dysfunctional within your agency that you’re making it harder to get something done.” And Scheuer will later criticize Clarke, saying: “[He] was an interferer of the first level, in terms of talking about things that he knew nothing about and killing them.… He was always playing the FBI off against us or us against the NSA.”
Conflict with the FBI - The bin Laden unit does not get along with some FBI agents assigned to it as well. From the very start, some FBI officials, including bin Laden expert John O’Neill, resist cooperating with the unit. CIA official John MacGaffin will later claim, “O’Neill just fought it and fought it [cooperating with Alec Station].” O’Neill and Scheuer “were at each other’s throats.” On one occasion an FBI agent at the bin Laden unit is caught hiding CIA files inside his shirt to take them back to O’Neill. Scheuer will also claim that the FBI rarely follows up leads the bin Laden unit sends it. Furthermore, the FBI never shares information. “I bet we sent 700 or 800 requests for information to the FBI, and we never got an answer to any of them,” Scheuer says.
Conflicts with CIA Higher-Ups - The bin Laden unit also has conflicts with others within the CIA, including powerful superiors. An incident in 1996 leads to a breakdown of trust between Scheuer and his superiors (see 1996). John MacGaffin, who is a top CIA official for clandestine operations at the time, will later say of Scheuer, “He’s a good guy, [but] he’s an angry guy.”
Situation Improves after Scheuer - In June 1999, Richard Blee replaces Scheuer as head of the bin Laden unit, and he will stay involved in the bin Laden issue until after 9/11 (see December 9, 2001). Vanity Fair will later comment that Blee “was just as heated up over bin Laden as Scheuer had been, but obviously less likely to cause the kind of friction that would discomfit the [CIA director].” [Vanity Fair, 11/2004]
Entity Tags: John MacGaffin, Alec Station, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Richard Blee, Richard A. Clarke, John O’Neill, Michael Scheuer, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency
February-September 11, 1996: Investigation of Bin Laden Family Members Is Opened; Then Closed
On the left: 5613 Leesburg Pike, address for WAMY’s US office. On the right: 5913 Leesburg Pike, the 2001 address for hijackers Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi. [Source: Paul Sperry]The FBI begin an investigation into two relatives of bin Laden in February 1996, then close it on September 11, 1996. The FBI wanted to learn more about Abdullah Awad bin Laden, “because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth [WAMY]—a suspected terrorist organization.” [Guardian, 11/7/2001] Abdullah Awad was the US director of WAMY and lived with his brother Omar in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington. They are believed to be nephews of Osama bin Laden. The coding on a leaked FBI document about the case, marked secret, indicates the case related to national security. WAMY’s office address is 5613 Leesburg Pike. It will later be determined that at least two of the 9/11 hijackers lived at 5913 Leesburg Pike for much of 2001 at the same time the two bin Laden brothers were working only three blocks away (see March 2001 and After). WAMY has been banned in Pakistan by this time. [BBC, 11/6/2001; Guardian, 11/7/2001] The Indian and Philippine governments also will cite WAMY for funding Islamic militancy. The 9/11 Commission later will hear testimony that WAMY “has openly supported Islamic terrorism. There are ties between WAMY and 9/11 hijackers. It is a group that has openly endorsed the notion that Jews must be killed.… [It] has consistently portrayed the United States, Jews, Christians, and other infidels as enemies who have to be defeated or killed. And there is no doubt, according to US intelligence, that WAMY has been tied directly to terrorist attacks.” [9/11 Commission, 7/9/2003, pp. 66] A security official who will later serve under President Bush will say, “WAMY was involved in terrorist-support activity. There’s no doubt about it.” [Vanity Fair, 10/2003] Before 9/11, FBI investigators had determined that Abdullah Awad had invested about $500,000 in BMI Inc., a company suspected of financing groups officially designated as terrorist organizations (see 1986-October 1999). [Wall Street Journal, 9/15/2003] The Bosnian government will say in September 2002 that a charity with Abdullah Awad bin Laden on its board had channeled money to Chechen guerrillas, something that reporter Greg Palast will claim “is only possible because the Clinton CIA gave the wink and nod to WAMY and other groups who were aiding Bosnian guerrillas when they were fighting Serbia, a US-approved enemy.” The investigation into WAMY will be restarted a few days after 9/11, around the same time these two bin Ladens will leave the US (see September 14-19, 2001). [Palast, 2002, pp. 96-99] (Note that Abdullah Awad bin Laden is Osama bin Laden’s nephew, and is not the same person as the Abdullah bin Laden who is Osama’s brother and serves as the bin Laden family spokesperson.) [Palast, 2002, pp. 98-99; Wall Street Journal, 9/15/2003] WAMY’s Virginia offices will be raided by US agents in 2004 (see June 1, 2004).
Entity Tags: Abdullah Awad bin Laden, Omar bin Laden, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Clinton administration
Category Tags: Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden Family, Terrorism Financing
February 1996-May 1998: CIA’s Bin Laden Unit Asks NSA for Full Transcripts of Al-Qaeda Communications, NSA Refuses
Barbara McNamara. [Source: National Security Agency]Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, and other senior agency officers repeatedly ask the NSA to provide verbatim transcripts of intercepted calls between al-Qaeda members. Alec Station chief Michael Scheuer will explain, “[V]erbatim transcripts are operationally useful, summaries are much less so.” [Atlantic Monthly, 12/2004] According to PBS, Alec Station believes that “only by carefully studying each word will it be possible to understand [Osama] bin Laden’s intentions.” This is because al-Qaeda operatives sometimes talk in a simplistic code (see (October 1993-November 2001)). Scheuer will say: “Over time, if you read enough of these conversations, you first get clued in to the fact that maybe ‘bottle of milk’ doesn’t mean ‘bottle of milk.’ And if you follow it long enough, you develop a sense of what they’re really talking about. But it’s not possible to do unless you have the verbatim transcript.” [PBS, 2/3/2009] Scheuer will also complain that the summaries “are usually not timely.” [Atlantic Monthly, 12/2004] Author James Bamford will say that the summaries are “brief” and come “once a week or something like that.” [Antiwar, 10/22/2008] Alec Station’s desire for verbatim transcripts will intensify when it discovers the NSA is intercepting calls between bin Laden and his operations center in Yemen (see December 1996). However, the NSA constantly rejects its requests. Scheuer will later say: “We went to Fort Meade to ask then the NSA’s deputy director for operations [Barbara McNamara] for the transcripts, and she said, ‘We are not going to share that with you.’ And that was the end.” He will add that McNamara “said that the National Security Act of 1947 gave her agency control of ‘raw’ signals intelligence, and that she would not pass such material to CIA.” [Atlantic Monthly, 12/2004; Antiwar, 10/22/2008; PBS, 2/3/2009] McNamara will tell the 9/11 Commission that “She does not recall being personally [asked] to provide… transcripts or raw data” for counterterrorism, but if people wanted raw data, “then NSA would have provided it.” [9/11 Commission, 12/15/2003, pp. 5]
Entity Tags: National Security Agency, Michael Scheuer, Central Intelligence Agency, Alec Station, Barbara McNamara
Category Tags: Remote Surveillance, Yemen Hub, Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11
Shortly After February 1996: Saudis Fail to Give CIA Bin Laden Documents before 9/11
Bin Laden’s Saudi passport photograph. [Source: Public domain]Shortly after the CIA’s Alec Station is created to go after bin Laden (see February 1996), the CIA asks the Saudi government to provide copies of bin Laden’s records such as his birth certificate, passports, bank accounts, and so forth. But the Saudis fail to turn over any of the documents. By 9/11, the CIA will still not even be given a copy of bin Laden’s birth certificate. [Risen, 2006, pp. 185]
Entity Tags: Saudi Arabia, Central Intelligence Agency, Alec Station
Early 1996: Future 9/11 Hijackers Begin Attending Radical Mosque Possibly Monitored by German Authorities
The Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg. [Source: Knut Muller]Future 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and other members of the Hamburg cell begin regularly attending the Al-Quds mosque. Atta becomes a well-known figure both there and at other mosques in the city. He grows a beard at this time, which some commentators interpret as a sign of greater religious devotion. The mosque is home to numerous radicals. For example, the imam, Mohammed Fazazi, advocates killing non-believers and encourages his followers to embrace martyrdom (see 1993-Late 2001 and Early 2001).
Atta Teaches Classes at Al-Quds - After a time, Atta begins to teach classes at the mosque. He is stern with his students and criticizes them for wearing their hair in ponytails and gold chains around their necks, as well as for listening to music, which he says is a product of the devil. If a woman shows up, her father is informed she is not welcome. This is one of the reasons that, of the 80 students that start the classes, only a handful are left at the end.
Other Hijackers and Cell Members Attend Al-Quds - One of Atta’s associates, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, also teaches classes at the mosque. 9/11 hijackers Marwan Alshehhi and Ziad Jarrah start attending the mosque at different times and possibly first meet Atta there. Other mosque attendees who interact with the future hijackers at the mosque include Said Bahaji, and al-Qaeda operatives Mamoun Darkazanli and Mohammed Haydar Zammar.
Is the Mosque Monitored? - According to author Terry McDermott, German investigators notice Bahaji meeting frequently with Darkazanli and Zammar at the mosque, so they presumably have a source inside it. [PBS Frontline, 1/2002; Burke, 2004, pp. 242; McDermott, 2005, pp. 1-5, 34-37, 72] The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will later report that there probably is an informer working for the LfV, the Hamburg state intelligence agency, inside the mosque by 1999. Somehow, the LfV is very knowledgeable about Atta and some his associates, and their behavior inside the mosque (see (April 1, 1999)). [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt), 2/2/2003] Radical imam Fazazi will continue to preach at the mosque until late 2001 (see Mid-September-Late 2001).
Entity Tags: Said Bahaji, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Mohammed Fazazi, Ziad Jarrah, Marwan Alshehhi, German State Office of Constitutional Security, Mohamed Atta, Mamoun Darkazanli
Category Tags: Key Hijacker Events, Marwan Alshehhi, Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Mamoun Darkazanli, Other Possible Moles or Informants, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh, Al-Qaeda in Germany
Spring 1996: 9/11 Hijacker Hanjour Stays in Florida
9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour, who returned to his native Saudi Arabia after a previous stay in the US (see October 3, 1991-February 1992), now arrives in the US for the second time, and will spend much of the next three years in the country. Hanjour first stays in Miramar, Florida with a couple that are longtime friends with Abulrahman Hanjour, his eldest brother: Adnan Khalil, a Saudi professor at a local college, and his wife Susan. Susan Khalil later remembers Hani Hanjour as socially inept, with “really bad hygiene.” She says, “Of all my husband’s colorful friends, he was probably the most nondescript. He would blend into the wall.” The Washington Post later reports: “Hanjour’s meek, introverted manner fits a recurrent pattern in the al-Qaeda network of unsophisticated young men being recruited as helpers in terrorist attacks. FBI agents have told people they have interviewed about Hanjour that he ‘fit the personality to be manipulated and brainwashed.’” Yet, Susan Khalil says, “I didn’t get the feeling that he hated me or hated Americans.” Hanjour, she says, “was very kind and gentle to my son, who was 3 years old.” He prays frequently, at their home and at a nearby mosque. After staying for about a month he leaves the Khalil’s, having been accepted at a flight school in California (see April 30-Early September 1996). [Associated Press, 9/21/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 10/2/2001; Washington Post, 10/15/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 226] Many of the hijackers will later live in this part of Florida. A nearby mosque is run by radical imam Gulshair Shukrijumah, who possibly associates with Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi in 2000 and 2001 (see 2000-2001 and May 2, 2001). [New York Times, 3/22/2003]
Entity Tags: Gulshair Shukrijumah, Hani Hanjour, Adnan Khalil, Susan Khalil
Category Tags: Hani Hanjour, Hijacker Visas and Immigration
Early 1996: FBI and Philippine Agents Bungle Capture of KSM
Bandido’s bar in Manila. This may be the restaurant frequented by KSM. [Source: Public domain]In January 1995 the Bojinka plot is foiled in the Philippines and on February 7, 1995, Ramzi Yousef is arrested in Pakistan (see February 7, 1995), but Yousef’s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) continues to live in the Philippines much of the time. KSM remains confident that he will not be arrested, and eats at a particular restaurant in Manila at roughly the same time almost every night. In early 1996, the FBI and Philippine authorities attempt to arrest KSM at Bandido’s restaurant. But counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna will later claim the “operation failed apparently due to the visibility of the FBI and other agents working on the case.” KSM flees to Qatar, where he was been living off and on since 1992 (see 1992-1996). But Gunaratna claims KSM continues to live part of the time in the Philippines as well until about September 1996. [Gunaratna, 2003]
Entity Tags: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Action Before 9/11, 1995 Bojinka Plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
March 1996: Movie Features Planned Suicide Attack with Commercial Jet
Executive Decision. [Source: Warner Bros.]Executive Decision, a military action film, has a plot about a group of Arab terrorists who hijack a transatlantic jet to gain the release of their leader, who is imprisoned in the United States. But what looks initially like a traditional hijacking is in fact a suicide mission. The plane carries a huge load of nerve gas that has been smuggled out of Russia, which the terrorists intend to explode over Washington, killing millions. The release demand is a ruse to convince US authorities to let the plane approach Washington unharmed. But thanks to an intelligence analyst who has been following the group’s efforts to obtain chemical weapons, the ruse is unraveled and the Pentagon considers asking the president for permission to shoot down the plane over the Atlantic. However, a Special Ops commander proposes a daring plan to avert a shoot down. Using a new Stealth fighter plane, he offers to board the jet in mid-air and disable the bomb. [New York Times, 3/15/1996] This movie is one of many works of fiction that will be remembered after 9/11 for their eerie similarity to the attacks. [New York Times, 9/13/2001]
March-May 1996: US, Sudan Squabble over Bin Laden’s Fate
US demands for Sudan to hand over its extensive files about bin Laden (see March 8, 1996-April 1996) escalate into demands to hand over bin Laden himself. Bin Laden has been living in Sudan since 1991, at a time when the Sudanese government’s ideology was similar to his. But after the US put Sudan on its list of terrorism sponsors and began economic sanctions in 1993, Sudan began to change. In 1994, it handed the notorious terrorist “Carlos the Jackal” to France. In March 1996, Sudan’s defense minister goes to Washington and engages in secret negotiations over bin Laden. Sudan offers to extradite bin Laden to anywhere he might stand trial. Some accounts claim that Sudan offers to hand bin Laden directly to the US, but the US decides not to take him because they do not have enough evidence at the time to charge him with a crime. [Washington Post, 10/3/2001; Village Voice, 10/31/2001; Vanity Fair, 1/2002] Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke later will call this story a “fable” invented by the Sudanese and Americans friendly to Sudan. He will point out that bin Laden “was an ideological blood brother, family friend, and benefactor” to Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi, so any offers to hand him over may have been disingenuous. [Clarke, 2004, pp. 142-43] CIA Director George Tenet later will deny that Sudan made any offers to hand over bin Laden directly to the US. [US Congress, 10/17/2002] The US reportedly asks Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan to accept bin Laden into custody, but is refused by all three governments. [Coll, 2004, pp. 323] The 9/11 Commission later will claim it finds no evidence that Sudan offers bin Laden directly to the US, but it does find evidence that Saudi Arabia was discussed as an option. [9/11 Commission, 3/23/2004] US officials insist that bin Laden leave Sudan for anywhere but Somalia. One US intelligence source in the region later will state: “We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn’t want this to happen.” [Washington Post, 10/3/2001; Village Voice, 10/31/2001] On May 18, 1996, bin Laden flies to Afghanistan, and the US does not try to stop him (see May 18, 1996).
Entity Tags: Egypt, Sudan, United States, Jordan, George J. Tenet, Osama bin Laden, Richard A. Clarke, Saudi Arabia, Central Intelligence Agency, Hassan al-Turabi
March 8, 1996-April 1996: US Asks Sudan for Its Files on Al-Qaeda, Then Declines to Accept Them
Omar al-Bashir. [Source: PBS]In 1993, the US put Sudan on its list of nations sponsoring terrorism, which automatically leads to economic sanctions. Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi espoused radical militant views, and allowed bin Laden to live in Sudan. But, as the 9/11 Commission later will note, “The Sudanese regime began to change. Though al-Turabi had been its inspirational leader, General Omar al-Bashir, president since 1989, had never been entirely under his thumb. Thus as outside pressures mounted, al-Bashir’s supporters began to displace those of al-Turabi.” In 1995, the US begins putting serious pressure on Sudan to deal with bin Laden, who is still living there. [Observer, 9/30/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 61] On March 8, 1996, the US sends Sudan a memorandum listing the measures Sudan can take to get the sanctions revoked. The second of six points listed is, “Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and passport data on mujaheddin that Osama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan.” [New York Times, 9/21/1998; Washington Post, 10/3/2001] Sudanese intelligence had been monitoring bin Laden since he’d moved there in 1991, collecting a “vast intelligence database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 leading members of his al-Qaeda terrorist network.” The files include information on their backgrounds, families, and contacts, plus photographs. There also is extensive information on bin Laden’s world-wide financial network. “One US source who has seen the files on bin Laden’s men in Khartoum said some were ‘an inch and a half thick.’” [Observer, 9/30/2001] An Egyptian intelligence officer with extensive Sudanese intelligence contacts says, “They knew all about them: who they were, where they came from. They had copies of their passports, their tickets; they knew where they went. Of course that information could have helped enormously. It is the history of those people.” To the surprise of US officials making the demands, the Sudanese seem receptive to sharing the file. This leads to a battle within the US government between top FBI officials, who want to engage the Sudanese and get their files, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Susan Rice, her assistant secretary for Africa, who want to isolate them politically and economically. The National Security Council is also opposed. The US decides to increase its demands, and tells Sudan to turn over not just files on bin Laden, but bin Laden himself (see March-May 1996). Ultimately, the US will get Sudan to evict bin Laden in May 1996 (see May 18, 1996), but they will not press for the files and will not get them. [Washington Post, 10/3/2001; Vanity Fair, 1/2002] An American involved in the secret negotiations later will says, “I’ve never seen a brick wall like that before. Somebody let this slip up.… We could have dismantled his operations and put a cage on top. It was not a matter of arresting bin Laden but of access to information. That’s the story, and that’s what could have prevented September 11. I knew it would come back to haunt us.” [Village Voice, 10/31/2001] Vanity Fair magazine later will opine, “How could this have happened? The simple answer is that the Clinton administration had accused Sudan of sponsoring terrorism, and refused to believe that anything it did to prove its bona fides could be genuine.” [Vanity Fair, 1/2002] The US will continue to refuse Sudan’s offers to take the files (see April 5, 1997; February 5, 1998; May 2000).
Entity Tags: Susan Rice, National Security Council, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hassan al-Turabi, Omar Al-Bashir, Madeleine Albright
March 13, 1996: Clinton Administration Criticized for Meetings with Radical Muslim Activist
President Clinton meeting with Abdulrahman Alamoudi in the 1990s. [Source: PBS]Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson, head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, criticizes the Clinton administration for its ties to Abdulrahman Alamoudi in a Wall Street Journal editorial. Alamoudi is a prominent Muslim activist and heads an organization called the American Muslim Council (AMC). Emerson notes that on November 9, 1995, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore met with Alamoudi as part of a meeting with 23 Muslim and Arab leaders. And on December 8, 1995, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, met with Alamoudi at the White House along with several other American Islamic leaders. Emerson notes that Alamoudi openly supports Hamas, even though the US government officially designated it a terrorist financier in early 1995 (see January 1995), and he has been the primary public defender of high ranking Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk, who the US declared a terrorism financier and then imprisoned in 1995 (see July 5, 1995-May 1997). He notes that Alamoudi’s AMC also has close ties to other Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and in 1994 the AMC co-sponsored a trip to the US for Sudanese leader Hasan al-Turabi, a well-known radical militant who is hosting Osama bin Laden in Sudan at the time. Emerson concludes, “The president is right to invite Muslim groups to the White House. But by inviting the extremist element of the American Muslim community—represented by the AMC—the administration undercuts moderate Muslims and strengthens the groups committing terrorist attacks.” [Wall Street Journal, 3/13/1996] It will later be reported that in 1994, US intelligence discovered that the AMC helped pass money from bin Laden to Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, but it is not known if Clinton was aware of this (see Shortly After March 1994). But Alamoudi’s political influence in the US will not diminish and he will later be courted by future President Bush (see July 2000). He will eventually be sentenced to a long prison term for illegal dealings with Libya (see October 15, 2004).
Entity Tags: William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, Steven Emerson, Mousa Abu Marzouk, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Abdurahman Alamoudi, Albert Arnold (“Al”) Gore, Jr., Hassan al-Turabi, Anthony Lake, American Muslim Council, Clinton administration
Spring 1996-December 23, 2000: United Arab Emirates Army Pays for Hijacker Alshehhi’s Studies
A poor photocopy of Marwan Alshehhi’s United Arab Emirates passport. [Source: FBI]Marwan Alshehhi, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) national, volunteered for the UAE army shortly after leaving high school (presumably in late 1995, based on his age). After going through basic training, in the spring of 1996 he is granted a college scholarship to Germany, paid for by the UAE army. Alshehhi is to learn German, then study marine engineering. The scholarship is accompanied by a monthly stipend of around $2,200. The UAE army declares him a deserter in April 2000, shortly before he quits school and moves to the US (see April 1, 2000). It is not clear why. Curiously, Alshehhi will continue to receive this stipend despite being a deserter, and even after he drops out of school in Germany and begins attending flight school in the US. The stipend comes to an end in December 2000. [9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 132 ; McDermott, 2005, pp. 53-56, 196]
Entity Tags: Marwan Alshehhi, United Arab Emirates
Category Tags: Marwan Alshehhi
Timeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks
Category Tags: Algerian Militant Collusion, Alleged Al-Qaeda Linked Attacks, Other Possible Moles or Informants
April 1996: US Aware of Al-Qaeda Cell in Kenya, Begins Monitoring It
It will later be revealed in a US trial that, by this time, US intelligence agents are aware that an al-Qaeda cell exists in Kenya. (In fact, it may have been aware of this since late 1994 (see Late 1994)). [East African, 1/1/2001] Further evidence confirming and detailing the cell is discovered in May and June of 1996 (see May 21, 1996). By August 1996, US intelligence is continually monitoring five telephone lines in Nairobi used by the cell members, such as Wadih El-Hage. The tapping reveals that the cell is providing false passports and other documents to operatives. They are sending coded telephone numbers to and from al-Qaeda headquarters in Afghanistan. The surveillance is apparently being conducted without the required approval of either President Clinton or Attorney General Janet Reno. [Associated Press, 12/19/2000; East African, 1/1/2001] Prudence Bushnell, the US ambassador to Kenya, will be briefed about the cell in early 1997, but will be told there is no evidence of a specific threat against the embassy or American interests in Kenya. [New York Times, 1/9/1999] Ali Mohamed, an al-Qaeda double agent living in California, will later admit in US court that he had been in long distance contact with Wadih El-Hage, one of the leaders of the cell, since at least 1996. It will also be revealed that US intelligence had been wiretapping Mohamed’s California phone calls since at least 1994 (see Late 1994), so presumably US intelligence is recording calls between Mohamed and the Kenya cell from both ends. The Nairobi phone taps continue until at least August 1997, when Kenyan and US agents conduct a joint search of El-Hage’s Nairobi house (see August 21, 1997). [United States of America v. Ali Mohamed, 10/20/2000; Associated Press, 12/19/2000; East African, 1/1/2001]
Entity Tags: Al-Qaeda, Ali Mohamed, Prudence Bushnell, Wadih El-Hage
Category Tags: 1998 US Embassy Bombings, Remote Surveillance, Ali Mohamed, Wadih El-Hage
April 1996-March 1997: Yousef Communicates with Islamic Militants from within Maximum Security Prison Using Telephone Provided by FBI
Gregory Scarpa Jr. [Source: Publicity photo (mafiason.com]Ramzi Yousef, mastermind along with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Operation Bojinka plots, is in a maximum-security prison, sentenced to hundreds of years of prison time for his plots. However, he can communicate with Gregory Scarpa Jr., a mob figure in the cell next to him. The FBI sets up a sting operation with Scarpa’s cooperation to learn more of what and whom Yousef knows. Scarpa is given a telephone, and he allows Yousef to use it. However, Yousef uses the sting operation for his own ends, communicating with operatives on the outside in code language without giving away their identities. He attempts to find passports to get co-conspirators into the US, and there is some discussion about imminent attacks on US passenger jets. Realizing the scheme has backfired, the FBI terminates the telephone sting in late 1996, but Yousef manages to keep communicating with the outside world for several more months. [New York Daily News, 9/24/2000; New York Daily News, 1/21/2002; Lance, 2003, pp. 280-82; Harmon, 2009, pp. 187-188,199-201]
Entity Tags: Gregory Scarpa Jr., Ramzi Yousef, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Category Tags: Warning Signs, Ramzi Yousef, 1995 Bojinka Plot
April 11, 1996: 9/11 Hijacker Atta Makes Will
The al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, where Mohamed Atta made his will. [Source: Der Speigel]Future 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta makes his will in Germany. It is not clear that the text of the will is actually written by Atta. For example, author Lawrence Wright will say that Atta merely signs a “standardized will” he gets from the Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, and journalists Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding will say that the will is a “printed-out form devised by the mosque.” Atta apparently makes it as he is angered by new reports of an Israeli operation against Lebanon, which begins on this day. [Fouda and Fielding, 2003, pp. 81-2; Wright, 2006, pp. 307] Although the act of making a will is not that unusual for a 27-year old Muslim, the content of the will is unusual, perhaps reflecting the radical environment of the mosque (see Early 1996). For example, it says: “… [6] I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good bye to me because I don’t approve it… [9] The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals… [11] I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.” The will is witnessed by Abdelghani Mouzdi and Mounir El Motassadeq, who also make wills around the same time. [Atta, 4/11/1996; Burke, 2004, pp. 242; McDermott, 2005, pp. 49, 245-7, 274]
Entity Tags: Abdelghani Mzoudi, Mounir El Motassadeq, Mohamed Atta
Category Tags: Mohamed Atta, Al-Qaeda in Germany
April 25, 1996: New Anti-Terrorism Law Passed
President Clinton signs the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which the New York Times calls “broad legislation that provides new tools and penalties for federal law-enforcement officials to use in fighting terrorism.” The Clinton administration proposed the bill in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). In many ways, the original bill will be mirrored by the USA Patriot Act six years later (see October 26, 2001). Civil libertarians on both the left and right opposed the legislation. Political analyst Michael Freeman called the proposal one of the “worst assaults on civil liberties in decades,” and the Houston Chronicle called it a “frightening” and “grievous” assault on domestic freedoms. Many Republicans opposed the bill, and forced a compromise that removed increased wiretap authority and lower standards for lawsuits against sellers of guns used in crimes. CNN called the version that finally passed the Republican-controlled Congress a “watered-down version of the White House’s proposal. The Clinton administration has been critical of the bill, calling it too weak. The original House bill, passed last month, had deleted many of the Senate’s anti-terrorism provisions because of lawmakers’ concerns about increasing federal law enforcement powers. Some of those provisions were restored in the compromise bill.” [CNN, 4/18/1996; New York Times, 4/25/1996; Roberts, 2008, pp. 35] An unusual coalition of gun rights groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) led the opposition to the law. [New York Times, 4/17/1996] By the time Congress passed the bill, it had been, in the words of FBI Director Louis Freeh, “stripped… of just about every meaningful provision.” [Roberts, 2008, pp. 35] The law makes it illegal in the US to provide “material support” to any organization banned by the State Department. [Guardian, 9/10/2001]
Entity Tags: William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, Louis J. Freeh, National Rifle Association, American Civil Liberties Union, Clinton administration, Michael Freeman, USA Patriot Act, US Congress
Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties, US Domestic Terrorism
Category Tags: Counterterrorism Policy/Politics, Terrorism Financing
Late April 1996: US Monitors Al-Qaeda Canceling Singapore Plot
According to counterterrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, US intelligence monitoring al-Qaeda communications learn that al-Qaeda is canceling an attack on Western targets in Singapore. On April 18, 1996, 108 Lebanese civilians seeking refuge at a UN camp in Qana, Lebanon, are killed by mortars fired by Israeli forces. Bin Laden “was keen not to dissipate what he envisaged as widespread revulsion against Israel’s action and hence called off the strike in Southeast Asia. Al-Qaeda’s team in question was very determined to go ahead, having spent years preparing the attack, and according to the intercepts it proved difficult for Osama to convince it otherwise.” Gunaratna claims the US learned this through the NSA’s Echelon satellite network (see Before September 11, 2001) “and other technical monitoring of their communications traffic.” [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 133-134] If true, this case supports other evidence that the US was successfully monitoring bin Laden’s communications from an early date (see Early 1990s) and that al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asia operations were penetrated years before an important al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia discussing the 9/11 plot (see January 5-8, 2000).
Entity Tags: Echelon, Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, National Security Agency
Category Tags: Remote Surveillance, Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia
April 30-Early September 1996: Hani Hanjour Studies English in Northern California; Enrolls at Aeronautics Academy
Hijacker Hani Hanjour moves from Florida to the San Francisco Bay area in California, staying with an unidentified family. He lives with them from late April to early September. For most of this time he takes English lessons in an intensive program requiring 30 hours of class time per week, at the ELS Language Center at Holy Names College in Oakland. He reportedly reaches a level of proficiency sufficient to “survive very well in the English language.” Yet in 2001, managers at an Arizona flight school will report him to the FAA at least five times, partly because they think his level of English is inadequate for him to keep his pilot’s license. Due to his poor English, it will take Hanjour five hours to complete an oral exam meant to last just two hours (see January-February 2001). At the end of this period, Hanjour enrolls on a rigorous one-year flight training program at the renowned Sierra Academy of Aeronautics, in Oakland. However, he only attends the 30-minute orientation class, on September 8, and then never returns. [CBS 5 (San Francisco), 10/10/2001; San Francisco Chronicle, 10/10/2001; Associated Press, 10/11/2001; Cape Cod Times, 10/21/2001; Star-Tribune (Minneapolis), 12/21/2001; Associated Press, 5/10/2002]
Entity Tags: Hani Hanjour, Sierra Academy of Aeronautics
May 1996: Al-Qaeda Begins Using Vital Communications Hub in Yemen
A close-up of Al-Qaeda’s communications hub in Sana’a, Yemen. [Source: PBS / Nova]Al-Qaeda begins using an important communications hub and operations center in Yemen. [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 2-3, 16, 188] The hub is set up because al-Qaeda is headquartered in Afghanistan, but requires another location that has access to regular telephone services and major air links. It is located in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, in the neighbourhood of Madbah. Ahmed al-Hada, an associate of Osama bin Laden’s who fought in Afghanistan, runs the hub and lives there with his family. [Bamford, 2008, pp. 7-8] Terrorism analyst Rohan Gunaratna will say that the hub is used as a switchboard to “divert and receive calls and messages from the [Middle East] region and beyond.” [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 2-3, 16, 188] FBI agent Mark Rossini will say, “That house was a focal point for operatives in the field to call in, that number would then contact bin Laden to pass along information and receive instruction back.” [PBS, 2/3/2009] Author James Bamford will add: “[T]he house in Yemen became the epicenter of bin Laden’s war against America, a logistics base to coordinate attacks, a switchboard to pass on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet to discuss and carry out operations.” Bin Laden himself places many calls to the house, and it is used to coordinate the attacks on US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Future 9/11 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar also lives at the house at some point in the late 1990s with his wife Hoda, al-Hada’s daughter. [Bamford, 2008, pp. 8]
Entity Tags: Mark Rossini, Al-Qaeda, Ahmed al-Hada, James Bamford, Rohan Gunaratna
Category Tags: Alhazmi and Almihdhar, Remote Surveillance, Yemen Hub, Yemeni Militant Collusion
May 1996: US Seeks Stability in Afghanistan for Unocal Pipeline
Robin Raphel. [Source: Mark Wilson / Agence France-Presse]Robin Raphel, Deputy Secretary of State for South Asia, speaks to the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister about Afghanistan. She says that the US government “now hopes that peace in the region will facilitate US business interests,” such as the proposed Unocal gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. [Coll, 2004, pp. 330]
Entity Tags: Unocal, Robin Raphel, Russia
May 1996: Saudis and Al-Qaeda Allegedly Strike a Secret Deal
French intelligence secretly monitors a meeting of Saudi billionaires at the Hotel Royale Monceau in Paris this month with the financial representative of al-Qaeda. “The Saudis, including a key Saudi prince joined by Muslim and non-Muslim gun traffickers, [meet] to determine who would pay how much to Osama. This [is] not so much an act of support but of protection—a payoff to keep the mad bomber away from Saudi Arabia.” [Palast, 2002, pp. 100] Participants also agree that Osama bin Laden should be rewarded for promoting Wahhabism (an austere form of Islam that requires literal interpretation of the Koran) in Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, and other places. [Fifth Estate, 10/29/2003 ] This extends an alleged secret deal first made between the Saudi government and bin Laden in 1991. Later, 9/11 victims’ relatives will rely on the “nonpublished French intelligence report” of this meeting in their lawsuit against important Saudis. [Star-Tribune (Minneapolis), 8/16/2002] According to French counterterrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard and/or reporter Greg Palast, there are about 20 people at the meeting, including Saudi intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal, an unnamed brother of bin Laden, and an unnamed representative from the Saudi Defense Ministry. [Fifth Estate, 10/29/2003 ; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 10/29/2003] Palast will claim that Saudi businessman Abdullah Taha Bakhsh attends the meeting. Bakhsh saved George W. Bush’s Harken Oil from bankruptcy around 1990. Palast will claim the notorious Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi also attends the meeting. [Democracy Now!, 3/4/2003; Santa Fe New Mexican, 3/20/2003] In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, Slate will claim that Khashoggi is a “shadowy international arms merchant” who is “connected to every scandal of the past 40 years.” Amongst other things, he was a major investor in BCCI and a key player in the Iran-Contra affair. [Slate, 12/4/2000; Slate, 11/14/2001; Slate, 3/12/2003] Palast, noting that the French monitored the meeting, will ask, “Since US intelligence was thus likely informed, the question becomes why didn’t the government immediately move against the Saudis?” [Palast, 2002, pp. 100]
Entity Tags: Al-Qaeda, Greg Palast, Turki al-Faisal, Abdullah Bakhsh, Adnan Khashoggi, France
Category Tags: Saudi Arabia, Terrorism Financing, BCCI, Bin Laden Family
May-June 1996: FEMA Considers Use of Airborne Operations Center at Atlanta Olympics
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reportedly considers using an E-4B National Airborne Operations Center during the Atlanta Olympics. The reason for this is not known, but it could be related to terrorism fears, including a possible air attack (see January 20, 1997). [Federal Computer Week, 6/2/1996] An aviation website will later show a picture of an E-4B taking off from Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Georgia on May 14, “after crew attended meeting with FEMA prior to ‘96 Atlanta Olympics.” [Airliners.net, 2000] However, there are no reports on whether an E-4B is actually used during the Olympics.
Entity Tags: Federal Emergency Management Agency, E-4B National Airborne Operations Center
Between May and December 1996: NSA Discovers Al-Qaeda Communications Hub
The NSA discovers a communications hub al-Qaeda uses to coordinate its global operations. The hub was set up in May 1996 by Ahmed al-Hada, a close associate of Osama bin Laden (see May 1996), and is discovered at some time in the next six months. [Bamford, 2008, pp. 16] According to a PBS documentary, the NSA discovers the hub by monitoring bin Laden’s calls from his satellite phone in Afghanistan (see November 1996-Late August 1998): “Once he starts dialing from Afghanistan, NSA’s listening posts quickly tap into his conversations.… By tracking all calls in and out of Afghanistan, the NSA quickly determines bin Laden’s number: 873-682505331.” According to CIA manager Michael Scheuer, bin Laden’s satellite phone is a “godsend,” because “[i]t gave us an idea, not only of where he was in Afghanistan, but where al-Qaeda, as an organization, was established, because there were calls to various places in the world.” As bin Laden’s phone calls are not encrypted, there is no code for the NSA to break. Instead, NSA voice interceptors and linguists translate, transcribe, and write summaries of the calls. In addition, human analysts plot out which numbers are being called from bin Laden’s phone and how frequently. [PBS, 2/3/2009]
Entity Tags: National Security Agency, Michael Scheuer
May 11, 1996-August 2001: Canadian Intelligence Monitors Islamic Jihad Operative Communicating with High-Ranking Militants
Mahmoud Jaballah. [Source: Public domain via Toronto Star]Islamic Jihad operative Mahmoud Jaballah enters Canada on May 11, 1996 and applies for refugee status. There is evidence Canadian intelligence, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), begins monitoring him shortly after his arrival. A 2008 CSIS report mentions details of phone calls Jaballah makes to high-ranking Islamic Jihad leaders as early as June 1996. The CSIS will later conclude that his “primary objective incoming to Canada was to acquire permanent status in a country where he would feel secure in maintaining communications with other [Islamic Jihad] members.” Jaballah is wary his calls may be monitored, and uses code words to discuss sensitive topics. But the CSIS is able to figure out many of the code words, for instance the mention of clothes to refer to travel documents.
Jaballah frequently calls Thirwat Salah Shehata, one of nine members of Islamic Jihad’s ruling council; the Egyptian government will later also call Shehata “a key figure in bin Laden’s organization.” They are in regular contact until August 1998, when Shehata moves to a new location in Lebanon but does not give Jaballah his new phone number.
Jaballah also stays in frequent contact with Ahmad Salama Mabruk, another member of Islamic Jihad’s ruling council. Mabruk is arrested in 1998.
Jaballah is also in frequent contact with Ibrahim Eidarous and Adel Abdel Bary, two Islamic Jihad operatives living in London and working closely with Khalid al-Fawwaz, Osama bin Laden’s de facto press secretary. He calls them over 60 times between 1996 and 1998. Bin Laden is monitored by Western intelligence agencies as he frequently calls Bary, Eidarous, and al-Fawwaz until all three are arrested one month after the 1998 African embassy bombings (see Early 1994-September 23, 1998). Jaballah presumably becomes more suspicious that he is being monitored in September 1998, when Canadian officials interview him and tell him they are aware of his contacts with the three men arrested in London.
The CSIS will later call Jaballah an “established contact” for Ahmed Said Khadr, a founding al-Qaeda member living in Canada. Khadr had been arrested in Pakistan in 1995 for suspected involvement in an Islamic Jihad bombing there, but he was released several months later after pressure from the Canadian government. After returning to Canada, Khadr ran his own non-profit organization, Health and Education Projects International (HEPI), and allegedly used the money he raised to help fund the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. If the CSIS was aware of Khadr’s activities through Jaballah, it is not clear why no action was taken against him or his charity before 9/11.
Essam Marzouk is an al-Qaeda operative living in Vancouver, Canada. During one call, Jaballah is asked for Marzouk’s phone number. He says he does not have it, but gives the name of another operative, Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, who is known to be in contact with Marzouk. Marzouk will later leave Canada to train the African embassy bombers, stopping by Toronto to visit Mahjoub on the way out of the country.
Jaballah is monitored communicating with other Islamic Jihad operatives, including ones in Germany, Yemen, and elsewhere in Canada.
He is arrested in March 1999, but after his arrest his wife warns him to reduce his communications and offers to help obtain information from his associates. He acquires a post office box in August 1999 and uses it to continue communicating with militants overseas. He is released in November 1999 and the CSIS will later claim he continues to communicate with other militants until he is arrested again in August 2001. [Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2/22/2008 ]
Entity Tags: Khaldan training camp, Thirwat Salah Shehata, Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, Osama bin Laden, Khalid al-Fawwaz, Ahmad Salama Mabruk, Ahmed Said Khadr, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Mahmoud Jaballah, Adel Abdel Bary, Ibrahim Eidarous, Islamic Jihad, Essam Marzouk
May 18, 1996: Sudan Expels Bin Laden; US Fails to Stop His Flight to Afghanistan
After pressure from the US (see March-May 1996), the Sudanese government asks bin Laden to leave the country. He decides to go to Afghanistan. He departs along with many other al-Qaeda members, plus much money and resources. Bin Laden flies to Afghanistan in a C-130 transport plane with an entourage of about 150 men, women, and children, stopping in Doha, Qatar, to refuel, where governmental officials greet him warmly. [Los Angeles Times, 9/1/2002; Coll, 2004, pp. 325] The US knows in advance that bin Laden is going to Afghanistan, but does nothing to stop him. Sudan’s defense minister Elfatih Erwa later says in an interview, “We warned [the US]. In Sudan, bin Laden and his money were under our control. But we knew that if he went to Afghanistan no one could control him. The US didn’t care; they just didn’t want him in Somalia. It’s crazy.” [Washington Post, 10/3/2001; Village Voice, 10/31/2001] US-al-Qaeda double agent Ali Mohamed handles security during the move. [Raleigh News and Observer, 10/21/2001]
Entity Tags: Somalia, Osama bin Laden, Sudan, Elfatih Erwa, Al-Qaeda, Ali Mohamed
Category Tags: Hunt for Bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, Osama Bin Laden
After May 18, 1996-September 1996: Bin Laden Quickly Alligns With the Taliban After Arrival in Afghanistan
Bin Laden arrives in Afghanistan on May 18, 1996 after being expelled from Sudan (see May 18, 1996). Initially, bin Laden stays in an area not controlled by the Taliban, who are fighting for control of the country. But by the end of September 1996, the Taliban conquer the capital of Kabul and gain control over most of the the country (see September 27, 1996). Bin Laden then becomes the guest of the Taliban. The Taliban, bin Laden, and their mutual ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar then call for a jihad against Ahmed Shah Massoud, who retains control over a small area along Afghanistan’s northern border. As bin Laden establishes a new safe base and political ties, he issues a public fatwa, or religious decree, authorizing attacks on Western military targets in the Arabian Peninsula (see August 1996). [Coll, 2004, pp. 326-328]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmed Shah Massoud
May 21, 1996: Boat Accident Helps Alert CIA to Al-Qaeda Cell in Kenya
A passenger ferry capsizes on Lake Victoria in East Africa and one of the more than 800 who drown is Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, al-Qaeda’s military commander (his job will be taken over by Mohammed Atef). Al-Qaeda operatives Wadih El-Hage and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed (a.k.a. Haroun Fazul) show up at the disaster scene to find out if al-Banshiri is still alive. There are many journalists covering the disaster and a Western investigator recognizes Fazul and El-Hage when they happen to appear in some of the widely broadcast footage. [Washington Post, 11/23/1998] El-Hage sends a computer file about the drowning to double agent Ali Mohamed in California. Mohamed’s computer hard drive will be copied by US intelligence in 1997 (see October 1997-September 10, 1998). The CIA already has much of El-Hage’s biography on file by this time. It appears this event, along with the defection of Jamal al-Fadl (see June 1996-April 1997), only strengthen knowledge of the Kenya cell gained earlier in the year (see April 1996). By August 1996, if not earlier, the phones of El-Hage and Fazul in Nairobi are bugged and closely monitored by the CIA and NSA. Apparently, not much is learned from these phone calls because the callers speak in code, but the CIA does learn about other al-Qaeda operatives from the numbers and locations that are being called. This information is shared with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), and the JTTF becomes “convinced that flipping El-Hage [is] the best way to get to bin Laden.” [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 200]
Entity Tags: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Central Intelligence Agency, Ali Mohamed, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Wadih El-Hage, National Security Agency
Category Tags: Wadih El-Hage, 1998 US Embassy Bombings, Remote Surveillance, Key Captures and Deaths
Summer 1996-August 1998: British Mole Penetrates Militant Islamic Circles in London
Finsbury Park mosque. [Source: Salim Fadhley / Public Domain]Omar Nasiri, an agent of the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, and the French service Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), penetrates radical Islamic circles in London, getting close to leading imams Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza (see Mid 1996-October 1997), learning about the Algerian Groupe Isamique Armé (GIA) (see November 1996), and dealing with al-Qaeda manager Abu Zubaida in Pakistan (see (Mid-1996) and (Mid-1996 and After)). Nasiri’s main task is to attend the main locations where radicals gather, Abu Qatada’s Four Feathers center and Abu Hamza’s Finsbury Park mosque, get close to senior operatives there to obtain information, and identify militants, even though the mosques, as Nasiri will later put it, are already “crawling with spies.” The British services are mostly interested in whether the radicals intend to attack in Britain, but, although they come close to inciting such attacks, they never cross the line. Nasiri will later comment: “[Abu Hamza] was inciting his followers to attack just about everywhere else, but never within England. He came very close to this line many times. He incited his followers to attack anyone who tried to claim Muslim land. He said many times that British soldiers and colonizers were fair game.” Nasiri, who previously received explosives training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan (see Mid 1995-Spring 1996), also gets his associates in Afghanistan to send him his notebook from an explosives course and passes this on to his handlers, who are impressed at how sophisticated the formulae are. However, after a couple of years the radicals realize he is an informer. In addition, on the day of the African embassy bombings (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998) he is so upset that he switches his mobile phone off for the first time since he received it, so MI5 stops trusting him. He will later write: “They must have worried that I was, in fact, a sleeper and that I had disappeared to pursue some mission. I couldn’t blame them of course. I was a trained killer. From the very beginning they hadn’t trusted me; I knew that.” He has to leave Britain and his career as an informer is practically over. [Nasiri, 2006, pp. 259-303]
Entity Tags: UK Security Service (MI5), UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Abu Hamza al-Masri, Finsbury Park Mosque, Omar Nasiri, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, Abu Qatada
Category Tags: Abu Hamza Al-Masri, Abu Qatada, Other Possible Moles or Informants, Londonistan - UK Counterterrorism, Algerian Militant Collusion
June 1996: Informant’s Clues Point to KSM
Wali Khan Amin Shah. [Source: Peter Lance]While al-Qaeda operative Jamal al-Fadl gives a treasure trove of useful information on al-Qaeda to US intelligence (see June 1996-April 1997), one person he describes in detail is Wali Khan Amin Shah. Shah was one of the plotters of the Operation Bojinka plot (see February 7, 1995). Al-Fadl reveals that Shah has al-Qaeda ties. Author Peter Lance notes that US intelligence should have concluded that Shah’s fellow Operation Bojinka plotter, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), also has al-Qaeda ties. However, there is no new effort to find KSM, and he later goes on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks. [Lance, 2003, pp. 330-31]
Entity Tags: Peter Lance, Wali Khan Amin Shah, Al-Qaeda, Jamal al-Fadl, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
Category Tags: 1995 Bojinka Plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Other Possible Moles or Informants
June 1996: Bin Laden Meets with Pakistani Military Leaders
Mushaf Ali Mir. [Source: Paknews.com]According to controversial author Gerald Posner, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida meet with senior members of Pakistan’s military, including Mushaf Ali Mir, who becomes chief of Pakistan’s air force in 2000. Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan the month before, and the Pakistanis offer him protection if he allies with the Taliban. The alliance will prove successful, and bin Laden will call it “blessed by the Saudis,” who are already giving money to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. [Posner, 2003, pp. 105-06; Time, 8/31/2003] Perhaps not coincidentally, this meeting comes only one month after a deal was reportedly made that reaffirmed Saudi support for al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is initially based in Jalalabad, which is free of Taliban control, but after the deal, he moves his base to Kandahar, which is the center of Taliban power. [Asia Times, 9/17/2003]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Taliban, Mushaf Ali Mir, Abu Zubaida
Category Tags: Abu Zubaida, Pakistan and the ISI, Saudi Arabia
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July 2nd, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
The Maryland State Fire Marshal’s Office released its list of 2015 public fireworks displays:
Aberdeen, Ripken Stadium, Harford County, 10 p.m.
Bowie, Six Flags America, Prince George’s County, 9:30 p.m.
Chesapeake Beach, Mears Avenue at Chesapeake Beach, Calvert County, 9 p.m.
Chevy Chase, Chevy Chase Country Club, Montgomery County, 9:30 p.m.
Cockeysville, Oregon Ridge Park, Baltimore County, 8 p.m.
Flintstone, Evitts Resort, Rocky Gap Resort, Allegany County, 9:40 p.m.
Frederick, Harry Grove Stadium, Frederick County, 9:30 p.m.
Hagerstown, Hagerstown Suns ball field, Washington County, 9:30 p.m.
Lanham, Ballfield behind church, Prince George’s County, 9 p.m.
Lutherville, Baltimore Country Club, Baltimore County, 9:30 p.m.
Mt. Airy, Mt. Airy Fireman’s Carnival Grounds, Carroll County, 9:30 p.m.
Mt. Lake Park, Broadford Recreation, Garrett County, 9 p.m.
Pikesville, Suburban Country Club, Baltimore County, 9 p.m.
Pikesville, Woodholme Country Club, Baltimore County
Rock Hall, Rock Hall Harbor, Kent County, 9 p.m.
Rockville, Mattie J.T. Stepanek Park, Montgomery County, 9:15 p.m.
St. Mary’s City, Dock across from college, St. Mary’s County, 9 p.m.
Salisbury, Arthur Perdue Stadium, Wicomico County, 9 p.m.
Silver Spring, 18th fairway at Country Club, Montgomery County, 9:15 p.m.
Solomons, The TIKI Village, Calvert County, 7 p.m.
Stevenson, Harward Lane, Queen Anne’s County, 9:30 p.m.
Waldorf, Regency Furniture Stadium, Charles County, 9:30 p.m.
Walkersville, Walkersville Carnival Grounds, Frederick County, 10 p.m.
Annapolis, barge in Annapolis Harbor, Anne Arundel County, 9:15 p.m.
Annapolis, Epping Forest, Anne Arundel County, 10 p.m.
Baltimore City, Inner Harbor, 9:30 p.m.
Berlin, Showell Park, Worcester County, 9 p.m.
Bethesda, Congressional Country Club, Montgomery County, 9 p.m.
Bowie, Prince George’s Stadium, Prince George’s County, 6:35 p.m.
Boyds, South Germantown Park, Montgomery County, 9 p.m.
Cambridge, Great Marsh Park, Dorchester County, 9:15 p.m.
Catonsville, Catonsville High School, Baltimore County, 9:15 p.m.
Chestertown, Kent County, 9:20 p.m.
College Park, University of Maryland, Prince George’s County, 9:15 p.m.
Columbia, Columbia Lakefront, Howard County, dusk
Dundalk, North Point Government Center, Baltimore County, 9:15 p.m.
Easton, Field behind Target, Talbot County, 9:40 p.m.
Elkton, J. Evans McKenney Memorial Park, Cecil County, 9 p.m.
Essex, Eastern Yacht Club, Baltimore County
Frederick, Parkway Elementary School, Frederick County, 9:30 p.m.
Gaithersburg, Montgomery County Agricultural Fairgrounds, Montgomery County, 9:30 p.m.
Galena, Colchester Farms, Kent County, 9 p.m.
Gibsons Island, Mt. Bar Point, Anne Arundel County, 9 p.m.
Greenbelt, Buddy Attick Park, Prince George’s County, 9:15 p.m.
Hagerstown, Fairgrounds Park, Washington County, 9:30 p.m.
Hebron, Carnival Grounds, Wicomico County, 9:30 p.m.
Hollywood, Hollywood VFD, St. Mary’s County, 9 p.m.
Kensington, Albert Einstein High School, Montgomery County, 9 p.m.
Laurel, Cherry Lane Office Park, Prince George’s County, 9:30 p.m.
Loch Raven Village, Baltimore County, dusk
McHenry, Wisp at Deep Creek, Garrett County, 9:30 p.m.
Mount Vernon, Charles County, 9:30 p.m.
Ocean City, Dorchester Street, Worcester County, 9:30 p.m.
Ocean City, North Side Park, Worcester County, 9:30 p.m.
Ocean City, West 49th Street, Worcester County, 9:30 p.m.
Overlea, Fullerton Park, Baltimore County
Salisbury, Wicomico Youth & Civic Center and Wicomico County Stadium, 9:15 p.m.
Sharpsburg, Antietam National Battlefield, Washington County, 9:30 p.m.
St. Michaels, Talbot County, 9 p.m.
Takoma, Lee Jordan Field, Montgomery County, 9:30 p.m.
Towson, Loch Raven Academy, Baltimore County
Williamsport, Byren Memorial Park, Washington County, 9 p.m.
Havre de Grace, Tydings Park, Harford County, 9:30 p.m.
Ocean City, North Division and First Street, Worcester County, 8:30 p.m.
Source: wbaltv.com
June 10th, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
Summer Bucket List for Eating, Drinking and Playing Around DC
source: https://www.washingtonian.com/
Summer is heating up and our staff is dreaming of their warm weather to-do lists, from hiking excursions to crab feasts.
Crack Chesapeake crabs
“Visiting Cantler’s in Annapolis for Chesapeake blue crabs is on my summer bucket list. They also have the best crab dip and soft-shell clams.” –Jessica Sidman, food editor
Cross it off your list: Whether you’re looking for crabs nearby or destination crustaceans, Old Bay your way through our favorite Chesapeake crab houses.
Boat with brews
“Although it is basic AF, I really do want to try the paddle pub. I’m down for anything that gets me out on the water, and the view of the monuments from the river is great. And I’m no nutritionist, but I’m pretty sure that if you pedal while drinking beer, you negate all calories. So it’s basically good for you.” –Mimi Montgomery, associate editor
Cross it off your list: Reserve a seat on the booze cruise or rent the boat for a private Potomac River outing. Don’t forget that libations are BYOB.
Pedal down the river while drinking beer on the Potomac Paddle Pub. Photograph courtesy of Potomac Paddle Pub.
Drink ALL the piña coladas
“It was the first drink I ever tried, and I still love it so. My current favorites are at Tiki TNT, Suburbia, and Colada Shop, but I’m looking forward to trying them at Little Havana, Whaley’s Rose Garden, and Estadio, where Adam Bernbach switches out rum for sherry. ” -Ann Limpert, food editor
Cross it off your list: If you like piña coladas…you should head to an al fresco happy hour for a tropical staycation courtesy of the pineapple drink. Try the classic with a matcha twist or discover more refreshing drinks local bartenders are sipping this summer.
Frolic in a field of sunflowers
“I love sunflowers—they’re not only cheery, but they embody summer. So on my summer bucket list is a visit to the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area in Poolesville, Maryland, when its 30 acres of sunflowers peak in mid-to-late July. I went two years ago, and it was not only an Instagram slam dunk, but it was fun to see so many visitors smiling and happy.” -Sherri Dalphonse, executive editor
Cross it off your list: Capture the perfect summer ‘gram at the sunflower oasis. Remember: the flowers are good for pictures, not picking.
Snap a summer Instagram with 30 acres of sunflowers as the background.
Hike the great outdoors
“I’ve been dying to do more hiking this year, so I’m excited to hike along the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blue Ridge is a massive collection of peaks that stretch through five states. From what I’ve seen, you can witness some gorgeous sunsets at their peaks. I’d like to see one of those sunsets, though I doubt I’ll make it to the top!” -Kaila Philo, editorial fellow
Cross it off your list: You don’t have to go far for a peaceful day of hiking in nature, thanks to the DC area’s ample trails.
Feast on some barbecue
“When the humidity dials up, I start craving barbecue favorites like smoky brisket and pulled pork. I’ll be kicking off my Summer of Meat Sweats at the National Capital Barbecue Battle, catching all the saucy action before eating my way through the different regional styles.” -Daniella Byck, assistant editor
Cross it off your list: Get a crash course in ‘cue with our guide to Washington BBQ.
Dig into some barbecue at Texas Jacks in Arlington. Photo by Scott Suchman
Get to the Nationals Crab Feast
“Is anything more summery than cracking crabs while sitting on (yes, on) the field at Nationals Park, drinking cold Buds, and watching a game on the Jumbotron? This year, the Nats Feast on the Field is July 16. While the team plays the Orioles, home fans take the field for all-you-can-eat-and-drink Chesapeake blue crabs (take that, Baltimore), beer and wine, and sides.” -Anna Spiegel, food editor
Cross it off your list: Tickets are $85 to $125 ($35 for kids under 12). Don’t forget to snag a photo in the dug out.
Go cherry picking at Homestead Farm
“Sour cherry jam, sour cherry pie, sour cherry clafoutis—bring it on. When the season opens in mid-June, I’ll be at this Poolesville farm with my two-and-a-half year-old apprentice (who will likely get sidetracked by the goats and chickens, but oh well).” -Ann Limpert
Cross it off your list: To pluck the official fruit of the District or soon-to-be-in-season berries, head to a pick-your-own farm in Maryland or Virginia. Prefer your fruit pre-picked? Support local farmers at DC-area farmers markets to stock up on the season’s abundant offerings.
Pick your own cherries and berries at a local farm. Photograph courtesy of Flickr user Tetsuya Kankubo.
Bike and camp at the C&O Canal
“If your problem with camping is that there are often too many people, or—let’s be honest—your problem with everything is that there are often too many people, try bike camping, because even on the nicest day there may be, like, four other people doing it. Throw everything you need on your bike (sleeping bag, small tent, food) and head out on the C&O Canal towpath. The first of the Park Service’s 31 free campsitesis a reasonable 16 miles from Georgetown (pack a spare tube and pump; that path can wreak havoc on your tires). You can spend the night under the stars and return to “civilization” in less than 24 hours, refreshed and ready to act as if you enjoy the company of others for another week.” -Andrew Beaujon, senior editor
Cross it off your list: Our round-up of DC-area camping spots will help you find a kid-friendly site or a lodge to skip the tent and go glamping.
Cruise on the water taxi
“I want to ride the water taxi from Old Town to the Wharf, enjoying both waterfronts and the ride over, wind in my (long and luscious) hair. Some may want to try the new Potomac paddleboat pub (which sounds both terrible and awesome). I just want the good ole fashioned water taxi.” -Elliot Williams, assistant editor
Cross it off your list: Water taxi starting points are in DC and Virginia. Check multiple boxes with one ride by taking a boat to a Nationals or DC United game.
The water taxi has starting locations in DC and Virginia. Photograph by Evy Mages
Be a tourist in DC’s neighborhoods
“I moved to DC in January, and the only other time I’ve been here was during an 8th grade field trip. So, I’m still pretty fresh. Thus, I’m converting my summer bucket list into a DC neighborhood bucket list. Becoming invested and candid in a community comes from familiarizing yourself with it, one weekend excursion at a time.” -Will Peischel, editorial fellow
Cross it off your list: Take advantage of sunny days and walk the city with our DC neighborhood guide.
Explore the thriving Mexican food (and margarita) scene
“Our friends from California and Texas always complained about Washington’s Mexican food scene, but lately they’ve been a lot quieter (probably too busy eating tacos). There’s an exciting new wave of great taquerias and restaurants in town, whether you’re looking for inexpensive street-style eats or a blowout taco omakase(yep, that’s a thing).” -Anna Spiegel
Cross it off your list: Make your way to one of the new Mexican restaurants around DC to try the diverse types of tacos the city has to sample.
Crispy skate, Coca-Cola–marinated carnitas, and fried-shrimp tacos at Tacos, Tortas & Tequila.
Get creative with rosé
“To my mind, there are few better summer coolers than a cold glass of minerally, salmon-pink rosé from Provence. But even I am starting to feel rosé fatigue. So, I’ve turned to the pale blue cans of rosé cider from DC cider-maker Anxo, which you can pick up at places like Batch 13 and Metro Wine & Spirits. You have to like sour brews (this one is very puckery), but it’s really refreshing.” -Ann Limpert
Cross it off your list: Check out a new outdoor bar to see who is pouring the hybrid drink, like Dacha’s Navy Yard outpost. If you’re still ride or die rosé, head to a bottomless rosé brunch.
Sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
“Baseball tends to elude me, but I’ll still be donning the “W” hat in support of our hometown team. Sure, I might be singing about peanuts and Cracker Jacks, but you can find me sampling the new concessions in between home runs.” -Daniella Byck
Cross it off your list: Snatch up tickets for a home game at Nationals Park. Looking for a spot to eat and drink around the stadium? We’ve got you covered.
Don some red, white, and blue to cheer on the Nationals. Photograph courtesy of the Washington Nationals Baseball Club.
60+ Things To Do This May
May 8th, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
Passport DC – May 1-31
Have you ever wanted to step foot inside an embassy? During this month-long journey through DC’s international pathways, you get two incredible chances to do just that with the Around the World Embassy Tour on May 4 and the European Union Embassies’ Open House on May 11. Don’t miss these fascinating events that grant you unprecedented access.
Flower Mart – May 3-4
Calling all garden enthusiasts! Enjoy one of spring’s most impressive showcases of colorful perennials, cutting-edge landscape exhibits and extraordinary floral arrangements produced by international floral designers at the Washington National Cathedral, as well as embassies throughout the District. The Flower Mart, an official Passport DC event, lets you take part in family-friendly activities including garden tours and an antique carousel.
Friday: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Saturday: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.| Free admission
Washington National Cathedral, 3101 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016
Capital Harvest on the Plaza – May 3 – Nov. 22
Located in the Woodrow Wilson Plaza at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Capital Harvest on the Plaza is open from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. on Fridays from May through November. During your visit, you’ll find plenty of farm-fresh deliciousness and artisanal crafts, as well as recipes and tips for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Check out the full list of vendors to start planning your haul.
11 a.m. – 3 p.m. | Free admission
Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004
Around the World Embassy Tour– May 4
You can visit any of more than 40 embassies during this annual event that is free to all. Embassies that span five continents will open their doors from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with programming and activities for visitors on-site. Check out the list of participating embassies and plan your multicultural excursion through the streets of DC!
Running of the Chihuahuas – May 4
The Wharf celebrates Cinco de Mayo with this too-cute-to-be-true chihuahua race, now in its eighth year. Watch the little pups run their way to glory at DC’s hottest new development. You’ll also be able to enjoy a beer garden and music throughout the afternoon. Check out The Wharf’s calendar for other upcoming events.
1-5 p.m. | Free admission
The Wharf, 600 Water Street SW, Washington, DC 20024
11th Annual National Wine & Food Festival – May 4-5
The scenic National Harbor hosts this two-day festival that foodies will not want to miss. Hang out on the waterfront and indulge in cuisine from world-renowned chefs and culinary creatives, in addition to delicious wines, beers and cocktails. A rosé garden, a margarita bar, a Stella Artois Craft Beer Experience and Smooth Ambler Whiskey Wagon are all on the docket.
12-6 p.m. | Tickets
National Harbor, 165 Waterfront Street, National Harbor, MD 20745
JxJ – May 8-26
For the first time, the Washington Jewish Film Festival and the Washington Jewish Music Festival have been combined, creating a stunning multidisciplinary arts project throughout the city for three weeks. The film festival, now 29 years old, offers a diverse lineup of international film premieres, panel discussions, Q&A’s and sneak previews. The music festival celebrates its 20th year with international performances that will span classical, rock, jazz and much more.
Cooking Up History: Regional Chinese Cooking Along the Transcontinental Railroad – May 10
In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad and the National Museum of American History’s American Enterprise exhibition, the museum’s free Cooking Up History series will turn its attention to the culinary influence of Chinese immigrants who lived and worked in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century while building said railroad. Chef Martin Yan will prepare dishes that the workers consumed during his demonstration while also addressing regional food traditions from the Guangdong Province and how Cantonese food culture altered American dining.
1 p.m. | Free admission
National Museum of American History, 1300 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20560
BYT & Nat Geo Present – ‘Queens of Egypt’: The Mother of All Parties – May 10
Girl power reigns for this Friday night event at the National Geographic Museum, hosted in partnership with Brightest Young Things. Explore the museum’s fascinating Queens of Egypt exhibit, jam to an energetic DJ set from Madame Gandhi, hear lightning talks from prominent woman explorers and scientists and enjoy an open bar. The event is for ages 21 and over.
8:30 p.m. | Tickets
National Geographic Museum, 1600 M Street NW, Washington, DC 20036
2019 Contemporaries Bash: Maravillas de México (Wonders of Mexico) – May 10
Held at Dock 5 at Union Market, this event welcomes you to enjoy the art and culture of Mexico through music, dancing, food and creative cocktails. The Phillips Collection and the Embassy of Mexico have joined together to bring you this evening that offers ice cream tacos, a balloon lounge, mezcal, agua frescas and a soaring tribute to Mexican women and their artistic contributions.
8:30 p.m. – 1 a.m. | Tickets
Dock 5 at Union Market, 1309 5th Street NE, Washington, DC 20002
European Union Open House – May 11
Europhiles can have a field day during this annual free event, with lets you take your own shortcut to Europe without any jet lag. All 28 European Union member states, including Italy, Spain, Ireland and many more, participate in this citywide open house experience. Take advantage of this chance to observe cultural heritage and traditions from the Old Continent at no cost.
6th Annual Funk Parade – May 11
In honor of U Street’s diverse cultural history, people from all over the District come together to celebrate the spirit of funk at this free, one-of-a-kind parade, street fair and music festival. Watch the street (and side streets) come to life with live musical performances and entertainment from a variety of vibrant dancers, marching bands and visual artists. Get an education on go-go music, made famous by DC’s own Chuck Brown, and then groove to Latin hip-hop, funk brass and frenetic DJ sets, among many activations. The parade also has a new wristband system this year, so make sure to purchase one in order to attend the Night Music Festival, the Featured Showcase and the Funk Parade Conference and receive special discounts throughout the day.
Festivities begin at 1 p.m.
U Street, Washington, DC 20009
ZooFari: Bite Night – May 16
Home to some 1,800 animals, the National Zoo transforms into a wild, culinary wonderland for this annual fundraiser featuring dozens of DC restaurants. ZooFari caters to all in the food-loving kingdom with complimentary bites from eateries like Pinstripes, Radiator and Rocklands Barbeque and Grilling Company, among others. Local beer and regional wines add to the revelry, which also includes live entertainment, a silent auction, a VIP lounge and exciting animal encounters with small mammals and great apes.
6:30-9:30 p.m. | Tickets
Smithsonian National Zoo, 3001 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008
SAVOR: An American Craft Beer & Food Experience – May 17
Lovers of brews will not want to miss SAVOR, which features 90 craft breweries from all over the U.S. showing off two of their most acclaimed flavors at the National Building Museum. That adds up to more than 180 beers available for sampling, and there will be small plates that pair perfectly with each brew. Grab tickets as soon as you can, because this event sells out every year.
7:30-11 p.m. | Tickets
National Building Museum, 401 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20001
Spring Wine Festival & Sunset Tour – May 17-19
This three-day celebration is sold out for Saturday, but you can still grab tickets for Friday and Sunday. Mount Vernon’s annual spring soiree includes tours of the property’s mansion and cellar, appearances by “George and Martha Washington” and live jazz on a beautiful lawn overlooking the Potomac River. You can also sample more than 20 Virginia wines, and a fruit and cheese box is available for purchase to pair with your sips.
6-9 p.m. | Tickets
George Washington’s Mount Vernon, 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, Mount Vernon, VA 22121
Jazz in the Garden – May 17 – Aug. 23
Kick back and groove to the music with sangria in hand at Jazz in the Garden on Fridays throughout the summer, held in the National Gallery of Art‘s Sculpture Garden starting May 17. An eclectic mix of DC area jazz musicians lend a soundtrack to one of the city’s most idyllic scenes set around the sculpture garden’s central fountain. This is a free seasonal tradition that you do not want to miss. Check out the lineup and the food and drink offerings.
5-8:30 p.m. | Free admission
National Gallery of Art, 6th and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565
DC Bike Ride – May 18
DC’s only car-free, recreational bike ride is fun for all ages and biking abilities. The family-friendly race has you cruise past the nation’s iconic landmarks on the National Mall, a memorable view and bike-riding experience if we’ve ever heard of either. Waiting for you as you end your 20-mile journey is the Finish Festival, with live music, fun activities and food and drink.
8 a.m. | Register
West Potomac Park, 100 West Basin Drive SW, Washington, DC 20418
Get More Events Here
60+ Things To Do In DC
April 5th, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
National Cherry Blossom Festival – Through April 14
The nation’s greatest springtime celebration fills the first two weeks of April with free family events, many with Japanese influences, a nod to the gift of the trees in 1912 from the Mayor of Tokyo to the citizens of Washington, DC. Among the signature events to be enjoyed in April: Petalpalooza (April 6) at The Wharf and the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade (April 13).
The Cherry Blossom PUB (Pop-Up Bar) – Through April 21
For the third consecutive year, the Cherry Blossom PUB returns to DC to spice up spring in Shaw. The 2019 edition features a room designed like a bowl of ramen, with sculptures of noodles and chopsticks and actual ramen from Ramen by UZU served. There’s also a garden room inspired by the Palace of Versailles’ Fontaine de L’Encelade. The drink menu offers the Honeydew, Honey See (sake, vermouth, fermented sake syrup, cucumber, honeydew, absinthe) as well as the Once and Floral (gin, peach, lemon, orange flower water, egg white, matcha).
5 p.m. – 12:30 a.m., Sunday – Thursday; 5 p.m. – 1:30 a.m., Friday – Saturday
1843 7th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001
ChefsFeed Indie Week – April 4-5, 7
ChefsFeed brings a weekend’s worth of events to the nation’s capital, starting with a sold-out event at Tim Ma’s American Son restaurant in the Eaton Hotel. On Friday, however, you can enjoy 12 courses from 12 different chefs in addition to wine pairings at the same location. Sunday presents the grand finale: 12 courses from all 24 chefs present throughout the weekend, with wine included. Dive into cuisine from all over the country in the culinary capital.
American Son, 1201 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005
Washington Auto Show – April 5-14
Things are heating up for one of the nation’s largest auto shows, which will take place in spring for the first time ever, compared to its usual January run. Car lovers can expect the 2019 edition to dazzle with more than 600 new makes and models from 35-plus manufacturers. Attendees will be able to take part in three different indoor ride and drive experiences, and also take a car out for a test drive on the streets of D.C. Throughout the show, there will be artists painting cars live on-site, VIP tours led by automotive writers, appearances from local sports stars and mascots, and much more. Grab your tickets quickly – the Auto Show draws large crowds every year.
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mount Vernon Place NW, Washington, DC 20001
Petalpalooza at The Wharf – April 6
Get ready for more than eight straight hours of free tunes, all-ages activities, a beer garden, interactive art installations and games, all capped off by fireworks at The Wharfduring Petalpalooza (formerly known as the Southwest Waterfront Fireworks Festival). Folks can explore DC’s hottest new development and grab a great seat for the fireworks show. Entertainment begins at 12 p.m. and is capped off with fireworks at 8:30 p.m., weather permitting.
12-9:30 p.m. | Free admission
The Wharf, 1100 Maine Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20024
21st Annual Cherry Blossom Freedom Walk – April 6
Lace up your sneakers for this stroll, which commemorates Japanese Americans and their experience during the Second World War and encourages the continued defense of civil liberties for all Americans. The walk begins and ends at the intersection of Louisiana & New Jersey Avenues NW, the site of the National Japanese American Memorial. This year’s theme is “Fractured: The Faces of Family Separation.”
9 a.m. – 1 p.m. | Free admission
Louisiana & New Jersey Avenues & D Street NW, Washington, DC 20001
Cherry Blossom Night with D.C. United – April 9
For the first time, a pro sports game in DC will be included as a part of the National Cherry Blossom Festival’s events. When D.C. United takes on the Montreal Impact on the second Tuesday in April, you can expect all kinds of cherry blossom-themed merchandise, food and beverages and on-field entertainment. A special ticket offer includes a collectible pin badge branded by both D.C. United and the Festival.
8 p.m. | Tickets
Audi Field, 100 Potomac Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20024
Cooking Up History: Ethiopian Culinary Cultures in Washington, DC – April 12
Cooking Up History is the National Museum of American History’s free monthly deep dive into the culinary arts at its demonstration kitchen on the Wallace H. Coulter Performance Plaza. Each event showcases a guest chef and the museum’s resident food historian, Dr. Ashley Young. In 2019, the museum is incorporating its refresh of the FOOD: Transforming the American Table exhibit into its Cooking Up History series, highlighting objects, stories and new materials that will be featured in the display. In April, learn about Ethiopian cuisine in the District from Sileshi Alifom of DAS Ethiopian Restaurant. The cooking demonstration will be accompanied by a special Ethiopian coffee ceremony.
Newseum Nights: In Bloom – April 12
The Newseum shows off its cherry blossom spirit with one of their signature after-hours events. Enjoy an open beer and wine bar, sample sake, savor signature Asian dishes from Wolfgang Puck, see a traditional Japanese drum performance, receive a personalized haiku, explore Newseum’s latest exhibit, Rise Up: Stonewall and the LGBTQ Rights Movement, savor giveaways from ThinkFoodGroup and Nando’s and so much more.<
Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001
Space Oddity: Ground Control to Major Party – April 12
The National Air and Space Museum, Brightest Young Things and Yuri’s Night team up for this after-hours extravaganza. In honor of Yuri Gagarin’s landmark voyage into space on April 12, 1961, the launch of the first Space Shuttle on April 12, 1981 AND the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing and the release of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” the museum will offer a DJ set, a Planetarium laser light show, a live taping of the AirSpace podcast, space-inspired activities, space-related TED-style talks, food and drink. The event is for ages 21 and over.
8:30 p.m. – 12 a.m. | Tickets
National Air and Space Museum, 600 Independence Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20560
Mid-Atlantic CrossFit Challenge 2019 – April 12-14
For the first time, DC will host this competition that features 800 of the best CrossFit athletes in the world. DC Armory and its 70,000-square-foot space will serve as the venue for the Challenge, which will provide divisions for all skill levels. Spectator tickets are available for those who wish to take in the competition and peruse the vendor village.
DC Armory, 2001 East Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC 20003
March 1st, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
For the third consecutive year, the Cherry Blossom PUB returns to DC to spice up spring in Shaw. The 2019 edition features a room designed like a bowl of ramen, with sculptures of noodles and chopsticks and actual ramen from Ramen by UZU served. There’s also a garden room inspired by the Palace of Versailles’ Fontaine de L’Encelade. The drink menu offers the Honeydew, Honey See (sake, vermouth, fermented sake syrup, cucumber, honeydew, absinthe) as well as the Once and Floral (gin, peach, lemon, orange flower water, egg white, matcha). The PUB will host a spring party on March 20, during which a timed $20 ticket can help you avoid the line.
5 p.m. – 12:30 a.m., Sunday – Thursday; 5 p.m. – 1:30 a.m., Friday – Saturday | 1843 7th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001
HopFest 2019 – March 9
HopFest is the only beer festival in the city hosted by local brewers for local brewers. The DC Brewers’ Guild has one heck of a day planned for the fifth installment of this beloved event. Dozens of breweries will be on hand at the DC Brau Brewing Company to showcase hoppy goodness, from one-off specials to old favorites to rare brews you can’t find anywhere else.
DC Brau Brewing Company, 3178 Bladensburg Road NE, Washington, DC 20018
Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon & ½ Marathon – March 9
Choose from three different race formats and run and rock through DC during this annual extravaganza. The two days prior to race day feature a health and fitness expo at DC Armory, where participants can pick up their race packets and try out new running apparel and technology. Then, on the big day, conquer the marathon, half-marathon or 5K. Each sport scenic routes that allow you to marvel at DC’s monuments.
Demetri Martin – March 9
Demetri Martin’s unique brand of comedy, which can feature sing-alongs, drawings and costumes, has taken him from self-described “relative obscurity” in New York City to superstardom. Along the way, he wrote for Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He’s released successful comedy albums and starred in his own television series on Comedy Central, where his acclaimed Demetri Martin. Person. stand-up special aired. His first book, This Is a Book by Demetri Martin, was a New York Timesbestseller. Witness his idiosyncrasies at Warner Theatre on the second Saturday in March.
10 p.m. | Tickets
Warner Theatre, 513 13th Street NW, Washington, DC 20004
Evenings at the Edge: Wonder Women – March 14
The National Gallery of Art’s Evenings at the Edge series returns to the East Building for spring with this night entirely dedicated to women. The all-female tap sensation Syncopated Ladies, which features two sisters from DC, will be on-hand to showcase their jaw-dropping talent. Attendees will also be able to view legendary art by women and hear their stories via pop-up talks, as well as craft their own female superhero.
6-9 p.m. | Register (free admission)
National Gallery of Art, 4th Street & Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565
Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital – March 14-24
The longest-running and largest environmental film festival in the U.S. enlightens viewers on the state of our environment and what we can do to maintain its health. More than 100 movies will be screened at venues all over the District. The festival will also include informative discussions and social events that will inspire dialogue surrounding these wonderful films and their important themes. Many of the events are free and all are open to the public. Check the website for a full schedule.
National Cherry Blossom Festival – March 20 – April 14
The nation’s greatest springtime celebration returns to fill four weeks with free family events, many with Japanese influences, a nod to the gift of the trees in 1912 from the Mayor of Tokyo to the citizens of Washington, DC. Among the signature events: the Pink Tie Party (March 22); the Opening Ceremony (March 23); the Blossom Kite Festival (March 30); Petalpalooza (April 6) at The Wharf and the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade (April 13).
Washington Capitals vs. Minnesota Wild – March 22
March is an action-packed month for the Capitals, with the defending Stanley Cup champions playing six games at Capital One Arena. Alex Ovechkin and the Caps are in dogged pursuit of prime playoff position in the hopes of bringing another championship to the nation’s capital. This Friday night tilt will see the boys square off against the Minnesota Wild, who are fighting for their own playoff lives under head coach (and former Caps bench boss) Bruce Boudreau.
Capital One Arena, 601 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20004
Pink Tie Party – March 22
This springtime affair in Washington signifies the beginning of blossom season. The Pink Tie Party raises funds for the National Cherry Blossom Festival, and the elaborate cocktail party brings on the fun with lots of features: spring-inspired cuisine, a silent auction, live music, dancing and other distinctive entertainment. Guests must be 21 and over to attend.
7-11 p.m. | Tickets
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004
National Cherry Blossom Festival Opening Ceremony – March 23
Diehard blossom-goers make a point to be official about their visit by reserving tickets to this free event. Experience the festival on stage through traditional and contemporary performances at the Warner Theatre, with a lineup that features the cast members of “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon” The Super Live making their North American debut and an original interpretation from violinist Ikuko Kawai. Note that there will be a $5 registration fee when tickets are claimed.
5-6:30 p.m. | Tickets
ShamrockFest – March 23
America’s largest St. Paddy’s Day festival will green out RFK Stadium again this year. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, The Mahones and Andrew W.K. highlight this year’s lineup of performers. Plan on plenty of brews, Irish dancers and bagpipes, DJs and contests. General admission and VIP tickets are available to this Irish-themed extravaganza.
12 – 8 p.m. | Tickets
RFK Stadium Festival Grounds, 2400 East Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC 20003
Washington Nationals Opening Day vs. New York Mets at Nationals Park – March 28
Yes, it’s officially that time of year. Baseball is back! The Washington Nationals will open their 2019 season with this matchup against the rival New York Mets. Max Scherzer, Anthony Rendon, Juan Soto and the rest of the Nats will look to erase the disappointment of last season’s 82-80 record and re-claim their throne as kings of the National League East. The Mets may have something to say about that, and they’ll get to showcase their offseason additions, including Robinson Cano and former Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos. Prepare for plenty of Opening Day excitement at Nationals Park.
Nationals Park, 1500 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC 20003
J.B. Smoove – March 29
J.B. Smoove is everywhere. From television commercials to TV specials to major films to his role as Leon on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Smoove’s blend of cool and comedy has made him a household name. However, the dynamic performer’s roots are in stand-up, and you can see him in his ultimate element at Warner Theatre at the end of March.
NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament East Regional – March 29 & 31
Capital One Arena hosts March Madness on two separate days this March. America’s favorite postseason tournament annually features jaw-dropping upsets and breathtaking buzzer beaters. DC is fortunate to host the Sweet Sixteen this year, when the tournament’s true juggernauts and Cinderellas begin to emerge. Expect plenty of spellbinding action during this set of games.
Blossom Kite Festival – March 30
Head to the Washington Monument grounds for this free kite-flying extravaganza, one of the most highly anticipated events of the National Cherry Blossom Festival . The entire family can watch expert kite fliers from all over the world participate in the Hot Tricks Showdown, a stunt kite-flying event. Make sure you bring your camera and a kite of your own!
10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. | Free admission
Washington Monument Grounds, 17th Street NW and Constitution Avenue NW
Zilia Sánchez: ‘Soy Isla (I Am an Island)’ – Through May 19
Head to The Phillips Collection to check out the first museum retrospective of Cuban artist Zilia Sànchez. You’ll encounter more than 60 works from the artist’s nearly 70-year career, from paintings to shaped canvases to sculptures to illustrations. Her work incorporates mythological heroes, lunar shapes, geometry and topologies. Sánchez’s travels have taken her to Europe, New York and Puerto Rico, leading to an incredibly diverse tapestry of art.
The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20009
‘The REDress Project’ – March 1-31
In honor of Women’s History Month, the National Museum of the American Indian will host this outdoor art installation from Jaime Black. Empty red dresses situated outside on the north side of the building will symbolize missing or murdered Indigenous women. Black’s work serves as an alarming reminder of the gendered and racialized violence frequently dealt with by Native women. On March 21, the artist will participate in Safety for Our Sisters: Ending Violence Against Native Women, a symposium that will feature harrowing stories and ignite important conversations about the issue at-hand.
National Museum of the American Indian, 4th Street & Independence Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20560
40+ Things To Do This February
February 4th, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
Discover a packed list of can’t-miss things to do this month, including Black History Month events, Chinese New Year celebrations, Valentine’s Day date ideas and so much more.
We’ve picked out the best events, festivals, museum exhibits, theater performances, concerts and more happening this month in Washington, DC. Check out the best things to do in the nation’s capital and plan your visit today.
Do Date Night Right with Date Nights DC – Feb. 1-28
Throughout the month of February, enjoy deals and discounts from attractions, hotels and restaurants, peruse more than 100 date ideas and read up on DC’s most romantic spots. Make sure to share your date night on social media using #MyDCcool and follow @visitwashingtondc to enter our Date Nights DC sweepstakes.
Washington Dollar Days: Tour for a Buck – Feb. 1-28
In honor of George Washington’s birthday month, Tudor Place is offering $1 tours throughout February. As DC’s only historic house museum with connections to Martha and George Washington, the gorgeous property is the ideal spot for such a deal. You will be able to view standouts from Tudor Place’s Washington Collection along the way.
10 a.m. – 4 p.m. | Register
Tudor Place, 1644 31st Street NW, Washington, DC 20007
Washington Wizards vs. Milwaukee Bucks – Feb. 2
The Wizards will celebrate Black History Month with special promotions and their exclusive Statement Jerseys in this Saturday night matchup against the Milwaukee Bucks, one of the NBA’s best teams. Bradley Beal and the Wiz will look to take down their Eastern Conference rival, a team led by one of the most exciting players in the world, forward Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Lunar New Year: Guangdong Arts Troupe – Feb. 8
Millennium Stage’s celebration of the Lunar New Year continues with another free performance full of Chinese culture. Award-winning artists from the Guangdong province will present a program full of wonder. Expect to see dance, stunning acrobatics, puppetry and live music during this special event at one of the city’s most illustrious venues.
Millennium Stageat The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20566
Cupid’s Undie Run – Feb. 9
Revel in running like never before, and do so to help a great cause. Cupid’s Undie Run is a national sensation that has helped raise millions of dollars for the Children’s Tumor Foundation since 2010. If you’re 21 or older, strut your stuff in skimpy attire as part of a team or solo, and enjoy pre- and post-run fun. And if you’re in a charitable mood, tack on a donation after you register to assist in stopping a deadly disease that affects 1 in 3,000 births.
12-4 p.m. | Register
Meet at Penn Social, 801 E Street NW, Washington, DC 20004
Chinatown Lunar New Year Festival 2019: Year of the Pig – Feb. 10
The Chinatown Community Cultural Center will host a special program featuring live cultural performances, family-oriented events and educational activities at its facility in Gallery Place. You can stop in to enjoy the festivities before or after you enjoy the DC Chinese New Year Parade. Details are below.
12:30-5 p.m. | Free admission
Chinatown Community Cultural Center, 616 H Street NW #201, Washington, DC 20001
DC Chinese New Year Parade – Feb. 10
This annual parade in Gallery Place is one of DC’s signature Chinese New Year celebrations. With dozens of entries, this year’s parade promises to be the largest and most diverse yet. Expect Chinese folk dancers, beauty queens, firecrackers, kung fu demonstrations, floats (including lions and dragons) and plenty of pageantry as the procession winds through Chinatown.
Meet at Gallery Place Metro Station
American Chinese School presents The Spring Bloom Grand Ceremony – Feb. 11
While not one of the Kennedy Center’s official Lunar New Year events, this evening show provides a great opportunity to immerse yourself in Chinese culture. The American Chinese School will bring Chinese artists, troupes and student ensembles to the Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center to perform dance and musical selections that honor the upcoming spring bloom and promote cooperation among nations.
Concert Hall at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20566
‘What Was, What Is, and What Will Be: A Cross-Genre Look at Afrofuturism’ – Feb. 12
Poet Airea D. Matthews, fiction writer N.K. Jemisin and screenwriter/author Tananarive Due will discuss the concept of “Afrofuturism” in this Folger Theatre event perfectly timed for Black History Month. Critic Mark Dery coined Afrofuturism, a term that has evolved to include spacey jazz, African-American sci-fi and psychedelic hip-hop and R&B. Three brilliant minds will discuss the term and read excerpts that help to illuminate the phenomenon.
Folger Theatre, 201 East Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC 20003
Disney On Ice presents ‘Worlds of Enchantment’ – Feb. 14-18
Capital One Arena offers up this Disney On ice adventure that will be a blast for the entire family. Submerge in the Little Mermaid’s world under the sea, warm up to Frozen’s princesses, play with Woody and Buzz in the Sunnyside Daycare and thrill to Lightning McQueen’s high-octane stunts in this cavalcade of film favorites on blades.
Big Apple Circus – Feb. 14 – March 14
The one-ring circus hosted by Grandma the Clown presents the likes of high-wire artists the Fabulous Wallendas, the acrobatic Anastasini Brothers and daredevil roller skaters Dandino and Luciana near the Gaylord National Harbor. Whether it’s for date night fun or family night on the town, Big Apple Circus makes for a fantastic winter activity.
30+ Things To Do This January
January 3rd, 2019 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
The new year kicks off with a packed list of can’t-miss things to do this month, including Winter Restaurant Week, action-packed sporting events, new museum exhibits and so much more.
Free Community Day at National Museum of Women in the Arts – Jan. 6
One of DC’s premier art museums opens its doors for free every first Sunday of the month. Visitors are granted access to NMWA’s extensive collection of seminal work by female artists, which includes pieces by Frida Kahlo, Amy Sherman, Judy Chicago and many more. Current exhibitions that can be explored without spending a dime include Rodarte and Ambreen Butt: Mark My Words. The museum will also host a fascinating tour entitled “Fierce Women” from 1-2 p.m.
12-5 p.m. | Free admission
National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005
Washington Capitals vs. Philadelphia Flyers – Jan. 8
The defending Stanley Cup champions will continue their quest for back-to-back titles with an early January matchup against the rival Philadelphia Flyers. Alex Ovechkin, on a searing goal-scoring pace again this year, will look to light the lamp along with fellow star forwards Evgeny Kuznetsov, Nicklas Backstrom and Tom Wilson. Goalie Braden Holtby will look to stop Claude Giroux and a potent Flyers offense. Make sure to rock the red to this one.
Iliza: Elder Millennial – Jan. 10
This stand-up comedy star has already sold out Friday night’s show, so grab tickets to this Thursday performance as soon as you can. Iliza rose to fame by being the only female and youngest comedian to win NBC’s Last Comic Standing. She had great success with the Truth & Iliza podcast, which gave way to a late-night show on Freeform. Now, Iliza has an acclaimed Netflix special and headlines comedy festivals. Don’t miss her unique brand of hilarity at Warner Theatre.
Jay Pharoah – Jan. 11
You know Jay Pharoah. He spent six years on Saturday Night Live and did absolutely unforgettable impressions of President Barack Obama, Jay-Z and Kanye West. He’s also done head-turning voice work on Bojack Horseman and Family Guy. The riveting stand-up performer will bring his immense talents to a special sit-down show at 9:30 Club, the legendary DC venue.
9:30 Club, 815 V Street NW, Washington, DC 20001
Winter Restaurant Week – Jan. 14-20
Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington (RAMW) curates two Restaurant Week promotions per year, and you’re in luck: one is right around the corner. Dozens of DC restaurants will participate, offering up multiple-course and prix fixe meals ($22 for lunch and brunch, $35 for dinner). Sign up for RAMW’s Restaurant Week mailing list to stay in-the-know on participants, deals, booking a table and chances to win special diner rewards.
Washington Wizards vs. Detroit Pistons – Jan. 15
The Wizards’ Martin Luther King, Jr. Day game is a holiday tradition, presenting a great opportunity to enjoy some matinee basketball inside Capital One Arena. John Wall, Bradley Beal and the rest of the Wiz will take on stars Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond and the Detroit Pistons. Each team is battling for a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, making for an exciting afternoon matchup.
38th Annual MLK Parade – Jan. 21
DC honors the late, great Martin Luther King, Jr. with this annual parade that brings the entire community together on the holiday that celebrates the Civil Rights leader. Community activists, performers and civic leaders will all be on-hand for this event that aims to prolong Dr. King’s legacy and everlasting message of peace. The parade concludes with a community fair at the Gateway Pavilion.
11 a.m. | Free admission
Parade begins at Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE & Good Hope Road SE, concludes at 2700 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE
‘New Nature’ by Marpi – Through Jan. 13
ARTECHOUSE presents this interactive exhibition that will have you viewing nature in an entirely different light. New Nature features digital and nature-like creatures and plants that respond to your gestures and actions, as well as insects, landscapes and planets. The responsive technology combines with music to create a full-on sensory experience. This is the first large-scale solo exhibition for the artist Marpi.
Bookings available from 10 a.m. – 11:30 p.m. | Tickets
ARTECHOUSE, 1238 Maryland Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20024
‘The Wiedmann Bible’ – Through April 28
The Wiedmann Bible is the longest illustrated Bible in the world, featuring 3,333 images. German artist Willy Wiedmann wanted to provide a visual narrative of the Bible, using the distinctive style of Polycon to communicate the book’s many stories. You will see the influence of other styles in Wiedmann’s work as well, including Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
10 a.m. – 5 p.m. | Tickets
Museum of the Bible, 400 4th Street SW, Washington, DC 20024
‘Celebrating New American Gardens’ – Jan. 31 – Oct. 15
The U.S. Botanic Garden, the oldest continually operating botanic garden in the country, celebrates new American gardens in this fascinating exhibit. Experience the latest and greatest in public gardens, which showcase plant collections, provide beautiful public spaces and highlight the changing of the seasons. Gardens created and renovated in the last five years are the focus, which means you will see only the height of creativity and innovation.
U.S. Botanic Garden, 100 Maryland Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20001
‘It’s Hip to Be Square: The Mint Family’ – Jan. 31 – Nov. 23
The mint family of plants is larger than you think. While Mentha (peppermint and spearmint) and Salvia (sage) get a majority of the attention, rosemary and coleus are also prevalent members of the species. In total, more than 230 genera and 7,000 species make up the mint family, which means you have a whole lot of plant-learning to do at this new U.S. Botanic Garden exhibit that opens at the end of the month.
‘Judy Garland: A Star is Born’ – Jan. 8-26
One of the biggest Hollywood stars in history receives a musical tribute at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va. Judy Garland was a queen of the Golden Age in Hollywood, known for her beautiful voice and unforgettable roles in The Wizard of Oz and A Star is Born. Signature Theatre favorites will sing some of her most famous songs, including “Get Happy” and “Over the Rainbow,” during this two-and-half-week engagement.
Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, VA 22206
WIT Road Show – Jan. 10-27
The Atlas Performing Arts Center hosts the Washington Improv Theater (WIT) for three weeks of special programming. WIT will perform company ensembles filled with improvised brilliance in the form of comedy and stirring musical numbers. The company will also debut a new production entitled, “Fourth Estate,” a comedy that centers on the much-maligned media.
Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC 20002
‘Cartography’ – Jan. 11-13
The subject of migration is artistically rendered through dance, film, map-making and sound sensor technology in this groundbreaking production from author and illustrator Christopher Myers, director Kaneza Schaal and New York-based company Arktype. Cartography will take you from rafts on the Mediterranean to cargo trucks to border checkpoints, revealing the trials and tribulations of youth migrants that face uncertain futures while constantly in motion.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20566
Washington National Opera: ‘Taking Up Serpents’ – Jan. 11 & 13
As part of the American Opera Initiative Festival, the Kennedy Center presents this new hour-long opera born from a collaboration between composer Kamala Sankaram and award-winning librettist Jerre Dye. Taking Up Serpents details the story of Kayla, who’s been estranged from her preacher father and bitten by one of his snakes. Kayla’s subsequent journey causes her to reflect on her upbringing, her faith, her family and her destiny. Soaring compositions weave the 25-year-old’s epic tale.
Washington National Opera: Three New 20-Minute Operas – Jan. 12
This additional offering of the American Opera Initiative Festival features three world premiere, 20-minute operas staged in a concert performance with a small chamber orchestra. You will be able to glimpse the future of opera through these short but endearing compositions from rising stars. A Q&A with the artists and creative teams of each piece will follow the performances.
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures: ‘Cinderella’ – Jan. 15-20
After a sterling adaptation of The Red Shoes in 2017, Matthew Bourne returns to the Kennedy Center with an inventive take on a classic fairy tale. Bourne’s Cinderella is set in London during World War II, where Cinderella falls in love with a handsome RAF pilot before the two are separated by the Blitz. You’ll have to see the show to find out how the rest unfolds, but you’re sure to see jaw-dropping production design and video projections in this vivid telling of an essential story.
‘School of Rock’ – Jan. 16-27
Based on director Richard Linklater’s classic 2003 film starring Jack Black, this acclaimed musical production will capture the imagination of the entire family at the National Theatre this January. Wannabe rock star Dewey Finn’s hilarious foray into substitute teaching at a prestigious school sees him turn his class into an earth-shattering rock band. The play will feature every song from the movie, 14 new songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber and musical theater’s very first kids rock band playing their instruments live on stage.
The National Theatre, 1621 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004
‘Admissions’ – Jan. 16 – Feb. 17
From the same writer of the best-selling play in Studio Theatre history comes this compelling tale that satirizes white privilege in America. Bill and Sherri are headmaster and dean at Hillcrest, a New Hampshire boarding school they’ve spent 15 years working to diversify. However, morals are put to the test when their son, Charlie, is denied entry to an Ivy League school. Charlie’s drastic response puts Sherri in the unenviable position of publicly breaking down an oppressive system while privately working to secure its privileges. This thought-provoking production promises to be a highlight of the season.
Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20005
‘Kleptocracy’ – Jan. 18 – Feb. 24
The seeds of troubling current events are planted in this world premiere drama at Arena Stage. A collapsed Soviet Union is ruled by the Oligarchs, hyper capitalists who want to ruthlessly reform Russian markets and open them to the world. The group’s leader is confronted by a young Vladimir Putin, who has his own plans for securing unquestionable power. Find out how modern Russia came to be in this of-the-moment production.
Arena Stage, 1101 6th Street SW, Washington, DC 20024
‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ – Jan. 23 – March 10
The Fats Waller Musical Show is going to bring a whole lot of boogie-woogie to Arlington’s Signature Theatre. You’ll be transported into the Harlem of yesteryear for an energetic, feet-moving celebration of big band music through the songs of Thomas “Fats” Waller. The Tony Award-winning musical production will feature songs like “Honeysuckle Rose” and “The Joint is Jumpin’”. Performers will include Signature regulars such as Nova Y. Payton and Iyona Blake.
American Ballet Theatre: ‘Harlequinade’ – Jan. 29 – Feb. 3
Marius Pepita’s 19th-century ballet, filled with rollicking comedy, is retold by American Ballet Theatre’s Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky. Co-produced with Australian Ballet and featuring music from the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, the production offers two acts, as Harlequin battles for his love, Columbine. Expect world-class dancing, fun costumes, colorful sets and plenty of slapstick laughs.
‘Nell Gwynn’ – Jan. 29 – Feb. 10
Nell Gwynn emerges from the streets of Drury Lane into the king’s court. The quiet orange seller steps onto the stage of the Restoration theater and dazzles none other than Charles II. Nell is then brought to court as one of Charles’ favorite mistresses, leading to a dazzling and funny tale of a woman discovering how amazing she truly is. The play was adored in London last season and the Folger Theatre is the perfect setting for its Shakespearean zaniness.
Diplo – Jan. 17
One of the most dynamic forces in modern music, Diplo is an international superstar who has worked with the likes of M.I.A., Lil’ Jon, Gucci Mane, Santigold and many, many more. He’s the founder of the famous Mad Decent block parties, has multiple Grammy nominations, garners millions of streams per year and starts a dance party as well as anyone on the face of the planet. Echostage is the ideal venue for Diplo’s talents.
Echostage, 2135 Queens Chapel Road NE, Washington, DC 20018
Bobby Sanabria MultiVerse Big Band: ‘West Side Story Reimagined’ – Jan. 18
The illustrious score of West Side Story, one of the most successful plays and films of all-time, is beautifully reimagined by percussionist Bobby Sanabria and his acclaimed MultiVerse Big Band. The jazzy, adventurous and touching music of Leonard Bernstein’s tale is brilliantly interpreted through Sanabria’s vibrant take on Latin jazz.
7 p.m. & 9 p.m. | Tickets
National Symphony Orchestra: Renée Fleming sings Schubert – Jan. 18 & 20
Renée Fleming is one of the world’s most celebrated sopranos and she’ll return to the renowned Kennedy Center to pay tribute to Franz Schubert and some of his most esteemed compositions. Among the highlights: orchestrations of Schubert classics, music from Rosamunde and Berio’s Rendering, a piece based on Schubert’s uncompleted 10th Symphony.
Panic! at the Disco – Jan. 20
Panic! at the Disco is led by singer/songwriter Brendon Urie, who formed the band with childhood friends in Las Vegas in 2004. Urie is now the only official member of the band, which has been churning out hits since it rose to fame in 2005. This year’s Pray for the Wicked is one of the project’s most successful releases yet, featuring the smash hit, “High Hopes”. Capital One Arena should be packed for this one.
A$AP Rocky – Jan. 20
A$AP Rocky is one of the best rap artists of the decade, a performer who has garnered critical adulation while maintaining a loyal fan base. Whether it’s releasing his own albums, like this year’s acclaimed Testing, or guesting on another artist’s track, A$AP Rocky always leaves an impression. He’ll bring his lively stage show to the state-of-the-art The Anthem.
The Anthem, 901 Wharf Street SW, Washington, DC 20024
NSO Pops: ‘Star Wars: Return of the Jedi’ (film with live orchestra) – Jan. 22-24
John Williams’ epic and treasured score will be performed live as the second installment of George Lucas’ initial Star Wars trilogy is screened at the Kennedy Center. Return of the Jedi is considered by many Star Wars fans to be one of the best of the series, and the experience of watching the movie while its powerful score is performed in front of you makes for an incredible evening.
NSO Pops: An Evening with Brandy – Jan. 25-26
Fresh off an acclaimed turn as Roxie Hart in the Tony Award-winning revival of Chicago, Brandy will unite R&B and symphony music in enthralling fashion at the Kennedy Center. The performances will mark the first time that the singer has collaborated with a live orchestra. The Grammy Award winner will sing numerous hits from her illustrious career.
Music for Young Audiences: Banda Magda – Jan. 26-27
The whole family can take a trip around the globe with Banda Magda, an award-winning group that combines jazz improvisation and South American rhythms. Songs will be sung in six different languages as the band zooms through a set list that will include selections from their new album, Tigre. Audience participation is also on the docket, so get ready to groove.
Neko Case – Jan. 27
Indie rock singer-songwriter Neko Case released one of her most acclaimed albums this year, Hell-On, and now brings her irresistible voice and songs to the stage of the Lincoln Theatre. Case’s solo career now stretches more than 20 years, and she is one of the founding members of The New Pornographers, one of the most critically adored rock groups of the same time period. Saturday night’s show sold out, so grab tickets to this Sunday night performance as soon as possible.
Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U Street NW, Washington, DC 20009
Source: washington.org
60+ Things To Do
December 7th, 2018 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
The nation’s capital offers a packed list of can’t-miss things to do this month, including holiday-themed events, markets and theater productions, New Year’s Eve celebrations and so much more.
Downtown Holiday Market – Through Dec. 23
This free-to-frequent downtown bazaar is centrally located at 8th and F Streets NW, in front of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. Scope out eclectic wares from dozens of pop-up tents with seasonally flavored music performed live in the background. Locally roasted coffee and crafted-before-your-eyes mini-doughnuts inspire a cold-weather appetite, creating a holiday atmosphere you won’t find anywhere else in DC.
12-8 p.m. daily | Free admission
Centered at 8th and F Streets NW, Washington, DC 20001
@ceelowphotographs
Holiday Afternoon Tea – Throughout December (excluding Dec. 24-25 & 31)
The Willard InterContinental Washington offers a holiday tradition throughout December. You can enjoy afternoon tea in the elegant Peacock Alley every day of the month (except Dec. 24, 25 and 31). There will be seasonal decor, sandwiches, pastries and the beautiful sounds of a harp to accompany you as you sip on festive teas from one of DC’s most historic hotels.
1-4 p.m. | Reserve
Willard InterContinental Washington, 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004
@fiz1point5
ZooLights – Through Jan. 1, 2018
Head to ZooLights at the National Zoo for a wildly vibrant display of LED Christmas lights (a half-million of them!), along with activities like Snow-less Tubing and special themed nights like BrewLights (Nov. 29). The kids will love the National Zoo Choo-Choo (a train ride through the Great Cats exhibit), while the big kids enjoy spiked hot chocolate and live music. ZooLights is closed on Dec. 24-25 and 31.
National Zoo, 3001 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008
LightUP Fest 2018 – Through Jan. 2, 2019
An illuminative feast for the eyes, LightUP Fest transforms 20 acres of land some 30 miles outside of DC into one of the largest light displays on the East Coast. In sum, the outdoor spectacle includes one million lights and Chinese lanterns comprising 77 installations that represent key themes, including Tour of Fantasy, Freedom America, Mysterious East and Magical World. In addition to its colorful, high-tech light arrays, the experience, which was devised by Chinese designers from the Zigong Lantern Festival, includes a food court with Chinese street food finds, daily performances from artists and acrobats, as well as interactive arts and craft activities. Onsite parking is free, but if you don’t have a car, you can ride share from DC (around $50-$60 each way) or from the closest Metro stop, the Wiehle-Reston East Station on the Silver Line (around $20-$25 each way).
5:30-10:30 p.m. | Tickets
44600 Freetown Boulevard, Ashburn, VA 20147
@ekelly80
Smithsonian Ingenuity Festival – Through Dec. 9
The Smithsonian Ingenuity Festival is a result of the annual Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards, which honor innovators across the entire creative spectrum, from technology to the performing arts to education. The 11-day festival will showcase award winners and other innovators all over DC through an array of events. Among the highlights: John Krasinski will speak at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Dec. 5, Jewel will bring her holiday tour to the Lincoln Theatre on Dec. 6 and The Long Conversation (detailed below) takes place on Dec. 7. Check out the full schedule.
SWEA Washington, DC
Swedish Christmas Bazaar – Dec. 1
Held at the House of Sweden, this annual DC tradition takes place on the first Saturday in December, every year. The event features a Swedish marketplace with for-sale crystal glassware, textiles, books, artworks and even homemade bread. Snack on Swedish delicacies like “fika” and “glögg” in the cafe and stick around for the main event: the St. Lucia procession with traditional caroling.
House of Sweden, 2900 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20007
Sam Kittner / Georgetown BID
Georgetown GLOW – Dec. 1 – Jan. 6
This stroll through DC’s most historic neighborhood will certainly make you light up as you pass by unique, illuminated artworks. Georgetown GLOW is a holiday hit in this District, a five-week celebration of 16 artists and 10 installations (this Saturday through Jan. 6). Participants range from locally renowned to internationally celebrated, while their works gorgeously adorn outdoor spaces throughout Georgetown. Afterwards, wander through a winter wonderland at The Washington Harbour, one of our favorite places to ice skate in the District.
5-10 p.m. | Free admission
The District’s Holiday Boat Parade – Dec. 1
Dozens of dazzling boats will traverse the Potomac River from the waterfront in Alexandria, Va. to The Wharf on the Southwest Waterfront. You can observe free of charge, and there are plenty of holiday festivities to supplement the experience. The Wharf will feature live music, cookie decorating, a fire pit, ice skating and winter-themed drinks at the Waterfront Wine & Beer Garden, in addition to an on-site Santa. Prizes will be awarded to the most beautiful vessels, which begin their journey at 5:30 p.m., and fireworks will cap off the parade at 8 p.m.
5:30-8 p.m. | Free admission
From the Docks of Alexandria to Southwest Waterfront in DC – 600 Water Street SW, Washington, DC 20024
@bambamfiasco
Native Art Market – Dec. 1-2
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hosts this two-day market that will showcase some of the best Native American artists. You’ll be able to peruse silver, jewelry, beadwork, dolls, paintings, prints, sculptures, fine apparel, ceramics and handwoven baskets. Expect to observe both traditional and contemporary styles as you shop at this free-to-attend event.
The Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show
The Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show – Dec. 1-2
From a Grand Tasting Pavilion featuring more than 50 local restaurants to chances to meet top celebrity chefs, the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show is like a Super Bowl for foodies. Over two days, the Walter E. Washington Convention Center will also sport tasting and entertaining workshops, a pop-up cooking school and a beer, wine and spirits garden. Finally, award-winning chefs such as Carla Hall, Emeril Lagasse, Michael Schlow, Erik Bruner-Yang, Nicholas Stefanelli, Vikram Sunderam and Amy Brandwein will participate in fascinating cooking demos. Ready the taste buds for this culinary bonanza.
12-5:30 p.m. | Tickets
2018 Nationals Winterfest – Dec. 1-2
In an event that always produces classic moments between players and fans, Nationals Winterfest comes to Nationals Park. Many of the Nats’ stars will be on-hand for fun interaction, games and autographs. Coaches and mascots will be hanging around, too, as the city celebrates its beloved baseball team.
11:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. | Tickets
@dmorrocco
40th Annual Logan Circle Holiday House Tour – Dec. 2
Logan Circle is hip, happening and historic. Get in the holiday spirit by exploring a diverse mix of Victorian mansions and upscale modern housing that lines DC’s only remaining residential circle during the 40th installment of this wintertime tradition. You’ll encounter fascinating interiors, accompanied by in-house musicians and street carolers along the way. The excursion concludes with a reception at the beautiful Studio Theatre.
Logan Circle NW, Washington, DC 20005
National Menorah Lighting: Chanukah on The Ellipse – Dec. 2
Chanukah kicks off with this lighting ceremony of the world’s largest menorah on the White House Ellipse, which greets all with latkes, doughnuts, menorah kits and dreidels. Music from the United States Air Force Band will add a soundtrack to the scene. As is the custom, a new candle is illuminated on each of the eight days of Chanukah.
4 p.m. (gates at 3 p.m.) | Free, but tickets required.
White House Ellipse, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500
@insiteimage
U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree Lighting – Dec. 5
Situated in front of the monumental U.S. Capitol on the West Lawn, this Christmas tree is yet another majestic staple of the holiday season in the District. This year’s version is a beautiful conifer from the Willamette National Forest in Oregon and will go aglow on Dec. 5. The tree has been transported across the country by motor vehicle – see its Facebook and Twitter pages to check out its journey. Once lit up, you’ll be able to admire the tree’s beauty throughout the season.
West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, East Capitol Street NE & First Street SE, Washington, DC 20004
Cirque du Soleil presents ‘Crystal’ – Dec. 5-9
The very first on-ice experience for Cirque du Soleil is coming to Capital One Arena. Crystal will feature feats of athleticism that challenge gravity and acrobatic moves from world-class ice skaters performed with daring speed. Follow the title character as she immerses herself in her own imagination in this fast-paced and empowering tale that is suitable for the entire family.
The Long Conversation – Dec. 7
Prepare for a creative marathon inside the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building. The Long Conversation will bring together individuals across a wide spectrum of professions, from comedian to DJ to geologist to poet to astrophysicist to drag queen and many more. The event is broken into sessions – each one will discuss pertinent topics of the moment and how we can make a brighter future. Speaker highlights include Cheech Marin, Sasha Velour, David Brooks and Alfre Woodard. The Long Conversation will also feature on-site art installs and locally sourced gourmet menu from James Beard Award winner Spike Gjerde. Attendance is free, but tickets are required.
2-10 p.m. | Free admission, but tickets required
Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, 900 Jefferson Drive SW, Washington, DC 20560
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
Russian Winter Festival – Dec. 9
Celebrate like it’s the 19th century at the Hillwood Estate’s annual event, which brings holiday cheer and Russian traditions to Upper Northwest. Meet Grandfather Frost (the Russian Santa Claus) and his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden. You can also make and wear your own traditional headwear and enjoy live performances as you explore the grounds of this historic estate. Admission ranges from free for children under six to $18 for adults; become a member and admission is only $12.
Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, 4155 Linnean Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008
November 2018 Festivals and Events
November 5th, 2018 | No Comments | Posted in Spotlight on the Community
Holiday Craft Shows
Throughout the month of November, you will find lots of arts and crafts shows ideal for shopping for unique holiday gifts. Find here a variety of craft shows in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
DC Cocktail Week
November 12-18, 2018. More than 50 Washington, D.C. area restaurants and bars offer specially priced cocktail and food pairings to entice guests to try something new. This is a great opportunity to check out the local happy hour scene.
ICE! – Christmas at the Gaylord National Resort
November 18, 2017 – January 1, 2018. The award-winning holiday attraction is a winter wonderland created entirely of 5,000 BLOCKS of ice weighing 1.5 MILLION POUNDS! hand-sculpted by 40 international artisans and kept at a chilling nine degrees Fahrenheit. This is an interactive holiday attraction you won’t want to miss.
Six Flags America – Holiday in the Park
November 23, 2018-January 1, 2019 The amusement park offers a holiday celebration featuring millions of glittering lights, holiday entertainment, seasonal treats, Santa’s Village, and many popular rides.
Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade and Illumination
November 17-18, 2018. Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg Address” and the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery are commemorated with a special ceremony, a parade and an illumination of the cemetery.
Turkey Trots in the Washington, D.C. Area
A variety of organizations in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia sponsor walks and runs to raise money for charity.
Thanksgiving Weekend in the Washington, D.C. Area
Thanksgiving weekend kicks off the holiday season and many wonderful activities and events begin in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Here are some ideas of fun things to do during the Thanksgiving weekend.
The National Christmas Tree and the Pageant of Peace
November 28, 2018, 5 p.m. Ellipse near the White House. At this annual celebration the national Christmas tree is illuminated along with 56 smaller trees with unique ornaments representing every state, territory, and the capital. The event will also have performers providing a soundtrack for the evening.
If you don’t make it to the lighting of the National Christmas Tree there are plenty of tree lighting ceremonies to visit in the area.
Christmas Light Displays
Celebrate the holiday season with a drive or a stroll through one of the Washington, D.C. area’s spectacle of lights at a local park in D.C., Maryland or Virginia.
Source: tripsavvy.com
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The Unofficial 1910 Fruitgum Co. Home Page
online since April 4, 2001
updated September 7, 2003 (yeah, it's about time)
The 1910 Fruitgum Company was, in my opinion, truly a great band, but who were they. Well, that's kind of a mystery. They were originally called Dr. Jeckell and the Hydes. According to the cover of the "Simon Says" album, they were formed in January of 1967 and originally consisted of Floyd Marcus on drums, Pat Karwan on lead guitar, Mark Gutkowski on organ, Steve Mortkowitz on bass guitar, and Frank Jeckell on rhythm guitar, all of them taking turns on vocals. It was this line up of the band that recorded their biggest hit, "Simon Says", which was on the album of the same title. As far as I know, this was also the line up on their second album, "1,2,3 Redlight", but I can't be sure of that. The cover of this album mysteriously doesn't mention anything about who they are, or list the names of the members, but judging by the sound I think it's most likely the same guys, or mostly the same guys, or a bunch of studio musicians with Mark doing vocals. On their third album, "Goody Goody Gumdrops", the band changes almost all of its members. Now the band consisted of Mark Gutkowski on organ and rhythm guitar, Chuck Travis on lead guitar, Rusty Oppenheimer on drums, Larry Ripley on bass and horns, and Bruce Shay on percussion, all of them taking turns on vocals. I'm pretty sure this is also the same line up on their fourth album, "Indian Giver", but once again, there is no mentioning of the band members on the cover, but at least they are pictured on it. On their fifth and final album, "Hard Ride", the band once again changed its line up, and this time the line up completely changed. There is not one member of the first two line ups in this album, and they don't really sound like a 1910 Fruitgum Company, although I still like this album very much. Now the Fruitgum Co. consisted of Jimmy Casazza on drums, Don Christopher on guitar and vocals, Ralph Cohen on trumpet, Rich Gomez on guitar and vocals, Jerry Roth on saxophone and Pat Soriano on keyboards and vocals. Well, that's about it, after that there were a few singles that went nowhere, and then they were gone. And now some members have gotten back together with others to reform the Fruitgum Company. Be sure to check out their website here, and try to catch them live. I certainly will be, and will cya there. Well, I'll let you take a look around the rest of my page now. There isn't much yet, there's a discography, some photos, and maybe by the time you're reading this there are some links.
Something new, I got a very interesting email with some better info on the history of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, from a staff writer/producer for Super K records, Steve Dworkin. He wrote "The Song Song" on the album "1,2,3 Red Light", and that Howdy Doody Song that is backwards on the flip side of the "Indian Giver" 45, titled "Pow Wow". Rather than modify what I wrote, and sort out everything, here's the email as it is here.
If you have any information, pictures, or rarities that you would like to contribute to this site, please email them to
j_gatarz@yahoo.com
Copyright ©2003 Jonathan Gatarz
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Home / Business / Fake Divorces Emerge as a Way to Buy an Apartment on the Cheap
Fake Divorces Emerge as a Way to Buy an Apartment on the Cheap
Posted on July 27, 2018 by Korea Bizwire in Business, Construction & Real Estate, Culture & Society, Editor's Picks, Industries, Most Viewed, Social Affairs, Top News with 0 Comments
(image: Kobiz Media / Korea Bizwire)
SEOUL, Jul. 27 (Korea Bizwire) — A middle-aged South Korean woman got married to and divorced from the same man twice, a rare occurrence in most parts of the world. But the couple’s on-again, off-again relationship may have been motivated by more than just their feelings for each other: The couple’s fake divorce appears to be part of a collaborative attempt to buy an apartment on the cheap.
In South Korea, before apartments are built, construction firms usually sell the right to buy units to ordinary people through lotteries and points-based systems, both of which are overseen by state authorities.
Marital status can be one factor in determining who wins those rights. Being divorced on paper means the woman could be categorized as someone who does not own a home, a status that could give her an advantage over homeowners and other potential buyers in the oft-fierce competition to win the right to buy apartments.
The woman — whose exact age is not known but appears to be in her 50s — divorced from her husband in November 2013 after 25 years of marriage, then tied the knot a second time with the same man in October 2014 before ending the union again in December 2017, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said, without identifying the woman.
The case may be extreme, but it illustrates how far some South Koreans are willing to go to win the right to buy apartments amid a surge in home prices in Seoul in recent years.
This photo taken on March 18, 2018, shows visitors lining up to be among the first to get inside a model house for apartments being built in Gangnam district. (image: Yonhap)
The ministry — which oversees the country’s housing policy — said it suspected that the woman “had a fake divorce to boost her chances of winning the right to buy an apartment.”
The woman eventually won home purchasing rights for an apartment being built in Hanam, just southeast of Seoul. More than 55,100 people applied for home purchasing rights for the apartments, resulting in a competition ratio of 26.3:1.
In the latest sign of just how heated South Korea’s housing market has become, a competition ratio of 649:1 was recorded for apartments being built by Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co. near Ewha Womans University in western Seoul.
Apartments have long been the most-favored housing choice for many South Koreans. In this densely populated country, apartment complexes often provide the most comfortable dwellings, as well as convenient access to amenities, such as schools and shopping. Also, apartments tend to steadily appreciate in value and are regarded by many not just as a home but as a means to get rich.
Apartment prices in Gangnam district — a posh neighborhood in southern Seoul that gained global attention thanks to rapper Psy’s 2012 mega hit “Gangnam Style” — soared 110.9 percent between December 2002 and June 2018, according to data compiled by KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s biggest retail bank.
In this file photo taken on July 1, 2018, a passerby walks in front of a realtor’s office displaying signs for home leases and home sales. A sign shows the sale price of a 148-square-meter apartment near in Gangnam district is 2.05 billion won (US$1.8 million). (image: Yonhap)
“Most South Koreans prefer apartments, as this type of home is convenient and generally allows people to accumulate wealth over time,” said Yoo Seon-jong, a professor of real estate studies at Konkuk University in Seoul.
Statistics Korea said the number of apartments in South Korea came to 10.03 million, accounting for 60 percent of all houses across the country, in 2016, the latest year for which statistics are available. New data is set to be released in August.
“Apartments have become something that symbolizes the status of the middle class,” said Park Won-gap, a real estate economist at KB Kookmin Bank.
Seoul — home to about one-fifth of South Korea’s total population of 51 million — is dotted with apartment buildings, including high rise ones. Data compiled by Statistics Korea showed 52.7 percent of the middle class and 74.6 percent of the upper class live in apartments in Seoul and its nearby metropolitan areas.
This photo taken from the observation deck of Lotte World Tower, the tallest building in South Korea, shows Seoul’s cityscape dotted with apartments. (image: Lotte Group)
People can buy apartments after construction has been completed, but winning home purchasing rights often ends up being more profitable, as construction firms usually sell home purchasing rights at prices somewhat lower than nearby existing apartments.
Park said comparatively-low home purchasing rights are the cause of various illegal activities, including fake divorces.
He described securing a home purchasing right as tantamount to winning a lottery because it means buyers can make hundreds of millions of won in profit.
GS Engineering & Construction Co., a major South Korean builder, sold home purchasing rights of 84-square-meter apartments in central Seoul at 780 million won (US$693,000) in 2014, and those units are now worth around 1.45 billion won.
Song Young-ju, a 45 year-old office worker in Seoul, said the government should plug loopholes in the housing policy and crack down on illegal activities related to home purchasing rights.
“I have a sense of remorse and anxiety as apartments prices have risen by tens of millions of won overnight and hundreds of millions of won in years at a time when it is not easy to save 100 million won,” Song said.
Still, she said getting divorced as a means of acquiring home purchasing rights is “crazy.”
There is no data on how many South Koreans had fake divorces to try to win home purchasing rights.
An official handling housing issues at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said there are other cases of fake divorces and fake marriages related to home purchasing rights, though he declined to elaborate.
The government has recently begun to probe into fake divorces and other illegal activities of those who won home purchasing rights, as a means to curb real estate speculation.
The ministry has referred the case of the suspected fake divorce to police for further investigation to determine whether the woman violated the country’s housing law. A detective said he has yet to question the suspect. He did not elaborate and asked not to be identified.
Michael Breen, CEO of Insight Communication Consultants, a public relations company, and author of “The New Koreans” and “Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader,” said, “Fake divorces seem rather extreme, but in reality, this type of behavior to skirt the rules is quite widespread in Korea. That is because the law is often seen as petty and bureaucratic.”
He added, “Fake divorces (or real divorces for law-skirting purposes) may be unusual, but other such tricks, like falsifying addresses (so that children qualify for the better schools), are very common, and yet are used as pretexts by politicians to vote against candidates for ministerial positions on the grounds that they reflect immorality.”
The woman could not be reached for an interview as both the ministry and police declined to share her phone number, citing the confidentiality of personal information.
The woman could face up to three years in prison or a maximum fine of 30 million won (US$27,000) if she is found to have disrupted the housing market. She could also see her home purchasing rights canceled and be banned from applying for home purchasing rights for up to 10 years, according to the ministry.
Besides cases of fake divorces and fake marriages, a South Korean is suspected to have illegally bought home purchasing rights from two people with disabilities who were given special government benefits related to home purchasing rights.
The ministry said it has found a total of 108 cases of illegal activities in home purchasing rights for apartments being built in Hanam. It said the lion’s share of illegal activities is false registration of addresses with 77 cases, followed by false income reports with three cases.
But for regular people like Song, the situation is still dire, with rising house prices making apartment ownership seem as though it is always slipping further out of reach.
She said, “I have had sleepless nights due to concern that my dream of buying a home may end up only a dream.”
fake divorces
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Mamamoo announces fan meeting
Girl group Mamamoo will celebrate its fifth anniversary as a group with a special meet-and-greet event for fans, its agency, RBW, said Wednesday.
According to the agency, the quartet will meet with fans on July 13 at 5 p.m. at Hwajeong Stadium located on the campus of Korea University in northern Seoul. The event, titled “Moomoo War,” will be the group’s largest fan meeting yet.
The group’s last fan meet event was in October 2017.
Mamamoo made its debut on June 19, 2014, with “Mr. Ambiguous” and has since released a slew of hit tracks, including “Piano Man” (2014), “Um Oh Ah Yeh” (2015), “Decalcomanie” (2016) and “Yes I Am” (2017).
Its latest release, “Gogobebe,” also ranked high on local music charts.
The group will hold concerts on July 27 and 28 at Daegu’s Exco.
Tickets for the fan meet became available on Wednesday for members of the group’s official fan club, and will open to the public on Friday, 8 p.m. through Interpark.
Ailee to release second full album
Singer Ailee will drop her second full-length album “butterFLY” on July 2, two years and five months after her last EP came out in 2017.
The powerful vocalist has recently contributed songs to the soundtracks of TV dramas and has not released her own music since the last EP.
The songs from the soundtracks have performed well on local music charts, including the immensely popular ballad “I Will Go to You Like the First Snow” (2017) and “Blue Spring” (2018).
The upcoming full-length album will be the second for the singer, and her first album release in almost four years. Her first album, “Vivid,” was released in September 2015.
By Yoon So-yeon
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In trade row, Korea asks for help
Minister travels to Washington to stress that many will be hurt
The Korean government is asking for U.S. help in the intensifying trade conflict with Japan.
According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy on Tuesday, Trade Minister Yoo Myung-hee will travel to the United States next week with the message that the trade dispute between Seoul and Tokyo will affect major U.S. tech companies including Apple and Google. Korean companies are major suppliers of semiconductors and displays for iPhones and other mobile devices.
On Monday, Yoo told reporters that the government is looking into various ways to deal with the problem, including international cooperation. She refrained from elaborating, saying, “I would like to reserve what I say as our counterparts could prepare if they know [our plan].”
Kim Hee-sang, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director general for bilateral economic affairs, is scheduled to meet with Roland de Marcellus, acting U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international finance and development, in Washington on Thursday. Kim is expected to ask the United States for assistance with the row.
Japan has already put export restrictions on three key materials - fluorinated polyimide, hydrogen fluoride and photoresists - needed in the production of semiconductors and smartphones. As Japan considers additional restrictions, Korea is drawing up a complaint for the World Trade Organization and trying to rally international support.
President Moon Jae-in, who was silent for days after Japan announced its plans a week ago, said Monday that the Korean government has no choice but to take counteractions if Tokyo’s export restrictions hurt Korean companies.
Deputy Prime Minister of Economics and Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki said Monday that Japan’s restrictions go against WTO rules, and stressed that the actions will hurt Japanese companies too and have a negative impact on the global economy.
“[The government] will continue to actively counter the situation through various angles including close communication and mutual cooperation with Korean companies and the international community,” Hong said.
The finance minister also hinted that the government will campaign against the export restrictions in international forums including Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and International Monetary Fund meetings in the second half of the year.
U.S. hardware companies - including Apple, Qualcomm, Intel and HP, as well as software developers such as Facebook, Amazon and Google - are major customers of Korean semiconductor companies.
As of last year, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix jointly hold the largest share in the global market for semiconductors of over 70 percent. Samsung accounts for more than 40 percent and SK Hynix close to 30 percent. Additionally, the combined market share of these two Korean companies for NAND flash chips is more than 45 percent.
Any delay in supplies from them would affect the Korean companies but also their major U.S. customers.
Samsung Display dominates the global small OLED panel market with a nearly 90-percent market share. These panels are not used only in smartphones but also in laptops and other digital gadgets.
One of Samsung Display’s biggest customers is Apple.
BY LEE HO-JEONG [lee.hojeong@joongang.co.kr]
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← Dickens and Dostoevsky Just Got Real
Book! →
Adventures in Russian archives
Posted on November 12, 2012 by Kate Antonova
The Ivanovo train station.
(Photo from Russian Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons license.)
I first arrived in Ivanovo, Russia, in the fall of 2004 by overnight train from Moscow. We pulled into Ivanovo at seven in the morning, and I peeked out, still sleepy and disoriented. I asked the elderly gentlemen getting off beside me if this was, indeed, Ivanovo. He looked out at the bleak landscape, still dark, of a handful of crumbling concrete buildings with a gigantic Soviet-era wall mosaic of a worker, and replied with an ironic grin, “sure looks like it.”
Hand-felted mittens, adapted for archive use.
I made these incredibly ugly mittens to wear in the Ivanovo archive where I did the bulk of the research for my book. They were knitted in Russian wool, then fulled with hot water and soap to make them denser and therefore warmer. The forefinger on the right mitten only was made separate from the rest of the hand, so that once the fulling process ensured the wool wouldn’t unravel, I could cut tiny holes in the pad of the forefinger and thumb, so that I could (just barely) grip a pen with the mitten still on. I went through all this in the long fall evening hours after the archive was closed, then wore them all through the winter. Those mittens tell you a lot about doing archival research in Russia.
I did my research mostly in just one archive, and one that few westerners ever visit: the State Archive of Ivanovo Region, or GAIO for short.
Like a beacon in the distance, the State Archive of Ivanovo Region calls to me…
GAIO is a provincial archive, and the city of Ivanovo is the capital for its region, also called Ivanovo. Like most enterprises in Ivanovo, the archive is run pretty much entirely by women. Ivanovo’s nickname is “City of Brides” because it has been a disproportionately female city for more than two hundred years. This phenomenon began because the city of Ivanovo grew out of a region that dominated Russia’s new textile industry in the late eighteenth century. Textile workshops tended to mostly employ women in those days, so there were disproportionate numbers of women workers. Today, Ivanovo’s textile industry is dead, but the disproportionate domination of women continues.
I assumed the “city of brides” thing was little more than a nickname, but Ivanovo actually has a hair salon specializing entirely in brides….
I lived in Ivanovo for almost ten months, all of them winter. Today, with its industry closed, Ivanovo is mainly known for its malls, a couple of which were built in abandoned factory spaces. Most young people try to leave Ivanovo as soon as they can, as there aren’t many jobs. Too many of the relatively small number of adult men can be seen wandering the streets, drunk at midday—there’s not much else for them to do, if they’re not both well-educated and lucky. When I was there, from 2004-05, there was some new construction, but mostly the town looked like a graveyard for the various historical epochs it has survived. There are old merchant homes from the late nineteenth century all over town, made of wood with decorations around the windows and doors. They are quaint, but decaying fast. In between them, there are the hastily erected apartment buildings and institutional constructions of the 1960s, ugly and decaying even faster than the nineteenth-century buildings. Along the river banks are the shells of what once was an enormous factory complex, and here and there are sparkling new apartment buildings offering “luxury” units to the entrepreneurs of the new shopping malls.
A nineteenth- or early twentieth-century house with a 1960s apartment building in the background, in Ivanovo.
The Ivanovo archive, like most archives, opens its reading room for pretty limited hours, about 4-5 hours each day, four days a week. As a researcher, you can only request a limited number of documents each day, so you try to plan ahead to make sure you’ll have enough to fill your time until you can request more, since you can’t afford to waste an hour. When you first arrive, they tend to not give you most of what you ask for. Instead they’ll give you one or two documents to start with, and watch how you handle them, to make sure you’re a serious researcher and are handling the documents carefully. And, at least when I was there, it was very difficult to get a xerox or digital photo of anything. It was very expensive, and you had to ask permission separately for every page. They approved only a few pages once in a while, and usually only something that obviously couldn’t be easily transcribed, like a drawing. This means you have to sit there and copy out the documents you’re interested in by hand. Eventually I was given permission to use a laptop, but I found that copying by hand was actually more efficient for my research, since the handwriting of private, nineteenth-century Russian documents was hard to decipher, so it was often easier and faster to “draw” the illegible bits in my notebook than to try to indicate what I thought I saw in the middle of typing. That’s why it took almost ten months to get the information I needed, and I barely got it all before I had to leave.
I didn’t bother to get a photograph of the EKG-type handwriting, as it wouldn’t have helped. This is an example of difficult, but decipherable handwriting. It’s an excerpt from an account book.
The handwriting isn’t really difficult because it’s old and Russian. First, I’d been reading Russian for more than ten years by the time I started this project, and it’s also not that difficult to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of the mid-nineteenth century. There are reference books that provide some of the standards of the time, though the real trick is getting to know the personal quirks of a given writer. I was lucky in that the vast majority of documents I needed were written by just a handful of people, so I could get to know each one within a week or two, and have little trouble with them thereafter. Deciphering the handwriting is a bit like the last stages of figuring out a code: you can see most of it, so you isolate the strange parts and try to identify patterns about when they appear. Once the context tells you what a figure must indicate in one instance, you can apply that to the other instances, and hopefully everything suddenly becomes clear. This is all rather fun. Though sometimes you come across the handwriting of someone who just completely defeats you. I had one such case in Vasily Rogozin, the husband of Aleksandra Chikhacheva, the daughter in the family I was studying. His handwriting looked like an EKG readout, and I had to give up on it, with great regret, since the content, if only it were legible, probably would have solved a few mysteries, because Aleksandra is one of the most enigmatic figures in this collection of documents. But I felt better when I read a letter by her father to Rogozin, complaining about his impossible handwriting!
These strange (to me) symbols popped up in all the family diaries and at first eluded me. Over time it became clear they represented days of the week. Then, I found this key, listing each symbol with its meaning and related day of the week, in the naval diary of Natalia Chikhacheva’s father, Ivan Yakovlevich Chernavin. I don’t know whether he invented it or it was a common naval code (perhaps a reader of this blog can tell me?)
This code was never mysterious, but is definitely a lot of fun. Andrei Chikhachev and his best friend and brother-in-law Yakov Chernavin invented a system of signaling to each other across their opposing balconies that they referred to as their “home telegraph.” The system involved navy-style flags (later they invented a nighttime version with lights). This is a page from their telegraph signal book.
Some mysteries remain: this seemingly coded text was inscribed by Andrei Chikhachev into his parallel diary. I have no idea what it means. Maybe someday someone will recognize it, if it wasn’t a completely idiosyncratic code unique to Andrei and his brother-in-law Yakov Chernavin. Other mysteries in the documents include odd lists and charts that I believe may have been related to various games the family played.
The hardest part about the archive work, for me, was the cold. The archive is deliberately kept cold because the low temperatures are better for the documents. But when you’re sitting still for 5 hours at a time in a cold room, you soon begin to feel like your limbs will fall off if you attempt to get up again. I coped with the help of those archive mittens, and an ankle-length down coat worn at all times (with hat and scarf and fur-lined boots). I went out into the hallway for a break with hot tea and crackers three times a day, and did quick stretches every time, to get the blood moving again.
The other greatest challenge was confronting the very different attitudes toward research and access held by the authorities of this archive (or any other state archive in Russia, though they vary in the details). Mind you, I had it incredibly easy compared to most foreign researchers in Russia. There’s even a whole book written about adventures in Russian archives. In the old days, your biggest problems included being followed by the KGB and getting permanently banned from ever traveling to Russia again. These days, keeping warm is really the biggest issue for most of us. Although it can still be very difficult to study certain subjects from the 20th century (some archives have still not been opened to researchers at all), for someone like me, studying gentry women in the early and mid-nineteenth century, there’s generally no question of whether I can get access. I’ve been denied some documents, and always told this was because they were “in restoration.” Sometimes I suspect this really means that they can’t be found, or that an archivist is in a bad mood, or that I’ve been asking for too much lately, but it’s never been anything very important.
What was much more challenging for me is that in Ivanovo in 2004-05, archivists were still very wary of digital photography, though they did eventually allow me to photograph a few documents, under strict supervision. Even now Russian archives are slow to permit digital imaging, although it has become pretty standard in most of the world and it’s potentially a marvelous way for archives to get paid to digitally preserve their own collections. For many decades, Russian archives were focused on keeping information from getting out, and this is how most working archivists were trained, so it has been a very slow—some might say glacial—process to shift policies toward the priorities shared by most western archives, which is that archives exist in order to provide access to the documents, so that researchers can do something productive with them, instead of letting them literally disintegrate unseen.
So, I labored away, copying by hand under the somewhat suspicious eyes of the authorities. But this is really not an accurate depiction. There are very few people who work in the reading room of the Ivanovo archive for more than a few days, and I was there every single moment of every day for so long that I became quite close to the main reading room archivist, and the archive as a whole was incredibly generous in helping me to pursue my research (they have little control over central policies, and in any case there’s a long history of archivists losing their jobs by being too kind to foreign researchers–their task is not an easy one). Working in the Russian provinces was very different from the kind of experience you’d have working at, for example, the Bakhmeteff Archive in New York, but not necessarily worse.
While it was harder to live in a rented room in a foreign town while I did my work, this aspect of my research was also incredibly fun. Ivanovo is a strange and interesting town in many ways. For whatever reason many of the names of streets and squares have not been renamed since the collapse of the Soviet Union (as they mostly have been in Moscow and especially St. Petersburg), so there’s a Revolution Square and Red Army Street and Marx Street and so on. There’s also a rock in the center of town to commemorate the fact that Pushkin once traveled somewhere near Ivanovo, but not actually to Ivanovo. This rock is maybe my favorite part of Ivanovo. The contrast of Pushkin rock and Revolution Square is just the beginning—beside the crumbling buildings there are fancy new western-style supermarkets and a McDonald’s knock-off. Above the post office that still smells of old Soviet paper there is an internet cafe full of foreign students sending emails to far-flung parts of the world. Ivanovo is home to a town-within-a-town full of universities, so there are a lot of students. There’s also a formerly-secret military base not far from town, so plenty of soldiers, too. And dotted here and there are a handful of pre-revolutionary churches, with shiny gold paint newly re-applied to their onion domes.
The back streets of Ivanovo: path to the archive.
To get to the archive every day I took a short-cut through the back alleys of one of the older neighborhoods, where I saw spectacular new dachas being built alongside 150-year-old peasant huts. There were still hand-pumps for water by the side of the roads, and every morning a lady walked her goats across the path I was taking. As I exited this neighborhood and neared the main road where the archive was located, I passed a 1960s-vintage apartment building with a pack of wild dogs encamped in the courtyard. You read that right. Dogs in Russia are not routinely spayed or neutered, and there isn’t much in the way of systematic dog-catching, so there are a lot of strays wandering everywhere. Calling them “wild” is probably a stretch, but they are dangerous, to each other and to passersby. I got used to them after a while, which I cannot say for the -30 degree windchill (Celcius) in February.
An area of Ivanovo I like to call “wild dog alley.”
By far the most exciting part of that research year, however, was traveling beyond Ivanovo, into the countryside. I went there to find the villages once owned by the gentry family I was researching. Their main residential village still exists, complete with manor house, then being used as the village school. I was able to meet several of the teachers, who gave me a tour of the house and village. We went back again in spring, and the teachers treated us to a memorable feast in an upstairs bedroom that once belonged to the woman at the center of my study.
The road sign to Dorozhaevo. We went once in the bitter cold of mid-winter, and again in a muggy and buggy June.
The village of Dorozhaevo
Enjoying the quality of freshly pumped well water in remote Dorozhaevo.
An upstairs bedroom of the Chikhachev house in Dorozhaevo, which the locals told me belonged to the lady of the house (and nothing I read in the documents contradicted this).
Traveling on back roads from the village of Berezovik (once owned by the Chernavin and Chikhachev families) to the nearest town, Teikovo.
A wooden church from the outdoor museum at Suzdal
A rich peasant’s house at the outdoor museum at Suzdal.
Interior of a rich peasant’s house, from the outdoor museum at Suzdal.
We also traveled to another village, where the church still stood, and to nearby towns that had been significant in the mid-nineteenth century. Of these, Suzdal is now a major stop on the tourist circuit known as the Golden Ring. It features two medieval monasteries and an outdoor museum with reconstructed village houses from the nineteenth century. We also visited Rostov-the-Great, home of a magnificent medieval fortress containing several cathedrals, which should also be a tourist site, but is somewhat off the beaten path and so not as prosperous as Suzdal.
A bell tower from a monastery in Yaroslavl, a beautiful and mostly thriving city on the Volga river.
Sadly, Yaroslavl is also the home of what I believe may be the world’s ugliest building.
Skyline of Vladimir.
Finally, we visited neighboring Yaroslavl, and the former provincial capital, Vladimir, both cities that are adjusting rather better to post-Soviet times than Ivanovo, thanks in part to their more diverse economies and several significant historical sites, which bring in tourist money.
None of these visits were really essential to my research, but they helped me to assimilate the setting in which the events of my study took place. Perhaps most exciting of all my side-trips, though, was a last-minute excursion to tiny Shuia. I went because I’d been told at the Ivanovo archive that the little town museum in Shuia had a few books that had belonged to the father of the family I studied. It turns out they had a shelf full of Andrei Chikhachev’s bound volumes of the newspaper Agricultural Gazette, full of articles he had written, and with his own marginalia! Not a bad surprise for my last day of research in Russia for that project.
On an article titled “The Influence of the Moon on Trees” Andrei wrote, “Rather useful article” (perhaps not the most revelatory annotation, but characteristic of Andrei!)
These are some of the aspects of historical research that don’t really get talked about in books or classrooms, though they should. For my current research I have been working so far in the central State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and will be doing more in St. Petersburg and possibly in archives in France and Germany, so my experience has been rather different. I can order xeroxes easily in Moscow, so I can gather my materials much more quickly, and I am less immersed in the process, as I work for short periods on summer “breaks.” This is probably more typical of most historians’ archival research, and I must admit there have been far fewer moments, lately, when I wished to myself that I had chosen to study Italian history instead.
For more images related to the people and places in my book, look here.
NOTE ABOUT IMAGES: All photographs are my own (© Katherine Pickering Antonova 2012), unless otherwise noted. Please don’t use or distribute without my permission. Photographs of archival documents were taken with permission from the State Archive of Ivanovo Region.
This entry was posted in History, Profession, Research and tagged Archives, FAQ, HistoryisFun, Ivanovo, provinces, research, russia, Shuia, Suzdal, travel, Vladimir. Bookmark the permalink.
3 Responses to Adventures in Russian archives
Michael Taubman says:
Googling astronomical day of week symbols returns several pages with the weekday symbols you found. It appears they’re fairly common. I haven’t found anything on the other cryptic page, with the crosses and dots, but you’ve piqued my curiosity. I’ll let you know if I come across anything. Is there a reason why these guys would be using codes, or was it just for fun?
Kate Antonova says:
Thanks for the link on the day of the week symbols!
The codes were almost certainly just for fun – these guys had no reason to do otherwise, though they might have picked up a code either in military service, or reading military memoirs. Do let me know if you come up with anything!
Jocelyn Smith says:
Thanks you for such an interesting review of your research in Russia.
Leave a Reply to Kate Antonova Cancel reply
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There's going to be another 'Ghostbusters' movie, so get ready for a new round of arguing
Ghostbusters Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) in 1989’s “Ghostbusters II.”
— Colombia Pictures
By Elahe Izadi , Washington Post
Where you were during the great "Ghostbusters" war of 2016? Was it in the comments section, fighting?
Get ready for more of that. Jason Reitman announced Tuesday that he will direct and co-write a new installment in the "Ghostbusters" series, which will not pick up where the 2016 all-female reboot left off. (His father, Ivan, directed the original 1984 movie and its 1989 follow-up.)
"This is the next chapter in the original franchise. It is not a reboot," Jason Reitman told Entertainment Weekly, which first broke the news. "What happened in the '80s happened in the '80s, and this is set in the present day."
There's even a teaser for the forthcoming movie, showing the old Ectomobile (that iconic "Ghostbusters" car) in a barn.
This comes after all of the drama surrounding Sony's 2016 reboot, which starred Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. The gender-swap sparked intense divisiveness well before the movie even hit theaters, with negative comments flooding the internet simply because it starred women. (The responses ranged from "how dare these women ruin a beloved childhood classic" to "women are not funny.")
The trailer for the Paul Feig-directed movie brought out an unprecedented level of hate, making it the most disliked trailer in YouTube history. Audience ratings posted on sites such as IMDb were also out of whack.
On the other end of the spectrum, the sight of four women fighting ghosts and taking names inspired plenty of love among a cadre of fans eager to see more female representation on screen. Feig was especially touched by seeing young girls and boys dressing up as the characters for Halloween.
"I wanted for little girls to be able to see themselves up on the screen," Feig told Vulture at the time. "The original one exists, so you can see boys doing it, but how fun for girls to have this experience!"
We know few details about the newest "Ghostbusters" installment, but it's sparking reactions about possible gender dynamics within the movie and what that could mean more broadly. Shooting will begin in the next few months, with a release date anticipated for summer 2020, according to EW. No word on the cast yet and whether it'll be an all-male, female or mixed-gender ensemble, although Reitman promised "new characters."
For the 2016 reboot, Feig had buy-in from the original cast members, many of whom had cameos, and Ivan Reitman produced. But the stakes were still high when Feig took the reins of the beloved movie franchise. The ongoing sexist vitriol made seeing the reboot more than just a night out at the movies; paying for a ticket became a political act.
"I have so much respect for what Paul [Feig] created with those brilliant actresses, and would love to see more stories from them," Reitman told EW. "However, this new movie will follow the trajectory of the original film."
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Sonali Bendre`s son posts an emotional message
Family and close friends of Bollywood actress Sonali Bendre have come out as the biggest support in her journey of fighting cancer. The actress who has been diagnosed with high-grade cancer is undergoing her treatment in New York. Being a true fighter, Sonali has not shied away from sharing her thoughts and new pictures on social media with her well-wishers.
As Sonali earlier mentioned, her husband Goldie Behl and son Ranveer Behl have been strong pillars for her and she feels proud how her son has taken everything and still being positive.
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REED v. THE STATE.
A96A1137.
BEASLEY, Chief Judge.
Drug violation. Newton Superior Court. Before Judge Sorrells.
Reed's first trial for trafficking in cocaine (OCGA 16-13-31) ended in a mistrial. A jury convicted him at the retrial, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The evidence showed that special drug agent Malcom received an anonymous call advising him that Reed was at a certain location, wearing described clothing and in possession of a large quantity of crack Cocaine. Malcom relayed this information to police officer Miller, who investigated.
When Miller arrived at the location, he saw Reed and another person exit a convenience store. As Reed passed a dumpster beside the store, Miller saw him discard a wad of plastic or cellophane. When Miller approached Reed and his companion and motioned for them to come to him, they fled. Miller and another officer chased and arrested them. Miller found a large sum of money in Reed's pocket and 29 grams of cocaine of a purity of 83 percent in many small yellow ziplock bags inside the discarded clear plastic bag.
1. Reed enumerates his retrial as error, invoking the former jeopardy provisions of Georgia law.
Prior to Reed's first trial, he moved in limine to prohibit or limit testimony regarding the anonymous call to the police. At trial, the prosecutor represented to the court that Malcom had been told by the caller that Reed was engaged in the sale of crack cocaine. Malcom then informed the court that he had been told only that Reed was in possession of the cocaine. The court ruled that the information provided by the anonymous caller to the police was admissible to explain their conduct but not to establish the truth of the matters asserted by the caller. The court warned the prosecutor that a mistrial would be granted if he misrepresented what the caller had said, and the prosecutor was advised by the court to take a "minimal approach and be quite clear when you're explaining to the jury that it is only to explain conduct at the time."
During the prosecutor's opening statement, he described what Lt. Miller found in the plastic bag "just as the caller had told what the evidence was expected to show regarding that call, Lt. Malcom. . . ." Reed moved for a mistrial, arguing that this was an assertion of proof for the truth of the caller's message. After some discussion of the parameters of allowable recitation of what the evidence was expected to show regarding that call, the court denied the motion but admonished the prosecutor and gave curative instructions to the jury, explaining that the opening statements are not evidence and also that what the anonymous caller said could be considered only to explain the officer's conduct and not for the truth of the message.
While being questioned by the prosecutor, Miller later testified that Malcom had told him the anonymous caller had said Reed was selling drugs. Reed again moved for a mistrial, which the court initially granted. Based in part on the strength of the evidence against Reed, the court reconsidered and proceeded with the trial but later granted a mistrial when the prosecutor, in examining a defense witness, referred to a statement made by Reed while in police custody which had not been provided to the defense as required by former OCGA 17-7-210.
Reed subsequently filed a "motion to bar retrial based on double jeopardy." The court denied it upon finding that the prosecuting attorney's actions were negligent rather than intentional and were not intended to provoke the defendant into moving for a mistrial.
"[T]he double jeopardy proscription of the U. S. and Georgia Constitutions generally does not prevent reprosecution of a defendant where a mistrial occurs on the motion of, or with the consent of, the defendant. [Cits.]" Studyvent v. State, 153 Ga. App. 161 (264 SE2d 695) (1980). The double jeopardy clause of the Georgia Constitution contains an express exception "in case of mistrial." Art. I, Sec. I, Par. XVIII, Ga. Const. of 1983. The double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment has been interpreted by the United States Supreme Court as incorporating such an exception. See Studyvent and cits.
In Studyvent, this Court, in reliance upon then-extant United States Supreme Court decisions, held that a defendant's retrial is barred when mistrial is granted on the grounds of prosecutorial overreaching and such was motivated by the prosecutor's bad faith or with intent to harass or prejudice the defendant. See Morris v. State, 180 Ga. App. 896 (350 SE2d 851) (1986).
However, in Oregon v. Kennedy, 456 U. S. 667, 676 (102 SC 2083, 72 LE2d 416) (1982), "[t]he Court concluded that: 'Only where the governmental conduct in question is intended to "goad" the defendant into moving for a mistrial may a defendant raise the bar of double jeopardy to a second trial after having succeeded in aborting the first on his own motion.' " State v. Whitehead, 184 Ga. App. 162, 163 (361 SE2d 41) (1987). In Kennedy, the Court "reasoned that 'bad faith conduct' or 'harassment' are not decisive factors to prevent retrial even though they might warrant a declaration of mistrial and that 'overreaching' is too broad a test." Whitehead, supra.
In Williams v. State, 258 Ga. 305, 310 (1) (369 SE2d 232) (1988), the Georgia Supreme Court adopted the decision in Kennedy as establishing the applicable double jeopardy standard "under both state and federal criminal law." Williams, 258 Ga. at 311; see also Beck v. State, 261 Ga. 826 (412 SE2d 530) (1992). We are not at liberty to construe our law more liberally. Art. VI, Sec. VI, Par. VI, Ga. Const. of 1983. Morris is disapproved to the extent that it holds otherwise. The applicable standard is the intent of the prosecutor in the misconduct, and such intent is a fact question for the court to resolve. Whitehead, supra. Since the evidence supports the trial court's finding that the prosecutor did not intend to goad Reed into moving for mistrial, denial of the motion to bar retrial was not legal error.
2. Reed enumerates as error the allowance of hearsay testimony regarding the content of the anonymous call.
At the beginning of retrial, Reed renewed his motion in limine regarding the anonymous call. The court denied it but agreed to instruct the jury to consider such evidence only as explaining police conduct and not for the truth of the matters asserted. The admission of the evidence, with this caveat, did not constitute error.
3. The next enumeration of error is the court's permitting a State's witness to comment on the invocation of his right to remain silent.
Malcom testified, in response to State examination, that Reed initially refused to make any statement but then said the money found on him at the time of his arrest had been given to him by a named individual. Reed moved for a mistrial, contending the witness had made an impermissible comment on his refusal to make a statement to the police. The prosecutor argued that the defendant had not been prejudiced because the refusal had been shown by his own testimony. Shortly thereafter, Reed withdrew his objection and thus failed to preserve this enumeration for appeal. Wilburn v. State, 199 Ga. App. 667, 668 (2) (405 SE2d 889) (1991).
4. Reed cites the court's rejection of his requests to charge the jury on abandonment of a controlled substance (OCGA 16-13-3) and possession of cocaine (OCGA 16-13-30) as lesser included offenses of trafficking in cocaine.
As in Parham v. State, 218 Ga. App. 42, 44 (3) (460 SE2d 78) (1995), " 'the evidence shows either the commission of the completed offense as charged, or the commission of no offense, [so] the trial court is not required to charge the jury on a lesser included offense. [Cits.]' [Cits.]"
5. Reed complains of the court's disallowance of his argument that he may have possessed less than 28 grams of cocaine. During closing argument, defense counsel urged that the jury might consider as a reasonable hypothesis that at least one-half of the cocaine belonged to Reed's companion, in which case Reed did not possess 28 grams. The court did not err, because there was no evidence that Reed had been in possession of only part of the cocaine with his companion in possession of the remainder.
Alan A. Cook, District Attorney, William K. Wynne, Jr., Assistant District Attorney, for appellee.
J. Ellis Millsaps, for appellant.
DECIDED JULY 30, 1996.
WILLIAMS v. THE STATE. (236 Ga. App. 503) (512 SE2d 387) (1999)
WATSON v. THE STATE. (230 Ga. App. 79) (495 SE2d 305) (1998)
WARD v. THE STATE. (230 Ga. App. 581) (497 SE2d 65) (1998)
MOSLEY v. THE STATE. (230 Ga. App. 890) (497 SE2d 608) (1998)
WALKER v. THE STATE. (228 Ga. App. 509) (493 SE2d 193) (1997)
HARALSON v. THE STATE. (227 Ga. App. 118) (488 SE2d 497) (1997)
THE STATE v. TELENKO. (225 Ga. App. 724) (484 SE2d 725) (1997)
ALEMAN v. THE STATE. (224 Ga. App. 391) (480 SE2d 393) (1997)
Thursday May 21 05:54 EDT
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Police Association of New Orleans Works to Protect Killer Cops
The Times-Picayune reported yesterday that a third police officer is expected to turn himself in for the killings and cover-up on the Danziger Bridge. The Picayune also reported on a party on Sunday, thrown by the Police Association of New Orleans (PANO) to raise money for the legal defense of two officers who are being investigated for murdering Henry Glover and burning his body.
We have also discovered that PANO has an NOPD payroll deduction form on their website for donations to the officers involved in the Danziger massacre. Professor Lance Hill, who pointed this out to us, adds, "This obviously means that NOPD authorized using its payroll services (our tax dollars) to assist in raising money for these cops."
All of this goes to show that these officers, and the organization that represents them, continue to work to protect cops who have killed and tried to cover it up. The problems in the NOPD are clearly systemic. This is more than a new mayor or police chief can solve. We need federal oversight.
Posted by jordan flaherty at 6:15 AM No comments:
Labels: Danziger Bridge, Henry Glover, PANO, Police Association of New Orleans
Day One of Trial in Tensas Parish
Today in St. Joseph, Louisiana, the trial of Waterproof mayor Bobby Higginbotham began. As we reported last week, Tensas Parish Sheriff Rickey Jones and District Attorney James Paxton have accused Higginbotham of various charges of corruption. Bobby Higginbotham and his supporters, including Police Chief Miles Jenkins and school board member Annie Watson, say that Paxton and Jones are attempting to carry out a coup against Black political leadership in the parish.
Mayor Higginbotham, who is not a lawyer, represented himself at the trial today. Displaying confident knowledge of the law and an array of legal precedents and statistics to back him up, the mayor brought motions to have DA James Paxton removed from the case for conflict of interest, as well as for change of venue and for a continuance. The presiding judge ruled against Higginbotham on all counts, and jury selection began.
A six person jury was selected, with five white members and one Black member. According to the 2000 Census, the parish is 55% African American.
Several supporters of Higginbotham came to the courtroom to observe the trial, including Chief Jenkins, Ms. Watson, and Concordia Parish NAACP President Justin Conner.
Labels: NAACP, Tensas Parish, Waterproof
A CALL TO ACTION: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE SUPERVISION OF NOPD REQUIRED NOW
When she was called for jury duty, Veda Manual’s reaction was no different from most citizens. “I knew it would be long,” she said. “No one wants to be there.” But because it was her civic duty, last week she sat at Criminal District Court and endured the process. Unfortunately, what she experienced will come as no surprise to most New Orleanians.
“Three times we could not seat a jury,” She says. The reason for this difficulty could not have been envisioned by the framers of our constitution. A majority of our residents – and an overwhelming majority of African-Americans – know this truth and live its fear. It was a case of drug possession with intent to distribute, where there was no physical evidence, just the testimony of the police officer(s). “In light of all of what we know about the police, I said I couldn’t convict anyone on their testimony alone. I was Juror No. 1. Sixteen of the other people in my group agreed. How can we trust the police?”
Ordinary citizens could not in good conscience affirm they could believe the truth of any testimony sworn under oath by officers of the New Orleans Police Department.
Harsh? Well, let’s consider some of the news headlines/reports and proven facts, just since Katrina:
NOPD officers' account of beating disputed
Oct. 10, 2005, 10:12PM
A retired elementary school teacher was arrested and beaten by police officers who claim he was publicly intoxicated. The incident was caught on tape by Associated Press Television News, and one producer was allegedly grabbed and shoved by the arresting officers.
NOPD baits, then arrests, the homeless
POSTED: 01:00 AM Friday, July 11, 2008
BY: Richard A. Webster, Staff Writer, New Orleans City Business
Police officers baited passersby by placing several small items worth less than 10 dollars in plain view on the dash of unlocked cars in an effort to entrap and arrest homeless people living under the Claiborne overpass.
Cop booked in rape of 13-year-old was investigated twice for raping young girls, but remained on the job
By Brendan McCarthy, The Times-Picayune
October 23, 2008, 7:59AM
A veteran NOPD officer, twice accused of rape by young girls in 2001 and 2003, was booked after a third girl accused him of rape. Though he was twice investigated in the past, both investigations ended with prosecutors citing “failure of the victims or the victim’s parents to cooperate.” Neither of the investigations were noted on his civil service record.
Cops involved in New Year's killing of Adolph Grimes III face other probes
On the same evening nine officers shot and killed 22 year-old Adolph Grimes III another incident occurred where the same nine-man unit subdued Cleavon Crutchfield with a taser gun and drew guns on his family. Several of the officers involved in the separate incidents are under investigation for other incidents.
Man 'impersonating' cop was an actual NOPD officer
By Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Times-Picayune
March 20, 2009, 11:35AM
Darrius Clipps, who allegedly forced his way into several area homes and victimized several Hispanic men and women, was not impersonating a police officer as early reports claimed but was in fact a member of the police force.
NOPD cops lied about bar brawl, inquiry says
July 10, 2009, 9:23AM
An NOPD internal report concludes that police officers involved in a 2008 bar fight between off-duty officers and RTA workers lied to investigators, and at least one officer coerced false testimony from a witness.
NOPD downgrading of rape reports raises questions
By Laura Maggi, The Times-Picayune
July 11, 2009, 9:02PM
Though the police boast a decline in the number of rapes, in examining complaints, there is a trend where in more than half of the complaints of rape or other sexual assault the matter is classified as a noncriminal complaint. The police attribute the disparity in complaints that are pursued and complaints that are “noncriminal” to the difficulty in coaxing rape victims to come forward. Some experts claim that many of the complaints that are reclassified as non criminal should be categorized as sex crimes.
State audit blasts NOPD evidence room, notes police leaders may have broken state lawBy Brendan McCarthy, The Times-Picayune
July 13, 2009, 10:09PM
The NOPD property and evidence room lost track of more than $200,000, and officials failed to notify the Orleans Parish District Attorney and state auditors in writing of the missing money.
NOPD cop who stole watch had been cited for two other crimes during time on forceBy Brendan McCarthy, The Times-Picayune
September 11, 2009, 7:00AM
An NOPD officer who was arrested amid allegations that he stole an expensive watch from a citizen while on a service call was twice cited for other crimes during his time on the force. In 2008 he was issued municipal summons in September for domestic battery, and in March for public intoxication, public intimidation, and resisting an officer.
Police shootings after Katrina: Was a gun inside a bag a threat to 5 officers?
By The Times-Picayune
December 13, 2009, 10:00PM
This story was reported by A.C. Thompson of ProPublica, and Brendan McCarthy and Laura Maggi of The Times-Picayune
A Matthew McDonald was shot and killed by 5 police officers days after Hurricane Katrina after they claimed he reached into a white plastic bag in an attempt to remove a handgun. No crime scene photos were taken, no autopsy was performed, and officers were unable to locate witnesses to the incident. Family members say that when they contacted the police, NOPD informed them that McDonald was killed by a civilian.
Police shootings after Katrina: How does a man waving down a police car die from a shotgun blast to his back?
Though a police investigation concluded that the shooting 45-year old Danny Brumfield Sr. by police officers outside of the Convention Center following Hurricane Katrina was justified by the threat Mr. Brumfield posed to the officers, further investigation suggests that the police investigation was half-hearted at best. Mr. Brumfield was shot in the back, not the shoulder as the police investigation claims. The police collected no evidence at the scene, and only one witness statement was taken, from Mr. Brumfield’s sister, despite the many onlookers who witnessed the incident.
Police shootings after Katrina: SWAT team sees armed man, shoots him three times, but where's the gun?
In an incident where no civilian witness interviews were taken, 28 year-old Keenon McCann was shot several times by police officers who claimed he was brandishing a gun. No gun was recovered.
Riley, Compass, New Orleans police officials summoned to federal grand jury
January 15, 2010, 4:03PM
Current Police Superintendent Riley and his predecessor Compass, with other police officials, were questioned by federal prosecutors concerning two separate inquiries into police conduct following Hurricane Katrina. The prosecutors are probing the Danziger bridge shooting and the mysterious death of a man found burned to death in a car in Algiers.
Police supervisor encouraged cover-up, knew officer planted gun while still on Danziger Bridge
February 24, 2010, 2:16PM
Lt. Michael Lohman has been charged with one count of conspiring to obstruct justice after he and several other officers colluded to falsify reports and plant evidence at the scene of a police shooting.
Mardi Gras Indians concerned about police antagonismBy Katy Reckdahl, The Times-Picayune
March 08, 2010, 4:18AM
With Super Sunday around the corner, Mardi Gras Indians from several tribes have expressed concern over police antagonism towards spectators and participants. Indians have reported several incidents in which police harassed maskers and participants who claim they were parading peacefully.
Algiers police shooting report altered, sources say
By Times-Picayune Staff
Inconsistencies lie between the official police report and the police report originally written by Officer David Warren whose name appears on the official document’s cover page. There are other inconsistencies in the report, which concerned the death of Henry Glover who died while in police custody and whose burned corpse was discovered in a car on the Algiers levee after Hurricane Katrina.
Suit claims police harass journalists and bystandersPosted: Monday, 15 March 2010 1:20PM
Associated Press Reporting
A suit brought against NOPD alleges that police officers have engaged in a pattern of arresting and/or harassing journalists and bystanders who photograph them in public. The plaintiffs cite 11 incidents since 2005 where people were harassed or arrested for videotaping, photographing, or observing police officers.
Danziger Bridge case suggests culture of corruption at NOPD
Officers involved in a shooting on the Danziger Bridge following Hurricane Katrina are accused of conspiracy to cover up police misconduct. The coverup included officers of varying rank, who went so far as to meet in a gutted police station to ensure that their fictitious version of the story was uniform among the conspirators.
A CULTURE OF CORRUPTION AT NOPD
There is a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers of the New Orleans Police Department that deprives persons of rights, privileges, and immunities secured and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States. We know this. It’s nothing new; the hurricane didn’t stop anything.
In Black Rage in New Orleans, Leonard N. Moore traces the disturbing history of police corruption in New Orleans since World War II, up to Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, crime, drug abuse, and murder have become an unfortunate fact of life. Unfortunately, an underpaid, inadequately staffed, and poorly trained police force frequently resorted to brutality against African Americans. “Endemic corruption among police officers increased as the city’s crime rate soared, generating anger and frustration among New Orleans’s black community,” According to Moore, The NOPD’s abuses read like a bad Hollywood script — police homicides, sexual violence against women, racial profiling, and complicity in drug deals, prostitution rings, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun smuggling. “Documenting the police harassment of civil rights workers in the 1950s and 1960s, Moore examines the aggressive policing techniques of the 1970s, and the attempts of Ernest “Dutch” Morial—the first black mayor of New Orleans—to reform the force in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even when the department hired more African American officers as part of that reform effort, Moore reveals, the corruption and brutality continued unabated in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
Dramatic changes in the NOPD cannot come by simply hiring a new police chief. We’ve done this before, yet the City of New Orleans has been beleaguered by the unrealized promise of sustainable reform. We recognize a new mayoral administration is coming, and no doubt Mitch Landrieu has his own ideas concerning needed innovations for NOPD. But one person can't fix this problem, and any assumption that the hiring of a new police chief is the solution simply placates the least vulnerable in our community, while adding salt to the wounds of those of us most likely to be victimized by brutal and/or corrupt police. We need a solution that addresses the systemic nature of the problem.
REMEDY THROUGH FEDERAL INTERVENTION
With an increasing awareness of police misconduct, Congress included a provision in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that authorizes the Department of Justice to file civil lawsuits against law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern of violating people's rights and obtain a court order to monitor and reform them.
To establish a claim, Section 14141 requires the Justice Department to demonstrate that a municipality, police department, or other Section 14141 defendant has engaged in "a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers . . . that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States." The Supreme Court has suggested that the term "pattern or practice" has a "usual meaning"—a meaning denoting something more "than the mere occurrence of isolated or 'accidental' or sporadic [unlawful] acts." A "pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers" depriving persons of constitutional or statutory rights, denotes a course of conduct that is "standard operating procedure" within a police department—in the Court's words, a course of conduct that is "the regular rather than the unusual practice."
How is the process initiated? Usually with a “Dear City Attorney” letter. City officials and local law enforcement departments are never surprised when the federal government finally seeks redress but, generally, there is a formal letter that precedes the filing of litigation. Sometime thereafter, civil litigation, much like the sample Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief linked here is initiated.
A Call to Action – Citizens Acting Now to Create the Consent Decree
If a federal action is filed and resolved, it will be through an agreed Consent Decree, which will allow our federal courts to retain jurisdiction and enforcement powers over the matter. While we believe the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights can, indeed, come to the rescue of New Orleans residents who have suffered for far too long the ravishes of a rogue police force, it is our responsibility to direct what is to become “Sustainable Reform.”
We can do this, but the work will require organizing and cooperation from the entire community in developing and agreeing upon the contents of a Consent Decree between the Department of Justice and the City of New Orleans. This document will be the compact that binds reform. We have drafted a model document – New Orleans Community Members’ Terms and Conditions for Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice and the City of New Orleans/New Orleans Police Department – which can begin this conversation, and includes provisions detailing Management and Supervision of Police, Community Relations, Training, an Independent Police Monitor who reports directly to the U.S. District Court, and Complaint Protocol and Procedures.
The bottom line is if we as a community want the culture of our police department changed, and if we want sustainable reform, we must sit at the table and negotiate those terms and conditions that will make NOPD accountable to us!
FEDERAL INTERVENTION CAN BRING LASTING IMPROVEMENT IN LOCAL POLICING
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations used the civil lawsuit provisions of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, successfully, several times: in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Detroit, the State of New Jersey, Steubenville, Ohio, and Prince Georges County, Maryland, among other jurisdictions.
In Pittsburgh—the first city to enter into a consent decree with the Justice Department— most provisions of the decree were lifted after the Bureau of Police was judged to be in substantial compliance. The key factors that enabled the city quickly to comply with the terms of the decree: the leadership of a talented police chief, guidance from the federal monitor, and an engaged community, which had an active, role in the process and access to police data that was given to the police monitor under the decree.
Veda Manual reported that in the end, a jury was seated in the possession with intent case. We understand not all – not even most - New Orleans Police Department officers are brutal or corrupt. But we can’t discern the good from the bad, and we are tired of suffering the consequences of trying. What we know for certain is that in the new rush to incorrectly proclaim crime as the #1 problem for the City of New Orleans, city officials have turned a blind-eye to civil liberties. Police cannot become the law unto themselves, and it is time for the U.S. government, through the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights, to step-in and step-up, be the good-guys, intervene, and help provide relief for New Orleans residents tired of and broken by our elected and appointed city officials who refuse to take responsibility for our chronically dysfunctional police department.
We deserve this. Justice has been delayed and denied for far too long.
LJI Organizer Saia M. Smith contributed to this article.
Posted by Tracie L. Washington at 8:50 AM No comments:
Labels: Civil Rights, Danziger Bridge, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans Police Department, Police Accountability, Police Corruption, Social Justice
Did a White Sheriff and District Attorney Orchestrate a Race-Based Coup in Northern Louisiana?
In the small northeast Louisiana town of Waterproof, the African-American mayor and police chief assert that they have been forced from office and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by the region's white political power structure. In a lawsuit filed last week, Police Chief Miles Jenkins (Pictured Above) describes a wide-ranging conspiracy led by the area’s district attorney and parish sheriff. These charges come at a time of widespread and high-profile racist attacks against the US President and Black members of Congress nationwide, and in a state where white political corruption and violence have been and continue to be used as tools to suppress Black political representation.
About 800 people live in Waterproof, a rural community in Tensas Parish that is 88% African American. Tensas has just over 6,000 residents, making it both the smallest parish in the state, and the parish with the state’s fastest declining population. The area schools remain mostly segregated, with nearly all the Black students attending public schools, and nearly all the white students attending private schools. With a median household income of $10,250, Waterproof is also one of the poorest communities in the US. The only jobs for Black people in town involve working for white farmers, according to Chief Jenkins. “Unless you go out of town to work,” he says, “You’re going to ride the white man’s tractor. That's it.”
Bobby Higginbotham was elected mayor of Waterproof in September of 2006. The next year, he appointed Miles Jenkins as chief of police. Jenkins, who served in the US military for 30 years and earned a master’s degree in public administration from Troy University in Alabama, immediately began the work of professionalizing a small town police department that had previously been mostly inactive. “You called the Waterproof police for help before,” says Chief Jenkins, “He would say, wait ‘til tomorrow, it’s too hot to come out today.” He also sought to reform the town’s financial practices, which Chief Jenkins says were in disorder and consumed by debt.
Ms. Annie Watson, a Black school board member in her 60s who was born and raised in Waterproof, worked as a volunteer for the mayor. She says that the mayor and chief, who had both lived in New Orleans, brought a new attitude that Parish officials didn’t like. “The Mayor and the Chief said you can’t treat people this way, and the Sheriff and DA said you got to know your place. If you're educated and intelligent and know your rights in this parish, you are in trouble,” she says. “They are determined to let you know you have a place and if you don't jump when they say jump you are in trouble.”
Ms. Watson explains that Parish Sheriff Rickey Jones and District Attorney James Paxton were threatened by Chief Jenkins’ efforts to professionalize the town’s police force. Aside from representing a challenge to Sheriff Jones’ political power, this also took away a source of his funding. “Before Mayor Higginbotham, all traffic tickets went to St. Joseph,” she says, referring to the Parish seat, where Sheriff Jones is based. “So he cut their income by having a police department.”
Jack McMillan, an African American deputy sheriff who works with Sheriff Jones, says he tried to warn Chief Jenkins to back down. “You’ve got to adapt to your environment,” he says. “You can't come to a small town and do things the same way you might in a big city. Like the song says, you got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em.”
Chief Jenkins asserts that the white-led political infrastructure, led by the Sheriff Jones and DA Paxton, were threatened by his actions. This group immediately sought to orchestrate a coup against the two Black men, including clandestine meetings, false arrests, harassment, and even physical violence. Court documents describe how Paxton, Jones, and their allies formed an alliance “designed to harass intimidate, arrest, imprison, prosecute, illegally remove plaintiff from his position of police chief, prevent plaintiff from performing his law duties as police chief and/or force plaintiff to leave the town of Waterproof.”
Tensas Parish
Below, District Attorney James Paxton
Prior to the registration of 15 voters in 1964, there was not a single Black voter registered in Tensas, despite having more than 7,000 African American residents (and about 4,000 white residents), making it the last parish in Louisiana to allow African Americans to register. Tensas and the nearby parishes of Madison and East Carroll all share the sixth judicial district – currently represented by District Attorney Paxton. It is a small but influential district - Buddy Caldwell, DA for the sixth judicial district from 1979 to 2008, is now Attorney General for the state of Louisiana. The sixth district parishes all have majority Black populations and mostly white elected officials, which Chief Jenkins and Ms. Watson attribute to political corruption and disenfranchisement of Black voters.
Waterproof is “Reminiscent of the bygone days of southern politics,” with a white power structure maintaining political power over a Black majority, according to veteran civil rights attorney Ron Wilson, who is representing Jenkins in his civil rights lawsuit. “At any and all costs, even jeopardizing the life and freedom of my client, they will ruin him to maintain power. This case is ultimately about whether an African-American can be guaranteed the rights that are assured to him in the constitution.” According to court papers, this Jim Crow alliance dominates elected power in the area, and "even on the local level, where the office holders tend to be African American, they are powerless to control their own destiny.” According to Chief Jenkins, the District Attorney once boasted that he controlled the votes of Waterproof’s Black aldermen.
Chief Jenkins says he faced an immediate campaign of harassment. “They just wanted this town to be white-controlled,” explained Chief Jenkins. The police chief described being arrested multiple times under the order of DA Paxton and Sheriff Jones. The charges, says Jenkins, range from charges of theft for a pay raise he received from the town’s board of Aldermen to criminal trespass for going to the home of a citizen who had been stopped for speeding without a valid driver’s license, to disturbing the peace for an incident where individuals threatened the police chief with violence for issuing traffic citations. Ms. Watson says the charges were invented out of thin air. “It was a sad case of lies,” she says, adding that, “The majority of the town of Waterproof supports the chief and supports the mayor.”
Chief Jenkins says he was arrested and declared a flight risk by District Attorney Paxton, despite living and owning property in the Parish. “In all my years,” says attorney Ron Wilson, “I've never seen a police officer, and certainly not a police chief, charged for something like this.” Chief Jenkins alleges he was attacked and choked by a deputy sheriff, who he says shouted, "Shut up...We are in charge…We are the sheriff and the sheriff controls Tensas Parish. The sooner you all learn this the better off you will be," an action that Ms. Watson says she also witnessed.
Chief Jenkins says his police car was shoved in a ditch, and when he arrested the people who had committed the act, the DA refused to press charges. In fact, he says the DA refused almost all charges he presented and released anyone he arrested. The chief was even charged with kidnapping for one incident in which he arrested the former town clerk for illegal entry. “That’s the most ludicrous notion I've ever come across,” says Wilson. “That a police chief can be arrested for kidnapping, because he placed someone under arrest who was breaking the law.”
A grand jury has returned indictments of Chief Jenkins and Mayor Higginbotham, and Higginbotham’s trial is scheduled to begin this Monday. The mayor faces 44 charges, including 18 counts of malfeasance in office and 21 counts of felony theft. Jenkins faces three counts of malfeasance in office. The charges appear to be based on the results of a state audit of Waterproof that found irregularities in the town’s record keeping going back to before the election of Higginbotham – irregularities that the mayor and police chief say they had repaired.
Patterns of Violence
Mayor Higginbotham was elected at the same time as two other Black mayors of small Louisiana towns, both of whom also received threats based on race. In December of 2006, shortly after Higginbotham was elected mayor of Waterproof, Gerald Washington was shot and killed three days before he was to become the first Black mayor of the small southwest Louisiana town of Westlake. An official investigation called his death a suicide, but family members insist otherwise. Less than two weeks after that, shots were fired into the house of Earnest Lampkins, the first Black mayor of the northwest Louisiana town of Greenwood. Lampkins reported that he continued to receive threats throughout his term, including a “for sale” sign that someone planted outside his house.
Waterproof was Klan country from the reconstruction era until well into the 20th century, and violence frequently broke out in the area. Eight Black men in Madison Parish were lynched over a period of three days in 1894 for the charge of “insurrection,” apparently because one man refused to follow an order from a sheriff. “The Klan was very active here,” says Ms. Watson, recalling her childhood in the 50s and 60s. “We had crosses burned on people’s lawns. The school principal had a cross burned on his lawn. A man named Sun Turner was shot and killed on the streets by the Klan.”
Waterproof is an hour south of Tallulah, the site of a notoriously abusive youth prison, and a little more than hour east of Jena, where accusations of systemic racism brought 50,000 people from around the country, including many civil rights leaders, to a 2007 march. Like Jena, Waterproof is also home to a prison that holds federal immigration prisoners.
When asked for comment on Chief Jenkins’ lawsuit, Tensas Parish Sheriff Rickey Jones (pictured at left) denied that race was a factor, claiming that Jenkins had abused his office and that many of the local citizens who filed complaints against him were Black. “I'm not going to support any type of corruption,” said Jones. “Certainly not from him.” District Attorney Paxton, also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, disputed all accusations from Jenkins, suggesting that he had tried to help Jenkins when he was first elected. “A lot of this will become clear when the case against Mayor Higginbotham goes to trial on Monday,” he added.
Flood Caldwell, one of the town’s aldermen, is currently serving as the town’s mayor. Jenkins points to Caldwell’s appointment as further evidence of a coup, saying that the town aldermen, under the direction of DA Paxton, illegally voted to remove Mayor Higginbotham. “No one recognizes Caldwell as mayor except the DA and his friends,” says Chief Jenkins. The office of the Louisiana Secretary of State confirms that they still have Higginbotham listed as mayor, adding that they cannot comment further because of pending litigation.
Wilson says this case is ultimately about the repression of Black political and civil rights. “I think this has been going on in Tensas for a while,” he says. “I think they’ve gone too far in this case, and someone finally has come along and says they won’t go along.” Wilson hopes this lawsuit will bring federal attention. “We hope the justice department will look into this and bring some much-needed reform to this part of the world,” he says.
Chief Jenkins says he took the Sheriff’s job to serve the community, “You’ve given this country the best years of your life and you get treated like an unwanted stepchild,” he says. “I didn't realize there was so much politics to just doing your job.”
Ms. Watson believes that this is a struggle for self-determination and basic civil rights. “I was born in 1948,” she says. “Ever since I was born, Blacks never had a say in this parish, until Chief Jenkins and Mayor Higginbotham. They spoke up, and tried to change things. That’s why the parish is going after them.”
Jacques Morial of the Louisiana Justice Institute contributed to this story.
Posted by jordan flaherty at 4:36 PM 9 comments:
Labels: James Paxton, Madison, Police Chief Miles Jenkins, Racism, Sheriff Jones, Tensas, Waterproof
Great Youth Events This Weekend
This Announcement Comes From Our Friends at the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies:
There are a lot of great youth events this Saturday.
During the night, come out to the STOP ShAkEdOwN, a Youth Talent Show that will also raise HIV awareness, put on by IWES' STOP campaign from 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm at Warren Easton High School's Auditorium (3019 Canal St.). ARRIVE EARLY because we our capacity is limited to 200 people!! Artists will perform in the categories of Spoken Word, Singing, Hip Hop, Dance, & Fashion, and there will also be a youth Art Exhibit. $275 will be raffled off to audience members, and there will also be FREE food & drinks. DJ Poppa will keep you moving between acts and Dennis Photo Finish will be there for you to take pictures, as well.
From 11:00 am - 3:00 PM Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL) is having their 2010 Youth Summit at Hope Academy (2437 Jena St.) with workshops, discussions, and planning for the future. There's FREE food and Young Adults Striving for Success (YASS) will be raffling off an iPod shuffle & a Playstation 3. DJ Chromatic will be on the 1s & 2s, and they will have special performances by Nobby & Magnolia Shorty.
From 10:00 am - 7:00 pm there will also be the Pick Up Your Pieces Youth Summit at Science & Math High School (5625 Loyola Ave.) for youth aged 8 - 25. The summit will address youth concerns to make positive change happen. They will also have a Second Line on Sunday, March 28th, kicking off at the Treme Center (900 North Villere St.) at 1:00 pm.
Derek Rankins, a youth organizer who has been working on the Summit at Science and Math, tells LJI, "It's important for young people to come to Pick Up Your Pieces, because its a place for youth to have the conversations about things that effect us every day."
See you this weekend!
Labels: Derek Rankins, Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies, JJPL, YASS, Youth Summit
A Mother’s Thank You
On November 4, 2008, family and friends broke bread at Casa Tracie to watch the election returns and, most importantly, to celebrate Jacob’s return home after his second surgery at Children’s Hospital. Most of my family and friends didn't know Jacob's treatment was made possible by the Emir of Qatar.
See, I was not insured in 2008, and nor was Jacob. After the NAACP Gulf Coast Advocacy Center (my former employer) closed its New Orleans Office in 2007, I was left without health insurance. “No problem,” I thought. “I can just purchase health insurance for me and Jacob.” Unfortunately, I learned I had a “pre-existing condition” strangely discovered only after my employment and insurance ended, which left it all but impossible for me to obtain health coverage.
While not having health insurance was annoying, I wasn’t bothered so much. I’ve always been very healthy, and Jacob’s pain was only in my tush. So I never expected October 2, 2008. I cannot begin to express in words the sheer terror I felt when I learned Jacob had a golf ball sized tumor growing in his back, compressing his spinal cord and literally paralyzing him, that he would need extensive surgery and some rehabilitation, and there was absolutely no way on earth I could pay for it all. I inhaled so deeply I nearly fainted.
The Children’s Hospital administrator must have thought I was crazy when she asked me how I would pay and I responded “Cash.” She said, “You know the first day of tests alone cost almost $8,000?” I couldn’t understand how 2 hours in the hospital for tests could cost $8k, but I really didn’t care. I just said I’d figure it out. That was a Friday and Jacob was scheduled for his first surgery the following Thursday. He was having that surgery. About an hour later that same administrator called me back and told me about this program at the hospital, funded by the Emir of Qatar. Through his substantial grant, Children’s Hospital was able to provide care free of charge to children without insurance.
You have to shake your head in bewilderment. I live in the richest country in the world, but healthcare is a privilege. It was Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Emir of Qatar – a small Arab emirate in the Middle East, absolute monarchy, with a population of about 1.4million people - who paid for the surgeries that saved my son from paralysis. He walks today, quite well, and is an even bigger pain in the tush.
I thanked Emir Hamad bin Khalif in November 2008. Today, I thank President Barak Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and all the brave men and women in our U.S. House of Representatives who listened to thousands of stories like mine, and are, indeed, Profiles in Courage, because they did not allow their fears to hold this country back from the hope of a nation where healthcare is a right. I thank them because once President Obama signs the healthcare reform bill to law, the discriminatory effect of having been cast as someone with a “pre-existing condition” will no longer exist.
I thank them because this week, I will exhale.
Posted by Tracie L. Washington at 4:35 PM 1 comment:
Labels: Health Care Equity, Healthcare Access in New Orleans, Healthcare Now New Orleans, Healthcare Reform
Jazz Funeral for Public Education at UNO
On Tuesday, March 23, at noon, a coalition of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and friends of the University of New Orleans (UNO) calling themselves SAVE UNO will be holding a Jazz Funeral and rally to protest budget cuts to UNO and other colleges and universities across the state. The event is also in support of political reforms that will restore funding to higher education in Louisiana in the short and long term.
The Jazz Funeral will begin at the University Center at noon, march through campus, and culminate with a rally on the Quad in front of the UNO Library. All students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of UNO are invited to attend and support public higher education in the city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana.
Speakers include Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center Executive Director James Perry; UNO alumni and activist Rafael Delgadillo; and UNO Graduate Student Anna Hackman.
According to a statement from organizers:
In 1958, the University of New Orleans opened its doors with the clear mandate of bringing “public-supported higher education to Louisiana's largest urban community." In little over a year, the state of Louisiana, led by Governor Jindal, has threatened that mission and undermined public support for UNO by cutting the budget for higher education by nearly $250 million dollars, with promises of more cuts to come. These cuts are occurring in a state that desperately needs more funding for higher education and ranks near the bottom of virtually every educational indicator. This assault on higher education, in turn, undermines Louisiana’s economic future. In order for the state to attract companies that offer good jobs, we need a labor force that is educationally equipped for the 21st century. Our political leaders must stop cuts to higher education – stop undermining the state’s future -- and reform the state constitution so that higher education is protected and supported in both the short and long term.
UNO, which saw its enrollment and budget decimated after Hurricane Katrina, has thus far been able to maintain its reputation as a place where a rigorous education can be obtained at a reasonable cost. That reputation and reality is being threatened on both ends: On the one hand, class sizes are increasing, class offerings are decreasing, and UNO is able to offer less and less in the way of programs, technology, and a college experience. On the other hand, as they receive less, students see their tuition and fees increase, which makes higher education less and less accessible for the average citizen. This Rally demands a different vision of higher education.
We'll see you Tuesday at noon, at UNO.
Labels: Jazz Funeral, Louisiana Budget, SAVE UNO
Downtown Business Meeting Draws Protest
The Louisiana Department of Commerce and the New Orleans World Trade Center drew protests yesterday for hosting a seminar called "Doing Business in Israel and the Middle East" hosted by an Israeli consulting company called EDI. On a cold early morning (the seminar was held at 8:00am) about twenty protesters marched from the World Trade Center to the Westin Hotel in Canal Place, the site of the seminar.
With chants like "Just Like Jim Crow/Israeli Apartheid Has Got to Go" and "Don't Invest in Occupation/ Invest in Haiti Reparations" the protesters linked issues of international investment with global and local social justice causes. The demonstration included members of the local chapter of Pax-Christi and New Orleans Palestine Solidarity as well as representatives from the UNO chapter of Amnesty International and UNO and Delgado chapters of the General Union of Palestine Students. They were upset about Louisiana tax dollars being spent to encourage investment in Israeli occupation. The timing of the seminar brought further outrage, as it came on the same day of rising tension between the current Israeli government and the Obama administration, and on the seventh anniversary of the day that US human rights activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while protesting illegal home demolitions carried out by Israeli forces.
At the same time that demonstrators gathered outside the Westin, one of the participants inside the seminar handed out information about the growing international divestment movement that seeks to apply international economic pressure for a peaceful solution to the conflict. The seminar reportedly brought out less than 10 businesses, at least some of which seemed receptive to the arguments against investment.
Top Photo by Adul Aziz.
Labels: Amnesty International, New Orleans World Trade Center, Palestine
Pressure on NOPD Continues in Trial This Week
The right of New Orleanians to observe and question police behavior is on trial this week.
During Mardi Gras 2007, Greg Griffith videotaped police grabbing a young girl by the hair and throwing her on the ground. The girl was soon released, but Griffith continued to film the police involved. Although the police appear to move on, they soon returned. On the video (which Griffith was able to preserve and is posted online) it appears that one of the officers rushes up to Griffith and violently arrests him without cause.
According to a press release from the ACLU of Louisiana, the ACLU (in partnership with Tulane Law Clinic) have jointly sued the New Orleans Police Department, Chief Warren Riley, and several officers for wrongful arrest and suppression of free speech, on behalf of two men who were arrested for filming police interaction with the public.
Greg Griffith and Noah Learned were watching the 2007 Bacchus parade on Canal Street when they saw and videotaped police officers engaging in what appeared to be rough treatment of a teenage girl. When the police realized that they were being filmed, they tackled and arrested both plaintiffs, seized the camera, and erased the video footage. "The public has a First Amendment right to film all activities that occur on public streets, including police activities," said Marjorie R. Esman, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. "In fact, public scrutiny of the actions of the police and other public officials is essential to the preservation of basic rights."
The lawsuit...seeks a declaration that the arrests and the seizure of the camera were illegal, an injunction prohibiting any future interference with the public's right to film police activities, and damages.
The case is being heard in the federal courtroom of Judge Jay Zainey, US District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana. We're told it's important for supporters to be in the courtroom.
Labels: Copwatch, Greg Griffith, New Orleans Police Department, Police Accountability
Louisiana Justice Institute Co-Director Tracie Washington Wins Victory Against Attempts To Silence Dissent
Yesterday, The Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) of the Louisiana Attorney Discipline Board announced that it had completed its investigation and has formally dismissed the complaint filed by the ODC on behalf of The New Orleans City Council against Louisiana Justice Institute (LJI) Co-Director Tracie Washington.
The ruling, which found no basis in fact for the charges attempting to disbarr Tracie Washington, is a victory for all who would seek to struggle for greater transparency in New Orleans city government. However, this victory has not come without sacrifice to LJI and the greater New Orleans legal advocacy community. Even now the ODC has left open a threat to "re-open the case" if this dismissal is "blasted" all over the news.
Background: In October 2008, LJI launched Project Transparency (NolaPublicRecords.org). We did this because access to information, especially about our government and its activities, is a crucial part of citizenship, and it is a human right. Members of the public demand access to unclassified documents their tax dollars have been used to produce.
In December 2008, LJI made a request for the emails of several city council members, their staff, and members of the Nagin administration. Our intent was to support research and provide information to the public. And our research proved what we suspected all along: roving quorums of councilmembers, divided along racial lines. The reason New Orleans local government has become ineffective and growth stymied is due in no small measure to the racial tension exhibited amongst City Council members, petty bickering, and tribalism one would expect in viewing Survivor - not local government.
But our councilmembers and their attorneys fought Louisiana Justice Institute at every step of the way - all the way to the State Supreme Court - to keep you from having full access to these records.
Yesterday's ruling from the ODC follows a September ruling from the Louisiana State Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruling agreed with The Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board's (LADB) Hearing Committee Report and Recommendation, which found absolutely no grounds to the charges against Tracie and LJI. In fact, one LADB Hearing Committee member wrote, in this case "New Orleans City Government is using its influence to attempt to crush an opponent with ethical charges when the real battle is over its own incompetence and ineptitude. With scant evidence of any harm caused by the public release of three emails that bear no resemblance to privileged documents and with no evidence of future harm posed by Tracie Washington, the LADB, by its prosecution of this matter, has become a weapon of the city government and an instrument of harm to the public."
The New Orleans City Council, in its petition to the Louisiana Office of Disciplinary Counsel, submitted misleading statements and outright lies to the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, all in an effort to punish and silence Tracie Washington and Louisiana Justice Institute for daring to challenge these government officials' obsession with secrecy, closed government, and good ol' boy politics of the 50's and 60's.
This is not just about Louisiana Justice Institute. Baseless attacks like these are an attack on all who would struggle for greater openness and transparency from their city government.
We applaud today's decision, we will fight any efforts in retaliation, and we pledge to keep advocating for openness and transparency from our local government.
Labels: Louisiana Attorney Discipline Board, New Orleans City Council, Office of Disciplinary Counsel, Tracie Washington
Exclusive Video of Police Harassment of Mardi Gras Indians
On Monday, journalist Katy Reckdahl ran a powerful story in the Times-Picayune exposing police harassment of Mardi Gras Indians in Central City on Mardi Gras Day. For many community members, this revived memories of previous police harassment, especially on St. Joseph's Night of 2005, when police broke up the Indian tradition by driving through at high speeds, cursing at and threatening Indians and others, and even making arrests.
Below is exclusive video of the Mardi Gras day police harassment of Mardi Gras Indians described in Reckdahl's story. The footage - shot from a cel phone - is very low-resolution and shaky, but it documents the chaos, sirens, and overall atmosphere of terror generated on that day.
The video was shot by Michelle Conerly, a certified nursing assistant who lives on the block the incident occurred. Conerly also managed to write down the car numbers of six of the seven police cars who caused the panic (the seventh was a black undercover car).
The police car numbers were 603, 903, 609, 0088, 03076 and 01020.
In a recent interview, Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu has said our city needs “a complete culture change in the New Orleans Police Department." A good first step would be to bring respect for New Orleans' cultural traditions to the police department.
Police Brutality of Mardi Gras Indians from Lily Keber on Vimeo.
Thanks to local filmmaker Lily Keber for her help in posting the video online.
Labels: Katy Reckdahl, Mardi Gras Indians, New Orleans Police Department, Police Accountability, Police Corruption
Battle Continues Over Future of New Orleans Public Schools
While most media coverage of New Orleans schools depicts the post-Katrina changes as a success story, community activists continue to raise concerns. The sudden transformation, including the firing of thousands of teachers and other staff; taking away recognition of the teacher's union; and the state's seizing of most schools, followed by a swift change to a mostly-charter system; have led to a school system radically different from the system of five years ago. But are these changes for the better?
Many former employees don't see it that way, and are still fighting back. Associated Press reports today that the class-action lawsuit filed in response to the mass-firings of school staff is continuing to move forward:
Louisiana's Supreme Court has declined to get in the way of a class action lawsuit fighting the dismissal of New Orleans public school employees following Hurricane Katrina. The suit alleges the school workers were wrongfully terminated after most of the city was flooded following the 2005 storm. The suit was filed by several of the fired employees. The Orleans school board and the state agency that took over many of the city's schools are defendants in the suit, which has yet to go to trial. In 2008, a state judge granted class-action status, meaning all of the fired employees could be covered by the suit. An appeal court agreed last year and the Supreme Court decided not to intervene last week. Attorneys estimate as many as 8,500 fired employees are affected.
Community activists are also involved. Tomorrow, an organization calling itself Citizens for Local Control (CLC) has organized a community meeting on the issue, asking what effect the changes in the school system has had on our community. The organization lists a wide range of issues to be discussed, including:
-The privatization of public finds for education.
-A lack of accountability for charter schools.
-A lack of special education services.
-The false notion of school choice.
-Former school buildings being turned into homes instead of community centers.
-The lack of a plan for the return of schools to the Orleans parish School Boards.
The meeting will be tomorrow: Thursday, March 12, from 5:30pm – 7:30pm, at the Central City Renaissance Alliance, 1809 Oretha Castle Haley. All parents, youth, former Orleans Parish teachers, and concerned citizens are invited.
Citizens for Local Control, the sponsors of the meeting, say their mission is "To restore democracy, access and fairness within the local system and network of schools in New Orleans; by organizing for local accountability and control of New Orleans Public Schools." For more information call 504-655-3515.
Posted by jordan flaherty at 2:44 PM 1 comment:
Labels: Charter Schools, Citizens for Local Control, New Orleans School Board, Privatization
Haitians Seek Shelter and Survival
A recent article in the New York Times reports that the approaching rainy season in Haiti is, "The hard deadline against which Haiti’s government and relief agencies in Port-au-Prince are racing as they try to solve a paralyzing riddle: how to shelter more than a million displaced people in a densely crowded country that has no good place to put them."
According to the Lawrence Downes, writing in the Times, Haiti has three choices:
1. Let people stay in filthy, fragile settlements where no one wants to live, and pray when the hurricanes hit.
2. Build sturdy transitional housing in places like Jérémie, in the southwest, that can absorb the capital’s overflow.
3. Encourage people to return to neighborhoods that are clogged with rubble and will be for years, where the smell of death persists...
In Downes' calculation, the first choice is the worst possible option, and the second is not possible (or at least years away), leaving only the third, which he refers to as "merely absurd."
Into this ongoing disaster, profiteers continue to seek ways to exploit this devastated country. As Bill Quigley has noted, Miami is hosting a conference this week where "private military and security companies [will] showcase their services to governments and non-governmental organizations working in the earthquake devastated country."
It has also been widely reported that the makers of the famous "poison trailers" that caused such harm on the Gulf Coast after Katrina are seeking to send their trailers to Haiti. "Trailer manufacturers see Haiti's disaster as an opportunity to unload used FEMA trailers that threaten to create a glut of cheap, used trailers on the US market," reports a recent editorial in the Times-Picayune, which adds that the trailers are "not deemed an acceptable health risk for US citizens, and it's offensive to suggest that the health of Haitians matters less."
Activists in New Orleans witnessed not only the effects of the toxic trailers but also the pattern of attempts to profit disguised as aid. "Why on earth would we want to export something that we know wont work?" asks Louisiana Justice Institute co-director Tracie Washington.
Housing will certainly be a continuing need in Haiti and this situation needs real answers, not more Shock Doctrine. It was exactly for these reasons that Louisiana Justice Institute and others started the Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village Project.
This coalition of more than 40 disaster recovery and urban infrastructure professionals - co-convened by LJI's Jacques Morial - is working to build an emergency village in Haiti that will provide housing, infrastructure and other services that constitute communities rather than camps. With major involvement of New Orleans residents, supporters and rebuilders, the Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village Project is laying the foundation for a model for recovery. We have learned the lessons of Katrina, and we seek to work for the accountable reconstruction that New Orleans never had. This effort seeks to support the Haitians in leading their own recovery.
The Project has already sent 100,000 cubic tons of donated medical supplies, tents, household goods, and food to the port of Jacmel. Previous to that, they airlifted more than six tons of medical supplies to medical teams in Jacmel and La Vallee de Jacmel in Haiti and they are preparing to send a second barge and more recovery experts.
Labels: Jacques Morial, Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village Project, New Orleans to Haiti Barge Initiative
Local Outrage at New Orleans Music Magazine Over Racially Insensitive Cover
Local music magazine OffBeat has stirred anger and outrage with it's new cover, which features a photo of members of a white rock band hanging in the air, next to the headline Strange Fruit.
OffBeat has pulled the picture from their website and issued the following statement today:
We’ve heard from many of you about our cover text for the March issue, and if we had the chance to do it again, we’d go in a different direction. In retrospect, it was ill-chosen and we apologize to those who are offended by it...We didn’t realize the phrase “strange fruit” has the same power in 2010 that it did when lynching was a more contemporary threat...
We profoundly regret our thoughtlessness and insensitivity, but we believe our history of coverage demonstrates our concern for race-related issues and we are saddened by those who would extrapolate this to speak to our character. The context of the cover text next to an indie rock band suggests that we’re not using the phrase in a threatening way, and we believe our mission covering music borne out of slavery suggests that we don’t take the issues connected with it—including hate crimes—lightly. We believed that in 2010, the phrase “strange fruit” could be used without automatically evoking the Billie Holiday song and its subject matter. This was an error in judgment for which we apologize.
Many community members have said that the apology doesn't go far enough. Takema Robinson, commenting on OffBeat's facebook page, writes,
The cover was Racist not insensitive. There is no way that a Southern Music magazine does not understand the history of lynching and Billie Holiday's lyrics. This does not make this magazine racist, but calling this cover anything less is an offense in and of itself. It's just hard to believe that this magazine cover passed so many eyes on its way to print and that no one on the Offbeat staff pulled the emergency break! Given that this is the case, I recommend immediate anti-racism training for all involved including the editor-in-chief. The pain this inflicts is way to deep for just an apology. A lesson needs to be learned.
Local Blogger Emilie Staat writes,
“Strange Fruit” is a famous song that immediately invokes a powerful, horrifying image of lynched black bodies hanging from trees–strange fruit. An image that your cover visual seems to mock, with the six white guys smilingly hanging from monkey bars/jungle gym. I can see no reason or intention for the title to be paired with this article except to incite response. Yet, it seems you expect to get off the hook (off the tree, offBeat?) with nothing more than a limp Twitter apology. Back to business as usual? If your audience knows what “Strange Fruit” refers to (and what serious Southern musician or listener wouldn’t?), the juxtaposed image can only offend. If your audience doesn’t know the song or its context, the headline wouldn’t grab their attention or make any sense, in which case, it simply fails.
Responding to Staat, one of many bloggers that have carried this story, OffBeat’s publisher and editor Jan Ramsey writes:
Being accused of being racist is blowing this faux pas so out of proportion, it’s ridiculous. I resent OffBeat being labeled as racist by anyone. It’s obvious to me that you’re getting a big kick our of keeping this bullshit going. Ah, the venality of our public. For 23 years, I’ve busted my butt trying to create someting positive about local music in OffBeat…dismissing what we’ve done with a quickie label of racism is taking a lot for granted and is just plain stupid when you consider 23 years of work...Our “black eye” (oops, was that racist?) is certainly generating more traffic for your blog, now isn’t it? Why don’t you let us apologize and get on with your blog?
This controversy over OffBeat's cover comes during the same week that students in California held mass protests over racist incidents at University of California, San Diego, including a "Compton Cookout," mocking Black history month. Clearly, the argument over what is racist and what is an "unfortunate mistake" is not over. We believe OffBeat needs to do some more thinking about their response to this controversy.
Labels: Offbeat Magazine, Race Relations, Racism, Strange Fruit
Time for a US Revolution: Fifteen Reasons, By Bill Quigley
It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.
The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the people's right, in fact their duty, to engage in a revolution.
Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is
clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.
Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution.
Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes. At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.
Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.
At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time.
Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions.
There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives: 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.
At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.
The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who authorized illegal torture.
Another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect.
The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare coverage, and are killed and maimed by being placed in elective wars and used as the world’s police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?
In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world – much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela - combined.
The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer views of sites, and travel.
The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the world.
The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big businesses.
Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic
justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.
Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. “We as a
nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
It is time.
Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be reached at Quigley77@gmail.com.
Labels: Bill Quigley, Martin Luther King Jr, Revolution
LJI Guest Columnist: Parnell Herbert on Police Accountability
As I sit in my apartment in Houston TX . I viewed a New Orleans news channel online and thought, "How pathetic. Will times never change?"
They are still using the same old strategies on us and we are still falling for them. "Civil Rights Leaders protest." The police assault on innocent civilians on the Danziger Bridge who were guilty of nothing more then trying to survive is the story I was drawn to.
"When Black people get angry, they call out the Safe Negroes to calm us down."
Several years ago I was in New Orleans after NOPD officers murdered mentally challenged Anthony Hayes on St Charles Ave. I was invited to join a group of "Civil Rights Leaders" to meet with Police Chief Warren Riley and high ranking officers of New Orleans police force.
After two hours of rhetorical discussion we left the meeting and met with the media who were anxiously waiting outside. Basically we said, "We told them not to do it again, and they said OK."
I was home New Years of 2009 when NOPD officers murdered a young man who was sitting in a car in front of his Grandmothers home. I watched the TV news as some of these same "Civil Rights Leaders" emerged from a meeting with Chief Riley and said, "We told them don't do it again, and they said OK."
On the Tuesday evening news, again many of the same "Civil Rights Leaders" held a press conference to denounce the actions of NOPD in the Danziger case.
What do you accomplish by denouncing a case where you have a confession? Where were they in 2005 when it occurred? That may be an unfair question because they were possibly dispersed throughout the country as many of us were. But a fair question is: "Where were they when New Orleans first Black District Attorney, Eddie Jordan, was being publicly lynched for bringing indictments against these same cops on this same case?"
I watched as they shouted into the microphones in front of the TV cameras expressing their outrage. Their "Call for justice and equality," their "Demand for change, change with police training and the way these investigations are handled," their plea for the incoming mayor to make choices that will prevent this from happening again.
I watched as incoming mayor Mitch Landrieu vowed to make sure we have a police force that is "Well resourced and well trained...to protect and to serve."
I was drawn to a term that we used often back in the 60's: "Talking loud and saying nothing!" That is the rhetoric I hear from the city.
The only way to demand and receive change is to reopen past cases of police abuse and murder beginning with the young brother on New Years morning; Anthony Hayes on St. Charles Ave; Raymond Robair on Villere St; Joe Williams of the Hot 8 Brass Band, Jenard Thomas murdered in front of his father.
Ask your readers to add to this list then go to City Councilman James Carter , State Representative Cedric Richmond of the Judiciary Commitee; Congressman John Conyers, Chairman of the Federal Judiciary Commitee; and Attorney General Eric Holder. And let us not forget Federal Investigator Jim Letten and Attorney General Buddy Caldwell.
We must also hold accountable Coroner Frank Minyard and his investigations and decisions in many of these cases. Accountability is the key. When police are shown that they can no longer get away with murder, they will discontinue the practice. The people of New Orleans are in a position to cause positive change throughout the United States.
These demands must be made publicly, they must be made loudly and they must be made clearly.
Just after I wrote about the police murder of Raymond Robair I found a new news story on the case: The FBI made a big deal about investigating that case and came up with the same cover up scenario. Business as usual.
Come on, Black people, stand up!!! We have to strike while the iron is hot. Google "Raymond Robair New Orleans " Don't sleep through this one.
Parnell Herbert is a New Orleanian, displaced to Houston by Hurricane Katrina. He is active on many social justice causes, including the right of return for New Orleanians, and freedom for the Angola Three. His new play, Angola Three, was recently performed in New Orleans.
Posted by jordan flaherty at 1:44 AM 2 comments:
Labels: Adolph Grimes, Anthony Hayes, Jenard Thomas, Joe Williams of the Hot 8 Brass Band, Raymond Robair
LJI Community Profile: Reverend Samson "Skip" Alexander
Speaking in front of an enraptured audience yesterday at the Carrollton Branch of the New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans civil rights leader Reverend Samson "Skip" Alexander presented a first-hand perspective of the civil rights movement. Showing personal photographs of legendary figures and historic moments, Reverend Alexander called the talk Eyewitness to History.
Samson's personal history began with a fifteen year old girl from Gert Town who's life was in danger from giving birth to a fifteen pound baby. Doctors didn't think both the girl and baby could live. But they did: the child grew up to be Reverend Alexander, and his mother lived into her 80s.
"You have to know your history," said the reverend, in a discussion that ranged from the Missouri Compromise to the story of the Scottsboro Boys, to a debate he once engaged in with the rapper Juvenile. Talking about the Scottsboro case, Reverend Alexander expressed the importance of doing your own research, saying, "Things like that were not listed in the Times Pick-On-You."
Reverend Alexander also described some of the inspiring figures he has met, from Louis Armstrong to national and local civil rights leaders. He discussed desegregation struggles in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the fight over the burial place of Louisiana's Black governor P.B.S. Pinchback, who remains buried in Metairie Cemetery, which had been previously reserved for whites only.
Reverend Alexander passionately recounted the importance of the struggles for freedom that made up the civil rights movement, and the very real dangers Black folks lived with during Jim Crow. "When you didn't have the law on your side, you didn't have anything," said Alexander. Black people at this time were not free to travel even small distances, he said. "Going to Baton Rouge might cost you your life. The Klan might run you off the road."
Discussing the period of Jim Crow segregation, Reverend Alexander highlighted the fact that Black New Orleanians owned more businesses then and in many ways had more economic opportunities. "In segregation, we didn't know anything else," he said. "And we got along quite well." The civil rights movement was a movement for political and economic freedom, but in many ways the economic side of the battle remains to be fought.
Reverend Alexander was also a leader of the Memphis Sanitation Strike, and worked with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. "We lived in struggle, but kept our eyes on the prize," he said, describing his time organizing for civil rights. "No one gave us freedom. We earned our place."
Labels: Memphis Sanitation Strike, PBS Pinchback, Reverend Samson "Skip" Alexander
Mercenaries Circling Haiti By Bill Quigley
On March 9 and 10, there will be a Haiti conference in Miami for private military and security companies to showcase their services to governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the earthquake devastated country.
On their website for the Haiti conference, the trade group IPOA (ironically called the International Peace Operations Association until recently) lists eleven companies advertising security services explicitly for Haiti. Even though guns are illegal to buy or sell in Haiti, many companies brag of their heavy duty military experience.
Triple Canopy, a private military company with extensive security operations in Iraq and Israel, is advertising for business in Haiti. According to human rights activist and investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, Triple Canopy took over the Xe/Blackwater security contract in Iraq in 2009. Scahill reports on a number of bloody incidents involving Triple Canopy including one where a team leader told his group, “I want to kill somebody today…because I am going on vacation tomorrow.”
Another company seeking work is EODT Technology which promises in its ad that its personnel are licensed to carry weapons in Haiti. EODT has worked in Afghanistan since 2004 and provides security for the Canadian Embassy in South Africa. On their website they promise a wide range of security services including force protection, guard services, port security, surveillance, and counter IED response services.
A retired CIA special operations officer founded another company, Overseas Security & Strategic Information, also advertising with IPOA for security business in Haiti. The company website says they have a “cadre of US personnel” who served in Special Forces, Delta Force and SEALS and they state many of their security personnel are former South African military and police.
Patrick Elie, the former Minister of Defence in Haiti, told Anthony Fenton of the Inter Press Service that “these guys are like vultures coming to grab the loot over this disaster, and probably money that might have been injected into the Haitian economy is just going to be grabbed by these companies and I’m sure they are not the only these mercenary companies but also other companies like Haliburton or these other ones that always come on the heels of the troops.”
Naomi Klein, world-renowned author of The Shock Doctrine, has criticized the militarization of the response to the earthquake and the presence of “disaster capitalists” swooping into Haiti. The high priority placed on security by the U.S. and NGOs is wrong, she told Newsweek. “Aid should be prioritized over security. Any aid agency that’s afraid of Haitians should get out of Haiti.”
Security is a necessity for the development of human rights. But outsourcing security to private military contractors has not proven beneficial in the U.S. or any other country. Recently, US Representative Jan Schakowsky (IL) and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) introduced bills titled “Stop Outsourcing Security” to phase out private military contractors in response to the many reports of waste, fraud and human rights abuse.
Human rights organizations have long challenged the growth in private security contractors in part because governments have failed to establish effective systems for requiring them to be transparent and for holding them accountable.
It is challenging enough to hold government accountable. The privatization of a public service like security gives government protection to private corporations which are also difficult to hold accountable. The combination is doubly difficult to regulate
The U.S. has prosecuted hardly any of the human rights abuses reported against private military contractors. Amnesty International has reviewed the code of conduct adopted by the IPOA and found it inadequate in which compliance with international human rights standards are not adequately addressed.
This is yet another example of what the world saw after Katrina. Private security forces, including Blackwater, also descended on the U.S. gulf coast after Katrina grabbing millions of dollars in contracts.
Contractors like these soak up much needed money which could instead go for job creation or humanitarian and rebuilding assistance. Haiti certainly does not need this kind of U.S. business.
In a final bit of irony, the IPOA, according to the Institute for Southern Studies, promises that all profits from the event will be donated to the Clinton-Bush Haiti relief fund.
Bill Quigley is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a long-time human rights advocate in Haiti. He can be reached at Quigley77@gmail.com.
Labels: Bill Quigley, Blackwater/Xe, Haiti Relief, IPOA, Mercenaries, Militarization of Relief
Police Association of New Orleans Works to Protect...
A CALL TO ACTION: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE SUPE...
Did a White Sheriff and District Attorney Orchestr...
Louisiana Justice Institute Co-Director Tracie Was...
Exclusive Video of Police Harassment of Mardi Gras...
Battle Continues Over Future of New Orleans Public...
Local Outrage at New Orleans Music Magazine Over R...
Time for a US Revolution: Fifteen Reasons, By Bil...
LJI Guest Columnist: Parnell Herbert on Police Acc...
LJI Community Profile: Reverend Samson "Skip" Alex...
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Reflections on the Ten Year Aftermath of the Federal Flood, by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
Trying to sum up my thoughts on the 10th anniversary of Katrina has proven to be more difficult than I ever imagined. A few months ago, when I decided it was worth it to take a step back, think about what I’ve witnessed over the past ten years, and how I understand these pieces fitting together within a longer history of racialized violence and resistance, it seemed like an easy assignment. It is the exact sort of thing that I have been trained to do. But figuring out how to actually articulate my thoughts became more and more emotionally charged and messy as the days passed by and the barrage of Katrina media coverage has grown exponentially each day. I have given up on this assignment a number of times already as I’ve alternated between feeling too raw (even as a non-New Orleanian) to productively write and questioning if any of my thoughts are worth sharing at all.
But, I know I will regret not capturing what I have to say now, at this particular moment as myself and so much of the city and broader Gulf South are being forced to remember not only August 29, 2005 but the losses and changes of the past ten years. I’d rather put down some messy and imperfect reflections of this moment than none at all, so here they are.
For the past nine years, every time I drive on 1-10 towards the West Bank and look up at the Superdome, the same image pops in my head. It’s of looking up at the Superdome in the summer of 2006 watching tiny little figures (who I would later learn were likely immigrant workers) atop of the Dome connected to ropes fixing the roof so it would ready for the 2006 Saints football season.[i] I remember how that summer the image of the folks fixing the Superdome,[ii] while houses still sat in the middle of the street in the Lower Ninth, tap water threatened to give one giardia, and Katrina refrigerators littered the city, served as a daily reminder of what city elites’ vision of the future of New Orleans was and was not to be.
That image probably only lasted a few months but it and dozens of others from the first months and years following the storm continue to shape how I see New Orleans as she speeds towards the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, or what People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and many others made sure we rightfully referred to as the Federal Flood. Mitch Landrieu and his conspirators are doing everything they can to make sure we forgot such images. There is no room in the success story of New Orleans for the remembrance of thousands of Black folks abandoned on roofs and highway overpasses or the unapologetic shootings of Black men by NOPD and white vigilantes or of the proliferation of homeless encampments across the city as the crisis of homelessness reached epic proportions in 2007[iii] or of the bulldozing of the WPA era public housing developments still filled with the countless possessions of thousands who never were able to come home.[iv] For Mitch and his ilk, these are the moments are best left forgotten[v] as the city moves forward and proves its ‘resiliency’ to the world. Reproducing the old liberal notion that the past does not shape the present, every where you turn is the disavowal that the ‘triumph’ of the city is predicated on the ongoing state sanctioned and extralegal violence, exploitation, and dispossession of Black New Orleanians.
Yes, this celebrated new New Orleans follows in the long tradition of New Souths remaking themselves time and time again through the dirty secret of all New Souths—their so-called successes have always been built upon the infrastructure of Jim Crow.[vi]
And indeed the last ten years have much in common with the dismantling of Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow regime of the New South. The framework of Reconstruction is not only familiar but was intentionally employed by numerous social justice organizations in the wake of the storm. Tracking back to both the promises of Radical Reconstruction and the ‘Second Reconstruction’ of the Black Freedom Movement, so many grassroots organizations named that the city’s rebuilding needed to be done as a “just reconstruction” if there was any hope of transforming the structures that created the conditions for such devastation to occur. Indeed, I was just one of thousands upon thousands of mostly, but not entirely, white Northerners who were called, moved, encouraged, recruited to come to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to support the reconstruction effort not dis-similarly from the Northern activists who went South in the 1860s and 1960s.[vii]
What’s more, community activists further followed in the best of the internationalist impulse of the Black Radical Tradition and other liberatory anti-racist movements in calling upon the most radical edge of human rights organizing, in the tradition of Paul Robeson and Malcolm X. People demanded that Gulf Coast residents be understood as internally displaced persons with the accompanied right of return, right to housing, right to healthcare, right to education, right to a living wage, right to a healthy environment and the right to collective self-determination. In doing so, Gulf South organizers highlighted that the experience New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents were facing had to be understood in a global frame of how climate change was (and would continue) wrecking havoc on vulnerable communities the world over.
Against such bold and visionary organizing were the other plans for the city. For a whiter and wealthier New Orleans. It feels hard to imagine it now, and perhaps I was just naive at the time, but I really believed that the organizing work across the city was going to be able to stop this land grab. But the racial capitalist state, at both the local and national level, was strong. HOPE VI was to destroy public housing exacerbating the city’s housing shortage, the busting of the teachers’ union and refusal to reopen Charity Hospital ensured that unknown numbers of New Orleanians (often women, usually Black) were unable to come home as their jobs were eliminated, Road Home was not only a disaster but the homeowners who did receive funds received them in a racially uneven manner, and so on and so on. With local folks busy trying to rebuild their homes and lives, and the weakening of solidarity networks over the years,[viii] to say nothing of the political depression experienced by many (including myself) as the losses accumulated, the capacity to confront the racialized neoliberal agenda for the city was limited (but never completely diminished).
In all of this, I see 2010 as one of the turning points of the city. During the previous five years, although the agenda for the city had clearly been set, it still had not come to full fruition.[ix] But then coupled with the incredible soul-lifting Super Bowl win was the historically low voter turnout for the mayoral election that brought Mitch Landrieu into office as the first white mayor since his father held the position in the 1970s.
Following the election, you could hear white folks unabashedly rejoicing at having a white mayor for the first time in decades. And again, following in the tradition set forth in the dismantling of Reconstruction, white folks justified their glee as not about racism but about *finally* having politicians running the city who weren’t corrupt or incompetent, neatly ignoring the fact it was only Black elected officials who were targeted for such investigations.[x]
Although the policy programs of Landrieu were not too dissimilar from the pro-business, neoliberal agenda that Nagin had promoted since 2002, their abilities to marshal outside resources were markedly different. While this difference can be partially understood as the timing of their respective administrations in the rebuilding landscape, we cannot and should not overlook how the city having white political leadership influenced the ways outside investors viewed New Orleans. Confidence in the city soared with Mitch in office and new capital flowed in to take advantage of the speculative boom. This private investment alongside the continued funneling of federal recovery dollars into private enterprises such as the St. Roch Market, demonstrated again the goal of the city’s recovery was capital accumulation on the backs of Black and poor New Orleanians.
I could go on at length about the heart-breaking experience of watching this most recent manifestation of the city disinvesting in Black New Orleans in favor of the new New Orleans over the past three years or so. The uptick in policing Black youth, notably transgirls, in the corridors targeted for ‘revitalization’; the ongoing commodification and marketing of the city’s Black cultural traditions even as Black musicians and other cultural workers struggle to make ends meet; the city’s auctioning off of property for exorbitant rates rather than investing in housing for working class and poor residents; the expansion of tourist rentals and the accompanied creep of drunken dude bro tourists that have made neighborhoods unrecognizable even to folks like myself and my friends who moved here in 2006 and 2007. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for folks who are actually from here.
Perhaps one of the things that most marks this most recent period to me is the extent to which the storm and its aftermath had faded and forgotten to the extent that many of the newest arrivals I talk with don’t even seem to consider themselves as living in a post-disaster environment. Yes, the houses are no longer strewn in the middle of the road. Humvees do not roll up and down streets. Katrina X’s on houses are hard to spot these days. But this is still a post-disaster world. Every single one of us who has come since the storm are here because of Katrina and what it did to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast whether we recognize it or not. This is not to feel to guilty, but to squarely and honestly assess where it is that we are so that we can think to the best of our abilities about how to best be and move in this incredible, complicated, magical, and contradictory place.
Because even with all the losses New Orleans has sustained in the last decade, it still is not lost. Just as it is a disservice to New Orleans and the Gulf South to forget the violence that folks have experienced here and in the broader Katrina diaspora, it is a disservice to ignore the wins of grassroots organizing from the shrinking of Orleans Parish Prison by several thousands beds to the recent win of higher wages for city contract workers.[xi] The current mobilizations of activists to disrupt the narrative of the city’s recovery and resiliency, to highlight the tremendous organizing work of the past ten years, and to come together to envision new just futures for the region reminds us that the work of movement building is never over. New Orleans organizing continues to build upon the city’s long legacies of resistance, that stretch back to slave revolts and Homer Plessy’s contestation to the solidification of Jim Crow, while creatively pushing for a city that does not continue to displace and exploit the people who’ve made it what it is over the centuries.
This is what still gives me hope. This is how I can imagine moving forward. Not forgetting the past or ignoring what is happening around me. But thinking critically, learning from the brilliance of people here, and finding ways to support the work of materializing the still unrealized project of abolition democracy and collective freedom.
[i] I must admit, I held a grudge at the Saints for this special treatment until the 2009/2010 NFL Season and their Super Bowl win.
[ii] Which we should not forget as also the site of much suffering by Katrina survivors in the aftermath of the flood.
[iii] During the summer and fall of 2007, a number of homeless folks came together to form a homeless union called Homeless Pride that set up a political encampment to demand an end to homelessness across from City Hall in Duncan Plaza until they were evicted by the city under the guise of park renovations. More about Homeless Pride can be found here: http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2393&context=td.
[iv] I will never forget that a week or so following the storm I called up an old friend from New Orleans who was collecting donations to get to the folks she knew who had lost everything (it was already known not to trust FEMA or the Red Cross). During our conversation, I asked her if her friends were ok and she told me that there were a bunch of folks she couldn’t get in touch with, but she knew they’d be ok since they’d been in the projects which were some of the sturdiest building in the city being three stories high and brick (a rarity in New Orleans).
[v] Or even celebrated as with the raising of public housing or the mass firing of teachers to break the teachers union and pave the wave for the complete charterization of the New Orleans school system.
[vi] By Jim Crow, I mean the full range of racialized and gendered exploitative violence aimed at containing and controlling the recently freed Black population of the South upon the dismantling of Reconstruction by members of the plantation bloc and New South industrialists alike, buttressed by the support of Northern capitalists: de jure segregation, mass disenfranchisement, criminalization of Black communities and the expansion of the state’s policing and penal power, widespread sexualized violence, dismantling of collective ownership structures, disinvestment in education and other social services, privatization of state services, free trade, and the rise of precarious labor (which in the case of Louisiana included the recruitment of Chinese coolie labor to do the former work of enslaved people). Otherwise the prototype of what we call neoliberalism today. For more on this, everyone should read everything Clyde Woods ever wrote, beginning with Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta.
[vii] I am not trying to imply that everyone who showed up to volunteer was a radical anti-racist activist. That is far from the truth. But something did indeed occur in the scale of response by primarily young folks who identified doing volunteer work as politically important work. This politicized volunteering tapered off as time wore on with less volunteers, and less organizations, framing the rebuilding New Orleans as an anti-racist or Left or social justice project.
[viii] To this day, I wonder how my own participation and advancement of certain political strategies contributed to the drying up of national support for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, particularly amongst the white activist-y Northerners similar to me. At the time it seemed important to emphasize to out of town volunteers that the conditions that gave rise to the disaster were not exceptional to New Orleans but could be found wherever they were from—thus the necessity of them focusing their activism home. And while I still generally agree with this framing, I wonder what could have happened if we had more firmly articulated that doing work at home required sticking with New Orleans for the long haul of what was sure to be a difficult and protracted recovery. This is hitting me particularly hard right now as I’ve realized in the last few weeks that no one I know is aware of any Katrina commemorative events happening outside of the Gulf Coast (I still hope I’m wrong on this front).
[ix] In the fall of 2009, I sat in an urban planning class where the different redevelopment schemes were presented to me of various “revitalization corridors” which include Tulane Ave, Freret Street, St. Claude, OC Haley, and Broad. At the time most of them seemed outlandish and unlikely, and now almost six years later I’ve seen them materialize, if unevenly.
[x] I am forever indebted to Du Bois’s discussion in Black Reconstruction about how white elites created and promoted the myth of Black Republican politicians as corrupt and incompetent in order to justify the ousting of Black political leadership and the reinstatement of white supremacist power during so-called Redemption for helping me articulate this connection. And noting this connection does not mean that I was a fan of everyone who was ousted following the storm, but that we cannot ignore that the targeting of corrupt politicians in the South has more often been about the diminishing of Black political power than about honest and principled politics.
[xi] For a fantastic description of the wide-range of organizing happening in New Orleans today check out Jordan Flaherty’s recent article “A Movement Lab in New Orleans” http://www.thenation.com/article/a-movement-lab-in-new-orleans/
Labels: Homelessness, Hurricane Katrina, Katrina Anniversary, Reconstruction, Road Home Program, Superbowl, Superdome
“The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to be proud of your heritage, where are they?” by New Orleans Youth
Note: This article was written by New Orleans young people. See another opinion piece by the students at this link.
Early Friday morning students arrived at their schools only to find that it was no regular morning. Pasted on the walls all around the schools were large black & white posters. But these were not your typical posters. These posters had facts, questions, and statistics regarding New Orleans public charter schools and their inhabitants -- former students, teachers, principals, and CEOs. Some posters had questions on them that referenced the firing of over 7,000 teachers post-Katrina: "The black math teacher from 2004 who lived in your neighborhood, where are they?" And some questioned the salaries of school principals and administrators compared to the quality of the schools they run: “Your principal makes $100,000 a year, but why is your school only a ‘D’ school?” These are only a few of the many posters that were found at several high schools across the New Orleans area, including Lake Area, Sci Academy, Warren Easton, and Landry Walker.
Students at these schools and others had a lot to say about the posters and the questions they posed. Responding to the question, “Your homie from the class of 2013...where are they now?” one high school student answered, “Most of the people I knew in the class of 2013 are currently in college, or didn’t finish and plan to go back this year. That makes me anxious and worry about if I can finish college when I’m ‘supposed’ to and wonder what happened to throw them off track. It makes me feel sad that people go into college unsure of their main drive and because of being rushed into it, they lose track of what they really want.”
Another student nearby answered as well saying, “Most of them are still in college but a few are struggling to have somewhere to stay and are still trying to get into college. They have no choice but to get a job, and their job is weighing on them and keeping them from going to school.”
At another local high school a student responded by saying, “My friend is currently working at Papa John’s, and it’s sad especially because he is now struggling and on the verge of giving up.” One student candidly said, “I don’t know where they are, and I feel some type of way because of their disappearance.” One final student gave a chilling answer, “Probably dead to be honest.”
Over at a high school on the West Bank students responded to several questions that were on posters around their school. Responding to, “How many teachers live in your neighborhood?” A student answered, “None. I feel disappointed because the teachers come from all over and they don’t know what the people from my neighborhood are going through.”
Other questions centered around how students get exposed to black culture in their schools. Two of them included, “The principal who taught you the black national anthem, what happened to them?” and “The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to be proud of your heritage, where are they?”
The first student answered, “It’s like a crime to teach your truth and your history, because if it wasn’t they wouldn’t have been fired and white people wouldn’t be the main ones teaching in our schools. There’s only a certain time for us to talk about black people in schools — February.”
And the other said, “I don’t even know what the Black National Anthem is, which makes me sad because it shows what type of schools I went to. The fact that I live in Louisiana and don’t know the Black National Anthem puts things into perspective for me.”
While the last student responded, “Well, that school doesn’t even have the same name any more. It’s charter school now, everything has changed — new principal, new teachers, new uniforms, new name. I don’t even know what happened to those teachers. When the school changed and those charter people came, they had to go. And that was the only school that I went to where I learned the Black National Anthem.” (The school was George Washington Carver, now it’s Carver Collegiate.)
One student talked in-depth about how the posters forced them to reflect on their place as youth in New Orleans. “After seeing the different posters at my school, it really made me think about how black youth don't really matter to this city, or that we do matter but only for the use of others. Schools and the entire city really just use us to pass off statistics to the rest of the world to say that the city is doing better. It’s like if we’re getting higher scores on tests than New Orleans must be moving forward...but it's not.”
Maybe the point of these posters is to raise questions about where the city really is 10 years after hurricane Katrina. A high school senior from New Orleans East seems to have summed up the feelings of their peers and families regarding the cruel irony of the anniversary festivities. “Our city's leaders are celebrating the anniversary of Katrina, and saying that if not for a terrible storm that killed so many people and hurt so many families we wouldn't have been able to move forward. Which implies that the way the city was before, and the things that happened before Katrina were wrong. All without acknowledging the damage that some of these ‘positive’ changes have caused our city.”
-written by New Orleans Youth
#k10truth4youth
#whywefight
Labels: Charter Schools, Education, Katrina, Katrina Anniversary, New Orleans Public Schools, Recovery School District, School Reform, School to Prison Pipeline
"All McDonough schools were founded by money made directly from slave labor" by New Orleans Youth
As the ten year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the city of New Orleans is filled with high energy from the life-long residents of the city. The New Orlenians that have seen the good and bad that this city has to offer. There has been plenty of conversation in the city about whether or not the people feel like New Orleans has fully recovered from hurricane Katrina. On this Friday morning as students were arriving to school, they were surprised to see a yard full of signs reading:
All McDonough schools were founded by money made directly from slave labor
Your principal makes over $90,000 a year , but why is your school a “F” school?
How many of your teachers live in your neighborhood?
If you feel like a prisoner in your school, ask your teacher “why”
Your homies from class of 2013. . . where are they now?
The black math teacher from 2004 who lived in your neighborhood, where are they?
The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to be proud of your heritage, where are they?
The principal who taught you the black national anthem, what happened to them?
New Beginnings Schools Foundation runs Lake Area. Their CEO makes $140,000 a year, but why is your school only a “D” school?
At a time like this when the city is highly anticipating the commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, the youth of New Orleans boldly decided to use artful expression to speak up about how they feel. Directly addressing the farce of better schools and improving education in the city of New Orleans that has been portrayed by the media. This is a method that I agree with completely. The youth has been blatantly ignored by the media and by the city of New Orleans when it comes to listening to their opinion of why the crime rate is so high, why there is a lack of opportunity in the city for youth of color and why the city is not better off now than it was ten years ago. In fact the city is worse off than it was ten years ago especially in terms of education.
Before you believe the hype that surrounds the 10th Anniversary, try to think of the names of all the teachers who were unjustly fired right after the storm. And try to think of the names of all the students who’ve been pushed out of schools because of racist and unfair discipline policies. When you think of what it means to have a real education system that encourages critical thought and self-discovery, try to think of names. Not data points. And if the names don’t come to you, maybe you should ask yourselves why they’ve been erased.
That’s what young people have done with their art. They’re asking questions and demanding answers. This reaction from the youth represents a bold statement in the face of anyone who is now saying that the city of New Orleans has recovered from hurricane Katrina and the corruption that followed in the midst of hurricane Katrina. As the hashtag at the bottom of the posters says, this is #whywefight.
Reflections on the Ten Year Aftermath of the Feder...
“The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to b...
"All McDonough schools were founded by money made ...
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Inside The World of Kenneth Ize
Posted 7 months ago by Mazzi Odu
Tucked away on a side street in Yaba, a historic part of Lagos that is also home to the city’s art school, is Kenneth Ize’s studio. It makes sense entirely that the man attributed of single-handedly spearheading Nigerian fashion’s revived love affair with woven cloth, contemporising it and designing collections of covetable pieces worn by the global fashion cognoscenti and a smattering of celebrities should choose this corner of the mainland for his base. He elaborates: “I picked here because I like colonial houses , I like old buildings and architecture and I just really wanted to be in a space where my staff and I could be here together.” For a designer who is known for the kaleidoscopic nature of his fabric choices and juxtapositions the two storied light filled, white walled and monochrome terrazzo floored house offers a striking and visually calming counterpoint to the pieces he creates. The overall vibe is of a conscientious creative commune, his aforementioned staff, two weavers and an assistant continue to diligently work in the adjacent room, samples are neatly arranged in a corner, and only his dog seems to be allowed to rush in and out as he pleases interrupting us every so often from his base camp of the veranda. Away from the hubbub, the plaudits the clients who keep returning to Alara for another Kenneth Ize fix, he has created the optimum cocoon for him to continue to live and work.
Image: Courtesy of Kenneth Ize
An Education in Aesthetics that’s find its way home
As with many designers Ize’s path has the aura of predestination. Regarding being drawn to fashion design he explains: I would say it was something I believed I could do best, it is something I saw around me [and] I customised my own clothes.” Attention to detail was inspired by his father: “I grew up seeing my dad wearing suits and the alignment was perfect. Even his singlet he would make sure, like, it was proper like flat…He would tell me there are some pants that you wear that it has to be so slick, like your bum has to be so smooth, you can’t have the pant line so my dad was rocking g strings to not have a pant line. I mean that guy, I don’t know what planet he was from…. But thinking now it is beautiful because it is my Dad who taught me mostly how to dress.” Upending the assumption that most African parents are reluctant for their child to embark in a career in the creative industries, much less fashion, he expands: “My parents are very nostalgic but cool… I studied psychology for a year and I never went to class [but] when I called my Mum and I am like Mum I think I know what I want to do I want to be a fashion designer, she was like go for it , this is what you should be doing.“
Of course, this was not misplaced optimism on the part of Ize’s parents; who had left Nigeria and settled in Austria as a family. He won a place at the prestigious Institute of Design, University of Applied Arts, Vienna where he did his BA under the instruction of Bernard Willhelm and his MA under the tutelage of the legendary Hussein Chalayan. Immersing himself in a demanding programme that was interdisciplinary in its approach and allowed him to explore the semiotics and theory of fashion as much as construction remains evident in his approach, which unlike many who are self-taught possesses an intellectualism and rigour that is every bit as important as the rack appeal of the finished pieces. “I just started playing with yarns during my thesis. I was researching, and I kept asking around where could I get weavers…one of my cousins knew a lady that made fabric and that wove here [in Lagos] so she took me there we did a sample and it was so experimental…I was saying everything I wanted and we sat outside and started doing it. And I was like wait, I could actually just expand this thing into something.” For many the finished fabric is aso’oke, a traditional woven fabric technique that is native to the Yoruba of South Western Nigeria but Ize sees his iteration of being an expansion on the traditional fabric. “It took me about two years… I feel like the experimentation we have done with this fabric has now shifted it from being aso’oke to being a woven cloth that should be celebrated everywhere in the world as we have moved this technique to a different level” In experimentation Ize has created a fabric that is 60% silk, 30% rayon and 10% cotton, allowing for more malleability and a glossy sheen in the finish. But this is not to say that he has abandoned the craft aspect in the process as he notes: “We hand weave here, a two-yard scarf for instance to prepare and design the pattern takes about a day and then to weave the actual fabric it takes about seven hours. It’s very labour intensive and the lady I started working with, she’s getting older, but I am so happy because one of her nieces is really loving this and has gotten into it now. I also have a team in Ilorin so we make the samples here and the team in Ilorin produces to a very large scale.” The organic nature of the process and the communal nature of the team behind it results in a more personal piece of luxury. In the age of the ‘drop’ and an insatiable client base that designers are pressured to feed at all times and costs, Ize’s process places skills, sustainability and perhaps most important of all, humanity at the centre.
Asked about his design language Ize is emphatic when he states: “For me the aesthetic is very pragmatic. It’s real definitely, and that is the kind of person I am designing for, because it is all comfortable clothes, just put it on and off you go. Also, the brand is very genuine and genuine aligns with one being very pragmatic.” Certainly, much of what he has offered on the runway has been classic in cut, from single breasted jackets to city shorts, trousers and jumbo scarves that can be draped and shaped in a myriad of ways. With the colours and textures being so audacious restraint is indicated in the silhouette. It also reveals commercial savvy; colour and print can often frighten the average shopper but made in an easy to wear shape the leap of consideration to purchase becomes easier. He also sees his brand as acting as conduit for others to plug into what is happening in Nigeria culturally and having an ambassadorial role in changing negative perceptions: “I am not just making these clothes for myself, I am making them for every African person. I want people to go Google oh yes, Nigeria, Lagos because they have seen the clothes and it makes them so fascinated.” In a world where cultural signifiers hold far greater currency than policy statements or government pronouncements, Ize’s thesis of Africa charting a positive course through its creative industries is far from naïve.
Muses, Supporters and the Fashion Eco-System
For a designer working in the 21st century there is something delightfully old-school in Ize’s methodology. Similar to the likes of Yves Saint Laurent with Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux or Karl Lagerfeld with Ines De La Frassange and a host of fabled beauties and it-girls since, Ize works closely with a muse. In his case the muse is Baingor Joiner, or as he is known more simply Bai, a creative consultant and photographer and part of the Lagos Cool Set. Ize is effusive in his praise for Bai: “Oh my God, I had a crush on Bai, the first time I met him my fantasies were on Bai, I just wanted to dress Bai…. I saw Bai and it was about clothes, it was about a design and about the runway which is interesting because runway is one thing that makes my collections really cohesive because even before a collection is made I have seen it, I have had the vision. Bai helps me narrate my vision.” It also helps that Bai by virtue of his activities as a DJ, model, photographer and fixture in Lagos’ creative nexus is in touch with many of the creative and cultural outlets that Ize infuses into his work and reframes via clothing. Ize adds: “We have conversations on design. He tells me how he feels about clothes because he also really understands where my mind is.” When asked how long he sees their working relationship lasting, Ize shakes his head at the thought of having a revolving door of muses: “I would love to use Bai in the next 20 years if he is not too busy for me…and even it gets that way Bai is an open spirit and I am too, we just really connect together and he knows how to say yes and never say no to me.”
Image Courtesy of Kenneth Ize
The familial energy extends to clients and supporters many whom are also cultural ambassadors in their own right: “I gain support from past relationships I have with people like Reni Folawiyo…friends like Faridah Folawiyo, Jomi Marcus-Bello from Waffles n Cream, Tokini Peterside of Art X and I love Nduka from This Day too.” Reni Folawiyo, owner of Alara is not only an early stockist, she has also invested significantly in the Oji Showroom in Paris (which with assistance from the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) saw Kenneth Ize and other menswear brands showcase their work) furthermore, Faridah Folawiyo a fine art consultant is a close friend and confidante. By having such a close network of friends and a clear sense of purpose Ize has been able to navigate challenging episodes most recently the rumour mill that went into overdrive when he didn’t show at either Lagos Fashion Week or GTB Fashion Weekend this year. He shares candidly: “My mind runs very fast…I am going through a serious depression right now… I had this collection ready before because I follow the international fashion calendar, but these weren’t the spaces for me to show anymore in a runway that I can’t be able to control or organise…I want to be able to be given the time and to be able to express my feelings and my emotions on the journey of making these clothes.” Instead he spent a month at a residency in New Orleans arranged by The Assemble a London based architectural and design collective and funded by two New Orleans based reclusive philanthropists who want to invest in the city’s creative possibilities. Ize expands on what the students should hope to experience: “I am really excited to be teaching how to make things more cohesive. I also have a project that I am going to give them… I am going to use the source of what I learnt from my university days because I feel like I have learnt so much from my uni and I am excited because it is a way of me remembering myself and refreshing my spirit and my energy because I really wanted to leave Lagos because I need a break not to see things that I see every day.”
He also provides a broadside on the efficacy and relevance of the spate of fashion weeks, shows and events saturating the Nigerian calendar when he adds: “I don’t think I have to lash anybody, but I do think maybe we just really have to go back to bed, sleep a bit and wake up again and think things through. I think fashion weeks here, there are too many already….I don’t know why this is like this because the fashion industry in Nigeria is just 1% , the 1% we all know each other…Everything I make and every one of my decisions in my life has to be very relevant. So if it is hurting me there is no point in showing. Then I also thought that why do I have to keep running around making this or making that to show? To show for who? Who am I really showing this for if my client isn’t really there? I mean I have done shows over four years under Lagos Fashion Week and I don’t think I have gotten a buyer from there one time.” It is an assessment that whilst not often spoken about overtly, for fear of offending industry leaders, gate-keepers and business leaders is whispered quietly by many designers regarding the different fashion weeks on the Lagos fashion calendar be it LFW or GTB. From the relative absence of buyers vis a vis journalists, influencers and bloggers to the flying in of big names in the international fashion scene that do not offer any ongoing engagement with the local industry beyond excitable social media posts during their brief visits and prestige by association for those who have hosted them. Whilst the flurry of articles and write ups that appear in the international press hailing the Lagos fashion scene might be deemed great for profile building, especially for the brands that get a mention, questions still remain as to why they do not necessarily translate into orders and sales. However, it is a nascent industry, and this too is something Ize concedes noting : “It’s a very tricky one, they, the organisers, are doing what they think they can do but it is self-taught. I don’t see the fashion shows here to be a business because at the end of the day that designer that has shown for one hundred years or whatever is still a bespoke designer. Ready to wear culture is not really known here…. Where are those clothes going to after the shows? So okay maybe [they are] going to go to Zinkata, Temple Muse, Alara but what else again?” By raising these questions and choosing to pause from the domestic fashion merry-go-round Ize is displaying a bravery that some might seem deem reckless, but conversely, if one does not critique or question, how does one grow?
He is equally passionate about the state of the Nigerian fashion industry and the paucity of opportunities available whether one is starting out in the business or more established. He notes: “We’re getting the press but we’re not making the money here. There are loads of international designers I won’t mention names, but you could show me their collections and I can show you how African designers or our aesthetics have been referenced.” And whilst the occasional Social Media ‘name and shame’ might cause a flurry of activity on threads it does not translate into revenue as he puts it more succinctly: “I mean the fashion industry is growing here but I don’t think it is making money. Because for example I do not know any Nigerian fashion designer that is selling in Dover Street Market.” He is equally scathing of the Pop-Up model which has seen a number of Nigerian designers be stocked albeit temporarily in prestigious stores overseas as he adds chuckling: “They want to pop you up honey but that’s just it. A pop means they don’t trust you. They are low-key trying to tell you that ‘oh let’s give you a pop up you know and then be happy and it’s going to be good’. But if someone offered me a pop up I would say no, because I am not willing to make 50 jackets for a pop up as what is really the assurance of me selling? If you really trust in someone’s brand you would actually want to have it in that store and buy the collection outright that’s my belief.” Training is an ongoing issue, something Ize with the benefit of his education feels needs to be urgently addressed: “The lack of education here in our system is a problem. The fact we don’t have a fashion school that would teach students how to grow an aesthetic. We need a strong fashion school here. it’s time.” He also questions the intent of the international spotlight so firmly on Africa currently when he adds .”They are consuming (our creativity) and we are not making the money…We think we are exposing these African brands but we are really not , we are only exposing the continent for people to take from.” And whilst his upbringing makes Ize very much an internationalist his warning to Nigeria and in the greater scheme Africa as a whole of needing to chart its own destiny rather than assume an equal playing field will be created on the global fashion landscape is pertinent.
Fame, Fandom and Future Plans
For someone who has seen his client list grow beyond Nigeria to include the likes of Donald Glover, Anum Bashir and most recently Beyoncé, Ize is decidedly muted about the implications for his brand. “You know it’s a sustainable brand and I don’t think about popularity, not at all. Trust me I didn’t know who Childish Gambino was. I don’t feel like I know five lyrics from Beyoncé’s songs… I know people would assume he would know this he would know that, but I just don’t…I am thinking about how can I better myself and better my environment? The way it works in my head is I care more about my staff than chasing celebrities to wear my clothes. I am not a crowd chaser. I am just about being natural. I am also very aware of how destructive this world is already so all I am[focusing on is how can I as an individual person make a change in the world or add to this world so that it can be better.” It is for this reason that Ize doesn’t engage in sending pieces out to celebrities speculatively or go into PR overdrive during awards season. Instead, stylists approach his team and orders are taken from there, just as with any other client. A contrarian approach but it allows for greater freedom in the long run as he is not enslaved to insta-popularity or the foibles of a few famous clients.
For female fans who have had to content themselves with slipping into menswear pieces of Kenneth Ize’s, if they are slender of hip enough to do so, this year brings the arrival of a full womenswear collection. “I have been working on this collection for the past four months I am still not done it’s a lot of work I have never made women’s wear before…, I want to know the body of a woman because I am making womenswear.” He gestures to me and adds: “I want to know your story as a woman I want to know everything…I want to know about your menstruation how you move how you feel everything. This is my headspace right now. I am so excited by this womenswear because my energy is so into it and I love it so much I am telling you it is going to be amazing.” His effervescence is infectious and with his meticulous approach to design conception female fans will no doubt flock for more. Womenswear is just one part of a broader expansion that will include lifestyle objects in due course. As Ize notes: “Because my brand is luxury there is a goal and there is a determination. My determination, I am going to be very honest here, is to be the brand that is from Africa that is on everyone’s radar globally because I am sick and tired of seeing negative things about Africa.”
Of his peers within the industry, there are only a few he admires: “I like Kelechi Odu and Maki Oh and I also like Waffles n Cream and it’s very affordable and it’s one of the only brands that I feel I own a lot of pieces from, yes Waffles n Cream totally. I would say those are the three brands.” Expanding to brands based outside of Africa, once more it is the interdisciplinary visionaries that capture his imagination the most when he adds: “You know in as much as I get that I sound a bit shady but I don’t feel like I know or love many brands even international brands….I love Chanel , because I have these conversations with a lot of people and they are like oh, they do the same thing and I am like no, the beautiful thing and the reason why I connect so much with Chanel is that every time you see his shows they are like fucking epic. This guy Karl, he thinks about everything with his shows. Sometimes I will just go on YouTube and be like let me just watch a Chanel show… I also like Christopher Lemaire and Paco Rabanne… it’s its own aesthetic, it is alternative, it’s a different sexy I can’t even explain it.” By not being over engrossed with what others are doing Ize’s career has to date not suffered from the critique of being derivative or homage heavy and in that lies its greatest strength.
It is clear that Ize has a long-term strategy for his brand and has assembled a team that can assist him in his journey, but he notes that although he is very much part of the renaissance that the creative arts are enjoying in Nigeria, challenges remain to him living a fully authentic life. Outside of the world of fashion, one where sexual orientation and identifying as non-binary barely raises a robed shoulder, society remains obstinately conservative: “I feel like my sexuality is something that will not allow me to be here for a very long time which is very sad… There are a lot of gay people here but at the same time if you have lived somewhere like Europe, lived all your life having this freedom and then someone is taking it away from you, someone you don’t even see, I am like why? The other day I was out with like twenty-one gay men at Nok and we were at a table and it was like the most beautiful thing for me in Lagos. It was so nice.” It is a poignant conclusion to my time with Ize as one is left with the notion of what does it take to have a truly dynamic fashion industry here in Nigeria? There is talent aplenty and a youth led population that is the breeding ground of innovation globally. Yes, structural challenges remain; capacity building is high up on the to-do and must-do list. But will we lose our greatest talents to other locales because we do not have a truly inclusive society? It would be a tragedy if this was the case. But for now we celebrate the places and spaces such as fashion where talent, beauty, creativity and possessing the ability to distil dreams into apparel still have the power to vanquish, and love and doing the work is enough.
info@magnusoculus.com
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EdITLib is now LearnTechLib. The new URL for this page is https://www.learntechlib.org/p/110639/
Examining the extent and nature of online learning in American K-12 Education: The research initiatives of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Anthony G. Picciano, Jeff Seaman, Peter Shea, Karen Swan
Internet and Higher Education Volume 15, Number 2, March 2012 ISSN 1096-7516 Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
In 1992, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation began its
Picciano, A.G., Seaman, J., Shea, P. & Swan, K. (2012). Examining the extent and nature of online learning in American K-12 Education: The research initiatives of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Internet and Higher Education, 15 (2), 127-135. Elsevier Ltd. Retrieved July 19, 2019 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/110639/.
This record was imported from Internet and Higher Education on January 29, 2019. Internet and Higher Education is a publication of Elsevier.
Full text is availabe on Science Direct: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.07.004
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Educational Change
Elementary Secondary Education
Futures (of Society)
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Describing Online Learning Programs and Practices that Serve Diverse Learners
Mary Rice, University of New Mexico, United States; Mark Deschaine, Central Michigan University, United States; Daryl Mellard, University of Kansas, United States
Journal of Online Learning Research Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018) pp. 117–121
Community of Inquiry and Perceived Learning: The Impact of Blended Learning among High School Students
Kyleigh Harrell, Liberty University, United States; Jillian Wendt, University of the District of Columbia, United States
EdMedia + Innovate Learning 2017 (Jun 20, 2017) pp. 501–508
Using Blended Teaching to Teach Blended Learning: Lessons Learned from Pre-Service Teachers in an Instructional Methods Course
Kristen Shand, California State University Fullerton, United States; Susan Glassett Farrelly, Humboldt State University, United States
Journal of Online Learning Research Vol. 3, No. 1 (May 2017) pp. 5–30
Inquiring into Presence as Support for Student Learning in a Blended Learning Classroom
Mark Stevens, George Mason University, United States; Mary Rice, University of Kansas, United States
Journal of Online Learning Research Vol. 2, No. 4 (Dec 31, 2016) pp. 447–473
The State of 21st Century Learning in the K-12 World of the United States: Online and Blended Learning Opportunities for American Elementary and Secondary Students
Kimberly Greene & William Hale, Brandman University, United States
E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2016 (Nov 14, 2016) pp. 826–840
A Case Study of a Professional Learning Community in a Highly Diverse Blended School
Exploring Online Education in K-12 Environments
Tina Heafner, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States; Richard Hartshorne, University of Central Florida, United States; Teresa Petty, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States
Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2015 (Mar 02, 2015) pp. 1478–1480
Applying the ESPRI to K-12 Blended Learning
Jason Siko, Grand Valley State University, United States
Online learning community development expectations: A science story
Thanh Truc Nguyen, CRDG, College of Education, University of Hawaii, United States; Francisco Jumawan, University of Hawaii, United States
E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2011 (Oct 18, 2011) pp. 1575–1578
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MT-Headed Blog
Musical thoughts and ramblings by Michael Teager
MTH Glossary
Dave Matthews Band’s ‘Crash’ at 20
Dave Matthews Band’s Crash turned twenty on April 30, 2016.
I don’t have time to mark all such occasions for albums from ~1996 that I hold up as iconic, but I did so for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and must do so again here. Like that other entry, this won’t be a song-by-song novella, but I’d still like to log some thoughts to mark the occasion.
Depending on how you parse it, Crash is either the second or third album released by the band. I suppose it’s officially seen as the second major label release (after 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming) and studio album. However, this doesn’t count the band’s self-released debut Remember Two Things from 1993, a mix of live and studio recordings that was eventually given a wider, major label pressing and re-release. Be it second or third, Crash was a juggernaut. “Crash Into Me,” “So Much to Say,” “Too Much,” and “Tripping Billies” dominated the airwaves, and the album is currently 7X platinum. Stats aside, this album is a monumental one for me personally. Regular readers should know by now that DMB is a cornerstone of my musical DNA, and this album was my “patient zero” — my entry point.
Even though “What Would You Say?” and “Ants Marching” had crossed my ears, I distinctly remember the time I first I knowingly heard “So Much to Say,” Crash‘s lead single. To date this then-adolescent, I was watching MTV and taken aback by seeing a saxophonist playing in such a quality, catchy song. I dug it and wanted more. Not long after, I purchased the CD and quickly seared every note and syllable into my brain. I listened to the full album constantly: at home, in the car, on my bike, doing yard work, walking around the neighborhood, etc. And I mean the full album — every last song. Often times I’d put in the CD and just select “repeat all” and let it go. I would of course go through spurts where I listened to some songs repetitively more than others, but in this album’s case every song got a turn. Nothing was glossed over.
Fast favorites for me were “#41,” “Two Step,” and “Let You Down,” but that studio recording of “#41” left a specific still-deep impression for several reasons. The instrumental jam, though short by the band’s live standards, particularly engaged this then-young saxophone student. By 1996, I had fallen down the rock rabbit hole. I made room for other styles, too, but as I wrote here I was under the spell of Smashing Pumpkins et al. That said, I also had a burgeoning interest in the saxophone, and there really no bands that I was aware of that included a fully-integrated saxophonist. I mean, I listened to a ton of oldies growing up. However, as I wrote here, much of the sax’s use then (and to a large extent now) was either a novelty or a cameo. Furthermore, those bands that did regularly use saxophone still preferred to exploit that honky rhythm & blues sound (e.g., Pink Floyd). So, to hear an album by a current band that both included sax and was good (great!) made quite an impression. And not only did it include saxophone, but the instrument was integral to the record’s — and, as I later learned, the band’s — sound, be it in the background, foreground, or just part of the overall texture.
Another thing about “#41” that was important for me at the time was the realization and understanding that some sort of improvising was occurring. At the time (I was 12 going on 13 — cut me some slack), I knew of jazz but wasn’t strongly interested in it, and the idea of full-blown improvising was something I knew happened, but not for extended periods of time in more “mainstream” solos and styles. Also, to focus to Crash, LeRoi Moore‘s brief riff-based solo on “Too Much” remains intact to this day, though it did go away for a few years. I heard the same thing on Letterman as I did on the album. “#41,” though, was another story. The violin and flute solos I liked, but they were short and bounced along with the rhythmic feel from the song proper. Roi’s sax solo, on the other hand…that was a whole different entity for me. In fact, I listened to that solo so much that I almost considered it a different song. Looking back, I think it was the first instrumental solo I committed to memory. I could sing or whistle it at the drop of a hat. Carter’s cymbal crash at 04:27 helps note the shift in feel, and Roi’s off to the races.
(Imagine my delight when, in 2010, Jeff Coffin and Rashawn Ross started playing an interlude horn line that used bits from Roi’s studio solo…)
In fact, I often thought of it as the “Moonlighting solo” to myself, as the rhythm section’s groove reminded me of the Moonlighting theme song. (A song that, when I heard it by the time I was 6, I really liked. Having recently listened back via YouTube, I don’t remain as sold on it, but in my mind there’s a connection. Ha!)
Even though “#41” remained a centerpiece (and to this day my favorite DMB song), it certainly wasn’t the only piece to make an impression. Instrumentally, Roi’s solo on the outro of “Proudest Monkey” was another improvisatory standout. That, and his soprano sax tone sounded magnificent to me. Even now, when I think of soprano tone, that’s one of the first things to come to mind along with Dave Liebman.
That’s enough shop talk, though. Back to the album at large.
Not only was the saxophone’s immersion in the band’s sound a game-changer, but so was the band’s overall sound of being a rock band with no lead guitar. (Well, at least at it’s core. I continue to contest that being the case these days.) Yes, Tim Reynolds is present throughout the album, but he’s felt more than explicitly heard. Instead, I was listening to a band that figured out how to rock with both a violin and saxophone (and flute!). Wild!
Also, Crash covers a fair amount of stylistic ground. The overall atmosphere of the album is cohesive, but the band covers a respectable range that includes rock/pop (“So Much to Say,” “Too Much,” “Tripping Billies”), more jam- and jazz-influenced fare (“#41,” “Say Goodbye,” and “Proudest Monkey”), ballads (“Crash Into Me,” “Let You Down,” “Cry Freedom”), the in-between (“Lie In Our Graves”), and a couple hard-driving selections (“Two Step,” “Drive In Drive Out”).
Most people consider the follow-up, 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets, to be the band’s best album, and it’s a consistent favorite among much of the hardcore fan base. I definitely see where BTCS devotees are coming from (and, in some respects, I agree that it’s DMB’s best): it’s an epic album with superb songs. That said, its grandiosity is something that gets in the way when I’m thinking of what makes an album my favorite when it comes to DMB (or most any band, I suppose). BTCS features Alanis Morissette, Béla Fleck, Kronos Quartet, and many more. It’s a big studio undertaking whereas Crash, still a big studio album, features the core five (plus Tim Reynolds) and, for the most part, features a pretty “live” sound. One drawback I always saw with Under the Table and Dreaming was the production — maybe it was the time and technology, but the album has much less of a “live” presence than Crash.)
At the end of the day, Crash is my personal favorite. Admittedly, it may partially be for nostalgic reasons, as it’s where it all started for me. Even so, it’s the band’s studio album I listen to the most, and it’s the one I keep handy in case I need a fix. For example, I use my iPod Classic when I’m on the move, but I do keep select albums on my iPhone and iPad, and Crash is always the first DMB one to get thrown on there. Its song selection, live sound, and lack of guests (beyond Reynolds) combine to offer a great distillation of a band that’s become a real piece of my life over these last two decades.
And with that, here’s to many more with Crash and the band…
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged 1996, crash, dave matthews band on May 1, 2016 by Mike.
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Who Would Be King: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Public Theater | The New York Observer:
At least twice during his new show, the virtuoso monologist Mike Daisey refers to himself as an actor. Twice more, he calls himself a storyteller. He is of course both things, but the descriptors miss the true impact of what he has accomplished in his powerful piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opened Monday night at the Public Theater.
As much as he is a performer, Mr. Daisey is also an investigative journalist, even, in the best sense, a muckraker. In his forthright examination of Mr. Jobs, of the various i-devices Jobs created, and of the Chinese sweatshops where those devices are manufactured, Mr. Daisey opens an Upton Sinclair-like window into the horrors and human cost of producing the shiny electronic gizmos resting silently, and increasingly uncomfortably, in our pockets.
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comm 2-4-13
BE IT REMEMBERED, that the White County Commissioners held a regular meeting on Monday, February 4, 2013. The meeting was held at the White County Building, Commissioners’ Conference room, beginning at 8:00 a.m.
Commissioners present were: President John C. Heimlich, Vice President, Steve Burton; and Commissioner David Diener. Also present was the White County Auditor, Gayle Rogers; White County Attorney, George Loy; and the Commissioners’ Secretary, Donya Tirpak.
Commissioner Heimlich called the meeting to order.
Commissioner Burton made a motion to approve the minutes as presented for the regular meeting on January 22, 2013. Vote: Unanimous
Commissioner Diener made a motion to approve payroll as presented, seconded by Commissioner Burton. Vote: Unanimous
Commissioner Diener made a motion to approve and pay the claims as presented, seconded by Commissioner Burton. Vote: Unanimous
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION - APPOINTMENT
Commissioner Heimlich said that the county council has recommended Jim Annis as their appointment to the Economic Development Commission board and the city has recommended Mark Gamble as their appointment.
Commissioner Diener made a motion to accept the recommendations and appoint Jim Annis and Mark Gamble to the Economic Development Commission board, seconded by Commissioner Burton. Vote: Unanimous
REDEVELOPMENT COMMISSION – APPOINTMENT
Commissioner Heimlich said that the commissioners are to appoint a school board advisory member to the Redevelopment Commission board.
Commissioner Burton made a motion to appoint Susan Mrzlack from the Twin Lakes School board as the school board advisory member to the Redevelopment Commission board, seconded by Commissioner Diener. Vote: Unanimous
DISABILITY AWARENESS MONTH
Cathy Gross, ADA Coordinator for the City of Monticello, announced that March is Disability Awareness month and she is trying to promote awareness within the community. She asked permission to hang art work done by the consumers at CDC in the lobby of the Courthouse during the month of March. Permission Granted
White County Surveyor, Brad Ward, presented quotes to the commissioners for a new copier. He has requested $7,000 for additional appropriations from the council and that should be approved at their next council meeting.
Commissioner Diener made a motion to approve the quote from Copiers Plus to purchase a Xerox 7121 copier for $5,726.00, seconded by Commissioner Burton. Vote: Unanimous
AREA PLAN
Joe Rogers, Director, said that the CDC property is currently zoned incorrectly and he recommends that the commissioners have rezoned.
Mr. Rogers said that the original parcel was zoned L1. When the parcel was split off the lake front was split off as the parcel that doesn’t have any zoning, and the CDC property was zoned as L1. The use of this site is not compatible with the current zoning.
Mr. Rogers said that the request of change needs to be submitted by a resolution requesting the Area Plan Commission for consideration of changing the rezoning. He recommends changing the rezoning to a B2. This will bring the Information Booth and the CDC property to the correct zoning.
Commissioner Diener made a motion to approve Resolution #13-02-04-01 requesting to rezone the county property from an L1 to a B2, seconded by Commissioner Burton. Vote: Unanimous
RESOLUTION NO. 13-02-04-01
Resolution of the Board of Commissioners of White County, Indiana, for Rezoning of County – Owned Property
WHEREAS, certain real estate owned by White County, located at 5053 Norway Road, Monticello, Indiana, is currently used by the Comprehensive Development Center (CDC) and Lakes Information Booth; and
WHEREAS, said property is zoned “L-1” under the White County Zoning Ordinance which zoning is inappropriate for the currently non-conforming for such use of said property; and
WHEREAS, the White County Commissioners desire said property to be rezoned to “B-2” in order that the current use of said property conform with the White County Zoning Ordinance.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED by the White County Commissioners that the White County Area Plan Commission rezone said property located at 5053 Norway Road, Monticello, Indiana (Tax I.D. #014-38780-00) from “L-1” to “B-2.”
RANDY MILLER & ASSOCIATES
Jason Miller, President, gave a presentation to the commissioner on how they can help the county become compliant with the new American with Disabilities Act. He explained that the federal government is now requiring us to sign documents annually saying that we are in compliance with the ADA. If this is not done, grant applications from White County could be denied.
Mr. Miller said that they can put a proposal together based on the needs of their services from the county. They will need to know if the county wants them to handle the evaluation and assessment of all the buildings, the bridges, put together a transition plan, include an evaluation of a schedule and cost estimate, etc. They can provide a lump sum cost to do everything, they can do an hourly rate, or they can put together an ala carte cost plan for individual jobs.
The commissioners asked Mr. Miller to get with Mike Kyburz, ADA Coordinator, and put an ala carte proposal together breaking down the different aspects for their next meeting.
Eric Storm, County IT, said that he has seven companies wanting to put in a proposal for the county’s GIS website. He is currently in the process of collecting those and he will discuss them with the commissioners at a later date.
There being no further business to come before the board, their meeting was adjourned.
__________________________ _____________________________ _______________________
John C. Heimlich, President Steve Burton, Vice President David Diener, Member
ATTEST: _________________________
Gayle Rogers, Auditor
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Archives For Identity Theft
This is series of short blogs that detail how the Church sought to strip Yeshua of his Jewishness.
Why Did Paul Change His Name?
Ron Cantor — January 7, 2013 — 9 Comments
Why did a Jewish man get rid of his Jewish name when he began to follow the Jewish Messiah? Sounds suspect doesn’t it? Because it is!
The central author of the New Covenant—at least of the letters to the congregations—was a fellow by the name of Saul of Tarsus. He was both Jewish and a Roman citizen not to mention an orthodox rabbi. He studied under Gamaliel, one of the most respected Jewish scholars of his day. He was so zealous for God and convinced that Jewish people who believed in Yeshua were deceived that he sought to arrest Jewish believers and even approved the stoning to death of Stephen, a leader among the first Jewish believers (Acts 7:58, 8:1).
However, on his way to Damascus to arrest believers, he was knocked to the ground and blinded by a great light. Yeshua spoke to him and convinced him that he was on the wrong side of this issue. After this dramatic encounter he became a believer and began to share the good news of Yeshua with Jewish people.
‘Also’ not ‘Instead Of’
Many years later, as he traveled throughout the known world seeking to help both Jews and Gentiles discover a dynamic, personal relationship with the King of the Universe, the Bible refers to the fact that he had two names.
Then Saul, who was also called Paul… (Acts 13:9, emphasis mine)
Sadly, for centuries Christians have taught that Saul changed his name to Paul after he became a believer. In other words, he had to get rid of his Jewish name and take on a Christian one. This is unreasonable on two levels.
There were no ‘Christian’ names in the First Century!
First, why would a Roman name be synonymous with a Christian name? Roman heritage was a pagan polytheistic (belief in many gods) heritage and Rome became the primary persecutor of the body of believers for the first three hundred years. Furthermore, there was no such thing as a Christian Name! The name Paul only became a Christian name because of Paul.
Secondly, if Saul truly changed his name from a Jewish one to a Roman one, then why did he wait so many years after coming to faith to do so?
Jews Get Two Names
Anyone who grew up in a Jewish home outside of Israel would know that it is common for Jewish people to have two names, one that is connected to the area in which they live and a Hebrew name. My English name is Ron, but my parents also gave me the name Chaim, which is Hebrew for life. (Nevertheless, I go by Ron here in Israel because it is also an accepted Hebrew name and way cooler!)
When Saul was traveling in non-Jewish areas, he used his Roman name. Notice the passage doesn’t say, “Saul, who changed his name to Paul,” but rather, “Saul, who was also called Paul…” (Acts 13:9) as, in addition to, not instead of.
Just today, I was listening to one of my favorite teachers on my iPod while jogging. This man is an excellent bible teacher and he loves Israel. He and his church have given sacrificially to the body believers here. In his message he referred to when Yeshua appeared to “Saul”… then adding that he used Saul and not Paul because that is what “his name was then.” If someone so bright and anointed cam miss this simple point, how easy has it been for the enemy to rob Saul, the second greatest figure in the New Covenant, of his Jewish identity and thus confuse the nature of the New Covenant.
What’s the big deal?
Good question… for which there is an answer. The enemy has worked hard to blind the Jewish people to Yeshua. However, the ancient Church has helped by de-judiazing many of the central characters of the New Testament. Paul is not presented as Sha’ul, a learned rabbi who followed the Jewish Messiah, but as a former Jew who started a religion foreign to Judaism.
Certainly this was not the case in his mind as he states “For this reason therefore I have called for you…, because for the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain” (Acts 28:20). In the mind of Sha’ul is not suffering for a new religion, but the hope of Israel.
Let’s expose this Identity Theft and present Yeshua to the Jewish people in His original Jewish/Hebraic context.
Footnote: The name Paulos in Greek means small or humble. If Paul did take on this name later in life, it would not been to separate himself from his Jewishness (See Acts 21:20ff, Acts 23:6), but more a nickname that may have been given to him to reflect his humility, as he calls himself the least of the apostles and even the worst of sinners. Of course, his embracing such a nickname would not have been so humble, so I am inclined to believe that he did indeed have a Jewish name and a Greek name.
Can you think of some other ways in which the gospel has been cleansed of its Jewishness? Use the comments section below.
In Identity Theft, Jewish Roots, Latest
The Odds of Yeshua Dying, Rising and Pouring out His Spirit on Jewish Feasts
Ron Cantor — September 7, 2012 — 2 Comments
I am not a mathematician, and don’t want to be. But let me ask you a question? What are the odds that Yeshua died on a Jewish holiday, rose on a Jewish holiday and birthed the New Testament congregation on a Jewish holiday?
Just so we are all clear as to what I am referring to:
Yeshua died on Passover. The very day when all Israel commemorates the first Passover, when they sacrificed an innocent lamb and took its blood and applied it to the doorpost of their homes.
He rose on the Feast of Firstfruits (Lev. 23:9ff).
And the Spirit of God was poured out in Jerusalem on the last day in which we count the Omer, the 49 between Firstfruits and Shavuot (What you may call Pentecost).
So, imagine that we took the 365 days that comprise a year and laid them out on a roulette wheel. Next we marked Passover, Firstfruits and Shavuot. The first ball you throw MUST land on Passover. The next, on Firstfruits. And the final ball must land on Shavuot.
One in Forty Eight Million
Okay, as I said, I am no mathematician or oddsmaker, but I think the chances of that happening 3 times in a row are 365 to the third degree. Or 1 in 48,627,125. In fact, the only way it could conceivably happen would be if someone were planning it. And of course, that is what I am maintaining—that God purposely had these events fall on Jewish feast days to emphasize to generations to come that salvation is of the Jews.
Of course the Good News of Yeshua is for every nation, but God would have those nations remember their roots and honor their elder brother Israel, who for the most part, has fallen away. It was Jews like Simeon and Anna who interceded for the Messiah to come the first time and Jewish prophets who foretold His appearing. Now God is looking to the Church to pray for Romans 11:26 to come to pass—which says “all Israel shall be saved.”
Now, let’s take a deeper look at these days.
Yeshua died on Passover
The last supper was actually the last Seder (meal on the first night of Passover). In fact, the practice of communion, the drinking of wine and eating of bread, symbolizing the body and blood of Yeshua was instituted on Passover. It was during the Seder that He took the third cup of wine, the Cup of Redemption and instituted the tradition. While many churches use bread for this practice, there was a reason that Yeshua used Matzah, bread without leaven. Leaven symbolizes sin. Yeshua was pure, without sin and therefore Matzah would have been the only appropriate type of bread to use.
Yeshua rose from the dead on Bikurim, Firstfruits.
The Bible teaches that the first Sunday, after the first Shabbat, after Passover begins would be the feast of Firstfruits. It was a time to thank God for the firstfruits of the Harvest. This is why Paul referred to Yeshua as the “firstfruits from among the dead” (1 Cor. 5:20). How fitting that God choose this day of all days to bring forth the Messiah from the grave.
The outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the first Jewish believers happened on Shavuot
If you look at just about any English version of the New Testament it will tell you that this great event took place on the “day of Pentecost.” Pentecost is a Greek word that means fifty. Jews would count the days from First Fruits to Shavuot. Shavuot means weeks, as in seven weeks or forty-nine days. Most Christians when they read their Bibles have no idea that this was an ancient Jewish feast day.
How interesting that God chose three Jewish Feast days for the sacrificial death of His Son, the resurrection of His Son and the outpouring of His Spirit, thus birthing the first assembly of believers in the Messiah (Acts 2).
(Photo D.C. Atty)
7 Quick Scriptural Proofs that Yeshua is Still Jewish
Ron Cantor — August 17, 2012 — 17 Comments
I received an email the other day in regards to our recent post Ten Jewish Facts About the New Testament. This person said:
“It is also a fact that Jesus is no longer Jewish. He has no nationality or ethnicity.”
While I thought fact was a strong word (Who am I to talk? I use proof in my title), I love to be challenged and he brought up an intriguing question: What does the Bible say about Yeshua’s ethnic identity post resurrection? My response to him was to ask for a Scripture reference for this fact. He kindly responded and I address his response at the end.
And to be clear, while I believe the Bible teaches that He is still a Jew[i], I don’t believe that being Jewish makes one better than another. God loves every child of His from every nation. There is no middle wall of partition (Eph. 2); any person from any place can come into the presence of God thanks to the sacrifice of Yeshua. Being Jewish is a calling (Rom. 11:29), not a sign of favoritism (Acts 10:34).
Okay, here we go! 7 Proofs that Yeshua is still Jewish
1. This may be shocking, but from the Book of Revelation, not only does Yeshua keep His ethnicity in heaven, but we do too! When John was able to peek into eternity, he said:
After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice (Rev. 7:9)
This is not on earth, but in heaven. John is told that: “they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple” (Rev. 7:15). And yet, John was able to make out their ethnic identity. Isn’t this exciting! God loves the nations. He has an eternal purpose for every country!—even in the age to come!
2. Post Resurrection, Yeshua is referred to as the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Root of David:
Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.” (Rev. 5:5)
Both of these titles reference His earthly ancestry and ethnic identity. He is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah—not was.
3. When Yeshua returns, He comes to fight on behalf of Israel.
Then the Lord will go out and fight against those nations, as He fights on a day of battle. (Zech. 14:3)
4. His landing spot when He returns is the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (not Vatican City!)
On that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south. (Zech. 14:4)
5. He sets up His Messianic Kingdom and His Throne in Jerusalem (not Rome!)
6. He oversees the Feast of Tabernacles—a feast given to Israel in the Torah.
Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. (Zech. 14:16)
7. Who can think of a seventh proof? I hate to leave it at six… Oh, I just thought of another… He told His disciples:
“I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.”
After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” (Luke 22:14-18)
Yeshua will again celebrate the Passover when “the kingdom of God comes.” While the kingdom did come in one manifestation while He lived on earth, Yeshua is pointing to a time after His resurrection—most likely to the Messianic Age/Millennial Kingdom after He returns.
The emailer sent me this in message to my request for Scriptural proof. My responses are below each point.
1. You don’t need a verse. Reason reveals it.
My Response: Considering the information I just provided, I think you do need Scriptural proof to make the claim that He is no longer a Jew.
2. But if you need one: Paul says we will be given a glorified body… a new body.
My Response: Indeed, and I can’t wait to get mine, but it doesn’t teach that we loose our ethnicity. Again, John sees a great multitude in heaven (people who have died) still identified by their earthly ethnicity. Of course that could be because they will receive their new bodies at His coming. But even in the age to come, there are countries and cities. (Zech. 14:16) The Nations come to the city Jerusalem. Egypt is mentioned by name. And Yeshua, post resurrection, still had his same body. They were able to see His scars.
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Yeshua came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After He said this, He showed them His hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. (John 19:19-20)
3. Jesus was unrecognizable by Mary in the garden after the resurrection. Also the folks on the road to Emmaus did not recognize him.
My Response: This is not because he lost his Jewish features (his nose did not get smaller!). This is because he blinded them to His identity on the road to Emmaus. He was seeking to converse with them, but didn’t want them to know it was Him, as He unpacked the prophecies about the Messiah.
…but they were kept from recognizing Him. (Luke 24:16)
In the case of Miriam (not Mary) … I mean, she thought he was the gardener! Does that sound like a glorified body? It was not that He was unrecognizable, but that she was distraught. As soon as He called her by name, “Miriam,” she cried out, “Rabbi!”
The disciples recognized Him immediately and He spent roughly 40 days with them and others.
There you have it—7 Proofs from the Bible that Yeshua is still Jewish. If you wish to add something, use the comments section below! Abundant blessings to you all!
[i] Technically the better word would be Hebrew, but the word Jewish, while referring to those of the tribe of Judah, has become synonymous with any son or daughter of Abraham, and that is how I use it. Even in the New Covenant, the word Jew is actually Judean, meaning, an Israelite living in Judea.
In Faith and Life, Identity Theft, Jewish Roots, Latest
First Negative Review of Identity Theft
Ron Cantor — August 4, 2012 — 1 Comment
a little disappointed
After reading Identity Theft, I was left a little disappointed, but ONLY because it was such a GREAT Read and I wanted MORE! I love the dialogue between David and the other Characters… I suppose I could use buzzwords like ‘transparent’ or ‘authentic’, which it was. But even more the dialogue was just REAL; it was like hanging out with a great friend.
Ron Cantor’s ability to take very intense Biblical theological concepts and break them down is extremely effective. And while this book is written in a fictional format, the foundational basis of Truth is unequivocally undeniable, even by the most ardent Theological scholars. I highly recommend this book …
Congregational Leader/Author
Texoma Messianic Fellowship
<<Start reading FREE here >>
Breaking News: Book Deal with Destiny Image!
Ron Cantor — July 14, 2012 — 26 Comments
I am at a loss for words.
Okay… on Tuesday last week we received our first batch of copies of my book, Identity Theft. Just to explain, while we did have a publisher, it was the kind of publisher where you pay them to publish your book: they edit, create a nice book cover, typeset and do some light marketing, get it on Amazon, iBooks, etc. I felt we had a good enough book to attract a real publisher, but I knew that would delay the project at least a year…and patience isn’t my strongest virtue.
However, Wednesday night, 24 hours after opening the first case of books, Elana and I were sitting with our long-time friend Paul Wilbur. Paul gave away Elana at our wedding and has been a father figure to her since she became a believer in 1986. We were chatting when someone came into the room to remind Paul he had a meeting with Destiny Image Publishers, one of the larger Christian publishing houses in the U.S., the next morning.
My ears perked up and thought wouldn’t it be great if Paul mentioned my book to them. I asked him if he would and Elana suggested that Paul take a copy of Identity Theft for them. Now let me state here that it is very difficult to get published without:
An agent,
Having already been a published author,
A book proposal.
And the fact that we already printed 700 copies is only further cause for a publisher to stay away. However….
Paul, who read Identity Theft and loved it, took them the copy, and gave it to their head of acquisitions. He then sent me this email:
I gave your book to the head of the acquisitions dept with a strong recommendation; she seemed genuinely interested and was intrigued by the title and cover! I think they will want to work with you. : )
I was pretty excited, but cautioned myself against getting overconfident. I didn’t want to be disappointed when they rejected it or stipulated that I had to commit to buying a ridiculous amount of copies. However, this woman actually came to Messiah College, where we were at the Messiah Conference with 41 Israelis, and found me (I still don’t know if that was the main reason that she came, or if she had other business there). By 6 p.m. they had offered me my first ever book deal. I thought something was up and asked, “To be clear—you are not asking me for money… or to guarantee that I will buy books?”
“No, Ron, we are taking this on as our project,” Ronda shared.
After some cordial negotiations, I signed the contract and sent it Monday morning. Today, I received it back, signed by Destiny Image!
I have been sitting on this news since July 5th, but didn’t want to share anything until I was holding that signed agreement… or at least looking at the PDF on my computer!
What is more, I received this note from Randy Pennington, my contact there:
Also I forgot to mention that Ronda’s husband started reading your book and he could not put it down. He said this book could be a New York Times best seller and was disappointed when she had to bring it into work. So I believe you are on the right track.
While I feel good about our book, that may be far-reaching, but still extremely encouraging!
Many of you have been right with me in prayer and encouragement over the past year as I was writing Identity Theft. I can’t thank you enough. What a journey… and it’s just beginning! Please pray with me for three things:
1. That God will use this book to bring Jewish people into the Kingdom of God.
2. That He will use it to open up the eyes of believers everywhere to Jewish Roots of Jesus and the greatest perpetration of Identity Theft in history.
3. And, that Jewish believers who believe receiving Yeshua would cut them off from Judaism would see things differently. Just today, during a radio interview with Dr. Michael Brown, a young Jewish believer, Erik, sent in a note saying that in his view, once he became a believer in the Jewish Messiah he became convinced he is no longer Jewish. Pray for Erik!
Together, we can see this book make a real difference!
In Faith and Life, Identity Theft, Jewish Roots
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Before the DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE NATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS & INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION
Improvement of Technical Management of Internet Names and Addresses Proposed Rule
Dated: March 23, 1998.
COMMENTS OF PGMEDIA
pgMedia, Inc. <http://namespace.pgmedia.net>, respectfully submits these comments on the "Green Paper" <http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/dnsdft.htm> released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration ("NTIA" or the "Department") regarding management of the Internet Domain Name System ("DNS").
INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY
NTIA's Green Paper proposes that certain key "centralized" functions for DNS administration be transferred from Network Solutions., Inc. ("NSI") and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ("IANA") to a new, not-for-profit corporation that will be governed by a broad cross-section of Internet stakeholders. This approach is clearly preferable to the current DNS system, under which NSI enjoys monopoly control of all generic top-level domains ("gTLDs"), including the huge ".com" registry, as well as the DNS "root" servers on which universal Internet connectivity is based. NTIA is plainly correct that competition in domain name registration services, on the basis of shared gTLDs, should be introduced as soon as possible.
The new Internet governance structure contemplated by the Green Paper would remove the anticompetitive incentives inherent in the current DNS system, under which potential registry competitors must depend on NSI, which controls the "essential facility" of the "A" root server, for access to "the dot." By contemplating a "set of authoritative and consistent roots" managed by a competitively impartial entity, instead of a single root server managed by a single commercial enterprise, the Green Paper would place the root server resources -- and with them the public interest requirement for universal resolvability of all Internet domains -- beyond the threat of anticompetitive conduct or catastrophic network failure. Such a development would mean that the customers of entrepreneurial registries such as pgMedia could, for the first time, have a fair chance to become a true part of the global Internet.
The Green Paper has a fatal flaw, however, in proposing that only five new gTLDs be opened for competition in the period through September 30, 1998. NTIA apparently believes that such a restriction is necessary (1) to assure technical "stability" of the Internet; (2) to assist trademark holders in "policing" violations of their intellectual property; and (3) to avoid "consumer confusion" from a proliferation of gTLDs. Even if the Commerce Department (or NTIA), let alone the United Stated government, had the legal authority to impose a limit on the number of new gTLDs -- which it does not -- none of these policy justifications has any validity.
As NSI itself has conceded, there "is no technical reason" why gTLDs need to be limited, because "[d]omains are equally scalable at all levels of the DNS. "The "dot" is, in reality, a simple 75K text file that can easily be expanded to virtually unlimited size, and at least comparable to the current ".com" zone file of 1.5 million entries. Thus, there is no stability reason why the Green Paper must artificially restrict the number of new gTLDs than can be added to the root servers, especially in the short run.
There is no difference between the Internet and any other medium of communications (TV, magazines, billboards, etc.) with respect to trademarks, because in each instance trademark owners have the resources, and the legal power, to assert challenges to their legal rights in any jurisdiction worldwide.
Consumers will not be more confused by different gTLDs than they are today by the massive proliferation of incrementally different second-level ".com" domains (e.g., flowers.com, florists.com and flowersforyou.com); rather, the introduction of new gTLDs (e.g., flowers.delivery or caruso.florists) could produce a new level of comprehension in consumer use of DNS.
In short, the Green Paper relies on misconceptions, unsubstantiated fears and chimeras in support of its crucial finding that only five new gTLDs should be added to the Internet root server system.
pgMedia strongly believes that, given the global nature of the Internet and the status of gTLDs as global communications resources, the U.S. government does not have the legal authority to restrict competition in top-level namespace on the Internet. There is no question that the Department of Commerce and NTIA lack any statutory authority to promulgate rules restricting the opening of new gTLDs, and that the National Science Foundation similarly has no authority to override ordinary U.S. antitrust rules applicable to access to essential facilities like the root servers maintained by NSI. Therefore, it is crucial that NTIA delete the third of the fourth functions it proposes be delegated to the "new corporation", namely to determine "the circumstances under which new top-level domains are added to the root system." Consistent with the Green Paper's preference for market-based solutions and bottom-up decision making, the NTIA should instead conclude that -- in the absence of an affirmative showing by the new corporation that technical considerations warrant a limit on gTLDs -- all gTLD registries which meet minimal technical standards must be added to the root system.
By eliminating any restriction on gTLDs and permitting future limitations only based on documented technical constraints, the Green Paper would meet its professed principles of introducing DNS competition as fast as possible while preserving consensus-driven, technically-objective Internet decision making. DNS administration should be as open, objective and competitively neutral as is the IETF RFC process of Internet standards-setting. The only way to achieve this goal is to eliminate the political and competitive incentives inherent in today's NSI monopoly of the "dot" while making gTLD competition a matter of purely technical, not pseudo "policy", consideration. After that, the marketplace itself would determine -- as a result of consumer demand -- which gTLDs are desirable and which registries, and registrars, will succeed commercially.
I. THE NEED FOR UNIVERSAL RESOLVABILITY OF DOMAIN NAMES REQUIRES, AS NTIA PROPOSES, THAT ROOT SERVER FUNCTIONS BE COORDINATED
Universal resolvability can be achieved while allowing for competition among domain name registries, thereby benefiting both the content providers and the end-users of the Internet. Likewise, the true value of the Internet can only be realized if all addresses are universally resolvable. That is to say, pgMedia agrees with the Department that the value attached to having a network of networks is maximized only when the root server network is properly coordinated allowing any user of the Internet to seamlessly access any site on the Internet using that site's domain name. To achieve universal resolvability, domain names must be unique and the protocols used must be standardized.
A. The Internet Root Server (or The "Dot") Functions As The "Traffic Cop" of the Internet, Allowing All Name Service Providers to Look to Authoritative Servers for the "Zone" Files Necessary For a Seamless Internet
The "dot" file is a plain-text file used by the nameserver software to define the available top level domains ("TLDs") to the rest of the network. Like all other "zone" files it contains the hostname to IP address mapping that the nameserver uses to find and connect computers over the network. Specifically, the "dot" file lists each available TLD and the names and addresses of the various nameservers that carry the Second-Level-Domain ("SLD") listings under a particular TLD. The ROOT-SERVERS that run the "dot" file direct requests to the appropriate TLD server which sends the request on to the Internet service provider ("ISP") or network managing the listed SLD that then returns the IP address for the requested domain name. So, for example, a request for "PGMEDIA.NET" would first be directed to the "dot" file that would return the locations of the TLD server for ".NET." The request would then be forwarded to the ".NET" server which would return the location of the nameserver for the SLD server for "PGMEDIA.NET" which contains the name to IP number mapping for the pgMedia domain.
Universal resolvability of TLD's requires that there exist an authoritative file that will direct requests to the appropriate server for any particular domain name request. There is more than one possible solution to achieving this goal. The Department's Green Paper suggests that the "dot" file be controlled by one entity. However, due to recent improvements in network administration technology, it is no longer required that a single entity, alone, manage the "dot." Decentralized and synchronized administration of the "dot" file would be a far better solution so long as there is free and open access by registries to the "dot" file. Under this model, the goal of competition in the domain name registration market can be achieved while true universal resolvability can be maintained.
B. Root Server Functions For gTLDs Are Currently Monopolized By NSI, Which Has Led to Significant Competitive Disparities
NSI controls and profits from the administration of the gTLDs (i.e. com, net, org, edu, int). NSI also controls the "dot" that would permit a gTLD to be universally resolvable. The "dot" file is an essential facility because the only alternative available to a registry wishing to compete with NSI, without access to the "dot" file, would be to create a new Internet. pgMedia, through its name.space(SM) division has created a network of 13 nameservers in seven countries. name.space(SM) currently offers registrations in more than 530 TLDs, these names are fully resolvable by the name.space(SM) nameservers, but are not universally resolvable on the Internet because NSI has refused to make the simple text edit to the "dot" file that would allow that universal resolvability. pgMedia supports the Department's position that coordination of root servers does not require a single "root," but rather consistent technical standards for interoperability and symmetry of all servers so as to maintain universal connectivity on the Internet. Operators of "dot" servers merely need to agree to run exact versions of the "dot" file and to implement a secure system to keep the contents synchronized whenever it is updated.
SINDI(TM), developed by pgMedia, is software technology designed to fulfill the function of keeping the name data synchronized in near real-time with security and authentication built in. This technology allows multiple registries to simultaneously submit unique SLDs to any TLD based on a first come, first served basis, and to easily survey the root file for existing TLDs. Through deployment of technologies like SINDI (TM), there is no need for monopoly control of the root server functions to continue to be awarded to NSI. Rather, registries around the world would be free to amend the root file based on market demand.
C. Transferring Control Of Root Servers To An Independent, Non-Profit Corporation, With Wide Representation Is A Valid Approach To Root Server Administration
pgMedia supports any solution that would open the domain name registration market to competition, so long as there is a non-discriminatory and simple procedure for adding new TLDs. As discussed above, there no longer exists an explicit technical need for the root file to be managed by a single entity. However, more importantly, there are serious and pressing problems associated with allowing the root server to be controlled by a private entity with a vested interest. NTIA's proposal to end NSI's monopoly control of the root server through creation of a "private, not-for-profit corporation . . . to manage the coordinated function in a stable and open institutional framework," is right on target. The root server is an essential facility, access to which is required for participation in the domain name business. The Department's proposal would transfer control of that essential facility to a non-profit organization created to serve the best interests of the entire Internet community, not just one company or set of companies.
pgMedia agrees wholeheartedly with the Department that there is no longer a need to propagate a domain name monopoly and the resultant monopoly rents paid by Internet users every day. In moving away from a privately controlled arrangement, an independent, non-profit corporation will remove the commercial conflict of interest that has been present to date. As a matter of policy, no registry should also control the root server, and NTIA's proposal to separate the two is admirable.
II. gTLDs ARE A PUBLIC DOMAIN RESOURCE WHICH MUST BE SHARED AMONG COMPETING REGISTRIES
pgMedia believes that generic-TLDs should be shared among the competing registries. gTLDs are not the property of any entity, including NSI. The technology exists today to allow such sharing and there is no public policy reason why such sharing should be restricted. Although there are stakeholders who advocate a branded model for TLDs, such a solution only benefits the registries that would then have monopoly control over that particular TLD. Rather, Internet users would benefit the most from an open system of TLDs whereby each registry could register new domain names under any existing or new TLDs.
A. NTIA Correctly Adopted pgMedia's Approach of "Shared" Registries, Under Which All gTLDs, Including Existing ".com" Registry, Will Be Open To Competitive Registration of Second-Level Domains.
pgMedia believes that all registries should compete on the basis of service and price, thereby benefiting the users of the Internet rather than developing a system of branded TLDs which would only benefit the registries by creating an artificial shortage in the generic name space. NTIA correctly recognized the importance of competition in the domain name registration industry in adopting a "shared registries" concept in its proposed rule. pgMedia urges the Department to retain this fundamental improvement in any further rule.
pgMedia has long supported shared gTLDs, and believes that gTLDs are a public resource that should not be within the commercial or competitive control of any one entity. The Department should resist creating new monopolies (in each new TLD) by giving a single registry the sole right to register under any one TLD. Such a proprietary system would be akin to geographic market allocation--each registry would own a series of TLDs over which it could exercise complete price and service control. To the extent that certain TLDs became recognized as the market norm for an industry or organization, as is the case currently with .com, users in need of domain names under those TLDs would be forced to deal at whatever price demanded. An open, market-driven system on the other hand would require different registries to introduce efficiencies, innovation and price reduction into the registration services market in order to compete and survive.
name.space has already made numerous achievements and improvements in registration services, even though its own registry does not currently enjoy the market benefits of universal resolvability. These include:
Instant, form based registration
Virtually instant updating of the zone files
Address portability
"Smart" Whois ("sWhois") -- a software application that allows cross-registry look-up capabilities
Secure Internet Name Data Integrator (SINDI)
Lower prices for users
These advantages are available today via the name.space (SM) system. Competitive gTLDs are a technologically feasible reality, as demonstrated by the over 500 gTLDs operated by name.space (SM). Shared gTLD registration is also technically possible and competitively preferable. Although companies like pgMedia have been able to make significant technological break-throughs in DNS administration despite the existence of a blanketing monopolist, it is simply indisputable that true competition in the domain name registry industry would result in even greater technological improvements, leading to better services and lower prices for consumers.
III. NTIA HAS INAPPROPRIATELY LIMITED THE SCOPE OF DNS COMPETITION OUT OF FALSE, UNSUBSTANTIATED CONCERNS REGARDING THE TECHNICAL STABILITY OF THE INTERNET
The Department proposed a transitional limitation on the addition of new gTLDs to a total fiveNTIA's basis for this decision was (1) concern regarding the stability of the Internet (2) the potential impact of more new gTLDs on the trademark dispute process, and (3) fears of exacerbated consumer confusion. The Department was wrong on all three issues.
A. There Are No Technical Restrictions to Increasing the Number of gTLDs
There are no technical constraints on the number of gTLDs that can operate simultaneously on the Internet, and absolutely no basis for any concern that expansion of the TLD name space will contribute even to transitional instability of the Internet. NSI readily agrees: NSI believes that there is no technical reason why the number of worldwide TLDs needs to be limited. Domains are equally scalable at all levels of the DNS. There can be as many TLDs as there are potential second-and third-level domains.
NSI Comments (August 18, 1998) at C-10.
As NSI recognized, Dr. Paul Mockepetris, the inventor of the Domain Name System ("DNS") is equally convinced that there exists no technical reason for limiting the number of new TLDs. "DNS is highly scalable. There is no technical limit to the number of new top-level names that could be introduced. The original designer of DNS, Paul Mockapetris, has verified the scalability of DNS. As well, America Online's eight million-plus third-level domains are also evidence of DNS scalability. There may be some practical and operational issues to the introduction of new TLDs, but we should be very suspicious of those that seek to control, limit and administer TLDs under the false pretense of technical feasibility."
Internet Domain Name System: Myths and Facts, NSI 6/18/97
http://rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/jun97/MYTHS4.html
pgMedia has already proven that such expansion of the TLD namespace is possible. The name.space registry (SM) has been servicing many hundreds of new TLDs for over one and one half years with no problem or interruption in service. The same cannot be said for NSI who's antiquated update procedures led to the catastrophic failure of DNS last July.
The technical explanation for the feasibility of TLD expansion is simple. Behind the current "root.zone" or "dot" file, which lists the currently recognized top level domains, is simply a 75K text file; updating the file for new gTLDs istechnically trivial and transparent to the end users--new top level namespaces will simply become available and functional just as any new country code or new second level domain becomes transparently available as changes are made to the DNS listings on a daily basis without interruption of service or other noticeable change.
For example, the current zone file for ".com" contains over 1.5 million entries and can scale indefinitely. The structure of all zonefiles is identical and used in the same way by the software. Thus, structurally, the "root.zone" file and the "com" file are identical and the number of possible top level domains is equally as scalable as is any other zone file in the existing DNS system. Therefore, to the extent the DNS can handle over 1.5 million registrations under the TLD ".com," there is no reason it cannot handle as many new gTLDs.
The record before the Department from the August comments does not support any technical rationale substantiating NTIA's conclusion that the number of gTLDs in the short run "should not be so large as to destabilize the Internet." As stated above, there is literally as much of a technical basis to limit the total number of gTLDs as there is to limit the number of entries under the ".com" TLD.
Hence, there is no justification for NTIA's proposals that:
There be a completely arbitrary limit of five new gTLDs betweennow and 9/98
The new non-profit corporation should set policies for determining "the circumstances under which new top-level domains are added to the root system"
Any gTLD administered by a technically competent registry should be included in the root server system. At most, any non-profit corporation established by the Department should set minimum technical criteria for gTLD registries, per existing RFCs covering name service.
B. Trademark Disputes Do Not Involve DNS Registries, and Do Not Provide a Technical Impediment to Allowing New gTLDs
pgMedia agrees with the Department's characterization that "trademark disputes arise very rarely on the Internet today," and that "management of the Internet must respond to the needs of the Internet community as a whole, and not trademark owners exclusively."
However, pgMedia disagrees with the Department's determination that increasing the number of gTLDs would make it more difficult for trademark holders to protect their marks. The addition of new domain names would have zero impact on trademark prosecution. The addition of new TLDs would not slow the search of domain name databases for trademark violations any more than the addition of new domain names under an existing TLD would. Any claim to the contrary is merely an effort to drag TLD registries into a fight that belongs solely to trademark owners.
As is the case now, trademark owners should continue to be required to police and prosecute their rights under their own devices. There is no other communications medium where those involved in providing the communication are responsible for participating in trademark policing or prosecution. The proliferation of other communications mediums, such as television or radio, has never been slowed or diluted to allow trademark owners an easier time of protecting their rights. In fact, it is the ubiquity of the medium, in this case the addition of thousands of new gTLDs, that gives mark owners the opportunity to add national and international value to their brand names. Rather than complain about this windfall, and the offsetting costs associated with tracking the worldwide exposure to their brand, trademark owners should be encouraging the immediate transition to an open gTLD system.
C. The Addition of New gTLDs Will Not Impact Consumer Confusion
Even with a limited number of gTLDs, there currently exist an infinite number of lower level domain name combinations that can be registered and employed by interested parties. Registrants are free to use virtually any second, third, fourth, etc., level domain name, so long as it has not been previously registered. It is therefore inconceivable that the addition of new gTLDs will somehow make consumer use of the Internet more difficult to employ. There is no substantive difference between the existing possibilities for confusion associated with an unlimited number of lower level domain names (flowers.com vs. florists.com vs. flowers.foryou.com) and those that might be found under a rubric of varied TLDs (flowers.com vs. flowers.delivery).
Rather, the recognition of specific domain names will be a function of advertisement and public awareness, as it is now. A few short years ago, few consumers knew what an Internet address was. Today, many, if not most, could not even name the five basic gTLDs, or even realize that there are gTLDs available for every country in the world. How can the addition new gTLDs be any more confusing than the existing fact that .za refers to South Africa?
Despite the confusion associated with the existing system, through advertising and repeated use, consumers are becoming more and more comfortable maneuvering on the web and locating the destinations of their choice. So too, in a world of many gTLDs, hosts will advertise and consumers will browse, and means for reaching each other will evolve. To the extent such a transition may cause some initial disruption, it is far better that it occur earlier in the growth of the Internet than later, when habits and customs will be more entrenched. More importantly, any minimal confusion that might occur in a multi-TLD environment that doesn't occur now, is more than offset by the advantages to consumers that true competition in the domain name industry will bring.
IV. NEITHER THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT NOR THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE HAS THE LEGAL AUTHORITY TO RESTRICT THE NUMBER OF gTLDs
There exists no statutory or other authority that would permit the Department of Commerce or the United States Government to limit the number of new TLDs. If anything, Congress has expressed a clear interest in leaving the Internet unregulated.
It is the policy of the United States-
(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation. 47 U.S.C. section 230(b)(2) (emphasis supplied).
While the Telecommunications Act of 1996 did not specifically address the domain name issue, it is clear that the Congresses' twin goals of deregulation and new competition would be severely undermined if the Department were to propagate some sort of "transitional" regulation regarding the number of new gTLDs that may be added to the root file.
pgMedia is sympathetic with NTIA's concern regarding coordination of essential Internet functions, but the agency, and for that matter, the entire US government, lacks the power to control the number of gTLDs, even in the short run. gTLDs are not a United States', but rather a global resource. The U.S. lacks the authority, under the U.N. charter and customary international law, to unilaterally assert extra-territorial jurisdiction by restricting the number of gTLDs. As policy matter, exclusion of EU and other nations from policy process could lead to costly fragmentation of the Internet community.
Historically, NSI has operated root servers pursuant to a "cooperative agreement" contract with the National Science Foundation ("NSF"), but neither that contract, nor NSF's statutory charter, grant either NSI or NSF the legal authority to restrict gTLDs and exclude competitors from the existing root server system. NSF Cooperative Agreement No. NCR-9218742. However, that is exactly what is currently happening, and, unfortunately, is what the Department proposed in the Green Paper when it suggested that only five gTLDs be added to the DNS.
The cooperative agreement between Network Solutions and The National Science Foundation leaves NSI with the power to implement new naming schemes or systems without seeking the approval of the NSF. NSI has improperly used this NSF agreement to perpetuate its monopoly and to prevent competition so as to continue its substantial profits derived from domain name registrations. According to NSI's own figures there are some 120,000 new domain name registrations per month equaling $ 12,000,000 in gross revenues per month.
pgMedia believes that the arguments advanced by NSI have been calculated to protect this lucrative monopoly position for as long as possible. By restricting the creation of new TLDs the Department of Commerce would be an unwilling accomplice in this bilking of the Internet community.
Congress has not granted either the Department of Commerce or NTIA the authority to constrain competition in the Internet. Congress created NTIA for the purpose of managing federal government's radio spectrum and advise the President on telecommunications policy. 47 U.S.C. section 902 (b). In addition, NTIA is given authority to "conduct studies and make recommendations concerning the impact of the convergence of computer and communications technology." 47 U.S.C. section 902 (b)(2)(M). Neither this nor NTIA's authority regarding telecommunications policies give it the right to restrain competition by restricting the number of gTLDs that may be added to the DNS. Similarly, the general regulatory authority granted to the Department of Commerce by Congress neither directly grants the Department regulatory authority over the Internet, nor expressly grants the Department the right to restrict competition. Therefore, any rule promulgated by the NTIA limiting the creation of new gTLDs would be ultra-vires.
VI. ANY LIMITATION ON THE NUMBER OF NEW gTLDs, BY EITHER THE NSF, THE DEPARTMENT OR ANY OTHER GOVERNMENTAL AGENCY, THAT IS NOT BASED ON TECHNICAL NECESSITY, WOULD BE VIOLATIVE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
The Internet is "a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication," Reno v. ACLU, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 2334 (1997), that "represent[s] an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens," 47 U.S.C.A. section 230(a)(1). As such, the Internet as a method of communication receives heightened protection under the First Amendment from restriction of the content it transmits. Reno, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 2334.
And, a domain name is more then the address for a site on the Internet. The domain name may be imbued with an idea or indication of the material to be found at the particular Internet site. pgMedia agrees with the Domain Name Rights Coalition ("DNRC"), that, at a minimum, "domain names are the identifiers used to designate and locate expression and communication." Limiting the number of TLDs limits the way in which content providers on the Internet can express these ideas. In the name.space (SM) system a candidate for political office may register their name in the following fashion "gore.for.president;" while in the current system, or the system proposed in the "Green Paper," this simple form of political speech would be impossible.
It is well settled law that for the government to limit a fundamental right, such as speech, it must first demonstrate 1) a compelling governmental interest that would be served by the regulation, and 2) that there exists no less restrictive method for achieving the governmental objective. See Sable Communications, Inc. v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115, 126 (1989). Absent any technical constraints on the expansion of the top-level name space, there is no compelling governmental interest that would be served by preventing pgMedia from offering domain name registrations under its expanded list of gTLDs. Moreover, even if there were a compelling governmental objective to be served by regulating the top-level name space, limiting the expansion to only five TLDs would by no means be the least restrictive alternative available. Therefore, any attempt by the Department to limit the expansion of the top-level name space would violate the First Amendment.
For the reasons stated above, pgMedia urges the Department to (1) abandon any effort to restrict the number of gTLDs that may be added to the DNS; (2) continue to support the creation of a non-profit organization to serve as neutral administrator of the root server, thereby separating the root administration services from registry services; and (3) continue to support a policy of shared rather than proprietary gTLDs, whereby true competition can work to lower domain name prices and improve services.
Paul Garrin, President
Paul Kalocsay
pgMedia, Inc.
11 East 4th Street, 2F
when you think .corp, think name.space
our gTLDs
your.space manage.your.domains
Congressional Filings
sWhois and NSLookUp
The gTLDs listed on this site are the Service Marks of Name.Space, Inc., 1996 - 2015 All Rights Reserved
Opt-in to name.space DNS
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World News /
American scientist's body reportedly found in Greece
2019-7-9 11:05 am World News 6 0 0
Authorities on the Greek island of Crete have reportedly found the body of an American scientist who disappeared last week while attending a conference on the island. Greek newspaper Ekathimerini reported on Tuesday that police found the body of Suzanne Eaton in a cave in Chania, about six miles from where she was last seen.
Eaton, a 59-year-old molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany, was reported missing exactly a week ago near the port of Chania. Colleagues at the conference told authorities they believed she had gone for a run in the area. A public notice of her disappearance was posted in Greece.
Ekathimerini did not report any further details and there was no comment from local authorities on any suspected cause of death. Local police in Chania confirmed to CBS News that they had found the body of a woman who appeared to be roughly the same age as Eaton, but they were still waiting for family members to confirm the identity.
Authorities searching for American scientist missing in Greece
Police and firefighters, joined by local volunteers, conducted a wide searched for days across the surrounding area. Emily Kappes, a cousin of the missing scientist, told The Associated Press that Eaton's husband and two sons had traveled to Crete to assist in the search.
american scientist reportedly found greece
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Hisham Melhem
Hisham Melhem is the Washington-based correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily; Al-Qabas, the Kuwaiti daily; and Radio Monte Carlo in France. He is currently the host of "Across the Ocean", a weekly talk show for Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite station. Close.
Hisham Melhem is the Washington-based correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily; Al-Qabas, the Kuwaiti daily; and Radio Monte Carlo in France. He is currently the host of "Across the Ocean", a weekly talk show for Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite station. more »
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The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis
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More Posts About: Annapolis
William, San Antonio:
They scatter and have moved to:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/america/2007/11/americanisraeli_settlers_hold.html
December 2, 2007 10:39 PM | The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis' in Hisham Melhem at PostGlobal on December 2, 2007 10:39 PM">Report Offensive Comments
Posted on December 2, 2007 22:39
You know what happens to cockroaches when you turn the lights on.
December 2, 2007 4:28 PM | The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis' in Hisham Melhem at PostGlobal on December 2, 2007 4:28 PM">Report Offensive Comments
Looks like nobody wants to debate your letter. I just read about Noviana Malewa. To the people in this blog espousing a one state solution, do you really think Jews would be safe in a Muslim majority country?
Please refrain from answering with "they were safe in many Arab countries for years". If so, how do you account for 99% Jewish population reductions in every Arabic country? When that large of a number leaves, one might conclude the locals weren't very friendly.
December 1, 2007 10:16 AM | The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis' in Hisham Melhem at PostGlobal on December 1, 2007 10:16 AM">Report Offensive Comments
Rick Jones:
RE: “They immigrated there illegally.”
Now, Rick, Hamas propaganda is one thing fact another. The fact is that Jewish immigrants into the districts that Palestine comprised were authorized and regulated by the Ottoman regime as were their land purchases. Although the history of that area is complicated because the Ottoman Empire was in decline, to characterize Jewish immigration during that period as illegal is simply false. After the Balfour Declaration the point was moot. It was not until 1934 that the question of the illegal immigrants (maapilim) arose (in the context of British appeasement of the Arabs) in contravention of the Balfour Declaration.
It is abundantly clear, most especially given revelations about the treatment of European Jews from 1934 to 1945, that a sovereign Jewish homeland is essential to their safety. The United Nations agreed. Arab states did not.
It is also clear, from even a cursory investigation of the causes of Arab intransigence, that the inherent anti-Semitism in Islam is central to their inflexibility. Claims of robbing Arabs of their ancestral land by European colonialist enterprises are simply unfounded attempts to deflect criticism from the true “root causes” of the current conflict.
Dr. Seymour Martin Lipset wrote an article "The Socialism of Fools: The Left, the Jews and Israel" which was published in the December, 1969 (page 24) edition of Encounter magazine. The article states: "Shortly before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Boston on a fund-raising mission, and I had the good fortune to attend a dinner which was given for him in Cambridge... One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, "Don't talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism!"
I agree with Dr. King.
November 30, 2007 2:43 PM | The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis' in Hisham Melhem at PostGlobal on November 30, 2007 2:43 PM">Report Offensive Comments
Posted on November 30, 2007 14:43
Rick Jones, Fredericksburg, VA:
“Rick, you keep saying that the Jews were absent for millennia, but there has been a continuous Jewish population in what is today Israel since the Roman expulsion.”
Yes, but at the turn of the 20th century Jews were 2% of the population of Palestine. That’s what it should be now. Just like the good ole US of A, no illegal unwanted immigrants are allowed.
“Furthermore there are many Jews in Israel who are descended from people who emigrated there from Arab countries.”
So what? They immigrated there illegally. They need to go back where they came from if they can, or else come to the USA and join their brethren in forming a legitimate Jewish homeland.
“Both sides have wronged and been wronged and the situation in Israel/Palestine is not entirely the fault of either party.”
The Jews were wronged by the Romans and Germans, not the Palestinians. The Palestinians should not have to pay the price.
November 29, 2007 10:26 AM | The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis' in Hisham Melhem at PostGlobal on November 29, 2007 10:26 AM">Report Offensive Comments
Andrew:
Rick, you keep saying that the Jews were absent for millenia, but there has been a continuous Jewish population in what is today Israel since the Roman expulsion. Furthermore there are many Jews in Israel who are descended from people who immigrated there from Arab countries. You are oversimplifying a complex issue. Both sides have wronged and been wronged and the situation in Israel/Palestine is not entirely the fault of either party. Israel isn't going anywhere and both sides need to learn to tolerate each other.
NRGlaw:
“Public policy questions and matters of peace and war must be decided on a secular basis today.”
“Mixing religious texts with politics has resulted in the deaths of Jews in their millions.”
How right you are. Yet without the religious dogma, what right have the Jews to return to Palestine after being absent for nearly two millennia, and forcing the Palestinians from the homes and land of their ancestors at gun point with the backing of the world’s super powers.
If not for “we are God’s chosen and He promised this land to us”, then what could possibly be the justification for the atrocities being perpetrated against the native Palestinians. All 5 million Israeli Jews might as well come to America, join your 5.7 million brethren, and form a true “State of Israel” with 80% of the world Jewish population in say Texas?
November 28, 2007 12:07 PM | The Annapolis Summit
Don't Expect Much from Annapolis' in Hisham Melhem at PostGlobal on November 28, 2007 12:07 PM">Report Offensive Comments
Maryanne--Public policy questions and matters of peace and war must be decided on a secular basis today. That is the only position of safety for us as Jews today, and it has been so for a very long time. Every atrocity committed against Jews over the centuries has had its ultimate source in religious philosophy about Jews and Judaism. Mixing religious texts with politics has resulted in the deaths of Jews in their millions.
Your argument openly mixes Torah and Tanakh with statements and conclusions about political facts as they exist today. All sides must eventually acknowledge a version of these political facts as acceptable if they are to achieve a peace. The Israelis and the Arabs, in other words, are going to have to find a common way of thinking about their relationship so they can move on from conflict to some kind of peace. That common understanding will certainly not be the one you describe.
There is no basis for any of it except in Tanakh. Whether I or you believe it is true as a matter our religious beliefs does not matter. We cannot turn to a non-Jewish world and say that our version of political facts is the only true one, even if that is what you yourself believe. That is simply a non-starter and will prolong conflict not solve it.
No sacred book is self-authenticating in this way, at least not in a pluralistic society and world.
Maryanne:
As you say, the Jews were absent from the land of Palestine for almost two millennia. Then they return (with the aid of the world’s superpowers) to retake the land by force over the past 100 years, from the families whose ancestors have tended their flocks and orchards, and farmed the land for millennia. You want to force these people out of their homes and off their land at the point of gun. Is that your idea of justice? Shame!
Sam,
Excellent post! You have the best solution and only solution, the single-state solution, with Palestinian right of return:
“…All citizens of the new state, PALISRA (Palestine +Israel), would enjoy equal rights and bear the same responsibilities…”
PALISRA is the only feasible and lasting solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.Both Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting and killing each other for more than 60 years now and unfortunately, no light could be seen at the end of this dark tunnel.
The geography and demography of the area that extends between River Jordan and the Mediterranean indicate the complexity of the current situation. Every party is trying hard to grab by mere force what is in the hand of the other. Many wars have been waged and thousands of innocent lives have been shed for this purpose.
Nowadays, almost everybody is talking about setting up two countries for both Israelis and Palestinians. This simply means that the land of historical Palestine will be divided between the two parties, Israelis and Palestinians.
I doubt very much that either party will be satisfied with his share of the cake. There are chronic problems like Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, water resources that nobody on earth can sort out to the satisfaction of both parties.
The short vision of setting up two separate states could sow the seeds for more bloody conflicts in the future. Nobody can guarantee or secure permanent and lasting peace under this proposition.
A far better viable solution that should satisfy both parties and put an end to all complicated issues is available. It is the establishment of one secular country for all on the whole territory of historical Palestine that includes the West Bank and Gaza besides Israel. Jerusalem will remain united for both parties, settlements could remain where they are now provided an appropriate compensation is made to the original land owners, natural geographical borders are already in place for the whole country and the issue of refugees could be settled by allowing all refugees to return home and to be compensated for the 60 years of misery they had to spend at refugee camps. All citizens of the new state, PALISRA (Palestine +Israel), would enjoy equal rights and bear the same responsibilities.
The newly established state, PALISRA will emerge as a prosperous and safe country within a very short period of time, and citizens of this state will learn how to tolerate,respect and even cherish each other. PALISRA will become a key player and an integral part of the Middle East as yesterday's enemies will become today's friends and allies for ever.
Unfortunately, there can be no lasting peace until the Arab peoples--and the rest of the world--recognize the Land of Israel as the ancient and historic homeland of the Jewish People.
How, truly, can Israel be colonialist or illegitimate??
The Jews were the original inhabitants of the Holy Land.
The earliest reference to Israel is from the Funerary Stela of the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah in 1209 B.C.! (And its sitting in museum in Cairo, by the way)
Indeed, ironic perhaps, but Jews' closest genetic cousins are Syrian. (The fact that most of these tests were done at Oxford is maybe even more ironic...)
After all, Jesus was a Jew--as was Isaac and Jacob, Jeremiah and Isaiah, all the Prophets, Kings David and Solomon, Mary, Josheph, John the Baptist, all the Disciples, etc....
The Jews were kicked out of their land by the Roman Empire and forced into Exile for nearly two thousand years.
One would think that this tiny group (there are 13.2 Million Jews in the world, compared to 2 Billion Christians and 1.6 Billion Muslims), expelled by Empire, exiled, and then returned to their original homeland after mass destruction in Europe and final expulsion from the Arab world would elicit sympathy and support among "Liberals."
Unfortunately, for those who believe in supersessionist philosophy--that Christianity and Islam superseded or replaced their mother faith community, the Jewish People--its rather a problem that the Jews returned to Jerusalem.
That means all the tenets that have been taught over the centuries--that Jews are no longer Chosen but in fact cursed and destined to live in exile, that all the promises of the Hebrew Scriptures relating to Israel and Judah now belong to the Church or, as stated in the Koran, the followers of Mohammad---might ring false.
Thus, most of the world can't stand the idea of Jews controlling their own country in their own ancestral homeland and returning to power in the city of their ancient Kings, Jerusalem.
Lebanon can shell Palestinian camps all day long--No one cares.
Jordan killed more Palestinians in Black September then Israel in all her history--No one said a word.
Iran persecutes more then a million Sunni Arabs within their borders, Syria forces its Kurds into abject poverty, etc., etc.....There are no protests.
As a Palestinian in East Jerusalem once told me, "the truth is, if we were to admit it to ourselves, is that people only pay attention to us because they hate the Jews."
Lisa:
"There is some truth there, but the larger reality is that Israel is ruled by small-time men (who said the Arabs have a monopoly on this?) and Bush has never been seriously committed to resolving this conflict"
Don't make Annapolis a total waste...pressure Israelis to release Marwan Baghouti...Abbas cannot inite Palestinians or deliver a state ...Marwan can...Arabs gave Bush Aministration, Olmert a public relations coup , especially Saudis...they need to secure Marwan's release, it's the only honorable thing to do at this point.
"Many Arabs ask: Why did the Bush Administration wait seven years to re-launch the 'peace process'? They ask, with justification, where is the intellectual/emotional commitment of the American president, since no real progress can be achieved without his real engagement?"
Well that is the problem...waiting for an American President?!?!...maybe the British and French should just come back and occupy the rest of the Middle East again along with US in Iraq...if everyone agrees with your thinking then you might as well be still be occupied by the west, because that is sure as heck how you are acting with this sort of thinking...
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Bengaluru Freethinkers’ January 2013 Meet – A Discussion on Rape Culture
by Chaitra
Our meeting on 6th January 2013 was held at Jaaga. We had 7 people attending, including two new faces!
In light of the Delhi gang rape case, we decided to talk about rape culture and the sexual violence that women face everyday. Rather than think of rape as a one-time event, we decided to look at it as one extreme in an entire spectrum of sexual violence. At one end, there is street harassment: intimidation through blatant leering, catcalling and sexual comments directed at women. We then have women being groped and stalked, and men exposing themselves to women. At the extreme end of the spectrum, we have rape, acid attacks, mutilation and murder. All these crimes may have different motives, but there is one thing in common: they’re all condoned by a culture that chooses to blame victims for somehow provoking their attackers, dismisses the issue as a “women’s problem” rather than a societal problem, and normalizes and glorifies sexual violence.
We talked about how male sexuality is portrayed as aggressive, and violence is glorified as something that’s sexy. We see this in the increasing popularity of hip-hop and singers like Honey Singh in cities. In rural areas, there is this mindset that encourages upper-caste men to prove their masculinity by raping lower-caste women. Movies portray heroes who continue making sexual advances even after the girls have made it clear that they’re not interested. We then talked about the heavy amount of repression in India. The stigma against dating and pre-marital sex leads to sexual desires being expressed in unhealthy and violent ways.
Two Indian women hold placards outside the residence of Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit during a protest over the gang rape of a woman in New Delhi, on December 19, 2012.
The first sign reads, “Touching a girl without her consent doesn’t make you a man, it makes you a coward”. The second sign reads, “We live in a society that teaches women not to get raped instead of teaching men not to rape”.
(AP Photo/Manish Swarup. Image links to source)
We discussed how Indian society is structured in a hierarchical manner. Because of this, people feel entitled to prove their dominance over those who are below them in the hierarchy. Sexual violence is one of the methods perpetrators use to establish their dominance over someone else. Since women are always considered lower than men in the hierarchy, they end up having to put up with the most sexual violence. In many parts of the country, such caste-based sexual violence is rampant. We see this in villages where wealthy landowners routinely rape Dalit women and get away with it.
We talked about how rape has been used as a weapon of war to intimidate and subjugate an entire population: in North-East India and Kashmir, West Africa, and even during the communal riots in Gujarat. We talked about how Al-Shabab militants are ordered to rape civilians in Sudan, and how rape has been used as a means to boost soldiers’ morale. We talked about how we can stop rapes by soldiers, how we need to modify the Armed Forces Act and look at how gender sensitization training is done in other countries’ armed forces.
Rape is also used as punishment. Women are often raped for doing something that upsets the status quo (Phoolan Devi, lesbians). Sometimes, women are raped to punish her family. We talked about an instance where a woman was raped because her brother eloped with an upper-caste woman.
Disincentives to Reporting Rapes:
– There is a lot of stigma attached to rape. In no other crime is the victim blamed for ‘bringing it on to themselves’, or the victim’s character questioned. Moreover, there is the notion that the rape victim has brought dishonor on her family. Often, the family is ostracized by the larger community. Not only does the victim have to put up with the stigma, but so does her family. Once the word gets out, it becomes difficult for her siblings to find someone willing to marry them.
– Indian culture makes it difficult to level allegations against men in the same community who are older or more powerful (or both). In these cases the victim is often discredited, especially when the perpetrator is a relative or family friend. These men are considered above reproach, and they are in a position to make the victim’s life very difficult. Even if the victim tells someone who believes her, they are often advised not to report the crime to the police.
Effects of Rape:
Many people close to the victim are affected by a single rape, even across generations. It’s not just the victim, but the victim’s parents and siblings who suffer the stigma. In addition, the victim feels the need to place restrictions on her (future or current) daughters as an attempt to keep them safer.
Cultural Narratives around Sexual Violence:
We talked about how there has been a gender-based division of labour that relegates women to the domestic sphere. Women who work outside the house are paid less, which adds to the notion that women are inherently worth less than men. Women’s roles are primarily those of a wife and mother, which means their worth is based on their sexuality. This leads to the idea that rape is an act of destroying a woman’s life permanently, and is the worst way someone can take revenge on a woman or her family.
Another part of the problem are the rigid gender roles assigned to people. On one hand, it restricts women’s roles, so that women are viewed primarily through a sexual lens. On the other hand, it leads to the notion that women are supposed to stay within certain limits. Women who step out of the ‘Lakshman Rekha’ are considered fair game when it comes to sexual violence.
We talked about how culture treats women’s sexuality as a taboo. Right from puberty, girls are told that they are unclean during menstruation, that their bodies are shameful, that it is uncouth to talk about their bodies and their sexuality. When a woman is sexually abused (often by a family member, relative or family friend), she is discouraged from talking about it. This means rapists often get away without any consequences and go on to victimize others without being stopped.
We discussed the notion that a woman’s sexuality does not really belong to her. Before marriage, it is the responsibility of her father to safeguard her sexuality. After marriage, it belongs to her husband. This means that culture doesn’t recognize marital rape. It is viewed as a husband claiming ownership of something that belongs to him. For the similar reasons, domestic violence is also dismissed.
We talked about how parents raise boys (and girls) to believe that women are not supposed to be better than men. The boys grow up to believe that any woman who reproaches them or raises her voice against them is guilty of trying to emasculate them. These men then feel a need to assert their dominance by assaulting the woman, often sexually. In this case, sexual assault becomes an act of ‘putting women in their place’. We discussed examples of this attitude that we had personally witnessed.
We then moved on to media and its portrayal of women. How tabloids use sex to increase sales, how sexual images are used in advertisements. Newspapers like the Times of India put pictures of scantily clad actresses next to articles that have little to do with them. Films employ item numbers to grab eyeballs, which leads to their portrayal as sexual objects.
We talked about the film ‘Cocktail’ that portrayed two different women. The first woman is modern and independent: someone who drinks, wears short skirts and engages in sexual relationships with men. The second woman is traditional: someone who prays regularly, wears traditional clothes and doesn’t date around. The film then goes on to show that the first type of women are only suitable for casual relationships, to be discarded afterwards, and the second type are the ones who are to be married. There is this idea in today’s culture that the only women who are worthy are those who are chaste and who conform to traditional roles.
We discussed the notion that women who wear non-traditional clothes are asking to be raped. The idea that it is provocative for women to show a little bit if skin, while men who show a similar amount of skin are not being provocative. We discussed the parallel narrative that it is provocative for a woman to walk around late at night, but not for a man. That women get raped even when they wear traditional clothes and avoid going out late at night, and how it’s important to challenge these perceptions.
What We Can Do:
We talked about how there was a need to change attitudes towards women, even if it will take a long time for cultural change. We discussed what we could to prevent rape.
– In the short term, we need to come up with mechanisms to protect and assist women.
— Set up committees for women to complain about harassment.
— Training about what constitutes harassment.
— Sensitizing the police force about sexual violence.
— There isn’t enough awareness on women’s rights among the general population. We agreed that we should create a pamphlet to educate people on women’s rights, telling them how to reach out to the police and what kind of procedures they are likely to come across.
— We also discussed mobilizing volunteers in each neighborhood who can help in an emergency situation. This includes people who can help ensure victims’ safety, assist while dealing with the police and provide legal guidance. We talked about how we could team up with NGOs who are already working on the issue.
— Call for an end to the ‘two-finger’ test used to medically verify rape.
— Safety in numbers: advocate for public transport to ply throughout the night. Don’t discourage women from staying out late.
– In the longer term, we need to educate people and bring about a change in attitudes.
— Keep facilitating everyday interaction between members of both sexes. Without this platonic, everyday type of interaction, men and women only interact with each other as family members or sexual partners. As a result, women are viewed primarily through a sexual lens.
— Educate men on how to approach and talk to women whom they wish to date. Talk to them about boundaries and what constitutes respectful behavior, and to respect women’s decisions when they say ‘No’. Tell them that direct communication is important to prevent confusion and any non-consensual sexual interaction, and how they can’t pretend to be platonic friends with a girl just to wait for an opportunity to ‘get in her pants’.
— Teach people about consent. What constitutes date rape. That just because a woman has consented to one sexual act does not imply she has consented to any other sexual act.
— Facilitate the economic empowerment of women, which will help prevent sexual violence from being swept under the carpet.
– We also need to bridge the urban/rural divide in women’s issues.
— Ask rural NGOs how we can help them and complement their work.
— Unite pro-women groups in rural areas.
— Keep pressing the government to combat caste-based violence, which is often manifested through rape.
Bengaluru Freethinkers March 2013 Meet
Bengaluru Freethinkers May 2013 Meet
Delhi Freethinkers January-13 meet report
Mumbai Freethinkers’ Meet (27.4.2013)
A Report on the Bengaluru Freethinkers’ Meet
Pune Freethinkers’ Meet – Dec 1st 2013
Feminism rape Regional meets
Chaitra
Keshav Shet Revankar. says:
Sensitize Hindu–mind to the fact that both ‘Manusmrithi’ and ” Githa”{9–32},which are glorified even today, condemn women as born to sin. Remind them the vedic gods Indra and Vishnu raped Ahalya and Brinda in the mythology.
Shankar R says:
Looks like the Nordic countries which are held as a model for women’s rights are now destined to plummet and become a lot worse than India, thanks to unbridled immigration from Islamic countries.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/1-in-4-swedish-women-will-be-raped-as-sexual-assaults-increase-500/
This is a fine example of confirmation bias. Hatred of Muslims simply translates into accepting whatever confirms that hatred. Looking at a more credible news source, a different story emerges – one of how statistics are collected.
Captain Mandrake says:
Even if the claim made by Shankar R is true (though not true really) I fail to see how that is a relevant comment to this article which is about misogynst attitudes in India.
The reason is that the title is quite misleading, as though India suffers a rape epidemic, although the issue has been thrust into the limelight due to one or two high profile cases recently. What is “rape culture”? This is as absurd as claiming there is a “murder culture” or “theft culture” or “kidnap culture” when criminals commit those crimes randomly for their own selfish gains, much as they commit them anywhere else in the world. Certainly, no schools, parents or friends cajole young men in India to rape women, at least to my knowledge, so don’t know what the term is supposed to mean.
Here are statistics from Wikipedia on the rape rates of various countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics
A lot of other advanced countries are relatively worse off, and I can completely believe the statistics. I have, in my long period of more than 30 years of residence in India, right from childhood, never personally known any woman who was known to have been raped, nor anyone else who personally knew a rape victim. On the other hand, during my stay in the US for only a decade, I had many of my colleagues who knew someone personally who had been raped, mostly by their dates. Date rape drugs such as rohypnol used to be circulated widely in the 90’s in certain parts of the US. If there is a “rape culture” to speak of, this was it.
I know that there is a blip in rape rates in the NCR region surrounding Delhi (in all categories of crimes, not just rape). The problem is, the media wants us to believe that Delhi is India and India is Delhi, and as though other regions don’t matter. If Delhi has a problem, the rest of India is supposed to have the same problem. This is what the talking heads of our media would want us to believe.
Within India, the rape rates vary widely. See p 206-207 of the official statistics of National Crime Records Bureau here-
http://ncrb.gov.in/CD-CII2011/Statistics2011.pdf
The relative rates are Delhi (2.8), Bangalore (1.1), Chennai (0.9), Mumbai (1.2), Ahmedabad (0.9) and Coimbatore (0.4). It can be seen that the reality is complicated. India has too heterogeneous a population to talk of some crime wave sweeping the whole nation. And the issue needs to be addressed in specific ways depending on the exact context in which rape might occur in different parts of the country. For example, date rape might be an issue in Delhi or Mumbai, but would hardly matter in a place like Coimbatore with its conservative mores and no night clubs to speak of. Similarly, rape as a mean of subjugating lower castes might be of more relevance in rural parts of the country compared to urban centres.
I’m afraid the current mass outrage against rape we see might just go the way of the Anna Hazare movement without doing anything productive in the long run, since it is rooted more in appealing to emotions than any well thought out policy which has to first and foremost scrutinize the actual statistics and see the feasibility of how lower it can go realistically. One cannot achieve a zero rate any more than one can achieve a zero murder rate or a zero traffic fatality rate.
First you link to a piece that misrepresents statistics to spread hatred of muslims.
And now you are presenting poor evidence to support your claims. You make a category error in assuming that statistics collected in India are on parity with statistics collected elsewhere. Women in India don’t report sexual harassment to the same degree that women in western countries do. You are using a privileged narrative to assert that just because you haven’t heard of any acts of sexual harassment, they don’t exist.
Before you comment again, I suggest you read this. This isn’t the first time you hijacked these comment spaces to make it a platform for your bigoted views.
Couldn’t you have made these ridiculous points with out bringing up Muslim immigrants in Nordic countries?
So what really was the point of your first post?
Sunil D'Monte says:
// What is rape culture? //
// so don’t know what the term is supposed to mean. //
This very article explains various elements of rape culture in the Indian context. I take it you didn’t read it? Stop wasting our time.
“This very article explains various elements of rape culture in the Indian context.”
Don’t know if this comment of mine would go through (the last 2 didn’t), so will keep it short.
Whatever points were brought up in the article doesn’t still justify the term rape culture, which implies that there is a culture in India that actively encourages rape, and I have no reason to believe that that is the case. Also regions with conservative mindsets regarding women do not necessarily report the highest rape rates. This can be cross checked in the National Crime Records Bureau document I have mentioned earlier.
“Stop wasting our time.”
No one is forcing you to read my comments. You have every right to skip over them on seeing my name. But in any case, I will spare even that agony, for I have decided not to post henceforth on this site. Bye.
I think you came into the discussion with a definition of rape culture that suits your purposes. If you were interested in good faith argumentation rather than in simply injecting your preconceived notions, you would have googled what rape culture is. You would have then found in what sense the article uses the term “rape culture” (Hint: the entire second paragraph of the article).
Of course we could have simply ignored your comment. But this site tries to achieve a balance between debating ideas and making it a safe space. When comments which are obviously bigoted are let to stand, it signals that a person who is marginalized would not be taken seriously here. When they see someone saying that there is no rape culture, it means that if they were to share their experiences, they would get a response on the lines of “I don’t believe you”, or “are you for real”. For us, making such people comfortable enough to read this site is a lot more important than to give people a platform to air bigoted views in the name of a debate.
Midbrain activation and mastery — A skeptic's view
Why Nirmukta?
Report on Nirmukta Trivandrum Meet
Challenges Issued From Rationalists To Those Claiming Supernatural Powers In Nepal
Gems from Chinmayananda - The Spiritual Inanity series, Part I
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Category Archives: Politics
Art & Culture, Politics
Sunday, 20 August 2017 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Richard “Dick” Claxton Gregory
(12 October 1932, St. Louis, Missouri – 19 August 2017, Washington, D.C.)
Dick Gregory Lecturing at Wright State University, April 1973
Photo: Wilbur Norman
Dick Gregory, U.S. Army veteran, urbane comedian-turned-social activist and writer, actor, businessman and provocateur par excellence, died yesterday at the age of 84. I first met him in April 1973 when he spoke at Wright State University. I would then run into him at various events around the East Coast. I think the last time I saw him must have been in 1987 when he was arrested protesting apartheid in front of the South African Embassy in Washington, DC.
He could keep up a biting and satirical running commentary better than anyone I have ever met, no doubt from practice as a stand-up comedian in his early career. That career was given a big boost by his appearance on The Jack Paar Tonight Show in 1961.
After turning down invitations to perform on the show he was called by Paar to find out why. (Billy Eckstine had told Gregory no black performer was ever asked to sit on the couch after their act.) Gregory told Paar that the reason he was not willing to perform on The Tonight Show was “because a Negro has never been able to finish the act and walk to the couch.” The show’s producers changed this policy, making Gregory the first African American to take the couch and talk with Paar after a stage appearance!
authorseducationphilosophyphotographyrace relationsVietnam
Art & Culture, Politics, War
Still the Greatest! RIP Mohammed Ali (1942-2016)
Saturday, 4 June 2016 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
“It was his beauty that beat me.” – George Foreman
In a world where many noted personalities are famous simply for being… well… famous, Mohammed Ali was a giant, a man who not only had a skill and performed colossal feats with that skill (40 Sports Illustrated covers as of next week attest to this) but who stood for something, as well. Ali became a symbol of hope and aspiration for anyone trying to make something of a life begun in humble or deprived origins, for those forced by circumstance into a life of servitude and despair. How appropriate that he was recognized by both the United Nations and Amnesty International as a world ambassador for peace and justice.
I met Mohahammed Ali once. I had, of course, seen him many times on television, flashing that infectious smile and spouting his sing-song braggadocio. What do you say to the man who was once the world’s highest paid athlete and most recognized face and name on earth (as an American, everywhere I went in Africa in the late 1970s people who could not speak much English would raise their arms and shout “Mohammed Ali!”)? I managed to mumble something about it being a supreme pleasure to finally meet “The Greatest”.
What I was not prepared for was his handshake. Ali took both my hands in his and I still remember, and often mention, that my hands (I’m 6 foot, 1 inch tall) were engulfed in what seemed to me to be two catcher’s mitts enclosing my hand. I immediately thought of what it would be like to be hit by such huge fists and said so. He laughed and slowly threw one of his famous mock punches.*
“If you are still the same person at 50 as you were at 20 then you have wasted 30 years of your life.” – Mohammed Ali
When you are “The Greatest”, so you shall ever remain.
* In Philadelphia I belonged to the same club as Joe Frazier and his hands were similarly sized. Plus, Frazier was not that tall but his shoulders extended far beyond my own when we would stand face to face. He was built like a moving , giant cinder block.
race relationsreligionVietnam
Who Knew? Putin has his own Mini-Me
Monday, 11 August 2014 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
A less-threatening Lill’Putin?
Russian President Vladimir Putin meeting with President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan and President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev
Original and un-retouched photograph provided 11 August 2014 by the Kremlin Twitter account: President of Russia @KremlinRussia_E
Politics, War
Vote Down Veterans Benefits – But Send Them Into Harms Way
Thursday, 19 June 2014 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
The Senators, listed below, complained Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ veterans benefits bill was too expensive. And they were upset that Majority Leader Harry Reid prevented a vote on a GOP amendment cutting the bill and adding sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program.
No doubt these same, mostly old, rich, white men will be wanting to send U.S. ground forces (a slick, cosmetic way of saying our young gals & guys) back to Iraq as soon as yesterday to try and save the unsavable: the corrupt, intransigent regime of Nouri Kamil Mohammed Hasan al-Maliki, the country’s Prime Minister. Oh… and yes, he is also acting Interior Minister, acting Defense Minister, acting National Security Minister and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party.
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
– from Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 24 November 1808 – 29 September 1890 and usually translated into English as, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Senators Who Voted Against Veteran’s Benefits This Past February
filibusternational security
The Buick Stops Here. A Chris-tastrophe Jams N.J.
Thursday, 9 January 2014 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Apologies for the puns but they are springing up everywhere. NY Daily News in their current headline (they must have been hoarding it) reads: Fat Chance Now, Chris. Assuming Gov. Christie of New Jersey is telling the truth about not knowing his staff and a NY/NJ Port Authority appointee (and a best friend) purposefully closed lanes of eastward traffic on the George Washington Bridge, it’s going to be a bad time for the rising star of the GOP. The fact that it was traffic into New York City on, of all days, 9-11, will speak volumes to residents of the Big Apple.
If you at seated at the top, the culture surrounding you takes its cue from you. If that culture shows itself to be mean-spirited, petty and vindictive … well… you get the idea. Further, if it is shown that the woman who died, because the emergency services could not get through, might have survived, it begins to sound like the kind of (justified) litigation that could drag on until the next presidential primaries.
I suppose many far-right Republicans are silently cheering more than the Dems as Gov. Christie is not exactly a darling of the most conservative wing. People love it when meteors plunk down as meteorites.
In the event you haven’t the slightest clue as to what this blog is about: the allegation is that senior staffers of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie closed three of four east-bound lanes of the country’s most heavily used bridge — for four days in September 2013 — as retaliation for Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, not endorsing Republican Christie in the governor’s re-election race – a contest where he was ahead in the polls by about 25%. The George Washington Bridge crosses the Hudson River connecting Fort Lee, NJ (and points west and south) to the northern section of New York City (and points east and north.) ALL traffic hugging the east coast of the United States crosses that single toll bridge. Delays during the four-day lane closures were as long as 4 hours.
Two damning emails have been unearthed by digging Democrats. One is: Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee (from Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs.) “Got it,” was the reply from David Wildstein, the Port Authority’s highest-ranking political appointee. Another, from Wildstein, regarding school buses stuck in bridge traffic: they are the children of Buono voters (Barbara Buono was Christie’s Democratic opponent for governor.)
Aside from the $60,000 reported as the cost for conducting the lane closures, there must be hundred’s of thousands of more dollars involved. How much overtime had to be paid out to freight drivers heading to New England? How many delayed shipments delayed yet other shipments? How much gasoline & diesel was consumed by stuck traffic? (320,00 cars per day, both ways on both decks. There are 4 lanes each way on the upper deck and another 6 lanes on the lower deck. I assume, from the photographs, the closures were on the upper deck, but have not been able to find out if this is correct.)
There is always a chain of consequences in such ill-advised stupidity. Or, perhaps, they just didn’t give a damn.
Other headline suggestions around the country were:
Bridge Set Me Up / Bridge To Nowhere / Payback’s a Bridge / Bridge Troll / A Bridge Too Far
Art & Culture, Politics, Wine & Spirits
R.I.P. Simon Hoggart
Monday, 6 January 2014 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
We lost one of the planets most entertaining writers yesterday. Simon Hoggart (26 May 1946 − 5 January 2014), Parliamentary sketch writer for The Guardian Newspaper and wine columnist for The Spectator. He might well have become a tennis star but for serious injuries that led him to consider journalism. Tennis’ loss was the written word’s gain (and broadcasting’s, on both sides of the Pond, as well.) Always writing, he published about twenty books, the last two after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2010.
Hoggart’s insights and witticisms are legion. Herewith, a few:
Watching John Major run the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands make balloon animals.
I’m just back from a week in France. Naturally I took a case of non-French wine over on the ferry so as to have something decent to drink. The French are terrifically complacent about their wine, believing that the worst they produce is better than the best from anywhere else. They are wrong, and there are few sights more depressing than the parade of tired, ill-kept, dreary bottles on the shelves of French supermarkets. The humblest British high street off- licence has wines from a dozen countries, and frequently twice that; in France it is hard to find wine from outside the region, never mind abroad. It may cost i1 or so per bottle less, but that is no compensation for Chablis like acidulated chalk dust, or clarets which have finesse and backbone but no discernible taste. I know many older drinkers like only French wines, but this is force of habit; just as men over 50 tend to prefer stockings to tights, it’s a matter of how you started. — 19 April 1996, Diary.
I loved his testimony (before Parliament’s Public Administration Select Committee) in 2009 about the bleaching effects of politicians’ jargon when they seek to white-wash political acts. He began the hearings by re-stating one of Churchill’s war-time phrases as if it were re-written by a modern government wonk, turning “We will fight on the beaches” into “an ongoing programme of hostile engagement in littoral sectors.”
Gotta love it! He and his writing will be much missed.
Simon Hoggart photograph courtesy © BBC
Art & Culture, Politics, Travel
The Bankrupt Vaults of Justice
Tuesday, 27 August 2013 coupdefoudre 2 Comments
“Insufficient Funds” still the by-words
The 50th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech has arrived (and the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation) and commentators are tripping over themselves lauding the accomplishments springing from the speech, confusing ‘black faces in high places’ with economic progress of the poorest elements of society.
Conflating improvements in segregation/integration with progress in class mobility is not a mistake Rev. Dr. King would have made and neither should we.
This speech, incidentally, is consistently rated by scholars of American history as the country’s most significant 20th century political speech. Once he got talking King deviated from the original prepared speech. Many of his most eloquent passages were extemporaneous injections from prior speeches as comparison of the filmed speech to his original, printed version reveals. This is especially true toward what was supposed to be the end of the speech when the singer Mahalia Jackson blurted out, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.” After a few sentences and Mahalia’s repeated exhortation King moved his prepared lines aside. His training as a black minister came to the fore and the rest, as they say, is history. But, as all history, it is one where black and white Americans see and hear different ideas in the same narrative with identical words.
FBI assistant director William Sullivan, after the speech, noted “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”
I rode my motorcycle from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. to the 25th anniversary celebrations of the March. En route I joined a column of black bikers without knowing who they were, it was just company and a cushion of motor safety on the massively trafficked interstate. When we neared New York Avenue the column got off and, as I was going to the anniversary event, so did I. We all filed into the Mall area and parked. My companions were a biker club from Staten Island, NY. The president had been to the original March in 1963 and was returning with his club members for the 25th. Very nice.
Business, Politics, Tech
Trash Talk, Literally
City of London Tracked Mobiles/Cells Via Wi-Fi Trash Bins
How can the public stay ahead of Big Brother when there are so many ways to keep tabs on citizenry? In what has to rank as one of the most creative methods, the City of London has been able to track Wi-Fi enabled devices that pass within proximity of 12 of the 100 “bomb-proof” recycle bins installed just before the 2012 Olympics. One might have guessed these bins were capable of more sophisticated uses as they sport internet-enabled displays. The 12 sleuth bins were “developed by… “Presence Aware” which markets the technology as providing ‘a cookie for the real world.’” Once again commerce and the security state intersect.
Quartz first broke this story and here, four hours ago, recounted its supposed withdrawal, complete with maps.
Art & Culture, Business, Politics, War
Pop-Up Ideas: BBC Radio 4 has a new series. 1st up: Malcolm Gladwell on listening in Vietnam
Sunday, 14 July 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
“Listening is hard because the more you listen the more unsettling the world becomes”
15 minutes each
First broadcast: Tuesday 09 July 2013
Tim Harford (the Financial Times‘ ‘Undercover Economist’ and presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less) has a new live-recorded, mini-series in Pop-Up Ideas, 15 minute programs exploring how prominent thinkers use “key ideas in anthropology and the social sciences to tell fascinating stories about how we – and the world – work.”
Program 1: New Yorker ‘Staff Writer’ Malcolm Gladwell describes how the U.S. war in Vietnam might have gone differently had the military listened to one of its own researchers, Konrad Kellen (family birth name Katzenellenbogen.) Kellen’s job was to debrief captured Vietcong guerrillas and describe their mind-set vis-à-vis the war. (Kellen’s life story is fabulous and fascinating.)
In one such debriefing he asked the captured senior officer if the officer believed the North Vietnamese could win the war. “No,” was the reply. Minutes later he asked if the Americans, then, would win the war? “No.”
This was interpreted by top U.S. Army brass as the answers of a demoralized enemy. Kellen, however, believed the answers were the responses of someone who did not think in terms of winning or losing at all — an entirely different view and one much more threatening to any eventual U.S. and South Vietnamese victory.
Listen to Gladwell’s interview here starting about minute time stamp 2:20.
The other programs (from the BBC Radio 4 website):
Program 2: One of the world’s most influential counter-insurgency experts, David Killcullen, whose ideas were described by the Washington Post as ‘revolutionizing military thinking throughout the West’, talks about how future instability will emanate from rapidly-growing coastal megacities.
Program 3: The financial journalist Gillian Tett describes how her background in anthropology led her to predict the financial crisis in 2008.
Program 4: Tim Harford explores the concept of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ – a term coined by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin in a hugely influential 1968 essay.
Malala Day at the United Nations
Saturday, 13 July 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
First Formal Public Remarks by the Pakistani Girl Shot by the Taliban
Malala Yousafzai gave a speech to the United Nations Youth Assembly yesterday morning. I would like to think of it as her western ‘coming out’ talk — hoping we will hear more from her in the future. (Although she is not a neophyte when it comes to presenting her views: she had a blog hosted by BBC Urdu when she was 11 years old, hand-writing her entries that were then transcribed and uploaded by a reporter.)
You may remember that she is the little Pakistani Pashtun girl shot (along with her friends) in the head and neck October 9, 2012 by the Taliban for saying that girls should have the right to go to school. As she stabilized, in critical condition, she was airlifted to England for rehab.
She is now 16 years old!
You can skip to time stamp 3:45 to get by the Introductions and Thank You comments.
The UN video
educationwomens rights
Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) Force-Fed Under Standard Guantánamo Bay Procedure
Tuesday, 9 July 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
A Video of the Procedure
A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees at Guantánamo. In this four-minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure. — The Guardian Newspaper
What are the alternatives for keeping the prisoners (100 hunger-strikers with 40 being force fed) alive? I do not know.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler has ruled that the court cannot make a ruling on whether the detainees can be force-fed by the military, adding “The President of the United States, as Commander-in-Chief, has authority – and power – to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.”
If you would like to read reporter Ben Ferguson’s eye-witness account of the making of the video, click here.
NOTE: This video is not for the faint of heart (nor, as you will see, was the procedure for Mos Def, a Muslim, born Dante Smith in Brooklyn, N.Y.)
Image Credit: Reprieve and Bafta
Guantanamoprisoners
Weiner-Spitzer: Grilling the Candidates
Monday, 8 July 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Hot Dog! A Campaign Made for Jokes
I did not think the possibilities for puns and jokes could get any better when former NY Representative Anthony D. Weiner tossed his 10-gallon hat in the ring as a candidate for mayor of New York City.
But now we have former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer deciding to run for comptroller.
Politics. You just have to love a profession where there’s more forgiveness and second acts than we see in the church!
Filibuster vs. Cloture
Thursday, 4 July 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Current Events & Things You Should Have Learned in School
Last week, just after the June 25th Texas senate debate when Wendy Davis filibustered Bill 5 for some ten plus hours, I heard someone say, “See Democrats in the U.S. Senate are always trying to do away with the filibuster but when it’s something they care about they resort to doing it themselves.” Leaving aside the obvious apples & oranges comparison (Davis is a Texas state senator, not a U.S. Senator) it seemed to me that the person I overheard was conflating two separate, but connected, political processes: the filibuster and cloture.
What many U.S. Senate Democrats want to do is to require a senator who wishes to stop a bill to actually be present and talking, to filibuster by putting his body where his mouth is. Currently, senators do not even need to be present to stop movement on a bill. Most Americans still think of the filibuster as a senator holding the floor for hours talking and reading anything he/she can to take up time. That is not the case with the current U.S. Senate rules. Unless there is a call for cloture, and it passes, bills can be stalled, held in limbo with the objecting senator truly having no skin in the game.
Think back to the dim days of Mr. Moody’s 8th grade civics class. Civics, by and large, was a dull affair. It lacked the pizzazz of history and possessed all the charm of balancing a bank account. Like health class, it was always taught by the coaches of our sporting teams. But I do recall our discussions around the process of cloture (from the French for closure.)
According to the U.S. Senate Glossary, in an attempt to curtail unlimited debate whose purpose was to block voting and adoption of a bill, “in 1917, senators adopted a rule (Rule 22), at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, that allowed the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds majority vote, a device known as ‘cloture.’” If cloture passed, an up or down vote on the bill in question could then be taken after an additional thirty hours of debate, thus breaking a bottleneck. Wilson had called for enacting a cloture provision because he saw the senate as,
“the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action. A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
Wilson’s sharp talk was in response to a twenty-three day filibuster against his placing arms on merchant ships in World War I.
Southern senators filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for sixty days, proving that two-thirds of the Senate, 67 votes, can be a difficult thing to get. Between 1917 and 1960 cloture was used only four times. In 1975 the number of senators needed for approval on a vote of cloture was reduced to 60 votes, with 16 members needed to bring the cloture question up for a vote. In the 110th Congress (2007-2008) cloture was enacted 61 times and then 63 times in the 2009-2010 congress. Yes, that’s correct, the 111th congress in one term voted cloture more than fifteen times the frequency it occurred in the first 43 years of its existence as a senate rule.
It is worth pointing out that the additional 30 hours of permitted debate after cloture is ruled, must be “on the measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate.” That is, you cannot read out your mother’s recipe for Derby pie or eloquently speechify on the entries in a dictionary (unless either of these is somehow relevant to the bill on the floor!)
Fortunately, the filibuster was eliminated from the U.S. House of Representatives’ rules as the assembly began to grow larger with the addition of new states. Could our already greatly deadlocked lower legislature be even less effective?
Politics, Tech
NSA Value-Added Backup Plan
Wednesday, 3 July 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Lots of protest but no Protestants
Front row from left: Thomas, Born Catholic, appointed while Episcopalian, returned to Catholic Church in late 1990s/ Yale; Scalia, Catholic/ Harvard; Roberts, Catholic/ Harvard; Kennedy, Catholic/ Harvard; Ginsburg, Jewish/ Columbia.
Back row, from the left: Sotomayor, Catholic/ Yale; Breyer, Jewish/ Harvard; Alito, Catholic/ Yale; Kagan, Jewish/ Harvard.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court is out of session for several months legal eagles can pick apart their decisions decoding for anything that suits their fancy. When I wrote my blog commentary a few days ago about a couple of their decisions I started thinking about how little our presidents and justices represent the mainstream demographics of the country’s population anymore…. perhaps they never did.
No matter how egalitarian we call ourselves as a nation, attendance at Princeton, Harvard and Yale gives you a pole starting position. More accurately, it flings you like the Starship Enterprise using a planet’s gravitational force to rocket you into the stratosphere of our country’s infrastructure.
Look at the law schools represented by the current sitting court: Harvard/ 5, Yale/ 3, Columbia/ 1. Although graduation from law school has been the norm in the last 60 years, historically, of the 112 justices appointed to the Court, only 47 have had law degrees, an additional 18 attended some law school but did not receive a degree, and 47 received their legal education without any law school attendance, mostly apprenticing to the trade as was the norm in the early years of our country. (Henry Julian Abraham, Justices, Presidents, and Senators: A History of the U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Bush II. 2007, p. 49.)
Supreme Court justices also no longer get their hands ‘dirty’ as criminal defense attorneys: Thurgood Marshall is said to be the last justice to have represented a death penalty client. (Sherrilyn Ifill, Commentary: Break the mold for Supreme Court picks. CNN, May 4, 2009.) All current justices but one were working on the East Coast upon their nomination. Nineteen states have never had a justice hailing from their confines (yes, I know, some states did not exist until the 20th century.) But we have had a justice from Vienna, Austria (F. Frankfurter), David Brewer (now Izmir, Turkey) and others from abroad. There is, unlike with the presidency, no requirement that a federal judge be an American citizen.
More importantly for our country, justices no longer seem to pull their law clerks from across the board as they did in past Courts. The mental associations we bring to the word clerk make it sound like a relatively unimportant job but they have a huge importance in setting up the arguments and reasoning in cases. Justices Thomas, in selecting clerks with prior federal clerkship experience, so far as I can ascertain, has only pulled ones who worked for a judge appointed by a Republican President.
Why is this bad? Because it sets up a situation where you do not get a good, frothy, debate on points of law. I won’t go so far as to say that such clerks are “yes” men and women but how are they able to provide searing, pointed debate mounted from other views on legal questions during the closed-door discussions that lead to written opinions? Here are scores for the other justices with regard to their hiring clerks (with prior federal clerkship experience) in adherence to the ‘think-alike’ syndrome (2005 – 2010): Scalia (100%); Alito (91.7%); Roberts (88%); Sotomayor (87.5%); Kennedy (83.3%); Ginsberg (83.3%); Kagan (75%) and Breyer (54.1%). (Data current as of 2010.) It was not always so, even taking into account that the ratio of Democratic to Republic-selected federal circuit court of appeals judges has not been close to even since the end of President Clinton’s administration (67 Democrat to 67 Republican appointed.) The ratio is now incredibly lop-sided as Republicans in congress consistently stall votes on Democratic president’s nominations to judgeships.
A study published by the Vanderbilt University Law School Review (Nelson, et.al. The Liberal Tradition of the Supreme Court Clerkship: Its Rise, Fall, and Reincarnation? 2009) notes:
“Whatever the cause of this polarization, what seems significant – and arguably troubling – about the putative emergence of politically oriented practice groups is a tendency to reify the role of the Court as a super-legislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law.” Justice Thomas has commented that selecting clerks is like “selecting mates in a foxhole.”
Small wonder our legislatures and courts make most Americans think we at war… with each other.
religionscotus
Justice Scalia Wants it Both Ways // 6 of the States Under Title 4 Impose a Voter ID Law in the Last 24 Hours
What’s good for the goose is NOT good for the gander?
Rapid Response Teams in Arizona, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Virginia
This yesterday from U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia in United States v. Windsor, … et.al. [DOMA]:
“We have no power to decide this case and even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America… It is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive….”
However, the day before, he voted with the majority (Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et.al.) in invalidating Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act that had been passed by both houses of the U.S. legislature (reauthorized three times, most recently in 2006 with voting 390 – 33 in the House and 98 – 0 in the Senate.) Section 4 contains the formula used by Congress to determine which states and local governments must receive federal pre-approval before changing their voting laws. The majority opinion argued that progress in voter registrations and turnout erased the need for Section 4, with Chief Justice Roberts, long a foe of the Act, referring specifically to gains in minority voting in the U.S. southern states
It would appear that Scalia is saying, “We, the conservative members of the Court, can overturn democratically adopted legislation if it goes against our principles and we can find a spurious reason, but we don’t believe the liberals on the Court ought to be able to do the same thing.”
Interestingly, 6 of the states that Title 4 was enacted for have, in the last 24 hours, enacted new Voter ID laws. Talk about quick reaction time! One, Arizona, had just had it’s previous law struck down by the Supreme Court (7 to 2) LAST WEEK! The state of Texas took only a few hours to pass a law REQUIRING a U.S. passport in hand as well as proof of state residency to vote.
In answer to these states reasoning that this will stop voter fraud (when the real reason for these laws is to hinder minority voting, and now, with Texas and its passport requirement, the elderly) several studies have found “that voter fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is nearly non-existent and much of the problems associated with alleged fraud in elections relates to unintentional mistakes by voters or election administrators.” – Brennan Center for Justice study (www.brennancenter.org/issues/voter-fraud). What has happened, in much more substantial numbers of cases, is election officials ‘misplacing’ ballots, voting machine irregularities, and other such incidents.
Supreme Court invalidates Voting Rights Act, Title 4, above.
Supreme Court strikes down DOMA.
Where’s Waldo?
Monday, 24 June 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Edward Snowden flies to Moscow (probably) but not beyond (yet).
About 30 journalists rushed to book seats this morning, 24 June 2013, on the daily 12 hour Aeroflot #SU150 / CU6150 Moscow to Havana flight in anticipation of interviewing recently fired U.S. National Security Agency technical contractor Edward Joseph Snowden (b. 21 June 1983). Unfortunately, he was not on the flight, at least in the Business (34 seats) or Economy classes (207 seats). (No one sprung for the First Class!)
The Airbus A330/200 departed Sheremetyevo International at 14:23 hours (UTC +4:00), 18 minutes late, and is scheduled to arrive at Havana’s Jose Marti International at 18:45 local time. (UTC -4:00)
To add insult to injury, this flight does not serve ANY alcohol, a state of emergency for the Fourth Estate!
Photo of Snowden’s empty, paid for/assigned seat on today’s Moscow to Havana flight.
Photo, above, of car from the Ecuadorian Embassy at the curb of Moscow’s International Airport about the time of Snowden’s (supposed) arrival from Hong Kong. (photo by Dmitry Rozhkov)
Edward Snowden, although he never completed high school, worked most recently for Booz Allen Hamilton as an IT contractor in a National Security Agency (NSA) office in Hawaii. He is accused, based on his own admission, of leaking to the press details of top-secret American and British government mass surveillance including the interception of U.S. and European telephone metadata and the PRISM and Tempora internet surveillance programs.
Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said disclosures linked to Snowden have “confirmed longstanding suspicions that NSA’s surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew.” U.S. federal prosecutors made public their sealed charges against Snowden on June 21st, his 30th birthday.
Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) employ’s around 25,000 people of whom about half possess a “Top Secret” clearance. Three-quarters of its employees have government clearances at various levels. 99% of BAH’s $5.76 billion 2013 revenue is derived from government contracts. “About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis….” (Bennett and Riley, “Booz Allen, the World’s Most Profitable Spy Organization”, Business Week magazine, 20 June 2013.)
Alpinists on Mt. Nanga Parbat Murdered
Sunday, 23 June 2013 coupdefoudre Leave a comment
Ten dead at 15,000 foot camp in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan.
Nanga Parbat from Base Camp. Photo taken November 30, 2005.
Back in my younger days I was a mountain climber. I still have all the stuff: the insulated boots; parkas; big-wall hardware; ice axes, hammers and screws; tents; down bags; metal-edged telemark skis, etc. But, as my life became more sedentary, with most days spent in front of the computer or at my gallery, I got soft. Now I just read about climbing.
Perhaps that’s a good thing. I came of age, as they say, in a time when I could trek almost anywhere and get out of most any trouble by flashing that all-important U.S. passport. There were hardly any mountains off limits except the Tibetan side of the Himalayas and some of the Soviet peaks. Sometimes even these were available for the right money.
The days of unfettered access have long been gone and highlighting this was today’s Taliban attack on an international climbing camp on Nanga Parbat, Pakistan’s second and the world’s ninth highest mountain. Locals call the mountain Diamir: “King of the Mountains”. It is located in Pakistan’s northwest Gilgit-Baltistan region and has resisted all attempts at a winter ascent. The area has had a lot of violence directed at the Shia minority but none toward foreigners as has occurred in more accessible regions. (The base camp, at a mountain elevation of 4200 feet, is roadless and difficult of access, requiring a two-day hike-in. The camp itself sits at 15,000 feet above sea level.)
“Spokesperson for the proscribed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Ehsanullah Ehsan, talking to Dawn.com from an undisclosed location claimed that the Janud-e-Hafsa faction of the [Taliban] had carried out the attack… dressed as Gilgit Scouts, a paramilitary police unit.” (The Muslim News, Middlesex, UK.) The reason given for the murders was to avenge recent U.S. drone attacks that killed the Taliban’s deputy leader on May 29.
The scene of the massacre at the Gilgit-Baltistan base camp – The Muslim News, UK.
One Chinese climber was wounded and escaped. The dead include an American of Chinese origin, the Pakistani guide, two Chinese, a Nepalese, two Slovakians, a Lithuanian and two Ukranians.
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Episode 171 – Peaks and Valleys
Episode 171 - Peaks and Valleys [ 2:05:17 | 172.05 MB ] Play Now | Download (731)
We probably spend WAY more time talking about the new cowboy romance movie The Longest Ride this week than any of us anticipated, but we offset that with talk about Bloodborne, the Mad Max and Godfather movies and feeling bad about feeling good about boobs.
In The Geek Week News In Review: you can […]
April 12th, 2015 | Tags: Akiva Goldsman, Arrested Development, Better Call Saul, Bloodborne, boobs, Brad Bird, Christina Hendricks, Fraggle Rock, Frank Cho, game piracy, game preservation, Han Solo's parka, hashbrowns, HBO Go, HBO Now, head transplants, Incredibles 2, John, Lego Dimensions, Mad Max, Mad Men, Marsha, McDonald's breakfast, National Lampoon's Vacation, Onion, orange juice, Peter Parker, Spider-Gwen, Stan Freberg, Star Wars, Star Wars Celebration, Steven Universe, taxes, The Dark Tower, the death of DVD, The Dukes of Hazzard, The ESA, The Godfather, The Hunger Games, The Longest Ride, The Odyssey, The Simpsons, Vikings, Youtube | Comments are closed
Episode 157 – 2014 In Review + 2015 Dumb Stuff Preview
Episode 157 - 2014 In Review + 2015 Dumb Stuff Preview [ 2:38:22 | 217.49 MB ] Play Now | Download (711)
It’s the first Boy Howdy of 2015, and so we’re celebrating (starting at the 1 hr 21 minute mark) with a lengthy review of all the pop culture stuff we enjoyed in 2014 and a look ahead to the movies, games and shows we’re looking forward to in the new year. But first we […]
January 5th, 2015 | Tags: action figures, AGDQ, Alien, Ant-Man, Babe, Banner Saga 2, Bee & Puppycat, Better Call Saul, Bloodborne, Bold Riley, Broad City, Broadway, Broken Age, Carol, Chappie, Child of Light, Christine Cavanaugh, Coming Out On Top, community, Dexter's Labroratory, Dragon Age Inquisition, Edge of Tomorrow, Edward Herman, Emily Blunt, Far Cry 4, Forza Horizon 2, Gilmore Girls, Hateful Eight, Hyrule Warriors, Inside Llewyn Davies, Inside Out, Into the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, Kirby, Last Man On Earth, LEGO, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mario Maker, Marvel, Michael Beihn, Mighty No. 9, Murdered: Soul Suspect, musicals, Neil Blomkamp, No Man's Sky, Over the Garden Wall, Parks & Recreation, Plastic Galaxy, Sam Raimi, Shadow of Mordor, Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall, Sigourney Weaver, Skeleseer, Smash Bros. Wii U, Spiderman 3, Star Wars Episove VII: The Force Awakens, Stephen Sondheim, The Clone Wars, The Good Dinosaur, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, The Kroll Show, The Last of Us: Left Behind, The Legend of Korra, The Lego Movie, The Lost Boys, The Nerdist, The Price of Salt, The Simpsons, The Witcher 3, Tina Fey, Tomorrowland, True Detective, Uncharted 4, Valiant Hearts, Veronica Mars, Wasteland 2, Zelda Wii U | Comments are closed
2014 E3 Special
2014 E3 Special [ 1:26:32 | 0.01 MB ] Play Now | Download (668)
Fresh off the floor from E3, Bill and Anne are all up in your earbuds with our thoughts about this year’s batch of E3 news – we talk about the highlights of each of the major press conferences, make a $50 bet as to how the Last of Us DLC will be integrated into […]
June 12th, 2014 | Tags: 2014, 2015, 3DS, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Bloodborne, Brian Michael Bendis, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, CodeName S.T.E.A.M., Crackdown 3, Cuphead, Dead Rising 3, Destiny, Double Fine, Dragon Age Inquisition, E3, Entwined, Fable Legends, Far Cry 4, Forza Horizon 2, Gay Panic, Grim Fandango, GTAV, Halo Master Chief Collection, InFamous First Light, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Last of Us PS4, Little Big Planet 3, Mario Maker, Mass Effect 4, Microsoft, Mirror's Edge 2, Miyamoto's Killer Laser Camera Craziness, Nintendo, No Man's Sky, Powers, Project Giant Robot, PS4, Smash Bros., Sony, Splatoon, Star Fox Wii U, Star Wars Battlefront, Street Fighter Super Ultra Dead Rising 3 Arcade Remix Hyper Edition DX Plus Alpha, Sunset Overdrive, Uncharted: A Thief's End, Valiant Hearts, Wii U, Witcher 3, Xbox One, Yoshi's Wooly World, Zelda Wii U | Comments are closed
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Cryptocurrency Mining Giant Bitmain Officially Gives up on Going Public in Hong Kong
Bitmain Technologies, a Chinese based chip maker of specialized cryptocurrency mining machines, has shelved its plans to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange due to a number of reasons including staff lay-offs, a protracted bear market, and management restructuring reported the South China Morning Post on March 26.
Bitmain’s Hong Kong IPO Application Expires
The mining giant released a statement in which it officially acknowledged that it had allowed its IPO application – initially filed on Sept. 26 at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange – to lapse after it had reached its six-month deadline.
“We will restart the listing application work at an appropriate time in the future,” reads part of the statement released by the firm.
There were hopes that the mining firm, founded in 2013, would have raised billions in what could have gone down in history as the world’s largest IPO by a crypto company.
However, things didn’t work out as planned after the crypto market found itself in a downward spiral in which more than $500 billion was wiped from the market.
According to sources who spoke to the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong regulators are reluctant to approve IPO applications for businesses in the crypto sector due to lack of regulation in the industry.
Other Chinese-based crypto mining chip makers – Canaan Creative and Ebang International Holdings – filed for IPOs last year. Canaan, just like Bitmain, allowed its application to lapse while Ebang updated its filing days before it lapsed.
During its peak period in 2017, Bitmain controlled nearly three-quarters of the crypto mining rigs market. The firm reported in its IPO filing that it had generated $740 million profit in H1 2018.
Bitmain Management Reshuffle
The mining behemoth confirmed the rumors that initially surfaced last year that its two co-CEOs and founders – Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan – were stepping down from their positions and assuming new roles.
The two co-founders, who are regarded as some of the richest entrepreneurs in the crypto space – will be replaced by Wang Haihao, an engineer who has previously held several positions within the company.
The company said in a statement that the two co-founders would steer the company’s “strategic development.” According to the IPO filing, Zhan owns a 37 percent in the company while Wu holds a 21 percent stake.
Bitmain, which has generated most of its revenue from selling its flagship Antminer units, is branching out to design AI chips under a different brand. However, non-crypto related business contributed only 0.1 percent of the $2.8 billion in revenue generated by the firm in the first half of last year.
Jehan Chu, the co-founder of Hong Kong-based crypto investment firm Kenetic Capital said the mining firm must renew the focus on its core business.
“The real driver to Bitmain’s recovery will be their renewed focus on the core business of designing and producing leading edge mining hardware and also the ongoing institutional investment in crypto and blockchain.”
Cryptocurrency Mining Giant Bitmain Officially Gives up on Going Public in Hong Kong was originally found on copy trading cryptocurrency | Blockchain News | Bitcoin News | blokt.com.
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Survivors: Series Two
Thursday, 23 July 2015 - Reviewed by Richard Brinck-Johnsen
Written by Ken Bentley, Louise Jameson, and Matt Fitton
Directed by Ken Bentley
Starring: Lucy Fleming , Ian McCulloch, Carolyn Seymour, John Banks, Louise Jameson, Bernard Holley, Tim Treloar, Fiona Sheehan, and Tim Bentinck
Released by Big Finish Productions – June 2015
The second audio series based on Terry Nation’s original series first broadcast in 1975, picks up events immediately following on from the last episode of the first TV series and approximately five weeks after the climax of last year’s first audio series. The audio series runs concurrently with the TV version, successfully allowing original TV characters Greg and Jenny to interact with new characters such as Daniel and Jackie, whose stories are picked up for this second series which exploits the rather generous continuity gap between the end of the first TV series and the start of the second. With most of the first audio series having taken place in the London area, the second returns to the West Country roots of the TV series with stories set mostly in the West of England and Wales. This provides the arc of this boxset with a more satisfyingly contained feel and yet some of the remote locations come across as being very dangerous thanks to some excellent sound design. It is also pleasing that having had the first series written mostly by regular Big Finish contributors this series has allowed two new writers to contribute, which adds a fresh feeling to the proceedings.
The set opens with Dark Rain, the first of two contributions from regular director Ken Bentley, who has a clear grasp on the characters’ voices from having directed the previous series. This cleverly serves to set the scene as we are reintroduced to Daniel and Jackie, the two main protagonists introduced for the first audio series, both sympathetically portrayed by John Banks and Louise Jameson. Simultaneously this story returns to the Grange community of the TV series, bringing with it the proper reintroduction of Carolyn Seymour as Abby Grant, alongside fellow original series actors Ian McCulloch and Lucy Fleming as Greg and Jenny. Having only heard her fleetingly in the first audio series, it is great to have Abby return to a central role in the proceedings as her ongoing search for her missing son forms a crucial part of the arc of this second audio series. The culmination of the A and B plots bring all the regular characters together before sending them off to new adventures whilst also adding Tim Treloar as Russell into the mix.
The second story, Mother’s Courage, features an all-female cast as Abby, Jenny and Jackie continue the journey to look for Peter and find themselves at an all-women community with extremely hostile views about men. They are joined on their way by another new regular, Molly, played very sympathetically by Fiona Sheehan. Sheehan makes a powerful impression in this and the subsequent episodes and will hopefully return although apparently not in series three. This unique episode is extremely well written by Louise Jameson, and provides an opportunity to delve deeper into the views and attitudes of the women survivors.
As a direct contrast, Ken Bentley’s second offering, The Hunted, features the male characters, who are joined by Big Finish and The Archers regular Tim Bentinck as survival expert Irvin Warner. This story really pushes the boundaries of how dark this series is capable of being with some scenes particularly towards the conclusion which are all the more distressing for being on audio. There are also some more pleasant surprises including a very touching scene, played with great sensitivity by John Banks and Tim Treloar.
The scene is neatly set for the finale, Savages by Matt Fitton, which brings together perfectly all the strands from the mini-arc that has run through this boxset. Without wanting to give too much away a special mention must go to Bernard Holley for his key role in the proceedings.
Survivors returns with a third audio series in November, with two further series already confirmed for 2016. On such strong form as this, long may it continue.
Related Reviews: Survivors: Series One (10 Apr 2015)
FILTER: - Audio Drama - Big Finish
Blake's 7 - The Classic Audio Adventures: Vol 1.1 – Fractures
Saturday, 1 March 2014 - Reviewed by Damian Christie
Blake's 7 - The Classic Audio Adventures: Vol 1.1 - Fractures
Writer: Justin Richards
Director: Ken Bentley
Producer: Big Finish
Released: January 2014
"Five! Did he say five? Five! That's the whole of my left hand! One, two, three, four, five!"
Vila Restal babbles - Blake's 7: Fractures
Regardless of what your favourite TV programme is - eg, Doctor Who, Arrow, Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead - you know that each new season opens with all barrels blazing from the get-go. It's a time-honoured tactic among TV series that's vital to rebuilding the audience after months off-screen. Once the viewers are hooked, the TV programme can afford to be more experimental with later episodes, slowing down the pace, injecting romance or contemplation, or creating an atmosphere of the claustrophobic or psychological. 2012's Asylum of the Daleks, for example, was Doctor Who's answer to delivering a season-opener with impact; it would have been a risk to have started with The Power of Three.
Even Big Finish is no stranger to this philosophy, as it's shown time and again with many of its mini-trilogies of Doctor Who tales with specific Doctor/companion combinations. So it's surprising that for its first full season of eight full-cast Blake's 7 audio dramas, it has opted for something more like a "mid-season" episode than an adrenaline-fuelled, fist-pumping opener.
Fractures, written by veteran Doctor Who and B7 scribe Justin Richards, marks (in the author's own words) the start of the "extension" to the second season of the Blake's 7 TV series (first broadcast in 1979). Unfortunately, he also seems to have treated this "season within a season" approach too literally. Richards has delivered a story that perhaps could plausibly have been a mid-season episode in B7's second series - but it certainly isn't a story that (to this B7 fan's mind) would have been a worthy one even if it had been produced for the TV series back in the day, and certainly not as a curtain-raiser.
The story starts with an exciting prologue that puts Blake (Gareth Thomas) and the Liberator crew in a stand-off with five Federation pursuit ships commandeered by Space Commander Travis (Brian Croucher). It's the kind of pulsating confrontation that you would expect of a new series-opener and brings back fond memories of early B7 episodes such as Duel that saw a similar confrontation on-screen (albeit with Travis being played by Stephen Greif). In yet another nod to the TV series, the preface even ends with Travis repeating his vow to hunt down Blake to the very end (Croucher recites a speech made more famous by Greif in the character's first episode Seek Locate Destroy).
To escape Travis's grasp, the Liberator retreats to a region of space that is off limits to Federation ships and littered with derelict spacecraft. It is from this point that the proper story begins. The Liberator is suddenly struck by what appears to be a systems crash and members of the crew are inevitably separated and trapped in different sections of the ship. It soon becomes clear that the Liberator has been incapacitated and that one of the crew may be responsible.
In the events that follow, Richards aspires to create a tense psychological mystery. This is achieved through ongoing dialogue between the regular cast members (and no other guest stars) to create suspicion and suspense. Richards has always been adept at making sound an important narrative device in his audio stories (his early Doctor Who serial Whispers of Terror is a great example) and with Fractures he makes the immediacy of the aural experience - with the characters talking to each other across the Liberator's communications channel - critical to the story. Although it becomes patently obvious the longer the story goes on that the Liberator crew are being manipulated, the cast all deliver believable and occasionally intense performances. Furthermore, the actors reprise their roles again as effortlessly as if they've never left them. Thomas is steadfast as Blake, Sally Knyvette cool and calm as Jenna, Jan Chappell inquisitive as Cally, Paul Darrow sardonic and dry as Avon and Michael Keating's Vila as nervously comical as ever.
Unfortunately, the central premise and climax of the story is as clichéd as some of B7's least popular episodes. As a TV series, B7 is most fondly remembered for its epic political and dystopian commentary on the future, not for its occasional and less successful forays into pure or hard science fiction. Fractures unfortunately belongs to the latter, although it would be grossly unfair to say it is as diabolical as The Web, Trial, Sarcophagus or Ultraworld - TV episodes that were endlessly derided by fans for being poorly written and unsuccessfully realised on screen. Nevertheless, the threat in this serial proves to be very generic and rather unimaginative and could belong just as easily in a Doctor Who serial or a Star Trek episode as a B7 one.
The serial ends with the Liberator crew learning information that has ramifications for the next seven instalments of this audio series. To me, this reinforces why Fractures is a weak and disappointing start to what may otherwise be an enthralling and tense saga. Perhaps this episode should have appeared in the middle of this run - certainly, if it had been part of B7's original television run, it would have been a mid-season episode and a forgettable one at that, with little relevance to the overall story arc. Let's hope the next instalment - the dramatic-sounding Battleground – is a major improvement.
FILTER: - Audio Drama - Big Finish - Blake's 7
The Liberator Chronicles Vol 6 (Big Finish)
Tuesday, 24 December 2013 - Reviewed by Damian Christie
Blake’s 7: The Liberator Chronicles, Vol 6
Produced by Big Finish
Written by Peter Anghelides, Steve Lyons, Mark Wright & Cavan Scott
... Because that’s how we measure success isn’t it? People like us! By how long we can get away with it! You’re about to learn the same lesson I did ... It doesn’t matter how successful you once were ... Not once it’s over!
Jenna Stannis
It's well over 30 years since the TV series ended and to this day Blake’s 7 fans have debated what happened to the titular character between the second season finale Star One and the program finale Blake. Many theories have been championed in fanzines and unofficial audio adaptations over the decades – and now Big Finish, with an authorised licence to produce B7 adventures, has offered its own take on Blake and Jenna’s whereabouts in the third and fourth series. It also surmises why Avon was in no rush to welcome them back to the bridge of the Liberator.
Long-term fans’ questions about what immediately happened after Star One were partly answered earlier this year in the brilliant full cast release Warship. The sixth volume of B7: The Liberator Chronicles offers us more answers about what may have happened after Warship – and also tantalisingly throws up some questions which challenge our memories of established history. Could Avon and Tarrant have found Jenna and Blake long before the program’s finale? Contrary to what Blake says in the final episode, could Jenna have survived the blockade above Gauda Prime? And did Avon meet with Blake at some other unspecified point in the program’s final season?
All these answers and questions are considered in a trilogy of episodes - Incentive, Jenna’s Story and Blake’s Story – which, in the spirit of earlier Liberator Chronicles, are told from the perspective of at least one protagonist. Incentive cleverly sets up an interrogation of Avon (Paul Darrow) and Tarrant (Stephen Pacey, reprising his role for the first time in a Big Finish B7 adventure) by Federation psychostrategist Bracheeni (Adrian Lukis). Jenna’s Story sees the woman of the hour (Sally Knyvette) seemingly under siege and playing nursemaid to an injured rebel leader Correl (John Banks). And Blake’s Story sets up an unexpected fireside chat between Blake (Gareth Thomas) and Avon.
As is the standard that we’ve come to expect of Big Finish, all three episodes are thoroughly written, convincingly performed and supported by excellent sound effects and incidental music. Incentive is the best of the three episodes and feels the most as if it is happening in “real time”, ie with little expository narrative (although the middle of the story is told in flashback by Avon and Tarrant). Jenna’s Story and Blake’s Story involve more exposition and flashbacks but are less formulaic and more experimental than Incentive which is the closest in structure to a regular B7 episode in the program’s third season.
What is most interesting about the Jenna and Blake instalments is the traumatic journeys, trials and eventual transformations that their characters undergo upon leaving the Liberator. Jenna witnesses the brutal, dehumanising and unjust treatment of refugees by the Federation (a scenario not unlike the way some Western nations treat asylum seekers!) while Blake is again duped by the Federation in a manner reminiscent of his original treatment before the events of the first episode The Way Back. These two instalments emotively reinforce the broad power of the Federation against the fractured cause that Blake and Jenna represent. Blake’s 7 is not and never was Star Wars – the rebellion of the B7 universe lacks unity, purpose, resources and manpower to seriously challenge the Federation. Indeed, it seems B7’s Federation is nowhere near as fragile as Star Wars’ Empire – it will take something extra special to topple the regime, which seems even beyond Blake and the Liberator crew.
Strong characterisation always underpins two- or three-hander plays such as these. The three episodes hold up a mirror to the established protagonists to show us previously unseen facets of their personalities. Bracheeni demonstrates that for all their bluster and bravado, Avon and Tarrant are more loyal and altruistic than they would have everyone believe. Similarly, we see whole new aspects to Jenna and Blake which were barely hinted at in the TV series. Jenna’s Story marks a 360-degree shift in the character who, like Avon, was a pragmatist at the start of the TV series. By the time of her story, Jenna has become as much of an idealist as Blake himself. By contrast, Blake has become more of the pragmatist that Jenna was.
Indeed, while quite dissimilar, the three episodes carry a common theme – that of characters aspiring to be like their heroes and role models but little realising that their perception of these champions rarely lives up to the reality. Bracheeni accuses Avon and Tarrant – “the leader and the pilot” – of needing to prove they are better than the “legendary” Blake and Jenna they begrudgingly admire. Similarly, Jenna holds Blake and the crew of the Liberator in such high esteem that she even tries to build a rebel team in the Liberator crew’s likeness. Ultimately her unshakeable faith and belief in Blake and his cause (little knowing that he has given up on it himself) seals her fate. In turn, Blake draws his strength from his own deep respect for Jenna and Avon – although the blind faith Blake and Avon have in one other proves to be the hallmark of their demise in the final TV episode. Inevitably, all the major characters draw inspiration from each other, even if they are loathe to admit that and even though their admiration of the others is more romanticised than real.
As can be expected, all of the performers in these plays are exceptionally good. Gareth Thomas and Paul Darrow are predictably solid as Blake and Avon respectively, and Stephen Pacey, most likely due to Peter Anghelides’ excellent writing and handle on the character, nails down Tarrant almost perfectly (something that could not be said when he last portrayed the character for BBC Radio in the 1990s, due to poorly written scripts and characterisation). Sally Knyvette again delivers the goods in her solo story. Warship marked something of a renaissance for Jenna and in Jenna’s Story Knyvette again relishes the opportunity to flesh out Jenna and show us just how independent, feisty and resourceful she is. In particular, it is generally assumed by fans that it was Blake’s idea to set up an army on Gauda Prime – writer Steve Lyons ingeniously turns this assumption on its head.
But the best performer of the trilogy is undoubtedly Adrian Lukis as the villainous Bracheeni, a man who proves to be a foil for Avon. Lukis’ voice is captivating and commanding from the outset, rivalling Darrow’s for charm and dry wit, and he conveys a character that is duly cunning and manipulative beneath a veil of humour and amicability. It is a great pity that Bracheeni does not survive the story. As a psychostrategist (similar to Carnell in the TV episode Weapon), Bracheeni would make a great recurring villain for the B7 audio series and partly atone for some of the naff villains that we had to suffer through in the third and fourth series of the TV show!
Volume 6 of The Liberator Chronicles offers an absorbing insight into the lives of the key characters in the B7 saga post-Star One and how they view each other and judge themselves. While the episodes may not completely answer fans’ questions about Blake and Jenna’s whereabouts in the third and fourth seasons or fill in the gaps completely (in fact there is a massive continuity blunder in Blake’s Story*!), they are entertaining and thought-provoking tales that enable us to crawl inside the characters’ heads and appreciate the joy, despair and anguish they feel. Of course, long-term fans will always prefer other versions of the B7 saga that have offered up explanations that are as valid and plausible as this volume (eg how Blake got his scar) but based on the quality of the writing and the performances, The Liberator Chronicles is the superior product. There is potential for Big Finish to continue investigating this hitherto unexplored era of the TV series in future instalments. Give us standalone adventures for Blake and Jenna rather than just the edited highlights, and if the writing and performances are as accomplished as they are in this trilogy, they will be eagerly anticipated by fans.
* Post-script - In Blake’s Story, Blake learns about the destruction of the Liberator before his death is faked by Bruler’s rebels on Jevron. However, in the TV episode Terminal, Servalan reveals to Avon that Blake is dead and she has already attended his funeral on Jevron. She then teleports to the Liberator and it is destroyed. Go figure!
FILTER: - Audio Drama - Blake's 7
Blake's 7: Warship
Monday, 22 April 2013 - Reviewed by Damian Christie
Reviewed by Damian Christie
Written by Peter Anghelides
Given that over the past 15 years, Big Finish Productions has acquired the rights to do audio spin-offs of a variety of cult SF and fantasy TV programmes – Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People, Robin Hood, Dark Shadows, Highlander, even Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis – it is a little surprising that it is only in the last year that the company has (finally) acquired the rights to Blake's 7.
Even then, the new adventures of Blake's crew have been largely limited to the first two volumes of The Liberator Chronicles, with some members of the original cast – Gareth Thomas (Blake), Paul Darrow (Avon), Michael Keating (Vila), Jan Chappell (Cally) and Jacqueline Pearce (Servalan) – performing two-hander narratives, either with each other or with another guest actor playing a completely new part. If long-suffering, diehard fans of the original series have wanted full-cast dramas with the Liberator crew (and not simply stories told by one of the crew), then they've had to console themselves with BF's supplementary range of B7 novels (The Forgotten and Archangel, to date).
In January, all that changed with the release of Warship, the first full-cast B7 audio released by Big Finish and the first story since the second series, in 1979, to feature members of the original cast (yes, if you want to be pedantic, there have been other full-cast audio iterations of B7 since the 1990s, produced by BBC Radio, Magic Bullet Productions and B7 Media respectively, but nonetheless, most of those productions could only muster some of the original cast or they recast the characters altogether).
All the aforementioned original actors return for Warship, along with Sally Knyvette reprising her role as feisty smuggler Jenna. Only sound guru Alistair Lock is the "odd one out", ably doubling as the voices of the Liberator's flight computer Zen and the supercilious computer Orac (parts originally played in the TV series by the late Peter Tuddenham; long-time fans of other B7 audio productions, though, will be aware that Lock also played Zen in the short-lived B7 Media audio revival a few years ago).
Warship is by far the best B7 audio that Big Finish has produced so far. As first-rate and as innovative as Big Finish is at doing two-hander plays, there is no substitute for a full-cast drama. Fuelled by one's own listening imagination, the solid writing by self-professed B7 fan Peter Anghelides, the zest of the original cast and Lock's sound design and incidental music (which recaptures the flavour of original composer Dudley Simpson), Warship is the closest thing we've had to a B7 TV episode in more than 30 years.
The "authenticity" of the story is further helped by its placement in the B7 canon. It neatly bridges the "gap", so to speak, between the second and third TV series. The second one ended on a cliffhanger, with the Liberator acting as the first line of defence against an extra-terrestrial invasion from outside Federation space. When the show resumed, the invasion had been repelled, the Federation had lost more than half of its forces in the war, and the Liberator crew was forced to temporarily abandon ship. Most importantly, the third series began with the loss of its titular character, with Blake going AWOL with little explanation (Thomas having departed the series) and Avon taking charge of the Liberator. Warship goes part of the way to explaining what happened in the interim.
To his credit, Anghelides doesn't just provide a filler between seasons. While it is a logical sequel or companion to second series finale Star One, he introduces enough new, fresh elements into the narrative to make it engaging and exciting while still keeping the writing tight. Warship has all the hallmarks of a studiobound B7 episode (the major setpiece being the Liberator itself), with the action played out mainly between the core characters. Anghelides, though, doesn't shy away from giving the story a celestial, expansive feel and his climax is of such Hollywood blockbuster-style proportions that it would have been well beyond the scope of a TV episode. (Well, the climax could – and probably would - have been attempted on TV but the result would have been decidedly shaky on a 1970s budget! Then again, I suspect even that may be a knowing wink on Anghelides' part!)
However, what makes Warship so successful is how much it feels like a B7 episode in its own right – and that would not have been possible without the inclusion of the original cast. Blake's 7 was so successful on TV because of its strong characterisation and ultimately it is the characters that bring the story to life.
It is a delight to hear all of the principal actors back in their roles and playing off each other. Anghelides can write all the clever one-liners he wants – but if Darrow and Keating, for example, aren't there to execute the delivery, then the battle is half-lost. This is something that is most noticeable in Big Finish's B7 novels – the wordplay between the characters is so flat in places that you realise just how integral the original actors are to making the lines sound right. Similarly, when B7 Media relaunched B7 a few years ago for audio with the characters recast, it was obvious – painfully so! – just how much the original actors had made the parts their own (for example, in the revamped version, Avon was portrayed by Colin Salmon, who did his best with that part but ultimately wasn't a patch on Darrow's acerbic wit).
The repartee between the characters in Warship is worthy of the original series, whether it be exchanges between Blake and Avon, Avon and Vila, Vila and Jenna, or even Cally and Servalan. Anghelides' dialogue, delivered perfectly by the cast, recaptures the dynamic of the original Liberator crew on TV. Although their voices may have become more seasoned with age, Thomas, Darrow, and Keating re-create their roles effortlessly and in turn reprise their on-screen chemistry – the Blake/Avon rivalry and the Avon/Vila double act – as if three decades have not elapsed at all. Even Cally and Jenna, who by the end of the second series had reverted to "housewife status" on the Liberator, get to say some of the best lines and earn their own slices of the action. In Warship, Knyvette and Chappell get the chance for redemption and take it with a vengeance (indeed, both actors discuss their relief at being given something positive to do in the supplementary documentary disc in this release). Although her part in the story is relatively minor, Pearce clearly relishes her lines as Servalan. Even in the face of mutually assured destruction, the listener is reminded of just how duplicitous and cunning Servalan was on TV. As mentioned earlier, Lock also does a creditable job as the ship's computers, recreating Orac's haughtiness - "Kindly do not interrupt while I am enumerating the possibilities!" – and Zen's bombastic, yet precise tones – "That information is not available."
Warship is a magnificent return to form for the Blake's 7 franchise; it has been well worth the wait after a couple of indifferent efforts on audio in a period spanning 17 years and some early workman-like efforts by Big Finish's Liberator Chronicles. Although Big Finish's immediate plans are to do a few more volumes of The Liberator Chronicles over the next 18 months, hopefully the positive reception that Warship has received since its release will convince BF that full-cast B7 audio dramas are the way of the future. There is really no reason why BF cannot follow its successful Doctor Who template of creating "event" box sets, such as the recent Dark Eyes and UNIT: Dominion. It's what the fans obviously want, but no doubt Cally's old Auron saying rings true here too: "Before you desire, you should deserve!" We'll obviously need to pledge our support with our purses first if we are to deserve at least one more full-cast narrative with the original B7 crew.
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You are here: Home / News and Commentary / Uncategorized / In documents, girl details alleged molestation by rabbi, 7 News
In documents, girl details alleged molestation by rabbi, 7 News
July 10, 2015 /in Uncategorized /by admin
An 11-year-old girl who has alleged that a rabbi molested her inside his Miami Beach art gallery in late May shared her side of the story in recently-released state documents.
In the documents, the alleged victim detailed her interaction with Rabbi Steve Karro at his gallery on 41st Street. The day after the incident, she told police, “I went there, and we were like, ‘Oh, how are you?’ And then we hugged. Then he took me to the back room, and then he said, ‘You look so beautiful. Your hair is so pretty. You’ve gotten so big.'”
The girl went on to tell police that Karro “made her sit on his lap. He got up, and then he gave her more hugs, which escalated to kisses.” She told police Karro “kissed her cheeks, then he went down to her neck, and it appeared that the subject was trying to go down to her lips, but she turned her head away so he wouldn’t.”
She told police the rabbi “told her again how beautiful she was, and then he began to touch her hair,” adding Karro told her, “‘It’s really not necessary for you to tell anybody about this.'” According to the documents, the girl said Karro “grabbed her butt when he hugged her with both of his hands.”
The 11-year-old said she told her mother about what allegedly happened the following day. She said Karro went to her mom’s job “because he didn’t want her to notify police.”
Karro was arrested and charged with lewd and lascivious molestation. He has denied any wrongdoing. “Very simple: It’s love, harmony, cleansing, nothing else,” he told 7News after bonding out of jail May 28. “There was nothing there inappropriate, nothing that I had violated anybody’s right.”
The girl’s mother spoke out about the alleged incident on June 24, after 7News aired surveillance video showing Karro giving her an envelope which, she said, contained cash. She gave that money to police. “God forbid, if you can just close your eyes and think about a child who comes home to you, very scared, and says, ‘Mom, I have something to tell you,'” she said.
The mother said, since Karro’s arrest, she has been outcast by her local community. “I know that I have to stand up for my daughter and for this community, maybe for the voices that are scared to speak out. I’m here for you,” she said.
According to the documents, Karro told the girl’s mother he would not do anything sexual to her daughter because he is very caring.
Karro declined 7News’ requests for an interview.
In documents, girl details alleged molestation by rabbi – WSVN-TV – 7NEWS Miami Ft
http://RFRAperils.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/RFRA-perils-logo-smaller.jpg 0 0 admin http://RFRAperils.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/RFRA-perils-logo-smaller.jpg admin2015-07-10 08:23:322015-07-10 08:23:32In documents, girl details alleged molestation by rabbi, 7 News
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Guitarist JASON BECKER Continues To Produce Music While Living With ALS; Video Available
Dan Ashley of San Francisco's KGO-TV (ABC7) reports: It's been 12 years since ABC7 first introduced you to Jason Becker, a former rock star who has continued a brilliant music career against all odds. Doctors were ready to give up on him many years ago, but he's still going strong. ABC7's Dan Ashley recently visited with Jason at his home in Richmond.
The life of a rock star consists of a personal assistant fussing with your hair, a photographer snapping your photo, and a newsman coming for an interview. But Jason Becker is no ordinary rock star. He can no longer speak or move his body, but he remains a brilliant composer with a legion of fans and a new CD.
Jason's musical odyssey began when he was just five and got his first guitar. By the time he was 13, he could play note for note with Eric Clapton recordings. By 17, he had a record deal of his own.
Read the rest of the story and watch the video report at this location. The video report can also be viewed below.
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SONATA ARCTICA To Release 'Talviyö' Album In September
On September 6, Finnish melodic metal titans SONATA ARCTICA will release their tenth studio album, called "Talviyö" (which means "Winter Night"), including eleven new tracks.
"We were talking about having an album cover made from a photo and luckily managed to find this award-winning photographer Onni Wiljami who actually hails from a village not too far from our hometown and his pictures were just perfect for this album," explains keyboardist Henrik "Henkka" Klingenberg.
"The idea was to create an album that is musically in line with at least the previous two albums," says vocalist Tony Kakko and adds: "I am very happy with the songs and the general mood of the album. Some career highlights there, I feel."
"We recorded a bunch of kick-ass songs and tried some new stuff as well. I'm really proud of how we managed to record the band sounding more live, playing together instead of just tracking everything one by one", states Klingenberg.
The official lyric video for the album's first single, "A Little Less Understanding", can be seen below.
"The song is lyrically somewhat a follow up for 'I Have A Right' and talks about the difficulty of making the right choices with the upbringing of a new human being", explains Kakko.
"Talviyö" was recorded between September 2018 and May 2019, produced by Mikko Tegelman and SONATA ARCTICA in Studio57. Additional recordings took place in various other places. The mixing was done by Mikko Tegelman and Pasi Kauppinen and the mastering was handled by Svante Forsbäck for Chartmakers.
"Mikko produced the album and he really managed to push us to do our best, even with the more experimental stuff," says Klingenberg. "Working with an outside producer was the biggest new thing we tried this time."
Tags: sonata arctica
DIAMOND HEAD Guitarist Says He Is 'Fine' With GRETA VAN FLEET Sounding 'A Bit Like LED ZEPPELIN'
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MINISTRY Feat. Ex-TOOL Bassist PAUL D'AMOUR: Video Of HELLFEST MEETS KNOTFEST Performance
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Derby Daily Telegraph - 13 October 1903
DERBY BANKRUPTCY COURT
TUESDAY.— Mr. Registrar W. B. Woodforde.
(The various debtors were examined by the Official Receiver, Mr. F. Stone.)
RE WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.— This debtor (for whom Mr. J. T. Wykes appeared) was at one time a farmer, in business near Shirley, but was now working on the road. His assets were £14 and his liabilities £109. Debtor was not able to give an intelligible account of his affairs.— The official receiver: Can't you remember anything about it?— Debtor: Not much. When the trouble began I put it into Mr. Wykes's hands and had done with.— Debtor was closely questioned as to the sale of certain stock to Mr. Morley, cattle dealer, on the eve of his bankruptcy, and he said he gave £14 of the proceeds to his solicitor. One of the causes of his bankruptcy was the borrowing of money at an exorbitant rate of interest.— The examination was closed.
© British Newspaper Archive
Harrison, William Henry Person
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You are here: Latest Updates » Reviews » Event Reviews » England » London » Review of 'Kinky Boots'
Review of 'Kinky Boots'
http://www.kinkybootsthemusical.co.uk/
Kinky Boots is most definitely a British musical both in body and soul. It tells the story of Charlie Price (David Hunter) a young man whose father runs a men's shoe factory in Northampton. Charlie and his fiance Nicola move to London for her to pursue a career in real estate but a short time later Charlie is called back to Northampton when his father dies. Charlie is left in charge of the factory which he learns has severe financial difficulties with little demand for the traditional men's shoes they manufacture. On a trip to London Charlie comes to the aid of the charismatic drag queen Lola (Simon-Anthony Rhoden) who was being mugged in an alley. In an off-hand comment Lola mentions how uncomfortable she finds the cheap knee-high boots she wears in her act. From this the seeds are sown and Charlie soon comes up with the idea of manufacturing “kinky boots” - Boots for drag stars. Enlisting the design talents of Lola, Charlie faces an uphill struggle to not only convince the factory workers this will work but also come to grips on what he really wants out of life…
A tremendously fun musical with fantastic dance numbers, particularly with Lola and her “Angels”, and great music written by Cyndi Lauper (yes, THE Cyndi Lauper). I can always tell when I have seen a great musical when I can actually remember one or more of the numbers the next day. Today I was on YouTube looking at the signature “Raise You Up” number – A very good sign.
The set is ingenious with an elevated central platform on which is perched the factory office that moves on and off the stage as required, under which the factory goes about it's normal business. The set detail is quite incredible with the care of the designer very much in evidence with even the slightest detail such as the realistic looking shoe making equipment or the shoe molds in racks on the walls. Often it seems cramped on the stage with the performers having to weave in and out it but this actually adds to the tight feeling of the musical itself - Of the walls, or hard reality, closing in on us. This is contrast to the clutter free staging when Lola performs - A space of liberation, freedom and fun.
The pace of the two-act show (with 20 minute interval) is truly breathtaking as the scenes come thick and fast (particularly early on). The performers certainly earn their keep here. As far as voices go, Rhoden particularly stood out as he fully threw himself into the fun and exciting character of Lola. Hunter, despite what seems to be a slight lisp, puts in a considered and sensitive performance as Charlie with a particularly wonderful solo in “Soul of a Man” in the second act. The Angels and the rest of the company all put on expressive and vibrant performances that bring the whole thing to life. This is the second cast for this show but from what I can see they have really nailed it.
The crowd really got into the performance with a standing ovation at the end. There were, let me tell you, a lot of smiling faces.
I was kind of wondering whether the focus would be on the somewhat uncomfortable subject, at least for a musical, of the sexuality of cross-dressing (yes, Rocky Horror, I am thinking of you here) but in this I was mistaken. This is a fun and tenderhearted musical that teaches us that we should be what we want to be rather than what others want you to be. I would suggest that we want to be going to this musical…
Adelphi Theatre
Address: Adelphi Theatre Strand London WC2R 0NS
Public Transport: Charing Cross Leicester Square Covent Garden
URL: http://www.reallyusefultheatres.co.uk/our-theatres/adelphi
Situated right on the Strand on the edge of the West End the Adelphi may be a bit smaller but it is well known for staging some of the longest running shows in town. The art deco exterior extends to the interior with fairly bland and boring decor throughout.
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Darkness Falls (2002)
Weaving Shadows (2003)
Jeff Rickman, detective chief inspector, and Lee Foster, a sergeant, in the CID, in Liverpool, England:
The Dispossessed (2004)
Now You See Me (2005)
Non-series psychological suspense thrillers:
Goodnight, My Angel (1996)
The Desire of the Moth (1997)
Caging the Tiger (1998)
Past Reason (1999)
Dying Embers (2000)
Written as A.D. Garrett
(joint pseudonym of Margaret Murphy and Dave Barclay)
Professor Nick Fennimore, a troubled forensic expert hiding away in Scotland, and Kate Simms, a detective inspector, in Manchester, England:
Everyone Lies (2013) [review]
Believe No One (2014)
Written as Ashley Dyer
(joint pseudonym of Margaret Murphy and Helen Pepper)
Detective Ruth Lake and Detective Chief Inspector Greg Carver in Liverpool, England:
Splinter in the Blood (2018) [review]
The Cutting Room (2019)
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LIVING THE TWI-LIFE: US saxophonist Marcus Strickland talks to SJF about his new album 'Nihil Novi' ahead of his April 30th appearance at the UK's Cheltenham Jazz Festival
Friday, 15 April 2016 12:58 Charles Waring
After seven well-received albums released on a series of different indie labels (including his own Strick Music venture) between 2001 and 2011, Florida-born multi-reed man, MARCUS STRICKLAND, has landed his first major label deal, joining the roster of the prestigious Blue Note imprint. His debut album for the company is the curiously titled 'Nihil Novi,' his first long player in five years. Leading a fresh incarnation of his long-running Twi-Life band - comprising keyboardists Mitch Henry and Masayuki Hirano, trumpeter Keyon Harrold, bassist Kyle Miles, drummer Charles Haynes and singer, Jean Baylor - 37-year-old Strickland (who has an identical twin brother called E.J., who plays drums) has moved away from straight ahead jazz to arrive at an elusive, ineffable sound and style that defies categorization but which references hip-hop, soul and R&B as well as improvised instrumental music. "I approached this record without thinking of genres," explains the saxophonist. "I'm tired of saying, 'yeah, it's music but it has a little hip-hop, a little soul and everything.' All these things come from the same source, which is the blues. So it's almost pointless to try and keep them separate. They're all meant to be mixed together anyway, so that's what's going to happen."
The album was produced by bassist/auteur Meshell Ndegeocello and features cameos by noted keyboardist Robert Glasper, bassist Pino Palladino, and ubiquitous drummer, Chris Dave (who's played with everyone from Mint Condition, and Maxwell to Anderson Paak and Adele). The album is going to figure prominently in Strickland's set list when he and Twi-Life appear at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in Gloucestershire, England on Sunday April 30th.
In an exclusive interview with SJF before his UK trip, Marcus Strickland talked to Charles Waring about his life in music...
Which musicians are you going to bring with you to the Cheltenham Jazz Festival later this month?
It will be Jean Baylor on vocals, Kyle Miles on electric bass, Chad Selph on organ/keys, and Charles Haynes on drums.
Is anyone there that you going to check out during the festival?
I'm definitely going to check out Hiatus Kaiyote because I think they're playing later the same night. That's definitely a priority because I love them.
How long has Twi-Life been going?
The band's been going for a while. Every time I do a Twi-Life record I think of it as starting from zero. Sometimes I'll just change up the whole personnel and that's what I did for this record but I've had the band since 2006. The personnel has interchanged a lot but I think I'm going to stay with this version for a while.
What sort of set will you play festival?
It's mainly going to be from the new album and there might be a few songs that I'm writing already for the second record
Where does the name Twi-Life come from?
Around the time when I named the band there were a lot of i-Phones, i- this and i- that, so I was thinking of playing off that word and playing off the word twilight - you know, equal day and equal night because I kind of had a double life: I was playing saxophone and then I wanted to do other things besides saxophone but with music. So I was beat-making. I just wanted to have another band where I just did all the things that were running in my head so I decided to call it Twi-Life, which is a weird word (laughs).
What's the story behind your new album 'Nihil Novi'? What does the title mean, for example?
Oh, that's exactly why I chose it: an archaic language that nobody knows (laughs). 'Nihil novi' is a Latin term meaning "nothing new" and the full-term is "nihil novi sub soli," which means "nothing new under the sun." It was a phrase coined by King Solomon way back in BC so it was a long time ago. He was the most intelligent King on earth, the King of Kings, and all the kings were influenced by him. He went through all these trials and tribulations and at the end of them said "there's nothing new under the sun." I think it's a very compelling phrase for me because it just means something different in each phase of my life. Right now for me it means creativity. It's not about producing something from thin air but allowing yourself to absorb what's around you so that it can influence the next creation. So that's like 'Nihil Novi,' nothing new. Just look around you and you've got all the inspiration that you need to create.
How does it compare, then, with what you've done?
It's very different. I plan on making each one my records as different as possible. I had five years between the last recording and this one. That's a lot of time to live and my experiences in that interim led me to basically going back to what I started in 2004 when I was listening to J Dilla (pictured) and saying "man, I wish I could make a beat like that." I have the greatest admiration for what he was doing and really appreciate how hard it actually is. So 750-plus beats later... (Laughs), I'm still like "wow, man, it's incredible how all these incredible producers like J Dilla, Madlib, Kanye (West) and Flying Lotus can produce music that is not that long - maybe a total of four minutes and it's a lot of looped music and keeps on repeating over and over - but still it's entertaining and captivating to the audience and keeps them interested for all that time. So I really appreciate beat-making and all of that really went into this record. I was living a double life before but now it's naturally come together - the beat-making and the saxophone playing.
It's got an interesting, textured sound...
Yeah, it was a very particular sound that I was going for because the intention of it was from beat-making, I've been beat-making for a long time. Along with that, you develop a taste for certain sounds because, you know, you want a certain bass sound for this song and a certain bass sound for the others. So I had to kind of look out for people who are prone to production and to understand that it's a very, very particular sound that I'm going for, so with that in mind that's why the band is really coming together because we have like-minds. You can either be open to other types of music and influences or you can just try to act as if you're in a castle (laughs) and can't experience what's outside. But I chose the other route, which is to be open and not think of it as jazz or any other genre and treat it as music, and the music that I want to create.
You're now on Blue Note records. How did that come about?
Man, I couldn't have planned it any better. It came out of the blue for me... pun intended!(laughs). I was getting together this project already and Meghan Stabile who had Revive Music wanted me to play at her stage for (New York's) Winter Jazzfest 2013. I was already putting together my new Twi-Life group and we hardly had any music prepared actually so when we got on that stage the energy was incredible and it was just like we just played what we wanted to play instead of all of the jazz or all of the funk - and I think all of the people who were involved were excited about that, to be able to play without lanes A lot of people who were in the band were also people who had also played with Meshell (Ndegeocello) so she ended up coming to the show and that's when I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if Meshell could produce the record, because I had been listening to all my life. Her music provided the soundtrack to my life. All her records are incredible. So I got the cohones to ask her but I asked her through Charles (Haynes, his drummer), who knows her more personally, of course. I had no idea how I was going to fund the thing (laughs) but I was determined to come up with it. That's the kind of person I am. I'd put out eight records before so I always find a way. But out of the blue I got a call from Meghan, maybe a year later, saying "hey, want to be signed to Blue Note?" and everything really spread from there and it was definitely a blessing. I'm just really grateful and it seems as if it's just meant to be.
What does it feel like to be on such an iconic jazz label? Do you feel the sense of history there?
Definitely. It's a history that I feel is treated as relative to each person's time. Some people see jazz as a castle but I see it as reflecting what's going on right now. Like Wayne Shorter, he put out all those classic records on Blue Note and that was a reflection of what was going on at that time. The same for Coltrane and the same for everybody who was on Blue Note and in keeping with that tradition I think it's important to reflect your own time. It's not so much about history but just like the tradition of being as current as you can and not worrying about the past.
Singing with you is Jean Baylor (pictured left) a member of Zhané in the '90s. How did she get involved?
I met her a while back. I was playing a gig with Marcus Baylor, who's her husband, and an incredible drummer who plays with Kenny Garrett. Jean was on the gig and I didn't really recognise that it was the same singer from Zhané so I had a very genuine, first experience of hearing her sing. Both her and Marcus are very funny people. They were cracking me up and then she got on the mic and started singing and it was the most angelic voice I had ever heard. So I decided right then and there that if I was going to have a band with vocals she was the vocalist that I wanted. I definitely made it a point to ask her to sing and I also discovered that she is a great lyricist. Those two skills, I found out, are very separate but she has honed both of them into one incredible instrument so we co-wrote three songs ('Talking Loud,' 'Alive,' ) on the record and it turned out beautifully.
Robert Glasper plays a couple of tracks with you.
Yeah, he plays on 'Inevitable' and 'Celestelude.'
You go back a long way with him, don't you?
Definitely. He's an incredible source of inspiration to me and many others. I met him before we graduated high school actually. There were all these jazz programs going on at I.A.J.E. (International Association of Jazz Educators) and the exciting part about it for a student is that you get to see all these young musicians that you've been hearing about, like I was hearing about Robert Glasper from HSPA in Houston and he was hearing about me and my brother in Miami at New World School of Arts. So we heard about each other through the grapevine and then when we met at a conference the first thing we wanted to do was jam together. That's what we did and meanwhile we were listening to people like Kenny Garrett and other people at the festival playing so it was incredible experience meeting Robert and we ended up going to the same college, New School University, in New York. It was there I met Casey Benjamin, Keyon Harrold, and Bilal. It was a great community of young musicians and me and Rob were part of that community. We had a great time just learning about New York, because weren't originally from there.
Also playing on the album is bassist Pino Palladino, who's noted for his work on albums by people like D'Angelo. How did it feel to have him on board?
Oh, he's incredible, it's mind blowing. I definitely have a connection with him through Chris Dave, whose band Drumhedz I played with for a while. Pino is a part of that group and to have him on the record was a blessing, man. That was the first thing that I noticed about (D'Angelo's) 'Voodoo' when it came out. I was like, "woah, that bass sound, it's incredible, who is that?" That's Pino. He has a very warm sound. I've learned that that's exactly the kind of timbre that I want from electric bass players: hardly any bite, just a warm, fat sound. Meshell (Ndegeocello) has that too, so, you know, all these people are just an absolute dream to work with.
What did Meshell bring to the album as a producer?
She's a wizard in the studio. The studio is just an instrument for her. It's so comfortable for her. It's incredible to watch her in the process. She's very focused and if she doesn't have the right people in the control booth, she'll kick you out. She is awesome. I was afraid to look at her because she is very intense. I really admire that and I wanted to learn from that. That, I think, was the main focus, to learn from her as much as I could because I really enjoy her records and like to listen to them all the way through and not skip tracks, which is rare these days.
What attracted you to jazz in general and the saxophone in particular?
I think because jazz is basically an art form where you can really express yourself. It wasn't about the composers but about expressing yourself and embellishing on the melody and also taking that embellishment and making a whole other piece right off the fly based on your musical knowledge. Jazz is an extremely high art. It was born out of black American music, born out of the blues and also the church, where they embellished on the melody again and again and that became jazz. So I was really attracted to it and also the second part of your question, the saxophone, I discovered when I was introduced to all the instruments in band class. Our teacher - and I say 'our' because I have a twin brother, EJ, and we were both in band class - introduced all the instruments to us: the tuba, the trombone, and trumpet, and then he finally got to the saxophone. And I thought wow, what the hell's that? I mean it's brass-wind and woodwind and it's shaped all phallic and everything and it attracted me right away so. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it up close. I was 11 years old.
Is it true that you started on the alto sax?
Yeah. My teacher wanted me to start on the clarinet but I was like no, alto. And I think by the time I got to 14 years old, I was listening to a lot of tenor players so I switched to tenor and also liked soprano too because when I was 11, my dad put on Coltrane's 'My Favourite Things' record on. I think it was a very defining moment for me when I heard Coltrane play that song, embellishing on the melody every single time and hearing that voice, the soprano saxophone, with that very nasal sound. So I was really attracted to those instruments but now I've come full circle and am playing alto again.
Which musicians have had the biggest influence on you?
Man, there are so many. I definitely would start with Coltrane (pictured left). He's a perfect example of a person who transcends music and just uses the music as a tool for a message. There's a term in West Africa called griot, a musician and poet who tells the stories of their heritage to educate people. I think that the journey of the Diaspora never really stopped so you have people like Coltrane, who I really think are griots with all the different ways he expressed himself and kept searching. You can tell it's like he's telling his story and our story at the same time.
Do you see yourself then as a storyteller like Coltrane in terms of having a message behind the music?
I don't think of myself in comparison to Coltrane but yes, I think of myself as a griot too. But I think we've lost the storytelling aspect and have institutionalised music to the point where people are just talking about the notes. Like okay, here's a B-flat scale and you've got all the notes in the scale and you just learn it and cool, now you're playing music. But no, there's so much more to it than that - much more, and it comes from living and also comes from being able to express yourself and how you're feeling. The more ability that you have on the instrument the more you can express yourself and the more freedom you have. So the music should not be a barrier to what you're aiming for. It's a tool to get further.
That's very interesting. Coltrane, of course, was a master and you also played several years with another old master - drummer, Roy Haynes. What did you learn from him?
Oh man, it was incredible. He's the whole history of jazz. He played with Louis Armstrong, who was there at the beginning of jazz and he's also played with Lester Young, Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny and just about anybody. It didn't matter what era of the music they came from, he was playing with them and is a perfect example of somebody who is not putting themselves in a castle. So I learned a lot about that. I also learned about melody from him. He knew the lyrics and phrasings of his favourite recordings that we were playing, so if I played a different phrasing, he would go like "no, I want you to phrase it like Sarah (Vaughan) did." And I was like oh, okay (laughs), so I had to learn her phrasing and learned a lot about the particulars of the music and also, Roy was a very cool bandleader who never used his age as a weapon. He already knew that he was older than all of us and had more experience but he didn't use that as a weapon on stage. He was just very exemplary in the way that he led his band. I've said this in many interviews, but I'm going to say it again, the most impressive part of Roy Haynes is that we did a gig and then went outside and got into this limo and the limo guy was blasting Missy Elliott. Roy Haynes who was probably 85 years old at the time - I think he's 91 now - knew every single lyric and was singing along with the whole song. So there you go (laughs). He never stayed in a castle, he was always pushing. That's what I learned from him.
He's the embodiment really of jazz being a living entity, isn't he? It's not for museums, it's something that's alive and reflects people's lives.
Exactly. We need to stop showing Ken Burns' documentaries on jazz because it's still alive and still happening. I think one of the problems is that as jazz musicians we are very involved with learning the music and getting towards the point where we can express ourselves. It's very time-consuming but there are some other things that we can learn too. Jazz was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, that was when it started coming into the mainstream, but now we're at 2016 and a lot of things have happened since then. Communications have changed and the way that we travel has changed and radio stations and their function in our lives has changed - we can make our own soundtrack from singles from everybody's albums, or listen to the whole album on CD player or on an LP. So if we're just paying attention to the instruments and getting masterful at it we're not paying enough attention to the other factors of life that affect music too, like being aware of what's around you in the world. I think if jazz musicians really embrace the times that we're in they won't be seen so much as a museum piece. It's not just us, though, I think other people in their perception of words affect us. As soon as somebody says 'jazz,' they think oh, that's that old stuff, right? First they should listen and then decide if it's old.
Any future projects in the pipeline?
I'm already working on what will be the second record for Blue Note but I'm also working on some stuff with Chris Dave from the Drumhedz - we'll be putting out a new mix tape we're working on. Also I'm doing the next 'Blue Note 75' project which includes Robert Glasper, Derrick Hodge, Kendrick Scott, Ambrose Akinmusire and Lionel Loueke - that record is coming out soon. I also started working with this band The New Jawn - 'jawn' is the way that people in Philly say joint. We haven't recorded yet, we've just started playing but I can't wait to record with that group. It's a piano-less quartet with Josh Evans on trumpet and Christian McBride, of course, is on bass.
Catch MARCUS STRICKLAND at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival on April 30th
Tickets here: http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/jazz/whats-on/2016/marcus-stricklands-twi-life/
'NIHIL NOVI' by Marcus Strickland's Twi-Life is out now on Blue Note/Revive.
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Online Sports Betting Among Failed Bills in New York
June 26, 2019, 10:58 am / sportsbetting03692.pointblog.net
New York lawmakers wrapped up their 2019 legislative session June 24, as more than a dozen bills that would affect the horse racing industry died in one or both houses of the Legislature.
A last-minute bid by some lawmakers and gambling interests to legalize online sports betting fell apart, as did a measure to create a new state panel to track the whereabouts and treatment of retired racehorses.
Nearly 1,000 "same as" bills passed the Legislature at the state Capitol since January. But lawmakers in the two houses did not come together on a host of racing-related measures, including one plan to require a continuing education-like program for Thoroughbred trainers.
Legislation to have New York State join the Mid-Atlantic Interstate Equine Drug Testing Compact also did not see final enactment in the Legislature.
The bill attracting the most attention—and lobbyists retained by casinos, gambling industry suppliers, racing interests, and others—was the online sports betting measure. Supporters said the measure would bring additional tax revenues to the state, provide additional ways for bettors to legally make wagers on sports contests, and keep money from flowing to off-shore companies and states that have legalized sports betting, such as neighboring New Jersey.
The bill was spawned by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last year that lifted a federal ban on sports betting. Assemblyman Gary Pretlow, the bill's sponsor and the chairman of the Assembly's racing and wagering committee, on the last night of session made a play to convince lawmakers in the Cuomo administration to support the measure.
"I'm trying,'' Pretlow said that night.
But Gov. Andrew Cuomo, along with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, said there were serious state constitutional flaws with the approach to permit bets to be made via the internet. The state recently moved ahead with plans to permit sports betting, but only through in-person bets made at four commercial casinos and Indian-owned casinos.
The retired racehorse welfare bill, proposed by Sen. Joseph Addabbo, head of the Senate's racing, wagering and gaming committee, did not advance. It would have created a state commission in 2020 to report on the whereabouts and condition of retired racehorses.
The bill's legislative intent was meant to "ensure the proper treatment of the horses following their racing career and to further prevent the illegal transport of horses to slaughterhouses.'' Pretlow sponsored a similar bill in the Assembly.
The Mid-Atlantic equine drug compact bill, which passed the Senate, was also proposed earlier this year by Cuomo. It did not make it among the bills getting final approval last week.
"One of the things we have strived for on a regional basis ... is to ensure that there are processes to ensure regulations, penalties, thresholds, etc., are as consistent as they can be to make barriers for horsemen moving from one jurisdiction to another as reduced as we can,'' Robert Williams, the state Gaming Commission executive director, said in an interview last month. "The Mid-Atlantic Compact would help advance that cause by allowing a more streamlined process for many of the states that have difficulty in navigating their legislative or regulatory hurdles in achieving those types of goals.''
For the third straight year, the Senate passed a measure to make permanent in law—instead of through a Gaming Commission rule—the existence of a racing fan advisory group to make recommendations to the state and industry on ways to "improve the sport of horse racing from the viewpoint of racing fans.''
For the third straight year, the idea died in the Assembly.
A bill to read more drive more money from video lottery terminal revenues to programs to improve the condition of Aqueduct Racetrack also did not advance.
Also, a measure by Addabbo—banning the use of any performance enhancing drug, including Lasix—gained no momentum after its introduction in the beginning of the year.
Another not passed: a plan by both Pretlow and Addabbo to reverse a decision earlier this year by a state education board requiring that electromagnetic field therapy be done either by a veterinarian or by a technician under the direct supervision of a veterinarian.
In May, the two lawmakers had a "same as" bill on the issue pending before the two houses. By the third week in June, however, an amendment was made to one of the bills. Neither version ended up passing.
"This bill is designed to ... reduce the potential for animal cruelty by allowing better access to care for racehorses by clarifying that the practice of electromagnetic field therapy does not fall with (in) the purview of veterinary medicine. Additionally, this bill will align New York's veterinarian medicine statutory framework with other states that have significant equine industries,'' the two lawmakers wrote in a memorandum in May.
A last-minute push to require owners and trainers to take an online course regarding "the responsible and humane retirement of horses" also did not get final passage when the Legislature ended its 2019 session last Friday. Two lawmakers had proposed that such training be a condition for being able to hold a license to participate in the horse racing industry in New York.
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“I had no idea, until I became a war worker myself, how low wages actually were. When my skimpy little paycheck of $23 a week came to me, I wondered how on earth I could ever live on that in wartime Washington if I were forced to pay my own room, board, transportation, doctors’ bills and other necessities out of it. Then I would look around the shop and wonder how the married women and mothers – the majority there – could support their children and parents as well as themselves on these wages.
“Not only do the women start at a low wage – they stay at it. At the Washington yard and at the other navy yards in the East and West, there are no automatic raises. Raises were accorded on some indeterminate basis. Promotions to supervisory jobs seem to be unknown not only at Washington but elsewhere in navy yards. Equal pay and promotions for women are one of the government standards of employment supported in writing by the Navy Department and seven other federal agencies. The navy yards themselves seem to be unaware of the fact; nor do they observe other standards adhered to on paper by the Department.
“I quickly adapted myself to eating sandwiches held between grimy hands. The yard gave us 20 minutes for lunch, but at least five minutes were gone by the time you had raced and waited at the understaffed canteen for cold,k watery chocolate milk or cola drinks (no coffee except on the midnight shift). The government standard of 30-minute lunch periods, hot lunches and a decent place to eat them is ignored by the Washington yard, which is nearer being the rule than the exception.
“I had mistakenly thought before going to work at the yard that minutes were precious in production. Once on the job, personnel officers and posters proclaimed the need for punctuality and perfect attendance. I was naturally surprised to learn after one day’s work that the main method of disciplining these “precious” workers was to lay them off for as much as a week at a time.l If you were one minute late in the morning, you were made to stand idle for one hour and be docked accordingly. If you forgot to tag in upon arrival at work or at lunch time, after three offenses you were laid off for a day.
“The women whom I met at the yard would stand for practically anything – five months without sleeping in a bed, a solid year on the graveyard shift so as to be home with the kids during the day, the double job,k indigestible lunches, long hours and no promise of a future after the war – all for miserably low wages. The longer I worked side by side with them, the more I admired their endurance – but the more I seethed to see them organized in a union that would help solve their problems. And the more I saw the necessity for really planned production, planned community service, labor-utilization inspectors, planned community service, labor-utilization inspectors, labor-management committees that function and are recognized, and a program to educate the workers about the issues of the war abroad and at home. I admired the patience of the women who stuck by their jobs, day after day, though it was obvious that their usefulness to the war effort was cut in half by the very working conditions which they endured.”
— Susan B. Anthony II, writing in The New Republic, May 1, 1944
I just came home from a visit to Half Price Books, where I scored a copy of “Reporting World War II Part Two: American Journalism 1944 – 1946,” an edition from The Library of America. One of my many dreams would be to line the walls of my house with shelves, and to stock those shelves of all the books published by The Library of America. Each sturdy, clothbound volume, clad in The Library’s trademark black dust jacket, seems to be just the right size to hold in one hand. The text of each page is set in a compact, clear font, and each volume comes with a ribbon sewn into the binding which you can use to mark your place. They are designed to be, and indeed are, classy books for a home library.
I’m especially happy to have found this particular volume because the people of my generation tend to glorify the second world war in a way that borders on indecency, and reading the work of Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, Lee Miller, Edward R. Murrow, John Hersey and their like is such a bracing antidote to the most romantic notions floating around out there.
Which is not to say the men and women of “The Greatest Generation” didn’t do amazing things; they did. But I’ve never read a first-hand report that made them out to be any more than ordinary people who were doing what they were more or less forced to do until the war was over, which wouldn’t be soon enough, as far as they were concerned. Life during the war years was very hard; nobody thought it was all that glorious or romantic, and they said so.
I’m glad The Library of America put this volume together, and I’m going to look for Part One.
“The Greatest Generation” | 3:16 pm CDT
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The TMACOG Blog
A conversation with the Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments
Fulton County Farmer Praises No-till
One in a series of articles looking at the business of agriculture in northwest Ohio.
Scientists have determined that agriculture is the source of more than 80 percent of the phosphorus that reaches Lake Erie and contributes to harmful algal blooms. This series shows how area farmers make choices during the year to both grow a profitable crop and protect the environment that is their livelihood.
Les Seiler and his brother Jerry farm 1,500-1,600 acres in Fulton County near the Village of Fayette. They are in the Tiffin River watershed which drains to the Maumee River. The land is lightly rolling and has a high water table. Les Seiler says that more than 30 soil types have been identified in the immediate area including what he calls “water sand,” a mucky gray soil that he compares to quick sand. The Seiler philosophy of agriculture emphasizes development and maintenance of healthy soil; they use several best management practices to keep the soil on the land with as little disturbance as possible and to ensure that the soil holds the right mixture of water and nutrients. They have run a continuous no-till operation since 1986 and over the years have seen healthy changes in their fields including higher water-holding capacity, increased organic matter, and more biological activity including more beneficial insects.
“Planting cover crop takes a lot of management, but it fits with continuous no-till. I think cover crops are the missing link for soil health. It makes the biological system work.”
– Les Seiler
Many farmers have a six- or seven-month growing season. They plant corn and soybeans in late April or early May and harvest in October leaving the fields without growing or planted vegetation all winter and into early spring. The Seilers keep their fields growing all year around. Les says, “Rain that falls on a living field is pulled up into the plants. Less water runs off.” Rain that stays on the field feeding a crop is not carrying nutrients to area waterways.
Wheat is a cash crop that is planted in October, goes dormant in later winter, then grows quickly in the spring and is harvested in early July. Les is convinced that planting more wheat would go a long way toward keeping phosphorus out of the waterways. There used to be 30,000 acres of wheat grown in Fulton County. That crop is now down to 10,000 acres. One reason is financial; while corn is subsidized and pays well, wheat pays poorly. However, Les Seiler grows wheat as much for its benefits to the soil as for its commercial value. An over-winter crop continues to absorb water and keeps the soil active. Les says that when insects, bacteria and other elements in the soil have a crop growing, the field stays healthier. When the wheat is harvested, they leave the stem (or straw) in the ground and allow it to be decayed by insects and bacteria living in the soil, further enriching the soil.
All fields – wheat, corn, and soybean – are interseeded with a non-cash cover crop blend after harvest giving the fields a constant growing cover. The cover crop mixture includes grasses, clover, and radishes. Most cover crops die off in late winter, decay, and return nutrients to the soil. A crop also functions to hold soil and water in place.
Diversity of Product
Like most farmers in the Midwest, Les Seiler farms mostly corn and soybeans. In 2018, he planted about 550 acres of corn, 800 of soybeans, and 120 acres of alfalfa during the summer. The alfalfa can be harvested two to four times and is processed for animal feed. Winter crops are wheat and, new in 2018, barley.
Barley is a grain that is planted in the fall and harvested in June. Les reports that his entire crop was purchased by a malting company that processes barley for the craft beer industry. The barley was a good fit for Seiler’s business plan because it is a winter crop that he can sell (as opposed to cover crops which he cannot), and because he can plant and harvest it with machinery he already owns. Another bonus of the barley crop is that he can get a second planting out of that field by putting in corn or beans after the barley harvest.
Continuous No-till Farming
Many of the fields the Seiler family manages have been no-till for 30 or more years. The Seilers are convinced that reducing the disturbance of the soil and keeping organic matter in place is key to healthy fields and good yields. When fields are continuously tilled and the soil broken up, the good soil breaks down into fine bits. This loose, light soil erodes easily. It can blow away or run off the field with rain water or snow melt. The topsoil that erodes can carry phosphorus with it, which contributes to harmful algal blooms. Les explains that bare dirt also loses organic matter. The loss of organic matter reduces the soil’s ability to hold on to valuable nutrients and helpful insects, and to retain water.
On fields that are bare, winter weather can result in gullies and washouts. In the spring, a farmer can spend a lot of time and expense filling those gullies and grading the fields to prepare them for planting. A no-till field is less susceptible to erosion and needs less maintenance. To keep soil compaction and disruption to a minimum, Les Seiler says he “tiptoes” on his fields, keeping seed bins half full, for example, to lighten the weight if the ground is wet.
Managing the flow of water is a primary concern on agricultural fields, particularly in northwest Ohio and the Great Black Swamp area. All farms in the region are tiled, with buried drainage that directs excess water to nearby ditches and waterways. Those tiles have somewhat different roles depending on the topography of the fields. Farms in Lucas and Wood counties can be as flat as a pool table. In those situations, water control structures are increasingly used to block the field tiles during dry periods to hold water and keep it accessible to plant roots. In Fulton County where Les Seiler farms, the property is more rolling, with some inclines too steep to plow. Les says water control structures are not appropriate for most of his land. In rolling fields, all the water is moving and farmers want to manage that movement. They want slow moving water that goes where they want it to go, staying at the high spots long enough to water the plants while not flooding the low spots.
To direct rain water and snowmelt, some of the fields that the Seilers farm have waterways planted with grass augmented with stone. These are meandering paths where the water naturally flows. By shaping and planting a waterway, they are able to keep stormwater from causing erosion damage. “It’s true we take some land out of use to build a waterway,” said Les Seiler. “But if I didn’t have it, I’d lose all the corn I’d try to plant there anyway, and we’d be losing soil, too.”
He has also built and planted some swales around stormwater culvert intakes. These swales hold stormwater and allow it to percolate into ground water slowly. Planted grasses, clover, and wildflowers in the swale take up some of the water. If the water is high enough, it reaches the stormwater inlet and is directed to area creeks and rivers.
In one large section of land that they farm, the Seilers had a problem creek. In 665 feet of length, the creek dropped 11 feet, creating a lot of water speed during storms. Due to the drop and soil composition, the creek had carved out a narrow, deep trench and every storm caused steep banks to erode and crumble. They were losing soil. Sediment was being discharged into the river and eventually into Lake Erie. Sediment itself is a pollutant because it can smother habitat in streambeds. But it also carries phosphorus and other nutrients. In a cooperative project with the Nature Conservancy, Conservation Action Project, USDA, Fulton Soil and Water Conservation District, and Fulton County Engineer’s Office, the natural creek was maintained, but the land around it was modified to create a wide two-stage ditch that slows and manages the water. Now the flat bottom is about 35 feet wide. It steps up to a wide shelf with a 2.5:1 slope and the top is about 70 feet wide. This riparian area between fields contains a wide range of plants including grasses, reeds and rushes, clover, and flowering shrubs. In August it was alive with birds, bees, dragonflies, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Beneficial Organisms
This summer, some of the Seilers’ neighbors are worried about aphids in the soybeans. The aphids attack beans and drain away critical fluids just as the beans are ripening. Some of the neighbors are spraying insecticide rather than risk the crop loss. For now, Les Seiler is waiting. He wants to preserve their beneficial insects and doesn’t want to take out the good bugs with the bad ones. Lady bugs and dragonflies are predators that like to eat aphids. Bees and butterflies are pollinators that Les Seiler likes to support. Bacteria and fungus in the soil, which would also be affected by insecticides, perform valuable tasks during the growing year. Because the Seilers have planted riparian strips, these fields have a lot of diversity in insect life. Les said that it’s his dream to not have to use any insecticide but to have such a healthy property that his crops can resist infestation and disease.
A Continuous No-till Farmer’s Thoughts on Lake Erie
Les Seiler says that farmers in the western Lake Erie basin need to take bigger steps to protect Lake Erie. He has some ideas to incentivize best management practices. He strongly believes that keeping live cover on the fields – planting cover crops – does work. He suggests that wheat could be subsidized. It’s good for the land, we need to protect the land, why not incentivize people to grow it? He suggests that with incentives, creative people can find more uses for wheat they way we have found more uses for subsidized corn (as ethanol, as oils, etc.).
Seiler says we should encourage new markets and other innovation. A lot of farmers do their job the way they’ve always done it, but there is room for new techniques and new strategies that could be profitable while protecting the environment. In Fulton County some of the farmers and business interests tried to attract the barley malting industry. While they weren’t successful in getting a firm to set up business in the county, farmers did find a market for their barley.
Les Seiler and his brother are farming with time-intensive strategies, spending more money on cover crops and more time in managing the soil. However, he is sure that his strategies are building a healthy ecosystem that is resilient, which provides good yield, and which protects the soil and water.
Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments | www.tmacog.org
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Home Trade Shows Advertising Subscribe Archives Search Tobacco Products International
US Legislature gives FDA regulatory abilities
Washington D.C. - At the end of July, the US House of Representatives approved legislation for H.R. 1108, the bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration the ability to regulate the tobacco industry.
The measure, which came down to 326 votes for, and 102 against, would allow the FDA to require the disclosure of tobacco ingredients, ban fruit- and candy-flavored cigarettes, and mandate larger health warnings as well as the reduction and possible elimination of harmful substances from tobacco products.
In a statement released shortly after, the Bush Administration said that because it believes �the bill will unfortunately undermine one of the nations premier public health and regulatory institutions�[it] would mandate significant added responsibilities for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that conflict with [the] FDA�s mission of ensuring the safety and effectiveness of drugs, biologics, and medical devices. Significantly, it also would create a new tax that would be paid disproportionately by low-income individuals. Therefore, if H.R. 1108 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.�
The statement continued to list other potential shortcomings if the bill were to be passed, such as stretching the FDA�s resources, personnel, and budget too thin in order to create a new infrastructure, saying that the �FDA does not have the expertise needed to investigate cigarette smuggling and perform other functions clearly beyond the scope of the Agency�s mission and expertise�
�In addition, the bill may spend more than it raises in revenues. ...The existing authority already addresses which tobacco products can lawfully appear in the domestic market, and the record keeping requirements and inspection rights pertaining to those involved in tobacco-related transactions.�
While Philip Morris USA supports H.R. 1108, all other members of the tobacco industry are opposed.
Imperial Tobacco Canada, federal government and provinces reach resolution on contraband tobacco investigation
Montreal - Imperial Tobacco Canada has announced that it has reached a resolution with the federal and ten all ten provincial governments of Canada with respect to the investigation regarding the exporting of Imperial Tobacco Canada products into the United States during the 1980s and �90s.
Imperial Tobacco Canada pleaded guilty to a violation of the Excise Act and has paid fines, and in addition, entered into a 15-year civil agreement, the Comprehensive Agreement.
Benjamin Kemball, President and CEO of Imperial Tobacco Canada, said, �We are pleased to have resolved this issue� Today�s events give our business the stability it needs to move forward to address, with clarity and focus, the issues, opportunities and challenges it faces today and will face in the future.�
The fine that Imperial Tobacco Canada paid was in the amount of $200 mn, and in keeping with the Comprehensive Agreement, must pay to the Canadian government �$50 mn in 2008 and a percentage of Imperial Tobacco Canada�s annual net sales revenue going forward for 15 years up to a maximum of $350 mn,� explained a statement from Imperial Tobacco Canada.
Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc. (RBH) entered into a similar agreement, and RBH will work with the government to fight the illegal tobacco market in Canada.
German Tobacco Group with new web presence
Frankfurt - German Tobacco Group AG, Frankfurt has created a new website to communicate the �company philosophy and strategy,� at the domain germantobacco.com.
The company released a statement saying that the website is an �honest, transparent, and educational approach� towards tobacco, and both German and international smokers �and non-smokers.�
Thomas Deng Mahmoud Schumann, the Chairman of German Tobacco, said �The essence of our new homepage is corporate, social, and individual responsibility, freedom of choice, and tolerance which will be also highlighted in the upcoming marketing and public relations campaign.
Schumann added, �German smokers, tobacco retailers, and tobacco companies finance Germany�s wealth with an annual contribution of e14 bn (US$20 bn)�representing the most stable and fourth highest tax income stream for Germany�s finance ministry.�
More tobacco, less smoke
Richmond - Altria, owner of Marlboro, announced that though it will continue to produce cigarettes, more time and energy will be spent focusing on smokeless products such as snus and snuff.
Test markets established last year for Marlboro Snus have been expanded to include Indianapolis, and Chief Executive Michael Szymanczyk said, �We�re making remarkable progress�We�ve learned a lot that will allow us to efficiently develop our products further.�
General Cigar prevails in trademark infringement and counterfeiting suit
Richmond - General Cigar Co. Inc. announced that the District Court for the District of Nevada has granted its motion for �summary judgment, awarding damages and permanently prohibiting the import, marketing, distribution and sale of infringing COHIBA Caribbean�s Finest cigars and rum.�
General Cigar claimed the defendants were liable for �trademark infringement, dilution, counterfeiting, unlawful importation, unfair competition, and cybersquatting,� and General Cigar was awarded compensatory damages in addition to a permanent injunction.
General Cigar will continue to employ a special task force of attorneys and private investigators to assist in further trademark enforcement efforts.
Philip Morris International to Acquire Rothmans Inc.
New York - Philip Morris International (PMI) announced that it has entered into an agreement with Rothmans Inc. to purchase all outstanding common shares of Rothmans at the rate of CAD$30.00 per share, with a total value amounting to CAD$2 bn.
Once this transaction is completed, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc., Canada�s largest tobacco company, will be wholly owned by PMI, who agreed to make a settlement of CAD$550 mn.
�This proposed acquisition is a win-win for both Rothmans and PMI shareholders,� said Louis C. Camilleri, Chairman and CEO of PMI. �Rothmans shareholders will receive a significant cash premium and PMI consolidates its presence in a market that we deem financially attractive and of strategic importance going forward. The transaction is projected to be modestly accretive to PMI�s earnings per share in 2009. We look forward to welcoming the talented management team and employees of RBH into the PMI family and building upon their solid track record of growth.�
Tobacco International - September, 2008
Tobacco International is published by Lockwood Publications, Inc., 26 Broadway, Floor 9M, New York, NY 10004 U.S.A., Tel: (212) 391-2060. Fax: (1)(212) 827-0945. Printed in the U.S.A.. HTML production and Copyright © 2000 - 2008 by Keys Technologies and Tobacco International Magazine. All rights reserved.
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Country Music Hall of Fame to Honor Keith Urban
Photo credit: http://www.kykx.com/
The Country Music Hall of Fame will introduce a new exhibit later this month. Keith Urban So Far is set to be open November 20th.
The exhibit will focus on this four-time Grammy winner’s drive and exceptional talent. He possesses an historic streak of 34 Top Ten songs and is the only male country artist to debut simultaneously atop the all-genre album charts in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Making this exhibit a must see this fall!
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'Pardon Edward Snowden' petition seeks White House response
Monday Jun 10, 2013 2:10 PM
Mario Tama / Getty Images
About 15 people attended a rally in support of Edward Snowden in Manhattan's Union Square on Monday.
By Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters
WASHINGTON — A petition to pardon Edward Snowden, who has acknowledged leaking secret documents from the U.S. National Security Agency, attracted more than 22,000 electronic signatures by Monday afternoon, one day after it was posted on the White House website.
"Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a full, free and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs," read the petition created by "P.M." of Rochester, New York, on Sunday.
Snowden, an outside contractor for the NSA, announced in a video on Sunday from Hong Kong that he was the source of leaks about the ultra-secret agency's surveillance programs. By Monday, he had dropped out of sight and was expected to face an extradition battle to face U.S. legal charges.
The NSA has requested a criminal probe into the leaks and, on Sunday, the U.S. Justice Department said it was in the initial stages of a criminal investigation.
If the petition gains 100,000 signatures by July 9, the White House will review it, forward it to policy experts and issue an official response as part of the Obama administration's "We the People" effort to engage Americans in government.
White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on Snowden's status at Monday's briefing: "When it comes to the petitions, we obviously will wait, a threshold being crossed before we respond to it. That threshold has not been crossed. ... Assessments are being made more broadly about the damage done here by the appropriate authorities."
The Snowden pardon petition was by far the most popular among those created recently on the White House site at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions, followed by one demanding President Barack Obama's resignation, with just over 13,000 signatures.
A another petition challenging Obama to a live, public debate with Snowden had just over 400 signatures by Monday afternoon, while one to free Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier charged with the biggest leak of classified files in the nation's history, had more than 1,200.
Manning, a U.S. Army private first class, was in the second week of his court-martial on Monday at Fort Meade, Maryland.
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UKRAINE BUSINESS NEWS: THREE ARTICLES
1.UKRAINE ABOVE THE REST IN CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Analysis & Commentary: by Anders Aslund, Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C.
The Moscow Times, Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, 22 April 2009
2.THE EU DAIRY & MEAT MARKET - REAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR UKRAINE?
Two policy papers on the dairy and meat sectors in Ukraineand the EU
Dr. Igor Burakovsky andDr. Heinz-Wilhelm Strubenhoff
Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting
German-Ukrainian Policy Dialogue in Agriculture, Kyiv, Ukraine
U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), Washington, D.C., April 22, 2009
3.INVESTORS AND THE UKRAINIAN STOCK MARKET
By Diana Smakhtina, Vice President, Corporate Governance,
Restructuring, SigmaBleyzer, Kharkiv Office
Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, No 13 (741), Kyiv, Ukraine 13-20 April 2009
1. UKRAINE ABOVE THE REST IN CRISIS MANAGEMENT
A month ago, I wrote a column about Russia's return to sane economic policy, but Ukraine has undertaken an even more impressive turnaround. Few countries have been more misunderstood than Ukraine, which has been particularly hurt by the global financial crisis.
In the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, international finance froze throughout the world. Ukraine suffered from an underlying problem -- its high dependence on steel exports, whose prices and demand collapsed in fall 2008. In the first half of 2008, steel accounted for no less than 42 percent of Ukraine's exports. This year all of Ukraine's exports are likely to drop by almost 50 percent, but imports even more, so the current account deficit will become insignificant.
Ukraine's Central Bank made one serious policy mistake. It insisted on maintaining a fixed peg of the hryvna to the U.S. dollar. Because of the apparent safety and obvious profitability, foreign banks transferred short-term, speculative funds to Ukraine, which expanded the domestic money supply as the exchange rate was fixed and boosted inflation similar to what happened in Russia but worse.
In 2007, Ukraine's money supply surged by 51 percent and inflation peaked at 31 percent in May 2008. The speculative currency inflow widened the current account deficit to 7 percent of gross domestic product in 2008. This was not tenable, although Ukraine's budget deficit was minimal and its public foreign debt was only 12 percent of GDP in 2007.
What ultimately scared foreign investors was Ukraine's open political feuding. International investors are a strange anti-democratic lot who get worried by open arguments between politicians. They prefer strict authoritarian regimes like in China, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
By Oct. 1, the Ukrainian economy suddenly halted. Steel production, mining and construction plummeted by about 50 percent in no time. The largest harvest ever could not salvage the economy. Astoundingly, industrial production contracted by more than 30 percent in the first quarter of 2009 over the same time one year earlier, and GDP probably plunged by 20 percent in this period. In addition, the stock market dropped by 90 percent from its peak last year.
Fortunately, the Ukrainian government acknowledged its crisis in early October and asked for help from the International Monetary Fund. Within four weeks, Ukraine concluded a deal with the IMF -- a large, strong two-year standby agreement with $16.4 billion of credits.
The IMF program was standard with three key demands: a nearly balanced budget, a floating exchange rate and bank restructuring. Ukraine has delivered. After some hesitation, the country's Central Bank let the exchange rate float. Although it depreciated by about 50 percent, it has since stabilized, giving Ukraine a new cost competitiveness.
Together with the international financial institutions, the Central Bank has examined all of Ukraine's banks and quantified their bad debt. Compared to the West, Ukraine's share of toxic debt is small.
Seventeen Western banks have committed themselves to recapitalizing their subsidiaries in Ukraine with $2 billion this year. In addition, it is estimated that two-thirds of the country's refinancing needs this year will be met. Most of this is done by European banks. So far, not a single foreign bank has withdrawn from Ukraine. Their prospects are just too attractive. Similarly, the three big Russian banks --VEB, VTB and Sberbank -- have increased their activity in Ukraine despite the crisis.
The Ukrainian authorities have taken seven private Ukrainian-owned banks under administration, and they have mobilized $2.6 billion for their recapitalization from the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank. All of them understand Ukraine's financial dilemma. The IMF assesses the total need for recapitalization of no more than $5 billion.
Yet the Ukrainian government had problems receiving its second tranche of the IMF loan because GDP declined much more than expected, and thus state revenues. The IMF assessed the budget deficit would be untenable at 6 percent of GDP, even leaving a possible public bank recapitalization of 4.5 percent of GDP aside.
The Ukrainian parliament agreed to increase excise taxes on alcohol, tobacco and diesel, and the prime minister decreed further revenue measures to reduce the budget deficit by 2 percent of GDP. With substantial financing from various international financial institutions, the IMF mission considered that the shortfall was almost covered and recommended a second enlarged tranche.
At the same time, the Ukrainian government has made a break with nontransparent gas-trading arrangements through the gas agreement with Russia on Jan. 19 and the agreement on the gas transit system with the European Union on March 23. These two decisions might belong to Ukraine's most fortuitous reforms. Fortunately, it joined the World Trade Organization in May last year, securing reasonable market access.
On April 1, the Ukrainian parliament voted by an overwhelming majority to hold the next presidential election on Oct. 25, which will help the country to clarify the political situation. The fundamental political problem, however, lies in the confusing constitutional compromise of December 2004, which was one of the most significant results of the Orange Revolution.
Now all major parties demand a transition to a purely parliamentary system that would make it impossible for a president to block all decisions. They also call for open-party lists to make it impossible for wealthy businesspeople to purchase seats in parliament.
Ukraine has not faced the level of social unrest that other countries have experienced, despite the serious blows to its economy. During television talk shows, both the government and opposition speak their minds freely, and the people hear their arguments until they are satisfied -- or bored.
Thanks to early and resolute anti-crisis actions, international reserves remain reassuring at $25 billion, or eight months of imports. Industrial production increased in both February and March over the preceding month, suggesting that Ukraine might already have turned the corner (although GDP will probably still decrease by 8 percent to 10 percent this year). Even the bond and stock markets have soared in the last month.
Ukraine has shown exemplary crisis management thanks to a few Ukrainian top officials --notably Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko -- and a good job by the international financial institutions.
NOTE: Anders Aslund, economic adviser to the Ukrainian government from 1994 to 1997, is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and author of "How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy." Dr. Aslund has served for many years as a Senior Advisor to the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC) in Washington, D.C., www.usubc.org.
LINK: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1028/42/376481.htm
2. THE EU DAIRY & MEAT MARKET - REAL OPPPORTUNITIES FOR UKRAINE?
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC) received the following letter today from the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting, German-Ukrainian Policy Dialogue in Agriculture inKyiv, Ukraine. USUBC thought this key information would be of interest to our members:
German-Ukrainian Policy Dialogue in Agriculture
We regularly share with you major findings of our applied research and policy advisory work. Today, we attach for your consideration two policy papers on the dairy and meat sectors in Ukraine and the EU. May Ukrainian exporters of dairy and meat products in the near future expect to get access to the EU market? If yes, what should the Government and private companies do to make this happen?
[1] The EU Dairy Market – Real Opportunities for Ukraine? by Mariya Ryshkova, Sebastian Hess and Bernhard Voget, Policy Paper AgP19
LINK TO PDF File of Entire 48 Page EU Dairy Market Policy Paper: http://ierpc.org/ierpc/papers/agpp19_en.pdf
[2] The EU Meat Market – Real Opportunities for Ukraine? by Anja Kuznetsova, Sebastian Hess and Bernhard Voget, Policy Paper AgP24,
LINK TO PDF File of Entire 48 Page EU Meat Market Policy Paper: http://ierpc.org/ierpc/papers/agpp24_en.pdf
The first paper [Dairy] has already been published at the end of last year. However, we think that both papers together give a more complete picture. So we decided to attach both papers. All information materials can be down-loaded free of charge from the website of the Institute in English and Ukrainian language: www.ier.kiev.ua; [English version: http://www.ier.kiev.ua/English/news_eng.cgi]
[Policy Papers Link: http://www.ier.kiev.ua/English/papers/papers_eng.phtml]
The papers give an overview on the current situation and future trends of the dairy and meat sectors and policies in the EU. Likely policy changes in the EU and the Free Trade Agreement of the EU with Ukraine will create opportunities.
Of particular importance are quality standards of the EU and of retail chains. These standards will be crucial for opening the door to new markets in Europe and beyond. Even for domestic meat and dairy markets European standards are considered to be important to develop more investment opportunities.
BOOK: AGRICULTURE, BIOENERGY AND FOOD POLICY IN UKRAINE
At the same time we would like to draw your attention to our book publication: “Agriculture, Bioenergy and Food Policy in Ukraine – Analyses, Conclusions and Recommendations”. Free copies in English and Ukrainian language are available on request.
Currently, we are working on genetically modified organisms (GMO) in agriculture comparing legislation, perspectives and policy options in the EU, USA and Ukraine.
Looking forward to an excellent further collaboration. Yours Sincerely,
Dr. Igor Burakovsky Dr. Heinz-Wilhelm Strubenhoff
For further information contact: Iryna Slavinska
Reyterska 8/5 A, 01034 Kyiv
Tel. office (+38044)235-7502, 278-6360
slavіnska@ier.kiev.ua, www.ier.kiev.ua
3. INVESTORS AND THE UKRAINIAN STOCK MARKET
Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, No 13 (741), Kyiv, Ukraine 13 - 20 April 2009
Even people not involved in the investment business are now saying that we need to deal ASAP with the problem of foreign and domestic investments that “escaped” Ukraine. So far “the process is at a standstill.” The world is feverishly watching the ups and downs of global stock market indices and trying to forecasting when, where and how much to invest as the crisis passes.
Everything is much simpler in Ukraine. Many people are already observing with interest the stock index curve of basically the only stock market that functions under market conditions – the PFTS. But when it contracted fivefold in 2008, this didn’t trigger an analysis of the cause and effect relationships: the global crisis – problems with financial resources – global economic recession – investors leaving Ukraine – Ukrainian stock market slump – economic recession in Ukraine. Everyone is used to our stock market being “free” - thereby not related to anything, in general, a totally “independent” market, that is in its early stages – they they’d didn’t even bother with analysis and conclusions.
The first responses to appear and catch the media’s attention were about “speculators having left” the Ukrainian stock market. This is indeed the case because in crisis situations portfolio investors are among the first to leave dangerous markets and look for more reliable environments to put their money.
However, it’s become the norm in Ukraine to associate the word “speculators” with the word “swindlers” that this information was treated very disparagingly. So they left – we don’t need speculators. Not understanding of the essence of stock markets, it’s easy to brush aside the fact that Ukraine lost this important component.
Naturally, those professionally tied to the stock market performed deeper analysis. But their voices weren’t heard. In Ukraine the stock market is viewed as something exotic that appeared and existed, even had its own state regulatory body, simply because that’s what a market economy is supposed to have. Our leaders don’t quite understand the connection between this market and the country’s economy. But what understanding of the role of stock markets can there be given the rapid changes in the “supreme commander of the economy” and constant changes in political priorities.
A stock market requires knowledge and an ability to analyze its impact on the economy…Right now this knowledge is imperative. All the claims concerning the need to improve the investment climate without an understanding of the role of the stock market, moreover in a post-crisis period that we should already be thinking about, remind me of the saying “fine words butter no parsnips.”
So what does Ukraine have today? There are no investors, the stock market has sunk deeply, and it’s not known what will attract investors to Ukraine and when. Let’s take for example the most convenient investments – so-called direct investments. An investor has available resources and is looking to invest them for a period of time to then recoup his investment plus profit. For companies this type of investment is in fact convenient - they’re not burdened with debt obligations and can use the resources received for development.
From the outside this all looks like investments unrelated to the stock market. For “direct” investors, the main task prior to making an investment decision is to calculate the return on investment, taking into account the sectoral, regional and political risks. But before making a decision to move towards Ukraine, this investor will first look at the stock market, even despite its rudimentary state.
Shares in companies, even leading ones, have fallen; corporate bonds have fallen sharply in terms of emission and sale; state securities aren’t being bought; IPOs in terms of numbers and volumes have dramatically declined, and planned IPOs have been cancelled. And somehow this is all on the background of mass departure by portfolio investors, who are called speculators, but who are the first to signal the state of affairs in our economy - worn out from the rapid change in programless governments.
But, let’s say that clear economic programs appeared and the global crisis loosened it powerful grip. Our “direct investor” not only successfully bought the company that dropped in price during the crisis, but is convinced that it hasn’t completely gone under, that it can be built up, and likely with additional corporate resources from that very stock market. As they say “the same old sixpence…”
Everyone will change while the country seeks a way out of the financial and economic crisis. In the banking system the strong will survive, companies will either grow some muscle or leave the market…but the stock market, based on the first year of the crisis, will likely remain as is.
What does an investor want to see from our stock market? What will draw his attention to Ukraine? What will help him become convinced that his property here won’t be lost in battles with competitors or due to excessive corporate interest by those very structures that register this property? What will allow him, if necessary, to invest money into the company he bought at a market rather than manipulated price? Will he be able to buy only a portion of the company, as ends up happening now? But disrespect for any non-controlling share in a joint stock company has long since scared off those investors who could provide a company with money, having, let’s say, a 20 percent share in its ownership.
The stock market’s problems can and should be viewed from various angles, while understanding and interpreting the systematic relations. Ukrainian stock market analysts are closely following the ongoing processes. Their statistics and analysis rather correctly link the circulation of securities with processes in the financial sector and real economy. Unfortunately, it seems that this subject is of interest for a rather small circle of experts.
This analysis is not seriously reflected in any of the anti-crisis programs. Interestingly enough, we have yet to see or hear any stock market experts on the numerous talk shows. There have been many discussions and accusations about the formula for calculating the gas price, about the economic grounds for various tariffs, and about the rate of the hryvnia…as they say – the people will eat it up. But talk shows aren’t to blame for these same people not understanding the impact the stock market has on their pockets.
Ukrainians, to great extent, learn about market economy from talk shows. When they suddenly lose or find money in their wallets, the media and talk shows are the first to respond. They all try to figure out where the money went or came from. They mention the stock market only when there are loud scandals over the loss of money through stocks. The broad reasons for the stock market’s problems aren’t exposed or named. But the names of the “swindlers” and their companies flash on tv screens and in newspaper columns.
There is nobody to discuss the reasons for the drop in these stocks because the usual talk show personalities and media aren’t knowledgeable in these issues…and I have yet to see any stock market experts on the screen. But let’s emphasize once again that these mass shows and publications aren’t at fault – they simply reflect the sad reality. Our leaders and their teams don’t understand the role of the stock market in hyping up the crisis and therefore don’t speak about this.
And what about investors? Those who are more knowledgeable will review the experts’ statistics and analysis. By the time those who aren’t learn the “scandalous facts” - the PFTS has fallen again. Careful, something’s amiss in Ukraine!
They waited it out - the real economy is getting back on its feet, the credit system has lowered its interest rates to reasonable levels, the exchange rate has become more or less forecastable and adequate. Our direct investor (let’s continue with this example because they’re impatiently waiting for his investments) believes that the company he likes based on price and opportunity for growth, will bring him the expected returns on his direct investment. We sympathize with the naïve. However, when it comes to Ukraine, there probably aren’t such naïve investors any longer. They got burned and are awaiting positive changes in the stock market.
Let’s say an investor plans to buy 85% of shares, take on a leading corporate management role proportional to the size of his shareholdings, within time attract additional resources through public (open) emission, thereby lowering his shareholdings to 75%; then, having strengthened the company, find a strategic investor and sell all his shares “into good hands” and leave a good impression about himself on the investment market. He didn’t ruin the company but strengthened it, and even during the sale selected a strategist that will ensure the company’s further growth, which will leave our investor with the normal reputation and not “buy low - sell high.” Ukraine’s dream is to find such investors!
But the harsh realities of the stock market await our investor. While we crawl our way out of the crisis (with complete lack of government attention to this market and to development its legal and normative base) our investor will think thrice before entering Ukraine. And even the ratification of the long-awaited law on joint-stock companies and persistent attempts by the regulator – the State Commission on Securities and the Stock Market – to bring the normative base in line with the realities of the global stock market experience, aren’t easing our investor’s worries.
But perhaps many already understand the truism that the joint-stock form of capital is convenient given its ability to attract investments. The stock market isn’t among the state’s development priorities. Nobody is convinced that by the time we emerge from the crisis the stock market will be able to secure the financial inflows that the economy needs. And we won’t be pressed to wait for investments in Ukraine even with all the measures to “improve the investment climate.”
Let’s trace the obstacles that our direct investor will encounter in implementing his abovementioned plans. We’re not even considering ill-fated corruption, corporate raidership and bureaucratism. We’ll simply look at the state of the legislative and normative base and the registration of the ownership rights to the purchased 85% shareholdings. The current Law “On the National Depositary System and Peculiarities of Electronic Circulation of Securities in Ukraine,” adopted in 1998 (and much needed back then), should have been reviewed a long time ago taking into account the realities of the development of depositary systems around the world. Meanwhile, legislators will never get around to ratifying a new version, let alone a needed new law.
The prepared draft Law of Ukraine “On the Depository System of Circulation of Securities” raises more questions than answers due to the general practice of preparing and approving laws. Mechanisms for enacting laws aren’t adequately worked out. Usually this only involves the legislative coordination – and rather scant at that - between the new law and existing laws. Nobody is bothering with issues related to the systematic coordination of procedures in Ukraine, which opens the way for mistakes, corruption and corporate raidership. The regulator clearly does not have enough functions to ensure enforcement of laws.
Rather, the function is outlined in article 7, paragraph 23 of the Law “On State Regulation of the Securities Market” (define procedures for effective securities legislation enforcement). But the principles, goals and methods of state regulation of the securities market is a separate and extensive topic, especially when there are lively discussions going on about the degree and role of government influence on the market during a global crisis. In acquiring 85% of shares, our investor enters the minefield that is corporate management. It’s expected that he’ll be able to circumvent some mines starting on April 29, 2009, when the new Law of Ukraine “On Joint Stock Companies” goes into effect.
There are also more questions than answers regarding the procedure for executing this law. For certain companies, the old law on business entities will still apply for another two years. It won’t be easy for our investor to sort through these cobwebs. We should also remember that according to the new law, which protects the interests of minority shareholders, minority shareholders have the right to demand that our investor buy their shares. But at what price? Try to make sense of article 8 of the law and its concept of market value. Stock market experts are still holding lively discussions, while investors are thinking of ways to circumvent this norm.
Our investor is getting ready to sell his package of shares and so far has decided to lower it to 75%. He makes a public issue, which allows him to give the company a financial injection for its development. Having learned from his own bitter experience or that of his fellow investors, he won’t lower his shareholdings below 60%. Battles between investors for a place in corporate management in Ukraine have made news around the world. Having carefully read the norm in the new law on quorum for general shareholders’ meetings at 60%, he won’t get burnt a second time.
Therefore, he opts for emission. The 2006 Law of Ukraine “On Securities and the Stock Market” and a host of normative documents issued by the State Commission on Securities and the Stock Market have made the procedure for emissions more or less clear. Unfortunately, these procedures don’t outline the regulator’s concrete and strict responsibilities.
Article 15 of the 1996 Law “On State Regulation of the Securities Market” on the responsibilities of the Commission and its officials “as established by Ukrainian legislation” includes nothing about the responsibility for efficient handling of the issuer’s documents. If they find a mistake in the submitted documents, they make the issuer correct it. Later they find one more mistake and the process repeats itself. As a result, instead of the set normative timeframe, the process is dragged out for a month, while the company and Ukrainian economy wait for money…
It’s often the case that this can be explained by the ineptness of the issuer and his specialists. But Ukraine needs investments, so there should be a procedure that minimizes the time for receiving finances. And there needs to be control over executive discipline. Then there won’t be hallway conversations about bribes to get through normal procedures envisaged by the regulations.
Now our investor is ready to exit the investment. If he didn’t think about this process from the very beginning, then he’s in for endless mess due to discrepancies between tax norms, currency norms, the foreign investor’s status in Ukraine.
The terms in our example were very simplified. We didn’t look at involving professional institutional investors (ICI) in the joint stock company. We didn’t look at problems of stock market operations when shares in our companies are in free circulation and the investor expects an objective assessment of the company’s capitalization, which will help give him a certain reputation and return on the sale of the investment.
And so we wait for the crisis to end, investment climate to improve and investments to increase. As for the stock market – “the same old sixpence.” Per instructions from the Cabinet of Ministers, a new draft “Concept on the Strategic Development of the Financial Sector in Ukraine through 2015” is being prepared. But without a program for getting the stock market through the crisis with concrete decisions and timeframes, without programs for other strategic sectors in Ukraine, we’ll never see these needed investments.
We need to start with a systematic analysis of the stock market’s legislative and normative base and clarifying all the cause and effect relationships. Who can and should do this? The State Commission on Securities and the Stock Market can’t hack it alone. And after all, this research doesn’t fall within its competence. Moreover, there are quite a few regulators in Ukraine who control the circulation of securities. An added plus is that each has its own infrastructure. Ukraine has wonderful experts who should be working on this together with the regulators.
The eternal question remains – where to get the money? After all, the cheap always end up paying double. If we want investments, we have to spend. We’re not talking about pumping tens or hundreds of millions like we’re doing to rescue strategic industries. We’re talking about financing the development of programs. But regulators shouldn’t be developing them alone. Let’s not forget one of the principles of the stock market – the division between making rules and applying rules. Business needs such a program and will find a way to involve its experts in its development.
We could, of course, continue our grand meetings about improving the investment climate in Ukraine, attracting investors, especially western ones. Out of nothing we’ll get nothing. Without decisive and real actions to develop the Ukrainian stock market, our investment climate won’t get through the challenges it faces. During this forced pause and economic recession, our legislators and government institutions are simply duty-bound to use all necessary measures and make a decision regarding the stock market.
NOTE: Diana Smachtina has been working for SigmaBleyzer since its foundation in 1993. She is well known in Ukraine as the leading specialist in issues of privatization and stock market development. She was one of the organizers and is a permanent member of the governing council of the Ukrainian Stock Market. (Ukrainian Association of Securities’ Traders and the Ukrainian Association of Investment Business (UAIB). Under her supervision, SigmaBleyzer was the participant of a pilot project implemented in Ukraine by USAID and PriceWaterhouse.
For more then 15 years, Ms. Smachtina has given lectures on economy and management. She is certified in privatization, asset management of investment funds, and stock brokerage. She has developed creative approaches to modern education.
In 1995, under her supervision and with SigmaBleyzer’s direct participation, Ukrainian Association of Investment Business (UAIB) published a directory titled “Investment business: professionally from professionals”. Her interviews in the mass media and appearances at conferences constantly attract attention due to her deep understanding of the problems of privatization and corporate culture in Ukraine. www.sigmableyzer.com
LINK: http://www.dt.ua/2000/2020/65877/
NOTE: Article translated into English for the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), Washington, D.C., www.usubc.com. SigmaBleyzer, www.SigmaBleyzer.com, is a member of the USUBC.
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TSIRC work with 15 outer island communities, reaching from the northern most point of Australia to the border of Papua New Guinea. Our communities are made up of diverse traditional language and dialect groups.
The Torres Strait Islands are distributed across an area of some 48 000 km². The distance across the Strait from Cape York to Papua New Guinea is around 150 km at the narrowest point; the islands lie scattered in between, extending some 200 to 300 km from farthest east to farthest west.
The Torres Strait was formerly a land bridge which connected the present-day Australian continent with Papua New Guinea. This land bridge was submerged by rising sea levels forming the Strait which now connects the Arafura and Coral seas. Many of the western Torres Strait Islands are actually the remaining peaks of this land bridge.
The islands and their surrounding waters and reefs provide a highly diverse set of land and marine ecosystems, with niches for many rare or unique species. Marine animals of the islands include dugongs (an endangered species of sea mammal), as well as Green, Hawksbill and Flatback Sea turtles and saltwater crocodiles.
Geographically, the islands in the Torres Strait can be divided into four main groups: an eastern group of high volcanic islands; a central group of low sandy islands; a western group of high islands composed of volcanic and granitic rocks; and a northern group of low islands composed of mangrove muds and peats.
For more information, see: Work with us
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Model Killers
Network: bio
Genre: Docudrama
Subject Matter: Crime
Using re-enactments, archival photos and first-person interviews with family members, friends, co-workers, detectives and cops, MODEL KILLERS chronicles stories of models who were killed or models who killed others. Each 60-minute episode features two stories, including the tales of these models: Lisa Davis, a swimsuit model living in Bartlett, Tennessee, who suffered multiple blows to the head and torso and then was shot twice -- once in the chest and a second time in the back of the head -- after coming home from a night on the town with a few co-workers and their acquaintance; and Omaima Aree Nelson (pictured), a 24-year-old nanny and Egyptian-born model, who bludgeoned, skinned, chopped up and consumed her husband after two months of an abusive marriage. Plus, the series also featured stories of: an ambitious male model, with a physique to die for, who was about to become an international sensation -- but not in a way he could have foreseen; a small-town girl from the Midwest, who moved to Hollywood in search of her blockbuster opportunity -- which she accepted despite the risks; and many more swimsuit models and attractive men.
Produced by Great Pacific TV
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Richard Tanter
Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute, and Honorary Professor in the School of Political and Social Studies, University of Melbourne
Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute, and Professor in the School of Political and Social Studies at the University of Melbourne. From 2004 – 2010 he was Professor of International Relations in the Research and Innovation Portfolio, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and Director of Nautilus Institute in Australia, where he coordinated Austral Peace and Security Net, the Australian Forces Abroad briefing book series (including Australian Bases Abroad and Australian Defence Facilities), and the Climate Change and Reframing Australia-Indonesia Security project. Within Nautilus he has been closely involved in the Global Problem Solving project, the East Asian Science and Security Collaborative, and the Indonesian Nuclear Power Proposal study project.
From 1989-2003 Richard was Professor of International Relations in the School of Environmental and Social Studies at Kyoto Seika University in Japan. After returning from Japan in 2003, he was Senior Curriculum Consultant to Deakin University for its Security Studies graduate program at the Australian Defence College’s Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies. His PhD dissertation for Monash University in 1992 was on Intelligence Agencies and Third World Militarization: A Case Study of Indonesia.
Richard has worked on peace, security and environment issues in East and Southeast Asia as analyst, policy advocate and activist since the 1970s. His research has focussed on militarisation and peace issues in Indonesia, Korea and Japan, as well as the wider politics of East and Southeast Asia. In East Asia he has written on questions of Japanese security policy, its intersection with US policy and relations with China, the issues of Japanese missile defence and electronic intelligence capabilities, and the possibilities of Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons. More recently he has been working with Nautilus colleagues and research partners on theoretical and policy aspects of nuclear extended deterrence in East Asia and the Pacific; nuclear energy issues in East and Southeast Asia; and Australian defence and foreign policy.
Senior Research Associate at the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, Melbourne University
Professor, School of Social and Political Studies, Melbourne University
For media enquiries,
rtanter@nautilus.org
Joined August 3, 2012
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Last decade saw greatest emission volumes ever
Climate change is unequivocal, affects all continents and will continue to the end of the century regardless of even the toughest emissions cuts, warned a landmark UN science report today.
Greenhouse gases released by human activity have caused sea levels to rise, Arctic ice to melt and oceans to become more acidic, the report said.
One of climate science’s greatest controversies, the 15-year pause in global warming, is described as an example of natural variability which does “not in general reflect long-term climate trends”.
Fourth and final installment
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] released the fourth and final installment of its latest assessment on global warming in Copenhagen on Sunday after a week of intense discussions between scientists and politicians.
Sleep deprived delegates stayed up to 5am on Saturday morning to finalise the document, which will form the scientific basis of the UN’s negotiations for a new international climate change agreement, set to be signed off in in Paris next year.
“We have the means to limit climate change,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC.
“The solutions are many and allow for continued economic and human development. All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change.”
The culmination of 6 years of work – 830 scientists
The 116-page report brings together six years of work by 830 scientists, who have synthesized over 30,000 scientific papers on the cause, effects and possible solutions to climate change.
The IPCC’s last report came out in 2007.
Since then, the evidence of human influence on the atmosphere has increased, the scientists announced.
And despite more policies designed to limit greenhouse gases, the last decade has seen greater volumes of emissions than ever before, the report warned.
The longer we wait, the more the cost
“The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change,” said Youba Sokona, who chaired the IPCC’s report on options to reduce greenhouse gases.
“Compared to the imminent risk of irreversible climate change impacts, the risks of mitigation are manageable.”
Burning coal, oil and gas has been responsible for 78% of the increase in emissions since 1970, with growing populations and economies driving activity. Greater use of coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel – has undermined attempts to create a cleaner energy system, it says. It warns that that the impacts have been felt across all continents and the oceans.
Global economy’s burden to increase, especially agriculture
The burden on the global economy and sectors such as agriculture is expected to increase as the planet gets warmer.
Even with aggressive emissions reductions designed to keep the world from heating beyond the dangerous threshold of 2C, warming is inevitable until the end of the century, scientists said.
Large fraction irreversible and felt for thousands of years
“A large fraction” of this will be irreversible for centuries, they warn, with impacts continuing to be felt across the natural world thousands of years after temperatures have stabilised.
“To keep a good chance of staying below 2C, and at manageable costs, our emissions should drop by 40 to 70% globally between 2010 and 2050, falling to zero or below by 2100,” said Pachauri.
Only 1000 gigatonnes left of carbon budget
To limit global warming to safe levels, humans can emit no more than 2900 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Of this budget, only around 1000 Gt remains.
Current fossil fuel reserves—the bedrock of the global economy—contain enough carbon dioxide to exceed this budget by up to seven times, the report said.
Dividing it up among countries will prove politically difficult.
The concept of the carbon budget was omitted from the IPCC’s “summary for policymakers”, the 40-page summary which politicians will read, after lobbying from a number of countries including the US and India.
Leading climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern said that the report should be “essential reading” for political leaders across the world.
Solutions are available
Options are available to combat climate change, the scientists say. Reducing emissions now and in the future can “substantially reduce climate change impacts in the latter decades of the 21st century and beyond”.
To keep warming below dangerous levels, emissions will have to drop to near zero by the end of the century, the report says.
The solutions are not financially crippling. Economists involved in the report say that the policies and technologies required to keep global temperatures below 2C will reduce economic growth by around 0.06% every year over the century.
Solutions include humans being richer
As growth itself is projected to be between 1.6-3%, this means that humans will still be richer in the future, even under the most stringent climate policies. And this doesn’t include the benefits of stopping climate change.
Since their previous 2007 report, there has been a “considerable increase” in national and sub-national governments implementing policies to both adapt to climate change and cut emissions.
The report released today will form the scientific basis of UN negotiations, as politicians prepare to sign off a new deal to address climate change in Paris next year.
“If we fail to act, we jeopardise efforts to reduce poverty and endanger food, water and livelihoods for many of the world’s poor,” said Samantha Smith, head of WWF’s climate and energy initiative.
“We also leave today’s youth and future generations with a nearly insurmountable challenge.”
By Sophie Yeo. Source: Responding To Climate Change
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Major Charles Herbert Villiers-Stuart1
M, #72771, b. 2 September 1874, d. May 1915
Major Charles Herbert Villiers-Stuart was born on 2 September 1874.1 He was the son of Captain Henry John Richard Villiers-Stuart and Jane Rigby Murray.1 He married Joan Lascelles Shepley, daughter of Robert Shepley Shepley, on 10 September 1913.1 He died in May 1915 at age 40 at Gallipoli, TurkeyG, killed in action.1
He fought in the North-West Frontier between 1897 and 1898.1 He fought in the Waziristan Campaign between 1901 and 1902.1 He fought in the First World War.1 He gained the rank of Major in the 56th Punjabi Rifles Field Force.1 He fought in the Gallipoli Campaign in May 1915.1
Child of Major Charles Herbert Villiers-Stuart and Joan Lascelles Shepley
Charles Henry Villiers-Stuart1 b. 9 Jun 1915, d. 25 Jan 1987
Joan Lascelles Shepley
Joan Lascelles Shepley was the daughter of Robert Shepley Shepley.1 She married Major Charles Herbert Villiers-Stuart, son of Captain Henry John Richard Villiers-Stuart and Jane Rigby Murray, on 10 September 1913.1 She died on 30 July 1950.1
Her married name became Villiers-Stuart.
Child of Joan Lascelles Shepley and Major Charles Herbert Villiers-Stuart
Charles Henry Villiers-Stuart1
M, #72773, b. 9 June 1915, d. 25 January 1987
Last Edited=26 Jun 2017
Charles Henry Villiers-Stuart was born posthumously on 9 June 1915.1 He was the son of Major Charles Herbert Villiers-Stuart and Joan Lascelles Shepley.1 He died on 25 January 1987 at age 71 at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.2
He was educated at Eton College, Windsor, Berkshire, EnglandG.1 He was educated at Wye Agricultural College, Wye, Kent, EnglandG.1 He gained the rank of Captain in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps.1 He fought in the Second World War, with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.1
[S266] World War II Unit Histories - Officers, online http://www.unithistories.com/units_index/default.asp?file=../officers/personsx.html. Hereinafter cited as World War II Unit Histories - Officers.
Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart1
M, #72774, b. 1 March 1879, d. 22 October 1958
Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart was born on 1 March 1879.1 He was the son of Captain Henry John Richard Villiers-Stuart and Jane Rigby Murray.1 He married, firstly, Phyllis Mary Read, daughter of James C. Read, on 6 December 1914.1 He married Eileen Nora MacLaughlin, daughter of Colonel Alexander John Maunsell MacLaughlin, on 22 December 1933.1 He died on 22 October 1958 at age 79.1
He fought in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.1 He fought in the Waziristan Campaign between 1901 and 1902.2 He fought in the East African Campaign between 1903 and 1904.2 He fought in the North-West Frontier, where he was mentioned in despatches.2 He fought in the First World War, where he was mentioned in despatches five times.2 He gained the rank of Colonel in the 1st/13th FFR.1 He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (D.S.O.) in 1915.1 He was awarded the Chevalier, Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur.2 He fought in the Afghan War in 1919, where he was mentioned in despatches twice.2 He was appointed Officer, Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 1920.1 He was appointed Companion, Order of the Bath (C.B.) in 1924.1
Children of Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart and Phyllis Mary Read
Claire Marie Villiers-Stuart2 b. 15 Jan 1917, d. 11 Oct 1966
Stella Villiers-Stuart+2 b. 25 Mar 1918, d. 22 Mar 2015
Major John Michael Villiers-Stuart+2 b. 13 Apr 1927, d. 16 Jun 1986
Phyllis Mary Read1
F, #72775, d. 26 January 1933
Phyllis Mary Read was the daughter of James C. Read.2 She married Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart, son of Captain Henry John Richard Villiers-Stuart and Jane Rigby Murray, on 6 December 1914.1 She died on 26 January 1933.1
Children of Phyllis Mary Read and Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart
Eileen Nora MacLaughlin1
Eileen Nora MacLaughlin is the daughter of Colonel Alexander John Maunsell MacLaughlin.2 She married Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart, son of Captain Henry John Richard Villiers-Stuart and Jane Rigby Murray, on 22 December 1933.1
Her married name became Villiers-Stuart. She lived in 2003 at The Beeches, Catsfield, Battle, Sussex, EnglandG.1
Major John Michael Villiers-Stuart1
M, #72777, b. 13 April 1927, d. 16 June 1986
Last Edited=17 Jul 2014
Major John Michael Villiers-Stuart was born on 13 April 1927.1 He was the son of Colonel John Patrick Villiers-Stuart and Phyllis Mary Read.1 He married Bridget Mary Grant, daughter of Lt.-Col. Patrick Francis Grant of Knockie, on 23 July 1960.1 He died on 16 June 1986 at age 59.1
He gained the rank of Major in the Queen's Own Highlanders.1
Children of Major John Michael Villiers-Stuart and Bridget Mary Grant
Michael Patrick Villiers-Stuart+1 b. 3 Jun 1961
Marianne Serena Villiers-Stuart+1 b. 10 Dec 1963
Margaret (?)1
F, #72778, b. 1829
Margaret (?) was born in 1829 at Scotland.1 She married Francis Johnston.1
Her married name became Johnston.1
Children of Margaret (?) and Francis Johnston
Francis Johnston+1 b. 1860
Jessie A. Johnston1 b. 1862
Agnes Johnston1 b. 1865
[S4567] Bill Norton, "re: Pitman Family," e-mail message to Darryl Roger LUNDY (101053), 6 April 2010 and 19 April 2011. Hereinafter cited as "re: Pitman Family."
Michael Patrick Villiers-Stuart1
M, #72779, b. 3 June 1961
Michael Patrick Villiers-Stuart was born on 3 June 1961.1 He is the son of Major John Michael Villiers-Stuart and Bridget Mary Grant.1 He married Caroline Mary Marsh, daughter of David Richard Marsh, in 1986.1
He lived in 2003 at Gothic Cottage, 393 Harborne Road, Birmingham, Warwickshire, EnglandG.1
Children of Michael Patrick Villiers-Stuart and Caroline Mary Marsh
Katharine Amelia Villiers-Stuart1 b. 1990
Archie James Villiers-Stuart1 b. 1992
Angus Theodore Villiers-Stuart1 b. 7 Aug 1994
Marianne Serena Villiers-Stuart1
F, #72780, b. 10 December 1963
Marianne Serena Villiers-Stuart was born on 10 December 1963.1 She is the daughter of Major John Michael Villiers-Stuart and Bridget Mary Grant.1 She married, firstly, Oliver John Nicholson in 1986.1 She and Oliver John Nicholson were divorced in 1993.1 She married, secondly, Michael Thomas Donnelly in 1994.1
From 1986, her married name became Nicholson. From 1994, her married name became Donnelly.
Child of Marianne Serena Villiers-Stuart and Oliver John Nicholson
Natasha Elizabeth Nicholson1 b. 1986
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Boy Meets World, on ABC
Amazon; IMDb; Retro Junk; Sitcoms Online; TV.com; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
Not really a great show, but it was okay. (A whole generation seems to have loved it, but I just liked it.) The show is about Cory Matthews (Ben Savage). He has an older brother named Eric (Will Friedle), who's kinda stupid. And they have a younger sister named Morgan. Cory's best friend is Shawn Hunter, who is kinda cool I guess. Cory's girlfriend is Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel). And there was a teacher named George Feeny, who had an interesting relationship with the kids... in a lot of ways, Cory and Shawn find him annoying, and he them, but they also seek advice from him, sometimes. Anyway, other characters came and went. The show started out when the kids were in like 6th grade, but it followed them all the way to college. So we really get to see them grow up, and things change a lot. Like Shawn and Cory kind of found Topanga weird and annoying when they were younger. She was always kind of a teacher's pet, and much more serious about school than they were. But of course they become good friends eventually, and Cory starts dating her. Um... I'm not sure what else to say, except Cory could be kind of neurotic and stuff. It was a reasonably entertaining show, but I didn't always watch it regularly, especially in the later seasons. So, I suppose I'm leaving out tons of details and other characters I should mention, and stuff....
The show ran from 1993 to 2000. In 2014, there is a sequel series, "Girl Meets World." Cory and Topanga are now married, and have a daughter named Riley. I first heard about the show in late 2012, I think, so I've been looking forward to it... probably more than one would expect, considering I generally thought the original series was just okay. But I don't have Disney Channel, so I can't see it, which annoys me.
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Carolina Martínez and Clemente Bernad
Two filmmakers at risk of going to prison because of recording images in the crypt of a Francoist monument.
The prosecutor requests two years in prison and a fine of 12,000 euros to the artists Carolina Martínez and Clemente Bernad for an alleged crime of disclosure of secrets of the Spanish Civil Code.
Carolina Martínez and Clemente Bernad are awaiting the resolution of a trial that was held on November 14 and 15, 2018. The Brotherhood of Volunteer Knights of the Cross (Hermandad de los Caballeros Voluntarios de la Cruz) denounced them for recording images of a mass in the crypt of the Monument to the Fallen (Monumento a los Caídos) of Pamplona. The recording was taken from one of the ventilation grills that connects the crypt with the rest of the building, property of the City council. The prosecutor requests that Martìnez and Bernad face a two year prison sentence and a fine of € 12,000, for a crime of disclosure of secrets. The recording was part of the documentary “A tvs mvertos”, which was broadcast in January 2017 during a conference entitled “What do we do with the Monument to the Fallen?”.
Image from: el diarionorte.es
The Brotherhood of Volunteer Knights of the Cross was created in 1939 by requetés ex-combatants (Carlist militia during the Spanish Civil War) in order “to maintain fully and aggressively if necessary the spirit that led Navarra to the Crusade for God and Spain”. In accordance with the Spanish Law of Historical Memory (2007), the Brotherhood modified its statutes in 2006. The law was to regulate the display of Francoist symbology and the digging out of Spanish civil war mass graves.
The Brotherhood celebrates a mass in the crypt of the Monument to the Fallen on the 19th of each month, so as to coincide with the day in which the Francoist coup took place in Navarre. This ceremony is conducted in the same place from where the General officers involved in the coup, Emilio Mola and José Sanjurjo, were exhumed.
In February 2015, the Parliament of Navarre and the City Council of Pamplona urged the Archdiocese to put an end to any type of celebration in the crypt that was related to the coup of 1936. However, the Brotherhood continues to do the Masses in the crypt.
Although the filmmakers were accused of revealing secrets, they had in fact obtained permission for the recordings from the City Council. These recordings were to be used by the filmakers to produce a documentary.
The prosecutor maintains the accusation of revelation of secrets and requests a two year jail sentence alongside a fine of € 12,000, for recording a mass of an association of Francoist origin from a ventilation grill in a public building. Currently the accused are awaiting sentencing.
In view of these events, various civil groups have demonstrated in favor of the accused, such as the Spanish Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory.
The Parliament of Navarre approved (on November 12th, 2018) a resolution expressing its solidarity with the accused, its opposition to the judicial persecution of those carrying out investigations linked to historical memory, and its objection to the politicization of justice.
Violated rights
Democratic countries protect the free exercise of journalism, as well as the freedom of information, due to their essential role in democratic societies. The Spanish Constitution also contains these provisions and protects these rights as fundamental rights, in accordance with international treaties.
On the other side, the masses in the crypt and the Monument to the Fallen may constitute a criminal offence, set forth in Articles 510 and 515.4 of the Criminal Code, on the public promotion of hatred against a group. Moreover, the Historical Memory Law 52/2007 prohibits commemorative actions of exaltation, personal or collective, of the military uprising and the repression of the Dictatorship. It also provides for the withdrawal of subsidies or public aid.
-Description of facts (in Spanish):
https://memoriahistorica.org.es/tag/zer/
-The Parliament of Navarre sympathizes with Clemente Bernad and Carolina Martínez (in Spanish):
https://www.diariodenavarra.es/noticias/navarra/2018/11/12/el-parlamento-navarra-solidariza-con-dos-personas-que-seran-juzgadas-por-grabar-cripta-los-caidos-620717-300.html
-Interview to Clemente Bernad and Carolina Martínez in at EITB TV program (in Spanish):
https://www.eitb.eus/es/television/programas/esta-pasando/videos/detalle/6003294/videoclemente-bernad-carolina-martinezsobre-misas-cripta-los-caidos/
-Interview on the program La Frontera on Publico TV (in Spanish):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gNvFVp5sr4
-Documental “A tvs mvertos”, done by Clemente Bernad and Carolina Martínez (In Spanish):
https://player.vimeo.com/video/289446380
-Manifest “Freedom is not a crime” in support of Clemente Bernad and Carolina Martínez (in Spanish):
https://lalibertadnoesundelito.net/
-The ARMH denounces to the prosecutor Francoist Masses in Navarra (in Spanish):
http://memoriahistorica.org.es/s1-news/c1-ultimasnoticias/denuncian-ante-la-fiscalia-misas-franquistas-en-navarra/
-Review of the meeting in which the documentary was screened (in Spanish):
https://www.noticiasdenavarra.com/2017/01/29/vecinos/lo-que-importa-a-la-ciudad-no-son-los-caidos-sino-el-proyecto-de-memoria-historica
-Response of the Brotherhood to the Commission of the Presidency, Justice and Interior of the Parliament of Navarre (in Spanish):
http://www.tradicionviva.es/2015/02/16/la-hermandad-canonica-de-caballeros-voluntarios-de-la-cruz-emite-un-duro-comunicado/
-The Parliament of Navarre denounces the judicial persecution (in Spanish):
https://www.nuevatribuna.es/articulo/espana/parlamento-navarra-denuncia-persecucion-judicial-autores-documental-franquismo/20181113165251157418.html
Francoist church recordings
Freedom to report
Volunteer Knights of the Cross
-Institutional declaration of the Parliament of Navarre (in Spanish):
http://www.parlamentodenavarra.es/es/noticias/sesi%C3%B3n-12-noviembre-2018
-Act of the Plenary Session of the City Council of Pamplona, February 15, 2015 (in Spanish):
http://www.pamplona.es/actasweb/actas/WWW_15/PLE_15/PLE_02.feb/a05FEB15.002/PLE15002.htm
-Daily Session of the Parliament of Navarra, February 4, 2015 (in Spanish):
https://www.parlamentodenavarra.es/es/publicaciones/diarios-sesiones
-Text of complaint presented by the ARMH to the Attorney General of Navarre (in Spanish):
https://www.nuevatribuna.es/media/nuevatribuna/files/2018/10/21/Denuncia-Misa-Caidos.pdf
All the cases
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Home » Why Christine Brown in Drag Me to Hell Deserved Everything She Got
Why Christine Brown in Drag Me to Hell Deserved Everything She Got
Nat Brehmer August 9, 2016 3 Comments 245 views 0 likes
Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell is equal parts Evil Dead and Thinner. It’s a supernatural Romani revenge story told through Raimi’s signature style. It’s over-the-top and things go insane, just the way you’d expect it to happen in an Evil Dead movie. But even though the style is there, Drag Me to Hell is a completely different type of film. It’s almost a complete 180 from The Evil Dead. In Raimi’s original classic feature, the evil that assaults our heroes is uncovered accidentally. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what ultimately sets the two apart. In Drag Me to Hell, Christine is the active catalyst for all of the supernatural terror she is subjected to. She has it coming.
When we first meet her, she doesn’t seem like a bad person, and that’s the point. Most horror films, to their core, are about how people react in the strongest, most extreme situations. When those moments come, you find out what kind of person you really are. She starts out like any young woman trying to make it in the world. She’s ambitious, self-motivated, but these traits amplify as the movie goes on to the point that they wind up defining her. In general, these are tricky things to balance in life. As Drag Me to Hell eventually shows, it doesn’t take much for self-motivation to turn into total self-centeredness.
The general point of the film seems to be that people will do anything to survive. That’s what Sam Raimi is exploring and I think it’s completely on purpose that Christine loses all redeeming value as the movie goes on. She’s just another embodiment of his dark sense of humor. Raimi, as a horror director at least, likes to push things to the breaking point. Even in a PG-13 flick, he goes for the gross out and absolutely succeeds. Because you start out caring for Christine, he pushes her into darker and darker territory until you eventually hit a breaking point.
That breaking point is when Christine kills a harmless kitten. Raimi literally picked the cutest, most innocent animal that he possibly could in order to make this scene work and show how far the heroine had gone past the point of no return. This scene is the perfect embodiment of the fact that she will do anything to survive, it doesn’t matter who or what she screws over. In some contexts, this can be something admirable, but there’s a point where self sacrifice looks pretty good too. There’s also a dark irony to the fact that so much of what she’s suffering from is due to her unwillingness to admit she’d even screwed anyone over in the first place.
It takes her a long time to admit that she’s done something wrong. And even when she does, it’s only because she’s tried everything else. She doesn’t believe a word she’s saying. As soon as it proves not to work, she just takes it back. She expects everyone to have sympathy for her as the movie goes on, but virtually the entire plot could have been avoided if she herself had sympathy in the first place. She doesn’t feel bad for this poor old woman or her family. She allows the woman to lose her home simply because she wants a promotion.
And you know what? That part is almost forgivable. It’s terrible, but her boss was looking over her shoulder to see if she could make a tough call and she proved that she could. But she doesn’t feel bad about it, not in any way and that’s made expressly clear. And her inability to feel bad about the entire family she’s hurt only becomes clearer and clearer in more absurd ways as the movie goes on.
She doesn’t care when she finds out that the old woman died. She crashes the funeral, desecrates the body and all she can feel walking away from that is embarrassment. Even after that she still has the gall to ask a member of that family for help, which is unbelievable. She pretends to feel sorry, almost sounds sincere about it, but these are brief and fleeting moments. Every action she takes, both before she’s cursed and after, are driven by her own self-interest.
This is all made abundantly clear when Christine digs up and continues to beat on the dead body of the woman who cursed her, the woman she failed to help, calling her “Bitch” and attempting to give the curse back. It’s absurd and over-the-top and that’s the whole point. This character is drained of all likability by this point and we’re just along for the ride. We’re just there to see what gets thrown at her next.
That’s why I had no problems with the ending, the way many fans did. I think you should be allowed to kill your heroine at the end of a horror film. I think it’s one of the few tricks that audience members never see coming. But that’s not what happens at the end of Drag Me to Hell. It’s not the hero who’s dying, it’s the villain. The person who deserved sympathy was the old woman who got down on her needs and begged for help, who’s motivations were pointedly selfless as she was looking after her family’s future since she would be dying soon.
You don’t need to feel bad for the protagonist at the end of Drag Me to Hell. In fact, you probably shouldn’t, especially after her intense slaughter of a small kitten. Her desperation is somewhat admirable, but she’s just fighting the inevitable and continually proving how terrible she is as the action escalates, and I think that’s ultimately the point.
Tags: 2000s horror, drag me to hell, horror features, horror films, horror movies, Sam Raimi
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This article is about the percussion instrument. For other uses, see High hat.
2 Modern stands
2.1 Clutch
2.1.1 Drop clutch
2.2 Cable hats
2.3 X-hats
3 Use
A modern hi-hat
The drum kit
(1) Bass drum
(2) Floor tom
(3) Snare drum
(4) Hanging/Rack toms
(5) Hi-hat
(6) Crash cymbal
(7) Ride cymbal
(8) Splash cymbal
(9) China cymbal
Not shown
sizzle cymbal
swish cymbal
crash/ride cymbal
drum stick
traps case
electronic drum
A hi-hat (hihat, high-hat, etc.) is a combination of two cymbals and a foot pedal, all mounted on a metal stand. It is a part of the standard drum kit used by drummers in many styles of music including rock, pop, and blues.[1] Hi-hats consist of a matching pair of small to medium-sized cymbals mounted on a stand, with the two cymbals facing each other. The bottom cymbal is fixed and the top is mounted on a rod which moves the top cymbal towards the bottom one when the pedal is depressed (a hi-hat that is in this position is said to be "closed" or "closed hi-hats").
The hi-hat evolved from a "sock cymbal", a pair of similar cymbals mounted at ground level on a hinged, spring-loaded foot apparatus. Drummers invented the first sock cymbals to enable one drummer to play multiple percussion instruments at the same time. Over time these became mounted on short stands - also known as "low-boys" - and activated by foot pedals similar to those used in the 2010s. When extended upwards roughly 3' (76 cm) they were originally known as "high sock" cymbals, which evolved over time to the familiar "high-hat" term.[2]
The cymbals may be played by closing them together with the foot pedal, which creates a "chck" sound or striking them with a stick, which may be done with them open, closed, open and then closed after striking to dampen the ring, or closed and then opened to create a shimmering effect at the end of the note. Depending on how hard a hi-hat is struck and whether it is "open" (i.e., pedal not pressed, so the two cymbals are not closed together), a hi-hat can produce a range of dynamics, from very quiet "chck" (or "chick") sounds, done with merely gently pressing the pedal; this is suitable for soft accompaniment during a ballad or the start of a guitar solo, to very loud (e.g. striking fully open hats hard with sticks, a technique used in loud heavy metal music songs).
While the term hi-hat normally refers to the entire setup (two cymbals, stand, foot pedal, rod mechanism), in some cases, drummers use it to refer exclusively to the two cymbals themselves.
Dance band drummer with sock, or low-hat, cymbal
Sabian 10" mini-hats, 1980s
Vented UFIP 14" hi-hat cymbals
Initial versions of the hi-hat were called clangers, which were small cymbals mounted onto a bass drum rim and struck with an arm on the bass drum pedal. Then came shoes, which were two hinged boards with cymbals on the ends that were clashed together. Next was the low-sock, low-boy or low-hat,[clarification needed] pedal-activated cymbals employing an ankle-high apparatus similar to a modern hi-hat stand. A standard size was 10 inches (25 cm), some with heavy bells up to 5 inches (13 cm) wide.[2]
Hi-hats that were raised and could be played by hand as well as foot may have been developed around 1926 by Barney Walberg of the drum accessory company Walberg and Auge.[1] The first recognized master[3] of the new instrument was "Papa" Jo Jones, whose playing of timekeeping "ride" rhythms while striking the hi-hat as it opened and closed inspired the innovation of the ride cymbal. Another claim, published in Jazz Profiles Blogspot on August 8, 2008, to the invention of the hi-hat is attributed to drummer William "O'Neil" Spencer (b.1909-d.1944). Legendary Jazz drummer, "Philly Jo Jones" (born as Joseph Rudolph Jones, b.1923-d.1985), was quoted describing his understanding about the hi-hat history. Jones said, "I really dug O'Neil. He came to club in Philadelphia where I was working in 1943, I think it was, and talked to me about the hi-hat. I was using a foot cymbal, the low-hat. O'Neil was the one who invented the hi-hat. I believe that, man. He suggested I close the hat on '2' and '4' when playing 4/4 time. The idea seemed so right hadn't heard anyone do that before."[4] The editor of the 2008 Jazz Profiles article made specific mention to others who are thought to invent the hi-hat, including Jo Jones, but also Kaiser Marshall. Not to take away from Papa Jones accomplishments in drumming style and technique, a 2013 Modern Drummer article credits Papa Jones with being the first to use brushes on drums and shifting time keeping from the bass drum to the hi-hat (providing a "swing-pulse focus").[5]
Until the late 1960s, standard hi-hats were 14 inches (36 cm), with 13 inches (33 cm) available as a less-common alternative in professional cymbal ranges, and smaller sizes down to 12 inches (30 cm) restricted to children's kits. In the early 1970s, hard rock drummers (including Led Zeppelin's John Bonham) began to use 15-inch (38 cm) hi-hats, such as the Paiste Giant Beat. In the late 1980s, Zildjian released its revolutionary 12-inch (30 cm) Special Recording hats, which were small, heavy hi-hat cymbals intended for close miking either live or recording, and other manufacturers quickly followed suit, Sabian for example with their 10-inch (25 cm) mini hats. In the early to mid-1990s, Paiste offered 8-inch (20 cm) mini hi-hats as part of its Visions series, which were among the world's smallest hi-hats. Starting in the 1980s, a number of manufacturers also experimented with rivets in the lower cymbal. But by the end of the 1990s, the standard size was again 14 inches (36 cm), with 13 inches (33 cm) a less-common alternative, and smaller hats mainly used for special sounds. Rivets in hi-hats failed to catch on.
Modern hi-hat cymbals are much heavier than modern crash cymbals, reflecting the trend to lighter and thinner crash cymbals as well as to heavier hi-hats. Another evolution is that a pair of hi-hat cymbals may not be identical, with the bottom often heavier than the top[citation needed], and possibly vented. Some examples are Sabian's Fusion Hats with holes in the bottom cymbal, and the Sabian X-cellerator, Zildjian Master Sound and Zildjian Quick Beats, Paiste Sound Edge, and Meinl Soundwave. Some drummers even use completely mismatched hi-hats from different cymbal ranges (Zildjian's K/Z hats), of different manufacturers, and even of different sizes (similar to the K Custom Session Hats where the top hat is a 1⁄16 inch (1.6 mm) smaller than the bottom). Max Roach was particularly known for using a 15-inch (38 cm) top with a 14-inch (36 cm) bottom.[dubious – discuss]
Other recent developments include the X-hat (fixed, closed, or half-open hi-hats) and cable-controlled or remote hi-hats.[6] Sabian introduced the Triple Hi-Hat, designed by Peter Kuppers. In this variation of the hi-hat, the top cymbal moves down and the bottom cymbal moves up simultaneously while the middle cymbal remains stationary.
Drop-clutches are also used to lock and release hi-hats while both feet are in use playing double bass drums. Drop clutches are commercially available from DW Drums, Gibraltar Hardware and Tama.
Modern stands [ edit ]
Bottom hat tilt screws
Most stands have retractable spikes, shown here extended, to minimize slipping
10 inch mini-hats with (1) hi-hat rod and clutch (2) tom and cowbell holder (3) hi-hat legs and pedal
Hi-hat pedal and legs
The standard hi-hat features two cymbals mounted on a stand consisting of a mating metal tube and rod supported by a tripod and linked to a foot pedal. The stationary bottom cymbal sits atop the tube, typically perpendicular to the ground, but is but often fitted with an adjustment screw allowing it to be set slightly tilted. The top cymbal is mounted bell up on the rod and closed against the bottom by foot pressure on the pedal.
An integrated clutch assembly includes a spring which may be adjusted to set resistance, which also varies rate and tension of return, as well as an adjustment for the gap between cymbals when open.[6]
Standard terminology has evolved. Open and closed hi-hat refer to notes struck while the two cymbals are apart or together (open or closed), while pedal hi-hat refers to parts or notes played solely with the pedal used to strike the two cymbals. Most cymbal patterns consist of both open and closed notes.[7]
Some hi-hats allow the tripod to be tilted or rotated. Another configuration omits the tripod and attaches the stand to the side of the bass drum, particular suitable for kits with very large or double bass drums.
Clutch [ edit ]
The standard clutch uses a knurled collar partially threaded below the cymbal and a pair of knurled rings above it. The collar is tightened against the end of the thread, while the rings are tightened against each other.
Tama hi-hat clutch of the traditional pattern
The same clutch disassembled
The same clutch installed on a top hi-hat cymbal
Drop clutch [ edit ]
A drop clutch allows a pair of hats mounted on a conventional hi-hat stand to be closed without use of the pedal.
The drop clutch is provided with a lever that can be operated by hand or struck with a drumstick. This action releases the upper hi-hat cymbal, which falls onto the bottom cymbal and remains there, with gravity then holding the hats loosely closed, and allowing them to be played by the sticks in this position. Operation of the pedal re-engages the clutch and allows the player to resume normal playing.
Drop clutches were developed to allow players using double bass drum pedals to play closed hi-hats without needing to operate the hi-hat pedal, and this remains their primary application.
As it relies on gravity to close the cymbals, the drop clutch gives the player no control over the tension holding them together, and supplies only minimal tension. On the other hand, if the player manually lowers the top cymbal of a standard hi-hat stand before playing, this allows any desired tension to be set, and the pedal can still be used to increase the tension while playing, but not to open the hats or to reduce the tension. Some drummers prefer this technique and reject the drop clutch as too limiting to the sounds available.
A less common alternative is the locking hi-hat pedal, such as the Tama "Cobra Clutch". This and similar high-end locking pedals do allow for control over the tension. It is engaged by pressing a lock pedal separate from the main pedal.[8]
Cable hats [ edit ]
A cable hat or remote hat uses a cable to allow hi-hat cymbals to be positioned independently of the pedal. Operation is otherwise normal.
X-hats [ edit ]
An X-hat is an adapter to allow a pair of hi-hat cymbals to be mounted in a closed position on a cymbal stand. There is no pedal, the hats are simply kept closed at a constant tension, similar to a cymbal stack. They are associated with heavy metal music, particularly styles that use double bass drumming, a two-foot technique. By using an X-hat, a drummer who is already using both feet on the bass drum pedals can still play hi-hat.
Use [ edit ]
Characteristic rock and hip hop hi-hat pattern play (help·info)
Four-four pattern with open (o) and closed (+) hi-hat (see: percussion notation) play (help·info)
Hi-hat "crescendo" from closed to open leading to the ride cymbal[9] Play (help·info)
When struck closed or played with the pedal, the hi-hat gives a short, crisp, muted percussive sound, referred to as a "chick".[citation needed] Adjusting the gap between the cymbals can alter the sound of the open hi-hat from a shimmering, sustained tone to something similar to a ride cymbal. When struck with a drumstick, the cymbals make either a short, snappy sound or a longer sustaining sandy sound depending on the position of the pedal.
It can also be played just by lifting and lowering the foot to clash the cymbals together, a style commonly used to accent beats 2 and 4 in jazz music. In rock music, the hi-hats are commonly struck every beat, or on beats 1 and 3, while the cymbals are held together. The drummer can control the sound by foot pressure. Less pressure allows the cymbals to rub together more freely, giving both greater sustain and greater volume for accent or crescendo. In shuffle time, a rhythm known as "cooking" is often employed. To produce this the cymbals are struck twice in rapid succession, being held closed on the first stroke and allowed to open just before the second, then allowed to ring before being closed with a chick to complete the pattern (the cymbals may or may not be struck on the chick).
A right-handed drummer will normally play the hi-hat pedal with his left foot, and may use one or both drumsticks. The traditional hi-hat rhythms of rock and jazz were produced by crossing the hands over, so the right stick would play the hi-hat while the left played the snare drum below it, but this is not universal. Some top modern drummers like Billy Cobham, Carter Beauford, Shawn Drover and Simon Phillips, play open handed, striking with their left. Some, such as Kenny Aronoff, and Jason Finn of The Presidents of the United States of America, use both techniques. Some trap sets may also include an extra hi-hat on the right for right-handed players. This is shown[clarification needed] when drums or cymbals in the middle of the set are played with the hi-hat rhythm. The technique is common with metal genres, such as Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Mike Portnoy formerly of Dream Theater. In both rock and jazz, the drummer will often move the same stick pattern between the hi-hat cymbal and the ride cymbal, for example using the hi-hat in the verses and the ride in the chorus of a song, or using the ride to accompany a lead break or other instrumental solo.
Roger Taylor, drummer for the band Queen, plays with many unique hi-hat techniques, including opening of the hi-hat on every backbeat for a rhythm emphasis and leaving the hi-hat slightly open when hitting the snare. His trademark hi-hat beat is opening the hi-hat on first and third before hitting the snare.
Phil Rudd of AC/DC also uses distinct hi-hat techniques, which include very heavily accentuating the hi-hat hit on each beat and softer in between.
Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones uses a technique in which he does not play the hi-hat in unison with the snare drum at all. If playing a standard 8th note pattern, he will play the hi-hat on 1 and 3 and not playing it on 2 and 4 where the snare drum is played.
In much hip-hop, the hi-hat is hit with drumsticks in a simple eighth-note pattern, although this playing is usually done by a drum machine or from an old recording from which the sound of a hi-hat is recorded and loaded into a sampler or similar recording-enabled equipment from which it is triggered.
Audio (Ogg Vorbis)
Hi-hat Closed hi-hat 41 KB (help·info)
Open hi-hat 58 KB (help·info)
Hi-hat being opened and closed by its foot pedal 48 KB (help·info)
See the Drums page at Wikimedia Commons for more
^ a b Nichols, Geoff (1997). The Drum Book: The History of the Rock Drum Kit. London: Balafon Books. pp. 8–12. ISBN 0879304766.
^ a b Guide to Vintage Drums, John Aldridge, Hal Leonard Corporation, 1994, ISBN 9780931759796
^ "Drumming Innovators: Papa Jo Jones". Drum!. Archived from the original on 2015-10-08. Retrieved 2015-09-02.
^ http://www.jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2008/08/wonder-of-philly-joe-jones-part-1.html?m=1
^ http://www.moderndrummer.com/article/february-2013-papa-jo-jones-bridge/
^ a b "Pearl Drums Hardware" 2004 Archived 2007-11-06 at the Wayback Machine
^ "Audio Graffiti: Guide to Drum & Percussion Notation"(PDF). August 2004.
^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2015-07-01. Retrieved 2012-01-28. CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link) retrieved 29/01/2012
^ Peckman, Jonathan (2007). Picture Yourself Drumming, p.201. ISBN 1-59863-330-9.
List of percussion instruments
Pitched percussion
Gubal
Handchime
Unpitched percussion
Bodhrán
Bongo drum
Jam block
Lagerphone
Triangle (musical instrument)
Washboard (musical instrument)
Acme siren
Clash cymbals
Percussion groupings
Cymbal manufacturers
List of drum manufacturers
List of marimba manufacturers
List of timpani manufacturers
Classification of percussion instruments
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Africa Syndicate Blog
Why The Africa Syndicate Blog?
In January 2016, The Africa Syndicate Blog was created to provide a platform to share historic, social, and economic development opinions on Africa and its people. As other existing blogs are not easily accessible to Africans on the continent, we are providing this accessible and “free” blog to all Africans and especially, to policy makers and Africa’s youth--the future of the continent. Opinions expressed are that of the editors.
How to Create Jobs for Africa’s Youth? Simple! Get Involve
The objective of this article is to briefly remind us of the alarming youth unemployment problem on the African continent. What have Africans, not just their leaders, done to help address the problem? The high rates of unemployment will continue to have serious impacts on the rights of Africans to earn their living. The consequences of unemployment are already self-evident: population movements into bloated cities; migration to Europe and elsewhere that often leads to the death of young, educated people in foreign seas, and the abuse and incarceration of those who make it to foreign land. Youth unemployment also threatens the national security of all 54 African countries, and by extension that of the Western nations as more young Africans become susceptible to the rhetoric of extremist groups.
Global Trade Under Fire: What that Means for Africa?
By all accounts, international trade is in trouble as anti-globalization sentiment continues to grow across continents especially in the U.S. and Europe. Some say it’s the slow economic recovery that has fueled protectionist, xenophobic and nationalistic politics that has given rise to Donald Trump and Marine LePen. It is undeniable that there is a popular sense of disenfranchisement or being left behind by many citizens in these nations.
African Diaspora Remittances What Should the African Governments Do?
The long standing problems with remittances to African countries and the need to address the factors that currently impede the full benefits of remittances from materializing must be the focus of African governments immediately.
Africans Abroad for the Promotion of Education in Twenty-First Century Africa
The twenty-first century has ushered in an era of ever-heightened power of ideas and knowledge. Although natural resources, such as the ones that make the African continent one of the wealthiest regions of the globe, remain vital to economic prosperity through industrialization; and although labor-intensive and capital-intensive activities are central to the creation of such prosperity, the current revolution in information and communication technology makes ideas and knowledge all the more critical. Contrasting the decline of Detroit, the former automobile hub of America, and the rise of Silicon Valley, the information and communication technology capital of America and the world, may seem to be a cliche. It does, nevertheless, speak to that critically.
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Francis Israel Regardie (November 17, 1907 – March 10, 1985) was an occultist, writer, and a personal secretary to Aleister Crowley. A prolific author, he published multiple works on magick, including The Tree of Life, The Middle Pillar, and the infamous Crowley biography The Eye in the Triangle. He also released the comprehensive, eponymous work The Golden Dawn—much to the chagrin of members of that Order—bringing to light the occult organization’s secrets and ceremonies, with the goal of preserving them for all time.
Born in London, England to Ukrainian Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Regardie would develop a deep interest in Qabalah, and the Western and Eastern mysteries. Regardie reached out to Crowley after reading Book 4, and by Crowley’s invitation in 1928, went to England to serve as Crowley’s personal secretary. Though Regardie studied under Crowley and showed immense respect for his work in his own writings, the two had a falling out in 1932, and there is no evidence that their relationship was ever reconciled.
A Probationer of the A∴A∴ under Crowley, Regardie went on to take Gerald Suster as his Student. As one of the last living individuals to have studied directly under Crowley, Regardie’s magical ability and knowledge of occultism was respected and sought after by serious magicians and Thelemites all his life. Phyllis Seckler, a.k.a. Soror Meral, corresponded with Regardie and sought his advice regarding her own work in A∴A∴, though Regardie insisted that he was not qualified to instruct her further. Through these letters, the two became close friends.
Regardie was first a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in America, the Golden Dawn successor Stella Matutina. He then became a member of the A∴A∴ and later, a IX° of the O.T.O.
Regardie, who taught psychiatry at Los Angeles College of Chiropractic, was a proponent of the chiropractic movement and psychoanalysis, with an interest in Reichian, Jungian, and Freudian psychology. Regardie placed a heavy emphasis on the role of psychology in the life of the magician. He went so far as to insist, in his work The Middle Pillar, that a foundation in psychology was necessary for a proper working of magick. Regardie’s work is now included on the A∴A∴ Student reading list of multiple groups, and his work is considered indispensable by many modern magicians and practical occultists.
Regardie retired from chiropractic and psychiatric work in 1981, moving to Sedona, Arizona where he spent the remainder of his days. He died of a heart attack on March 10, 1985, aged 77.
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Onesicritus also mentions his colleague Calanus trying to meet them, who is initially denied audience, but later invited because he was sent by a "king curious of wisdom and philosophy".[108] Onesicritus and Calanus learn that the yogins consider the best doctrine of life as "rid the spirit of not only pain, but also pleasure", that "man trains the body for toil in order that his opinions may be strengthened", that "there is no shame in life on frugal fare", and that "the best place to inhabit is one with scantiest equipment or outfit".[107][108] These principles are significant to the history of spiritual side of yoga.[107] These may reflect the ancient roots of "undisturbed calmness" and "mindfulness through balance" in later works of Hindu Patanjali and Buddhist Buddhaghosa respectively, states Charles Rockwell Lanman;[107] as well as the principle of Aparigraha (non-possessiveness, non-craving, simple living) and asceticism discussed in later Hinduism and Jainism.[citation needed]
^ James Mallinson, "Sāktism and Hathayoga," 28 June 2012. Archived 16 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine [accessed 19 September 2013] pgs. 2 "The earliest references to hathayoga are scattered mentions in Buddhist canonical works and their exegesis dating from the eighth century onwards, in which it is the soteriological method of last resort."
Jain yoga has been a central practice in Jainism. Jain spirituality is based on a strict code of nonviolence or ahimsa (which includes vegetarianism), almsgiving (dana), right faith in the three jewels, the practice of austerities (tapas) such as fasting, and yogic practices.[249][250] Jain yoga aims at the liberation and purification of the self (atma) or soul (jiva) from the forces of karma, which keep all souls bound to the cycle of transmigration. Like Yoga and Sankhya, Jainism believes in a multiplicity of individual souls which bound by their individual karma.[251] Only through the reduction of karmic influxes and the exhaustion of one's collected karma can a soul become purified and released, at which point one becomes an omniscient being who has reaches "absolute knowledge" (kevala jnana).[252]
Alexander Wynne observes that formless meditation and elemental meditation might have originated in the Upanishadic tradition.[93] The earliest reference to meditation is in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest Upanishads.[67] Chandogya Upanishad describes the five kinds of vital energies (prana). Concepts used later in many yoga traditions such as internal sound and veins (nadis) are also described in the Upanishad.[59] Taittiriya Upanishad defines yoga as the mastery of body and senses.[94]
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Birth defects (cleft lip/cleft palate). If you take Qsymia during pregnancy, your baby has a higher risk for birth defects called cleft lip and cleft palate. These defects can begin early in pregnancy, even before you know you are pregnant. Women who are pregnant must not take Qsymia. Women who can become pregnant should have a negative pregnancy test before taking Qsymia and every month while taking Qsymia and use effective birth control (contraception) consistently while taking Qsymia. Talk to your healthcare provider about how to prevent pregnancy. If you become pregnant while taking Qsymia, stop taking Qsymia immediately, and tell your healthcare provider right away. Healthcare providers and patients should report all cases of pregnancy to FDA MedWatch at 1-800-FDA-1088, and the Qsymia Pregnancy Surveillance Program at 1-888-998-4887.
"...[T]here is the cultivation of meditative and contemplative techniques aimed at producing what might, for the lack of a suitable technical term in English, be referred to as 'altered states of consciousness'. In the technical vocabulary of Indian religious texts such states come to be termed 'meditations' ([Skt.:] dhyāna / [Pali:] jhāna) or 'concentrations' (samādhi); the attainment of such states of consciousness was generally regarded as bringing the practitioner to deeper knowledge and experience of the nature of the world." (Gethin, 1998, p. 10.)
The Yoga Sutras are also influenced by the Sramana traditions of Buddhism and Jainism, and may represent a further Brahmanical attempt to adopt yoga from the Sramana traditions.[129] As noted by Larson, there are numerous parallels in the concepts in ancient Samkhya, Yoga and Abhidharma Buddhist schools of thought, particularly from 2nd century BCE to 1st century AD.[139] Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is a synthesis of these three traditions. From Samkhya, the Yoga Sutras adopt the "reflective discernment" (adhyavasaya) of prakrti and purusa (dualism), its metaphysical rationalism, as well its three epistemic methods of gaining reliable knowledge.[139] From Abhidharma Buddhism's idea of nirodhasamadhi, suggests Larson, Yoga Sutras adopt the pursuit of altered state of awareness, but unlike Buddhism's concept of no self nor soul, Yoga is physicalist and realist like Samkhya in believing that each individual has a self and soul.[139] The third concept Yoga Sutras synthesize into its philosophy is the ancient ascetic traditions of meditation and introspection, as well as the yoga ideas from middle Upanishads such as Katha, Shvetashvatara and Maitri.[139]
Drugs.com provides accurate and independent information on more than 24,000 prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicines and natural products. This material is provided for educational purposes only and is not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Data sources include IBM Watson Micromedex (updated 3 June 2019), Cerner Multum™ (updated 4 June 2019), Wolters Kluwer™ (updated 31 May 2019) and others.
Theosophists including Madame Blavatsky also had a large influence on the Western public's view of Yoga.[207] Esoteric views current at the end of the 19th century provided a further basis for the reception of Vedanta and of Yoga with its theory and practice of correspondence between the spiritual and the physical.[208] The reception of Yoga and of Vedanta thus entwined with each other and with the (mostly Neoplatonism-based) currents of religious and philosophical reform and transformation throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mircea Eliade brought a new element into the reception of Yoga with the strong emphasis on Tantric Yoga in his seminal book: Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.[209] With the introduction of the Tantra traditions and philosophy of Yoga, the conception of the "transcendent" to be attained by Yogic practice shifted from experiencing the "transcendent" ("Atman-Brahman" in Advaitic theory) in the mind to the body itself.[210]
PEAK's core responsibility is to provide practical training and education for undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Health. These types of opportunities foster the development of knowledge, skills, and abilities for the students and provide professional level health, fitness and wellness services to the University and Community members.
^ James Mallinson, "Sāktism and Hathayoga," 28 June 2012. Archived 16 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine [accessed 19 September 2013] pgs. 2 "In its earliest definition, in Pundarīka's eleventh-century Vimalaprabhā commentary on the Kālacakratantra, hathayoga is said to bring about the "unchanging moment" (aksaraksana) "through the practice of nāda by forcefully making the breath enter the central channel and through restraining the bindu of the bodhicitta in the vajra of the lotus of wisdom". While the means employed are not specified, the ends, in particular restraining bindu, semen, and making the breath enter the central channel, are similar to those mentioned in the earliest descriptions of the practices of hathayoga, to which I now turn."
The chart presents data for patients who completed treatment at each time point. Some patients left the study or stopped taking Qsymia prior to completing the full 56 weeks. The drop off rate for placebo was 47% (687/1477), recommended dose was 31% (150/488) and high dose was 38% (561/1479). The most common reasons (>2% of patients) were: adverse events, patients lost to follow up, patients who withdrew consent, or lack of efficacy. https://www.facebook.com/Buzzing-Offer-Self-Help-342022286679901/
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Kaki King performs her latest show “The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body,” which fuses a mesmerizing light show with King’s melodic guitar compositions. Photos courtesy of Simone Cecchetti
Eastside Scene
Kaki King brings colorful performance to Kirkland
The project fuses visual storytelling with King’s guitar melodies.
by Kailan Manandic
Friday, March 30, 2018 1:36pm
LifeEastside Scene
A lone figure sits on stage with a stark, white guitar and begins to play. The stage goes black before the guitar explodes with light and flashes images of ocean waves, buzzing wildlife and electricity.
This is solo guitarist, Kaki King’s unique project that fuses guitar melodies and visual storytelling into an innovative performance that she’s bringing to the Kirkland Performance Center (KPC).
The unique performance, “The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body,” utilizes projection mapping to cast colorful textures, shapes and “visions of genesis and death” onto King’s guitar, which was customized specifically for the project.
“No one else is doing projection mapped guitar work, playing and composing the way I do,” King said. “Expanding the visual aspect of the guitar was a natural way to keep pushing the boundaries of the instrument.”
King has released eight albums, performed with numerous bands, including Foo Fighters, Timbaland, and The Mountain Goats and contributed to a variety of film and TV soundtracks including Golden Globe-nominated work on Sean Penn’s “Into The Wild”.
Currently, King is on a world tour and will visit the KPC on April 5. Her first album, “Everybody Loves you”, was released in 2003 and she hasn’t stopped developing her art since then.
“I never had a grand scheme,” she said. “I just kept taking the next right step. Kept working and trying and experimenting. Same thing still works for me today.”
“The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body,” is her latest project, which King created in 2014. The entire show revolves around King’s signature Ovation Adamas guitar. King created a visual experience that is projected onto her guitar, throughout the hour-long performance, as she plays.
“I’m a guitarist and I try to push the boundaries of the instrument as far as I can,” King said.
King added that she’s grown a lot over her 15-year-old career. Originally, she said she didn’t even want to perform for a living.
“The idea terrified me,” she said. “I just ended up having to quit all my other jobs because eventually touring and performing was taking up all of my time.”
The music hasn’t been King’s only change over her career. She started out as a self-described “lonely depressed gay teenager” and is now a married woman with two children.
“Some of my early work was the best because there was no pressure for it to be great or do or say anything,” King said. “I will say I’m a much more stable and well adjusted human being, but most people can say that of themselves between 23 and 38.”
King added that there was an unfortunate shift in her fan base throughout her career. She said she lost an intimacy with her following as it grew.
“It was sad when I realized things had changed,” King said. “I used to have fun times hanging with fans early on—back when there would be 30-40 people at a gig. Now due to the actions of some super weirdos I have to protect myself a lot more. I’m an open person but I have to be careful who I’m letting into my world sometimes.”
King has been touring with this project since 2014 and has numerous shows scheduled throughout the country throughout April.
Currently, her final tour date is scheduled for Aug. 10 in Australia. Afterwards, King plans to spend some time with her family before working on her next projects.
“I’m excited for my son to start walking, talking and eating solid food, and I want to teach my daughter to read,” King said. “After that, I’ll focus on more art.”
Kaki King performs her latest show “The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body,” which fuses a mesmerizing light show with King’s melodic guitar compositions. Photos courtesy of Simone Cecchetti Photo courtesy of Simone Cecchetti
Kindering Gala launches a big promise to the littlest among us
Northwest wine: Red Mountain is red for many reasons
© 2019, Bellevue Reporter and Sound Publishing, Inc.
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We gonna do the best we can 'til we can't
This quote by Willie Dee Wimberly of The Open Door Community perfectly sums up my attitude about why we ought to be involved in organizations that seek a better world.
http://opendoorcommunity.org/
In my 26 years as an ordained minister in a mainline church like the United Church of Canada I have seen hundreds if not thousands of volunteers give themselves to a cause larger than self. One of the many reasons I can’t bring myself to complain about the hours I work, the salary I am paid or the demands of this work is that every day the folks doing the work beside me are volunteers who contribute their time, talent and treasure to this effort. How can a 52 year-old man complain when an 80 year-old volunteer arrives at the church first thing in the morning, works all day and then drives home without any pay, little thanks and an aching back? I can’t.
I am blessed to have this work, have this community to work with and most importantly serve a mission or cause that is so fulfilling. I am proud of the work I do, but more importantly I am proud of the people I do it with and the mission we all serve. But with age comes perspective and one thing I have learned is that while the mission endures the institutions that harness that mission change, many die and many more emerge to meet different times and places.
There was a time in my career when I thought my role was to keep this institution afloat. But the mainline churches have been in decline long before I was ordained. The signs of decline are easy to see; aging membership, reduced attendance, less revenues, churches closing, morale low. As new ministers are called to serve individual churches you hear the yearning for a saviour, someone who will emerge with a plan, or a gift for preaching, or a gift for engaging youth, something that will arrest the arc of decline and replace it with an explosion of new growth. There are just enough examples, a handful, across our country, to keep this dream alive. But there are only so many John Pentlands, Lisa Vaughns, or Anthony Baileys to go around. The truth is most of us in the mainline ordained ministry are not charismatic figures, most are introverts, good listeners, excellent pastors, but not the type of personality or skill-set who help grow a church by reaching out to the spiritual seekers and searches in our communities.
So what are we to do in these times of decline? Some leaders in the church try to find easy solutions; lay leaders say that ministers aren’t what they used to be, as if the model of ministry in the 50’s and 60’s would work today. Some clergy say that lay leaders are cliquish, afraid of change and uninterested in the latest theological trends, as if these things don’t also describe we clergy. But what of the assets that remain, the thousands of volunteers in churches across this country, the caring ministers who serve the church, the buildings that are often underutilized, the money raised each week, are there not countless ways these assets could be harnessed by a mission to make an even more lasting difference?
Today in the mail I received the last newsletter to be produced by The Open Door Community of Atlanta. For 35 years a small committed band of disciples have managed, staffed and funded important work for Atlanta’s homeless community. They did everything they could to make this mission work and they succeeded. Think of the lives changed, both those who offered the shelter and those who received it, the relationships changed all concerned. But now, 35 years later, that small band of disciples are older, frail, and lacking the energy they once had. They had hoped a younger group would come along and assume the responsibility of leadership. Younger people did come, volunteers for a time, but they did not stay. The neighbourhood also changed, gentrification emerged and the homeless population are no longer located in that area like they once were. So the core leadership are moving on, selling the building they collectively purchased 35 years ago with their own money, using the proceeds to move closer to their grown children and grandchildren, wherever that might be.
Which brings me to the quote from Willie Dee Wimberly, “We gonna do the best we can 'til we can't”. What is the shame in proclaiming that we did our best and will continue to do our best until we can’t any longer? Why is that attitude so wrong? What I like about it is the lack of nostalgia, the lack of blame, the lack of defeat. We do what we can until we can’t any longer. How refreshing! No one wants a mission statement that reads “we survived” or “we are bitterly still trying” or “we’d succeed if only they tried harder”. Instead people who work and volunteer want to serve a cause larger than self, one where we keep the thing that brought us to this work in front of us, keeping our “eyes on the prize”.
And when we are done doing all we can we can rest in the assurance that our lives matters, that other’s lives mattered, that life has purpose and we know this because we were there, doing our best.
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News Campus
Nat Geo explorer delivers critique against travel influencers
Courtesy Ryan Chui
Shown above, Andrew Evans gives his take on the values of traveling the world.
By An Nguyen
People sometimes call Andrew Evans an influencer. He hates it.
Evans — a travel writer, TV host, and author who has completed over 40 assignments for National Geographic — delivered the first speech of TEDx University of Rochester 2019 in the Feldman Ballroom on Sunday.
His talk, ranging from his travels to his philosophies on life, was titled “How to Be an Influencer.” But he is far from a proponent of standard influencer culture, which he referred to as “the latest iteration of imperialism” that leads to “irresponsible travel behavior.”
“What influencers have done is to take the whole world and remap it into whatever is #instagrammable and toss the rest,” Evans said.
Evans began his talk by talking about an earlier iteration of imperialism: Commodore John Byron’s encounters Pacific islands 1765.
Evans detailed how Byron, “sailing across the infinite blue Pacific Ocean at the speed of a child’s bicycle,” was in dire straits when he stumbled across two beautiful islands. Much to the despair of his sick crew, the coral was too shallow, preventing a landing. And the natives on the beach, carrying 16-foot spears, were not particularly welcoming. For two days Byron tried and failed to successfully dock his ship, Evans said, until finally he fired a cannonball over the heads of the natives and sailed. Byron, frustrated by these failures, marked down the islands on his new map under the name “the Islands of Disappointment.”
Evans recapped the story as “a stranger attempts to come to shore. He fails to engage or understand the locals. He captions their entire society with a single emotion — disappointment — and for 254 years, that name sticks.”
More than two centuries later, Evans himself embarked on a journey to the Islands of Disappointment, which he refers to by their native names, Tepoto and Napuka. Even though Evans arrived unannounced like Byron, he was welcomed by the locals, who shared their resources and smiles.
Evans spoke of the necessity of the “basic travel manners” he practiced, like listening, paying attention to the culture, paying for his stay, and asking for permission before photographing anyone.
The experiences in the Pacific islands changed Evans, who said that “the biggest souvenir of my lifetime of wandering has been unfolding the blueprint of my own ignorance. Every time I go somewhere, I learn what I don’t know.”
He said his career as a professional traveler has shown him the dangers of our ethnocentric tendencies and the confirmation bias that arises from them.
“We interpret the world based on our own tribe, our own psyche, our own experience,” Evans said. “And in the colonial era, we tended to define the whole world on how we could exploit it. The Gold Coast, Côte d’Ivoire [the Ivory Coast], the Spice Islands.”
In the modern era, this exploitation lives on through social media travel influencers, who have monetized the sanctity of travel, Evans said.
“Because now everyone is looking for Instagram-worthy selfie spots, […] we’ve destroyed iconic travel destinations,” he said. “We’ve downgraded and cheapened what I love most about travel, which is real connections with real people in real places.”
Evans views social media as the conduit for mass discontentment, describing how “we are creating a universe of unrealistic expectations. That, in turn, is going to lead us to be more and more disappointed, in our travel and everywhere else.”
For Evans, the complexity of the world, in all its varied, diverse beauty, was not meant to serve as a backdrop for our social media accounts. “It’s the world, and you are a part of it,” he said.
“The real test of travel is not our glossy expectation of the exotic world; it’s how we react to a place when we get there.”
Yet the talk was not a call to completely disconnect from the Internet. Evans admitted, “It’s too late. We’re already part of the Matrix, yo.”
Instead, true to this year’s “What if?” TEDx theme, Evans asked the audience, “What if we were less concerned about becoming influencers and a little more discerning about the influences that we let into our lives? What if we paid closer attention to who was drawing our map of the world? And what if occasionally we said no thank you, unsubscribe?”
He ended the talk with a call for action: “We need to be open and to listen to the places that we go to. We need to laugh at our mistakes. We need to correct our misconceptions. We need to attack our own ignorance […] and above all, we need to keep space in our life for good people.”
Tagged: TedxUniverstityofRochester
An Nguyen is a member of the Class of 2022.
Mangelsdorf
Sarah Mangelsdorf begins UR presidency
By Wil Aiken on Jul 2, 2019
New University President Sarah Mangelsdorf officially began her role on Monday, according to a university-wide email sent from her office.…
The ultimate fun and competitive club sports experience
By Micah Greenberg on Apr 29, 2019
This weekend, Men’s Club Ultimate Frisbee traveled to Oneonta to compete in the USA Ultimate Division III Metro East Regional Tournament. A strong showing in inclement weather at this weekend’s games could allow the team to qualify for the national Division III tournament.
By Shweta Koul on Apr 29, 2019
“People we honor seem to be more and more men, white men in particular [...] We have hundreds of women alumni who are super important. Where are they?”
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Washington, DC weather in July 1995
Temperature for July 1995
In July 1995 the average high temperature in Washington, DC was 89.8°F, and this was 0.9°F warmer than the average of 88.9°F. The hottest day in July 1995 was 15 July when the temperature reached 99.0°F. Overnight the average temperature in July is 70.4°F and in 1995 the average overnight temperature was 2.7°F warmer at 73.1°F.
Precipitation for July 1995
In July the average monthly rainfall in Washington, DC is 2.27 inches with rain usually falling on 11 days. In July 1995 there was a total of 4.03 inches of rain, that fell on 10 days.
The climate summary for this page is based on data from the Global Summary of the Day and is based on weather observations between September 1936 and December 2012.
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International / New plant
Viet Nam Chooses Japan as “Partner for Building two Reactors” Nuke Info Tokyo No. 139
by CNIC_english_admin · November 12, 2010
On October 31, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung issued a joint statement stating that the Vietnamese Government had “decided to choose Japan as the cooperation partner for building two reactors at the second nuclear power plant site in Ninh Thuan Province”. The statement also indicated that negotiations on the substance of a Japan-Viet Nam nuclear cooperation agreement had been concluded and that the two countries expect to sign the agreement soon.
On November 24, 2009 the National Assembly of Vietnam approved a plan to build up to four reactors at two sites with an initial budget of about US$11 billion. It was reported earlier this year that the Vietnamese Government had chosen Russian technology for the construction of two reactors at its first nuclear power plant site, also in Ninh Thuan Province. On October 31, the same day as the Japan-Viet Nam joint statement, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev witnessed the signing between Russian state nuclear conglomerate Rosatom and the Vietnamese Government of an estimated US$5.6 billion contract for construction of the two reactors at the first site.
Construction of these nuclear power plants is scheduled to start in 2014, with operations of the first reactor scheduled to start in 2020.
Akihiro Ohata, Minister for Economy Trade and Industry, issued a statement saying that Japan Atomic Power Company (JAPCO) and Vietnam’s state-owned utility Electricity of Viet Nam (EVN) would shortly begin a feasibility study and that the recently established International Nuclear Energy Development of Japan Co., Ltd. (JINED – see News Watch on page 11) and EVN would make arrangements to speed up detailed consideration of the construction, operation and maintenance of the nuclear power plants. He also said that related ministries and agencies would work together to assist Vietnam with training, and to put in place safety regulations and related systems.
The Democratic Party of Japan is elated with its “great achievement” in winning Japan’s “first nuclear power plant export”, something that not even the Liberal Democratic Party could achieve during its many decades in office. But how does the Japanese Government view its responsibilities in relation to the proposed export? It is hard to imagine that the Vietnamese Government has provided its people with accurate information, or that it will allow genuine participation by the residents around the proposed site in Ninh Thuan Province’s Ninh Hai District. Japan is taking advantage of disparities in access to information and lack of participation in decision-making processes in order to enable it to export nuclear power plants. This is equivalent to engaging in the worst type of polluting export.
Prime Minister Kan gave his assurance that Japan would “meet the conditions that Viet Nam had set out.” These conditions were quoted as follows:
“…assistance in conducting feasibility studies for the project, low-interest and preferential loans for the project, use of most advanced technology with highest safety standards, technology transfer and training of human resources, cooperation in the waste treatment and the stable supply of materials for the whole life of the project.”
One can only wonder how Japan proposes to meet conditions such as “the highest safety standards” and “waste treatment”, when it cannot even fulfill its responsibilities in these areas for Japan’s own nuclear program.
The way ahead is completely unclear. During a meeting held on November 2 between the Ministry for Economy Trade and Industry (METI), NGOs and Social Democratic Party leader, Mizuho Fukushima, a METI official admitted that none of the key details had been decided, including price or plant type, and that the whole deal could collapse if future negotiations do not yield agreement.
JINED, which includes Japan’s major plant makers and electric power companies, is the central point of contact. Nevertheless, the companies remain rivals. The Yomiuri Shimbun (November 1 Japanese edition, November 2 English edition) noted, “Profits reeled in by individual firms … likely will differ greatly depending on the terms of contracts Vietnam will propose hereafter.” Nikkei Shimbun (November 1) expressed concerns, saying, “From a cost-benefit perspective it is doubtful whether adequate results will be achieved” and “participation in [plant] operation provides an opportunity to expand business overseas, but if there is an accident this could develop into a situation which shakes [the company’s] finances.”
So, while Japan may have taken a significant first step in dividing up the spoils of what remains of the alleged nuclear renaissance, there is still a long way to go before this deal is done.
Baku Nishio and Philip White
Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center
NPT PrepCom and the US-India Nuclear Deal Nuke Info Tokyo 118
Kaminoseki NPP: Sea Reclamation Begins Nuke Info Tokyo No. 133
The No Nukes Asia Forum 2011 Nuke Info Tokyo No. 144
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No, You’re Not More Likely to be killed by a Right-Wing Extremist than an Islamic Terrorist
Posted January 13, 2018 10:15 pm by Zosimas
“Muslim adults comprise less than 1% of the U.S population, and yet according to the [Government Accountability Office] study, are responsible for a whopping 27% of the terrorism in the country. This is a significant overrepresentation among such a tiny minority…”
by Damion Daniels, Areo Magazine, May 28, 2017 (thanks to Tim Furnish):
On 22nd May, 2017, a 22 year old jihadist named Salman Ramadan Abedi wandered into the Manchester Arena during a concert populated primarily by young teens and their parents, and detonated a suicide bomb, killing 22 people including an 8 year old girl, and injuring approximately 120 others. This was the deadliest terror attack on U.K. soil since a group of jihadists murdered 52 commuters in the London transport attacks of 2005.
We are often told that in the wake of a large scale atrocity of this kind, we should defy the terrorists by simply carrying on as normal. Well, it just so happens that what I would normally be doing is writing about Islamic terrorism and berating the apologists who shamefully obfuscate the issue. Which is exactly what I intend to do now.
The fact that the two deadliest attacks upon the U.K. in recent memory were at the hands of Islamic terrorists is not simply pub trivia. I mention it because when these apologists for Islam get bored of claiming that jihadists are incessantly and inexplicably lying about their religious motivations, they invariably engage in the crass exercise of throwing around skewed data in a desperate attempt to deemphasize the danger posed by Islamic terror. As far as I can tell, this is not due to some well-meaning concern for people worrying unnecessarily, or to ensure that counter terrorism strategy is accurately focused upon the most serious threat, it seems rather to be a tactical attempt to prioritize the protection of odious 7th century folklore over the welfare of real human beings.
In the not uncommon event of an Islamic lunatic slaughtering a crowd of innocent people, Americentric articles and tweets lying about the likelihood of this happening to you, instantaneously begin to surface, like gunk from the ocean floor after a depth charge detonation.
Each of these claims are variations on the assertion that right-wing or far-right terrorism poses a greater danger than Islamic terrorism, and they are based on several studies which attempt to make the same claims.
“Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, nearly twice as many Americans have been killed by non-Muslim extremists than by jihadists,”
insists this MSNBC article based on this report by research center New America.
I understand that a deconstruction of statistics may read as a little sterile and dispassionate, but I think it’s important to nip this particular line of obscurantism in the bud once and for all. And disappointingly, I’ve noticed that some high profile secularists and liberal atheists also appear to have been taken in by this propaganda which contains a multitude of errors and inconsistencies resulting in inaccurate figures and starkly misleading conclusions. For instance; the MSNBC article referenced above was published in the summer of 2015. And whilst the information contained within it is frozen at this point in time, the source report that it cites is not. The report has since been updated, and so anyone citing the article now, is citing statistics that do not include the 49 Orlando clubbers murdered the following year by ISIS inspired gunman Omar Mateen in the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The updated statistics which now include this attack, along with other attacks in 2016, show that deaths from jihadist terror attacks in the U.S. are now almost double those attributable to far-right terrorists.
What’s more, this very same study that is routinely cited in order to downplay the threat of jihadism, shows not only that jihadists have claimed more fatalities in the U.S., but also that “most U.S. attacks are also carried out by individuals inspired by jihadism.”
The practice of quoting outdated figures to further a false narrative is sloppy in some cases and outright disingenuous in others, but even when using the most up-to-date figures, there are a number of issues with the actual dataset this report relies on which further skew the statistics towards downplaying the Islamic threat. As John Sexton of Breitbart notes, the numbers here ostensibly focus on the threat to Americans, but do not take Americans killed abroad by Islamic terrorists into account. The beheading of Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 7 Americans killed in the 2002 Bali Bombing, the 6 Americans killed in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 4 Americans killed in the 2016 Brussels bombings, the American killed in the Zamboanga City bombing, the American killed in the 2015 Bamako hotel attack, the 22 year old American student killed in the 2015 Paris attacks, for example, are all absent from these figures. Nor do the figures take into account the number of Islamic plots foiled as a result of the asymmetric counter-terrorism focus placed upon jihadism as a result of 9/11. As former counter-terrorism analyst Daryl Johnson acknowledges:
“The U.S. government currently employs hundreds of analysts focused on Islamic extremism, but only a couple dozen who monitor domestic terror.”
Fortunately I didn’t need to undertake a great deal of arduous research to find this quote. Why? Because it’s mentioned in the very same MSNBC article that is routinely circulated as proof that Islamic terrorism is essentially a non-issue in comparison to “far-right” terrorism.
The lopsidedness of this report is also evident in the fact that, according to the article, it treats terrorists with an Islamist agenda as one dataset, and compares it to terrorists with a white supremacist agenda, terrorists with an anti-government agenda, and terrorist with a fundamentalist Christian agenda, by treating all three non-Islamic motivations as one dataset. This is not an apples to apples comparison. This is an apples to fruit bowl comparison.
But surely the most blatant and deliberate skewing of the numbers here is in the fact that the biggest terror attack in the history of the United States is discounted by beginning the tally on 12th September 2001. Florida State College Professor Andrew Holt issued a thorough debunking of this report and the methods it uses. In it he points out that if one were to start the clock a day earlier and therefore include the approximately three thousand innocent lives taken on 9/11, then “there have been around 62 people killed in the United States by Islamic extremists for every one American killed by a right wing terrorist.”
Another more recent report created by the Government Accountability Office and promoted by the CATO Institute claims that since 12th September 2001 (there’s that date again) there have been 62 traditional right-wing extremist “incidents” that resulted in death, compared to only 23 attributed to radical Islamic violence. However, this report doesn’t focus on death toll, and instead concentrates solely on the number of incidents. This misleading way of determining threat is then spun by the CATO institute as 73 percent of attacks being committed by right-wing groups even though the report states that 52.8 percent of deaths were at the hands of jihadists:
“Attacks by domestic or ‘homegrown’ violent extremists in the United States resulted in 225 fatalities… Of these, 106 were killed by far right violent extremists in 62 separate incidents, and 119 were victims of radical Islamist violent extremists in 23 separate incidents.”
To reiterate; the threat level here is being determined by incident count rather than body count, so although jihadists killed more people, they are painted as being less of a risk. The ludicrousness of this methodology is inadvertently illustrated by Benjamin Dixon on the David Pakman Show:
“They’re not counting the number of people killed, they’re counting the number of events. So technically they could throw in September 11th and still get about the same result” he says, and therefore “we have more of a reason to be fearful of Billy-Bob (if I can be stereotypical) than we do of Ahmed.”
Dixon can only make such a ludicrous statement if he treats one incident in which one person is killed, and another incident in which four airliners are hijacked and slammed into buildings causing 3000 deaths, as equal. Which he does. And his ridiculous way of measuring threat is in keeping with the same methodology used in the GOA report.
Furthermore, the proportionality of terror attacks attributable to Islamic extremism does not factor in the scarcity of Muslims in the U.S population.
Muslim adults comprise less than 1% of the U.S population, and yet according to this study, are responsible for a whopping 27% of the terrorism in the country. This is a significant overrepresentation among such a tiny minority and, as expected, is completely overlooked in this report.
One of the most common articles I see routinely bandied around in the aftermath of Islamic massacres is a 2015 piece by Ian Millhiser for the political news blog ThinkProgress with the startling headline: “You Are More Than 7 Times as Likely to Be Killed by a Right-Wing Extremist than by Muslim Terrorists.” Needless to say, this suspicious piece suffers from many of the same failures as the previous reports and articles. Additionally it gets its figures from two different source reports. The figure of 50 deaths that it claims resulted from Islamic terrorism comes from Charles Kurzman’s 2014 report which omits both 9/11 and the Orlando Nightclub shooting, whereas the figure of 254 deaths from far-right terrorism comes from a study by Arie Perliger which fails to provide any detail as to which attacks this figure is comprised of, and therefore prevents any kind of cross-checking of this dubious figure.
Oddly enough, the “7 times as likely” claim which Millhiser leads with is made nowhere in the New York Times article referenced in his piece, nor is it made anywhere in the Arie Perliger study which both articles cite as their source. In fact the actual figures quoted in Millhiser’s article refute his own headline.
“Just 4 groups (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al Qaeda) were responsible for 74% of the world’s terror related deaths in 2015 — and Islamic State and Boko Haram were responsible for over half of the world’s terrorism fatalities between them.”
Every time one of these articles crops up, a cursory glance at the source data it relies on reveals a myriad of flaws in its methods and therefore in its conclusions. It is highly likely that the next time you are confronted by someone claiming that “far-right terrorism” (or some variation of) is a greater threat than Islamic terrorism, they will be citing a report or article that contains most, if not all, of the below errors:
A tally which starts after the biggest terror attack committed on U.S. soil.
A tally which ends before the deadliest mass shooting on U.S. soil. (Both of these attacks were committed by jihadists.)
A tally which fails to include certain other jihadist and right-wing attacks.
A tally which misreports certain attacks as “right-wing” or “far-right”.
A report which fails to include figures for Americans killed abroad.
A report which ignores foiled plots.
A report which ignores the number of non-fatal casualties.
A report which is not calibrated to consider the disproportionate focus of counter-terror analysis on Islamic terrorism.
A report which is not calibrated to consider the disproportionate number of attacks by Muslim extremists in relation to their lack of prevalence as a minority group.
A report which conflates several disparate ideological motivations for non-Islamic terrorism by lumping them all into the “far-right” bracket.
A report which ignores all terror attacks outside of the United States.
This narrow focus on terrorism committed within U.S. borders is particularly galling. According to the 2015 Global Terrorism Index published by Institute for Economics and Peace, only 2.6 percent of terror related deaths occur in the West (for accuracy, this figure includes the September 11th attacks.) Furthermore, just 4 groups (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al Qaeda) were responsible for 74% of the world’s terror related deaths in 2015 — and Islamic State and Boko Haram were responsible for over half of the world’s terrorism fatalities between them. It’s likely that there has been some fluctuation in these figures since the publishing of this data, but the point remains that the overwhelming majority of terror attacks occur in countries outside of the West and that they are committed by Islamic extremists. And so the insistence that our gaze should never stray from terrorism within U.S. borders further skews that data and buries the victims of these attacks figuratively, often before they’ve even been buried literally.
It’s often said, that the biggest victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims. This is undoubtedly true. It’s odd then that those who claim to concern themselves with the welfare of Muslims should spend so much of their time smugly undermining threats to their safety. I’m sure the families of Shiite day laborers eviscerated in Baghdad marketplaces by Sunni suicide bombers are grateful to American “progressives” to be told that Islamic terrorism is far less of a problem in the United States and is therefore essentially irrelevant. I’m sure that the families of secular bloggers hacked to death with machetes and swords in Bangladesh are open to the idea that their lives are not as important as those of American abortion doctors, for instance.
Ironically, those of us concerned about the global impacts of Islam, are routinely accused of xenophobia and bigotry, often by the very same people who demand that we measure threat by ignoring Islamic terrorism in foreign states. They seem to be arguing that as long as jihadism is negligible in the good ole U.S. of A, then it’s as though the threat to “foreigners” in the rest of the world is of little to no concern. I must say, that sounds a lot like bigotry and xenophobia to me.
One of the peddlers of these chauvinistically selective figures is writer and professional Islamic apologist Nathan Lean. In response to the San Bernardino attack in which a jihadist couple massacred 14 people and injured another 22, Lean decided to wheel out a standard, tactlessly timed factoid once again in an attempt to downplay the threat.
Lean came perilously close to learning the danger of his obfuscation the hard way when Istanbul airport in Turkey was the scene of an ISIS gun and bomb attack which left 41 people dead and over 230 injured the day after he had caught a flight from it.
Many well-meaning people have been hoodwinked by these reports, seemingly due to a legitimate concern over a general increase in far-right sentiment. However, their circulation and citation by Islamic apologists like Lean, is a deliberate attempt to limit the problem of Islam solely to terrorism, then to further limit it to terrorism on U.S. soil, and then to extinguish even that concern with a firehose of deceitful nonsense.
None of which is to say that far-right terrorism is not an issue. Far-right sentiment is to be condemned, and any increase in its prevalence is a worry. But the prevalence and threat of Islamic terrorism is a perfectly legitimate area of concern and focus in its own right. Particularly, one would think, in the immediate aftermath of an Islamically inspired bloodbath. And this insistence on changing the subject to the far-right in response to it is not dissimilar to mounting a sustained campaign of vocal objection to cancer research on the basis that diabetes kills people too. It’s a textbook example of whataboutery, and it’s a response which is becoming infuriatingly endemic. Scarcely a few hours after a Muslim refugee in Stockholm ploughed a truck through crowds of pedestrians killing 5 people including an 11 year old girl who was literally ripped in half, and injuring 15 others, The Irish Times published a disgraceful article worrying about how this ISIS inspired butchery would be used as political capital by the Swedish far-right.
Immediately hijacking any conversation on the detrimental impacts of Islam as an ideology, and redirecting it towards the likes of Anders Breivik and Thomas Mair is often intended not only to whitewash the global phenomenon of Islamic terrorism, but also to divert focus away from Islam entirely, including scrutiny of its role in Female Genital Mutilation, honour violence, religiously mandated spousal abuse, blasphemy codes, the persecution of religious and sexual minorities, the subjugation of women, the grooming and sexual exploitation of girls, the murder of apostates, the dehumanization of unbelievers, the indoctrination of children, the contempt for liberalism, the surrender of critical thought, and the systematic bludgeoning to death of free expression. If we could solve the problem of Islamic terrorism tomorrow, or if it truly was the rare, barely perceptible inconvenience that the apologists claim, my concerns over the real-world effects of Islam would barely have taken a dent.
But it is simply a fact that Islamic terrorism is currently the deadliest form of terrorism on the global stage. I care about that for several reasons, but primarily because I care about the victims of Islamic terrorism. I care about the people who are routinely maimed and murdered as a result of the toxic influences of archaic superstition on a 21st Century world. And I care about these victims no matter where they reside globally, no matter what their race, no matter what their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion, or their skin color. I care about them whether they are Bangladeshi secularists pulled apart by Islamists blades, whether they are French cartoonists gunned down for defying Islamic blasphemy laws, whether they are Pakistani Sufis incinerated in Lahore for being the wrong kind of Muslims, or whether they are British children blown to pieces and lacerated by shrapnel in a Manchester concert hall. I care about them all and I want it to stop. I can’t for a second see how the people who make it their life’s work to obfuscate and dismiss this issue can even begin to say the same.
Damion Daniels
Damion Daniels is a writer focusing on religion, secularism, and free expression with an emphasis on Islam and Islamic fundamentalism.p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 23.5px ‘Minion Pro’; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 23.5px ‘Minion Pro’; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 28.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px ‘Minion Pro’; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 22.0px} p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px ‘Minion Pro’; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 20.0px ‘Minion Pro’; color: #585858; -webkit-text-stroke: #585858} li.li4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px ‘Minion Pro’; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {font: 17.6px ‘Minion Pro’; font-kerning: none} span.s3 {font-kerning: none; color: #585858; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #585858} span.s4 {font: 20.0px ‘Minion Pro’; font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #585858} ul.ul1 {list-style-type: disc}
Red more ... https://facingislam.blogspot.ca/
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The International Sailing Federation and All Member National Authorities Support Polluting the World's Oceans
Albert Einstein:
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
In 2006 the world learned that Rio de Janeiro was awarded the Olympic Games in 2016. At the same time, the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) made the decision to "approve" Guanabara Bay in Rio as the venue for Sailing. It was well known to ISAF that the waters of the Bay were horribly polluted, but accepted the Rio's promise that the Bay would be clean by 2016.
All along ISAF has been monitoring the clean up efforts. And as we all know, very little has been accomplished. With ISAF and each country's sailing organizations called Member National Authorities (MNA), which are the ISAF dues paying members, remaining eerily silent now that the reality is here that Rio continues to make the Ocean their dump for the raw sewage of 7,000,000 people, for their untreated hospital wastes, for their farm run-off, for their industrial wastes, and 110 tons of garbage monthly.
ISAF and the MNA's can make a stance. Call it punishment for not meeting clean up goals, call it support for assuring that the sailors are safe, call it providing a fair field of play, ISAF can move the venue out of Guanabara Bay with a vote, phone call and a press release.
Instead, ISAF and the MNA's by their silence now support polluting the waters of the world. They accept the conditions of pollution, of which they control. ISAF can move the event to clean water. ISAF can move the event to water that won't make competitors ill. But they don't. They could take a stance that polluted waters for sailing the Olympics will never happen again. Their inaction is the equivalent of the action to support polluting the world's waters
We learned the 1992 Barcelona, Spain Sailing Olympics did have a water clean up, but sailors reported the venue was still polluted. We have learned that the waters in 2008 Qingdao, China Sailing Olympics were polluted. And now with 2016 Sailing Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, once again, the organization who controls where the sailing venue is to be held - ISAF, endorses the use of a heavily polluted sailing venue in Guanabara Bay.
The problem is not the country that solicits holding the Olympics, the problem is an extremely weak Federation that does not stand up to make a stance that sailing in polluted waters will not be tolerated. ISAF could become the champion for clean water, be a positive beacon of inspiration bringing good press to the sport of sailing, but plays political games instead. Sickening.
Rio de Janeiro has a history of starting Bay clean up projects and failing to get anywhere with them. This time it was more Rio rhetoric with little follow through. There must be consequences to Rio's lies. The world can no longer tolerate this abuse of our ocean waters. And ISAF can make a stand against pollution.
The sailors of the world need to revolt against their country MNA. In the U.S. that would be US Sailing, in Australia that would be Yachting Australia, in Germany that would be the Germany Sailing Association, and all other 137 Member National Authorities worldwide. They don't deserve any respect when all of them vote together to tolerate the destruction of not just the water, but of all life that depends on the water to be clean of human population wastes.
ISAF and the MNA's are not leaders. They are not being responsible. They are sticking their collective heads in the sand to a really important global issue for the future of the world itself, and for the sailors in today's world.
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Population studies exhibit a J-curve correlation between wine consumption and rates of heart disease: heavy drinkers have an elevated rate, while people who drink small amount (up to 20 g of alcohol per day, approximately 200 ml (7 imp fl oz; 7 US fl oz) of 12.7% ABV wine) have a lower rate than non-drinkers. Studies have also found that moderate consumption of other alcoholic drinks is correlated with decreased mortality from cardiovascular causes,[129] although the association is stronger for wine. Additionally, some studies have found a greater correlation of health benefits with red than white wine, though other studies have found no difference. Red wine contains more polyphenols than white wine, and these could be protective against cardiovascular disease.[130]
German research in 2003 showed significant benefits in reducing breast cancer risk when large amounts of raw vegetable matter are included in the diet. The authors attribute some of this effect to heat-labile phytonutrients.[27] Sulforaphane, a glucosinolate breakdown product, which may be found in vegetables such as broccoli, has been shown to be protective against prostate cancer, however, much of it is destroyed when the vegetable is boiled.[28][29]
Foods that spoil easily, such as meats, dairy, and seafood, must be prepared a certain way to avoid contaminating the people for whom they are prepared. As such, the rule of thumb is that cold foods (such as dairy products) should be kept cold and hot foods (such as soup) should be kept hot until storage. Cold meats, such as chicken, that are to be cooked should not be placed at room temperature for thawing, at the risk of dangerous bacterial growth, such as Salmonella or E. coli.[139]
A rosé wine incorporates some of the color from the grape skins, but not enough to qualify it as a red wine. It may be the oldest known type of wine, as it is the most straightforward to make with the skin contact method. The pink color can range from a pale orange to a vivid near-purple, depending on the varietals used and wine-making techniques. There are three primary ways to produce rosé wine: skin contact (allowing dark grape skins to stain the wort), saignée (removing juice from the must early in fermentation and continuing fermentation of the juice separately), and blending (uncommon and discouraged in most wine growing regions). Rosé wines can be made still, semi-sparkling, or sparkling, with a wide range of sweetness levels from dry Provençal rosé to sweet White Zinfandels and blushes. Rosé wines are made from a wide variety of grapes all over the world.[62][63]
A 2003 report by archaeologists indicates a possibility that grapes were mixed with rice to produce mixed fermented drinks in China in the early years of the seventh millennium BC. Pottery jars from the Neolithic site of Jiahu, Henan, contained traces of tartaric acid and other organic compounds commonly found in wine. However, other fruits indigenous to the region, such as hawthorn, cannot be ruled out.[27][28] If these drinks, which seem to be the precursors of rice wine, included grapes rather than other fruits, they would have been any of the several dozen indigenous wild species in China, rather than Vitis vinifera, which was introduced there 6000 years later.[27]
The word diet first appeared in English in the 13th century. Its original meaning was the same as in modern English, “habitually taken food and drink.” But diet was used in another sense too in the Middle and early modern English periods to mean “way of living.” This is, in fact, the original meaning of diet’s Greek ancestor diaita, which is derived from the verb diaitasthan, meaning “to lead one’s life.” In Greek, diaita, had already come to be used more specifically for a way of living prescribed by a physician, a diet, or other regimen.
Prison food is the term for meals served to prisoners while incarcerated in correctional institutions. While some prisons prepare their own food, many use staff from on-site catering companies. Many prisons today support the requirements of specific religions, as well as vegetarianism.[54] It is said that prison food of many developed countries is adequate to maintain health and dieting.[55][unreliable source?]
Cooking or cookery is the art, technology, science and craft of preparing food for consumption. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, from grilling food over an open fire to using electric stoves, to baking in various types of ovens, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions and trends. The ways or types of cooking also depend on the skill and type of training an individual cook has. Cooking is done both by people in their own dwellings and by professional cooks and chefs in restaurants and other food establishments. Cooking can also occur through chemical reactions without the presence of heat, such as in ceviche, a traditional Latin American dish where fish is cooked with the acids in lemon or lime juice.
Some cultures and religions have restrictions concerning what foods are acceptable in their diet. For example, only Kosher foods are permitted by Judaism, and Halal foods by Islam. Although Buddhists are generally vegetarians, the practice varies and meat-eating may be permitted depending on the sects.[2] In Hinduism, vegetarianism is the ideal. Jains are strictly vegetarian and consumption of roots is not permitted.
In addition, the healthy habits and kinds of foods recommended on the Mayo Clinic Diet — including lots of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, beans, fish and healthy fats — can further reduce your risk of certain health conditions. The Mayo Clinic Diet is meant to be positive, practical, sustainable and enjoyable, so you can enjoy a happier, healthier life over the long term.
Regulations govern the classification and sale of wine in many regions of the world. European wines tend to be classified by region (e.g. Bordeaux, Rioja and Chianti), while non-European wines are most often classified by grape (e.g. Pinot noir and Merlot). Market recognition of particular regions has recently been leading to their increased prominence on non-European wine labels. Examples of recognized non-European locales include Napa Valley, Santa Clara Valley, Sonoma Valley, Anderson Valley, and Mendocino County in California; Willamette Valley and Rogue Valley in Oregon; Columbia Valley in Washington; Barossa Valley in South Australia; Hunter Valley in New South Wales; Luján de Cuyo in Argentina; Central Valley in Chile; Vale dos Vinhedos in Brazil; Hawke's Bay and Marlborough in New Zealand; and in Canada, the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, and the Niagara Peninsula and Essex County regions of Ontario are the three largest producers.
The ideal temperature for serving a particular wine is a matter of debate by wine enthusiasts and sommeliers, but some broad guidelines have emerged that will generally enhance the experience of tasting certain common wines. A white wine should foster a sense of coolness, achieved by serving at "cellar temperature" (13 °C (55 °F)). Light red wines drunk young should also be brought to the table at this temperature, where they will quickly rise a few degrees. Red wines are generally perceived best when served chambré ("at room temperature"). However, this does not mean the temperature of the dining room—often around 21 °C (70 °F)—but rather the coolest room in the house and, therefore, always slightly cooler than the dining room itself. Pinot noir should be brought to the table for serving at 16 °C (61 °F) and will reach its full bouquet at 18 °C (64 °F). Cabernet Sauvignon, zinfandel, and Rhone varieties should be served at 18 °C (64 °F) and allowed to warm on the table to 21 °C (70 °F) for best aroma.[97]
Between the extremes of optimal health and death from starvation or malnutrition, there is an array of disease states that can be caused or alleviated by changes in diet. Deficiencies, excesses, and imbalances in diet can produce negative impacts on health, which may lead to various health problems such as scurvy, obesity, or osteoporosis, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases as well as psychological and behavioral problems. The science of nutrition attempts to understand how and why specific dietary aspects influence health.
Fruits are the ripened ovaries of plants, including the seeds within. Many plants and animals have coevolved such that the fruits of the former are an attractive food source to the latter, because animals that eat the fruits may excrete the seeds some distance away. Fruits, therefore, make up a significant part of the diets of most cultures. Some botanical fruits, such as tomatoes, pumpkins, and eggplants, are eaten as vegetables.[10] (For more information, see list of fruits.)
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Army's 'Ready and Resilient Campaign' kicks off
WASHINGTON (March 13, 2013) -- The Army has made available to Soldiers a new online resource to complement the Ready and Resilient Campaign that launched March 12.
The campaign's website is available now at www.army.mil/readyandresilient, and is designed as a "one-stop shop" for resources related to Soldier resilience and readiness. The new site includes sections for medical readiness, personal readiness, and Soldier transition issues.
On the front page of the site is a list of hotlines for Soldiers to call for when "something bad happens," said Col. John Sims, with the Army's Office of the Chief of Public Affairs. Such an event could include a sexual assault, suicide issues, traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Army already has dozens of programs and websites that can help Soldiers improve their readiness, help them become more resilient, and help them deal with crises such as sexual assault, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress disorder, or traumatic brain injury for instance. But the new website is meant to bring access to those resources together in one place.
"You can find this information in 500 other different places. But this is supposed to be the one-stop shop for Soldiers," Sims said. "We wanted to make a place where leaders, Soldiers and family members could go and find information and quick resources, emergency hotlines, and learn to improve their resiliency."
Resilience is an individual's ability to bounce back when "something bad happens, in the simplest terms," said Sims. A Soldier's resilience, he said, can come from how they were raised, the experiences they had in their lives, and how they were trained.
Sims said the secretary of the Army, the chief of staff of the Army and the vice chief of staff of the Army want to show the connection between a Soldier's resilience and a Soldier's readiness for duty. That connection, and maintaining that connection, is the impetus for the Ready and Resilient Campaign.
Readiness, Sims said, is the ability of an individual or unit to accomplish its assigned task or mission.
"We are recognizing that it's not just the training we go through that makes us ready, but all the things that we bring as an individual," Sims said.
Col. Theresa Gonzalez, with Army Medical Command, said for an individual, not being ready could be the result of administrative, medical, or mental health issues. Readiness, she said, means that a Soldier is resilient to the many stressors that all Soldiers face.
"The difference between people who do well and sustain their capacity, is what we refer to under the name resilience," Gonzalez said. "A more resilient Soldier is able to accept the same load, allostatic load is the term we would use. They can accept the same allostatic load and continue to perform their mission."
An "allostatic load," she said, describes the physical consequences to one's body that result from repeated exposure to stressors. Those stressors could include, among other things, relationship issues or financial issues, for instance.
Such stressors can affect a Soldier's ability to concentrate, Sims added. And long-term exposure to such stressors, and a Soldier's inability to adapt to them and deal with them can also affect his or her health, Gonzalez added.
Additionally, Gonzalez said, Soldiers rarely have just one stressor in their lives, they often have multiple stressors that can affect them. And the Ready and Resilient Campaign website, and program overall, is meant to help Soldiers identify in one place the things that are affecting their lives and then point them to available solutions.
Sims said the Ready and Resilient Campaign offers "nothing new" in terms of programs, but instead aims to take an array of existing Army programs and optimize them, to make them all more effective. Additionally, he said, some programs that are redundant have been eliminated to ensure resources are directed to other more effective programs.
"Really what we are doing is changing how we view these programs," Sims said. "No longer do we view suicide as unconnected to negative behavior, or sexual assault, or other things. We are now seeing them much more holistically."
The Ready and Resilient Campaign website is just one part of a larger Campaign to emphasize how Soldier resilience directly affects a Soldier's readiness, and the readiness of that Soldier's unit. The goal of the Ready and Resilient Campaign is to make it easier for Soldiers, commanders and families from all components of the Army to find the resources they need to make themselves ready for the war fight, and to help them understand the connection between being resilient and being ready to be a Soldier.
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Grantland grab bag: Mats Sundin doesn't understand how hats work
This week's grab bag looks at buyouts, the upcoming draft, playing hurt, and Don Cherry's playoff run. But the most important thing we learn is that 18-year-old Mats Sundin had no idea how hats work.
Labels: grab bag, grantland, sundin
Grantland: All the key dates from a busy July in the NHL
The NHL has wrapped up the action on the ice for another season. Hockey fans have already turned their attention to the draft, which will be held this Sunday in New Jersey.
Sunday is an important date on the hockey calendar for another reason: It’s June 30. That’s traditionally been the NHL’s New Year's Eve, the last date before the league officially rolls over into a new season. And with that brand-new season comes weeks and weeks of … not very much, actually. Let’s face it, July and August have usually been pretty dull for NHL fans.
But wait! Just because there are no more games and the draft is done doesn’t mean that nothing at all is going on. In fact, thanks to a lockout that messed up this season’s schedule for everyone, there are still some important dates on the calendar.
The entire month of July is looking pretty packed. Here’s a look at what hockey fans can look forward to next month.
Labels: grantland
Other hidden NHL injuries revealed
Marchand and Ference star in a scene from the
summer's hilarious new comedy, Weekend At Bergie's.
The NHL playoffs have ended, which means everyone can start coming clean about all the injuries they've been hiding. After months of "upper body" this and "lower body" that, fans finally get to learn the real truth behind the injuries that were hampering certain players.
One player making headlines because of an injury revelation is Patrice Bergeron of the Boston Bruins. We already knew that he was playing through a separated shoulder, damaged cartilage and a broken rib during the Stanley Cup Final. On Wednesday we learned that he'd also been admitted to a local hospital with a small hole in his lung.
While Bergeron is an extreme case, he's far from the only one in the hockey world who's been hiding a health problem. Here are some of the other NHL players and personalities who've recently revealed the injuries they've been suffering from:
Jarome Iginla - Probably has a badly injured foot, neighbors say, since he's constantly speeding down the street in his Delorean then jumping out and kicking the fender while yelling "Take me back to the trade deadline, damn you!"
Roberto Luongo - Has been suffering from a severe blister on the finger he uses to hit refresh on his Google search for "Did I get bought out yet"?
Greg Sherman - Admits to dealing with some frost bite during the last month spent scouting rec players at outdoor games in Iceland, but hey, if this trip wasn't super important then Joe Sakic and Patrick Roy wouldn't have sent the general manager to handle it, right?
Sidney Crosby - Must have had some sort of relapse and had to have his jaw rewired shut, based on how he clenches his teeth and just stares at you silently when you ask him if he thinks the Penguins can win another Cup with Marc-Andre Fleury in net.
Read the rest of this post...
Labels: bergeron, bernier, campbell, crosby, dipietro, fleury, getzlaf, iginla, jagr, rask, reimer, roy, sakic, sherman
Grantland: The Blackhawks broke the system and that's a good thing
You see, Chicago, this is not the way it’s supposed to work.
Not in the salary-cap era, at least. We lost an entire season to get this system, and then we lost another half-season to … well, nobody’s quite sure, but to tweak it, we guess. This is supposed to be the age of parity in the NHL, and that means everybody needs to play by the rules.
Here’s how it’s supposed to go: You lose. You draft high and pray you find a superstar or two. You try to find a few more stars on the trade market or in free agency. That’s your core, and you build up a supporting cast around it as cheaply as possible.
And then the window opens, maybe for a year or two, maybe longer if you’re lucky. That’s your chance to win the Stanley Cup. At that point, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope.
And then — and this is the important part — the window slams shut.
A ranking of 20 years of Gary Bettman Stanley Cup presentations from least to most awkward
The Stanley Cup will be in the building tonight in Boston, with the Chicago Blackhawks one win away from claiming the championship. And that means it’s time to get excited about one of the highlights of the NHL season: Watching commissioner Gary Bettman struggle through presenting the Cup.
In the years since Bettman’s debut as the Stanley Cup presenter, the ceremony has evolved into one of the most awkward traditions in all of sports. Bettman fidgets, the crowd boos, the posed photo takes way too long, and the winning captain fakes a smile while he waits for Bettman to just let go of the Cup and hit the bricks.
Calls for Bettman to step aside and let somebody else do the honors have reached the point where it’s practically a consensus. But he’s made it clear that he has no intention of doing so, and he will be back out there again this year.
All of which is great news for fans of unintentional comedy. So to mark the occasion, I thought it would be fun to go through all 20 years of Bettman’s reign (there are 19 presentations total, thanks to one year lost to a lockout) and rank them in order of awkwardness.
We’ll be using the following criteria:
Crowd Response: The more hostile the better. Unfortunately, not every video clip I found includes Bettman’s introduction, but we’ll do our best to piece everything together.
Cup Handoff: A combination of factors, including: How disgusted does the captain seem to be by Bettman’s presence? How long does it take them to get the photo right? Can they figure out which hand goes where? Is Steve Yzerman involved? (That last one turns out to be important.)
Bettman Awkwardness: A catchall, and the most important category. We’re looking
at everything from hair to wardrobe to random gesticulation to attempted one-liners to his level of flusteredness, which I don’t think is a word but should be.
Overall: The combined level of overall awkwardness. Not necessarily an average.
So here we go … 20 years’ worth of presentations, ranked in order from the least to the most awkward.
Labels: bettman, grantland, greatest hits
Grantland grab bag: Jean-Claude Van Damme's awesome kitchen brawl with the Penguins mascot
In the weekly grab bag: Should Gary Bettman let somebody else present the Stanley Cup? An obscure player with an awesome nickname. And a detailed breakdown of the Pittsburgh Penguin's mascot's fight to the death with Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Labels: grab bag, grantland
Grantland: The five factors of Game 5, and beyond
So the Blackhawks and Bruins are down to a best-of-three for the Stanley Cup, and nobody has any idea what to expect from these teams anymore.
Oh, we thought we had it figured out. After Monday’s 2-0 Bruins win in Game 3, we all felt confident in going with the “defense wins championships” narrative. Then the two teams went out on Wednesday and blew the doors off in the Blackhawks' wild 6-5 overtime win.
So now they’re headed back to Chicago for Game 5 on Saturday, and anyone who tells you they know what’s going to happen is lying. But in the absence of actual predictions, we can at least take our best shot at figuring out which factors are likely to play a key role in the outcome.
Here are five elements that have loomed large so far, and might determine which team skates away with the Stanley Cup in the next few days.
Grantland: How did the Leafs almost beat the Bruins when nobody else can?
The Boston Bruins are starting to look unstoppable. After shutting down the Chicago Blackhawks on Monday night, they hold a 2-1 series lead in the Stanley Cup final heading into Game 4 at home tonight. They’re two wins away from a championship that would cap off one of the most impressive playoff runs in recent history.
A quick recap: In the first round, the Bruins beat the Toronto Maple Leafs. Since then, they’ve found themselves facing the New York Rangers, Pittsburgh Penguins, and now the Blackhawks. Or, to put those matchups in some perspective: last year’s top seed in the East, this year’s top seed in the East, and this year’s top seed overall.
Heading into tonight’s action, here’s how those teams have fared against Boston:
Everyone Else Combined
Games played 7 12
Goals scored 18 17
Regulation wins 3 0
Without putting too fine a point on it, those numbers don’t make any sense. How could the Bruins be rolling over three of the best teams in the NHL so easily, when they needed a historic Game 7 comeback just to survive against a very average Toronto team?
Or, to rephrase the question in a more intriguing way: Is it possible that the Leafs knew something that everyone else has missed?
The good news is that, as a Maple Leafs fan, I watched that first-round series closely. The bad news is that, as a Maple Leafs fan, my therapist has ordered me never to discuss it again. So if he asks, the next few thousand words never happened.
I floated a version of the question — What the hell happened in that Leafs series? — on Twitter a few nights ago. Here are some of the most common theories I got back in response, and my thoughts on whether there could be some truth to them.
Labels: bruins, grantland
The New York Rangers head coaching vacancy questionnaire
Messier aced the "Where is the
faceoff after every shot on goal
against the Flyers" question.
The New York Rangers have apparently found their new head coach. While the deal hasn't been formally signed, reports say that the Rangers have settled on former Canucks coach Alain Vigneault and will make the official announcement soon.
Assuming those reports are true, it will conclude a lengthy and at times bizarre search that involved plenty of big names. In addition to Vigneault, the Rangers were rumored to be considering legendary former players like Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky, and even names like Ulf Samuelsson and Brian Leetch were mentioned.
According to reports, GM Glen Sather had each of the candidates fill out a questionnaire prior to being interviewed. It goes without saying that DGB spies were quickly able to locate a copy and pass it along.
Thank you for your interest in becoming the next coach of the New York Rangers. To help us process the many candidates we expect to apply, please fill out this brief questionnaire to help us get to know you.
Your first name: ________________
Your last name: ________________
Your nickname when you played with the Rangers, which we're just going to go ahead and assume you did: ________________
Date you are available to start work: ________________
Date you are available to stop work, if you make Henrik Lundqvist mad: ________________
Your salary demands: ________________
(Note: this form will be reviewed by Glen Sather, so just go ahead and write in literally anything for that last one.)
Do you have any experience as a head coach in an NHL market?
( ) No.
( ) Nope.
( ) None at all.
( ) Coached in Montreal and Vancouver for a total of 11 seasons
( ) Coached in Phoenix for four seasons, so… no.
What would you say is the most important skill that a New York Rangers coach must possess?
( ) Familiarity with the CBA's buyout section
( ) Ability to resist punching Larry Brooks
( ) Willingness to attend Stanley Cup parades every half-century whether you want to or not
( ) Staying calm during difficult times by quietly mumbling "Well, at least we're not the Sabres".
What do you like best about the current New York Rangers organization?
( ) Notice you have decided to go with one and only one starting goalie; kind of wish my old boss had thought of that.
( ) Love Ryan McDonagh's two-way game, and sure hope we have more guys like him being developed by our farm team in Montreal.
( ) Really like the way you always keep your "Days since we last employed Sean Avery" sign updated.
( ) Have so many good young leaders that a New York Ranger player will definitely be winning the Mark Messier Leadership Award every year for a long long time, if you play your cards right.
Do you have any unique talents or abilities that you feel we should be aware of?
( ) Was the best hockey player in the world and the only reason Glen Sather has all those Cup rings that keep him employed to this day, but don't let that affect your decision or anything.
( ) On free agency day, can repeatedly hit my general manager on the nose with a rolled up newspaper while yelling "NO!" every time the phone rings.
( ) Don't want to get into it, but let's just say I'm on a first name basis with like half the local riot squad in two different cities.
( ) When I set my mind to it, can achieve the impossible. For example, have occasionally succeeded in eating just one.
Do you have any concerns about taking this position?
( ) Ryan Clowe and Darroll Powe's names don't rhyme and that's always just really bothered me for some reason.
( ) Would like to put together a long-term strategic plan, so it would be cool if we could eventually get one or two players signed past next season.
( ) Realize that part of the New York sports scene involves dealing with celebrities, but still not sure why the lead singer from this horrible band is always walking around MSG like he owns the place.
( ) Sort of creeped out by how realistic those mounted heads of sportswriters hanging in the old coach's office are
What would you say are the odds that you get this job?
( ) Pretty good.
( ) Just OK.
( ) Definite longshot.
( ) Not sure, let me ask my wife.
Finally, if you are the successful candidate, what would you do on your first day on the job?
( ) Get to work preparing a game plan for next year's playoff series against the Capitals.
( ) Try to cheer up that depressed looking usher by asking him if he knows how much he looks like Brad Richards
( ) Take off pants; sit on photocopier; fax results to Mike Gillis.
( ) Probably Google "How to be a hockey coach" since that is something I have never been in my entire life.
Thank you for your interest in this position. Please note that the successful candidate will be contacted next week. The unsuccessful candidates will be contacted next season, during our first losing streak.
Featuring 70 posts including 24 chapters of exclusive new material, The Best of Down Goes Brown is now available.
Buy it today: Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Barnes & Noble | Nook | Chapters/Indigo | Kobo | iBooks
Labels: avery, gomez, gretzky, leetch, lundqvist, mcdonagh, messier, richards, samuelsson, sather, tortorella
Grantland: The 1-1 Stanley Cup Series: A Historical Analysis
After the opening two games between the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins, the Stanley Cup final is tied at one game apiece for the first time since the lockout.
Well, not this year’s lockout. I mean, that would be true, but it wouldn’t be very interesting. And because we need to be more specific in Gary Bettman’s wonderful world of perpetual work stoppages, let’s try this again: This year’s final is tied 1-1 for the first time since the lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. Much better.
Yes, in all seven Stanley Cup final series since 2004, the team that won the first game also won the second. (Although two of those teams still ended up losing the series.) Given that, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the most recent 10 times that we’ve found ourselves even after two games, and to see if the past has anything to teach us about what we might be able to expect this year.
Grantland grab bag: Settle down, goal horn guys
In this week's grab bag: Criticizing the refs during the playoffs, Jagr’s brilliant goal from 1992, Darin Kimble vs. The Grim Reaper, and enough with the goal horns.
The 25 Stages of a Marathon Playoff Overtime
The Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins needed a third overtime to decide Game 1 of their Stanley Cup final this week. It was the longest game of the 2013 playoffs. (The series picks up again Saturday night in Chicago.) Now it goes without saying that if you’re a fan of one of the teams involved, watching sudden-death overtime is torture. But if you’re a relatively neutral observer who wants to see an entertaining game, overtime is just about the best possible result. And the longer it drags on, the better.
But while you never know exactly how a long overtime game will turn out, veteran hockey fans should have a good idea of what to expect along the way. Here are 25 moments that you'll probably experience at some point in every multiple-overtime NHL playoff game.
Labels: grantland, greatest hits
2013 Stanley Cup Final preview
Even Hossa agreed that his stick's Gregory
Campbell impression was in poor taste.
The Stanley Cup Final start tomorrow, which means it's time for an in-depth preview of the two teams that will be competing to be crowned champion.
With the Bruins and Blackhawks this evenly matched, even a small advantage in one area can become the key to victory. Here's a look at each of the crucial matchups that could end up deciding the series.
Blackhawks: Joe Quenneville is a savvy veteran who can be counted on to avoid rookie mistakes, like picking up when his general manager tries to Skype him.
Bruins: Claude Julien has turned the Bruins into perennial Cup contenders thanks to the patented strategy he calls "Always make sure you have pretty much the best goalie in the entire league".
Blackhawks: Patrick Kane has been on fire lately, which is pretty much what you'd expect from something greasy that's frequently soaked in alcohol.
Bruins: Brad Marchand has established himself as one of the best agitators in hockey, in the sense that watching a guy rack up goals and assists against your team in crucial situations can be really agitating.
Labels: chara, crawford, edwards, hossa, iginla, jagr, julien, kane, krueger, quenneville, rancourt, rask, raycroft
Grantland: How Disappointing Was Your Team's NHL Playoff Run?
This is the time of year when you can expect to repeatedly encounter some variation of these words: We’re down to just two teams left standing in the NHL playoffs.
That phrasing always seemed oddly appropriate, since it implies that the rest of the league must be on the ground. And metaphorically speaking, that’s true. By the end of the third round, the floor is littered with failed playoff teams. Some may have collapsed from sheer exhaustion, others are sprawled out after a swift and bruising knockout, and a few are curled up in a little puddle of tears, wondering how it all went so wrong.
So before we move on to praising Boston and Chicago, let’s spend a few minutes picking through three rounds of postseason wreckage. Here are the 14 playoff teams that have been eliminated, ranked in order of how disappointing their playoff runs ultimately were.
Grantland grab bag: Are we supposed to hate Sidney Crosby?
In this week's grab bag: The Great Pens/Bruins War of '91, mocking bad uniforms, feeling sorry for Bill Muckalt, and the Sidney Crosby debate.
Grantland: A visual guide to four decades of Bruins/Penguins hatred
The Bruins and Penguins are three games into their conference finals matchup, and the series has already produced its share of bad blood. We’ve seen Matt Cooke ejected for hitting Andrew McQuaid from behind, a fight between Evgeni Malkin and Patrice Bergeron, and Sidney Crosby going nose-to-chest with Zdeno Chara. And that was just Game 1. As the series continues, it’s become clear that these two teams just don’t seem to like each other.
The animosity doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given which teams we're talking about. And we don’t just mean this year — Boston and Pittsburgh have a history that goes back decades, and it has featured some memorably nasty moments.
Here’s a visual guide to the history of the Penguins and Bruins hating each other.
Labels: cooke, grantland, neely, samuelsson, savard
A brief history of the Conference Finals
Ever the sportsman, Chara decided he wouldn't hit the
guy until he’d given him a chance to stand up.
The Conference Finals are underway, and so far they haven't exactly been the most entertaining. The Penguins and Bruins may be headed for a sweep, and the Hawks and Kings have so far served up a predictable series of home team wins. While there's still time for some excitement, so far the two series haven't served up much.
That's unfortunate, and it's also at least somewhat rare. Over the years the Conference Finals have often proven to be the most interesting round of the NHL playoffs, and have featured some of hockey's most enduring moments.
Let's take a look back through the NHL history book at some memorable Conference Finals matchups.
1979 - Don Cherry's Bruins take a too-many-men penalty during game seven against the Habs, which must be some sort of call that they've since taken out of the rulebook according to current Penguins players who are pretty sure the Bruins have been using an extra guy this entire series.
1989 - Ron Hextall earns a 12-game suspension after charging from his net and viciously attacking Montreal's Chris Chelios. Or, as an entire generation of Philadelphia sports fans will grow to refer to it, "the most sensible thing a Flyers goalie has ever done in my lifetime".
1993 - While it's normal to want to celebrate taking a 3-2 series lead with a little bit of music, the Maple Leafs will later regret asking Wayne Gretzky if they could borrow that piano he's been carrying around on his back.
2000 - Scott Stevens cements his status as the league's hardest hitter on a devastating open ice check on Eric Lindros, and by "status" we mean "shoulder pad" and by "cements" we mean "fills with actual cement".
Labels: alfredsson, chara, chelios, cherry, crosby, fraser, gretzky, hextall, koharski, lemieux, lindros, lucic, mellanby, messier, neely, phillips, potvin, roy, samuelsson, stevens
Grantland: What's Wrong With the L.A. Kings? (And Can They Fix It?)
The old sports cliché says that you’re never really in trouble in a playoff series until you lose at home. But, with all due respect to the wisdom of old sports clichés, right now the Los Angeles Kings look like a team that’s in a lot of trouble.
They’ve dropped the first two games of their Western Conference finals matchup with the Blackhawks, including a surprisingly easy Chicago win Sunday that saw L.A. trailing 4-0 before the midway mark. While the series has returned to Los Angeles for the next two games, the prospect of the Kings coming back to win four-of-five against the Presidents’ Trophy winners seems slim.
Or does it? After all, the Kings are the defending Stanley Cup champions, and they’ve already come back from a 2-0 series deficit this postseason (against the Blues in Round 1). Counting them out after two games of a seven-game series seems like a reach.
Here are eight things that are going wrong for the Kings right now, and our best guess as to whether they’ll be able to fix them in time.
Grantland grab bag: Mats Sundin doesn't understand...
Grantland: All the key dates from a busy July in t...
Grantland: The Blackhawks broke the system and tha...
A ranking of 20 years of Gary Bettman Stanley Cup ...
Grantland grab bag: Jean-Claude Van Damme's awesom...
Grantland: How did the Leafs almost beat the Bruin...
The New York Rangers head coaching vacancy questio...
Grantland: The 1-1 Stanley Cup Series: A Historica...
Grantland: How Disappointing Was Your Team's NHL P...
Grantland grab bag: Are we supposed to hate Sidney...
Grantland: A visual guide to four decades of Bruin...
Grantland: What's Wrong With the L.A. Kings? (And ...
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Delaware State University Hornets
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6 Brycen Alleyne
2018: Preseason All-MEAC Second Team (RB) … Phil Steele Preseason All-MEAC Third Team (KR)
2017: Phil Steele All-MEAC Third Team kick-off returner … competed in 10 games at running back and kick returner … second on the Hornets with 240 yards rushing on 60 carries (4.0 ypc) … ranked third in the MEAC in kickoff returns at 21.7 yards per attempt (543 yards total) … sixth in the league in all-purpose yards at 90.5 yards per contest (905 yards total) … had team season-best 73 yard run, also a career-high, vs. Howard on Oct. 14 … ran for team-high 65 yards, including a 47-yard run, vs. FBS West Virginia (Sep. 16) … also returned seven kickoffs for 132 yards, including a long of 40, in West Virginia contest … rushed for team-high 47 yards on nine carries (5.2 ypc), including long of 23, in season opener at Delaware (Aug. 31) … recorded three receptions for 52 yards (long 45) and three kickoff returns for 81 yards (long 43) vs. FBS Florida State (Nov. 18) … had a 56-yard kickoff return at North Carolina A&T on Oct. 7 … surpassed career 1,000-yard rushing mark during 71-yard performance vs. Howard on Oct. 14 … missed Oct. 28 contest at NC Central due to injury… team co-captain
2016: Second on the Hornets and fifth in the MEAC in rushing at 57.5 yards per game (575 total) … third in the MEAC in all-purpose yards at 117.9 per game (575 rushing/450 kickoff return/154 receiving) … also second on the team with three rushing touchdowns … rushed for career-highs of 174 yards and two touchdowns vs. Florida A&M on Oct. 15 … had touchdown runs of 42 and 14 yards, in addition to 26, 19, 13 and two 12-yard carries in the Florida A&M contest … also recorded five catches for 47 yards (both career-highs) vs. FAMU … had nine carries for 94 yards, including a career-best 64-yard touchdown run, vs. Monmouth on Sep. 10 … rushed for 73 yards on 23 attempts (long 10) at Morgan State on Oct. 1 … ran for a 49-yard touchdown in loss to North Carolina A&T on Nov. 12 … also had three receptions for 36 yards, including a career-best 27-yard catch, in NCA&T contest … rushed for team-high 61 yards on 22 carries ( long 17) at So. Carolina State on Oct. 22 … had a team-best 22 yard carry in season-opener at Delaware (Sep. 1) … also had career-high 141 kickoff return yards on five attempts, including a season-best 50 yard kickoff return in Delaware contest … third on the Hornets with 28 receptions … completed a three-yard pass for a touchdown to tight end Isaiah Williams on his first career throw vs. NC Central (Nov. 5) … appeared in 10 of the 11 games
2015: Competed in all 11 games as a running back and kick returner … second on the Hornets in rushing yards (249) and rushing yards per game (22.6) … also second on the team in all-purpose yards at 78.4 per game (862 total) … third on the Hornets with 16 receptions and 132 receiving yards … team leader with 481 kickoff return yards (25.3 ypr) … named MEAC Special Teams Player-of-the-Week after returning two kickoffs for 110 yards, including an 88-yard touchdown, and recording a tackle on a Howard punt return at the Bison one-yard line in the closing moments of the game in 32-31 victory over HU on Nov. 21 … Hornet leader with five touchdown and 30 points … had career-highs of 65 rushing yards (long 15) and 52 receiving yards in loss to Bethune-Cookman on Oct. 31 … also had rushing and receiving touchdowns, and a career-best 38-yard catch in Bethune-Cookman contest … recorded 139 kickoff return yards (long 43) on six attempts vs. No. Carolina Central on Nov. 7… also rushed for 37 yards and a touchdown (three yards) in NC Central contest … ran for 50 yards on career-high 20 carries (long 10) in loss to SC State on Oct. 24 … also grabbed a career-best four passes in SC State contest … had a four-yard touchdown run for the Hornets’ lone score in loss to NCA&T on Nov. 14 … recorded a 28-yard kickoff return vs. Florida A&M on Oct. 17.
High School: Three-year varsity football letterwinner at Concord … 2014 Delaware All-State Second Team running back as a senior … All-Blue Hen Conference First Team running back and
Honorable Mention defensive back during senior year … 2015 Delaware Blue-Gold All-Star selection … recorded an interception in Blue-Gold contest … tallied 2,200 all-purpose yards and 21 touchdowns during senior season … also returned three kickoffs for touchdowns as a senior … two-time Delaware Player-of-the-Week in 2014 … All-Blue Hen Conference First Team selection after rushing for 510 yards and eight touchdowns during junior season … rushed for 198 yards and five touchdowns as a sophomore … Academic All-Star … also lettered in track and field as a freshman.
Position: Running Back
Hometown: Wilmington, Del.
High School: Concord HS
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THE DGA INTERVIEW
An Aptitude for Leadership
Michael Apted's deep documentary experience informs his quest for authenticity, and as the issue of creative rights loomed after Thunderheart, that awareness sparked a decades-long involvement in DGA leadership
BY ROBERT KOEHLER
Director Michael Apted. (Photographed by Shayan Asgharnia)
Keeping up with the shifting career leaps of director Michael Apted turns out to be an adventure.
From his beginnings in the early 1960s at the U.K.'s legendary Granada Television, which served as his training ground, Apted refused to be slotted into a single category. First as researcher, then as director, Apted broke ground as a documentarian with the Up series, which profiled a group of 7 year olds across Britain's stratified class system—and then revisited them every seven years. (In a sustained act unprecedented in nonfiction filmmaking, Apted is currently preparing 63 Up.)
At the same time, he worked in a wide range of British television productions, from the still-running soap opera Coronation Street to dramas to theater adaptations, such as the 1976 Great Performances version of Harold Pinter's The Collection, produced by Laurence Olivier, with a dream cast of Alan Bates, Malcolm McDowell, Olivier and Helen Mirren.
In 1980, Apted came to the U.S. to direct Coal Miner's Daughter, immediately sealing his reputation in Hollywood as a maker of nuanced, genre-crossing stories with strong, humanist hearts beating at their centers, including Gorky Park (1983), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Class Action (1991), Thunderheart (1992), Nell (1994), Enigma (2001), Amazing Grace (2006) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
Like the late Jonathan Demme did, Apted maintains a dance between fiction and nonfiction, each creatively feeding the other. Besides his regular seven-year process of revisiting the Up project, he's made a range of documentaries profiling performers and artists (including the brilliant and little-known Inspirations, featuring David Bowie) and work that taps complex political topics, from the arrest of American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier (Incident at Oglala) to the experience of young Chinese activists who survived the 1989 Tiananmen massacre in Beijing (Moving the Mountain).
As he explains in this wide-ranging interview with DGA Quarterly, Apted is at heart a realist who brings his drive for truth even to the James Bond spectacle The World Is Not Enough (1999) and his latest, the 2017 international espionage thriller Unlocked, starring Noomi Rapace. A three-term president of the DGA, as well as its current secretary-treasurer, and upcoming 2018 recipient of the DGA's Honorary Life Member Award, Apted also expresses strong, clear-headed ideas on the current and future course of the Guild and its core values.
(Top) Apted confers with Sigourney Weaver on location for Gorillas in the Mist; (Bottom) The director, sitting behind the microphone, takes a pause in the action during the making of 35 Up, part of a landmark documentary series that became a stinging indictment of the English class system. (Photos: (Top) Photofest; (Bottom) Granada Television)
Q: Now, you didn't study filmmaking. Your background is history and law. How did you tumble into television and film production?
A: When I was 11, I got a scholarship to The City of London School. It gave me a sense of a big city, and that led to an interest in amateur, school drama. When I was 14, I went to the Academy Theater and saw an Ingmar Bergman film, Wild Strawberries. That changed my life, because I had been going to the movies really as a social event but I never really knew the existence of anything profound or lasting about movies, and this was my road to Damascus. From then on, that is what I wanted to do.
I was on London's West End, so we could go to the theater. We did great school plays, and it was all very seriously done. My real roots came from my mother because she loved going to plays. I tagged along with her, and I loved that.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: In Elford, in Essex, which is kind of a slightly middle-class part of the East End of London. That gave me a basis for when I went to Cambridge. I jumped straight into college theater and going to the movies all the time. It was an interesting generation. I was at college with Trevor Nunn, Stephen Frears, Mike Newell. John Cleese and I were on the football team together. It was kind of a golden age at Cambridge in the '60s. A lot of us went off into the entertainment industry.
I graduated [during a] time of change in U.K. television. The BBC had run the whole thing for decades. After starting around 1958, commercial television was looking for talent to develop by the early 1960s. They [focused on] raw talent from the universities, and I got in on that and I went to Granada Television, which was the best place to be. It had a famous Australian documentarian named Tim Hewat who transformed the face of news and documentaries in British television. He ran a weekly show called World in Action, which focused on real social problems and went all over the world. I joined this unit after I had done training at Granada. The company was too small to really train us, so it was on-the-job training. We jumped in straight away, making horrific mistakes and things like that. But that didn't seem to matter.
One of the shows I did was Seven Up! Hewat said, "The English social system stinks to heaven; how are we going to dramatize it? How are we going to show that? You know, we could talk to journalists and intellectuals. But why not get 7-year-old kids in and ask them about their lives and their hopes?"
I was put on it as researcher, and found the children. We prepared it for about a month, shot it and then put it on the air. And it was staggering… the impact it had. Because here for the first time was a real look at the English class system, which was horrific.
Q: What was interesting and maybe unprecedented about Seven Up! was how it grouped all of the classes together. They were all under the same tent.
A: Exactly. What was good about it was that it was directed by a very skillful Canadian director, Paul Almond (Apted directed all of the subsequent films in the series). He didn't really have any sense of the English class system as a Canadian. He turned it into a nice film, but I turned it into a political document. That if you were born into a certain environment, you had no chance at all of achieving any ambition. It was going to be controversial, crude, no holds barred, and was going to tell it as it was. It had a huge effect on the country, not just on television, because it showed graphically how awful things were.
Q: Some people said it had an effect similar to that of Dickens' novels.
A: Yeah, I think it did.
Q: How did you see yourself growing up, developing, maturing, both as a filmmaker and also as a human being interacting with these kids turning into adults?
A: It was a piece of hands-on sociology. You know, as I went on with the program, I learned how to do it properly. Earlier on, I made mistakes trying to anticipate what was going to happen to them, like most famously when I did 21 Up. I was convinced by 28 that [Tony Walker, whom Apted referred to as "Tony the Jockey"] was going to be in prison, so I thought it would be a very cute idea to have him drive around the East End of London where he lived and he could point out the great crime spots because there had been very famous criminals who had been murdering people in the East End of London. I thought this would be very, very good. And of course, it wasn't. Nothing could have been further from the truth. And he realized it. He picked it up at 28 Up. I'll never forget, he said, "See, Michael, don't judge the book by its cover." And I realized, "Michael, you're trying to play God here, so stop it." And so that was the first lesson I learned painfully, don't try and anticipate what's going on. It's the hardest thing to do. I refined that to such a degree that I would have almost no fixed questions. It wasn't about my input, it was what they were. Because if you look at all the films, they're all different in a way. 35 Up, for example, is about death, because a lot of them were losing their parents at that age. And yet when I did 56 Up, they weren't thinking about death. Economically, it was interesting because when 35 was filmed [in 1991], England was in a catastrophic crisis with the miners' strikes, and they never mentioned it. I might try to get them [to comment on it], but they had nothing to say about it. Yet by 56, they're worried about their pensions. So, it had to be their view of the world, and that took quite a lot of figuring out, to be honest with you. And so the interviews are really what they want to talk about, not what I want them to talk about. It isn't about current affairs. It's about where their emotional, political, social lives are. And that gives freshness to it.
Q: Was Coronation Street your training ground for directing actors?
A: Absolutely. That was the first time I ever met actors. Mike Newell, who's still a very close friend—we've had very similar careers—was directing Coronation Street and went on holiday. So I went to the management and said, "Newell's going on holidays, can I do his episodes?" I can't imagine how I managed to get the nerve to do it. They said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah. I would really love to do it." And they said, "OK." It was as simple as that. So I did his pair, and I did them well, and the actors liked working with me. I went back to documentaries, and then about six, seven months later, they came back and said, "Do you want to do some more of that?" It was a fantastic experience. We weren't exactly doing it live, but it had to be done in two chunks with a commercial break in the middle. So you had to get through the first 15 minutes without stopping. And then you had a break and then you did the second. So you had to plan everything. It also helped that they'd been doing it for six years. And it's still going.
Q: At the same time, you were developing your skills and tools as a director of dramatic material. The Collection remains one of the most interesting visual records of a Pinter play in a more realistic world. When you got to that point, did you feel like, wow, I have really reached the top of a mountain here? I'm working with Laurence Olivier.
A: Olivier was married to Joan Plowright, and her brother David ran Granada. Olivier went through quite a long period of illness, and he wanted to get back into acting again. So he did this deal with Granada that they would do six plays, [and] he would act in one or two of them. But he would be the producer, which is why we attracted all this incredible talent. I was only in my late 20s, so it was a frightening experience. I mean I would have a read-through and there were all these actors with Harold Pinter. And there was me saying, "Shall we get going?"
(Top) The director with Sissy Spacek, who played the title role in Apted's Coal Miner's Daughter, for which she won an Oscar; (Bottom) Apted decrees order in the court on the set of Class Action with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. (Photos: (Top) Courtesy Michael Apted; (Bottom) Everett)
Q: One of the most interesting examples of you directing an actor is with Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter. On what details did you work with her?
A: Well, the big specific was singing. Loretta and the music producer spent six weeks with Sissy, working on the whole thing. Sissy had all that time with Loretta to learn about her, watch her sing. It was concrete. She learned how to sing. She already had a lovely voice for it, but she also learned all the body movements. Incredibly, Loretta did the preparations and then left, and never showed up for any of the filming. She didn't intend to get in the way once we started.
Q: How do you direct actors?
A: Well, I've never really been an actor. My way of directing actors is to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. For me, it's always a case of not being afraid to talk about the characters and scenes a lot, and get their input as much as I can. Not to go in there and say to them, "This is what I want you to do." I mean, specific directions may come later in matters of staging or whatever. But I begin by trying to help them feel part of the character. Sissy had to enter the living world of Loretta. The documentarian in me is still very large. I think I'm much more of a documentarian than I am a theatrical person. So whenever I do anything, I go to what is the truth of the matter, even if it's kind of a ridiculous or invented truth. But to get into that world and to find a way to rehearse, which introduces them to their world. Like if they're playing a cop, go out with a cop. To get them to look at the world which we're going to inhabit in as intimate a way as possible.
Q: When you say you get to know the actor's strengths and talk to them about that—for example, in Sissy Spacek's case, what did that mean? There isn't anyone else like her, she's sort of sui generis.
A: Yeah, she's also tough in the way she works. And it's that toughness that I wanted to get because everything was against her the whole time. So the question I face is considering what is the character's strength as written and what strengths does the actor bring to that. It's some way to find the documentary part of it in the casting and also in the way I talk to the actors. And what I talk to them about is the kind of real world they're in. That's what interests me.
Even when I did The World Is Not Enough, the Bond movie, that involved business in the Caspian Sea. I told the producers I want to go to the Caspian and see what's going on there. I think they thought I was crazy. And I said, "I want to go down to the Caspian and to Azerbaijan." It was amazing what we got out of doing that. We discovered that the Russians were building cities on the water because they had so much steel in the '50s and '60s, they didn't know what to do with it, so they built these cities. I mean, we would never have figured that out if we hadn't gone down there. That was a kind of an extreme example of what I do to bring out reality.
Q: That raises another interesting element in a lot of your work: How you work with location scouts. Your movies, almost without exception, are shot on location and usually shot where the story is set.
A: I was enormously influenced by English realism, our version of Italian neo-realism—dominated by people like Ken Loach—which was about not just finding the place but also to have the voice of the people living there. Getting away from the usual BBC theatrical thing. That was always my agenda. If I could do it outside a studio, in the real place, I would do it. I always want to go and see where these story's events took place, even if it was impossible to shoot in the original location. It's part of the documentarian, a very strong element even now in my life. That's why doing The Chronicles of Narnia was a nightmare for me because that was magical. I mean other people can sit down and just draw something like that out of their imagination. But my imagination is always rooted in reality, which can be a burden as well as an advantage. And I was having a fit doing Narnia because I had all these great artists doing all these themes for the various islands we have in the film, and I thought, "Oh my God, how am I going to choose?"
Q: Your most recent movie, Unlocked, has some incredible locations. Where were they?
A: People saw the film and assumed I shot it in London. But I shot five days in London, and the rest of it in Prague, exteriors and everything. In that case, I listened to my production designer [Ondřej Nekvasi] who said, "When you pick the London locations that I've got to match, don't make them necessarily famous things. And don't make them very old. Because I can't match old in the Czech Republic as London. Forget all that. And go more recent. Then I can do it." Which he did. I'm usually very close with the production designer.
I think in some ways the production designer to me is more important than the cinematographer because I know a cinematographer whose work I like, and I know that I'm not a great photographer. I tend to trust a DP. I can't express to them how I want it done. But I know what to ask the designers, I know what I want from them.
Q: Then we're really talking about a three-way conversation, right? Between the production designer, the location scout and you in terms of finding that right place.
A: Yes. The location scout can understand how to change what's there to suit what I need, i.e., to find you a place where you can do things to it, to fit in with the look. So the location manager is a very important figure in all this, because he'll be part of the discussions I have with the production designer. That part of production I enjoy a lot, how to make locations work.
Nell was interesting because the DP, Dante Spinotti, with whom I've done three or four films, worked very closely with the production designer, Jon Hutman, because he wanted the sun to be in a particular place for the location for certain parts of the film. So that was the two of them having to decide exactly where to put that cabin so Dante had the best opportunities with dawn and dusk. So it became Jon's and the location scout's job to find us a piece of seaside or lakeside where we could do that. Dante's needs became my needs since I would never have thought of that. And when we started doing it, I realized how important that decision was by Dante and how well the location scout and production designer understood that.
Q: You don't write your own movies. Where do you begin to be involved with the script? How do you work with a writer?
A: I go with scripts that are about a subject that interests me.
Q: What's an example of that?
A: Well, I mean with Coal Miner's Daughter, I thought, "My God, you know, I'm in the north of England here. I'm there."
Q: You see that in the early scenes right away?
A: The most important thing to me in a script is to have a relationship at the center of the film. It could be Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. I have to have an emotional center in the film, whatever it is. Because to me I can only tell a story through the emotion of it. I can't necessarily tell it through the action or the scale of it so much.
Then I know what to ask a writer for. Then I know what to ask in a piece of casting. Is this actress capable of creating a relationship with this actor? Would they be sympathetic together? Because I find the better films I've done have been the ones that have some real emotional power to them. If I don't see that in a script, then there's nothing I can do because I can't rewrite the script. I'm not capable of doing that.
(Top) Apted with star Jodie Foster on Nell; (Middle) Going over the script with Georgie Henley on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; (Bottom) Apted trains his focus on Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet on Enigma. (Photos: (Top & Middle) Everett; (Bottom) Shutterstock)
Q: Do you treat the writer's words as sacrosanct on the set or do you change them? Or do they change in the rehearsal period?
A: I think it is all of the above. If I know a scene or film is beautifully written, I will make sure it is done in that way. If I think a script can be enhanced by something an actor brings to it, I would go along with that. I don't have strict rules with it, except I do think the script and writers should be treated with respect. I don't pick up a script and say, "Thank you very much" and then turn the whole thing round. If someone comes up with a line that seems to me to be better than what is written, I will use it. I won't say no. So, again it is part of the whole kind of documentary discovery of me doing a movie to finding out what are the best bits to use.
Q: In the case of Nell, screenwriter William Nicholson came to the set to work on scenes and the language. What's unique about that movie is that you have this invented language. And he has to write it. What kind of discussion would you have?
A: Bill gave us kind of a rough synthesis of what the key words would be and how you would say "and" and "the" and things like that. He gave us 20, 30, 40 words and then (Jodie Foster) got used to those and then would improvise. He gave her the kind of structure of sentences and clues on kind of the simplest words. The character had never heard someone speak and there was no research we could do. There was no living person who had gone through this. It was just a nightmare for her and then for me all the way through.
Q: With Thunderheart, the story develops these relationships that in different ways become emotional with the elder, with the Indian police, with Sam Shepard's FBI guy. And they all go in different ways.
A: I also used real people. I was making Incident at Oglala when the script of Thunderheart came in. The [elder] brought something to it, which was so moving that you can't act that. That was him. And there are occasions when you cast someone who you know brings something [special] to it. There's some emotional quality they bring to it, because I think that's the essence of movies, the emotional thing. The films I love are the films with emotion, which make me cry. And the films I like the most [are] political stories that can be told within the microcosm of a relationship.
And what was so interesting to me, by doing a documentary and a drama about the same subject (in this case, injustices at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota), you can see the power of the documentary, the weakness of the documentary, the power of the written script and the weakness of the written script. The most difficult thing about making a documentary is giving it some shape or form. You simply have to build the thing up from the raw material. And there was raw material in Incident at Oglala that was very powerful.
And when you're doing a scripted film, you can't quite get the authenticity of the real thing. You can't get the surprises of a real thing that can happen in a documentary. [So] I sometimes mix non-actors in with actors, not to train the non-actors, but to put the actors in the right ballpark. When they're doing scenes with the real thing, they behave quite differently from when they're doing scenes with fellow actors. They have to subconsciously and consciously acknowledge the existence of this weight that this person is bringing. To me, the real success of a project is if it feels that there is some almost intangible reality, some emotional truthfulness about it and isn't a load of actors doing a good job.
Q: Thunderheart was how you first discovered the DGA's workings—when you had to claim your rights to fight alterations to the original cut that 20th Century Fox demanded for TV broadcast. You joined the Guild in 1978 in order to make Coal Miner's Daughter.
A: I had been interested in the Guild in London because I had always been very left wing and interested in industrial relations. But it was a time when [then-Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher was destroying the trade union movement and the [British version of the Directors Guild] with it. The Thunderheart story was remarkable. One of the agreements on Thunderheart was that I needed to represent religious aspects of Sioux life, which are critical in the story. The traditional Sioux insisted that they be represented. They wanted to be there when these things are filmed to make sure they're accurate. So that is what we did, and they were very, very helpful and I used a lot of them in the film. Then I got a letter from Fox saying I have to take 28 minutes out of the film. It has to run 90 minutes. I said "What?" I didn't know what to do. I said to my agent, "Where do I go, I don't know where to go." He said go to the DGA. I hadn't shown much interest in the DGA. But I asked for help and the Guild was phenomenal. They just took the whole thing over and it was a long fight and we won each decision as it was appealed.
Q: You went all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court?
A: Yeah. The court said Fox can cut it down to 90 but you have to put a title card on the front of the film and hold it for about 15 seconds stating that the director did not approve of this cut. That was when Fox gave up. But I mean, the money that the Guild spent defending me. I wanted to know more about the Guild at this point.
Q: This was based on the spiritual needs of the Lakota people making a promise and this historical and cultural burden of another white man breaking a promise to the Native Americans for the umpteenth time.
A: Absolutely. It was a real promise I made to them because it was essential for the credibility of the film. It was so generous, what the Guild did for us. Kevin Costner deserves a lot of credit, too, because of the success of Dances With Wolves. My film wouldn't have been made if he hadn't (A) made a successful film and (B) treated the Indian population with respect.
Q: What's striking is how, once you got involved, you really rose through the DGA leadership so rapidly. How did that happen?
A: I did have an interest in my blood about the labor movement. I met very good people and then John Frankenheimer passed away, and there was a need to bring in new blood. I then became friendly with Steven Soderbergh and between us we pushed the idea of having an independent council for independent filmmakers. I knew [the Guild] would fight for financial things, but what I was so impressed with was the way it protected our cultural and artistic interests, [as when] they went to a huge expense to support Thunderheart.
So, although doing the negotiations is our bread and butter, there's still a whole acknowledgement of the spiritual side of the work we do, the quality of the work, the subject matter. Making it an acceptable organization, encouraging creativity, as well as encouraging good negotiation. I love that balance.
Q: During your time on the Board, you have seen negotiations up close, first from both the role of the president and, most recently, from the role of negotiations co-chair. Can you share a little about that evolution from your perspective?
A: I've been intimately involved with the last… must be five negotiations. Sort of going backwards. When you do the presidency, because it's a difficult job, you've got to in some ways be in the middle of it but you've also got to be able to step back from it. I think it's a mistake when presidents want to be too involved in it, because they miss the point of being able to look at it from 30,000 feet. Negotiations are a skilled and singular event which have their own kind of routine, their own unpredictability or predictability, but you can't get bogged down in that. You can't get involved in all the minutiae of it. You've got to know what's going on but you've got to let people do their job.
(Top) Apted surveys the scene on location for Gorky Park with actors William Hurt and Joanna Pacula; (Middle) the director provides guidance to Sophie Marceau and his 007 star Pierce Brosnan on the Bond thriller The World Is Not Enough; (Bottom) Apted with Thunderheart writer/producer John Fusco. (Photos: (Top) Courtesy Michael Apted; (Middle & Bottom) Everett)
Q: You were president during a time when technological change was happening quite rapidly. Wasn't much of it about new delivery systems and how they were going to affect directors?
A: Absolutely. [Former National Executive Director] Jay Roth was very, very interested in this. He's a very powerful figure, and I just made sure that he got all the support we could give him from the membership. Because the Guild was being run efficiently, we were able to look into the future.
Q: New media had really started to come onto the agenda in 2006. What did you and the leadership decide to do with respect to that issue?
A: Well, we approved that we would start really doing our homework, trying to be on the cutting edge of it. I remember in 2006, we had a big retreat in Santa Monica when all the senior directors of the Guild showed up, and we brought in a number of experts who made presentations to us. That was the birth of what became for management, a kind of two- to three-year guidance. We tried to make ourselves as knowledgeable as we could about the technology of new media because we felt very strongly that that was going to be, other than health care, a necessary infusion of resources into the future.
Q: So what were the basic goals of the DGA negotiations on new media at that time?
A: Well, it was two things. One was jurisdiction, and the second was residual compensation that was reasonable. But it was the jurisdiction that was the key thing—that we had to have some control over this new medium. Those were our two ambitions, that we needed to establish those two things, which we achieved.
Q: Your career marks these sometimes surprising jumps, and yet if you look at it, there's a pattern. One of the patterns is the crime thriller. And there are such interesting different types of action that you've staged. How do you manage the choreography?
A: The first thing I deal with is to make sure [the sequences] gel with the drama and the characters, and keep the story moving. It was more difficult with the Bond movie and more difficult with Narnia, but particularly with Bond because if you are taking on a Bond, then you have to take on the action sequences. You have a big map in your office. There's two hours of the film. We have to have an action scene there at the 59th minute, 73rd minute, and you have to have six action sequences. They are all plotted carefully. I had to do a skiing sequence, but there were already three skiing sequences in previous Bond movies so you're trying to—
Q: —make it fresh.
A: Yeah. Which is almost impossible. What are the circumstances? What are the characters doing? And is there anything singular or individual? Or does it kind of become, as it were, an element to their character in the way they conduct themselves?
One of my favorite lines is (paraphrasing) "tension is the removal of information." You limit what audiences know. When action scenes are too long, you get off message a bit. That's why in all the action movies I have done, I have been quite tough about not making [the action] stay around too long, because I think with action sequences, they're so brilliant that less is more.
Q: The finale also has to be the biggest sequence too, right? You have to build through each one.
Yes. You do it so that it is real. As long as it keeps the same tone that I am trying to set with the rest of the film. Again, it was the relationship.
Q: You don't do fast cutting.
A: If you go too fast, you haven't the faintest idea of what is going on. You can sense the filmmaker has watched the cut 100 times and saying, "Well, I think we could still shorten that a little bit," and there comes a point where you can't understand it. Nothing is worse.
Q: What advice would you have to new directors?
A: Have a sense of priorities. Everything is never going to be perfect, and you have to build a sense of priorities when you schedule a film so that you give enough time to shoot the very difficult, important scenes. You do other scenes quickly simply because you've got to get the thing done in as good a way as you can. I find this very stimulating because it makes you think about everything.
(Top) Apted commands the podium at a Guild 75th Anniversary event in December of 2011; (Bottom) Apted and his lead actress Noomi Rapace ponder their next move on the director's latest feature, Unlocked. (Photos: (Top) DGA Archives; (Bottom) Larry Horricks/Lionsgate)
Q: I think of how William Friedkin spoke about how much time and energy he spent constructing, designing, planning the main chase sequence in The French Connection. He knew that if he didn't get that sequence right, the rest of the movie falls apart.
A: Absolutely. I'm very much a part of that school. The whole thing can't be perfect. But you have to realize where the money is, what you're selling, and make sure those elements are done to the best of your ability. That's the way of the industry. People get stuck trying to make everything perfect and go over budget. Spielberg always gets the job done and knows what has to be done. That's why he has such a huge body of work. He realizes the essence of this particular film [and] makes sure to give attention to developing that essence.
Q: Both Spielberg and Friedkin have also served in DGA leadership; can you tell me a little more about working with other directors in the Guild?
A: What was impressive to me is the quality of the people and the quality of their work, and it has been just wonderful to be able to be around those people and talk to them. One of the joys of going to a Council meeting or to a Board meeting is meeting directors that I wouldn't necessarily run across during my working career, and just to be with them, and talk about them, and not necessarily talk about the DGA, but talk about the work, and what they were doing, and what people liked and what people didn't like. That congeniality; that kind of brotherhood of directors was perhaps the most important thing to me, because I didn't grow up in America.
Q: After you stepped down as president, you played a huge role in organizing the Guild's 75th anniversary celebration.
A: Yeah, I just had an idea: Which of the directors have changed the game? From Hitchcock through Cassavetes, Spielberg, James Cameron, and game-changing ADs, UPMs, daytime television directors, television comedy directors and so on. That was an interesting way of getting a variety of films shown. And people who would still be alive; it wasn't just a history lesson.
Q: You are perhaps not appreciated enough for your role as an early activist for diversity. When did that start for you at the Guild and what did you do in a practical, fundamental way of articulating that to the membership?
A: I used to go to the staff meetings with the various studios and companies. I was able to report back to my colleagues about what was going on. We were on to it very early. It was back-breaking and very uncomfortable and very difficult to get any movement with [the studios regarding] people of color and women. It took years.
I think it's now changed. It's still not the right balance about people who get jobs, but in terms of the running of the DGA, it's much healthier. More than 50% of the National Board is now women.
Q: After serving as president, you now serve as secretary and treasurer.
A: Gil [Cates] was secretary/treasurer after he was president. I took that post over when he died. The opening had to be filled immediately.
Q: His death left a huge vacuum to be filled.
A: We've never really filled it. You'll never have him again. But at least we stopped any bleeding, as it were.
Q: Right now, what do you think are the most important issues for the Guild?
A: I think we've got to be very, very alert to how things change, but we've got to stick to our rights. Things are slipping and sliding and changing all the time: It's a very fastmoving horizon with distribution. It's very complicated. As long as we are unified as a Guild, we're very, very powerful. The industry could not exist without us. Things would stop if every DGA member refused to work for a company that wouldn't recognize the minimal requirements of any guild, not just us.
You can see it with Trump, where trade unions have been vilified for decades. I think that's always a terrible thing when the people who make the things, do the jobs, don't have a place at the table. That was what I used to say to everybody. I think we should have a seat at the table. And we can only fight for that if we're solid—and we are all in the same rhythm. And we do have an important [role] in the way the business is run. We're committed to that.
We can be a bastion. We know what we want, we know what we're entitled to, and we know the price we'll pay if we don't pay attention to it.
The whole creative process is changing. But we all believe that the director is crucial to this whole—not to the business, but to the execution of what we're distributing, whether it's on a telephone or a Marvel film, there is quality and intelligence and good business practices attached to directing.
We know that movies are very difficult to direct, and if you don't use experienced directors, you end up with chaos and huge amounts of money being lost. We know that we have something, as well as our creative senses, organizational senses, to get films made in a civilized and proper manner. And that's our business.
We want to be part of the economic fabric of the industry but we want to preserve the quality that the DGA brings in its job, which we think is central to the making of films. That's what we have to fight for.
Prominent directors reflecting on their body of
work through an extended and in-depth Q&A.
See more articles from DGA Interviews
Jean-Marc Vallée
Jean-Marc Vallée has mined raw, powerful performances and made the internal external as he's tracked the trials and tribulations of the lost and damaged.
Anthony and Joe Russo
Brothers Anthony and Joe Russo went from no-budget indie underdogs from Cleveland to Marvel tentpole overlords, without sacrificing their character-driven sensibility and storytelling vision.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu
The three-time DGA award winner discusses cosmic injustice, what drives him, the art of collaboration and what comes next.
Richard Linklater learned by doing, and over the course of his 30-year career, the Texas-based filmmaker has left his own unique stamp on the indie world and beyond.
Dan Attias
Dan Attias, who has directed more than 80 series since he joined the Guild in 1980, brings arduous prep and probing insights to the table as a key contributor to Peak TV.
A trailblazer in movies and television, director Mimi Leder has learned that knowledge is power, and tenacity is the key to success.
Check out the latest DGA Quarterly, featuring a Special Report exploring Content Distribution in the Streaming Age as well as interviews with Michael Apted, Reed Morano, Lily Olszewski, Martin Campbell, Kenneth Branagh, Pamela Adlon, and more!
Special Report: Content Distribution in the Streaming Age
Primer on the Spectrum
Given that in the new millennium, consumers access TV programming in myriad ways, we present a thorough rundown of how DGA members' content is delivered to viewers.
Widening the Stream
Following in the footsteps of Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, networks like CBS, AMC and FX are getting into the custom streaming game, with exclusive content a primary selling point.
Who Controls Your Future?
With Big Tech becoming increasingly invasive on our economy and private lives, we look at how antitrust battles of the past are relevant to the present, and the consequences of a monopolistic world on entertainment.
Michael Apted
Michael Apted's deep documentary experience informs his quest for authenticity, and as the issue of creative rights loomed after Thunderheart, that awareness sparked a decades-long involvement in DGA leadership.
GMA's Daily Sprint
Director Lily Olszewski and her team keep the country's most-watched morning telecast churning ahead of a hyperactive news cycle.
Kenneth Branagh and Patrick Doyle
Three decades of kinship have allowed director Kenneth Branagh and composer Patrick Doyle to work in cultivated harmony, dating back beyond Branagh's first feature, 1989's Henry V.
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Digital Equipment Corporation
Photographs and memories from Digital Equipment in Galway.
John Player Tops
Home » News » In memory of Ronnie Conlon
In memory of Ronnie Conlon
Anyone who worked at Digital in the 1970s or 1980s will have fond memories of Ronnie Conlon, a man whose perseverance in the face of adversity was an inspiration to all who knew him.
Ronnie was born in Tuam and joined An Garda Síochána after leaving school. On November 16th 1966, a year to the day after graduating from Templemore, he suffered a freak accident when chopping timber for the barracks fire. His axe caught an overhead branch, and the impact caused a blood clot that led to a spinal injury and left him paralysed at just 20 years of age. He spent four years at the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dun Laoghaire before he could return home.
On returning to Tuam in 1970, Ronnie was determined to live a normal life. He found work with a local mail order company and when it closed in 1974, he joined Digital. He spent 18 years at Digital where, in spite of his disability, he pursued a normal career and lived an independent life. He and his beloved specially adapted Daf 66 car, donated by his work and Garda colleagues, were a regular sight all around Galway. Such was Ronnie’s independence, he even went back to college and graduated with a BA degree and a Higher Diploma in Education.
“Digital and all the people I met there gave me back the chance of having a life, and enhanced it multi fold. After I had been discharged from the Gardai in 1967 my life had been badly shattered, and my spirit was almost quenched; without a penny and without a hope of a proper income ever again in those days. Digital and all my Digital friends turned all that around. To my dying day I will always sing their praise.”
Ronnie Conlon
After leaving Digital in 1994, Ronnie established the Galway Centre for Independent Living and worked with the Irish Wheelchair Association as an advocate whose personal story inspired many other people with disabilities. Ronnie loved to meet his friends from his Digital days and kept in close touch with many of them right up until his death in August 2012. The picture above shows Ronnie at the 40th anniversary tour of the HP plant in Galway.
Ronnie was the subject of a radio documentary which was broadcast on RTÉ Radio on 25 March 2011. You can download the podcast from the RTÉ website. See also his obituary, which appeared in the Tuam Herald on 29 August 2012.
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You Are Beautiful Art Installation Surpasses Fundraising Goal Reviewed by Keely Jones on March 13, 2015 .
Skokie, Illinois, artist Matthew Hoffman’s You are Beautiful public art project, a partnership with eco-Andersonville, will be coming to four locations in Andersonville as well as to two other neighborhoods in April thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that ended on March 4. The campaign raised well over its initial goal of $5,500. “The idea we […]
You Are Beautiful Art Installation Surpasses Fundraising Goal
March 13, 2015 / By Keely Jones
Skokie, Illinois, artist Matthew Hoffman’s You are Beautiful public art project, a partnership with eco-Andersonville, will be coming to four locations in Andersonville as well as to two other neighborhoods in April thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that ended on March 4. The campaign raised well over its initial goal of $5,500.
“The idea we are going after is, number one, the positivity of it, having a positive message out there on the street,” said Brian Bonanno, the sustainability programs manager for the Andersonville Development Corp., which oversees eco-Andersonville. “But really what it’s about is trying to get people to realize that there are a lot of under-utilized spaces all over the city.”
The Kickstarter campaign raised $7,312. That means Hoffman and eco-Andersonville will be able to install floating texts at the corners of Clark and Winona, Ashland and Foster, and Clark and Olive. A smaller installation is planned on the sign of what was Trumbull Elementary School at 5200 N. Ashland. Displays will also likely be installed in the neighborhoods of Lawndale and Englewood, Bonanno said.
He added that the project seeks to make people feel more comfortable in their urban environment. Fences, gaps or eyesores in commercial districts that are filled in with art projects like Hoffman’s can generate more community interaction, Bonanno said.
Hoffman began the You are Beautiful project in Chicago in 2002. At the time, he had 100 stickers, but since then, the project has grown worldwide. Except for the smaller display on the Trumbull School sign, the hanging art displays will be on fences and will likely be fairly large. The words will be painted white and silver and will be 3 to 4 feet tall each. The signs themselves will be made of plastic or wood and will extend 50 to 60 feet long, Bonanno said.
“I think it’s important for people in the community to support this because it gives them an opportunity to shape the neighborhood that they want to live in,” Bonnano said in a video about the project. “They make a community more livable and more vital.”
For more information on the You are Beautiful project, watch the Kickstarter video.
Tags: #YABSticker, Andersonville, art, Beautiful, Chicago, edgeville, Edgewater, Installation, Kickstarter, Matthew Hoffman, YAB, You Are Beautiful
New Restaurant, Pearl's Southern Comfort, Coming to the Hood March 12, 2015 / By Keely Jones
233-Unit Sheridan And Foster Apartment Building For Sale March 16, 2015 / By Keely Jones
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Global Travel Media » Blog Archive » Luxury Resort Wear Designer Marie France van Damme Unveils an Exclusive New Pet Capsule Collection
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Luxury Resort Wear Designer Marie France van Damme Unveils an Exclusive New Pet Capsule Collection
November 30, 2018 Lifestyle No Comments Email
Marie France Van Damme, the Hong Kong-based designer known for her globally-influenced line of luxury resort, swim, and ready-to-wear, has partnered with Jay Ahr (a.k.a designer Jonathan Riss) to launch a limited-edition pet capsule collection of chic leather leashes and dog collars: the small Boubou size set ($450 USD), and medium Momo set ($550).
Designed to seamlessly match Marie France Van Damme’s collections, the metallic leather pet collection is named after Marie France’s two rescue dogs, Boubou and Momo, and can be found exclusively at Marie France Van Damme’s boutiques as of December. Available in a metallic color palette of gold, black, bronze, and silver, to match the designer’s available collection of bags and clutches, Marie France created the pet accessory for the chic traveler and her canine companion, in celebration of the Year of The Dog. The material, a soft leather, is texturally rich and multi-layered, and incorporates Jay Ahr’s iconic braiding techniques and intricate leatherwork.
Marie France Van Damme plans to host a series of charity events, from Los Angeles to London, to launch the collection. A portion of the proceeds from the MFVD & Jay Ahr pet collection will be donated to help rescue animals.
This exclusive capsule collection is the latest addition to the Marie France Van Damme brand, which has rapidly expanded since its inception in 2011 to include an impressive range of ready-to-wear, resortwear, swimwear, sunglasses, perfume, and candles. The designer just opened her thirteenth boutique at the Wynn Las Vegas and her first store in The Middle East at The Dubai Mall. She recently opened her eleventh boutique in Miami at Bal Harbour Shops and a store in Marrakech at La Mamounia in January 2018, a Los Angeles boutique in September 2017 at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, a boutique in Bangkok’s luxury shopping and entertainment complex Gaysorn Village in 2017, and her seventh store in December 2016 in Hong Kong’s prestigious Elements shopping mall, which is Marie France Van Damme’s second Hong Kong store. The company opened its very first store in Hong Kong’s acclaimed International Finance Centre (IFC) mall in September 2013. Five years later, Marie France Van Damme has twelve stores worldwide, proving that small curated stores are still very relevant. The company currently has 100 retail locations in some of the world’s most desirable shopping destinations.
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