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Adia Victoria plays 3rd & Lindsley 06.23; tours with The National in July
The Deli Nashville wants to take a moment to check in with one of our favorite artists, Adia Victoria, who will perform at 3rd & Lindsley on June 23rd. The blues singer-songwriter announced at the beginning of June that she had received the Songwriters Hall of Fame's Holly Prize, an award named for Buddy Holly which "recognizes and supports a new all-in-one songwriter". Adia's show at 3rd & Lindsley falls right in the middle of her Dope Queen Tour, which will take her to Europe later this summer. She'll headline a few shows in the UK and in Germany, as well as open for The National while she's out there. Later this year, Adia will open for Calexico and Iron & Wine at several shows around Europe; these performances will grow her audience and give her scintillating Southern blues the attention it deserves. Take a listen to Adia's latest single, "Different Kind Of Love", below. - Will Sisskind
Published: June 14, 2019 |
This Emerging Artist is based in Nashville,
for our Nashville Artist of the Month poll below!
Which of these emerging local acts should be The Deli Nashville's next Artist of the Month?
Total: 24 votes
The High Tides
No Coast
This poll will end on July 31, 2019 at 11.59 PM ET
Please stay positive with the comments, support for other bands is one of the secrets of "success."
Results as of July 16, 2019, 12:35 am
Nashville New Bands With Buzz
Explore The Deli Nashville Music Charts!
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Japan's Minister of Defence Visits JMSDF AEGIS Destroyer Deployed Against North Korean Missiles
Posted On Friday, 25 August 2017 17:05
Naval Forces News - Japan
Japan's Minister of Defense, Itsunori Onodera, visited a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) AEGIS in the Sea of Japan on on Wednesday, August 23, 2017. The Kongo-class guided missile destroyer JS Chokai (DDG 176) is currently deployed to provide anti-ballistic protection against North Korea's missile threat. It is the first time that a Japanese minister of defense inspects a JMSDF vessel while underway at sea.
Japan's Minister of Defense, Itsunori Onodera, visited a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) AEGIS in the Sea of Japan on on Wednesday, August 23, 2017. Picture: Japan MoD
The minister went on board by helicopter and then visited several key areas of the vessel such as the combat information center (CIC) and bridge. An anti-ballistic interception was simulated in hiw presence. At the end of his visit, he told the crew: "You are the focal point of our national defense. The success or failure of missile defense rests on your shoulders."
Since the latest developments in the crisis with North Korea, Japan self defense forces are permanently maintaining an AEGIS destroyer in the Sea of Japan and Patriot PAC-3 batteries on the likely trajectory ballistic missiles that North Korea may launch against Guam.
File picture: Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force guided missile destroyer JS Chokai (DDG-176) launches a missile as part of Rim of the Pacific 2016 in the Pacific Ocean, July 22, 2016. (Photo by Ryo Tanaka)
Kongo class
The Kongo class of guided missile destroyers serves as the core ship of the JMSDF's Escort Fleet. They are largely based on the United States Navy's Arleigh Burke class (Flight I).
4 Kongo class destroyers were commissioned between 1993 and 1998. They displace 9,500 tons full load.
• RGM-84 Harpoon SSM
• 61 VLS forward 29 VLS aft for: SM-2MR SAM, SM-3 Block IA ABM, RUM-139 Vertical Launch ASROC
• 1x 5 inch (127 mm) Oto-Melara main gun
• 2x 20 mm Phalanx CIWS
• 2x Type 68 triple torpedo tubes (6x Mk-46 or Type 73 torpedoes)
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Rough waters for container shipping. Why Hanjin, the world’s seventh largest container line, went under
End of the line
Olaf Merk, Ports and Shipping expert at the International Transport Forum (ITF), OECD. We are co-publishing this post with the ITF’s Transport Policy Matters blog
Sad news. After months – even years – of pain and suffering, the South Korean container shipping company Hanjin finally sank and passed away. Not just any casualty, but the largest shipping bankruptcy in history: Hanjin was the world’s seventh biggest container line with a fleet of 90 ships. Was this an accident, an isolated case of bad luck, or is something more structural going on?
Like with any bereavement, there are the immediate arrangements to make. Terminal operators and maritime service providers were not paid for their services and need their money, so they have seized Hanjin ships in ports to have some sort of guarantee. Hanjin’s clients are eager to know that their goods will be delivered and not be stuck on ships. Competitors are circling around the deceased to pick up some of the ships that Hanjin leaves behind.
At the same time, people are starting to wonder how all this could have happened. Forensic analysts talk about the sluggish demand for container transport, hit by declining trade from China, the overcapacity in container shipping and the resulting low ocean freight rates that have made it very difficult to make profits in container shipping. All this sounds very logical, but also pretty abstract, and – more fundamentally – it obscures an uncomfortable truth: this was not an accident, but market forces at play – and it will happen again.
The story starts – in a way – in a corporate boardroom in Copenhagen in 2010. Then, the world’s largest container shipping company, Maersk Line, decided to order a set of new container ships that were larger than the world had ever seen, able to carry 18,000 standard containers. Putting more containers on a more fuel-efficient ship would save costs and thus give it a better position in a very competitive market.
For a weekly container service between Asia and Europe – the route on which the largest ships are deployed – ten to eleven ships are needed; a lot of capital that smaller companies would not be able to collect. As the order for the new mega-ships was placed while the global economic crisis was still unfolding, banks were unwilling to lend much to a risky business like shipping, especially the smaller ones with high risk profiles. Timing was excellent, with ship prices low due to overcapacity in shipbuilding yards. The new mega-ships were smartly marketed as “Triple E” ships, providing economies of scale, energy efficiency and environmental performance. They also provided a once in a lifetime opportunity “for the market consolidation that big players hoped for“.
Yet things worked out differently: other firms reacted by ordering similar mega-ships and by organising themselves in alliances. They agreed to share slots on each other’s vessels, which means they can offer networks and connections that they would not be able to offer if they would go it alone. Alliances had existed before, but the Triple E-strategy involuntarily resulted in stronger alliances in which more carriers were involved. These consortia were also used to share newly acquired mega-ships, so individual carriers would only need to buy a few of these, instead of having to shoulder a whole set of ten ships. Consequently, many carriers were able to rapidly catch up and also order mega-ships, many more than expected. The alliances became such powerful mechanisms that even the largest companies found themselves forced to find alliance partners.
This gave a different twist to the play, but with a similar outcome. The combined mega-ship orders in a period of sluggish demand created a sensational amount of overcapacity: way more ships than were needed. This overcapacity resulted in lower freight rates, lower revenues and several years of losses, which we have not started to see the end of yet. Whoever has the longest breath and biggest pockets will survive; the others won’t and will suffer death by overcapacity, like Hanjin.
There will very likely be more Hanjins. Hardly any container shipping line is making profit nowadays and the perspectives are bleak. Sputtering trade growth and gigantic ship overcapacity will continue to depress ocean freight rates. Banks, creditors and governments might well get impatient with some of the liners and cut life lines again.
Economic theory champions the notion of “creative destruction”, in which inefficient firms are replaced by more efficient ones. So, even if it is hardly any comfort for employees that lose their jobs in the process, one could consider it a natural thing that weaker shipping firms disappear.
There is just one problem. If this process continues, it will soon lead to a very small group of powerful carriers dominating an already concentrated market, enabling them to put a lot of pressure on clients and ports. We are starting to see what the results of this are: less choice, less service and fewer connections for shippers, the clients of shipping lines. The ports that accepted the offer they could not refuse and invested in becoming mega ship-ready may find out that they placed their fate in the hands of a few big players who frequently change loyalties at fast as the wind.
Hanjin is gone; the problem is still very much there.
The impact of mega-ships Olaf Merk on OECD Insights
The Hanjin case is a practical illustration of the complexity of sectors such as international shipping. The OECD is organising a Workshop on Complexity and Policy, 29-30 September, OECD HQ, Paris, along with the European Commission and INET. Watch the webcast: 29/09 morning; 29/09 afternoon; 30/09 morning
Women in transport
and truck drivers, and CEOs, and…
Magdalena Olczak-Rancitelli, International Transport Forum
The role of women in the transport sector is something that needs to be addressed. Women account for only 17.5% of the workforce in EU urban public transport for example, and hold less than 10% of technical and operational jobs. In the United States, women comprise only 15% of transport and related occupations and only 4.6% of commercial truck drivers are women.
Changing these numbers to achieve inclusivity and gender balance in the transport sector is a very ambitious agenda. What is transport-specific about the gender issues? What are the catalysts for change? How can different stakeholders support this aim?
These questions were at the heart of a debate during the recent International Transport Forum’s 2015 Annual Summit in Leipzig, Germany. Under the theme of “Women Shaping Mobility for a Connected World”, transport ministers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, civil society and academics shared their experiences and good practices, and emphasised the message that a strong transport system depends on a vibrant and diverse workforce which includes women and men.
Closing the gender gap in the transport sector is a priority for many governments. “People should succeed because of their training, ability and commitment. Transportation will always be a major factor for all nations around the world. We will need all skilled individuals to operate and manage our networks”, highlighted the Canadian Minister of Transport, Lisa Raitt, for whom promoting women’s leadership is of paramount importance. Half of the senior executives in the Canadian Ministry of Transport are women, and similarly, gender parity has been achieved across the boards under the Minister’s responsibility.
For Susan Kurland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Aviation and International Affairs, “Women bring a unique perspective to the issues facing a modernising global transportation system. When women are given an equal opportunity to succeed in transportation careers they unlock new pathways for growth and profitability.” This reflects the strong engagement of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), at the highest level, to attract, retain, and advance the careers of women in the sector. The Department aims to build an economically compelling case by leveraging a growing body of research that outlines bottom-line benefits to transport systems that have greater numbers of women.
The USDOT is fully engaged in these endeavours at national level, and also international level, where it leads APEC’s Women in Transportation (WiT) initiative to increase women’s economic engagement in the transport sector throughout the region. A four-pillar approach is taken to achieve this: ensuring access to education, creating access to jobs, increasing retention, and providing a path to leadership. A data framework is being developed in the context of this initiative to enhance opportunities for women’s employment in the sector, as well as to improve the sector’s infrastructure and services to women as consumers. The results of the survey will be presented at the APEC WiT Forum and Transportation Ministerial in October 2015, in Cebu, Philippines.
But not only women are supporting stronger presence of women in the transport sector. New Zealand’s Minister of Transport Simon Bridges indicated that his government promotes parity on boards: 30 % of board members of key transport agencies in New Zealand are women. Similarly, Tunisia’s Minister of Transport, Mahmoud Ben Romdhane saw value in having more women as part of the workforce at all levels in transport, including at board level, and indicated he was proud to announce that he has appointed women as CEOs of two major transport companies – Tunisair and the national rail company SNCFT.
Also in the corporate world, leadership and role models are needed. Women in senior management positions can impact board dynamics and broaden a company’s knowledge as well as raising its profile. The effect of more women on boards can also trickle down to management and other levels in the hierarchy.
Jessica Jung, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility of Bombardier Transportation,
pointed out that in order to increase the number of women in the male-dominated transport industry, it is crucial to set specific targets, develop road maps to reach these, and implement regular monitoring. Setting targets in the recruitment process is also important. To avoid cognitive biases, Bombardier decided to ensure that a balanced gender mix of candidates is invited to the final interview round.
More women means bringing more talent to transport and a broader view conducive to innovation. For Robin Chase – founder of Zipcar, Veniam, and the author of the recently published book “Peers Inc” – diversity is vital for creativity. Robin provided the example of Lyft, a car sharing company, intended to be a more woman-friendly option than taking taxis. For Lyft, where 60% of passengers and 30% of drivers are female, gender diversity in decision making is critical to the company’s experience-based growth strategy. Fourteen of Lyft’s 30 executives at director level and above are women, and these include leaders in engineering and operations.
Women’s skills and perceptions are central to addressing different gender requirements in access to transport and mobility, as well as to safety and security. Silvia Maffii, Professor of Transport Planning at Milan Polytechnic, and co-author of the CIVITAS policy paper “Gender equality and mobility: mind the gap!” showed how women and men use transport modes differently. Often, these differences have not been taken into consideration in transport planning, neglecting problems of accessibility and safety and thus limiting women’s social participation.
Moreover, neglecting women’s preferences of transport and mobility may also limit women’s economic participation. A recent analysis carried out by US researchers shows a negative correlation between commuting time and women’s participation in the labour force. An increase of 1 minute in commuting time in metropolitan areas is associated with an approximately 0.3 percentage point decline in the women’s labour force participation – reflecting women’s mobility patterns: they do not simply commute but do a lot of additional travel.
Gender sensitive mobility planning should be also seen as an opportunity to promote urban sustainability. A study from Malmö shows that women choose sustainable alternatives to a greater extent than men. Men use cars for 48% of their transport needs, while for women the figure is 34 %. If men started travelling like women, CO2 emissions would go down by 31%, particle emissions would decrease by 21%, nitrogen emissions by 25%, and the noise level would go down by 1 decibel. Reduced negative effects on the environment, accidents and noise imply annual savings of 300 million kronor (32 million euros).
This debate proved how rich the issue of women in transport is and that the enhanced participation of women, with their unique skills and perceptions, is an opportunity that the sector cannot ignore. Next year’s Annual Summit, “Green and Inclusive Transport”, will certainly be an occasion to continue this multi-stakeholder dialogue. So, mark your agenda: 18-20 May 2016, Leipzig, Germany!
Help shape APEC’s WiT data framework by contributing your views as private sector stakeholders: responses via survey.
Networking Breakfast “Women Shaping Mobility for a Connected World”, International Transport Forum’s 2015 Annual Summit in Leipzig
OECD work on gender
Key data on gender equality
Transport, trade and tourism
To mark the opening of the International Transport Forum’s Annual Summit, today’s post is by the Summit’s keynote speaker Pravin Krishna, Chung Ju Yung Distinguished Professor of International Economics and Business at Johns Hopkins University
We live in exciting times. Globalization is deepening at a very rapid rate. In the last decade and a half, international trade in goods has nearly tripled and international tourism has nearly doubled in magnitude. Increased connectivity has led to globally fragmented production processes.
We are now more internationally connected in our economic interactions. We have a better appreciation of the peoples of different countries and their cultures through our travels. We have greater economic prosperity and a greater civilization through these interactions. A large part of this is due to the availability of transportation systems and the increased efficiency of their operation over time.
I will address three broad issues of the complex and multidimensional triangular relationship between transport, trade and tourism.
First, the crucial importance of transportation in generating economic gains, and the concerns about the effects of globalization on poverty and inequality.
Transport networks have obviously provided the backbone for the process of globalization. And, study after study has shown that improved access to transportation infrastructure can be beneficial at the local, national and the international levels. Research from the World Bank has shown that reducing delays at borders in an exporting country by 1 day, through improved trade facilitation, increases exports by 1 percent and that a 10 percent improvement in the quality of transport infrastructure would result in a 10 percent increase in trade, which suggests a very significant impact of improved transportation logistics on trade.
Going beyond the straightforward consequence of lower transport costs for trade flows; there seem to be other productivity benefits as well. For instance, following the Golden Quadrilateral project, which upgraded a central highway network in India, we observe an increase in size of the most productive firms and reduction in the size of the least efficient firms, signaling improvements in allocative efficiency in the economy.
In my own research, I have investigated a rather different set of issues concerning trade, poverty reduction and the availability of transport networks. The claim is often made that exposure to globalization may lead to greater levels of poverty and inequality. However, by looking across various regions within India, comparing regions which are proximate to ports and transportation networks with those that are not, we actually found the opposite. Without trade openness, poverty reduction is actually lower in geographically remote areas due to their lack of exposure to international markets (Krishna, Mitra and Sundaram, 2010). This is important for countries where persistent poverty is a major policy issue. Access to transport networks should clearly be an important part of equitable progress and poverty alleviation strategies.
Second, despite the obvious infrastructure gaps in transportation in large parts of the world, the question of whether to invest more in transport and in what forms, can only be answered in its specific context.
While we generally believe that there is a positive effect of infrastructure on output and productivity, it is not always the case that the benefits of additional infrastructure outweigh the costs. It is, of course, only with productive spending that value is created. Indeed, after surpassing certain thresholds in infrastructure levels, the marginal productivity of infrastructure declines. And, there is some evidence that the productivity of public capital has been declining in advanced economies. As transport networks have become more complete, the average impact of additional segments has been lowered.
Furthermore, the link between infrastructure and growth is much weaker when we measure infrastructure supply using pecuniary measures such as public investment flows. And there is a good reason for this: namely the lack of a close correspondence between public capital expenditure and the provision of infrastructure services, owing to inefficiencies in public procurement and outright corruption (Pritchett, 2000).
Evidence of waste of public resources can cost governments dearly in terms of lost credibility and trust on the part of citizens, even for well-designed projects. In rapidly growing India, the intense struggles of the current government, which is attempting to push through legislation on land acquisition to advance its infrastructure agenda, against a backdrop of long-standing cynicism about public capital expenditure, bear testimony to this fact.
Third the nature of change is complex, and while trade and tourism have grown steadily, this has not taken place in a uniform manner.
Over the last few decades, the center of global production activity has begun to shift back from the West to Asia, and in recent years especially towards China, which has become an important venue for offshore production. But many variations and uncertainties remain. Businesses looking for low-cost export platforms in Asia are increasingly considering countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. Indeed, even Mexico is possibly returning back to favor for many US based manufacturers.
These shifts raise important questions.
For instance, how is freight demand expected to evolve over time? On the one hand, demand could increase dramatically due to rising wealth and rising trade. On the other hand, changes in energy prices, in trade patterns and in economic geography, could affect the origin, destination and mode of traffic, possibly decreasing demand in particular segments and modes. Are our transport networks capable of flexibly adapting to these changes in demand and usage? Are there alternative infrastructure strategies that allow both efficiency and flexibility of response to changing demand?
The demographics of the planet are rapidly changing. A decade or two from now, populations in the United States, Japan, Europe and even China are likely to be significantly older than today. This may, in turn, alter demands for tourism and transportation. However, enhancements in information and communication technologies and other trends such as the movement of aging citizens to urban, pedestrian-friendly areas may mitigate the need for changes to be made in supply. It is unclear which way this will go and by how much.
Interestingly, other parts of the world will be getting younger. For instance, it is estimated that over 30 percent of India’s population, roughly 400 million people, are under 15 years of age and that, going forward, about 1 million young Indians will join the labor force each month, many in urban areas.
These are big trends and they are relatively easy to forecast. But how well do we understand the impact they will have on transportation? And how prepared are we for those challenges?
In addressing these issues, institutional gaps may be as large a problem as infrastructure gaps. Lack of co-ordination between transportation and tourism ministries, for instance, may yield mismatches in mutual expectations of both supply and demand. Similarly, with international trade, infrastructural improvements need to go hand in hand with other behind-the-border reforms, as bottlenecks may lie as much, for instance, in poor customs facilitation, as in poor transport infrastructure.
Long range planning has an outlook of 20-30 years, but is often largely a linear projection based on current relationships between economic and demographic patterns – much like the Times of London forecast in 1894, that given the growth rate of horse carriages, every street in the city of London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure by 1950! These linear projections may be the single greatest weakness of policy making for transport today. A wide range of technological, demographic, social and economic changes will likely affect demand and supply patterns in the future.
These changes and their impacts are not as well understood as we would like. But I am sure that the collective talent of the ITF Summit audience is very well equipped to address them, today and in future research.
Pravin Krishna, Devashish Mitra and Asha Sundaram, 2010, “Trade, Poverty and Lagging Regions in South Asia,” in The Poor Half Billion in South Asia, Ejaz Ghani, ed., Oxford University Press
Lant Pritchett, 2010, “The Tyranny of Concepts: CUIDE (Cumulated, Depreciated,Investment Effort) is Not Capital”, Journal of Economic Growth, 5 (4): 361–84
Free ebooks from ITF
Africa on the move: the Bamboo Bike Project
Bamboo has higher tensile strength than steel. Click on the logo for the project prospectus.
Africa imports an estimated 30 million bikes per year, yet there are no bike manufacturers on the continent. In today’s post, John Mutter of Columbia University describes a project to build bikes locally, using bamboo for the frames.
People in wealthy countries full of young, genuinely well motivated and committed people with honest and very good intentions can always do something to help those in poorer countries – something small, that is. These small things no doubt can be very good things. You can build a sanitary facility in a village and the health of the villagers will improve. You can introduce better farming practices and yields will improve on the few hectares of a poor farmer’s field.
It is also not very difficult to establish a small business in Africa. There must be millions of roadside vendors selling everything from food to furniture to appliances. In many cases the goods are produced right there on the side of the road. They operate out of stalls as small as the average toilet stall in the US. These businesses support the income needs of perhaps one or two people at a very modest level.
When we first started the Bamboo Bike Project many people suggested that we should emulate that model. We should create new village-level or roadside businesses because “that’s what works in Africa”. People who encouraged that approach said that if we just got a few started then things would “go viral” and next thing you know they would be everywhere, like Starbucks maybe.
The problem is that just about nothing goes viral in Africa except biological viruses like HIV. The singular exception is cell phones. It’s hard to think of anything else that just took off. The roadside vendor selling fruit isn’t on the first step of a path that will lead to opening a Shop Rite supermarket, there isn’t a Pret a Manger chain in the future for the woman cooking food over a wood-fueled fire, the guy walking around with a display of 50 cheap sunglasses isn’t about to challenge Sunglass Hut any time soon.
For us the issue is that we want to make a serious difference to transportation needs and those needs are vast. Our guess is that there is something between 5 and 50 million bikes in sub-Saharan Africa (it is impossible to get a good number), almost every one made in China and every one of inappropriate design and very poor quality. A bike is something that is assumed to break and need constant repair. We want to make good quality bikes designed for the needs of the rural poor and don’t need repair as often.
Most important is that we want to make them at a scale comparable to the needs – millions. That can’t be done on the side of the road or in village settings. Bike building won’t go viral. It needs a factory and now there is one in Kumasi, Ghana.
The whole story is too long to tell here, but thanks to a partnership between the Millennium Cities Initiative at Columbia University, The Bamboo Bike Studio in Brooklyn, New York and a Ghanaian investor, a factory is taking shape that has the potential to produce perhaps 10,000 bikes a year all made locally. That’s not millions but it is a lot closer than what can be done on the side of a road and it has a chance of meeting some significant part of the transportation needs in West Africa.
We haven’t found the Rosetta stone for scale-up. You can’t scale-up latrines this way. But we have kept a clear focus on the size of the problem from the very start and not been tempted into the much easier path of making a few bikes in a few places, taking pictures of ourselves in Africa, and achieving little more than making ourselves feel virtuous.
China in Africa: Debunking myths and debating truths
Linda Richter of South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria speaks out against AIDS orphan tourism in this post
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Category: Rome
Rich Man, Poor Man
After Corinth was rebuilt by Caesar in 44 BC as a Roman colony, people from throughout the empire began to to settle there in droves, including a large number of freed slaves. Because of Corinth’s geographical position it quickly grew into a valuable trade center. Land travelers from throughout Greece had to pass through the city on most southern routes, plus with two nearby ports it was a huge shipping center. Tourism was also a big industry for Corinth. Every two years Corinth hosted the Isthmian Games–similar in size and scope to the Olympics.
All of this meant that Corinth grew very quickly from a backwater town to the third largest city in the Roman Empire. Corinth went from very poor, to very rich. Some of its top officials were children of former slaves who had earned their freedom and come into money. In Phoebe’s Journey, Phoebe’s mother and father are both freed slaves. Miklos builds his shipping agency to be the largest in the region.
But not everyone benefitted from the growth and the booming economy. Like many cities that grow quickly, huge swaths of people were left behind by the more successful. Corinth became a city with a wide disparity between rich and poor.
Corinth was also a city known for its wild living. It had more than three temples devoted to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, desire, and beauty. The city’s worship of Aphrodite coupled with the large numbers of sailors and itinerant travelers led Corinth to become so known for its promiscuity that its name became slang. “To act like a Corinthian,” was to be drunk. “To play like a Corinthian,” was another way of talking about sex.
Prosperity, tourism, pride, promiscuous culture…it’s easy to see why at least one Biblical scholar has called Corinth, “at once the New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas of the ancient world.”
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CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA 2nd October 2015
Clouds of Sils Maria
Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is an actress at the peak of her international career who is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years earlier. Back then she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young woman who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena.
She departs with her assistant (Kristen Stewart) to rehearse in Sils Maria, a remote region of the Alps. Maria confronts her personal demons and prepares for the most important role of her life. Set in the scenic splendour of the Swiss Alps, Clouds of Sils Maria is propelled by tour-de-force performances from three actresses at the top of their game.
Rating: R (for language and brief graphic nudity) Genre: Drama Directed By: Olivier Assayas Written By: Olivier Assayas
Runtime: 2 hr. 4 min.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus: Bolstered by a trio of powerful performances from its talented leads, Clouds of Sils Maria is an absorbing, richly detailed drama with impressive depth and intelligence.
Find out what's on next month at http://picsandflicksgerringong.blogspot.com/
We are now on Facebook Gerringong Pics & Flicks
WOMEN HE'S UNDRESSED 9th Oct 2015
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Cri de Coeur
This is the weblog of Pierz Newton-John. I am a Melbourne-based fiction writer, currently focussing on short stories, but with a novel in the pipeline. My collection 'Fault Lines' was published by Spineless Wonders in 2012. Among other places my work has appeared in the Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, and Wet Ink.
Reflections on Lars Von Trier's 'Melancholia'
Pierz Newton-John
My grandfather was a writer. Had a dream once that he gave me his unfinished manuscript to complete. That dream was the start of me becoming a writer. I spent quite a number of years working as a psychotherapist, then moved into project work and web design and development. Web work pays the bills, writing is my passion. I also play classical guitar, love to swing dance, and don't mind a game of chess.
Spoiler alert: There's almost no suspense in the film Melancholia, but any tiny bit it might have will be ruined by the following review.
Ironically, the last time I found a film as uncomfortable to watch as 'Melancholia', Lars Von Trier's latest piece of cinematic iconoclasm, was when I suffered through Todd Solondz's 'Happiness', almost fourteen years ago. The titles might be diametrically opposed, but the films share a determination to go straight for the viewer's psychological jugular. In Happiness, the subject was paedophilia, in Melancholia, it is depression and death. And Von Trier is not pulling his punches. However artful the cinematography and art direction, Von Trier's message about mortality is brutally blunt. We all die, the film reminds us, and only the melancholic, Von Trier seems to be saying, is capable of facing the true facts of existence unflinchingly.
For those who know nothing about the film, it depicts the end of the world as the earth collides with Melancholia, a planet which has been 'hiding behind the sun'. Simultaneously it tells the story of a clinically depressed young bride, Justine (Kirstin Dunst), an advertising copywriter whose marriage disintegrates before the wedding party is over. Reviewers who have decried the film's scientific implausibility miss the point entirely. Despite the premise, this is no sci fi flick. Those who have described it as a film about mental illness are of course much closer to the mark, for it is indeed a study of depression, and the whole film can be read as a metaphor for the implosion of the depressive's psyche. The world may be larger than any single mind it contains, yet it is never experienced on any grander scale than the mind of the individual, and so the obliteration of one mind is no less a cataclysm, in that subjective frame, than the annihilation of the whole planet. But ultimately, to describe it as a portrait of depression is to miss the ultimate message about mortality. Von Trier hasn't just made a film about depression, he's made a film that argues depression.
In a sense, Melancholia is not so much cinema as anti-cinema. For where the usual function of cinema is anodyne, pandering to soothing fantasies of perfect romance, invincible power, unlimited wealth and so on, Von Trier's aim is the absolute opposite. This is a film driven by the same iconoclastic impulse that drove the director to declare at Cannes that he "understood Hitler," sparking widespread condemnation. He wishes to tear away everything phony, every saccharine fantasy, every pitiful self-deception, and expose the ugliest truth. That was the ethic at the heart of 'dogma': don't soothe the viewer with the trappings of slick production values, stirring soundtracks, and technical whizz-bangery. The cinematic illusion is harnessed to a contradictory project: the destruction of the viewer's illusions. In that sense, Von Trier has something in common with Brecht, though Brecht exposed the illusions of theatre for political purposes, whereas Von Trier's ultimate motivations seem darker and more emotionally driven. Iconoclasm does not need a constructive agenda.
The deep discomfort that this film engenders stems from the way the film targets the viewer for attack. At the end of the film, Dunst's character Justine comforts her nephew, a boy of seven or eight, by helping him to build a 'magic cave' where he will be safe against the coming catastrophe. The magic cave turns out to be a rough tipi of sharpened sticks under which Justine, her sister Claire, and the boy all sit to await the end of the world. So much for your childish illusions of safety, Von Trier seems to be saying. See how pitiful are your attempts to keep out the reality of death? And I couldn't help feeling there was another layer to this 'magic cave' image: couldn't it be that cinema itself is this magic cave, a place we go to deny death and close our eyes to horrible reality? Von Trier ends the film by hurling Melancholia directly into the audience's face in a climax that is at once haunting, terrifying and strangely empty - there is no 'resolution' here, only annihilation.
Violence is also done to the other possible remedies for death anxiety: love, solidarity, togetherness. Justine's sister Claire shakily and unconvincingly tries to persuade Justine that they should perhaps sit on the porch and drink wine together for the coming of the end. Justine is scathing. More than scathing. "I think your idea is a piece of shit," she spits. At the end, in the magic cave, they do hold hands, and I was reminded for just a moment of that lovely scene in Toy Story 3, where the toys hold hands as they slide down towards the furnace that also clearly stands for death. But in Melancholia, we aren't offered the release of that emotion. The hand holding feels futile and desperate, another form of the magic cave.
No wonder that the first thing that could be heard as the credits rolled was the querulous voice of a movie-goer complaining that her time had been wasted. If you go the cinema for the pleasures of fantasy and self-deception, you just stepped into the wrong theatre. As my friend put it, pity the poor sod who saw a poster with Kirstin Dunst in a wedding dress and expected Toby MacGuire might make a showing too.
Despite this, Melancholia is a beautiful film - the opening sequence contains some of the most extraordinary and surreal images I have seen on the silver screen. The soundtrack is pure melodrama, gothically overblown, but the effect is perfect: it creates a mood of claustrophobia and barely repressed hysteria. I kept thinking of the German word Beklemmung, an emotion also captured in the work of another famous depressive, Franz Kafka.
There's a moment in the film in which Claire discovers Justine lying naked on the bank of a river staring up at Melancholia looming in the night sky. Having rejected human love, turned away from the world altogether, she basks in the blue light of death, in a voluptuous misery. It is moments of imagistic poetry like this that lend the film a kind of greatness. It is a perfect image of the depressive dynamic. All around her, the people who love Justine have been shut out. Her husband cannot reach her sexually, her sister can barely feed her. Yet inwardly she gives herself completely to Melancholia, the deadly pull of pure negativity. It is a haunting image that will stay with me a long time.
I said that the film argues depression. By that I mean it tries to convince us that depression is rational, the only sane response to our meaningless existential condition - at least that is how I read Von Trier's intent. There is a competition at Justine's wedding to try to guess the number of beans in a jar. None guess correctly, but Justine does. Perhaps Lars has read the psychological studies that show that people with depression have more accurate reality checking than non depressed people. Having used the bean guess to prove she 'knows things', Justine then tells us that there is no life anywhere else in the universe, that we are alone, that life is evil anyway, and deserves the annihilation soon coming to it. One has the feeling Von Trier is presenting this as a sort of argument, even though, as a piece of logic, it's as flimsy as Justine's 'magic cave'.
The depressive may have superior reality checking, but this does not mean the depressive is a good philosopher, even less a wise man. To seek truth means facing the reality of death and having the courage to face one's illusions. But depression is not the final waystop on that journey. Many artists pass this way and many have fallen into their own private doomsday, flying too close to the planet Melancholia. Yet those who do not suicide find something on the other side of this crisis - compare the Leonard Cohen of today, a man exuding wisdom and gentleness, with the near-deranged singer you can sometimes see in old films. Peace and acceptance are possible and sane responses to the reality of mortality, even for those who have rejected the comforts of religion.
Nihilism is bad philosophy, and Melancholia is deeply nihilistic. Nevertheless, it's one hell of a piece of filmmaking.
Posted by Pierz Newton-John at 11:31 PM
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Broken Genius – Joel Shurkin *****
We are used to tales of the billionaire geniuses of Silicon Valley – this gripping scientific biography gives a balanced picture of the most bizarre and atypical of the great names of electronics, William Shockley.
Still widely thought of as the “father of the transistor”, Shockley’s role in the nascent electronics industry was much more complex. Consider two simplistic and frequently parroted versions of the Shockley myth. William Shockley was the man who invented the transistor. Wrong. Alternatively, Shockley had nothing to do with the invention of the transistor, but managed to bulldoze his way into the limelight, refusing to allow the real inventors to get visibility and muscling in on their Nobel prize. Also wrong.
Joel Shurkin, with access to a huge archive of material, takes us back through Shockley’s coldly administered childhood to his discovery of the joys of quantum mechanics, and the possibility of practical application of the theory to solid state electronics to replace the fragile and errant valve (vacuum tube). In those early years it became apparent that Shockley truly had an element of genius – he could see solutions instantly that others would take an age to work out, particularly in the statistical field. Probability and statistics are essential to quantum theory, and also to Shockley’s work during World War II, which, inspired by the British physicist Blackett’s development of Operational Research, resulted in Shockley and others producing the US equivalent, Operations Research – effectively the application of mathematical techniques to problem solving.
This problem solving aspect would remain with Shockley as he moved on to the next phase of his life and the Nobel prize for the development of the transistor. Here the complexity arises. The work resulting in the prize was largely done by Bardeen and Brattain. Although some of the original theory was Shockley’s there were plenty of others who could be included on that basis. His role in the actual project was as a hands-off project manager. Shurkin shows, though, that however unwarranted the award, B&B’s original transistor design was hardly practical, where the first effective design of a totally different kind of transistor was Shockley’s.
After the transistor, Shockley set up his own company which effectively started Silicon Valley, both in its location, and in its initial staff, who would go on to seed many of the hardware names of the Valley, notably including the founders of Intel. Shockley’s company was a failure, thanks to his bizarre management style that seemed to expect everyone in the organization to be his mental inferior. He then went on to totally destroy his reputation by discussing his belief that intelligence was hereditary, and it was important for the survival of the race that we prevent too much breeding from those with low intelligence (and, he implied, of inferior races).
One aspect of Shockley’s argument is true. The building blocks of intelligence are genetic (though what you do with that intelligence is largely influenced by environment). But that doesn’t mean, as many seemed to assume, that the children of people who haven’t done very well for themselves aren’t going to be intelligent. For that matter it doesn’t mean that intelligent parents will have intelligent children – simply that the child’s mental capabilities are determined by a combination of genes from both parents. Shockley, perhaps rightly upset by the way the social sciences tried to pretend there was nothing even to think about in the genetic aspect of intelligence, reacted by getting more extreme, and digging himself a pit from which he would never escape. Fatally, he not only supported the idea that the intelligence of an individual is linked to his or her genes, but also the unfounded concept that different racial and social groups have different levels of intelligence. It was, as Shurkin points out, a classical example of hubris resulting in nemesis.
The only fault in an otherwise great page-turner of a scientific biography is that Shurkin is either a little unsure of his history of science, or in the attempt to simplify to make the book readable (and it certainly is readable), he takes some of the facts over the border between simplicity and inaccuracy. For instance, he makes it sound as if Young was the first to challenge Newton’s idea of light being particles, where in fact there were plenty of Newton’s contemporaries like Huygens who believed light was a wave. In another example, we are told that Gilbert Lewis, who coined the word photon, was a British physicist. In fact he was an American chemist.
But this is a minor problem, and mostly occurs in the early part of the book where the scientific background is established. Shurkin had a dream subject in a man with such strong conflicting characteristics – and he made the most of it. After reading this book you’ll have a better idea of where Silicon Valley came from, but more importantly you’ll have an insight into the nature of an important scientist who is almost always described as a caricature of the real man. Recommended.
Also on Kindle:
Review by Brian Clegg
***** Biography Technology
Labels: ***** Biography Technology
The Long Tail – Chris Anderson *****
The New Killer Germs – Pete Moore ****
Chloroform: the quest for oblivion – Linda Stratma...
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The Yanks are coming...again
By Peter Coates - posted Friday, 11 April 2014 Sign Up for free e-mail updates!
Over the next few days around thirteen hundred US marines will begin their six month visit to the Northern Territory. This has increasing political, economic, military and perhaps social implications for the Northern Territory, Australia generally and the southern Asia-Pacific region.
An article from the US military press agency on the arrival of the marine advance guard includes unintended ironies and what has to be humour : "…Australia and the U.S have fought alongside each other in nearly every major conflict since World War II, a relationship the Australian prime minister and U.S. president make sure remains strong and productive" [followed eventually by] "A smile sat below the eyes of every Marine exiting the plane to be welcomed into Darwin, their new home for the next six months."
Most of the marines are from the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment based at Camp Pendleton in California. Ferrying them around are four very large Sea Stallion helicopters each capable of lifting 55 troops.
The six month visit (called a "rotation" by the military) of the thirteen hundred is up from 250 marines last year. By 2017 the annual visit may amount to what is promised to be a full 2,500 man Marine Air Ground Task Force. In terms of activities - some marines may attend Exercise Hamel near Townsville - perhaps in June-July 2014. Larger numbers of marines may exercise at the Northern Territory's Bradshaw field training area in August 2014. Marine training with military forces from New Zealand and southeast Asia may also occur http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/2014/03/26/16/00/more-than-1000-us-marines-arrive-in-darwin.
In 2011, during the rapidly forgotten Gillard government, President Obama announced the marine rotational scheme. When Obama visits Australia for the G-20 Summit in BrisbaneNovember 15–16, 2014 it's likely he will reaffirm this alliance commitment. Obama's visit to Australia and his reaffirmation that the marine's will continue to visit will provide a needed boost to the Abbott government just as it did to the fleeting Labor governments.
The visits of US marines in increasing numbers may probably provide the most visible and concrete example of America's alliance with Australia. The visits will grow in importance as the forlorn memory of the joint effort to democratise Afghanistan recedes. As a type of payment for the marine visits Australia has spent several $million upgrading facilities at Robertson Barracks in Darwin, where the marines will be mainly based. Australian purchases of US weapons, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter, are not so obviously linked, but such purchases contribute to the alliance bond that keeps the marines coming.
In terms of Obama's foreign policy platform the marine visit may also be the most tangible sign of the US pivot or rebalance to our part of the southern Asia-Pacific. The threat always exists that US attention may be distracted by its other global concerns - in Africa, the Middle East or Ukraine-Eastern Europe - instead. Keeping US attention focussed on our own region pays and also costs.
This part-time US marine presence may also be perceived as a largely symbolic counter-weight to a recent increase in Chinese naval activity close to Australia's shores. The surprising appearance in the Timor Sea, two months ago, of a Chinese flotilla of two destroyers and an amphibious assault ship was played down by the Australian and Indonesian governments. Up to eight Chinese warships off Western Australia hunting for MH370 appears excessive, even for such an important search effort. In the face of a relatively low-key (compared to China) US naval presence in the search for MH370 the marine visit is all the more important.
Australian and US authorities insist that these marine six month visits will not build up to a permanent marine base presence in Australia, but some are sceptical. Some in the Darwin community, like BaseWatch have serious concerns about the impact marines will have on Darwin. They don't want a repeat of the issues, including aircraft noise and violent crime, that residents of Okinawa face from permanent US bases. US military public affairs officer Lieutenant Savannah Moyer insists that a midnight curfew on marines, known as the "Cinderella curfew", will reduce the chance of bad behaviour. In any case the Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles has underlined the economic benefits the marines bring when he estimates they contribute around $5 million to the local economy.
So the marines bring a plethora of political, military, economic and possible social issues. Their arrival may be timely for Australia or may just send the wrong signals to China. A six month presence may make more sense if it became permanent. But how important is Australia's autonomy and sovereignty?
22 posts so far.
Peter Coates has been writing articles on military, security and international relations issues since 2006. In 2014 he completed a Master’s Degree in International Relations, with a high distinction average. His website is Submarine Matters.
» Trump not that bad - January 18, 2017
» 'Killer' drones for Australia? - March 2, 2015
» Australia: the future junior ally of Japan - February 5, 2015
» Future submarine choices: more than a one horse race - December 11, 2014
» Russian gunboat diplomacy in Australia's region - November 21, 2014
All articles by Peter Coates
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'Smart' toys helping to make smart kids: a different type of interface
By Lydia Plowman and Rosemary Luckin - posted Monday, 28 July 2003 Sign Up for free e-mail updates!
This UK study, codenamed CACHET (Computers and Children's Electronic Toys), is a wide-ranging exploration of issues involving the use of toys in conjunction with computer software in childhood learning. It has specific implications for the design of digital toys and, because there has been little prior research in this area, it is timely both for its analysis and for laying the foundations for future reasearch into areas beyond the specific toys and software used in this study to the general design of tangible interfaces for learning technologies. It has been widely disseminated in the UK and abroad to audiences ranging from early childhood practicioners to academics. Details of CACHET have been circulated to 57 toy companies in the UK, and one of the results of this has been the establishment of an on-going relationship with Leapfrog Toys UK.
The aims of the study were three-fold:-
To construct a descriptive framework of interaction and mediation engendered by digital toys in formal and informal educational contexts
To contribute to the development of methodologies and analytical tools for research into interactivity beyond the desktop
To inform the design of digital toys.
The toys chosen as the focus of this research can be used on a stand-alone basis or in conjunction with a computer and so provided scope for examining children's responses to multiple interfaces on an exploratory basis. They appear like traditional soft toys but have a vocabulary of about 4000 words, motors to provide movement and a ROM chip so they respond to inputs such as the hand, toe or ear being squeezed. Produced by Microsoft and marketed as Actimates, the toys have now been withdrawn from the market because the costs of R&D made them too dear. Although there has been a marked increase in the availability of other 'smart' toys during the lifetime of this study, the particular functionality of the Actimates has not been replicated.
Targeted at children ages four to eight, the toys are based on Arthur and his sister DW, two aardvark characters from the Marc Brown stories. On a stand-alone basis the toys ask questions and suggest games. Playing simultaneously with the toy and the compatible CD-ROMs that feature language and number games requires a 'PC pack' accessory consisting of a radio transmitter that connects to the computer's game port. This increases the toy's vocabulary to 10,000 words, enabling it to comment on the child's interaction with the software and to offer advice and encouragement. In this mode, the child does not interact solely with the computer but also interacts with the toy which, in turn, interacts with the computer and mediates the child's actions. If the child plays with a partner the interaction possibilities are multiplied.
Whilst engaged in the software activities, children are able to elicit help from the toy by squeezing its ear. If the toy is not present, the help and information are provided by a clickable on-screen icon of Arthur or DW. If children have difficulty with a game, or persist in making the same mistake, the toy or icon reminds them of this. This provision of the same help content delivered through different mechanisms was central to our interest in these toys.
Data Collection:
A common core of data collection methods was employed, comparing use of the toy alone, the software alone and the two used in conjunction across all sites. This was supplemented with methods that were suitable for the different conditions in specific locations - homes, after school clubs and classrooms.
Researchers adopted both a controlled approach with detailed, dual-source video analysis and a semi-naturalistic approach using video, diaries and interviews. The Wechsler Pre-School and Primary Intelligence Scales - Revised (WPPSI-R), were used across all sites to provide data on verbal and non-verbal skills and the Pre-school Play behaviour Scale (PPBS) was used in the after school clubs and the classroom. Children taking part in the at home studies were visited three times over a period of approximately two weeks (beginning, midway and end). Twelve children (six girls and six boys, average age of 6:2) were involved, either receiving the toy and then the software or the software and then the toy, with all children having both items for the second week. Parents completed a diary over the two weeks to provide background information and data on use of the toy/software in the researcher's absence. Video recordings were made on an opportunistic basis.
Fieldwork in the four after school clubs was similar to that conducted in the school inasmuch as children used the items for fixed times, were observed once and the playleaders completed a PPBS. Twenty-two children (nine girls and 13 boys, average age of 5:5) participated in the sessions which were an average of thirty minutes in duration. Children used the toy/software individually or as pairs and, as in the homebased studies, children were introduced to either the toy or the software first.
A more controlled approach was adopted in the classroom, with detailed, dual-source video analysis of 32 children (16 girls, 16 boys) with an average age of 4:7. Children were observed on single visits and spent about twenty minutes playing with the toy on its own followed by an average of forty minutes playing with the software, either with or without the toy. Both sessions were recorded on video. The teacher completed a PPBS for each child and parents provided data on home computer use and the child's favourite software and toys. All children were given verbal instructions on using the software and received a demonstration of how to access the help facility. At the school and after school clubs the researcher's role was to remain in the background but to prompt activity when children were stuck.
All of the data relating to the individual children in the homes and individuals or pairs in the after school clubs were compiled to produce separate case studies. This enabled analysis of data for individuals and across children and to build up a detailed picture including context of use, individual differences, patterns of play and use of the toy and software.
Although parents found the ways in which the toy and the software interacted to be an impressive feature, children seemed to take it for granted. In homes, the time spent playing with the toy or the software decreased as the novelty value diminished, although interest in the toy wore off faster. The software had more lasting appeal whether the toy was used with it or not. If the toy was introduced after the software, the toy was played with infrequently, if at all, partly because the help features were not generally needed - the software had already been explored. However, in this sequence it was also the case that the toy was mostly seen as an adjunct to the software and rarely played with away from the PC.
Article edited by Betsy Fysh.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.
Dr Lydia Plowman is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Research at the institute of Education, University of Stirling.
Dr Rosemary Luckin is a Reader at the School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences, University of Sussex.
CACHET Project home page
Lydia Plowman's home page
Rosemary Luckin's home page
Lydia Plowman Rosemary Luckin
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Biography / Fact File
Picture Gallery 1 Studio Photos
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Orlando Bloom Facts
Full name: Orlando Bloom
Date of Birth: 13th January 1977
Birthplace: Canterbury, Kent, England
Lives: LA
Starsign: Capricom
Marital Status: Dating Kate Bosworth
Hair: Dark brown, naturally wavy
Eyes: Dark brown
Parents: Sonia and Colin
Siblings: 1 older sister - Samantha
Pets: A dog named Maude
Hobbies: Photography, sculpting
Orlando Bloom Biography
At age 16, Orlando dropped out of school, which he didn't particularly enjoy. He says, "As a kid I was dyslexic so I always struggled in school. I'm still mildly dyslexic." He then moved to London to kick-start his acting career. By age 16, Orlando had been with the National Youth Theatre for 2 seasons. He then landed himself a scholarship to train with the British American Drama Academy. Later, he joined the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he says he finally felt like he was receiving a real education, as opposed to at a regular school. Orlando says, "It was only when I went to Guildhall that I started to feel like I got a proper education. We would learn about Milton and Donne and read Chekhov and Shakespeare and that kind of inspired me."
He had bit-parts in British TV shows such as "Casualty" and "Midsomer Murders". His first movie role was a cameo in the critically acclaimed "Wilde", when he was 20 years old. His performance led to various movie offers, but he turned them down to work in the theatre industry for a few years.
He performed in many theatre plays during that period, including "The Twelfth Night", "Trojan Woman" and "The Seagull".
Then came the audition call for the casting of "The Lord of the Rings" triolgy - he originally auditioned for the role of "Faramir" by videotape. A few months later Peter Jackson (Director of LOTR Trilogy) and his business partner Fran Walsh met up with Orlando personally. Again he went on videotape, this time directed by Peter, for the role of Faramir. Later on Peter phoned Orlando's agent and asked if Orlando would read for the role of "Legolas Greenleaf" as the role of Famamir (which went to Aussie actor David Wenham) would not be available for him. Orlando read for the part and a few weeks later he was offered the role.
Orlando spent 18 months in New Zealand filming the epic trilogy. Since then he has filmed Black Hawk Down, Ned Kelly, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Calcium Kid. Orlando is currently filming Troy in Malta, co-starring alongside Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. In Troy Orlando plays Paris, the character who instigates the Trojan War that triggers an epic battle between Achilles (Pitt) and Hector (Bana).
Orlando Bloom was born January 13th, 1977 in Canterbury, Kent (England) and was raised there with his sister, Samantha. Up until recently, it was believed that Orlando's father was South African lawyer and novelist Harry Bloom, but in an interview with 'The Face' magazine, Orlando revealed that his real dad was his supposed legal guardian Colin Stone. Up until he was a teenager, Orlando had believed Colin was nothing more than a close family friend, until his mum revealed that he was in fact his biological father. Orlando says, "I found out that Colin was my father – not Harry, but Colin," said Orlando. He explains further: "When my father (Harry) died, Colin Stone was made my guardian. He was always a close family friend but I always thought Harry was my biological father."
Although the very busy Orlando has often said that his only major relationship was "with his work", he is currently dating Blue Crush actress Kate Bosworth. In the past, it was rumoured that he was once engaged to model/make-up artist Jemma Kidd.
His hobbies include adrenaline sports such as sky diving, bungee jumping (which he did while filming in New Zealand), paragliding, surfing and snowboarding. He enjoys all sorts of music, especially folk singers such as Ben Harper, David Gray and Bob Dylan.
He stands at 5'11, has olive skin and dark brown hair and eyes. He has 2 tattoos, including the number 9 tattooed in Elvish script on his forearm and a sun on his lower torso.
A few years ago, Orlando suffered a devastating back injury when he fell three floors from a drainpipe while at a friend's apartment. He spent several days in hospital and seriously contemplated the possibility of having to live his life in a wheelchair. Miraculously, he walked from the hospital several days later and fully recovered from his injuries. Orlando has said that the accident made him slow down a lot in his life and tries to look at it as a positive thing as opposed to a negative thing. He says, "It made me appreciate things more. I try not too take myself too seriously. I feel fortunate to be doing everything that I'm doing. I feel quite privileged to be an actor, I think it's unbelievable that I'm being paid to do something I love!"
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LOUIS LEBLANC (2011-2014)
Position C
Shoots R
Weight 178lbs
Date of birth January 26th, 1991
Place of birth Pointe-Claire, QC, CAN
Seasons - MTL 2
GP Games played - Number of games the player has set foot on the ice
G Goals - Number of goals the player has scored
A Assists - Number of goals the player has assisted in
PTS Points - Scoring points, calculated as the sum of G and A
+/- Plus/Minus - The number of team goals for minus the number of team goals against while the player is on the ice
PIM Penalties infraction minutes - Number of penalty minutes the player has been assessed
TOTALS 50 5 5 10 4 32
2011-2012 42 5 5 10 3 28
2013-2014 8 0 0 0 1 4
The 2011-12 season kicked off with a bang for the Habs when they enlisted the services of [...]
The Nashville Predators arrived in the NHL in 1998-99. The Predators ended their debut season [...]
Louis Leblanc was selected 18th-overall with the Canadiens’ first pick in the 2009 NHL Draft. He played 50 games with the Habs between 2011 and 2014 before being traded to the Anaheim Ducks on June 14, 2014 in exchange for a fifth-round 2015 draft pick.
BOURNIVAL
CAMMALLERI
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The Music of Kuasha Jakhon is Edge of the Seat: Chirantan
September 2, 2018 September 2, 2018 Prabuddha 1202 Views 0 Comments Artiste
He has already composed music for two award winning films. In a brief chat with RBN, Chirantan Banerjee talks about his upcoming film Kuasha Jakhon, the things he had to keep in mind while composing its music, and his future projects.
How did the film come your way?
Joydeepda (Joydeep Majumdar), popularly known as Bajuda in the industry, had knowledge of my previous works in films. He introduced me to Abhishek and Meenakshii, the directors of Kuasha Jakhon. They first considered me only for the background score. But I ended up doing the entire music for the film including the four songs.
Kuasha Jakhon is a paranormal romance. What are the things you kept in mind while composing the background music?
I believe that the background music of a film should have a language of its own. It not only underlines the sequence of events happening in the film, but also illustrates the story in its own way. I did likewise for two award winning films Smug and Watchmaker. Both were directed by Anindya Pulak Banerjee. Since Kuasha Jakhon is a paranormal romance, I tried to retain the element of thrill while composing the background score. I have tried to compose the music in such a way that people would be at the edge of their seats in most of the sequences. The subtle sense of thrill and horror is the high point of the film’s music.
Rewind: 30 Years of Mile Sur Mera Tumhara
Each film, of course, is unique in its own way. How is Kuasha Jakhon different from the music that you have done so far?
Kuasha Jakhon is my fifth film as a composer. I composed the entire music in all my earlier films and was confident of diving into this new soundscape of a paranormal romance. I love to make music that is soulful, heart touching and contemporary. For Kuasha Jakhon, I had an entire period in my hands to play with. The film’s timeline is from the 1960s to the present day, so I was able to play with a number of sound spectrums in not only the songs, but also the background music. All the songs depict different periods and so does their arrangement.
In most period films, be it in Mumbai or Bengal, we find that the music often doesn’t conform to the period shown in the film. The instrumentation sounds more contemporary than the period in which the film is set. As a composer how did you tackle this issue in Kuasha Jakhon?
Well, I believe art is all about content and form. You can’t serve pizzas or pastas in banana leaves. The content and form of the music should match each other and so does the arrangement of a song in a period film. I have used several traditional and organic instruments like the oud, shanjh, dotara, harmonium, sitar, flute, ukulele, and others. This has forged the period-feel in the music for Kuasha Jakhon. I have also used various ragas to depict different moods in the film that are relevant to that period.
Winged Tourists in My City
You have been an actor as well. How do you manage the roles as a composer, playback singer, and an actor?
I have acted both in films and television. But the hours of work were hectic and it became increasingly difficult for me to continue with my music, live shows and recordings. I have taken a temporary break from acting, and right now, fully concentrating on music.
Basic songs and private albums are passé. It’s film music everywhere. Now, all artistes won’t get a chance to work in films. How then will they survive in competition? Neighbourhood musical soirees that were popular even at the turn of the century, don’t happen much these days
Very true. The music scene has changed a lot over the last decade. It’s all about film music these days. But I believe that everything comes with an expiry date and things are subject to change after a period of time. Independent music should be given more preference by artistes as well as the audience. Love for music, not the packaging, should precede everything. Artistes who love their trade have a big quality called perseverance. We have to see this time through. I’m sure independent music will see better times. It’s just a part of the cycle.
50 Years of Chiriyakhana
You have performed in many stage shows. What are the songs that are mostly demanded by the audience?
I started my career from a popular reality show and since then stage shows have become a part of my life. I have performed at home and abroad. I keep the genre of music open for all my shows and that includes Sufi, semi-classical, ghazals, folk songs, retro film music, rock, blues, and contemporary music.
Your upcoming projects?
I am composing the music for three Bengali films, namely Network, Dwikhondito and an yet untitled project. I am also opening a high-tech sound studio and my own production house along with my partner Tridibesh Choudhury. Both these ventures will be launched before the Pujas.
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I Never Regret Not Working in Mumbai: Soumik Haldar
April 22, 2018 Prabuddha 0
কাটমানি কাণ্ড নিয়ে গান বাঁধলেন নচিকেতা
June 22, 2019 RadioBanglaNet 0
Penniless, Miss Shefali Battles for Life
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Brief: Killing Them Softly
This is a movie with a lot of ambition and not always enough skill to back it up. Directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford), this is a heist thriller that wants to be about the inherent inequality of the American project, the disconnect between politicians and the people they serve, and this country's inability to escape its outlaw past, but mostly accomplishes this by setting its tale of violent retribution against the backdrop of Obama's 2008 campaign for the White House. There's more good here than bad, but it doesn't cohere the way Dominik clearly intended. The heist that kicks off the film's plot is excellently paced, a white knuckle affair that takes time to weigh the consequences as the actions are being taken, the soundtrack is solid, if occasionally a tad on-the-nose (a scene of one character doing heroin is scored, unsurprisingly to The Velvet Underground's "Heroin"), and the film is peppered with enjoyable, if not particularly memorable, performances from heavy weights like Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, and Richard Jenkins. The film is far more interested in conversations and political philosophy than you'd expect, and while the actors chew their dialogue fairly well, there's not always a lot of meat to what they're saying. At its best, this is a slick, artful heist movie (some of the other bursts of violence are also done incredibly well and in often interesting ways) with a lot on its mind, but at its worst it seems like an ambitious movie with a winning concept that fails in its execution.
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Home > TV > TV News > ‘True Blood’ Returns Sunday, June 22 See The First Two Episodes Synopsis
‘True Blood’ Returns Sunday, June 22 See The First Two Episodes Synopsis
RedCarpetCrash May 29, 20142014-05-29T12:06:25-05:002014-05-29T12:06:25-05:00
TRUE BLOOD returns for its ten-episode, seventh and final season SUNDAY, JUNE 22 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO, followed by other new episodes on subsequent Sundays at the same time. Mixing romance, suspense, mystery and humor, the series takes place in a world where vampires and humans co-exist, after vampires have come out of the coffin, thanks to the invention of mass-produced synthetic blood that means they no longer need humans as a nutritional source. The series follows waitress and part-faerie Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), who can hear people’s thoughts, and vampires Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård). Created by Alan Ball, the show is based on the bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.
Season seven cast members on TRUE BLOOD include: Sam Trammell as Sam, Ryan Kwanten as Jason, Rutina Wesley as Tara, Chris Bauer as Andy, Kristin Bauer van Straten as Pam, Amelia Rose Blaire as Willa, Lauren Bowles as Holly, Tara Buck as Ginger, Gregg Daniel as Rev. Daniels, Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette, Aaron Christian Howles as Rocky, Joe Manganiello as Alcide, Noah Matthews as Wade, Bailey Noble as Adilyn, Nathan Parsons as James (previously played by Luke Grimes), Adina Porter as Lettie Mae, Carrie Preston as Arlene, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Nicole, Deborah Ann Woll as Jessica, and Karolina Wydra as Violet.
June’s episodes:
Episode #71: “Jesus Gonna Be Here”
Debut: SUNDAY, JUNE 22 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET/PT)
Other HBO playdates: June 22 (10:00 p.m., 11:30 p.m., 1:00 a.m.), 23 (11:00 p.m.), 24 (11:00 p.m.), 25 (8:00 p.m., 12:45 a.m.) and 27 (midnight)
HBO2 playdates: June 23 (9:00 p.m.), 26 (1:00 a.m.), 28 (9:00 p.m.) and 29 (8:00 p.m.), and July 10 (2:30 a.m.)
A band of rogue H-vamps crashes the vampire-human mixer at Bellefleur’s, with shocking results. As Sookie (Anna Paquin) seeks refuge from accusations that she’s somehow to blame for the chaos in Bon Temps, the “one vampire for every human” plan moves forward. In the face of a vigilante insurrection led by redneck Vince (Brett Rickaby), Bill (Stephen Moyer) receives aid from an unexpected source.
Written by Angela Robinson; directed by Stephen Moyer.
Episode #72: “I Found You”
Debut: SUNDAY, JUNE 29 (9:00-10:00 p.m.)
Other HBO playdates: June 29 (11:45 p.m., 2:30 a.m.) and 30 (11:15 p.m.), and July 1 (12:15 a.m.), 2 (8:00 p.m., 12:30 a.m.) and 4 (midnight)
HBO2 playdates: June 30 (9:00 p.m.) and June 3 (3:35 a.m.), 5 (9:00 p.m.), 6 (8:00 p.m.) and 10 (3:25 a.m.)
A trio of hostages taken in the Bellefleur’s attack looks to a familiar face as a possible liberator from the H-vamps. Sookie and Jason (Ryan Kwanten) visit the neighboring town of Saint Alice, where a young woman’s diary offers clues to the potential fate of Bon Temps. Spurned by Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), a desperate Lettie Mae (Adina Porter) turns to Willa (Amelia Rose Blaire) to channel her family past. Vince whips his fellow vigilantes into a dangerous frenzy. Pam’s (Kristin Bauer van Straten) search for her maker leads her to a very familiar place.
Written by Kate Barnow; directed by Howard Deutch.
‘The Traffickers’ Preview Sunday
Coming November 4th ‘Doctor Who: The Complete Matt Smith Years Limited Edition Blu-ray Set’
TV Review: Sharknado 2 Puts The B in Bigger And Badder
Taylor Lautner Joins ‘Scream Queens’ For Season Two
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Al Hurra TV Details :
Al Hurra TV
Al Hurra TV Online Al Hurra Live Alhurra Watch Channels Streaming. Al Hurra is a United States-based Arabic-language satellite TV channel funded by the U.S. Congress that broadcasts news and current affairs programming to audiences in the Middle East and North Africa. Alhurra began broadcasting on February 14, 2004 to 22 countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Like all forms of U.S. public diplomacy, the station is forbidden from broadcasting within the United States under the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act.
Middle East Television Network, Inc. PO Box 23366, DC 20026-3366
comments@alhurra.com
http://www.alhurra.com/
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Don R. Roberts Elementary
Published by jackbgarvey on Thu, 06/27/2013 - 14:28
16601 LaMarche Dr.
Little Rock AR 72223
Principal: Steven Helmick
PTA President: Kimberly Molden
Grade Levels: K - 5
"Soaring to the Pinnacle of Excellence"
Roberts Elementary Web Page
Roberts Facebook Page
Online School Payment
Follow this link to pay for school activities. You can use this method to pay for field trips, yearbooks, projects or almost anything that requires you to send money to school!
Roberts Elementary provides an excellent educational program for the students they serve in this community. Roberts uses the Common Core standards to prepare each student to be college and career ready in literacy and math at the end of high school.
Our mission is that through ongoing collaboration, innovative technology, and an enriching curriculum, in partnership with our families and community, Roberts Elementary is committed to establishing a distinguished tradition of excellence in a diverse environment by nurturing, inspiring and challenging each student to value learning, respect and to always do the right thing.
Don R. Roberts Elementary is the newest elementary school in the Little Rock School District. It opened in August 2010 and is a 2017 National Blue Ribbon School. It is named after Dr. Don R. Roberts, former Director of the Arkansas Department of Education from 1979-1984. After his retirement, Dr. Roberts returned to the Little Rock School District as interim Superintendent and led the district through the selection process of a new superintendent.
While working for the Little Rock School District, Dr. Roberts was recognized for his leadership and was noted as "well-respected" by members of the community and media. Dr. Roberts is known for his ability to build bridges between businesses and schools in the communities where he has led school districts. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette characterized his superintendence as "serious business." The Arkansas Times noted his tenure as "an uncommon period of tranquility." His legacy we most choose to follow is to “always do the right thing”. This is a quote heard often from Dr. Roberts during his years of working in the field of educating all students, and it is this quote we have chosen for the motto of our school. Roberts elementary school consists of dedicated high performing students, parents and staff that believe in always doing the right thing.
The two story, 147,431 square-foot building features two art rooms, two music rooms, a gymnasium, large dining room, an EAST lab and a state of the art media center. A unique learning environment that provides for community learning in multipurpose areas for gatherings and specials projects.
Parents voted in 2011 against a formal uniform. There is, however, a dress code that should be followed. This dress code is explained fully in the Parent/Student Handbook.
Partners in Education:
Attendance, Schedule, Grades, Classwork & Report Cards
Web tool web-based tool that allows parents/guardians to monitor your child's attendance, schedule, grades, and classwork. This includes access to interim progress and report cards. Requires an Internet connection.
Emergency School Closures
AMI - Inclement Weather Alternative Home Learning Activities
Roberts Home
Dr. Don R. Roberts Biography
School Supplies Lists
Roberts Teacher Pages
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The good news is that to Janz‘s credit, he has been able to keep the Dextress ship moving forward and the remaining band members currently consist of singer Eric Paulin, drummer Keith Runco and bassist Reece Runco._____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ CD Review — Interview — Band Website Unfortunately, there are some ’80s era bands like Twisted Sister that think that their fans do not want any more new music.One Sleaze Roxx reader advised that Wraith‘s previous studio albums are similar to what can be found on .If that is indeed the case, there are a lot of great albums to discover from the UK rockers in the near future.On their self-titled full-length album, Dextress shrewdly re-recorded the three best tracks from and added seven new songs including the different but good ballad “Distance.” What is interesting about Dextress‘ debut full-length album is that it was actually recorded back in the summer of 2016 and there’s only one member left (Janz) from the line-up that plays on the album.
She then told him that her husband had run off with a younger woman after 46 years of marriage.
What’s quite interesting about Tales From The Porn is that Brazil based guitarist Andy Sun and bassist Bento Mello started the group, recruited some other Brazilian musicians and after finishing their first few songs, elected to have an American singer from the ’80s scene front the band.
What is truly astonishing is that with the advances of modern technology, Rachelle has yet to meet his Brazilian bandmates in person.
Luckily, that narrow minded view is not shared by many ’80s and early ’90s era “hair metal” and sleaze rock bands including Babylon A. who have come up with a fantastic new studio album in , Babylon A. revisit four of those songs while offering six new tracks. provide some good variety on their new studio album from the gorgeous ballad “One Million Miles” to the scorching closer “Don’t Tell Me Tonight.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ seems to have taken forever to get released.
While father time has not been kind to certain singers over the years (Dokken‘s Don Dokken and KISS‘ Paul Stanley come to mind), Babylon A. lead vocalist Derek Davis seems to have retained or kept his vocal pipes in fine shape over the years as he delivers on as if it was 1989 rather than 2017. Back in January 2016, it was announced that the album would be released with a different cover on April 14, 2016. Yes, the new album featuring the reunited Tracii Guns and Phil Lewis is a good one but believe or not, I was slightly disappointed with it because I was expecting even more.
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This time around, Eclipse do spread their wings a little bit more such as on the heavier closing number “Black Rain” which shouldn’t be a surprise considering frontman Erik Mårtensson‘s love for thrash metal bands.
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What is Sailor Moon?
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon also known as "Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon" is a Japanese Manga series written and illustrated by Naoko Takeuchi. Sailor Moon is popular for its concept for having a team of cute teenage girls with magical powers that can transforms into heroines named for the Moon and planets. Due to its popularity an anime adaptation was created of it.
It's the story of an ordinary, clumsy, crybaby, 14 year old girl named Usagi Tsukino who happens to discover a talking cat named Luna, who reveals her identity as Sailor Moon. At first Usagi is hesistant about accepting the role as Sailor Moon, a special warrior with the destiny of saving the planet earth and later the entire galaxy. Luna gave her some special items that will help her on her journey in battling evil from the Negaverse. Luna trained Usagi to become a great warrior and later on the show, she finally learned to accept her destiny as Sailor Moon.
As the series progresses, she gains some friends that will help her in her challenges: Mamoru (Tuxedo Mask), her love interest and the four guardian Inner Senshi Ami, Rei, Makoto, Minako (Sailors Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Venus). They are later joined by Chibi-Usa, Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask's daughter from the future, and the four Outer Senshi Haruka, Michiru, Setsuna and Hotaru (Sailors Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Saturn).
The anime itself ran for 200 episodes, running for over 5 years in Japan. The series began airing in Japan on March 7, 1992 and ended February 8, 1997. It is one of the most succesful and longest anime series Japan has ever had. Sailor Moon consists of five series. The titles of the series are Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon R, Sailor Moon Super, Sailor Moon Super S and Sailor Moon Sailor Stars. There were also five special episodes and three released films: Sailor Moon R: The Movie, Sailor Moon Super: The Movie, Sailor Moon Super S: The Movie.
The anime series won the Animage Grand Prix Prize in 1993. And on that same year the Manga won the Kodansha Manga award for shoujo.
On July 6, 2012, Sailor Moon celebrated its 20th anniversary. During the event Naoko Takeuchi and Kodansha announced that a new anime series of Sailor Moon is currently in the works and is set for released in summer of 2013.
Naoko Takeuchi was born on March 15, 1967 in Kofu, Yamanashi, Japan. She is a Japanese Manga writer and artist who created Sailor Moon and Code Name: Sailor V. Her other series are Prism Time, The Cherry Project, Chocolate Christmas, PQ Angels, Maria, Miss Rain, Toki Meka, Love Witch and Princess Naoko Takeuchi's Return to Society Punch!! Naoko currently lives in Tokyo Japan and is happily married to Yoshihiro Togashi, the creator of YuYu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter. They have two lovely children.
Music Playing: "Moonlight Densetsu"
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You are here: Home / News and Commentary / Constitutionality (Case) / CITY OF BOERNE v. FLORES, 1996 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs LEXIS 761(BRIEF FOR ...
CITY OF BOERNE v. FLORES, 1996 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs LEXIS 761(BRIEF FOR PETITIONER)
November 29, 1996 /31,252 Comments/in Constitutionality (Case), Resources (All) /by admin
CITY OF BOERNE v. FLORES, 1996 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs LEXIS 761
October Term, 1996
Reporter: 1996 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs LEXIS 761
CITY OF BOERNE, TEXAS, Petitioner, versus P.F. FLORES, ARCHBISHOP OF SAN ANTONIO, Respondent, and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Intervenor-Respondent.
Type: Brief
Prior History: [1]
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
Lowell F. Denton, Esq., DENTON, McKAMIE & NAVARRO, 1700 Tower Life Building, 310 South St. Mary’s Street, San Antonio, Texas 78205, (210) 227-3243
Gordon L. Hollon, Esq., 101 N. Saunders, Boerne, Texas 78006, (210) 249-2521, Attorneys for Petitioner City of Boerne, Texas
Marci A. Hamilton, Esq., 482 Kings Road, Yardley, Pennsylvania 19067, (215) 493-1973 Counsel of Record
BRIEF FOR PETITIONER
QUESTIONS PRESENTED
1. Whether Congress violated the separation of powers doctrine by legislatively overruling a Supreme Court determination of the scope of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
2. Whether Congress violated the constitutional balance between its power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and fundamental principles of federalism by commandeering state and local governments to be agents of a federal policy to accommodate religious exercise more than the Constitution requires.
3. Whether Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641 (1966), should be overruled in part.
4. Whether Congress violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by broadly [2] and exclusively privileging religion over other expressions of conscience.
OPINIONS BELOW
Flores v. City of Boerne, 877 F. Supp. 355 (W.D. Tex. 1995), reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. 1 at 24a-29a; Flores v. City of Boerne, Texas, 73 F.3d 1352 (5th Cir. 1996), reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 1a-23a. Order Granting United States Leave to Intervene, March 13, 1995, reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 32a; Petition for Leave to Appeal an Interlocutory Order, granted May 9, 1995, reprinted in Jt. App. at 74; Order Treating the Suggestion for Rehearing En Banc as a Petition for Panel Rehearing, denied March 28, 1996, reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 30a.
The Fifth Circuit decision was reached on January 23, 1996; the petition for rehearing en banc, which was treated by the Fifth Circuit as a petition for rehearing, was denied on March 28, 1996. This Court has jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1254(1) (1994).
CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS AND STATUTES INVOLVED
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb1-4 (1993), reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 39a-42a; U.S. Constitution, Article III,§ 1, reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 35a; Amendment XIV, §§ 1, 5, reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 36a-38a; Amendment I, clauses 1, 2, reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 36a; Amendment X, reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 36a.
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
1. Facts. This case is about a request to tear down a beautiful stone church, whose times and memories are graven into the souls of a city. While the issue of the church’s precise historical value is a matter that has been left to trial, Jt. App. at 72, the City maintains that St. Peter Church, which was built in 1923, is a striking example of mission revival [10] architecture self-consciously referring back to the original Spanish missions in South Texas. As one arrives in the City of Boerne, Texas, this highly visible church set on a hill speaks directly of the history of this City and its people. Klein Affidavit, Jt. App. at 43. The people of the City seek to preserve their community’s shared history as reflected in this familiar mission revival structure. Id.
With Ordinance 91-05, the City of Boerne enacted a historic preservation law intended to preserve and protect its rich history and culture. Recognizing that “rapid change in population, economic functions and land use activities” has threatened the distinctive historical character of its community, the City Council of Boerne passed its historic landmark preservation law for the following purposes:
(1) “To protect, enhance, and perpetuate selected historic landmarks which represent or reflect distinctive and important elements of the city’s and State’s architectural, archeological, cultural, social, economic, ethnic and political history . . . .”
(2) “To safeguard the City’s historic and cultural heritage . . . .”
(3) “To stabilize and improve property values in such locations. [11] ”
(4) “To foster civic pride in the beauty and accomplishments of the past.”
(5) “To protect and enhance the City’s attractions to tourists and visitors and provide incidental support and stimulus to business and industry.”
(6) “To strengthen the economy of the City.”
(7) “To promote the use of historic landmarks for the culture, prosperity, education and general welfare of the people of the City and visitors to the City.”
Cert. Pet. App. at 46a-48a.
Boerne’s historic preservation law represents years of effort on the part of the City and evidences the citizens’ commitment to their community’s heritage. On May 20, 1985, the City Council duly enacted Ordinance No. 85-11, which authorized the creation of a Landmark Commission. Jt. App. at 66. The Landmark Commission was appointed on November 10, 1987, began to explore the creation of a historic district on February 16, 1988, and held numerous meetings to discuss the historic district boundaries. Id. Three public hearings were held in 1990 to discuss and determine the historic district boundaries. Id.
Ordinance 91-05, which was enacted into law on June 25, 1991, codifies the City’s historical preservation policy [12] goals; defines “historic landmark” and “historic district”; appoints and designates procedures for a “Historic Landmark Commission”; orders the Commission to prepare a landmark preservation plan; and designates procedures for the following: the acquisition and removal of historic landmark designation, the creation of historic districts, the evaluation of proposed exterior changes to structures within a historical district or a designated historic landmark, and the acquisition of a historic structure preservation tax exemption. Cert. Pet. App. at 46a-63a. Pursuant to Ordinance 91-05, the Historic Landmark Commission presented its recommendation for creation of the historic district to the Planning and Zoning Commission on October 1, 1991. Jt. App. at 67.
Respondent Flores was given notice of the December 3, 1991 hearing of the Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council for the creation of the historic district. Jt. App. at 69. Subsequently, Ordinance 91-15 added the historic overlay district to the City of Boerne zoning map on January 14, 1992. Jt. App. at 68. Ordinance 91-15 states that rapid changes in the local population, economy, and land use have led to the demolition of [13] historical structures that “reflect the heritage of the state, and its people . . . so that the city, the state, and the nation are thereby losing a part of their heritage.” Jt. App. at 24.
There is no dispute that the City’s historic preservation ordinance covers at the least a substantial portion of the church. Flores v. City of Boerne, 73 F.3d 1352, 1354 (5th Cir. 1996).
On December 14, 1993, a building permit application was submitted on behalf of Respondent Flores for the purpose of demolishing and expanding St. Peter Church. Jt. App. at 67. A public hearing was held by the Landmark Commission to consider the application. Upon its determination that the proposed plan will adversely affect the historic district and is inappropriate or inconsistent with the spirit and purposes of Ordinance 91-05, the Landmark Commission advised the City Building Inspector, Mr. Ed Beasley, that the permit could not be approved until certain changes to the application were made. Jt. App. at 68-69. The letter stated that the Landmark Commission had employed the following criteria, which are taken from Sec. 6.1 of Ordinance 91-05, to determine that the application violated the ordinance: [14]
1. Character, interest or value as part of the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of the City.
3. Embodiment of distinguishing characteristics of an architectural type or specimen.
5. Unique location of singular physical characteristics representing an established and familiar visual feature of a neighborhood, community or the City.
6. Value as an aspect of community sentiment or public pride.
The letter further stated: “Due to the structure’s historical importance to the community and our charge of protecting and preserving certain structures, areas, etc., deemed historical, any new plans shall not include demolition of the existing structure referred to as St. Peter’s Catholic Church.” Jt. App. at 39a. The City Building Inspector sent a letter to Respondent’s architect, Mr. Gregory Davis, confirming the denial of the permit by the Landmark Commission. Jt. App. at 60a.
Pursuant to Ordinance 91-05, Respondent Flores appealed the Landmark Commission’s decision to the City Council. After notice and a public hearing, the City Council voted to deny Respondent’s appeal. Jt. App. at 69. Representatives of both parties have considered [15] alternative site designs but have been unable to reach an agreement. Jt. App. at 70. Respondent Flores filed this suit, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331, alleging inter alia that Ordinance 91-05 violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA” or “the Act”), 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb (1993).
2. The District Court. Following certification of the question of RFRA’s constitutionality pursuant to28 U.S.C. § 2403(a) to the Attorney General of the United States, intervention of the United States, and briefing on the constitutional issue by all parties, the district court ruled that RFRA was facially invalid because “Congress specifically sought to overturn Supreme Court precedent as found in Employment Division v. Smith through the passage of RFRA,” Flores v. City of Boerne, 877 F. Supp. 355, 357 (W. D. Tex. 1995), and therefore infringed on the long-settled authority of the courts “‘to say what the law is.'” Id. (quoting Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803)). The court noted Congress’s power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, but did not find it a persuasive basis [16] for congressional authority in light of “Congress’ violation of the doctrine of Separation of Powers by intruding on the power and duty of the judiciary.” Flores, 877 F. Supp. at 357.
The district court certified its order for interlocutory appeal to the court of appeals pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b). Cert. Pet. App. at 29a. Respondent Flores and the United States appealed the district court’s decision. The court of appeals accepted the appeal, treating it as a Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(b) partial final judgment. Jt. App. at 73.
3. The Court of Appeals. The court of appeals reversed on four grounds. First, the court held that Congress acted within its power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment on the theory that RFRA is remedial because it prohibits “budding or disguised constitutional violations,” “sprouting constitutional violations,” and “incipient constitutional violations.” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1359-60. The court applied the three-part test found in M’Culloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 421 (1819):
Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are [17] appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.
The Fifth Circuit found that RFRA “may be regarded” as an enactment to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, which incorporates the First Amendment. In support of its conclusion that RFRA enforces the First Amendment’s prohibitions against the states, the court cited legislative history regarding the “need for legislation to defend individuals, particularly those from minority religions, from generally applicable laws that burden the exercise of religion.” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1359.
The court then stated that RFRA is “plainly adapted to [the end of the First Amendment.]” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1360. The court agreed with the United States’ argument that “even if the Constitution only prohibits governmental action taken with the intent of interfering with religious exercise, Congress may go farther, as it did with RFRA, and prohibit conduct that has the effect of burdening the exercise of religion” on the ground that this Court had held in City of Rome v. United States, 446 U.S. 156, 177 (1980), [18] that Congress may “prohibit laws with a racially discriminatory effect . . . as an appropriate method of promoting the Amendment’s purpose, even if the Constitution only prohibits laws with a racially discriminatory intent.” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1360. Further, the court reasoned, RFRA could be justified as an attempt to protect religious minorities, and that Congress “could reasonably conclude” that minority religions would be at a disadvantage in obtaining religious exemptions. Id.
The Fifth Circuit ruled that the third prong of the M’Culloch test, whether RFRA is consistent “with the letter and spirit of the constitution,” was satisfied because RFRA did not violate the separation of powers, the Establishment Clause, or the Tenth Amendment.
Second, the court addressed the City’s separation of powers challenge to RFRA. The City had argued that RFRA violates the separation of powers by permitting Congress to legislate an interpretation of the Constitution at odds with the Supreme Court’s interpretation. The City cited this Court’s statement in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803), that it is the duty of the judiciary “to say what the law [19] is.” Acknowledging that RFRA is a “direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith,” the court rejected the notion that RFRA “second-guess[es] the courts.” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1361. Rather, the court characterized RFRA as a statute regulating “nascent violations” of the Free Exercise Clause, in the sense that it dispenses with the requirement that discriminatory purpose be shown in order to ferret out substantial burdens on the free exercise of religion. Id.
The court of appeals also reasoned that because governments may accommodate religion more than the Free Exercise Clause requires, Congress has the power to force all governments to accommodate all religious conduct substantially burdened by a generally applicable law. It concluded: “In short, the judiciary’s duty is to say what the law is, but that duty is not exclusive.”Id. at 1363.
The court of appeals also termed as “facile” the United States’ argument that RFRA is merely a statute that “provides legislative protection for a constitutional right over and above that provided by the Constitution.” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1361. The court stated: “We will not pretend that RFRA is [20] anything but a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith.” Id. Nevertheless, the court upheld RFRA on the theory that Section 5 permits Congress “an extraordinary exercise of power.” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1362.
Third, the court rejected the City’s argument that RFRA violates the Establishment Clause by privileging religion on the ground that RFRA does not “amount to the Government coercing religious activity through ‘its own activities and influence.'” Flores, 73 F.3d at 1364 (quotingCorporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, 483 U.S. 327, 337 (1987)).
Finally, the court held that RFRA “on its face” does not violate the Tenth Amendment, but left “RFRA’s applicability to particular areas of state regulation . . . for individual, case-by-case resolution.” Id.
The City of Boerne filed a timely Petition for Writ of Certiorari in this Court, and on October 15, 1996, the writ was granted.
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires governments to accommodate religious conduct unless they can prove a “compelling interest” and that they have acted with the “least restrictive means.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1, [21] reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 40a. It was enacted for the purpose of supplanting this Court’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause announced inEmployment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), with an interpretation more palatable to Congress.
The word “Restoration” in the Act’s title is a euphemism. In Smith, this Court announced that neutral, generally applicable laws are not subject to the compelling interest standard. Smith, 494 U.S. at 885. RFRA’s across-the-board, extraordinarily high standard requires more than this Court’s free exercise doctrine ever required, either in Smith or before Smith. This brazen attempt to take over free exercise law knows no parallel in congressional history and violates the separation of powers, federalism principles, and the Establishment Clause.
The courts’ core judicial function is to resolve Article III cases or controversies by reading and interpreting the relevant constitutional text. Under the guise of creating a “statutory” cause of action to support a legislatively-preferred reading of the Free Exercise Clause, Congress has taken over the judicial function of interpreting the Constitution in the course [22] of adjudicating cases and controversies.
RFRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Under The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), Section 5 extends power to Congress solely to enforce constitutional guarantees. Id. at 11. The Act’s invalidation of every law that incidentally burdens the free exercise of religion, whether the law targets a particular religion or not, creates extra-constitutional rights and therefore exceeds Congress’s remedial power under Section 5.
This Court should lay to rest the “substantive power theory,” i.e., the notion that Congress may expand the scope of constitutional guarantees, which was an alternative holding in the Voting Rights Act cases, and which transgresses separation of powers and federalism concerns.
The Act oversteps federalism boundaries inherent in Section 5 by forcing state and local governments to abide by a statutory scheme that is not required by the Constitution.
RFRA violates the Establishment Clause by privileging religion over all other forms of conscience. It fails this Court’s test announced in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612-13 (1971). [23] It does not have a secular purpose. It is certainly not neutral in effect. It requires entanglement of church and state by requiring all governments to become intimately informed on the theological tenets of every religion in the relevant community in order to be able to enact a law that is the least restrictive means.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act mocks the genius of the American Constitution’s structure. “From the standpoint of the . . . constitutional structure of this Nation, [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] bring[s] us to a crossroad that is marked with a formidable ‘Stop’ sign. That sign compels us to pause before we [are carried] to the point of sanctioning Congress'” attempt to expand the scope of constitutional rights “by simple legislation.” Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112, 152 (1970) (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
The success of the Constitution resides in the Framers’ fundamental insight that a division of duties, authority, and power is essential to avoiding the concentrations of power that irresistibly lead to tyranny. In James Madison’s words, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, [24] executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The Federalist No. 47, at 301 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). Acutely conscious of the history of tyranny in other countries and times, the Framers crafted a series of mechanisms intended to prevent the consolidation of too much power in any one institution. They separated the powers of the federal government into three branches, divided power between the federal and the state governments, and prohibited the union of church and state. With RFRA, Congress has disabled all three mechanisms, simultaneously transgressing three different constitutional boundaries.
I. THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RESTORATION ACT VIOLATES THE SEPARATION OF POWERS
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is an undisguised attempt by Congress to overtake this Court’s core constitutional function and to reverse this Court’s statement of the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause in Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). See, e.g., The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1990: Hearings on H.R. [25] 5377 Before the Subcomm. on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Comm. on the Judiciary, 101st Cong., 2d Sess. 8, 9, 38, 41, 48 (1990). It rejects the Court’s announced standard, which does not apply the Free Exercise Clause to general and otherwise valid neutral laws that incidentally burden religious conduct, and replaces it with one more pleasing to Congress. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb(a)(4), Cert. Pet. App. at 39a (criticizing Smith standard); id. at §§ 2000bb(b)(1), 2000bb-1(a)-(c), Cert. Pet. App. at 40a (instituting compelling interest and least restrictive means tests whenever religious conduct is substantially burdened). “RFRA’s rewrite of the Free Exercise Clause . . . is but the vehicle by which Congress seeks to ride into the judicial reservation.” Eugene Gressman & Angela C. Carmella, The RFRA Revision of the Free Exercise Clause, 57 Ohio St. L.J. 65, 111 (1996).
A. Separation of Powers Principles
Long settled constitutional doctrine holds that it is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803); U.S. Const. art. [26] III, §§ 1, 2. The Supreme Court, and only the Supreme Court, is the “ultimate interpreter of the Constitution.” Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 211 (1962). The Supreme Court’s core constitutional function is to decide the meaning of the Constitution in the context of deciding Article III cases and controversies.
Where Congress or the President tries to overtake this core judicial function, it violates the separation of powers. “It remains a basic principle of our constitutional scheme that one branch of the Government may not intrude upon the central prerogatives of another.” Loving v. United States, 116 S. Ct. 1737, 1743 (1996) (citing Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 115 S. Ct. 1447 (1995)). The judicial branch has been characterized as the “least dangerous branch.” See Alexander M. Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch (1962). Where its distinctive power to set constitutional standards of review has been usurped, it is the most irrelevant branch. In the words of Alexander Hamilton:
The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges as, a fundamental [27] law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.
The Federalist No. 78, at 467 (Alexander Hamilton) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). See also United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 703 (1974);Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 115 S.Ct. 1447, 1463 (1995) (“The doctrine of separation of powers is a structural safeguard.”). The eminent constitutional scholar Thomas Cooley articulated the separation of powers problem embedded in RFRA in precise terms: the legislature “cannot compel the courts . . . to adopt a particular construction of a law [and] cannot… require of them a construction of the law according to its own views.” Thomas Cooley, Constitutional Limitations 94-95 (1868), cited with approval in Plaut, 115 S. Ct. at 1455-56.
“Congress simply lacks [28] the constitutional authority to override the Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment.” Douglas Laycock & Oliver S. Thomas, Interpreting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 73 Tex. L. Rev. 209, 243 (1994). After this Court declared the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause in Smith, Congress had no latitude to introduce a competing standard and then to direct the courts to implement that standard in cases adjudicating free exercise interests.
With RFRA, Congress has overstepped the bounds of its legitimate constitutional powers and made real the “fear of legislative usurpation” that animated the Framers’ pivotal decision to institute a government of limited powers. Henry P. Monaghan, Marbury and the Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 32 (1983). In the end, this case is not about religious liberty, but rather about the power of Congress to alter the Constitution’s liberty-preserving structure.
Fortunately, “the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to [29] the crisis of the day.” New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 187 (1992).
B. The Supreme Court’s Free Exercise Doctrine
In 1990, this Court took the occasion of its decision in Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), to survey First Amendment Free Exercise doctrine. Reaffirming the approach that this Court has employed since its first free exercise decision, Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), this Court explained that the compelling interest standard announced eighty-five years after Reynolds in Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963), had been applied rarely in free exercise cases involving neutral, nondiscriminatory, generally applicable laws. Smith, 494 U.S. at 883-85. Justice Scalia, writing for the Court and joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices White, Stevens, and Kennedy, surveyed the doctrine as follows:
We have never invalidated any governmental action on the basis of the Sherbert test except the denial of unemployment compensation. Although we have sometimes purported to apply the Sherbert test in contexts other than that, we have always found the test satisfied. [30] In recent years we have abstained from applying the Sherbert test … In Bowen v. Roy, 476 U.S. 693 (1986), we declined to apply Sherbert analysis to a federal statutory scheme that required benefit applicants and recipients to provide their Social Security numbers … In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Assn., 485 U.S. 439 (1988), we declined to apply Sherbert analysis to the Government’s logging and road construction activities on lands used for religious purposes by several Native American Tribes . . . In Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 U.S. 503, 106 S. Ct. 1310, 89 L.Ed.2d 478 (1986), we rejected application of the Sherbert test to military dress regulations that forbade the wearing of yarmulkes. In O’Lone v. Estate of Shabazz, 482 U.S. 342 (1987), we sustained without mentioning the Sherbert test, a prison’s refusal to excuse inmates from work requirements to attend worship services.
Smith, 494 U.S. at 883-84 (citations omitted).
Even those in dissent in Smith agreed that the compelling interest test had not obtained in every context. Justices Brennan, Marshall and Blackmun joined the section [31] of Justice O’Connor’s concurrence in the judgment in which she identified “contexts in which [the Court has] not traditionally required the government to justify a burden on religious conduct by articulating a compelling interest.” Id. at 900-01 (identifying cases involving the government’s conduct of its own internal affairs, military regulations and prison regulations as subject to deferential review).2
The Court continued: “Even if we were inclined to breathe into Sherbert some life beyond the unemployment compensation field, we would not apply it to require exemptions from a generally applicable criminal law … We conclude today that the sounder approach, and the approach in accord with the vast majority of our precedents, is to hold the [Sherbert] test inapplicable to… [free exercise] challenges [to generally applicable laws].” Id. at 885-86 (emphasis added). In other words, the compelling interest test was inconsistent with most of the Court’s free exercise precedents.
The Smith Court limited its discussion to the compelling interest test announced in Sherbert, not even referring to the least restrictive means test that appears in § 2000bb-1(b) of RFRA. In fact, the least restrictive means test has not been a staple of free exercise doctrine. It has never been used by this Court to invalidate a law and has been cited as a component of the standard of review for free exercise cases in only one case, Thomas v. Review Bd. of Indiana Employment Sec. Div., 450 U.S. 707, 718 (1981). See also The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1991: Hearings on H.R. 2797 [33] Before the Subcomm. on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Comm. on the Judiciary, 102d Cong., 2d Sess. 380-81 (1992) (statement of Professor Ira C. Lupu) (“You will search the Supreme Court’s opinions in Yoder and Sherbert in vain for the [least restrictive means test].”).
The Smith Court explained its decision to follow the larger trend of its precedents rather than to extend the compelling interest test beyond the few cases employing it, saying:
Any society adopting such a system would be courting anarchy, but that danger increases in direct proportion to the society’s diversity of religious beliefs, and its determination to coerce or suppress none of them. Precisely because “we are a cosmopolitan nation made up of people of almost every conceivable religious preference,” Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S., at 606, and precisely because we value and protect that religious divergence, we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order.
Smith, 494 U.S. at 888.
Five months before RFRA was enacted, [34] the Court reaffirmed its commitment to its free exercise doctrine announced in Smith with its decision in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993). The opinion for the Court, written by Justice Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Stevens, White, Scalia, and Thomas, declared: “In addressing the constitutional protection for free exercise of religion, our cases establish the general proposition that a law that is neutral and of general applicability need not be justified by a compelling governmental interest even if the law has the incidental effect of burdening a particular religious practice.” Lukumi, 508 U.S. at 531. Although challenged to retreat from the Smith Court’s analysis by separate opinions authored by Justices Blackmun, id. at 577 (Blackmun, J., concurring in the judgment), and Souter, id. at 559 (Souter, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment), this Court adhered to the Smith analysis of free exercise doctrine. Congress ignored this manifest reaffirmation of the Court’s free exercise doctrine and enacted RFRA only months later.
C. Congress’s Hostile [35] Response to Employment Division v. Smith
The plain language of RFRA, as well as its legislative history, make painfully clear that members of Congress read the Court’s thoughtful opinion in Smith with attention and therefore understood that the Court had declared that the First Amendment’s free exercise doctrine does not require strict scrutiny of neutral, nondiscriminatory, generally applicable regulations. 3Smith, 494 U.S. at 888. Not satisfied with the Court’s statement of the Free Exercise Clause, Congress, at the insistence of organized religions and civil liberties groups from around the country, drafted and enacted RFRA for the sole purpose of overturning Smith. 4
Any hopes that the Executive Branch’s veto power might have been exercised to halt this march into the judiciary’s terrain were dashed when President Clinton signed RFRA into law, saying RFRA “reverses the Supreme Court’s decision [in] Employment Division against Smith.” Remarks on Signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, II Pub. Papers 2000 (Nov. 16, 1993).
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is nothing less than a competing interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause. In the Free Exercise context, it turns day to night. It transforms presumptively valid neutral, nondiscriminatory, and generally applicable laws into “presumptively invalid” laws. Smith, 494 U.S. at 888.
RFRA bears the hallmarks of a constitutional decision overruling a prior judicial precedent. The text of the Act is not in the least shy about declaring its constitutional character. The Act begins with the following declaration: “The framers of the Constitution, recognizing free exercise of religion as an unalienable right, secured its protection in the First Amendment to the Constitution.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb(a)(1), Cert. Pet. App. at 39a. The Act goes [37] so far as to define “exercise of religion” for purposes of the Act as “the exercise of religion under the First Amendment to the Constitution.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-2(4), Cert. Pet. App. at 41a.
The Act’s scope is constitutional in nature, its sweep breathtaking. RFRA applies to every government and every law in the United States, past, present and future:
Every government. The Act defines “government” as including “a branch, department, agency, instrumentality, and official (or person acting under color of law) of the United States, a State, or a subdivision of a State.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-2(1), Cert. Pet. App. at 41a.
Every law. The Act states that RFRA “applies to all Federal and State laws, and the implementation of that law, whether statutory or otherwise.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-3(a), Cert. Pet. App. at 41a. The range of amici in support of Petitioner evidences the way in which RFRA invades every arena of government regulation: from the protection of children to historical preservation and urban planning to prison oversight. These in turn reflect only a small portion of the universe affected by [38] RFRA.
Every time. The Act expressly applies to every law that was “adopted before or after November 16, 1993 [the date of RFRA’s enactment].” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-3(b), Cert. Pet. App. at 41a.
In direct and unmistakable contravention of Smith, Congress enacted into law the compelling interest test announced in Sherbert, stating, “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability [unless the law] is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1(a), reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 40a.
Congress also codified in RFRA a least restrictive means test, despite its insignificant role in free exercise cases. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1(b), reprinted in Cert. Pet. App. at 40a. In short, RFRA mandates a standard — the compelling interest test — that the Supreme Court expressly stated was not the traditional or the appropriate standard in free exercise cases, Smith, 494 U.S. at 884-85, and appends to it a test so infrequently invoked that the Smith Court found it unnecessary [39] to address.
RFRA’s new standard marks a sea change from prior free exercise law. The least restrictive means test by itself transforms Smith’s presumption of validity for neutral, generally applicable laws into a standard that “will ultimately lead to striking down almost any statute on the ground that the Court could think of another ‘less restrictive’ way to write it.” Supreme Court of New Hampshire v. Piper, 470 U.S. 274, 294-95 (1985) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).
Predictably and ironically, in Congress’s headlong rush to “fix” free exercise law, Congress drafted a new free exercise standard. As the preceding description of the Court’s doctrine should make clear, the euphemistically-named Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not restore the free exercise doctrine in place before Smith but rather creates out of whole cloth a new free exercise standard characterized by a rigid, across-the-board standard not in evidence in the “vast majority” of the Court’s Free Exercise decisions before Smith was decided. Smith, 494 U.S. at 882-87; see also id. at 900-01 (O’Connor, J., concurring). Indeed, the most oppressive aspect of RFRA for governments [40] — the least restrictive means test — is a virtual novelty in the free exercise arena. See supra part I.B. If what members of Congress intended to do was to restore prior law, they bungled the job rather seriously.
Congress has co-opted the Court’s interpretive role. As a direct result, the courts have been relegated in free exercise cases to the role of interpreting Congress’s inaccurate assessment of the Constitution, rather than their constitutionally appointed role of interpreting the Constitution itself.
RFRA’s defenders have attempted to gloss over its glaring separation of powers faults by stating that it is merely a “statutory” right over and above a constitutional floor set by the Court. The characterization of RFRA as a “mere statutory right,” however, is nothing more than a thin pretext for Congress’s attempt to overtake the Court’s appointed role in interpreting the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. See M’Culloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat) 316 (1819) (“The judicial department . . . will decide whether the connection is real, or assumed as the pretext for the usurpation of powers not belonging to the government.”). The lower courts have had [41] little patience with this misleading defense of RFRA. See Flores, 73 F.3d at 1361;Hamilton v. Schriro, 74 F.3d 1545, 1563 (8th Cir. 1996) (McMillian, J., dissenting); Hodge v. Magic Valley Evangelical Free Church, Inc., 200 B.R. 884, 900-01 (Bankr. D. Idaho 1996);Keeler v. Mayor & City Council of Cumberland, 928 F. Supp. 591, 599 (D. Md. 1996).
D. RFRA Must Be Struck to Preserve the Balance of Power Between the Court and Congress
The Supreme Court bears responsibility to delineate the constitutional scope of congressional power to legislate. See United States v. Lopez, 115 S. Ct. 1624, 1639-40 (1995) (Kennedy, J., concurring); Miller v. Johnson, 115 S. Ct. 2475, 2491 (1995). As then-Justice Rehnquist has stated,
While the presumption of constitutionality is due to any act of a coordinate branch of the Federal Government or of one of the States, it is this Court which is ultimately responsible for deciding challenges to the exercise of power by those entities.
City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 207 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). RFRA’s transgression of judicial power overcomes [42] this presumption of constitutionality. “To allow a simple majority of Congress to have final say on matters of constitutional interpretation is . . . fundamentally out of keeping with the constitutional structure.” Mitchell, 400 U.S. at 205 (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
In essence, Congress has instructed the Supreme Court how to interpret the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment (that is, apply the compelling interest test), even though the Court, the entity charged by the Constitution with its application, has determined that the compelling interest test is neither feasible nor required. It hardly needs to be said that where Congress and the Supreme Court are so clearly at odds with each other over the definition of a fundamental right, the conflict presents an obvious and serious threat to the delicate balance of the separation of power.
Hamilton, 74 F.3d at 1566 (McMillian, J., dissenting).
There is nothing ambiguous about RFRA’s separation of powers violation. This Court’s statement of the free exercise standard in Smith was stated in plain terms. And Congress’s act of overriding that standard is [43] unmistakable in the title, the plain language of the Act, and in its legislative history. 5 Never before has the Court’s constitutional preserve of power been compromised to this extent. RFRA is nothing short of a hostile takeover of this Court’s constitutionally appointed role in free exercise cases.
Without a doubt, religious liberty is at the heart of this country’s experiment with democracy. This Court stated in Smith that governments could and would accommodate religion with specific exemptions from generally applicable laws. See Smith, 494 U.S. at 890 (“Values that are protected against government interference through enshrinement in the Bill of Rights are not thereby banished from the political process. . . . [A] society that believes in the negative protection accorded to religious belief [44] can be expected to be solicitous of that value in its legislation as well.”). But the power of accommodation does not make any and every congressional foray into the free exercise preserve safe from constitutional error. However Congress may act to protect religious liberty, it must not be permitted to enter this deeply important arena by undermining the courts’ authority to interpret the Constitution.
To restore the balance of power between Congress and the Court intended by the Framers to ensure liberty, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act must be struck down. 6
II. THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RESTORATION ACT IS NOT A LEGITIMATE EXERCISE OF CONGRESS’S POWER UNDER SECTION 5 OF THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT
Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment states: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 5. “This article,” is the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides a set of constitutional guarantees against the states. By the plain language of Section 5, Congress may enforce only constitutional guarantees contemplated by the Fourteenth Amendment. 7 There is not the least intimation that Congress has the power to enforce its policy predilections beyond constitutional guarantees. See City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 206 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting); Mitchell, 400 U.S. at 152 (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Congress’s attempt with RFRA to force state and local governments to accommodate religious conduct more than this Court has said the Constitution requires runs headlong over a dangerous precipice. 8 A decision to uphold RFRA would overruleThe Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 11 (1883), which were decided in the [46] same era as the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, and in which the Court stated that Section 5 “invests Congress with power to enforce it by appropriate legislation. To enforce what? To enforce the prohibition [found in the Fourteenth Amendment] . . .”
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act “does not [48] profess to be corrective of any constitutional wrong committed by the States; it does not make its operation to depend upon any such wrong committed.” The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. at 11. Indeed, the Act makes no pretense to enforce only the constitutional guarantees against specifically targeted legislation recognized as unconstitutional in Smith and redressed in Lukumi. Smith, 494 U.S. at 872;Lukumi, 508 U.S. at 520. Rather, the Act was intended to prohibit all substantial burdens on “a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicabilty . . . .” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1(a), Cert. Pet. App. at 40a. See also 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb(a)(4), Cert. Pet. App. at 39a (stating that Smith “eliminated the requirement that the government justify burdens on religious exercise imposed by laws neutral toward religion . . . .”); H.R. Rep. No. 88, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. 1239 (1993) (“The test applies whenever a law or an action taken by the government to implement a law burdens a person’s exercise of religion.”). The purpose of the Act is to supplant Smith, not to reinforce [49] it. Thus, RFRA directs courts to enforce wholly extra-constitutional “rights,” moving it well beyond the preserve of Section 5 power.
A. RFRA Is Unlike Any Other Statute
The various Section 5 arguments of RFRA’s defenders boil down to one claim: the Court has upheld similar statutes before. That is, emphatically, untrue for two reasons.
First, and without a doubt, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is in a class by itself. This is the first time Congress has attempted to preempt this Court’s declared standard of review. Never before has Congress attempted to take the reins from the Court over a clause of the First Amendment, or, for that matter, over any clause of the Constitution.
The only congressional action that bears a surface resemblance to RFRA’s blatant attempt to trump this Court’s constitutional determination is the Human Life Bill, which was intended to overrule Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). See The Human Life Bill, S. 158, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. (1981). That bill faltered in part because of concerns raised about the constitutionality of Congress overruling a decision by the Supreme Court. Senator Orrin Hatch, one of its primary sponsors, [50] refused to vote in favor of the Bill on the grounds that it overturned this Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, and therefore exceeded congressional authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Staff of Subcomm. on Separation of Powers of Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., Report on Human Life Bill, S. 158, together with additional and minority views 35 (Comm. Print 1981). RFRA, with its broad sweep, strays into the judiciary’s terrain even more than the Human Life Bill, which affected only one issue — abortion — within the Court’s privacy doctrine. RFRA stands by itself.
Second, the cases on which RFRA’s defenders rely simply do not hold that Congress may reverse a Supreme Court decision by altering the standard of review in any, let alone all, cases.
B. RFRA Is Inconsistent With the Enumerated Power Requirement Announced in M’Culloch v. Maryland
The test for determining whether a statute is consistent with the enumerated power requirement was announced by this Court in M’Culloch, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) at 421:
Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which [51] are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.
See also Ex Parte Virginia, 100 U.S. (10 Otto) 339 (1879). The Religious Freedom Restoration Act fails all three prongs of the M’Culloch test applied by the Fifth Circuit.
1. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act Is Not Within the Scope of the Constitution
The Fifth Circuit erred in its holding that RFRA enforces guarantees to be found in the Fourteenth Amendment. The court of appeals’ error lies in its failure to grasp this Court’s free exercise doctrine. The court of appeals employs RFRA as its benchmark for constitutional protection, assuming that all substantial burdens on the exercise of religion automatically trigger constitutional protection. Flores, 73 F.3d at 1355. That view, however, is plainly rejected by this Court in Smith and Lukumi. See Smith, 494 U.S. at 881;Lukumi, 508 U.S. at 531. Neutral, generally applicable laws that incidentally burden religious exercise do not trigger close judicial review in free exercise cases. As Justice Scalia stated in his concurrence [52] in Lukumi:
The terms “neutrality” and “general applicability” are not to be found within the First Amendment itself, of course, but are used in Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, and earlier cases to describe those characteristics which cause a law that prohibits an activity a particular individual wishes to engage in for religious reasons nonetheless not to constitute a “law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of religion within the meaning of the First Amendment.
508 U.S. at 557 (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment).
The guarantee against all substantial burdens on religious exercise is located in a congressional enactment, RFRA, not a constitutional source. As such, RFRA is not “within the scope of the constitution.” M’Culloch, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat) at 421.
2. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act Is Not Plainly Adapted to Achieve Constitutional Ends
Nor is RFRA “plainly adapted to” constitutional ends. As the preceding discussion makes clear, RFRA is designed to fill in a perceived gap in free exercise protection left open by Smith, not to enforce rights guaranteed by the Constitution. [53] The Fifth Circuit found this prong satisfied on the basis of this Court’s decisions in Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641 (1966), and City of Rome v. United States, 446 U.S. 156 (1980), holding that Congress properly exercised its remedial power under Section 5 when it enacted RFRA. Flores, 73 F.3d at 1356-57. The remedial power found in these cases, however, does not justify RFRA.
Defenders of RFRA have also posited that RFRA is “plainly adapted to” constitutional ends because Section 5 gives Congress the power to expand the substantive scope of constitutional guarantees. This is the substantive power theory. The following discussion of Congress’s Section 5 power will first address the remedial power theory and then the substantive power theory.
a. The Remedial Power Theory. Congress offered no basis for the exercise of its power in RFRA other than Section 5, specifically citing the Voting Rights Act cases. 9 Section 5 gives Congress the power to “enforce” or remedy, constitutional guarantees secured by the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress missed the mark. The Voting Rights Act cases simply do not stand for the proposition that Congress may [54] “remedy” potential constitutional violations by altering the standard of review in all cases raising a particular constitutional issue.
i. The Voting Rights Act Cases Do Not Support RFRA. The Voting Rights Act cases read Section 5’s remedial power to permit Congress, when employing the Supreme Court’s previously announced standard, and on the basis of its superior factfinding capacity, to reach a conclusion under that standard at odds with Supreme Court determinations under the same standard. Under the Court’s broadest reading of the remedial power, Congress has been permitted to enact prophylactic legislation that bans actions not forbidden by the Constitution for the purpose of enforcing constitutional guarantees. RFRA treats that prophylactic power as a warrant to enforce ends not guaranteed by the Constitution and therefore exceeds Section 5. The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. at 19.
This Court’s decision in Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641 (1966), [55] involved Section 4(e) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provides that persons who have received a primary education in Puerto Rico cannot be denied the right to vote. Id. The federal law was in direct conflict with New York’s law requiring English literacy as a condition to vote, a law that was presumably not unconstitutional “on its face” under Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 360 U.S. 45, 54 (1959). Section 4(e) was challenged by New York State as beyond Congress’s Section 5 power and in derogation of the Tenth Amendment. This Court upheld Section 4(e) as an exercise of Congress’s power to remedy Equal Protection violations, stating that “§ 5 is a positive grant of legislative power authorizing Congress to exercise its discretion in determining whether and what legislation is needed to secure the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Morgan, 384 U.S. at 651 (emphasis added). See also id. at 652 (quoting Section 4(e) purpose “to secure the rights under the fourteenth amendment”). This Court left to Congress the power “to assess and weigh the various conflicting considerations,” in determining whether constitutional [56] guarantees were being infringed. Id. at 653.
The Court in Morgan did not hand Congress carte blanche to overrule Supreme Court declarations of the appropriate standard of review in constitutional cases. Rather it stated that its decision in Lassiter was “inapposite,” Morgan, 384 U.S. at 649, when Congress is engaging its factfinding capacities to protect Equal Protection guarantees. RFRA, of course, protects extra-constitutional interests and therefore exceeds congressional authority. The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. at 11.
In City of Rome, in addressing the reach of Congress’s power under Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Court held, as in Morgan, that Congress could reach a factual conclusion at odds with a prior Supreme Court case. This Court upheld the Voting Rights Act’s ban on electoral changes discriminating in effect, even though Section 1 of the Amendment only prohibited intentional discrimination. City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 177. Congress rationally concluded that there existed significant risk of purposeful discrimination that justified the enactment of a marginally overbroad remedy. Id. at 173-78. [57] Once again, in the context of a detailed statute addressing the specifics of voting practices, the Court expressed its willingness to permit Congress to cure a particular constitutional evil with means deduced from a factual record indicating a link between the congressional remedy and a constitutional guarantee. Id. at 179. RFRA bears no corresponding correlation. It is hardly a detailed plan to cure a particular constitutional evil; it is based on the thinnest of factfinding records, especially when compared to its broad sweep; and it is aimed plainly at extra-constitutional evils.
Neither Morgan nor City of Rome provides precedent that supports the extraordinary exercise of power found in RFRA. 10 Even in the Court’s most expansive Section 5 cases, the remedial power has been limited to the exercise of superior factfinding skills in the context of applying the Court’s designated standard for constitutional violations. This Section 5 doctrine in no way creates a haven for RFRA’s bald rejection of the Court’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment in all cases.
ii. Congress Made No Factfindings in Passing RFRA That Would Support Its Extreme Overenforcement of Religious Interests. Apparently, even Congress did not believe RFRA could be justified as an exercise of Congress’s remedial power. Despite being urged by Professor Laycock to do so, see Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1991: Hearings on H.R. 2797 Before the Subcomm. on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 102d Cong., 2d Sess. 357-58, 398 (1992), Congress engaged in no meaningful factfinding that would support the need for a congressional remedy in the free exercise arena. Indeed, Congress’s express “Findings” in the Act speak to its dissatisfaction with Smith, not the state of religious liberty in the United States. 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb, Cert. Pet. App. at 39a.
Congress simply did not ask what effect RFRA would have on the thousands, if not millions, of regulations that would be affected by RFRA, for example, regulations governing emergency medical care of children in imminent danger of dying or sustaining permanent disability, childhood immunization requirements, child support payments, state-mandated [59] autopsies, school safety laws governing the carrying of dangerous weapons, bankruptcy proceedings involving churches, the removal of Native American remains from church grounds, and every aspect of land use law. See, e.g., Cheema v. Thompson, 67 F.3d 883 (9th Cir. 1995) (holding that Sikh school-children must be permitted to carry knives in violation of school rule against the carrying of dangerous weapons).
“The enactment of RFRA can in no sense be said to involve the ‘specially informed legislative competence’ of Congress.” Keeler v. Mayor & City of Council of Cumberland, 928 F. Supp. 591, 603 (D. Md. 1996). In fact, “Congress abdicated its responsibility to investigate the particular state action which might have the potential of unconstitutionally burdening the free exercise of religion . . . .” Hamilton, 74 F.3d at 1567 (McMillian, J., dissenting).
Under the prophylactic theory of Morgan’s first rationale, this Court has not upheld congressional action that overenforces constitutional guarantees against the states in the absence of a history of the states’ unwillingness to comply with the constitutional standard. What “Congress has done [60] through RFRA’s passage under the banner of § 5 is dramatically different from its exercise of § 5 power in Morgan or in any other case to date.” Hamilton, 74 F.3d at 1568 (McMillian, J., dissenting). Unlike the Voting Rights Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was not necessitated by a refusal by state and local governments to abide by the Constitution, thereby requiring prophylactic legislation. See Sasnett v. Sullivan, 91 F.3d 1018, 1021 (7th Cir. 1996)(“We are given some pause . . . by the lack of a recent history of governmental discrimination against religious observance. . . . It is not easy to take entirely seriously the proposition that the enactment of RFRA was necessary in order to prevent the states from engaging in forms of intentional discrimination that, unlike the ordinance invalidated in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, could not readily be shown to be intentional.”). The thin record supporting RFRA is in sharp contrast to this Court’s description of the record on which the Voting Rights Act was based:
Two points emerge vividly from the voluminous legislative history of the [Voting Rights] Act contained in the committee [61] hearings and floor debates. First: Congress felt itself confronted by an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution. Second: Congress concluded that the unsuccessful remedies which it had prescribed in the past would have to be replaced by sterner and more elaborate measures in order to satisfy the clear commands of the Fifteenth Amendment.
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 309 (1966). See also Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, 640 (1993);City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 182;Gaston County, N.C. v. United States, 395 U.S. 285, 291 (1969). The RFRA legislative history is replete with denigrations of Smith but only sporadically dotted with a limited number of anecdotal reports of religious suppression. This Act invites this Court to charge Congress with the responsibility of building a record in overenforcement cases which would clarify, “streamline — and sharpen — the judicial task of reviewing federal legislation” under Section 5. Harold J. Krent, Turning Congress Into an Agency: The Propriety of Requiring Legislative [62] Findings, 46 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 731, 737 n.20 (1996).
In conclusion, RFRA is not a constitutionally legitimate prophylactic measure; rather, it is an unjustified and abusive exercise of Congress’s remedial power under Section 5. See Hamilton, 74 F.3d at 1570 (McMillian, J., dissenting) (“This is not prophylaxis but unconstitutional interbranch hegemony.”).
b. The Substantive Power Theory. To be completely fair to those who passed RFRA in reliance onKatzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641 (1966), and to those who continue to defend RFRA under Morgan, language in that decision implies a congressional power to expand the scope of constitutional guarantees:
[Section] 5 does not grant Congress power to exercise discretion in the other direction and to enact “statutes so as in effect to dilute equal protection and due process decisions of this Court.” We emphasize that Congress’ power under § 5 is limited to adopting measures to enforce the guarantees of the Amendment; § 5 grants Congress no power to restrict, abrogate, or dilute these guarantees.
Morgan, 384 U.S. at 651 n.10. This overreading of Morgan has been [63] pervasive in the legal academy, and has misled the lower courts into upholding RFRA. See, e.g., Belgard v. State of Hawai’i, 883 F. Supp. 510, 513 (D. Haw. 1995).
Yet, the substantive power theory has never been the dispositive basis for a decision by this Court. Even in Morgan, it was only an alternative ground for decision. Morgan, 384 U.S. at 652-53 (justifying statute as exercise of remedial power under Section 5). See also Daniel O. Conkle, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: The Constitutional Significance of an Unconstitutional Statute, 56 Mont. L. Rev. 39, 51-52 (1995). As then-Justice Rehnquist has pointed out, five members of this Court rejected the substantive power theory in the later-decided case of Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), see City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 220-21 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting), while only four members were in favor of the theory. Mitchell, 400 U.S. at 239-81 (Brennan, J., dissenting); id. at 135-44 (Douglas, J., dissenting). See also EEOC v. Wyoming, 460 U.S. 226, 262 (1983)(Burger, C.J., dissenting) (“I have always read Oregon v. Mitchell as finally [64] imposing a limitation on the extent to which Congress may substitute its own judgment for that of the states and assume this Court’s ‘role of final arbiter’ . . .”).
This Court has in fact rejected the substantive power theory in the context of the Fifteenth Amendment, the enforcement language of which is almost identical to Section 5. Congress has been found to have exceeded its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement powers when “Congress has attacked evils not comprehended by the Fifteenth Amendment.” South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 326 (1966) (citing United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. (2 Otto) 214, 217-18 (1875);James v. Bowman, 190 U.S. 127, 138 (1903)).
The substantive power theory hands Congress a power at odds with the separation of powers, and it permits Congress to yoke the states to its policy predilections in violation of the federalism constraints inherent in Section 5. The great Justice Harlan dissented in Morgan, because he believed that Congress must not be permitted to re-define the scope of constitutional guarantees. Legislation like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can only be “sustained . . . at the sacrifice of [65] fundamentals in the American constitutional system — the separation between the legislative and judicial function and the boundaries between federal and state political authority.” Morgan, 384 U.S. at 659 (Harlan, J., dissenting). He reaffirmed his commitment to these principles when he joined four other members of this Court to hold in Mitchell that Congress lacked the power to determine that the voting age in state elections ought to be 18 rather than 21. See Mitchell, 400 U.S. at 204-07 (Harlan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part); id. at 296 (Stewart, J., joined by Burger, C.J., and Blackmun, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part); id. at 124-30 (Black, J.).
These essential truths were echoed by then-Justice Rehnquist in dissent in City of Rome when he stated that Congress’s attempt to override the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution under the Fourteenth Amendment “requires state and local governments to cede far more of their powers to the Federal Government than the Civil War Amendments ever envisioned; and it requires the judiciary to cede far more of its power to interpret and enforce the Constitution than ever [66] envisioned.” City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 221 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). See also id. at 207, 210-13, 220-221.
Although the Court did not reach the Section 5 issue in EEOC v. Wyoming, 460 U.S. 226 (1983),four members of this Court — Chief Justice Burger and Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor — went to great lengths to reject the notion that Congress may “define rights wholly independently of [this Court’s] case law . . . .” Wyoming, 460 U.S. at 262 (Burger, C.J., dissenting). To the contrary, “allowing Congress to protect constitutional rights statutorily that it has independently defined fundamentally alters our scheme of government.” Id.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act makes real what Justice Harlan only imagined when he dissented in Morgan:
To deny the effectiveness of [the Voting Rights Act] is not of course to disparage Congress’ exertion of authority in the field of civil rights; it is simply to recognize that the Legislative Branch like the other branches of federal authority is subject to the governmental boundaries set by the Constitution. To hold, on this record, that [the Act] overrides [67] the New York [law] seems to me tantamount to allowing the Fourteenth Amendment to swallow the State’s constitutionally ordained primary authority in this field. For if Congress by what, as here, amounts to mere ipse dixit can set the otherwise permissible requirement partially at naught I see no reason why it could not also substitute its judgment for that of the States in other fields of their exclusive primary competence as well.
Morgan, 384 U.S. at 671. With RFRA, Congress has fulfilled Justice Harlan’s hoped-against prophecy to the nth degree. It is ipse dixit that blankets every field of state competence. The passage of RFRA invites this Court to set to rest, once and for all, the troublesome and constitutionally misguided notion that Congress has plenary power to interpret the Constitution at odds with this Court’s interpretation and to force that interpretation on the courts. 11
Finally, even if this Court were to read Morgan as relying on a substantive power theory, the purported alteration of the constitutional calculus in that case, and in City of Rome, is mere tinkering compared with the broad-brush attack on the Court’s constitutional doctrine in RFRA. By upholding RFRA on a substantive power theory, the Court would be vastly expanding the power of Congress even beyond that arguably contemplated in Morgan and City of Rome.
In sum, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not plainly adapted to constitutional ends and therefore fails the second prong of the M’Culloch test. RFRA was not enacted pursuant to a legitimate exercise of Congress’s remedial power, and the substantive power theory deserves to be definitively interred by this Court at this time.
3. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act Is Prohibited by and Inconsistent with the Letter and Spirit of the Federalism Constraints Inherent in Section 5
The M’Culloch test finally requires congressional action “which [is] not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and spirit of the constitution . . . .” M’Culloch, 17 U.S. at 421. Because the Act violates the separation of [69] powers, see supra sec. I, federalism principles inherent in Section 5, see infra, and the Establishment Clause, see infra sec. III, it fails the final M’Culloch prong.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a bold and unprecedented example of federal social policy engineering that commandeers the states to follow the federal government’s decision to accommodate religion more than the Constitution requires. RFRA intrudes on the sovereign power of the states. See New York, 505 U.S. at 155-57. Congress is a body of enumerated powers, and it must respect state integrity in that exercise. Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, 116 S. Ct. 1114, 1127, 1132 (1996); Lopez, 115 S. Ct. at 1626; New York, 505 U.S. at 156-57; Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452, 457-59 (1991). As this Court stated in New York, “‘the preservation of the States, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National government.'” New York, 505 U.S. at 162 (quoting Texas v. White, 7 Wall. 700, 725 (1869)).
Congress [70] may not ignore principles of federalism when it exercises its Section 5 powers. Rather, federalism principles provide innate limitations on the exercise of such power. As this Court declared in New York, 505 U.S. at 159, per Justice O’Connor:
Just as a cup may be half empty or half full, it makes no difference whether one views the question at issue in this case as one of ascertaining the limits of the power delegated to the Federal Government under the affirmative provisions of the Constitution or of discerning the core of sovereignty retained by the States under the Tenth Amendment. Either way, we must determine whether [the Act] . . . oversteps the boundary between federal and state authority.
One year earlier, this Court stated in Gregory that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not override all principles of federalism.” Gregory, 501 U.S. at 469. The history of the Fourteenth Amendment makes it abundantly clear that “its framers rejected the option of an open-ended grant of power to Congress to meddle with conditions within the states so as to render them equal in accordance with its own notions.” Alexander Bickel, The Voting Rights Act [71] Cases, 1966 Sup. Ct. Rev. 79, 97.
This case, which involves quintessentially local prerogatives over land use, illustrates vividly the incursion RFRA makes on federalism concerns. Laws governing land use, and in particular historical preservation, are of intense local concern. “Respect for local landmark law is founded on principles of federalism.” Raphael Winick, Copyright Protection for Architecture After the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990, 41 Duke L.J. 1598, 1624 (1992). Thus, the enforcement of historic preservation law has been a matter left almost entirely to state and local governments, with supporting legislation from the federal government. See Penn Cent. Transp. Co. v. New York City, 438 U.S. 104 (1978). See generally, Jane Papademetriou Kourtis, Comment, The Constructive Trust: Equity’s Answer to the Need for a Strong Deterrent to the Destruction of Historic Landmarks, 16 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 793, 798-804 (1989).
History in and of itself is a commodity of compelling importance to a community. It educates, it comforts, and it solidifies a community’s shared sense of itself. Francis Bacon said [72] truly that “histories make men wise.” The Essays Or, Counsels, Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon, Of Studies 14 (1883). This Court has recognized the educative value of history, stating that “a page of history is worth a volume of logic.” New York Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 U.S. 345, 349 (1921)(Holmes, J.).
The Court’s “cases are quite clear that there are real limits to federal power.” Lopez, 115 S. Ct. at 1642 (Thomas, J., concurring). See also Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452 (1991). Those limits are transgressed by RFRA. Tests of compelling interest and least restrictive means dramatically skew the balance of power between local governments and churches on land use issues, including historical preservation, to the detriment of this traditional area of local autonomy. See Cert. Pet. at 6-7. In the end, RFRA tips “the scales too far” in favor of the federal government and in derogation of the states. See Lopez, 115 S. Ct. at 1639 (Kennedy, J., concurring); Gregory, 501 U.S. at 467-70 (holding that absent a plain statement, congressional legislation under Section 5 will not be interpreted to reach certain state political [73] functions); id. at 469; Pennhurst State School v. Halderman, 451 U.S. 1, 16 (1981) (“Because [legislation under Section 5] imposes congressional policy on a State involuntarily, and because it often intrudes on traditional state authority, we should not quickly attribute to Congress an unstated intent to act under its authority to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.”); Wyoming, 460 U.S. at 259 (Burger, C.J., dissenting) (“The Tenth Amendment was not, after all, repealed when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified: it was merely limited.”).
Congress has done in RFRA what — in our constitutional scheme — only the states may do themselves. Without question, the states voluntarily could protect religious liberty more robustly than the Federal Constitution through their own constitutions or through legislative action. See William J. Brennan, Jr., State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights, 90 Harv. L. Rev. 489 (1977); Angella C. Carmella, State Constitutional Protection of Religious Exercise: An Emerging Post-Smith Jurisprudence, 1993 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 275; Wisconsin v. Miller, 549 N.W.2d 235, 239-41 (Wis. 1996); [74] Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel, 336 A.2d 713, 725 (N.J. 1975). But Congress may not curtail state and local government lawmaking by forcing the states to observe a higher standard of religious liberty than the Court has deemed the Constitution requires. New York, 505, U.S. at 161-65; Wyoming, 460 U.S. at 259-63 (Burger, C.J., dissenting).
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act violates the principles of federalism reflected in the Tenth Amendment and operating as an inherent constitutional limitation on the exercise of Section 5 authority against the states.
III. THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RESTORATION ACT VIOLATES THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” U.S. Const. amend. I, cl. 1. The purpose of the Establishment Clause, which is specifically addressed to Congress, is to prevent the union of Congress with organized religions. Such a union is the definition of tyranny. ” For fourteen hundred years, tyranny presented a united front, thereby forcing those who would declare their independence to fight a revolution [75] to resist all tyranny, whether of church or of state, for in the final analysis all tyranny was one.” Edwin S. Gaustad, A Religious History of America 115 (1990). In James Madison’s words, “The connection of Church and State was fatal to the liberty of both.” Adrienne Koch, Madison’s “Advice to My Country” 27 (1966).
This Court announced its test to be applied in Establishment Clause cases in Lemon v. Kurtzman: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion, . . . finally, the statute must not foster ‘an excessive government entanglement with religion.'” Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612-13 (1971) (quoting Walz v. Tax Comm’n of the City of New York, 397 U.S. 664, 674 (1970)). This test is not satisfied by RFRA. See Scott C. Idleman, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: Pushing the Limits of Legislative Power, 73 Tex. L. Rev. 247, 285-302 (1994).
There is no secular purpose in RFRA. The plain purpose is to provide statutory protection for all substantial burdens on religion, whether constitutionally protected or not. Unlike the [76] type of narrowly tailored accommodation of religion contemplated by the Court in Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), and occasionally permitted under the First Amendment, RFRA establishes an across-the-board scheme that deliberately singles out religious practices, en masse, as a congressionally favored class of activity. Congress has proffered no secular rationale — just as it has offered no factual findings — as to why such across-the-board special treatment is necessary to correct specific constitutional wrongs.
There is certainly no neutral effect. Churches have now become privileged members of every community, federal, state, or local, on every issue. The sheer breadth and substantive strength of RFRA necessarily “advance” religion, both in absolute terms and in relation to functionally comparable nonreligious forms of belief and practice. The entire purpose of the statute, after all, is to establish a new balance — a new equilibrium — between religion and government, entirely different from the baseline of neutrality contemplated by the Court in Smith.
The Act miserably fails the entanglement prong by forcing every government to become expert on every religion. There [77] is now necessary entanglement every time a community seeks to enact a law, for it must investigate whether the law will be the means of accomplishing its goal that is the least restrictive of every religion’s requirements. That cannot be done without extensive investigation into the theological requirements of every relevant religion. City Councils are encouraged now to have on file detailed descriptions of every religion present and likely to be present in their communities so that they can know whether each law is narrowly tailored for every religion. Unlike the procedure envisioned by this Court in Smith where a city must act neutrally and in a generally applicable way and then may consider specific requests for accommodation that are raised after passage, Smith, 494 U.S. at 890, RFRA places cities in the position of considering every potential religious objection to every ordinance, from the perspective of each religious believer. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act both entangles and strangles local lawmaking capacity.
In Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 587 (1992), this Court held that government may not endorse the message of a particular religion. [78] RFRA endorses a global message: the government likes religion. This message violates the fundamental constitutional requirement of neutrality on issues of conscience. See Board of Educ. of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687, 114 S. Ct. 2481, 2487 (1994); Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 610-11 (1992) (Souter, J., concurring); Christopher L. Eisgruber & Lawrence G. Sager, Why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is Unconstitutional,69 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 437, 444 (1994). Congress may not favor religion over nonreligion or religion over philosophy. As this Court stated in Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705, 715 (1977), laws may not “‘invade the sphere of intellect and spirit which . . . [is] reserved from all official control.'” (quoting West Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943)). See also Lawson v. Singletary, 85 F.3d 502, 506 n.2 (11th Cir. 1996). In sum, by entangling religion and government and by privileging religion, RFRA violates the Establishment Clause.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is different from any other act Congress has ever passed. Never before [79] has Congress attempted to define for itself the core meaning of a clause of the Constitution and then to force that interpretation on the courts in every case raising the constitutional issue.
This Act is unconstitutional because it goes too far. With RFRA, Congress has wrested from this Court its core judicial function of finally interpreting the meaning of the Constitution, has trespassed against the states by requiring them to accommodate religious conduct more than the Constitution requires, and has forced all governments to become entangled in the theological tenets of every religion. Whatever the merits of Congress’s objection to the Smith decision, it cannot “fix” religious liberty in flagrant disregard of settled principles of separation of powers, federalism, and church-state relations. Although the Court owes Congress deference as a coordinate branch, the obvious constitutional evils of this statute dictate that it be struck down.
This Court should declare the Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional, reverse the judgment below, and remand the case to the district court for further proceedings consistent with this Court’s decision.
Respectfully submitted, [80]
Marci A. Hamilton, Esq., 482 Kings Road, Yardley, Pennsylvania 19067, (215) 493-1973, Counsel of Record
Gordon L. Hollon, Esq., 101 N. Saunders, Boerne, Texas 78006, (210) 249-2521, Attorneys for Petitioner, City of Boerne, Texas
Dated: November 29, 1996
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1:00 a.m., 7/16/2019
Personality: Jer’Mykeal D. McCoy
Spotlight on president-elect of the Urban League of Greater Richmond Young Professionals
6/21/2018, 3:39 p.m.
The Urban League of Greater Richmond Young Professionals has helped its members become entrepreneurs and homeowners, engage in the community’s civic affairs and enhance their careers and leadership abilities. Jer’Mykeal D. McCoy, the organization’s incoming president plans to continue that work and increase the number of members. Currently, 89 young professionals between the ages of 21 and 45 hold membership in the organization that views its mission as empowering its communities and changing lives. The 27-year-old Mr. McCoy will take office on July 1, and serve a two-year term. He’s excited about taking the helm of the organization he joined in 2016 after being recruited by outgoing president Antione M. Green. “I’m in a position to lead an amazing group of young people who want to make Richmond a better place,” he says. The Urban League Young Professionals is a part of the National Urban League, a New York City-based, nonpartisan organization that is dedicated to helping African-Americans secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights. While the Richmond Young Professionals group was founded in 1999, it has been under the umbrella of the Hampton Roads Urban League group for the past three years. With Richmond’s membership bouncing back from a low of 20 members just a few years ago, Mr. McCoy hopes to have the Young Professionals chapter back under the auspices of the Richmond Urban League during his tenure.
Re-affiliation with Richmond will allow the organization to receive financial and administrative support from the National Urban League, with the ability to apply for grants for community programming, Mr. McCoy says. The organization has counted on volunteer efforts, philanthropy and its members to be effective. It has held forums, discussions and “meet and greets” for members and the Richmond community with business leaders, community advocates, politicians and other city and state leaders. During the 2017 statewide election, the Young Professionals hosted events for members and the community to meet the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. “If our members don’t know who our representatives or elected officials are, how can we effectively communicate to our community?” he asks. He says members questioned the candidates on how their platforms would affect “the community economically and socially and the mobility of African-Americans in the commonwealth, especially Richmond, and the country.” Plans are in the works for the Young Professionals to host forums for candidates running for election in November, chiefly candidates for U.S. Senate and for the congressional races in the 4th and 7th Districts.
He firmly believes the organization is not about personal success, but about helping people open doors for others. Meet community advocate and president-elect of the Urban League of Greater Richmond Young Professionals, Jer’Mykeal D. McCoy:
Occupation: Business development manager at Schutt Sports.
No. 1 volunteer position: President-elect, Urban League of Greater Richmond Young Professionals.
Date and place of birth: Nov. 9 in East Knoxville, Tenn.
Current residence: Richmond’s Swansboro West neighborhood.
Alma maters: Bachelor’s in mass communications, Tennessee State University, magna cum laude; and master’s in professional studies, Georgetown University.
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Personality: Victor L. Rogers
Meet-and-greet for congressional candidates May 15
Personality: Monica Brinkley Davis
Urban League group hosting panel discussion
Personality: Robin M. Brown
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Home - Articles - Things - Thetis Fund
The Thetis Disaster Relief Fund
Thetis after being raised in November 1939
The following chronicles the communication between the Chairman of the Barrow Branch of The Submariners Association and the office of The Lord mayor of London.
Thetis Disaster Relief Fund
FAO The Lord Mayor of London, Alderman Clive Martin
I am the Chairman of the above association and have been asked by members of my branch to enquire about the whereabouts of the Fund, raised by the Lord Mayor of London for the Survivors and Relatives of HM Submarine Thetis.
The media has produced many articles on this Submarine subject, the latest being in the centre pages of last weekends Mail on Sunday. This story holds interest for many people and the content of this particular article is one I personally agree with strongly.
Books and newspaper articles regarding Thetis have been abundant in recent years, however one point that always dies a death is the whereabouts of this fund. As far as we can ascertain the money was only partially spent, reluctantly, may I hasten to add, owing to the draconian method adopted by the then Government.
The surviving relatives of those poor souls lost in this tragic event have struggled throughout the years to make ends meet with little or no assistance from the Admiralty or the so-called Government.
Therefore I would appreciate your investigation into the surprising disappearance of the information regarding this matter, and hope that you can resolve it.
We believe that the fund must be in the region of £500,000 taking into account interest that must have accrued over the years. The funds stood at £115,000 on June 10th 1939, within a week of the disaster.
Martin's Bank was the original bankers, swallowed up by what is now known as Barclays, from whence all monies went to Mansion House in London. This money, the Thetis Appeal Fund, should it emerge, would assist the surviving relatives in, and add quality to, they're remaining years, providing the fund is shared out amongst them.
As a retired Submariner and Falklands veteran I would like nothing better than to see justice done in rewarding these worthy recipients.
Ken Collins, Chairman Barrow-in-Furness SA.
Mansion House, London EC4N 8BH
Dear Mr Collins,
The Lord Mayor has asked me to thank you for your recent letter about the Thetis Disaster Relief Fund.
My office has now investigated the details of this fund and I am now in a position to answer the concerns that you raised.
The Thetis Disaster Fund was launched by the then Lord Mayor, Sir Frank Bowater on 5th June 1939 and raised approximately £150,000. The whole of the capital and income was intended for distribution to the beneficiaries, comprising 106 adults and 86 children. Children benefited to the age of 18. The money was distributed to the dependants by the Central Bureau of Naval Officers' Charities; the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust; the Civil Service Benevolent Fund and the shipbuilders Messrs Cammel Laird & Co.
The fund was administered by an Executive Committee of which latterly Sir Herbert Tetley, the Government Actuary, was Chairman. The City firms of Turquand Youngs & Co and Freshfields acted for the Fund as auditors and solicitors respectively. The bankers to the Fund were Lloyds Bank and the Bank of England also assisted. Under the trust deed the Lord Mayor and the Governor of the Bank of England were trustees ex officio.
In view of the decreasing number of beneficiaries, it was eventually decided to buy annuities to provide for the remainder and wind up the fund. Fifty four annuities were bought at a total cost of £60,356 from the Provident Mutual Life Assurance Association. The final meeting of the Fund took place at the Mansion House on 1st March 1966.
For your information the Provident Mutual Life Assurance Association was taken over by General Accident which has now become CGU Life.
I am enclosing a note from the Corporation of London Records office from Mr R G Pinney, who was the Secretary to the Fund in 1966 to the then Lord Mayor Sir Lionel Denny, and also a press release from 1966 detailing the winding up of this Fund.
I hope that you find this information helpful.
Yours sincerely, Peter Tribe,
Private Secretary to Rt. Hon. The Lord Mayor 14th February, 2000
Notes for the Lord Mayor from R.G. Pinney, Secretary of the Fund
The Thetis Disaster Relief Fund was launched in a broadcast by the then Lord Mayor, Sir Frank Bowater, on the 5th June 1939, following the loss of the submarine in Liverpool Bay four days earlier.
The amount subscribed was approximately £150,000 and the number of victims was almost 100.
The money was sent in direct to the Mansion House, and through supporting funds organised by civic heads.
The administration of the fund was governed by a Trust Deed and Scheme, with Sir Frank Bowater a Trustee and future Lord Mayors and Governors and the Bank of England Trustees ex officio.
The operation of the fund was entrusted to an Executive Committee who obtained the money they needed from the Trustees from time to time.
The Executive Committee in turn relied on four voluntary distributing agencies, namely the Central Bureau of Naval Officers' Charities, the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust, the Civil Service Benevolent Fund and Messrs Cammel Laird & CO Ltd. These deserve special thanks.
A Schedule of widows and children of the victims, and of dependent relatives, was drawn up and arrangements were made to distribute the whole of the capital and income of the fund during the lives of the adult dependants and for the assistance of the children up to the age of 18. There were 106 adult beneficiaries and 86 children at the outset.
The scheme has operated smoothly, and it has proved possible gradually to raise the rate of pensions, to some extent, if not entirely, to offset the rising cost of living. This achievement must be attributed to the prudent policy advocated by the Honorary Actuaries of the fund and, more particularly, to Sir Herbert Tetley who has occupied this office for the greater part of the life of the fund as well as becoming the customary chairman at the half yearly meetings of the Executive Committee. He deserves the greatest credit.
Recently, with the diminishing numbers of beneficiaries, it was decided that the funds should be wound-up and beneficiaries provided for in the future by annuities. The number of annuities bought was 54 and the cost of the policy was £60,356.6s.6d.
From the start Messrs. Turquand Youngs & Co., have acted as Honorary Auditors and Sir Leslie Peppiatt, and more recently his firm Freshfields, as the funds voluntary legal advisors. The co-operation of the Bank of England has been equally valuable.
The final meeting is for the purpose of adopting the last audited statement of accounts which shows that the fund has no remaining resources of its own, after receiving from the Trustees the final balance in the possession following the realisation of securities, and after buying the annuities from the Provident Mutual Life Assurance Association, who offered the best terms from among many generous quotations obtained by Mr Tetley (who has recently received a KBE in his capacity as Government Actuary.
Lastly, if the accounts are adopted, the Executive Committee should record that the Trustees have fulfilled their trust and are discharged from any further responsibility.
The Thetis Disaster Fund launched in a broadcast by the then Lord Mayor, Sir Frank Bowater, on June 5 1939, four days after the submarine was lost in Liverpool Bay, was wound up at the meeting presided over by Sir Lionel Denny, Lord Mayor and Trustee of the Fund, at the Mansion House yesterday.
Approximately £150,000 was subscribed as a result of the Appeal to help the dependants of the one hundred lost on board.
The whole of the capital and income was intended for distribution to the original 106 adults and 86 children who were beneficiaries; children benefited to the age of 18.
In view of the decreasing number of beneficiaries, it has been decided to buy annuities to provided for the remainder and to wind up the Fund. 54 Annuities were bought at a cost of £60,356.
In his speech at the final meeting, Sir Lionel Denny thanked those who had administered the Fund so efficiently over the years and carried out the actual distribution of the money, and said that " There was no doubt that the Fund had been a tremendous success, and was a splendid example of how willingly the public would respond to an appeal for a worthy cause" .
Reproduced with kind permission from
Submariners News
Thunderbolt (N25) Read
Boat Database
Thetis (N25) Read
The Loss of HMS Thetis Read
On Thursday 1st June 1939 the brand new submarine HMS Thetis (Lieutenant Commander Guy H Bolus) sailed from the Birkenhead Yard of Cammell Laird into Liverpool Bay to carry out diving trials. In addition to the normal crew of fifty five Officers and Ratings there were a large number of passengers both uniformed personnel and civilians on board for Trials purposes. This took the total number of personnel onboard the Submarine up to one hundred and one. During the dive difficulties were encountered with the trim of the submarine.
Featured Reading
Baptism By BellWadding - Escape from 603ft
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Class cuts cost some students more
Home /Opinion/Class cuts cost some students more
With over 20,100 Full Time Equivalent Students attending PCC this semester, along with the class cuts and limits to adding classes, finding a spot in a class is a trying task. For the 1,501 international and out of state students, identified by the Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Enrollment Management department, the most difficult obstacle is the heavily and unnecessarily burdensome cost of attending classes at a community college.
International computer science student Ashish Ingoe is in his second semester at PCC. Botswana native Ingoe lives with his sister who is an international student at CSU Los Angeles.
Like every international student attending PCC, Ingoe must be registered for a minimum of 12 units each semester, and he must pay at least $3,564 each semester for those 12 units. Ingoe is registered for 13 units this semester, a total cost of $3,818.
According to the International Student Tuition and Fees section on the PCC website, international students must pay a minimum of $3,564 per semester. An average instate student has to pay only $432 for 12 units.
What is most upsetting is that international students will not get financial aid, since it is exclusively available to U.S. citizens.
That is not the only restriction for coping with the high cost of college tuition, “[International students] are allowed only to work on campus, except in economic hardships,” said Ingoe.
With the stressful 12 unit requirement for international students to keep their U.S. visas current, they must also maintain a GPA of at least 2.0.
“I have a 3.5 GPA, but that’s only from one semester here. I’m taking more units this semester,” said Ingoe, “and I’m looking for a job, but I’m limited to only the on – campus [jobs].”
It seems the entire community college system is doing everything possible to discourage international students from attending. International students are not funded in any way by the state.
Out of state students may not have to hassle with employment restrictions and financial aid qualifications as much as international students, but the tuition fees for them are still at least $238 per unit, according to the PCC website. To qualify for financial aid, an out of state student must register for 12 units, which can be a heavy load for some.
Another problem for out of state students confronts those who had paperwork lost, thus having the state assume that students who have been residents of California are instead newcomers to the state. One of these students is undeclared major Ana Delacerda, who has been in foster care.
“My custody files were lost, so I was marked as no longer being a current resident of the state,” she said. She is taking 14 units this semester, but she has financial aid.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “I don’t even know why it’s that expensive with it being $238 [per] unit. You’re already an out of state student, with other bills, and the school wants you to pay more.”
In the end, it is fair to say that although resident students don’t have priority registration, the ridiculously high cost of attendance for out of state and international students certainly gives them the right to get the classes they need to keep their eligibility as U.S. citizens as well as residents of the state.
Incoming freshman improve their Math Skills
EDITORIAL: Transparency yes: Censorship no
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October Art-Science Activities
Posted by Rick Barry on October 14, 2008 at 8:30am
Thanks to ASCI (Art & Science Collaborations, Inc.:
~ WIRED NextFest is the premier showcase of the global innovations transforming our world. Now in its fifth year, WIRED's Gallery of the Future includes unique and bold exhibits of sustainable design, next generation healthcare, interactive art and games, humanoid robotics and more. The exhibit is in Chicago this year; thru Oct.12, 2008. http://www.wirednextfest.com
~ EMPAC Opens! Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, has opened its Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center with 220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and work spaces hooked to supercomputers. http://empac.rpi.edu
~ Entrepreneur, Greg Wyler's new company, O3b Networks, plans to launch 16 satellites into low-earth orbit around the equator, opening-up inexpensive Internet access to billions of people in remote parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. http://www.o3bnetworks.com/
about_management.html
~ FRIDAYS OPENLAB at MediaLabPardo, Spain [7pm] are a work and meeting space for experimentation open to everyone interested in developing or collaborating in projects, prototypes, and experiments with electronics, interactivity, sound devices, computer vision, etc. Free admission, no signing up required. *Double check dates at: http://www.medialab-prado.es/talleres
~ ANAT [Australian Network for Art & Technology] announces its selected art-science funded residencies for 2008/09. http://www.synapse.net.au
~ Eric Singer's LEMUR's [League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots] fall Art and Technology classes begin October 21, 2008, including two new classes and instructors. http://lemurbots.org/classes.html
~ ICE PEOPLE, a new docu film by Anne Aghion. Review quote: "I have seen hundreds of science films, and ICE PEOPLE is unique in the way it portrays what it's really like to do field science. This is some of the best cinematography I've ever seen of the Dry Valleys." Tom Wagner, Program Director for Antarctic Earth Sciences, U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. http://www.icepeople.com
~ MONITORING MEDIA ART PRESERVATION // edition 2008-2, is an online newsletter on preservation by the Netherlands Media Art Institute. Offers 4 times a year information and news about ongoing research, presentations and publications dealing with video and media art preservation. The newsletter is in English only; Subscribe to: "preservation [at] nimk [dot] nl"
~ The "Aquaduct Bike" purifies water as you pedal!
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/10/08/
aquaduct-bike-purifies-water-as-you-pedal/
~ Nano sculptures... Dr. Ioannis Michaloudis [or Michalous], after 7-years of research, artist-scientist, has produced new "aerosculptures" that utilize a nanomaterial [silica aerogel, 99% air and used by NASA for collecting stardust to create "pieces of atmosphere in glass vials that he calls, "Bottled Skies." http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov
http://www.skyforsale.com
~ Winners announced for International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by The National Science Foundation (NSF) along with the journal, SCIENCE, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), their sixth annual competition/ exhibitoin. http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/
~ Lincoln Schatz was commissioned by the Hearst Corporation and Esquire magazine to create Cube "generative" portraits of individuals from Esquire’s list of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century in celebration of their 75th Anniversary Issue; and create a sculptural video wall at Hearst Tower in NYC. http://www.lincolnschatz.com/work/
present/08/cubeesq_main.php
~ NEW BOOK: "Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices" by Holly Crawford (Editor); an anthology of the most passionate practitioners and critics of collaborative art. With over 40 texts from noted academics and artists in the field, the book explores both socio-political and psychological dimensions of this new development in contemporary art. http://www.art-poetry.info/id60.html
~ The new "green" building of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is worth checking-out, as well as the web-animation of little people walking on the grass rooftop; Additionally, the building has a four-story rainforest, an aquarium, a planetarium, and a natural history museum all under one living roof! http://www.calacademy.org
FESTIVALS / EXHIBITIONS / PERFORMANCES
~ David Colosi presents a Three-Dimensional Literature work called "The Proof," transforms LMCC’s Project Space into the physical interior of a mathematical equation. The laboratory and labor used to generate the equation will remain, but the scientist/mathematician will be absent. The viewer entering the space will serve as the variable X, executing the proof by his/her entrance; thru Oct.11, 11am - 7pm; LMCC Project Space, 125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor, NYC. http://lmcc.net/art/swingspace/
125projectspace/index.html
~ The Wellcome Collection in London features two artist installations and other events to launch publication of their new book, MEDICAL LONDON.http://www.wellcomecollection.org/
exhibitionsandevents/events/Medical-London/index.htm
~ The Arts Catalyst, London will exhibit NUCLEAR: ART & RADIOACTIVITY that includes two commission pieces and public talks; beginning Nov.13, 2008. http://www.artscatalyst.org
~ BAM's Next Wave Festival features, innovative theatre, film, new media, music, talks, and much more; Oct.10-16, 2008; Brooklyn, NYC. http://www.bam.org
~ Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence" exhibition is at the Univ.of Southern California's Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; thru Nov.8, 2008; exhibition draws on forms of representation linked with traditions of fantasy and magic, reframing them around contemporary issues. http://uscfishermuseumofart.org/
index.php?page=exhibitions&action=
viewExhibition&exhibitionID=80
~ British artist, Tine Bech, has been commissioned to create an interactive "Light Trail" installation and a Light Workshop to engage with the local community; Oct.18, 2008 from 6-9pm; Farnham Maltings, UK. http://www.farnhamcreates.com/news/
tracing_light/19/1/7/tracing_light.aspx
~ "Nature (Re)Made: Genomics and Art" exhibition and choreographer Liz Lerman will perform at Lafayette College, Easton, PA on Nov.14, 2008. http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~artscntr/
williams/wms_art_gall.php
~ Streaming Museum is a new hybrid Museum that presents real-time exhibitions in cyberspace and public space on seven continents. Their recent program, "Artists and Innovators for the Environment" Part One, just took place Oct.3-5, 2008; produced in New York City by Founder/Creative Director, Nina Colosi, in collaboration with international artists, curators, and cultural institutions; view at: Ars Virtua New Media Center in Second Life and online at: http://www.streamingmuseum.org
~ "Aboutness" exhibition at SB London brings together an architect, a neuroscientist, and a sculptor to depict the experience of experiencing an object; 3740 W SUNSET BLVD, 2ND FL, Silver Lake, California;TEL: 323 356 1105; HOURS - SAT, SUN 12-6 & BY APPT
~ The 2nd International Festival of NanoArt organized by NanoArt21 will be hosted in Stuttgart, Germany by NAHVISION Institute for International Culture Exchange, between November 1st and November 30th, 2008. The show is curated by artist/scientist Cris Orfescu (USA) and art professor Dorothea Fleiss (Germany). http://www.nanoart21.org
~ Electronic Music Foundation presents EAR TO THE EARTH 2008 Festival in various venues around NYC; thru Oct.25, 2008; closing with a star-studded New York City first performance of John Cage's "Lecture on the Weather." http://www.emfproductions.org/
upcoming/overview.html
~ AVLAB 1.0 - A/V Experimentation; Oct.1-26, 2008. Nine collaboratively developed projects will be showcased from October 1 through 26, 2008 at Medialab-Prado, Spain, as a result of the intensive two-week international workshop, AVLAB 1.0. http://medialab-prado.es/article/
avlab_10_-_muestra_de_proyectos2
~ Alyce Santoro has brewed-up a fresh batch of "the homeopathic remedies for the 5 ills of society," a series of conceptual art that began with "violence," created shortly after 9/11/2001. http://www.choosedeterminism.blogspot.com
~ Join the artists who have been working for years on the stop-motion animated movie, "Coraline," at the "After Hours" exhibition/event in Portland, Oregon; Oct.12, 16-19, 2008 from 10am - 4pm; Goldsmith Building, 32 NW Fifth at Couch Street.
~ "HOLLYWOULD," the Freewaves 11th Festival of Experimental Media Arts; day and night, Hollywood Blvd, California; thru Oct.13, 2008. http://www.freewaves.org
~ Festival for art & technology, TEKS - Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre, Norway; includes a symposium and exhibition, "Hybrids," Oct. 17-18, 2008. http://www.matchmaking.no
~ Kurt Hentschlager: ZEE[RANGE] installations are currently at the Wood Street Galleries, a world premiere; Oct.3 - Dec.31, 2008.
http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org/
home.html#currentshow
~ Free screenings at the IMAGINE SCIENCE FILM FESTIVAL in New York City; "Diseases, Discoveries, and Devotions": Four Short Films by Sloan Foundation Award-Winning Filmmakers; Oct.17, 2008 at 7:00 pm; Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue at 66th Street, Caspary Auditorium, Manhattan.
http://www.imaginesciencefilms.com/2008/10/17/
diseases-discoveries-and-devotion-
rockefeller-university-101708/
~ Media Facades Festival Berlin 2008: Myth and Potentials of Media Architecture and Urban Screens; various events; October-December 2008. http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/
mediafacades2008
~ The new Nam June Paik Art Center opens its "NOW JUMP" Festival; Oct.8, 2008 - Feb.5, 2009 in Korea. http://www.njpartcenter.kr
~ "Science in Art Exhibition" at the University of Chicago Center for Integrative Science; Oct.10 - Dec.13, 2008. Images will be posted soon, may need updated website, last year's at: http://artsci.uchsc.edu
~ "art/tapes/22" features pioneering works in video by leading international artists; thru Oct.19, 2008; University Art Museum, College of the Arts, Cal.State at Long Beach, California. http://www.csulb.edu/org/uam/curr_exhib.html
~ Crossroads: A Tribute to avant-garde filmmaker, Bruce Conner, known for pushing the practice of re-editing found footage, and thus being an influence on assemblage and collage in gallery spaces and media remixing in the electronic arts. 25 artists from multiple disciplines present works inspired by and in tribute of Conner; at Light Industry; $6 at door goes to benefit Anthology Film Archives' preservation of Bruce Conner's films; Oct.14, 2008 at 8pm; 55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NYC. http://www.lightindustry.org/conner.html
~ Manifesto Marathon, [art manifestos for the 21st century] is the third in the Serpentine Gallery's acclaimed series of Marathon events in London, UK; October 18-19, 2008; this is also the closing weekend of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry.
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2008/05/
park_nights_manifesto_marathon.html
~ John Milton Ensor Parker's first NYC solo show "Fundamental Principles, New and Recent Work" features his paintings that are characterized by beginning with a scientific equation and ends up with a philosophical inquiry; Oct.16, 6-8 thru Nov.11, 2008 at the Cheryl Hazan Gallery, 35 North Moore Street, NYC. http://www.johnparkerart.com
~ The Studio at Moderna Museet is a new place for moving images and Internet-based art, currently showing Thomson & Craighead's "Decorative Newsfeed"; Moderna Museet; Stockholm, Sweden; thru Oct.30, 2008. http://modernamuseet.se/v4/templates/
template4.asp?lang=Eng&id=3900
~ iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology offers a current exhibition, "INFO PARK (goo geo)" by JODI from Oct.17 - Nov.9, 2008; Bruxelles, Belgium. http://www.imal.org
~ GalleryThe.org presents Patrick Visentin's year-long exhibition, "OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS II" [thru Sept.2009].
http://gallerythe.org/artist/visentin/visentin.html
~ "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon" at the San Jose Museum of Art, California; thru Oct.19, 2008. http://www.sjmusart.org/content/
exhibitions/current/exhibition_info.phtml?itemID=369
~ "Untethered: a Sculpture Garden of Readymade Art" at Eyebeam in NYC, extends the concept to a copy machine that "reads" the stars, a P.D.A.-cum-guitar, and a piano that plays the Internet; thru Oct.25, 2008. http://www.eyebeam.org
~ "Vessel," field recordings drifting on sound waves is a multi-channel sound installation by Esther Venrooy; Saturdays, October 4, 11, 18 & 25 from 2-8pm; Diapason Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; free. http://www.diapasongallery.org
~ The 2nd International Festival for NanoArt organized by NanoArt21 will be hosted in Stuttgart, Germany by NAHVISION Institute for International Culture Exchange; Nov.1-30, 2008; The nano-art exhibition is curated by artist/scientist Cris Orfescu (USA) and art professor Dorothea Fleiss (Germany). http://www.nanoart21.org
~ Common Ground's 2008 exhibition on environmental stewardship will open at the Haun Tie Art Museum in Beijing; Nov 9-19, 2008; original works of digital art from over 80 artists. http://www.commonground2008.com
~ Rarely seen documentary, "Reef Reborn," at Gossamer Fiber Arts in Portland, OR, October 17th. A benefit for the Global Coral Reef Alliance's (GCRA) innovative reef building technology, Biorock TM. Colleen Flanigan talks about her experience making "coral arks" in Bali; also showing metalwork, paintings, kinetic sculpture inspired by the ocean, corals and jellyfish. Funds raised support GCRA reef project, Karang Lestari, in Bali. View the Crocheted Community Coral Reef. This large crocheted community reef will be on display through Nov. 15. It travels to OMSI, Dec-Feb. 2008. http://www.gossamerfiberarts.com/events.html
~ Computer art pioneer, Manfred Mohr's KLANGFARBEN exhibition [he was the winner of DAM's 2006 "d.velop digital art award [ddaa]"; thru Nov.15, 2008; [DAM]Berlin [Gallery for Digital Art], Berlin. http://www.dam.org
SYMPOSIA /WORKSHOPS /LECTURES
~ "The Doctor Atomic Symposium" is presented by the CUNY Graduate Center/NYC's Science & the Arts Program; free and open to the public on "first come, first seated" basis; Saturday, Oct. 11 1:00-3:00 pm is "The History, Science and Scientists of the Bomb"; followed at 4:30-6:30 pm with "The Making of the Opera Doctor Atomic." And, on Oct. 17, 2008 at 3:00pm, Ten participants in the Manhattan Project will offer their recollections and commentary; more events info: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/sciart/
~ "Intersection of Art and Science" Symposium; Adelphi University, Garden City, NY; Oct.29, 2008, 9:30 am - 4pm; Free & open to public, but RSVP to: Justyna Widera "widera [at] adelphi [dot] edu"; The symposium will be followed in the afternoon by the "The Alchemy of Art" exhibition of artworks by Cheryl Safren, Puneeta Mittal, and Paul Harrison. http://events.adelphi.edu/as_symposium/schedule.php
~ "The Eye of the Needle", a lecture/presentation by David Wilson, founder and director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California; Oct.14, 2008 at 5:30 pm; Univ. of Southern California's Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles; free. http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/866375
~ Susan Alexjander will be presenting a workshop, "A Metaphysical Approach to Light to Sound;" Oslo, Norway; October 17 and l8, 2008; for members of the Norsk Forening for Lgsstimulering, associate member of International Light Association, and also speaking at the International Light Association Conference in Heidelberg, Germany, Friday evening October 24th: "From Light to Sound: MicroCosmic Music;" conference runs from October 20-26, 2008. http://www.OurSoundUniverse.com
~ Lansdown Lecture: "Interdisciplinary Design" by Alan Blackwell of Cambridge University; Oct.22, 2008 at 4:45pm; Lansdown Centre, Middlesex University, UK; free. http://www.cea.mdx.ac.uk/?location_id=85&item=21
~ Next presenter in Ana Dumitriu's "Knowledge Through Practice" seminar series will be Sandra Lim, speaking about how can the makers of film and video art ask questions pertaining to interpreting time, urban space and the everyday experience? Oct.13, 2008 at 4pm, Room M50 (on the mezzanine floor); The University of Brighton, Grand Parade, Brighton, UK.
~ "The Relevance of Art in an Age of Global Worming," public panel discussion; Oct.11, 2008 from 1:30-4pm; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia.
~ The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology is proud to present the Fourth International DOCAM Summit; Oct. 30-31, 2008; Tanna Schulich Hall (New Music Building), McGill University, Montreal, Canada. http://www.docam.ca
~ Media in Motion: Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age symposium; Oct.29, 2008; Rooms 832/833 (New Music Building), McGill University, Montreal, Canada; space is limited and registration is required by emailing Marilyn Terzic at: "docam [dot] symposium [at] mac [dot] com"
~ Cafe Science's monthly event on Oct.13, 2008, 6-7pm; Physical Chemist Laura J. Kaufman will discuss "IS GLASS A LIQUID? THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE URBAN LEGEND; Picnic Café, 2665 Broadway (Btwn 101st & 102nd), NYC. http://www.cafescience.columbia.edu
~ Brooke Singer (lecture) and Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga (lecture) at Pace College's Digital Gallery, NYC; Oct.16, 2008 at 6pm. http://csis.pace.edu/digitalgallery/
~ Center for Inquiry & Dactyl Foundation present: Wine & Conversation with JOHN ALLEN PAULOS, writer of the long-running monthly column on ABCNews.com that deals with mathematical aspects of stories in the news, and author of the best-selling books "Innumeracy", and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper"; Nov.6 at 6:30pm; The Dactyl Foundation in NYC. http://www.dactyl.org
~ October's public discussion on ANAT's Synapse eList is: "Lost (and Found) in Space"; explores artists' engagement with the contemporary space sciences. Of particular interest is the way that space demands a shift in consciousness from an earth-centred frame of reference, as well as the emerging view of space as the single most important resource for supporting humanity now and into the future. To join the discussion visit: [select 'Discuss' at:
http://www.synapse.net.au
~ Le Laboratoire in Paris, founded by scientist-writer David Edwards, presents its second year of experimental art-science collaborative projects, exhibitions, and public dialogues; 4 rue du Bouloi, Paris. http://www.lelaboratoire.org
~ Phoenix Brighton, the largest and most eclectic hotbed of creativity in the South East of England is now offering a wide range of exciting workshops and courses aimed at artists and emerging professionals. http://www.phoenixbrighton.org
OPPORTUNITIES / JOBS
~ CALL FOR WORKS for the WRO 09 Expanded City, 13th Media Art Biennale to be held at the National Museum, Wroclaw, Poland in May 2009; Deadline: Feb. 15, 2009.
http://wro09.wrocenter.pl/entry/
~ Call for Presenters for "Creativity & Innovation" Symposium, will take place at Wake-Forest University, March 2009; Deadline Oct.15, 2008. http://www.wfu.edu/creativity/
symposium/submissions.html
~ Submissions for ReSiDeNt, LEMUR's monthly creator-in-residence program, are being accepted through October 13th for November residencies. Accepted artists are awarded a one-month residency at LEMUR to create a new performance or installation utilizing LEMUR's musical robots, MIDI controllers and other technologies; Brooklyn, NY. http://lemurbots.org/resident.html
~ AC[Institute Direct Unlimited Chapel] opens new exhibition space in Chelsea/NYC and invites submissions for their Open Call for "UNEARTHED": projects that explore the performative exchanges and experience across visual, verbal and experiential disciplines and practice. http://www.artcurrents.org
~ Call for Proposals for "Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)"; a Juried International Competition; Deadline: Dec.15, 2008. http://turbulence.org/networked
~ CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS for Turbulence's commission, "Wikireuse" by Julia Christensen who is documentations of how communities are re-using abandoned "big box" buildings like Wal-Mart; can be up-dated online by the public.
http://turbulence.org/works/wikireuse
~ CALL FOR ENTRIES: 2009 BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE announced; $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems; Deadline: Nov.7th, 2008.
http://challenge.bfi.org
~ Call for papers for Technarte 2009, to be held in Bilbao, Spain; April 23-24, 2009; Deadline: Nov.14, 2008. http://www.technarte.org
~ CALL FOR PHOTOGRAPHS: SHOTS Magazine announces an international call for photographic work to be considered for publication in the ANNUAL PORTFOLIO ISSUE; Subject matter is open; Submittals due by Nov.3, 2008. http://shotsmag.com/shotssubmission.htm
~ NYSCA Electronic Media and Film Program Announces New Distribution Grant Workshops for NY State Individual Artists; Nov.13 in NYC and Dec. 4, Catskill, New York. http://www.free103point9.org/events/1973/
~ The SZPILMAN AWARD is given for artworks that exist only for a moment or a short period of time. The purpose of the award is to promote such works whose forms consist of ephemeral situations; Deadline: Oct.15, 2008 postmark. http://www.award.szpilman.de
~ Seeking Submissions for Videodansa, Barcelona Prize, the international competition held as part of IDN - Image, Dance and New Media. The competition accepts audiovisual works where dance, choreographic language, body and movements are the main subjects; Deadline: Oct.31, 2008. http://www.nu2s.org/eng/
~ CALL for film & video - 2009 Ohio Independent Film Festival (OIFF); deadline: Feb.1, 2009. http://www.withoutabox.com
~ Metropolis Magazine's NEXT GENERATION DESIGN COMPETITION challenges young designers to apply their talents towards one of the world's most urgent issues: fixing our energy addiction. Designs can range from buildings and interiors to products, landscapes, and communications -anything in need of an energy efficiency overhaul- and the winning design will be awarded $10,000.
http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen
~ eVolo Skyscraper for the XXI Century Contest is accepting entries. http://www.evolo-arch.com
~ The Kellicutt International [a group in the San Francisco Bay area] juried photo show, "Through a Lens: Contrasting Elements", invites entries and announces an increased first prize of $2000.
http://www.coastalartsleague.com/photoshow
~ The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (with the support of Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center) invites the submission of works for various electronic media; Deadline: Nov.1, 2008; Details online at: http://www.nycemf.org
~ The Hungarian Multicultural Center (HMC) is currently accepting applications for the Budapest, Hungary -International Artists Residencies; Deadlines: on-going. http://www.hungarian-multicultural-center.com
~ Seeking Artists for the 2009 Denali National Park [Alaska] Artist-in-Residence program; Postmark deadline: Oct.31, 2008. http://www.arts.alaskageographic.org
NET ART & ACTIVITIES
~ New Turbulence Commission: "Touching Gravity 2/Tilt" by Caryn Heilman (LiquidBody MediaDance), is an interactive, aerial videodance superimposed on a composited image of two rivers in the towns of North Adams and Adams, Massachusetts.
http://turbulence.org/works/touching_gravity
~ For more net.art projects... visit Rhizome.org
http://www.rhizome.org
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Veteran US diplomat John Buzbee dies at 50
In his photo provided by the family, taken April 16, 2014, John Buzbee is seen at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Buzbee, a veteran Foreign Service officer who served across the Middle East, including two stints in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, died Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016, from complications from metastatic colon cancer. He was 50. (Family Photo via AP)
WASHINGTON — John Buzbee, a veteran Foreign Service officer who served across the Middle East, including two stints in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, died Thursday from complications from metastatic colon cancer. He was 50.
Buzbee served in Iraq during the effort to rebuild that nation after the ouster of Saddam Hussein — first in Tikrit, under the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004, and later as a political officer in Baghdad in 2008 and 2009.
In Tikrit, he worked closely with local Iraqi officials, visiting schools and promoting democracy, economic and education efforts as the U.S. sought to rebuild the devastated country before a violent insurgency took hold. He remained optimistic about the long-term chances for democracy in the Middle East despite the region's troubles in recent years.
"He loved serving people," said Ambassador Stuart Jones, Buzbee's longtime friend and colleague, who served with him in Iraq, Egypt and Washington. Jones most recently served as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
"The question with him was always, 'How do we make people's lives better?' It was something that animated the work he did," Jones said.
Buzbee started his career as a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles and Kansas City, covering police and city hall. But a longtime fascination with the Middle East prompted him to change careers in his early 30s.
After earning a degree in Arab Studies and studying Arabic at Georgetown University, he joined the U.S. Foreign Service, working in U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East and in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department in Washington over the next 16 turbulent years.
Buzbee served as a political officer and vice consul in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; an economic officer in both Cairo and Jerusalem; and a cultural affairs officer in Cairo. In later years, he served in Washington as deputy director for Syria in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs; as a senior adviser in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs; as a researcher at the Foreign Service Institute; and as an adviser in the office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs.
He also worked on Balkans issues in the Bureau of European Affairs as the deputy director for South Central Europe.
"He was so passionate about public service and about helping our country get back on its feet," said Raed al-Jabbouri, the current governor of Tikrit. "He's someone I called a friend."
Robert Ford, former ambassador to Syria, described Buzbee as "unflappable" as they grappled with the escalating war there.
"John Buzbee was a real gentleman, which is about the highest compliment I can give somebody," Ford said.
Buzbee was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer five years ago. On his personal blog, "Sunny Days and Ice Cream," he wrote, "my odds of celebrating my 50th (birthday) were no better than the odds of ice cream surviving a sunny afternoon on the Potomac."
He took a medical retirement from the Foreign Service in January 2016. A few months later, he turned 50, reflecting on the milestone in his blog:
"Between the time in hospital beds and chemotherapy lounge chairs, I've also traveled around the world with my daughters, hiked in the Scottish highlands, kayaked in California, snorkeled down to a shipwreck in the Caribbean, climbed up Buddhist temples in Thailand and Moorish castles in Spain, watched a thousand innings of baseball, drank a hundred bottles of wine (or maybe a few more, but who's counting), worked, played, ate, drank, made merry, and piloted that boat down the Potomac and through a Naval firing range that was, according to the insistent man on the radio, in hot status that afternoon. (Long story that.)"
Buzbee was born in Olathe, Kansas, in 1966, and moved in high school to Hutchinson, Kansas, where his father was editor and publisher of The Hutchinson News. He earned political science and journalism degrees from the University of Kansas and later graduated from Georgetown University with a Master of Arts in Arab Studies.
He is survived by his wife, Sally Buzbee, bureau chief and a vice president of The Associated Press in Washington; his two daughters, Emma and Meg; his parents, Richard and Marie Buzbee of Hutchinson, Kansas; and his brothers, Bill Buzbee of Half Moon Bay, California, and Jim Buzbee of Centennial, Colorado, and their families.
He was preceded in death by his daughter, Anne Marie Buzbee; and his brother, Bob Buzbee.
He was a passionate and loyal baseball fan of the Kansas City Royals and the Washington Nationals. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, reflected in the satirical newspapers he started in high school and college.
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‘Migrante’ portrays dreams, harrowing tales of OFWs
MANILA – A few years ago, renowned director Joel Lamangan and Palanca-awardee scriptwriter Bonifacio Ilagan teamed up with Ricky Lee to film the Flor Contemplacion Story, a movie based on the life of an overseas Filipino worker who was sentenced to die in Singapore. Her death amplified the costs of labor migration.
Yet recently, Lamangan and Ilagan teamed up again to film another gripping portrayal of the continuing poor working conditions of overseas Filipino workers.
“Flor’s story was a film on one individual’s life. But now, (in this film) you will see the bigger problem. It also focuses on how groups like Migrante are helping OFWs in other countries,” Lamangan told Bulatlat.com. The film, he added, is “telling the truth of how our local embassies in other countries are not helping that much.”
‘Migrante (The Filipino Diaspora)’ is a film that portrays the many faces of being an overseas Filipino worker. The fates of the OFWs in the film were intertwined by the tragic incident that has befallen Frida (Jody Sta. Maria) and her family. It also highlighted the role of people’s organizations such as Migrante International, which, in real life, have been at the forefront of helping fellow Filipino migrants workers in need.
“One of our inspirations in making this film is the accumulating number of cases of OFWs being maltreated. The number of reported incidents have increased tremendously that people think that it is just an ordinary case,” Ilagan said.
Leaving the country
Frida’s children tries to convince her not to leave (Photo courtesy of Migrante (The Filipino Diaspora) Facebook account)
The scenes leading to Frida’s departure to Israel is all too familiar since many Filipinos, including this writer, have relatives working abroad. But it is an entirely new experience when viewing it from a different perspective.
One could almost sense the pain that characters were feeling as Frida’s departure neared, most especially when the children were begging desperately for their mother not to leave. Even Jody Sta. Maria, who played Frida, told Bulatlat.com that it is one of the scenes that struck her.
“If they had a choice, who would want to go out of this country to work? Knowing our Filipino culture for strong family ties, no one would,” Sta. Maria said..... MORE
URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2012/07/20/%E2%80%98migrante%E2%80%99-portrays-dreams-harrowing-tales-of-ofws/
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Tariq Ramadan Arrested for Rape
Trump's First State of the Union Address
Assaulted in Malmo, Sweden
The Real Misogynist
Trump Realigns America's Foreign Relations
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Is Democracy Failing?
Hillary Clinton Thanks Activist Bitches
Palestinian Failure
Europe's Migrant Invasion
Perplexed by Transgenderism
The Iranian Navy Stands Down
Trump, Haley, Kerry on Israel and the Palestinians...
The Ethics of Casual Relationships
Trump the Autocrat
John Kerry Betrays America and Israel
Trump in Davos
Swedes Get Tough on Sexual Molestation
Collusion at the FBI
Giving Sex Away for Free
Hollywood Hypocrites
Democratic or Authoritarian
Rats Are Invading Paris
Kids Say the Darndest Things
Cleaning Out Foggy Bottom
Feminist Misandry
The Revolution Comes to Silicon Valley
If the Sky Is Not Falling...
New York Times Readers for Trump
Netanyahu in India
Some Facts About Immigration
The Iranian Regime Won't Go Quietly
A Fecalized Environment
Sex With Someone You Don't Know
Apology Pending... Not!
France's Migrant Problem
What Is Baby Brain?
California, There It Goes!
The Damsel in Distress and Her Fuckboy
The Case of the Homicidal Nanny
The Case of the Ice Princess
The Gospel of Self-Helplessness
Wholly Shit
German Engineering Fails
Feminist Misogyny Running Wild
Europe's Appeasement Policy
Dr. Bandy Lee's Duty to Warn
Is She Too Old for Love?
Saudi Arabia in Transition
Catherine Deneuve on #MeToo
Swedes Are Blind to Rape Culture in Sweden
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Weaponized Stubbornness
The New Israeli Immigration Policy
Arabs Tacitly Accepting Trump's Jerusalem Move
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Keith Ellison Happily Endorses Antifa
The Case of the Slothful Procrastinator
The National Health Service Is Failing
Roger Cohen on Iran
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Scenes from Occupied Europe
Donald Trump's Moral Clarity
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Humor, California Style
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Dave Barry Bids 2017 Adieu
Remember Tariq Ramadan. Maybe you don’t. If you don’t, Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He teaches Islamic Studies at Oxford University. He was in the news over ten years ago because the Bush administration refused to grant him a visa to come to the United States. It seems that he was connected to terrorism, as in, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. For the record, Hamas is an armed branch of the Brotherhood.
Ramadan had been offered a tenured professorship at Notre Dame, but the Bush administration denied him a visa in 2004. It did so again in 2006.
The ACLU and others took the case to the courts and the courts ruled in his favor. And, once Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State she lifted the ban and allowed Ramadan to come to America. Civil libertarians were thrilled.
The New York Times portrayed him as a conquering hero:
A federal appeals court had ruled in his favor. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had issued an order that paved the way for a visa. And so, on Wednesday afternoon, Tariq Ramadan stepped off a plane at Newark Liberty International Airport for his first visit to the United States since 2004, when the Bush administration barred him from entering, asserting he had contributed money to terrorist enterprises.
But for Mr. Ramadan, one of the foremost European scholars of the Islamic world, there was still one last hurdle: a closed-door session with three immigration agents, one after the other, who asked him where he planned to go, whom he planned to meet and what he planned to discuss.
Two hours after his plane from Paris landed, Mr. Ramadan, wearing a dark suit and a smile of relief, cleared customs and shook hands with two representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had litigated his case, and Muna Ali, an assistant of his who lives in the United States.
“How are you, Muna?” he asked.
“You kept us waiting,” she said, with good humor. “What’s new?”
Of course, that was a long time ago. We are all anxious to know how Prof. Ramadan has been doing lately. As it happens, he hasn’t been doing too well. He has just been arrested in Paris for rape. Hmmm.
The Daily Mail has the story:
Prominent Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been taken into custody by French police following accusations of rape, a judicial source said on Wednesday.
The source said a preliminary investigation was opened after two complaints were filed against Ramadan, a well-known figure in the Middle East.
He is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna.
Ramadan took a leave of absence from Oxford last November after two women filed complaints in France alleging rape.
He has denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against author Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.
She made the accusations as part of the #MeToo movement:
Ms Ayari, 41, claims Ramadan raped her at a Paris hotel during a Muslim convention in 2012.
She first made the allegation in October last year as part of the #MeToo movement in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
She later made a formal complaint to prosecutors in Rouen, Normandy on October 20, insisting she had been too scared to speak up until now.
The divorced mother-of-three also accused the contemporary Islamic studies professor of threatening her children to stop her from going to the police….
The other accuser is a an unnamed disabled woman also claims the academic raped her in a hotel room in Lyon in 2009.
Ramadan has denied the two women's accusations, as well as further allegations in Swiss media of sexual misconduct against teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s, as 'a campaign of lies launched by my adversaries'.
Where have we heard that before? All of those who were defending Ramadan against the big, bad Bush administration could have known that he had previously been accused of sexually predatory behavior.
First impressions are misleading, but we all allow ourselves to be guided and influenced by them. The research suggests that first impressions are misleading, but if people rely on them, they might not be all that misleading.
We are often told that we must judge each individual as a uniquely individuated individual. As you can easily ascertain, such is an impossible task. It is too time consuming to get to know each individual as an individual. You would be spending all of your time working on whether your first or second impression had been caused by a stereotype or because he resembles someone you know or because of your indigestion.
Still, a first impression is a baseline. One imagines that some people, for whatever reason, cling to their first impressions, regardless of the evidence. And one imagines that other people are more flexible, more willing to accept the evidence and change their opinions. Obviously, the second group is more rational and deliberative. And yet, the second approach requires considerably more time and effort. Whether or not you are going to invest that much in proving or disproving your first impression will depend on the nature of your relationship and the need to do so. If you are going to hire someone or to marry someone you do will to put in the time and effort to ascertain whether or not your first impression is accurate. If you meet someone in passing at a party, and never expect to see him again, you do not feel the same need.
Anyway, we are all told, from an early age, to make a good first impression. Surely, it will not hurt. It will not harm your prospects, in a job interview or in meeting a new acquaintance.
We can and should manage the first impression we make. To do so we should know how we appear to other people. You might have gotten in touch with your feelings, and you might feel your feelings, but, that is all mental drool when it comes to the real issue: how you look to others. You cannot control every aspect of your self-presentation, but you can control some of them. Just because you cannot control it all… is not a reason not to control some of it.
Sue Shellenbarger reflects on this matter in the Wall Street Journal. As you know, many researchers have studied which facial expressions, which postures signify what.
A happy expression, with the corners of the mouth turned upward and eyebrows relaxed, is likely to inspire trust, research shows. People teamed in an investment game with online partners whose facial images appeared friendly and reliable entrusted their partners with 42% more money than those whose partners looked downbeat and threatening, says a 2012 study by British and U.S. researchers.
She adds an important point. A facial expression that is put on at the last minute to impress someone is not likely to look sincere. If you want to improve your self-presentation, work at it while no one is looking:
Facial expressions are important even when you think no one is looking. People tend to distrust others whose “dominant face,” or habitual expression, is grumpy, disapproving or angry, says Judson Vaughn, an impression-management consultant. And suddenly switching that downbeat expression to a 1,000-watt smile, just because someone is looking, is likely to undermine trust even more, he says.
Shellenbarger reports on the techniques developed by Hilary Blair, communications consultant. Blair looks to many people like their “second grade teacher.” Thus, she tends to make a bad first impression. Thus, she works to modify the the impression she makes.
When Ms. Blair greets a new acquaintance, she avoids sending mixed messages. She stands with her hands relaxed and visible at her side, rather than hidden in her pockets or crossed defensively in front of her. This suggests that your warm greeting is genuine and you have no secret agenda or need to protect yourself, she says.
Judson Vaughn is an impression management consultant. Thus, he helps people to control their gestures:
Mr. Vaughn also advises adjusting your stance and posture, leaning or turning toward the other person to show you’re focused intently on what he or she is thinking and feeling. Rather than extending your arm stiffly to shake hands at a distance, relax your arm and lower your elbow to your side, drawing the other person closer to you, he says. “This shows you’ve made a subconscious decision to trust the person, without having spoken a word,” he says.
He still uses the techniques as a portfolio manager for an Atlanta asset-management firm. He never reaches across a table to shake hands when meeting new clients, but walks around it to greet them face-to-face and offer a relaxed, warm handshake, elbow at his side. He’s also mindful of his posture, keeping his shoulders square and making eye contact to convey confidence, he says. “These little nuances are important. They can help create a deeper bond.”
Little things matter. Small gestures can convey a wealth of information, or perhaps disinformation. Naturally, we all want to put our best face forward. Shellenbarger closes with these pointers:
Avoid hunching over to stare into your phone before meeting others.
Keep your elbow at your side when shaking hands, drawing the other person closer than arm’s length.
Lean forward and focus intently on the other person when he or she is speaking.
Stand erect with shoulders squared, balancing your weight evenly.
Smile in response to what others say or do, rather than grinning nonstop.
Remain mindful of what others are thinking and feeling.
Last night, Pres. Donald Trump played the patriotism card… off the top of the deck. Trump extolled America’s achievements, America’s values, America’s successes and America’s heroes. He kept repeating the word “America” over and over again. He called for people to feel pride in their country, to show respect for the flag and the National Anthem. He drew a sharp line between American citizens and non-citizens, whether the so-called Dreamers or other illegal immigrants.
Naturally, the glass-half-empty crowd has been out in force deriding and demeaning everything that Trump said. To their jaded eyes, 2017 has been an unmitigated catastrophe, a disaster of major proportions. Nothing good has happened in the nation over the past year: not the stock market, not the job market, not the shifting alliances with other world powers. As for lowered taxes, the Democratic Party considers it akin to a plague, the worst thing that has happened to America since 9/11.
They see Trump as a neo-fascist war monger who is itching for a nuclear war with North Korea. They are cosmopolitan to the roots of their being, so that when the assembled representatives started chanting USA, Illinois representative and open-borders fanatic Luis Guttierez walked out of the chamber. Think of it, a Democratic Congressman takes offense, feels triggered by patriotism.
If you want to know why Democrats have not been winning elections, keep that scene in mind.
Trump’s speech clearly repudiated the Obama legacy. When Obama took office he went around the world denouncing America for holding enemy terrorist combatants at Guantanamo Bay. He denounced America for torturing prisoners and made it appear that the meaning of America was: torturing innocent Muslims. Obama promised to be more open to the world, to have more open borders, to legalize those who are here illegally, and to do penance for America’s crimes against the oppressed peoples of the world. Nothing to feel proud about. Much to feel ashamed about.
The American people repudiated the Obama vision over and over again during his tenure. The Democratic Party became a party at war with America… and thus left the patriotism issue for Republicans to exploit. It got so bad that they could not even beat Donald Trump.
Last night, Trump chose to exploit their weakness and assert America's strength, over and over again. Democrats sat stone faced, as though the worst thing that could happen to the nation would be a revival of patriotism. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus did not budge when Trump announced, proudly, that African-American unemployment had reached its lowest level in decades. Perhaps they were following the lead of one Jay-Z who said that money doesn’t matter. In truth, when you have as much money as Jay-Z has, money ceases to matter. To the average citizen, black and white, money certainly does matter.
Anyway, the first polls, from CBS, suggested that the Democratic Party has lost touch with America.
Let’s look at the numbers.
CBS reports:
Three in four Americans who tuned in to President Trump's State of the Union address tonight approved of the speech he gave. Just a quarter disapproved.
75% approval… not bad at all.
Of course, patriotism, reviled by Democrats, unites the nation. Democratic pundits declared the speech to be divisive. Those surveyed thought otherwise:
Eight in 10 Americans who watched tonight felt that the president was trying to unite the country, rather than divide it. Two-thirds said the speech made them feel proud, though just a third said it made them feel safer. Fewer said the speech made them feel angry or scared.
Of course, most of the people who watched the speech were Republicans and Independents. Democrats tended to stick with their sit-coms. Still, if the Democratic Party wants to learn how to win elections, fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants, shutting down the government to defend people who have no right to be here, and disparaging patriotism does not seem the way to go.
As Trump said, in his best line of the night: "... Americans are dreamers, too." The left-leaning commentariat thought it was a gross insult to immigrants.
[Addendum, from Roger Simon, regarding the Democratic reaction to the Trump speech:
Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi watching Trump's speech looked like a pair of sullen six-year olds on a sugar crash the day after Halloween. Bernie Sanders looked mummified. Schumer was slumped so deeply in his chair he was almost falling through the crack.
Other Democrats, even ones who should have known better or secretly felt otherwise, sat on their hands. You could see them glancing at each other, wondering whether they were allowed to applaud or stand up. What a bunch of cowards.
It was a disgraceful display of bad manners, but even more it was incredibly stupid because "the whole world was watching." The camera was getting them all in close-up.
Everyone knows that Malmo, Sweden has a serious problem with Muslim immigrants. I will not belabor the point.
How bad is the problem? Consider this incident, in which a teenage girl was attacked with fist and bottle in a Malmo nightclub because she rejected a man's vulgar assault.
From the Daily Mail:
A teenager has spoken of how a mystery man smashed a bottle over her head in a nightclub in Malmo, Sweden, after he sexually assaulted her and she pushed him away.
Sophie Johansson, 19, told Swedish media that she had never met the man before, and that she suddenly felt his hands hands on her bottom and between her legs on the dancefloor.
She says she hit him in order to get him to stop, to which he responded by punching her in the face and then hitting her with a glass bottle.
Shocking images shared on social media show her face and body covered in blood after the late-night attack this weekend.
Miss Johansson says she had been enjoying her evening at Babel night club on Saturday when she felt a tug on her handbag and turned around to face a man she did not recognise.
'I turned around and then I felt his hand on my bottom and between my legs,' she told Aftonbladet.
After rebuking the man, whom she describes as 5ft 10in in his mid-20s with dark hair, he punched her in the face with a closed fist.
Saying she did not want to escalate the situation, Miss Johansson and her friend moved to leave the club, at which point the man hit her with a bottle on the left side of her head, breaking it.
Beginning with the victim, no one is willing to describe the ethnicity of the attacker. Perhaps it is just too obvious for words. While you are at it, explain to me why we need more refugees in America?
A picture, however, is worth a thousand words. Here is what the dark haired attacker did to Miss Johansson.
I add a picture of her before the attack:
Why are we even discussing this issue? When a Republican woman is defamed, smeared, slandered or demeaned… good feminists have nothing to say. When a Democratic woman receive far less obnoxious treatment, feminists are screaming from the rooftops about the sexism.
New York Times editor Bari Weiss applies the principle to the recent suggestion, made by serial fabulator Michael Wolff, that U. N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is having an affair with Donald Trump. Weiss notes that the liberal progressive feminists refuse to defend the slandered woman but happily celebrate the man who uttered the foul accusation.
For years, the fundamental complaint of the right in the culture wars has been that the left is hypocritical, and the Nikki Haley episode perfectly confirms the point: A prominent Republican woman is smeared. The author who does the smearing is celebrated by all the A-listers, including the most prominent Democratic woman in the country, who herself has a history of giving a pass (or worse) to men accused of sexual assault and harassment. And yet the arbiters of American culture cheer the Democrat and, in the words of the actor Don Cheadle, tell the Republican who has the gall to defend herself: “Sit down, girl. You’re drunk.”
Surely, this is true. The reaction of left-thinking people to the Wolff smear shows us that the message has not yet gotten through:
When Matt Lauer subjected Hillary Clinton to a harsh interview, within 24 hours it was common knowledge that it was evidence of misogyny. But when Nikki Haley is smeared with the most base, sexist lie, it’s met with little more than a collective shrug.
Will the real misogynist please stand up?
Foreign policy involves relationships, between nations and between national leaders. And it involves alliances favoring and disfavoring certain nations and their leaders.
The Wall Street Journal provides us with a clear overview of the way that Trump has shifted America’s alliances, in large part in an effort to undo the damage inflicted by the Obama administration. Trump’s vision and his reformulation of relationships also distances him from other presidents.
The Journal offers this analysis:
In a bid to correct what he views as the faults of his predecessor Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Mr. Trump has reshuffled the deck of American relationships, elevating Gulf Arab leaders, alienating Europeans and eschewing some of the tough talk typically reserved for the heads of China and Russia, diplomats, former officials and analysts said.
A White House official, however, noted that Mr. Trump has formed improbable friendships with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron. “They don’t look like Trump types,” the official said.
So, Trump has alienated the open-arms Chancellor of Germany and many of the European countries that have been appeasing Islamist terrorism. He is defying the conventional wisdom of political elites, but that does not make him wrong.
While American liberals are wringing their crying towels over the horrors that Trump has visited on the world—about which they have no real examples to offer—French President Emmanuel Macron has forged a good friendship with our president. We recall that Trump received the very high honor of sitting with Macron at last July’s Bastille Day celebrations. No one in the American press really cares, but surely it matters.
For the record, under Macron’s leadership, France’s economy has been enjoying excellent growth. We note that Macron used to work for the socialist president Hollande, but has been running as a moderate, centrist. But he has succeeded in loosening the hold that labor unions have on the French labor market. A difficult undertaking, attempted by his predecessors, accomplished only by him.
Again, the Journal reports, Trump is working to undo the Obama legacy… and the Obama mistakes. As you know, these involve the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and bad relations with the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates:
Mr. Trump has invoked what he says are Mr. Obama’s mistakes in nearly every major foreign policy roll out—from pulling out of the Paris climate accord, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and, most recently, threatening to walk away from the Iran nuclear agreement unless European officials agree by May to address concerns not covered by the original accord.
“He viewed President Obama as having embraced the wrong policies, the wrong allies, and he’s picking the ones that are going to make America great,” said Andrew Bowen, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute with ties to the Trump administration. “There is a certain personal obsession in his foreign policy to roll back President Obama.”
One notes that if Trump’s policies have been coherent, it is difficult to call them a “personal obsession.” More importantly, Trump has restored good relations with the Israeli prime minister, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the president of Egypt and even the president of the Philippines:
Since taking office last year, Mr. Trump has forged close bonds with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, all of whom had particularly frosty relationships with Mr. Obama. He also withdrew from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership accord that Mr. Obama championed and pared back the former president’s opening to Cuba.
As it happens, these nations and their leaders were always closely allied with the United States. Obama had done his best to undermine the relationships… because he sided with the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran… but Trump is restoring them. One imagines that most right thinking people will consider this a good thing. They will consider it good for America... though not necessarily for the cosmopolitan no-borders elites.
Trump will advance his relationship with President Macron when the latter becomes the first foreign leader to be honored at Trump White House state dinner, relations with British prime minister Theresa May have frayed:
Mr. Trump last week scrapped a planned visit to London, capital of America’s historically closest ally, after U.K. leaders criticized him for retweeting videos posted by a far-right British group and as activists prepared protests against his visit.
Strangely enough, Trump’s visit to Paris did not provoke any demonstrations. A planned visit to Great Britain seems likely to do so. After all, London’s mayor is the cowardly and weak Sadiq Khan… a man who would rather live with terrorism than to fight it. And Britain’s Tory prime minister May has failed conspicuously at negotiating an exit from the European Union. One notes that Trump is associating himself with the most successful European political leader, Macron, and has been avoiding the embrace of failing leaders like May and Merkel. An interesting concept, to say the least.
We also know that the Trump administration released large swaths of Syria and Iraq from ISIS control. ISIS did not exist when George W. Bush left the White House but that enjoyed great success when Obama was running Middle East policy. In order to dislodge ISIS from places like Mosul and Raqqa, the Trump administration successfully maintained alliances with other players in the region.
The Journal explains:
Still, officials and experts say Mr. Trump has successfully been able to keep intact an international coalition against Islamic State, with Iraq recently declaring victory over the extremists.
“That’s the kind of thing only the United States can do,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador to Baghdad and Ankara and a senior official in the George W. Bush administration. “He didn’t screw it up.”
Obviously, other significant challenges remain. The report says nothing about the situation on the Korean peninsula and on Trump’s efforts to establish an alliance with China… one based more on respect and less on American fawning.
Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping have exchanged gracious and cordial visits. The Chinese treated Trump with far more respect than they did Barack Obama. The situation in North Korea is unclear, but it seems to have calmed down. Those who imagined that we were facing nuclear Armageddon did not expect that the North and South Koreans would be negotiating anything… no less Olympic cooperation.
Perhaps the new rounds of sanctions, successfully negotiated by U. N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are finally biting. Here we do not know what is going on behind the scenes. If the Chinese are pressuring North Korea they are not going to announce it. Were they to announce it they would look like they are doing Trump’s bidding. If the North Koreans were to announce that they were acting at China’s behest, they would lose face… and probably also lose their authority and their lives.
About the situation on the Korean peninsula, Trump has discarded Obama’s policy of strategic patience for more direct confrontation. We will see how it all works out.
For the past five decades feminists have argued that the greatest impediment to women’s career success was motherhood. Thus, they told young women to delay pregnancy as long as possible. If a woman became pregnant before her feminist matriarchs said was the right time, she needed but have an abortion—safe, legal and rare.
The argument continued that a fully self-actualized successful professional woman in her mid-thirties would easily find an appropriate husband… because, not being a needy clinger, should could be loved for herself and not for her looks. A good Darwinian could have told her that she was writing herself out of the marriage market, but feminists would not let themselves be tied down by male scientists. The fact that female fertility declined precipitously after age 35 was well known and scrupulously ignored.
While feminists are marching in the streets for reproductive rights they do not realize that their life plan has deprived many women of the free choice, to have or not to have children. Reproductive endocrinology has solved some of the problem, but it is certainly not a foolproof solution.
In the meantime the great feminist minds of Silicon Valley and elsewhere decided that they could extend a women’s fertility and keep them on the job. They would pay for women to freeze their eggs. Using frozen eggs a woman could wait to find the perfect husband and could have children at just about any age.
Companies like Facebook and Apple even offered to pay for the freezing. Anything to make a good feminist point… and to trick women out of their fertility.
The poster child for the movement was named Brigitte Adams. She appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek several years back, to tout the fact that she had frozen her eggs and was merely awaiting the arrival of Prince Charming.
As it happened, Prince Charming never arrived, so Adams decided at the age of 45 to unfreeze her eggs and to have a child. What followed was tragic. The Washington Post reports:
Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”
Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.
Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.
In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.
Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.
Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground.
“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’
What did she do wrong? She bought into the feminist life plan, without realizing that biology and technology had a voice in her decision. She allowed herself to be duped by an ideology and lost her chance to have a child. She announced on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek that she had freed her career. Perhaps she did. But she paid a price.
Doubtless, you want to know the statistics. Surely, some women do conceive via frozen eggs.
The Post continues:
On average, a woman freezing 10 eggs at age 36 has a 30 to 60 percent chance of having a baby with them, according to published studies. The odds are higher for younger women, but they drop precipitously for older women. They also go up with the number of eggs stored (as does the cost). But the chance of success varies so wildly by individual that reproductive specialists say it’s nearly impossible to predict the outcome based on aggregate data.
In short, it’s a gamble. It’s also a gamble that a woman will find an appropriate suitor. Otherwise, she will need to find an appropriate sperm donor.
Fertility specialists are very clear:
James A. Grifo, a fertility specialist at NYU Langone Health who is one of the pioneers of the procedure, calls the whole notion of being able to “control” your fertility — perpetuated by the media and embraced by feminists — destructive.
“It’s total fiction. It’s incorrect,” Grifo said. “Your whole life it’s beaten into your head that you’re in control and if you can’t have a baby, you blame yourself. There has to be more dialogue about what women can be responsible for and what they are not responsible for.”
As for Adams, she is currently pregnant, with a donor egg and donor sperm. Not for an instant does she or any of the other women quoted in the story declare that this has anything to do with the feminist life plan. They blame it all on the fertility industry.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall liberal democracy seemed to be triumphant. After all, Francis Fukuyama, in a wild misreading of Hegel, declared that the dialectic of history would end when everyone accepted that liberal democracy was the only way to govern. The idea of democracy, accompanied by free enterprise economic policies, would triumph... because Hegel thought it was inevitable.
In truth, for those who care, Hegel himself did not see things that way. He saw the final manifestation of the World Spirit in the figure of Napoleon invading Prussia. And his views, as all post Hegelian thinkers have known, aimed more toward a police state than a liberal democracy. All good Hegelian Marxists have understood perfectly well what Hegel meant-- and it was not about the triumph of liberal democracy.
Nowadays, we are bemoaning the world’s turn away from democracy. Roger Cohen suggests that the world is reacting against democracy. Apparently, eh believes that the dialectic has not ended-- the thesis of democracy had provoked an antithetical movement, autocracy.
In America, the triumph of democracy means that America would be saved from its bigoted past by the new Messiah, Barack Obama. With the advent of Obama liberal thinkers believed that they had gained control over the minds of the American people. They were horrified to discover that they had not. When Americans elected Donald Trump to the presidency, our intelligentsia threw a massive tantrum. They could only explain it by thinking that it was the product of a vast right wing conspiracy, run out of Moscow.
Of course, we do not have a direct democracy. If you try to decide an important issue through a referendum, and if the American people vote against what the cognoscenti think is right, these same great minds will immediately repair to the courts to have the referendum declared unconstitutional.
At the beginning of the American Republic, senators were appointed, not elected. And, of course, a single voter in Wyoming has far more clout in a senatorial election than a voter in California. We do not have a direct democracy and never have.
If the world is turning away from democracy, as clearly seems to be the case, the reason might be that our democracy has become dysfunctional. We have a free market where lawyers and bureaucrats and environmentalists and other activists make it their business to slow down or to stop manufacturing and industry. In the Chinese autocracy, strangely enough, they have a less powerful regulatory state… and seem largely unwilling to allow activists to veto or delay any piece of legislation or any project that does not fulfill their expectations. As it happens the Chinese Communist Party has been sending cadres to oversee corporations-- in America we call them compliance officers.
And of course, America's obsession with talking about sex all the time makes us look decadent. If America wants to fight in the trenches for the rights of the transgendered, countries around the world are not going to want to emulate our shining example.
In the Obama years we learned how to fight the good fight against thought crimes, with little concern for the jobs lost or the slowing economic growth.
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are deeply concerned with the ways that our democracy is becoming dysfunctional. After eight years of Obama’s defiance of democratic norms, they are happy to pay lip service to his influence and to blame it all on Republicans. The nation is divided against itself. People are at each other’s throats. The anti-Trump left has mounted a Resistance against the president and is doing everything in its power to remove him from office. Naturally, the authors blame Republicans.
Since Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize the importance of the norms underpinning democratic governance, I will emphasize that the most basic norm is: accepting the results of fair elections, of elections that are conducted according to the rules. Those who have lost an election become part of what is called the loyal opposition. They do not attack the legitimacy of the election and do not mount a domestic insurgency in the name of a disloyal opposition—if it was anything at all, the French Resistance was a disloyal opposition.
In a New York Times op-ed the authors offer two basic norms that govern democracy:
To function well, democratic constitutions must be reinforced by two basic norms, or unwritten rules. The first is mutual toleration, according to which politicians accept their opponents as legitimate. When mutual toleration exists, we recognize that our partisan rivals are loyal citizens who love our country just as we do.
The second norm is forbearance, or self-restraint in the exercise of power. Forbearance is the act of not exercising a legal right. In politics, it means not deploying one’s institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it’s legal to do so.
Accepting your opponents as legitimate is a good thing. But, accepting election results is not the same thing as accepting that a duly elected president is patriotic.
What happens when the president apologizes for the country, when he has spent two decades at the feet of a hate-America preacher, when his wife declares that she had not felt any pride in the country before her husband was nominated, when the president says that there is nothing special about the country and when he is happy to empower nations that hate America? And let’s not forget the president’s commuting the prison sentence of convicted traitor Bradley Manning, his releasing from prison FALN terrorist, Oscar Lopez Rivera and his trading five Taliban commanders for a deserter. And what about sending his National Security Advisor out to explain that deserter Bergdahl had served with honor and distinction. Let's not forget, the Obama years gave us professional football players who displayed their disloyalty to country by refusing to respect the National Anthem. As you recall, Obama said that he respected Colin Kaepernick's decision.
Call it patriotism if you like, but you are stretching the meaning of the word.
Next, the authors suggest that leaders should show forbearance, that is, they should not abuse their powers and circumvent the constitution. About that we would certainly agree. If you go out and sign treaties, like the Paris Climate Change Accord and the Iran Nuclear Deal, and call them deals in order to circumvent the Senate’s power to ratify those treaties, you are not exercising forbearance.
If you govern by executive order… as with the Dreamers… you are not exercising forbearance.
The authors do not explain how it happens, but they do suggest that democracies are subject to polarization:
History suggests, however, that democratic norms are vulnerable to polarization. Some polarization is healthy, even necessary, for democracy. But extreme polarization can kill it. When societies divide into partisan camps with profoundly different worldviews, and when those differences are viewed as existential and irreconcilable, political rivalry can devolve into partisan hatred.
Parties come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe. When that happens, politicians are tempted to abandon forbearance and win at any cost. If we believe our opponents are dangerous, should we not use any means necessary to stop them?
Have the virtuous and idealistic Democratic opponents of Donald Trump treated him as a legitimate rival or as a dangerous enemy. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, a shining example of a great legal mind, completely lost control of his rational faculties and declare that Trump was the “Devil Incarnate.” And he went on to recommend that his colleague Alan Dershowitz, a liberal Democrat himself, should not offer an opinion about obstructive of justice because said opinion might be used to perpetuate the reign of the Devil Incarnate.
The nation is polarized, but it was also polarized in 2016 when the Pew Research Center polled the nation. We note that the authors neglect to mention that the Pew survey was taken during the last year of the Obama administration, where it becomes more difficult to blame it on Donald Trump:
Yet our parties are more polarized than at any time during the last century. Whereas 50 years ago some 5 percent of either Democrats or Republicans said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party, today 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats say so. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 49 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats say the other party makes them “afraid.”
The authors cannot see that the fault for the polarization lies with the Obama presidency and with serious intellectuals like them, professors who are so biased that they called see straight. According to them, Senate Republicans polarized the nation by refusing to take up the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. You recall that people took to the streets, that they protested and rioted, that they expressed full throated outrage over this horrific violation of Senatorial norms:
Perhaps the most consequential was the Senate’s refusal to take up Mr. Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Since 1866, every time a president had an opportunity to fill a vacancy before the election of his successor, he was allowed to do so (though not always on the first try). The Senate’s refusal to even consider an Obama nominee violated a 150-year-old norm.
Since the authors barely have anything to say about the fact that their Messiah, Barack Obama, was president while the nation became increasingly polarized, we will consider them as propagandists.
When it comes to enabling sexual harassment, Hillary Clinton is in a class all her own. So many of the current round of harassers and rapists are from the left, so many are friends and associates of Hillary herself that it does not take too much thought to figure out that Harvey Weinstein and Co. figured out that they could get away with molesting, assaulting and harassing women … because Hillary Clinton had their back.
Since Hillary had defended her sexual predator of a husband from charges of sex crimes, they assumed that if only they contributed to the Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton election campaigns and Planned Parenthood, they could get away with anything.
No one did more to normalize and to condone sexual harassment than Hillary Clinton. If you were wondering why so many women hated her—and No, she was not, in Obama’s (highly ironic) words “likeable enough—now you know.
Recently, the New York Times reported that in 2008 a member of Hillary Clinton’s staff was reported for sexually harassing a subordinate. How did the dowager Duchess of Chappaqua deal with the situation? She demoted the woman and gave the accused man a short suspension. Talk about standing up for oppressed and victimized women.
The man in question was named Burns Strider. The Daily Mail has the story, with all the gory details:
A woman who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign accused her boss, Burns Strider, of sexual harassment in the forms of inappropriate touching and sexual comments.
But after the young woman filed an official complaint, and against the advice of senior aides, Clinton refused to fire him from the campaign - instead docking his pay and demoting him, and reassigning the staffer to a different department.
So when Clinton lost the Democratic candidate bid to Barack Obama, Strider's reputation wasn't hurt, and he continued on working in high power positions in Washington.
In 2013 he started a job at the pro-Clinton super PAC American Bridge, where he headed a new project and was named vice president.
Two of his female subordinates at the job have revealed that during their time working for Strider he sexually harassed them - stalked them- and even made them feel like he might hinder their future careers if they spoke up, Buzzfeed news reported.
In the years after the 2008 campaign Strider thrived professionally - eventually taking on a senior role at the pro-Clinton super PAC American Bridge in November 2013, just after Clinton left the State Department.
It was announced that Strider would head a new project called Correct the Record, and he was named vice president at the super PAC - which was headed by longtime Clinton ally David Brock.
While at that job he allegedly sexually harassed two young female subordinates who worked for him.
Of course, it was not an isolated incident. Any more than Bill Clinton’s serial sexual abuse of women was a one-off event.
I will spare you all the details of Strider’s harassment. I will note that Hillary Clinton responded to the Times story with a canned and bloodless statement, released by a lawyer:
To ensure a safe working environment, the campaign had a process to address complaints of misconduct or harassment. When matters arose, they were reviewed in accordance with these policies, and appropriate action was taken. This complaint was no exception.
She shows no concern for the women. She refuses to say anything about the charges. She has no feeling for the situation. She talks about complaints, not about facts. She merely wants to retain her own viability… which is all she ever cared about.
You would think that after all this time, Hillary would have learned how to deal with sexual harassment. She has not. This tells us most of what we need to know about how she failed to win the presidency and why most of the nation considers her an incompetent fraud.
While we are with Hillary, let’s not overlook her recent statement—about “activist bitches.” She was sending a video message to the women who had supported her. The New York Post reports:
“Thanks for your feminism, for your activism, and all I can hope is you keep up the really important, good work,” she said.
At the urging of an off-camera companion, she added with a laugh: “And let me just say, this is directed to the activist bitches supporting bitches. So let’s go.”
This gives us the other side, the hidden side of Hillary Clinton. It is an ugly side, a dark side, a vulgar side…
One feels somewhat encouraged to see New York Times columnist Roger Cohen calling for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to resign. One also feels encouraged when Cohen says that blaming the ills of the Palestinians on the Israeli occupation is dishonest blame shifting.
But then, as you read through Cohen’s article, you discover the dog that didn’t bark. Cohen neglects to mention that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is largely defensive, a way to defend its nation against an organization that has vowed to kill Jews and to drive Jews out of what they call Palestine. The dog that did not bark is terrorism. If the Palestinians renounce terrorism, the situation will change. If they do not it will not.
At the same time, as reported on this blog, the Arab world has no real use for the Palestinian cause any more. It does not merely want to fight Iran, as Cohen says, but it also wants to have diplomatic relations and open trade with Israel. Cohen neglects the latter point. And, of course, he ignores the importance of the advent of a Trump administration that is markedly and openly pro-Israeli has changed the calculus.
Cohen writes:
Never, through decades of national struggle, have the Palestinians been weaker. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel has been implacable in undermining possible Palestinian statehood. Arab states, Iran-obsessed, have lost interest in the Palestinian cause. President Trump has threatened to cut off “hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and support” in response to perceived Palestinian lèse-majesté after his decision to take Jerusalem “off the table” by recognizing it as Israel’s capital.
But even in this environment, Mahmoud Abbas, the 82-year-old Palestinian president, cannot escape responsibility for failure. His government is now widely seen as a corrupt gerontocracy. It is inept, remote, self-serving and ever more authoritarian. Elected to a four-year term in January 2005, he’s entering the 14th year of a largely unaccountable presidency.
Cohen is a journalist, a liberal journalist at that. He seems still to be prey to the illusion that only a liberal democracy, guaranteeing press freedoms, can produce a good life for its citizens. He neglects the simple fact that nations like China and Saudi Arabia have modernized by introducing free market reforms, but without a free press or even elections:
Abbas has stamped on a free press at a time when strong investigative journalism in Israel has contributed to Netanyahu’s woes over corruption allegations. He issued a grotesque cybercrime law last summer that punishes with a year of imprisonment anyone who creates a website that “aims to publish news that would endanger the integrity of the Palestinian state” or “the public order.” The legislation, which also imposes a two-year sentence on anyone publishing information “with the intent to attack any family principles or values,” amounts to a violation of the Palestinian Basic Law of 2003. This guarantees the right of everyone to “express his opinion and to circulate it orally, in writing, or in any form of expression.” Putative Palestine is in a repressive slide.
Abbas ought to liberalize the economy. Cohen misses the point:
By dismantling Palestinian freedoms, by disempowering his people, Abbas has been undoing the foundations of statehood and sapping the energy that comes with personal agency. It is time to organize elections that might usher in younger leadership — and reveal the balance of forces in the West Bank and Gaza. The alternative is a drift to despotism under a bunch of old men long on outrage but short on everything else.
“If you don’t take agency in your liberation, you are not going to be free,” Fayyad told me. “What Palestinians see of their state right now is not very attractive.”
So, we give Cohen credit for showing the extent of the Abbas failure. We deduct points for his failure to see that Palestinian terrorism has produced the situation that Palestinians are complaining about. And we deduct even more points for his assertion that liberal democracy will solve the problem. Apparently, he forgot that the last time the people of Gaza, under the aegis of George W. Bush, held free elections, it put Hamas in power. And he forgot that the Obama freedom agenda supported Egyptian elections that put the Muslim Brotherhood in power.
No one seems to be able to connect the dots anymore, but America’s current conversation about immigration has generally ignored European experience. True, the European immigrants are Muslim refugees. The American refugees mostly come from south of the border.
But, it is also true that the Trump immigration ban was largely directed against Muslim countries. And it is even more true that immigration activists were out in force demonstrating against it. They have not just fought it in the airports. They have happily fought it in the courts.
As you know, when leftists lose an election or see a law or a regulation that they do not like, especially when directed by a president they detest, they immediately run to the courts… in the name of democracy. If democracy gives them what they want, they love it. If it elects politicians they abhor they believe that it has erred and must be corrected… by judicial fiat.
Anyway, it’s time to take a look at what is happening in those European nations that have opened their arms to Muslim refugees. For today, the stories come from Germany, Norway and Sweden. I am sure that you are thinking—couldn’t have happened to a more politically correct multiculturalist bunch. If so, you are right.
Anyway, German women, having been liberated from their girdles will now have the option of buying underwear that protects them from predatory Muslim males. Evidently, the government of Frau Merkel, the German police and their brothers are not quite up to the task.
The Gateway Pundit (via Maggie’s Farm) reports that what are called “Safety Pants” are now on sale in Germany. Grab a woman the wrong way and an alarm goes off… alerting the authorities to a danger that they had best avoid.
The news from Norway is not very encouraging either. Writing in the City Journal Bruce Bawer reports (via Maggie’s Farm) on what is happening in a part of Oslo that is called Groruddalen.
In case you thought that this dates to yesterday, the report begins with the scene in 2011:
In 2011, Aftenposten broke the prevailing media silence on the topic by reporting on the experiences of ethnic Norwegians living in Groruddalen. “It has been difficult to be an ethnic Norwegian in Groruddalen,” Patrick Åserud, a schoolteacher who had lived in the valley all his life, told the newspaper. “It’s about huge language problems, plus a pressure to adapt to norms that feel totally alien to those of us who have a Western lifestyle and mind-set.” Åserud said that at some schools in the valley, “children are threatened with beating for having salami in their packed lunches. Girls are harassed for being blond, and dye their hair to fit in. It’s not okay to be gay at school, or an atheist, or a Jew. . . . An Indian family I know are expected to live as Muslims because they’re brown-skinned.” Out of 18 parent-teacher meetings that Åserud had recently held, ten required translators. Conditions in the valley had worsened over the last three years, he said, and he had decided—reluctantly—to decamp: “I’m not going to let my children grow up here.” Aftenposten’s reporter suggested that Åserud was being “oversensitive” and was “out of touch with the new Norway.” The teacher replied that if this was the case, there were many ethnic Norwegians in Groruddalen who felt the same way.
Ethnic Norwegians cannot live there. They are decamping for other neighborhoods.
Two years later, things had not improved:
Two years later, in 2013, a remarkably candid SSB report acknowledged that 1,000 ethnic Norwegians were leaving Groruddalen annually, with an equal number of non-Western immigrants moving in to replace them. During that year alone, muggings in Groruddalen rose by nearly 80 percent. The great majority of perpetrators arrested were teenagers with immigrant backgrounds and Muslim names; almost none of their parents bothered to show up for their trials. (One father did take action: he tried to intimidate mugging victims into changing their testimonies.) Yet the police and politicians continued to insist that Groruddalen was doing fine. They pointed to statistics on crimes other than mugging, which seemed, superficially, to back up their claims. But many—perhaps most—crimes in the valley went unreported. Muslim victims of crimes committed by other Muslims knew better than to involve the police: their families, imams, and other local Muslims would view them as traitors and respond accordingly. Such matters, they knew, were to be handled within the community. Many non-Muslim victims feared going to the cops, too, because they knew that they risked retribution from their immigrant neighbors that would make the original transgressions look mild.
In 2015, things had gotten worse:
Non-Muslim boys in secondary school were leery of coming into the crosshairs of Muslim gangs—but they couldn’t be sure what to avoid doing or saying, because Muslim classmates judged their conduct according to a set of codes entirely alien to Norwegian society. As for non-Muslim girls and women, simply going outside alone—to the mall, for instance—earned them the angry stares of long-bearded Muslim men who believed that they should not leave their homes unescorted by males and with their heads uncovered. Jews had it especially tough. Gays? Forget it. In short, a place where people had once lived without fear and treated one another with respect and friendliness had become charged with tension, dread, and bigotry—not anti-Muslim bigotry, mind you, but anti-Norwegian bigotry.
And then, in 2017, despite strenuous efforts by the government to ignore the problem and to assure everyone that the immigrants were fine, upstanding assimilated citizens, things were getting worse still:
On March 11, 2017, to many viewers’ surprise, the nightly news program on government-run NRK television ran an honest segment on the dramatic rise in crime in East Oslo, with a focus principally on Groruddalen—where, as journalist Anders Magnus reported, about 50 percent of the population now had non-Western immigrant backgrounds. Twelve-year-olds were selling drugs; 15-year-olds were carrying guns, knives, and baseball bats; Muslim youth gangs were assaulting adults in the open street; and Muslim parents, with few exceptions, were showing utter indifference to the activities of their criminal sons. Meanwhile, in accordance with long-standing Norwegian tradition, police continued to patrol unarmed. Magnus interviewed a hockey coach who said that some of his team members had quit because they were scared of getting beaten up on the way to practice. One young local said that Muslims in the valley had formed a “parallel society,” one in which the kids simply weren’t afraid of the police. True to form, Aftenposten ran an angry rebuttal to Magnus’s segment: Øystein E. Søreide and Mobashar Banaras, two leading Groruddalen politicians, accused NRK of “stigmatizing” people in the valley and of increasing divisions between “us” and “them.”
Then, in May, for three consecutive nights, dozens of Muslim teenagers in Vestli, at the far eastern end of Groruddalen, went rioting—throwing stones, setting fires, and committing knife attacks. Only three marauders were arrested, and they were quickly released. The reality of life in the valley was getting harder to deny—yet, as Rita Karlsen of HRS wrote, even now the mainstream media and police spokespeople covered up the news and issued fierce denials that Groruddalen had taken on “Swedish conditions”—that is, uncontrollable crime levels and the ceding of authority to Muslim community leaders. But HRS had its own police sources, who revealed that the police did recognize the gravity of the valley’s problems. In huge numbers, Muslim youths were issuing threats against teachers, security guards, businesses, police, firefighters, ambulance personnel, and others. More and more fires were being set, as in the Stockholm and Paris suburbs.
As Bawer notes, Norway is fast becoming more anarchic and more Islamicized. Congratulations, Norwegians, on destroying your country.
And then there is Sweden. Especially, the Malmo area where many Muslim refugees have settled. Zero Hedge blog has the story (via Maggie’s Farm). It seems that the Swedish authorities are waking up from their moral slumber and might try to do something about the migrant crime problem:
As we reported last week, Sweden may or may not be preparing for civil conflict - as Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said that the government would do whatever it takes - including deploying the military - to end the wave of gang violence coming primarily from young migrants in the country's "no-go" zones.
Lofven's comments come on the heels of a spate of gang related murders, including that of a 21-year-old man in Malmö last weekend, shot in the head as he stepped out of a taxi near a grocery store.
The same weekend, a 16 year old boy found shot in Rosengård district of Malmö died in the hospital next to a bus stop. Two people were taken in for questioning by the police.
And on January 3rd a 22-year-old man was shot in the Fosie district of Malmö, the day after an 18-year-old woman was taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds ten minutes away in Rosengård.
The increase in crime has been so overwhelming that Swedish authorities admit they are unable to investigate rape cases right now because of the enormous backlog of gang crime under investigation. “We are forced to choose between two evils,” said police.
Prime Minister Lofven's strong language also follows an attack on the Rosengård police station last Wednesday after an explosive device was lobbed at the electric-fenced building - the latest in ongoing violence against Swedish peacekeepers.
The Times of London adds more salient details:
In Malmö, where a fifth of the 340,000 inhabitants are under 18, children as young as 14 roam the streets with Kalashnikov assault rifles and bulletproof vests. The average age of gang members is 22, the vast majority of them hailing from migrant families.
Zero Hedge suggests that the liberal feminist government of Sweden is beginning to see the madness of its ways.
It seems, perhaps, that Sweden's ultra-liberal, open-border, self-described feminist government is realizing they may have screwed up by allowing unchecked migration from Islamic countries associated with terrorism, violence, and perhaps containing people with an axe to grind against the West.
The Times of London adds:
Sweden has pursued a liberal immigration policy for more than a generation; its government speaks of being a “humanitarian superpower” for having taken in a large number of asylum seekers. After the migrant crisis of 2015, when more than 160,000 people sought asylum, the policy was abruptly changed. Yet there is little debate or reliable data about the integration of the 12% of the population that derive from non-western countries.
For a long time the Swedish establishment played down the decay of immigrant-dominated suburbs, but it can no longer ignore the explosion of violence.
Of course, the Swedes have been ignoring the problem. Undoubtedly, they will do so as long as they can get away with it. For now they are focused on their true enemy, President Donald Trump, who had the temerity to point out that Swedish immigration policy had produced terrorist attacks and a crime wave.
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The Alfred Russel Wallace Website
News & Views Blog
CATALOGUE OF WALLACE PORTRAITS (Version 2)
Home » Honours Wallace Received » Revisions » Revision of Honours Wallace Received from Tue, 2015-01-13 22:44
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About Wallace
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Wallace's Ternate house
Scientific Legacy
Alfred Russel Wallace - A Very Important Ornithologist
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'Iconic' species discovered by Wallace
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2002-“The Dell” plaque
Thomas Wonnacott
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Owners of The Dell
2005-“Treeps” plaque
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2013-Bronze statue of Wallace
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Revision of Honours Wallace Received from Tue, 2015-01-13 22:44
By George Beccaloni
Wallace received an impressive number of honours during his lifetime, the most prestigious being the Order of Merit from King Edward VII in 1908. His greatest scientific honours were the 7 medals he was awarded, the most important of which was the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (their highest award). Charles Darwin also received the Copley, plus three others: the Baly (Royal College of Physicians), Royal (Royal Society), and Wollaston (Geological Society).
Medals Received
1868 (30 November): Royal Medal of the Royal Society. (Awarded "For his labours in practical and theoretical zoology". He was nominated by T. H. Huxley)
Wallace's Royal Medal. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
1870: Gold Medal, Société de Géographie.
Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
1890 (1 December): Darwin Medal of the Royal Society. (Awarded "For his independent origination of the theory of the origin of species by natural selection". Wallace was the first recipient of this medal).
Wallace's Royal Society Darwin Medal. Copyright Wallace Memorial fund.
1892 (23 May): Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. (Awarded "...in recognition of the high geographical value of his great works, 'The Geographical Distribution of Animals,' 'Island Life,' and 'The Malay Archipelago.'")
Wallace's Founder's Medal. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
1892 (24 May): Gold Medal of the Linnean Society (now known as the Linnean Medal).
Wallace's Gold Medal of the Linnean Society. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
1908 (1 July): Gold Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society of London. (Wallace was the first recipient of this medal, and his was the only gold version ever made).
Wallace's Darwin-Wallace medal. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
1908 (30 November): Copley Medal of the Royal Society. (Awarded "On the ground of the great value of his numerous contributions to natural history, and of the part he took in working out the theory of the origin of species by natural selection." This is the highest award of the Royal Society.)
Wallace's Copley Medal. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
1908 (14 December): Order of Merit. (The order has been described as "quite possibly, the most prestigious honour one can receive on planet Earth." There may be only 24 living individuals in the order at any given time, not including honorary appointees, and new members are personally selected by the reigning monarch.) For more information click HERE
Wallace's Order of Merit. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.
Assorted Honours
1879 (28 July): Freedom of the City of London.
1882 (26 April): Pall Bearer at Darwin's funeral at Westminster Abbey.
1882 (29 June): LL.D. (Doctor of Laws) from Trinity College, University of Dublin. On the recommendation of Rev. Samuel Haughton, senior lecturer in geology. See HERE
ARW in his LL.D. robes
1889 (26 November): D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law) from Oxford University.
Honorary (Elected) Memberships
Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia: Elected a Corresponding Member on 31 January 1893. See HERE and HERE
American Ornithologists' Union: Elected an Honorary Member in 1883 and an Honorary Fellow in 1905. See HERE
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia: Elected a Member on 18 April 1873. See HERE and HERE
Anthropological Society of Washington: Elected an Honorary Member on 15 February 1887. See HERE
Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta: Elected an Honorary Member on 7 February 1883. See HERE
Austrian Zoological-Botanical Society, Vienna: Elected a Honorary Member on 1 March 1901. See HERE
Brooklyn Ethical Association: Elected an Honorary Corresponding Member in c. 1894-1895. See HERE
Central Association of Spiritualists, London: Elected an Honorary Member on 13th June 1882.
Chester Society of Natural Science, Literature & Art, Chester, England: Elected as an Honorary Member in ? See HERE
Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club: Elected an Honorary Member in 1909. See HERE
Dutch Society of Sciences, Haarlem: Elected as a Foreign Member in 1883. See HERE
Essex Field Club, UK: Elected as an Honorary Member 10 January 1880. See HERE
Hertfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club: Elected an Honorary Member in 1896. See HERE
New Zealand Institute (now Royal Society of New Zealand): Elected an Honorary Member of 3 February 1885. See HERE
Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, Jakarta, Indonesia: Elected a Corresponding Member on 1 June 1878. See HERE
Royal Dutch Geographical Society: Elected an Honorary Member in October 1883. See HERE
Royal Irish Academy, Dublin: Elected an Honorary Member on 16 March 1908. See HERE
Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland (Societas Regia Edinensis): Elected an Honorary Member on 7 November 1910. See HERE
Royal Society, London: Elected a Fellow in June 1893. See HERE. He had at first refused fellowship, but Thistleton-Dyer and Huxley eventually persuaded him to accept.
Royal Society of New South Wales, Sydney: Elected an Honorary Member on 3 July 1895. see HERE
Royal Society of Sciences, Upsala: Elected a Member in 1893. See HERE
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Regia Scientiarum Academia Suecica): Elected an Honorary Member 1 February 1907. See HERE
Société de Géographie, France: Elected a Corresponding Member on 22 April 1887. See HERE
Società Geografica Italiana, Italy: Elected an Honorary Member in c. 1890. See HERE
Société Scientifique "Antonio Alzate", Mexico: Elected an Honorary Member on 1 March 1896. See HERE
Society for Psychical Research: Elected an Honorary Member in c. 1903. See HERE
Zoological Society of London: Elected a Fellow in 1862. See HERE
Wallace was also an 'ordinary' member of a number of other societies and other organisations i.e. Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; Anthropological Society of London; Anti-Vaccination League; British Association for the Advancement of Science (elected in 1863); British National Association of Spiritualists; British Ornithologists' Union; Croydon Microscopical and Natural History Club; Entomological Society of London (elected 1 June 1863); Ethnological Society of London (elected in 1866); Ethological Society (London); Kington Mechanic's Institution (1840's); Land Nationalisation Society; Linnean Society of London (elected a Fellow in 1872); London Spiritualist Alliance; Neath Mechanics Institute; Royal Geographical Society (elected a Fellow on 27 February 1854).
1863: Appointed to a committee to review the rules of zoological nomenclature that had been set up by Hugh E. Strickland in 1842. See HERE
August 1869: Vice-president, Section D (Biology) of the British Association's August 1869 meetings at Exeter. See HERE
1870 - 1872: President of the Entomological Society of London.
1872: Appointed to the H.M.S. Challenger Expedition Circumnavigation Committee formed by the Royal Society to advise the Admiralty about what research should be done and where. See HERE
September 1876: President, Section D (Biology) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science annual meetings. See HERE
March 1881: Becomes first president of the newly established Land Nationalisation Society. See HERE
1893: Vice-president of the Chrysanthemum and Horticultural Society, Parkstone. See HERE
16 June 1904: Vice-president of the London Library. See HERE
October 1904: Vice-president of the Ethological Society. See HERE
January 1907 - November 1913: Honorary president of the Bournemouth National Spiritualist Church. See HERE
Sun, 2012-12-02 19:32 -- George Beccaloni
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Islamist hyperextremism’ could bring world to brink of catastrophe – report
November 19, 2016 in Americas, Headlines, Middle East, North America & Canada
Catholic charity says the kind of religiously motivated violence espoused by Isis has led to attacks in one in five countries in last two years
A new and deadly wave of Islamist “hyperextremism” is undermining global peace and stability with an impact felt in the Middle East, Africa and the west, according to a new report that calls for urgent action to protect religious diversity.
The Religious Freedom in the World 2016 report, produced by the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, says the kind of religiously motivated violence espoused by Islamic State has given rise to attacks in one in five countries worldwide over the past two years.
It argues that the “Islamist hyper-extremism” of Isis – a phenomenon whose hallmarks are systematic attempts to drive out all dissenting groups, unprecedented levels of cruelty, a global reach and the effective use of social media – is having a devastating impact around the world.
“In parts of the Middle East – including Syria and Iraq – this hyper-extremism is eliminating all forms of religious diversity and is threatening to do so in parts of Africa and the Asian subcontinent,” says the report. “The intention is to replace pluralism with a religious monoculture.”
The study says that such violence and intolerance have been a major of cross-border migration. In June, the UN said that a record 65.3 million men, women and children had been forced from their homes by war and persecution last year, leaving one in every 113 people a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum.
The effects of Islamist hyperextremism are felt most keenly in the Middle East and some African countries, but the report notes that the west is far from immune. “[The phenomenon] is at risk of destabilising the socio-religious fabric, with countries sporadically targeted by fanatics and under pressure to receive unprecedented numbers of refugees, mostly of a different faith from the indigenous communities.
“Manifest ripple effects include the rise of rightwing and populist groups, restrictions on free movement, discrimination and violence against minority faiths, and a decline in social cohesion, including in state schools.”
Father Jacques Mourad, a Syriac-Catholic priest whom Isis held in Syria for five months last year, says that people of all faiths have to find a way to respect one another and their differences. In his foreword to the study, he writes: “Our world teeters on the brink of complete catastrophe as extremism threatens to wipe out all trace of diversity in society. But if religion teaches us anything, it is the value of the human person, the need to respect each other as a gift from God.”
He adds that if the cycle of violence is to be broken, “we need to replace war with peace … It is time to cast aside religious hatred and personal interests and learn to love one another, as our faiths call us to do.”
Beyond its focus on extremist Islamism, the report stresses that people of faith are suffering “a renewed crackdown” in China and Turkmenistan and are being denied their human rights in North Korea and Eritrea. It also says the situation has improved for some faith minorities in countries such as Bhutan, Egypt and Qatar over the past two years.
John Pontifex, the editor-in-chief of the study, said it was intended to serve as a wake-up call to the “evident genocidal intent” of religious hyperextremism, and urged faith groups to do more to address the hatred within their ranks. “What prospects are there for peace when powerful sections within specific faith groups have nothing but contempt for those who do not share their world-view – and who deny the right to life not just to people of other faiths, but also to moderates from among their own community?” he said.
Pontifex also said that western policymakers had to “rethink their whole outlook” and acknowledge the pivotal role that religion plays in global politics. “It’s no longer compatible to say that traditional faith practice belongs to the past when the evidence shows that for millions and million of people – a new generation – religion is at the centre of their lives, driving everything they do,” he said.
Islamist hyperextremism' could bring world to brink of catastrophe – report 2016-11-19
Willis Khan
Tagged with: Islamist hyperextremism' could bring world to brink of catastrophe – report
US: Muslims face most discrimination
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Spirit of Dru Scholarship Winner: Courtney Ring
Throughout the month of July, we will be sharing the inspiring essays from our Spirit of Dru Scholarship recipients. Please enjoy Courtney Ring's - she will be attending the University of Central Florida (UCF) this fall.
Over the past four years, I’ve been very involved as an activist in the LGBT+ community. I created a panel of LGBT+ guests to speak and preform at my public library in an event called “The ABC’s of the LGBT” and when the library pushed back, I petitioned to continue the event, and was successful. I then suggested we read an LGBT book for our summer book club. We chose If I was Your Girl by Meredith Russo, a book written and featuring a trans girl. At my school, I founded a Gay-Straight Alliance, which was disbanded three years before. I held the position of president, and lead participation in the Orlando Come Out with Pride Parade, our school’s Homecoming parade, a spirit night fundraiser that raised $700 for the club, Ally Week at the school, and an educational Family Night. The Family Night, which included LGBT+ information for families, food, decorations made by the club, and a panel of guests from PFLAG and the Zebra Coalition was the first event of its kind in the Seminole County School System. While President of GSA I also represented the club at the Human Rights Campaign Time to Thrive Conference, where I met the leaders of the Central Florida GSA Network. Soon after, the club was inducted into the Network. I myself am now the Network Editor and leader for District 4 in the Central Florida GSA Network and will continue to work closely with the Zebra Coalition in the future.
I’m very proud of my work at my school, which I have seen bring people together, show young queer kids that they have allies in their schools, and spread awareness of acceptance within the school system. Though I’m graduating this year, I’ve worked with my club to plan future activities, including a co-created Open Prom, a dance dedicated to LGBT+ students in the community to have a safe prom experience, with a GSA at our sister high school, as well as a book drive over the summer and into the next academic year to find diverse books for elementary schools, middle schools, and the city’s public library.
I’m so happy I’ve gotten the chance to do impactful work in my community. Creating public events for allies to learn about the LGBT community are very important, and I would like to continue those events in the future. I have also seen my work effect those who struggle as an LGBT+ individual, whether from bullying, hate messages, or acceptance at home. Working with an organization like the Zebra Coalition allows me to reach out to other areas and LGBT+ kids who need support.
Tagged: the dru project, scholarships, gay straight alliance, gsa, march for our lives, florida, ucf
Spirit of Dru Scholarship Winner: James van Kuilenburg
Throughout the month of July, we will be sharing the inspiring essays from our Spirit of Dru Scholarship recipients. Please enjoy James van Kuilenburg's - he will be attending Dickenson College this fall.
My leadership and service have brought a new visibility to young LGBTQ+ people in my town and school.
I've been involved in my community since I came out as transgender at 12 years old. I was fortunate to come out to an accepting family, but school was the opposite. I wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom or even participate in gym class. I was bullied by students and teachers and eventually had to leave. After the horrible experience of losing my friends and struggling in school, I have been a community organizer and activist.
At school, I am the founder and president of my GSA, which has over 100 members. In the past, I have led projects for the club like creating affirming posters for the hallway, and organized dozens of events, like picnics and vigils, with hundreds of participants. My club is now the most popular club in the school, and the fastest growing in the county. I’ve helped students at three other high schools and four middle schools start similar clubs.
On a national level, I was part of a panel of trans students who spoke to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in 2015 and helped the creation of the trans-inclusive Title IX guidance released in 2016. In 2016, I spoke at the Bullying Prevention Summit at the White House and the Department of Education.
As an individual, I have written and hosted three professional development training for teachers, “Gender and Sexuality 101”, and “How To Be An Ally”. This has helped both teachers and students to create safe environments to learn. I also speak to the public about my personal story as a young trans person and have held my local community accountable to its promise of including all.
I'm the founder of a grassroots advocacy group called Support Frederick County Public School Trans Students, made up of trans students, family, teachers, and community members. I was the lead organizer of the first trans rights rally in my county of Frederick County, Maryland, and led a campaign to create a school policy welcoming and affirming trans students. I led email writing efforts, rallies, and hours of public comment. The policy, now called Policy 443, was passed in June of 2017, almost unanimously, thanks to the work of trans students and their allies.
Following this success, I organized a social media campaign titled #IAmFrederick. I encouraged people to take pictures of themselves and write a reason they support trans youth using the hashtag. The campaign was part of an effort to normalize trans people in my town. Our participants have ranged from friends, community members, state and local politicians, and representatives from national organizations.
My achievements have had local and national impacts. Overall, I have helped make my school system a safer place for everybody; where everyone is encouraged to be themselves and able to pursue their education without any boundaries. My goal is to stop what happened to me from happening to anyone else.
Tagged: the dru project, pulse, gay straight alliance, transgender, James van Kuilenburg, scholarships
Spirit of Dru Scholarship Winner: Alyssa Sileo
Throughout the month of July, we will be sharing the inspiring essays from our Spirit of Dru Scholarship recipients. Please enjoy Alyssa Sileo's - she will be attending Drew University(!!!) this fall.
It has never been a want to advocate that has driven all of my actionsーit has been a need. My creative and coming out journeys ran parallel courses, and this was no coincidence. Ever since I realized my own queerness I have made sure my pride is always more than a statement. Instead, I make it a project.
My mantra is that artists must be the caretakers of equality. Forwarding unity and inclusion through arts is the perfect way to look past differences, because any person can add to a story. I believe the stage is the perfect place to get messages across, with the honesty and vulnerability required by the creators.
I’m the founder of "The Laramie Project" Project (LPP), an international theatre advocacy initiative that fights for the end of discriminatory violence by honoring hate crime victims with worldwide performances of the acclaimed Tectonic Theater Project play that chronicles the Matthew Shepard story.
The LPP educates audiences and casts on a turning point of LGBTQ+ history while clarifying that hate crimes are still ravaging marginalized communities. By honoring the Pulse victims and sharing the stories of the incidents that are associated with the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act (heavily under-reported in the media), we are calling on LPPers to hold institutions accountable. The compelling message of Laramie drives a person to rethink their perceptions about the supposed safety of the queer community, whereas the truth is that there’s a long way to go.
To date, there are 67 registered events from 23 states and 4 other countries, representing Thespian Troupes and GSAs, colleges, theatre companies, and community groups.
Phase 3 of the LPP is an effort to advocate for The Dru Project by connecting 32 Laramies to honor Drew’s 32 years of life. We are mobilizing high schools from many states (especially those with active GSAs) to fight for their Florida student peers with fundraising and awareness, since the future of queer liberation lies in the safety and empowerment of youth.
A latent function of the LPP is to inspire people in the audience or cast who has a project inside them but doesn’t know where to start. I make the story of my LPP journey as available as I can so others can know how quickly and wildly this all happenedーhow impulsive but thoughtful activism must be.
I remember how seeing productions with queer representation, like Rent and Fun Home, right around the time that I was coming out, were the experiences that locked-in my own pride and drove me to put this on the stage for others who need this affirmation.
Drew Leinonen’s compassion, humor, and advocacy manifests in any person who works to make a space safe for someone else. I believe in the power of friendship, camaraderie, and legacy. I believe in the life-saving work of The Dru Project and the surge of GSA presence and programming, and I pledge my commitment to availability for the youth of the queer community.
Tagged: lgbtq, gay straight alliance, thespian, laramie project, the dru project, pulse, theater, activism, matthew shepard
Meet TDP's Scholarship Winners
Many thanks to Joey Gemelli for producing and editing this video!
Tagged: the dru project, lgbtq, scholarships, youth, gay straight alliance, gsa
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Published on The Examiner (http://theexaminer.com)
Home > Features > Melanie Dishman's archive > In the Dark: McKinnon still the best, even when playing second fiddle
In the Dark: McKinnon still the best, even when playing second fiddle
Submitted by Melanie Dishman [1] on August 9, 2018 - 12:39pm
spynew.jpg [2]
‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’
Starring: Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon
Directed by: Susanna Fogel
In this female-centric buddy pic with a questionable story line but some insanely funny bits provided mostly by the second banana, Kate McKinnon, the bigger mystery here that who the bad guy is really is why McKinnon only gets offered supporting roles. This is someone who has won not one but two Emmys for her work as a regular cast member of “Saturday Night Live,” and yet she keeps playing second fiddle in her theatrical roles.
Here she plays Morgan, BFF to Mila Kunis’s Audrey, two 30-somethings making their way in Los Angeles. Audrey’s boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), has just dumped her via text message but what she doesn’t know is he is really working for the CIA and is being chased through Prague by bad guys when Morgan decides to call him on Audrey’s behalf to tell him they are setting fire to his belongings.
Within 24 hours, he’s lying dead in the living room in their apartment, and the bad guys are still coming. With his dying breath, Drew asks Audrey to deliver what appears to be a cheap plastic trophy to someone in Vienna restaurant or else to world will be at risk.
From there, this just keeps getting sillier as Audrey and Morgan make their way across Europe with the help of MI6 agent Sebastian (Sam Heughan), who they really don’t know if they can trust. Hot on their trail is gymnast/assassin Verne, whose mission it is to stop them, even though through with no particular strategy or skill, these two dingbats manage to elude her.
So the plot is pretty lame, but if you can take its silly inanity for the sake of watching McKinnon riff her way through scene after scene, then you’re in for some laughs. Not every gag finds its mark, but when they do, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s all in her reactions to everything going on around her, while Kunis gamely plays the straight man, make that … woman, even though her name is over the title.
It’s nice to see Heughan out of his kilt and long locks, as he is better known for his role as Jamie in “Outlander.” Mere minutes after meeting him, Audrey is like, “Drew who?” even though his body is still warm. In one of the funniest ongoing bits, Morgan develops a serious crush on Wendy (Gillian Anderson), Sebastian’s boss. When the two gal pals are brought in for questioning McKinnon’s unabashed reaction to her is hilarious.
The incongruence in this movie is the violence, which at times seems really gratuitous and unnecessary. It leaves you wondering if this is conflicted about being a buddy comedy or a serious spy thriller, when really it’s neither. There are a few scenes that seem like they belong in “Sicario” rather than this, and it’s enough to jolt you.
Directed by Susanna Fogel, this is the second movie this summer to have female stars and director. The other, “Ocean’s 8,” will no doubt come away from this season with higher earnings and better reviews, but it didn’t have Kate McKinnon, now did it?
Entertainment [3]
cinema [4]
movie review [5]
movies [6]
Source URL: http://theexaminer.com/features/entertainment/dark-mckinnon-still-best-even-when-playing-second-fiddle
[1] http://theexaminer.com/users/melanie-dishman
[2] http://theexaminer.com/sites/default/files/blog/spynew.jpg
[3] http://theexaminer.com/features/entertainment
[4] http://theexaminer.com/tags/cinema
[5] http://theexaminer.com/tags/movie-review
[6] http://theexaminer.com/tags/movies
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Exploring Whatever Tickles Our Fancy
Graphic Literature
What Nots
T. H. White’s The Once and Future King
Rebecca Swain penned this review.
This classic work is a must for anyone interested in Arthurian legend. White has taken Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and retold it in modern language, in a novel that adults and young people can read over and over with pleasure and tears. It is an enormously influential novel as well, a book by which other tellings of the legend are judged.
White’s version of the legend takes place in the 13th century, presumably because that’s when Malory set his work. However, historians agree that the real Arthur lived sometime in the fifth century AD. So much is known about the kings of England after the Norman Conquest that there is no way Arthur could have reigned then without our knowledge.
Though White’s setting in time is inaccurate, it does fit well with the legend, since castles and knights play such a large part in Arthur’s story. White stays fairly faithful to the time he has chosen, mentioning Robin Hood (Robin Wood), and occasionally making references to Richard the Lionheart and other Norman rulers, although he talks about them as if they were imaginary and only Arthur was real. He gives some detailed descriptions of typical knightly pursuits such as training falcons and competing in tournaments, and describes castles and armor, giving an idea of what life would have been like for Arthur if he had lived then.
Despite his faithfulness to his time period, White frequently resorts to anachronisms. He compares the sound of an arrow’s flight to the sound of a lawn mower. A falcon quotes Hamlet. One of his characters mentions Communism. He doesn’t actually describe his characters using inventions that didn’t exist then, as far as I can tell; the anachronisms usually appear in authorial asides. I find this a bit jarring, but not sufficiently irritating to spoil the book.
White has a lighthearted, conversational writing style. He often interjects authorial comments into his narrative, occasionally making observations of a political nature, and digressing frequently. At all times there is a definite feeling of being told a story, rather than of events happening before our eyes. Some readers may find this style annoying, although I find it charming and refreshing.
The triumph of this novel is its characterization, White succeeds in presenting Arthur and Lancelot vividly and realistically. They behave like real people, not like paper dolls, and are utterly believable, despite their fantastic adventures. Lesser characters are also convincing, though White does not take as much trouble with them. Merlyn figures prominently in the novel, but his character and history are not explored very thoroughly. Guinevere and Elaine are described beautifully, but they figure in White’s tale only as they relate to Arthur and Lancelot, while other female characters, such as Morgan le Fay and Morgause, are not described in much detail. Of the many knights mentioned, Gawaine is the only one who is really fleshed out, though we are given interesting glimpses into the minds of the Oedipal Agravaine and the self-righteous Galahad.
White’s novel is divided into four distinct books. They tell of Arthur’s life from his childhood through his old age, and are best read in order, though any of the books can be enjoyed on its own for the beautiful writing and quirky insight of the author. (It is possible to find copies of the individual books.)
The novel begins with The Sword in the Stone, which concentrates on Arthur’s upbringing. Arthur, nicknamed Wart, is a young boy living with his guardian Sir Ector, and Ector’s son Kay. Arthur knows he is not related to these people, but he has no idea who his father is. The boys run wild until Arthur meets Merlyn, who becomes their tutor. Merlyn is a wizard who is living backwards. This backwards-living makes him absent-minded and muddled, but he manages to be a good teacher, especially to Arthur.
We see Arthur’s character develop during this part of the book. He is a generous, uncomplicated, loving boy. He has an inclusive way of thinking, wanting to draw people to him, share what he has with them, rather than shut them out and separate himself from them. White describes him as a hero worshipper, a born follower, He does not lose these traits when he becomes king. This is important to know, as it helps explain his future actions.
At the end of The Sword in the Stone Arthur pulls a sword from the stone in which it is imbedded, thus proving himself the rightful king of England. He removes the sword to take to Kay, who has arrived at a tournament without his weapon. Arthur doesn’t at first realize that he has worked a miracle and shown himself to be ruler of England. The book ends with him being declared king.
The Queen of Air and Darkness focuses mostly on Morgause, Arthur’s half-sister and queen of Orkney, and on her four sons, all of whom grow up to play important parts in the Arthurian drama. Gawaine is hotheaded and loyal, and figures prominently throughout Arthur’s life. Agravaine is in love with his mother without realizing it, and this motivates all of his actions. Gaheris is rarely mentioned after this book, except as one of the Orkney clan. Gareth is handsome and sweet, and has adventures of his own in the legend, though White tends to mention them only in passing.
This book contains the story of how Morgause seduces Arthur. It also contains more violence than the other three books; one of the first scenes involves a horrible thing being done to a cat, and later a unicorn is killed. Generally, however, White’s writing does not contain graphic descriptions of violence, even when men are being killed.
Near the beginning of this section of the novel Merlyn gives Arthur and Kay a brief, highly biased history lesson about the Gaels and Normans and their place in the history of the British Isles. The Gaels do not come off very well in this conversation, although I’m not sure it’s fair to say this is White revealing his own prejudice; he could be voicing opinions he thought Merlyn would have. During this conversation the three men also discuss the Norman idea of “might makes right,” and we see Arthur groping toward his idea that justice, not force, should rule the land.
The Ill Made Knight is about Sir Lancelot, who is barely mentioned before this section. White makes Lancelot an interesting and complex character. He describes him as ugly, and as not being a good person. For example, White says “[Lancelot’s] word was valuable to him not only because he was good, but also because he was bad. It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them.” He also says, “He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.” These are not observations authors usually make about the best knight in the world!
The Ill Made Knight explains how Lancelot came to Arthur’s court and how he fell in love with Guinevere. White traces that illicit love through the years, interspersing his tale with Lancelot’s adventures away from the queen. His most important feat is rescuing plain, straightforward Elaine from a tub of boiling water where she has been held captive for years. She falls in love with him. He cannot reciprocate her love, but he gives her a son, Galahad, who figures prominently in the later search for the Holy Grail.
The knights begin searching for this precious object and some of them come back and tell of their adventures, though White doesn’t go into as much detail here as Malory does. Some well-known characters such as Sir Bedevere are barely mentioned, and some famous incidents, such as Gawaine and the Green Knight, are not mentioned at all.
This is arguably the most moving section of the long novel as it explores Lancelot’s struggle between his love for God and his love for Guinevere, his feelings of duty and guilt toward Elaine, and his knowledge that he is not the saint others think he is.
The Candle in the Wind chronicles the twilight of Arthur’s reign. Everyone is older now, and Mordred, Arthur’s son by his half-sister, comes into the picture. Everyone knows about Lancelot and Guinevere, even Arthur, but no one wants to say it out loud except Mordred, who hates his father, and Agravaine, who hates unfaithful women in general.
These two malcontents plot a way to take Lancelot and the queen in adultery, but their plan fails and the lovers escape. The pope orders that they return and be reconciled with the king, but Gawaine insists that Arthur not forgive Lancelot, who killed two of Gawaine’s brothers while they were unarmed. Arthur and Gawaine follow Lancelot to France and besiege his castle, leaving Mordred as regent over England. Mordred is insane by this time, and he decides to marry the queen. Guinevere smuggles a letter to Arthur, and he and his remaining knights rush back to England to rescue her. The book ends with Arthur entrusting the tale of the Round Table to a thirteen-year-old Thomas Malory.
This is a wonderful book. The characterization is outstanding, as I observed earlier. White has an original way of narrating the story which usually doesn’t get in the way of the events themselves. While he does not cover every famous adventure and incident in the legend, he certainly hits the highlights and gives them depth and meaning. It’s the sort of story you wish were true.
(Berkley Medalion Edition, 1966)
About Diverse Voices
Diverse Voices is our catch-all for writers and other staffers who did but a few reviews or other writings for us. They are credited at the beginning of the actual writing if we know who they are which we don’t always.
It also includes material by writers that first appeared in the Sleeping Hedgehog, our in-house newsletter for staff and readers here. Some material is drawn from Folk Tales, Mostly Folk and Roots & Branches, three other publications we’ve donedone the centuries.
Cat Eldridge
Denise Dutton
Gary Whitehouse
Jennifer Stevenson
Robert Tilendis
What’s New for 14th of July: Writings Based on Music, A New Mythology, Japanese Photography, Cider, Supervillains, Nordic Music from the Midwest, Aaron Copland, and other goodies
What’s New for the 7th of July: A Magical Family, Historical SF, Chocolate, The Cat In the Hat, Music, Traditional and Not, and other neat stuff
A Travels Abroad story: A Theatre Company
What’s New for the 30th of June: Composer and Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, A Bonnie Bunch of Steeleye Span, Another Spider-Man Film, Ghirardelli’s Intense Dark Hazelnut Heaven bar, Online Crafters Ban Trump as a Conversation Subject, A Lúnasa Recording, A Yolen Fantasy and Other Delights
A Kinrowan Estate story: Did You Notice…?
What’s New for the 23rd of June: The Very First Spider-Man Film, Four Fantasies, Bees, Mouse Guard short stories, A Spanish Christmas sweet fit for year round, Dr. John Live and Some Other Matters
A Kinrowan Estate story: Firewood
What’s New for the 16th of June: Folkmanis’ Rat in a Tin Can, Patricia A. McKillip’s Solstice Wood, Sam Adams Seasonal Ale, A Dance & Concert by Blato Zlato, A Futuristic Riff off Holmes, Clash’s ‘London Calling’ and Other Neat Matters
A Kinrowan Estate story: Tea & Scones
What’s New for the 9th of June: A Whiskey Review Site, The Birth of British Folk Rock, Charles de Lint digital editions, Grateful Dead live music, A Great Supernatural Novel From Robert McCammon, Rocket Raccoon & Groot and Other Rather Charming Things
A Kinrowan Estate story: How the Troll Came To Be
What’s New for the 2nd of June: Killer Robots, Dirty Rice, Gifted Children, Aaron Copland and other neat stuff
A Kinrowan Estate story: Herne
What’s New for the 26th of May: Music from Down Under, A History of Ice Cream, Supernatural Westerns, Game of Thrones, the Great Machine, and other goodies
What’s New for the 19th of May: Pickled Eggs, Brideshead Revisited, Maxx and Bad Apple, A Scree on Author Politics and Other Matters
A Kinrowan Estate story: Thank You! ( A Letter to Anna)
What’s New for the 12th of May: Another Thirteenth Doctor Figure, A Tanya Huff trilogy, Recordings by Molly Mason & Jay Ungar, A Conversation with Charles de Lint, Lots of Chocolate, ‘Saturday in the Park’ by Chicago and Other Tasty Matters
What’s New for the 5th of May: It’s Spring, Beatrix Potter’s Garden, Time Travel, Candy, Jazz, and more
A Kinrowan Estate story: The Oysterband
What’s New for the 28th of April: Folklore in the Twentieth Century, Russian Music, Real Fairy Tales, Swedish Pan Pipes, and more
A Kinrowan Estate story: Lost Empires
What’s New for the 21st of April: A History of Tull, the Polesotechnic League, Chocolate Eggs, More Tull, Payback, and other neat stuff
A Kinrowan Estate Story: Writing Retreats (A Letter To Peter)
What’s New for the 14th of April: Joanna Russ, Live Music from Altan, Outlander, Really Great Brownies, Haunted Gotham and Other Neat Stuff
A Kinrowan Estate story: Musical Ganeshas
What’s New for the 7th of April: A Tale of Two Cities, A Bokashi Composter, Zombies, Scrapple, Jazz, Opera, and Other Tasty Matters
A Kinrowan Estate story: Fuck, That Was Strange
What’s New for the 31st of March: A Full Scottish Breakfast, Beatrix Potter’s Garden, Terrorists on Mars, Celtic and Eastern European Music, and more. . .
A Kinrowan Estate story: Booking Matters
What’s New for the 24th of March: Istanbul, Tulips, Church Music, Tyrannical Gods, Giant Bears and Other Colourful Matters
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Gupta Empire Facts
Gupta Empire Facts: The Gupta Empire was named after the Gupta dynasty which ruled approximately between 320- 550 CE. The Gupta dynasty period is regarded as the Golden Age of India. The facts of the Gupta Empire consist of the administrative system, economy, scientific and technological development, social life of the people, education, etc.
Gupta Empire Facts:
1) Administration
The administrative system during the Gupta period was similar to that of the Mauryan Empire. The King was that highest authority and possessed wide powers to enable the smooth functioning of the empire. During the Gupta period, the empire was classified into separate administrative divisions like Rajya, Rashtra, Desha, Mandala, etc., and a Vishayapati was appointed to control it. Thus importance was given to decentralization of power.
During the Gupta dynasty period, the charge of managing the welfare of the villages was upon the rural bodies. These rural bodies comprised of the headman of the village and the elders. The Gupta Empire had a separate judicial system. At the lowest level of the judicial system was the village assembly or trade guild.
The King presided over the highest court of appeal. In discharging his duty, the King was assisted by judges, ministers, priests, etc. The decision or the judgment of the court was based on the legal texts, the social customs prevailing during those times, or upon the decision of the King.
2) Economy
During the Gupta, period agriculture formed a significant part of the empire’s economy. The trade and commerce activities of the Gupta Empire grew steadily. The merchant and other traders were organized into guilds. These guilds were given concessions in the taxes that were liable to be paid to the government.
The guilds played a chief role in the goods industry and also helped in strengthening the economy of the empire. There was industrial development during the Gupta period. The textile industry was an essential industry of this empire.
Silver Coin of Kumaragupta
Some of the major items of produce included silk, muslin, calico, linen, wool, and cotton. These goods were also exported. There were other flourishing industries like ivory work, stone cutting and carving of stones, metalwork of precious metals like gold, silver, copper, iron, bronze, and lead.
Pearl industry was also very popular. The most important industry was pottery. The Gupta rulers issued a large number of gold coins. These gold coins were known as diners. The Gupta rulers also issued silver coins. During the reign of the Gupta dynasty, lead and rare copper coins were also issued. Gupta Empire carried out a trade with China, Ceylon, and other European countries.
3) Education
The Gupta rulers gave a lot of importance to education. Cities like Pataliputra, Nasik, and Ayodhya were popular centers for education. The two famous universities during this time were Nalanda and Takshila. Nalanda was established by Kumaragupta I in the 5th century.
Nalanda University
It was the only university which provided hostels for students to stay. Both the universities were offered high standards of education. These universities also admitted students from foreign countries.
4) Gupta Era Society
During the Gupta period, there was peace and harmony in society. The social ranking or caste of a person was decided by the trade or profession of that person. The society was classified in four castes namely, Brahmans, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, and Sudras. The Brahmans carried out activities like trade, architecture, service, etc. The Gupta rulers were Vaishyas. The Kshatriya’s practiced industrial vocation. Sudras were engaged in trade and agriculture. People lived in joint families and the society was male dominating.
Gupta Empire Society
There were overall prosperity and development in the Gupta era society. The women were given secondary position. They were allowed to obtain an education. The food consumed by the Gupta people was very simple. It is believed that they were strictly vegetarian and excluded onions, garlic, potatoes and wine from their diet. Entertainment during those days included dances, musical concerts, gambling, animal fights, etc. The religion followed during the Gupta period was Hinduism and Buddhism.
5) Science and Technological Development
One of the major developments achieved in the scientific field was the progress in metallurgy. Another important discovery was the invention of a modern system of numbers. There was an advancement in mathematics and astronomy as well. The chief exponent of the development was Aryabhatta.
He calculated the value of pi and invented a formula to calculate the precise area of a triangle. Aryabhatta also proved that the earth revolves around its own axis. He even found out the reasons for solar and lunar eclipse. He even calculated that it takes around 365 days for the earth to complete one revolution around the sun.
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Friends and Family of Lamar Johnson to “Walk for Justice” in Downtown Baton Rouge
02 Jul Friends and Family of Lamar Johnson to “Walk for Justice” in Downtown Baton Rouge
Posted at 18:03h in News by admin 0 Comments
Media Contact Quentin Anthony Anderson
Contact Phone Number (225) 803-2536
Contact Email press@thejusticealliance.org
Baton Rouge, La. – On Monday, July 6, the family and friends of Lamar Alexander Johnson, the 27-year old man whose June 10 death while in police custody has sparked controversy about the series of events that led to his passing, will lead a peaceful protest in downtown Baton Rouge. The “Walk for Justice” will be followed by a candlelight vigil in Johnson’s honor.
The event, which will follow the North Boulevard downtown route to its Town Center before heading to the steps of City Hall, is in response to the controversy surrounding Johnson’s death as a result of a brain injury suffered while being held at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. While the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office has claimed Johnson hung himself from his isolated jail cell, Johnson’s family and friends have insisted that this could not have been the case, especially considering Johnson believed he was being held for minor offense.
“Lamar loved life,” said Adrienne Sandifer, Johnson’s fiance. “He was really looking forward to coming home to the kids, his family and his music. He was told the whole time that this was minor. So no, it makes absolutely no sense that he would suddenly decided to end it all.”
Johnson, a father of three who was engaged to be married, was arrested on May 26 after an officer pulled him over for a window tint violation. According to the family, Johnson admitted to the officer that he had an outstanding 2011 warrant for what he believed, at the time, was a failure to appear for a traffic violation. On May 30, when the family tried to inquire about Johnson’s status, they were informed he was in the hospital, after prison officials said they discovered him hanging from his bed sheet in his cell. Johnson’s family said Lamar had no history of mental illness or depression.
“Throughout the process, I stayed in touch with my son,” said Linda Johnson Franks, Lamar’s mother. “He kept assuring me that this was small potatoes and he’d either serve a few days or figure out how to pay whatever fines might be levied. This wouldn’t make sense in any situation, but especially if you knew Lamar? No way.”
Johnson passed away on Sunday, June 10 from a total brain injury due to lack of oxygen.
The “Walk for Justice” will take place at 7:00 P.M. While the EBRSO said it conducted an internal review of the incident that confirmed their original story, the family has called for EBR city-parish officials to sanction an “uninterested, third-party investigation” into the series of events that led to Johnson’s injury. An online petition started late last week calling for the same had 2,933 signatures at the time of this release.
“We’re not making any accusations, we just want answers,” said Karl Franks, Lamar’s father. “And to get them, the investigated shouldn’t be conducting the investigation. That’s just common sense.”
The Justice Alliance is a Louisiana-based 501(c)4 nonprofit organization committed to defending and advancing causes of equality statewide while urgently promoting & pursuing social equity. We are a data-first social justice convener, utilizing research, community organizing, and coalition-building to lead or support campaigns for equality and equity throughout the state.
» The Justice Alliance Announces Inaugural My Louisiana Equality & Equity Summit
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Home » AMERICAS » Who caused the global financial crisis? An inconvenient truth
Who caused the global financial crisis? An inconvenient truth
Guest Writer March 14, 2013 AMERICAS
You have heard this before, a million times in the past five years:
1. American banks knowingly sold unrepayable home loans to a gullible public;
2. Unregulated Wall Street greed resulted in poor investments being sold to retirement funds the world over;
3. Credit derivatives and credit default swaps were among those evil toxic securities which banks created and which led to a loss of wealth;
4. This house of cards collapsed, leading to corporate insolvencies, stock market crashes, real estate value declines, and increased unemployment;
5. If governments had not stepped in to rescue the banks and insurance companies, we would have had a depression that could have lasted decades;
6. It proves once and for all, that in a system of unregulated capitalism, the greedy and the corrupt will take advantage of the simple and the virtuous;
7. So we must now regulate the financial system even more to prevent this from ever occurring again, and rescue us the people from the current malaise via ‘economic stimulus’ that the government alone is an expert at providing.
There are almost no major media outlets anywhere—newspapers, television, radio, magazines, even Hollywood movies and television serials, that have not repeated a version of this mantra. If I were to tell you that, it is all wrong, you would be right in asking “But if all the experts agree, even five years after the event, why should we believe you?”
Well, firstly, the vast majority of newspaper columnists, radio & television show hosts, and Hollywood high-fliers, are not experts in macroeconomics—in fact, they haven’t got a clue. But weren’t the professors of economics consulted? Sure, they were, but many of them have cushy, lucrative, consulting contracts with Governments. They have long lost the ability to be objective, if they ever had it. Even if they know it, they won’t talk themselves out of a lucrative living. Many of them even believed the macroeconomics taught in high schools and universities from day one, and simply cannot come to terms with the scale of the deception that is involved in selling voodoo economics in general, and this explanation in particular, to the public.
So what is the real story, and who has been voicing it?
In recent times, some of the prominent voices of reason are—George Reisman; Thomas E Woods and other economists associated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute; Ron Paul, a libertarian ex-congressman, and a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 and 2012; Governor Gary Johnson, an independent candidate for president in 2012; investment maven Peter Schiff; and the disciples of Ayn Rand. In times past, the real story was narrated several times by Ludwig Von Mises, Henry Hazlitt,
and Friedrich Hayek— some of the greatest economists associated with the Austrian tradition of economics, and also by an outstanding exponent of free market capitalism—philosopher Ayn Rand.
The principles of the free market have long since been discovered. An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations was written by Adam Smith in 1776, and the principles were refined in the 19th century. Those who follow the rules of logic, and are objective in their judgment, have not a shred of doubt as to the efficacy of the free market.
Wherever there is an economic problem—collapsing asset prices, widespread unemployment, a cluster of insolvencies, inflation, depression, stagflation, or recession—the source of the problem is almost always that elected officials have not allowed the free market to work. Governments have interfered using various devices such as subsidies, tax incentives & other legal distortions, unwarranted regulatory burdens, price or volume controls, dictates about which consumers are to be served, or outright nationalisation. This is the generic form of the story.
The particulars of this story (the lessons of history unlearnt)
More specific to this case, the Clinton Administration revived legislation that was designed to ‘encourage’ banks to make home loans to minorities. Even though Asian Americans were getting more home loans in percentage numbers than white Americans, an apparent lower rate of lending to African Americans and Latino Americans was taken as prima facie evidence of discrimination. The stick of reputationdestroying discrimination lawsuits became quite ominous as regulators began to collect data regularly from the banks.
Later studies found that there never had been any evidence of discrimination when the data was adjusted for credit risk, but the media uproar drowned out the follow-up studies. The American dream was being denied to some on account of their race, said the media. The market, already tied up in subsidies and regulation, was further nudged into an uneconomic direction. The fire ignited.
The Bush Administration then added carrots to the stick, and the party morphed into an inferno. Far more capital was diverted into real estate construction than was justifiable. Eventually there was glut of construction and prices collapsed. Even though banks were packaging the risk of price downturns and selling them in the form of securities, they did hold significant portions of it themselves, and their solvency came into question. In this thinly capitalised industry, it was not easy to tell which of the banks were solvent and which were not, so banks grew wary of lending to each other. In their current state, financial markets cannot function easily without financial intermediaries carrying large levels of risk to each other, and the contagion of panic spread.
So what were the Bush-era carrots?
First, the Government created or revitalized institutions that they owned to give them an appearance of governmentsupported credit risk. You may have heard of Fannie and Freddie. These institutions were granted over USD 2 billion in a line of credit by the Department of Treasury. Moreover, their quasi-government status helped them to raise money cheaply. These institutions bought the worst of the risk, embedded in the form of securities, from the banks.
Further, Governments everywhere have allowed themselves to create paper money out of thin air—so that they can spend money without raising taxes excessively, which is an electoral no-no. It also creates a temporary illusion of prosperity, the perfect device for getting re-elected when in power. In this case, it added fuel to the fire. The prosperity illusion begins to fade. More money needs to be printed to kick the can down the road. Eventually the problem gets too big to avoid.
The stick & carrot regime created an irresistible cycle of profit for the banks. The cycle began with unwarranted construction, followed by lending to the undeserving, who would then buy homes to keep the construction going, followed by banks selling major portions of the risk to the Fannies, the Freddies, and any other sucker who would buy it—and there were more of those when the illusion of prosperity was created, and finally, pocketing a lot of ‘origination’ fees. The cycle took about a year from end to end. But at any given time, many such profit cycles would overlap. Thus when the bubble burst, the banks were left holding a lot of the risk.
Overinvestments in one sector of the economy must be painfully liquidated and the capital redeployed to restore equilibrium. The problem cannot be cured by simply looking the other way, or by propping up the sector overinvested in with even more government handouts. In fact, the more the market is prevented from functioning normally, the longer it will take to cure the problem. The cure is never costless either. The longer it is postponed, the more it will cost.
The unavoidable inference
The Government, due to its desire to force its will on the market, was the primary culprit behind the large-scale malinvestment, and the consequential crisis that followed.
Why is this obvious truth hidden from the public?
As governments are in the business of getting re-elected, they and the economists in their lucrative employ, do not wish to acknowledge, sometimes even to themselves, their principal causative role in the boom and bust cycle.
In 1936, a mathematics lecturer gave a vacuous scholarly credence to the notion that free markets do not work, and that governments, undoubtedly advised by utopian macroeconomists, must step in to ‘fix’ the market. This idea elevated the role of politicians, and opened the gates of fame and fortune to the macroeconomist government advisers. This so-called treatise was mired in obfuscations, incorrect assumptions, and bad logic, but came replete with elegant and opaque prose, and equally elegant but dense and diversionary mathematical equations. With the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, a quack was elevated to the level of a superstar.
John(ny the phony) Maynard Keynes, was duly anointed as the father of ‘modern economics’, and the science of money suffered so serious a setback that it has never recovered. With government control of curriculum in public and private education, hordes of future academics, newspaper columnists, elected officials, film & television producers, and even investment professionals and company presidents, have been trained to think in terms of the avarice myth (“markets left to themselves must necessarily reward avarice
over conscientious work”), and the fixed pie myth (“wealth is never newly created, it is always taken by the powerful from the vulnerable”).
In historic times, monarchs did dilute gold money to cheat their subjects but at least the classical economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill) never pandered to the Kings by offering a scholarly cloak of respectability to this deceptive practice. Following the Keynesian era’s extraordinary intellectual regression however, fine-tuning the economy by printing money to stimulate the economy, and burning money to slow down the economy, has been converted into a pseudo-intellectual art form. But in practice, the cumulative action over a decade or more in almost any part of the world is a savage level of net printing, which results in an inflation tax that governments do not ever acknowledge as being entirely of their own making. Productivity has a tendency to get better and will rarely decline—thus prices should in general be reducing, yet endless inflation is now a world-wide phenomenon.
Where to, next?
Investment practitioners should not assume that market events are so unforeseeable that diversification across asset classes is the only rational avenue to pursue in an increasingly volatile world. It is befitting to try and understand the macro causes of why asset prices and economies as a whole are volatile, and why markets appear to fail. Modern finance theory does not illuminate the practitioner in this regard.
If classical and Austrian perspectives are correct, various world economies are headed for a severe downturn when the music stops for unrepayable levels of government debt. Keynesian solutions to print even more money and to recklessly divert capital to economically unprofitable election promises are dangerously in play in the US, the UK, Japan, China, Europe, and Australia.
Regulation of the finance sector has increased. Meanwhile, subsidies to the finance sector abound in terms of increasing government bond prices—through money printing for which the banks are the first beneficiaries, and regulatory propups of the banks’ severe illiquidity & outrageously low levels of capital. Yet these subsidies are not even reported in the press, let alone fought against.
No, it is not some gigantic conspiracy theory. Vast numbers of politicians are untrained and ill advised, often by advisers who are themselves ignorant. Thus, many who carry the courage of their convictions, are egregiously wrong, and are taking decisions that make the problems worse. The fact that they may not be conspiring to do so makes no difference—having your plane piloted by an honest incompetent, guided and encouraged as he or she is by ignoramuses in the control tower, will still lead to a crash.
There is no substitute for thinking and a bit of quiet reflection. Do not just accept what Ross Gittins, Alan Jones, your lecturer, or this author for that matter, have to say on this issue.
Read, ponder, and decide for yourself. Here is a collection of readings that may help:
1. Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts by Hunter Lewis
2. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E Woods
3. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand
4. Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt
5. The Government Against the Economy by George Reisman
6. How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D Schiff and Andrew J Schiff
7. The Frankenstein Candidate: A Woman Awakens to a Web of Deceit
-Vinay Kolhatkar
Vinay Kolhatkar is a Sydney-based writer and finance professional. He has a Masters in finance from UNSW, and served as a chief investment officer for a suite of funds invested internationally. He is the author of The Frankenstein Candidate: A Woman Awakens to a Web of Deceit, a political thriller available on Amazon, Kindle, Borders online, TheNile.com.au, and other online outlets.
(Featured photo: ©athrine, Creative Commons, Flickr
Photo 1: Michael Aston, Creative Commons, Flickr
Photo 2: Truthout.org, Creative Commons, Flickr)
American banks austerity capitalism Credit derivative economic stimulus financial crisis global financial crisis Government Debt Guest Writer unregulated capitalism US economy wall street 2013-03-14
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Michael Restagno
Plugging your own political fiction thriller as “credible economic literature” is quite hilarious, if not a bit embarrassing. .
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The Unconsious: Secondary Rationalisations
One of the difficulties of being human is that we have both a conscious and an unconscious. By definition, we are aware of what’s in our conscious and unaware of what goes on in our unconscious, yet both worked together to influence us, sometimes in surprising ways.
© ketrin1407 - Flickr.com
The influence of our unconscious
When we are influenced to do or to say something by our conscious, it can all be pretty clear to us and we understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. We take comfort from this certainty, and feel like we’re in charge. But when we are influenced by things in our unconscious this linkage isn't quite so clear to us. We do or say things and we don't understand why we are doing or saying them.
Usually, we don't even know that we're doing it – it's just that instinctive. We're effectively on autopilot, and that's not something we're generally comfortable with. As a side note, our unconscious has three different aspects.
Rational justifications
This state of affairs is very uncomfortable for people; they don't like to be in situations where they do and say things but don't understand why. For this reason the brain uses secondary rationalisations as a way of coping. These secondary rationalisations of the things we tell ourselves about why we must have done what we did – they are the story we tell ourselves so our lives make sense to us.
The difficulty with secondary rationalisations is that they generally aren't true, and our real motivations can remained hidden from us.
One of the goals of people entering psychotherapy is to make the unconscious more conscious. When we do this, we better understand why we do what we do; then we have less need to make secondary rationalisations.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Now, read about the three illusions of the mind.
Self-Confidence Lies Sleeping: It Needs Waking Being of Influence: Beyond Punishment and Reward
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English » Mission » Reports of Vassula's Meetings » 2017 Reports » Vassula's Twelfth Visit to the Philippines »
Vassula's Twelfth Visit to the Philippines
February 24-28 and March 22-26, 2017
Prior to the 2017 Asian Mission, Vassula had visited the Philippines eleven times. She went as far north as Tuao, Cagayan Valley, and as far south as Davao, in Mindanao. This year, when the archbishop of Cagayan de Oro (another city in Mindanao), His Excellency Most Rev. Antonio J. Ledesma, SJ, DD, learned that Vassula would be in Asia, he invited her to share the messages of True Life in God with the people of Mindanao.
Vassula’s twelfth visit to the Philippines meant that she would enter the country twice, due to her travel itinerary. During her first entry into the country, she had ample time to physically adjust to the Asian standard time zone. She and her companion, Rev. Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, STL, arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport on Friday, February 24, 2017. They were welcomed by members of the True Life in God Philippines Association.
February 26, 2017 (Sunday): After resting and recovering from jetlag for a day and a half, Vassula’s first activity in the country was a welcome lunch meeting with members from the Center for Peace Asia and the True Life in God Philippines Association, graciously hosted by the family of Mr. and Mrs. Salvador De Leon. The Center for Peace Asia, together with Ms. June Keithley Castro (a friend of Vassula’s, now deceased), first invited Vassula to the Philippines in 1991, when there was still no True Life in God Philippines Association. This group has helped promote Vassula’s TLIG missions.
The first event of the day was a Holy Mass celebrated by Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, con-celebrated by Fr. Richie Santos, SDB and Fr. Delio Ruiz, SCJ. The very relaxed atmosphere was highlighted by Vassula’s stories about her recent mission to Syria and Lebanon, and an explanation of how important the mission of TLIG is for our time. Due to its importance, most of Vassula’s friends acknowledged their enthusiasm towards providing assistance for the TLIG missions.
February 27, 2017 (Monday): Even though Vassula’s lay-over in Manila was supposed to have no major activity, J. C. Gotinga of CNN-Philippines contacted the TLIG Philippines Association, asking if it would be alright to interview Vassula. Upon hearing this, Vassula agreed to do the interview at around 2:00 p.m. J. C. knew a little about the messages and Vassula, because he became acquainted with True Life in God when he was still in school, more than 15 years ago. He said it took him some time to receive his boss’s approval to do the interview, thus the late notice. The interview lasted almost an hour. The important parts of the interview were aired on Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2017, during the CNN-Philippines Evening News.
Visionary laments rise of killings in PH
The news segment presented a brief background on Vassula and the True Life in God messages with videos on how the messages are received through locutions, along with photos of TLIG Ecumenical Pilgrimages and Vassula’s recent visit to war-torn Syria, showing Muslims receiving the messages with open hearts. Vassula said, “Jesus says in the messages that all calamities, sorrows, natural disasters, wars, and all that is not good does not come from Him. But we, through our apostasy, are self-destroying ourselves.” (cf. TLIG Messages, September 11, 1991) When asked about the moral climate in the Philippines, especially with regard to the growing number of killings, Vassula said, “God is Love. God is Mercy. Did He stone that adulterous woman to death? She should have been killed according to her sins. Yet Jesus spared her.” (The Jerusalem Bible, John 8:1-11) Then J. C. said, “Rydén has compiled these messages in a book called True Life in God. It bears the Catholic 'Imprimatur', a guarantee that the work is free of doctrinal errors.”
TLIG One Book showing Imprimatur
Towards the end of the segment, J. C. said, “…in the midst of the world’s troubles, Rydén says there is hope.” Vassula said, “… in the end, Jesus will triumph and we know it. But He wants to hear [touching her ear] … a cry of repentance.” Then J. C. concluded, “Repentance or a change of heart … that can change the world.”
February 28, 2017 (Tuesday): A bit past 3:00 a.m. the following day, Vassula and Fr. Joseph checked-in at the airport for their flight to Beijing, the first leg of their Asian Mission, which would also take them to Vietnam, Sydney and then back to the Philippines.
TLIG Mission in Cagayan de Oro (PHILIPPINES)
March 22, 2017 (Wednesday): Vassula and Fr. Joseph arrived in Manila and checked into their hotel, located near the terminal, had a quick dinner, and rested from their eight-hour flight from Sydney.
March 23, 2017 (Thursday): The following day we were on-board our 2:20 p.m. flight headed for Cagayan de Oro (CDO). We were welcomed at the Laguindingan Airport by the True Life in God–CDO prayer group led by a married couple, Cecille and Anthony Somido. Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr., the spiritual adviser of the Philippines Association, was also there, together with TLIG-Cebu prayer group members who came to help sell TLIG books at the public meeting the following day.
True Life in God prayer groups members from Cagayan de Oro and Cebu welcoming Vassula at Laguindingan Airport, Cagayan de Oro
On our way to the hotel, while still caught in the city’s rush hour traffic, we were informed that those who would be interviewing Vassula ‘live’ over three local radio stations, including the radio station of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro, were already waiting at the hotel. After checking-in, Vassula did not keep the reporters waiting. She immediately proceeded to the conference room where the interview was to take place.
Vassula being interviewed “Live” by three local radio stations, while Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi (at right) listens.
In the interview, Vassula said that she has been receiving these messages since 1985, and that the basic message of True Life in God is Unity of the Church in diversity. She explained that the Lord is asking us to unite the dates of Easter because Easter between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church usually falls on different dates. They are based on different calendars. She said that this year, by coincidence, the dates are the same. She said, “If we unite the dates of Easter, and He (Jesus) asks us to do this because it is feasible, then the Church will receive more of the Holy Spirit’s Light inside to know how to unite in diversity.” (cf. TLIG Messages, October 25, 1991 and October 24, 1994)
When asked how she receives the messages, she replied that she receives them in two ways. The first is through 'locution’ wherein she hears an interior voice, speaking word after word, even unfamiliar English words; words whose meaning she has to reference from a dictionary. Then at other times, it’s a light on her intellect. God gives her the meaning of what He wants to convey. She writes it down; moreover, her handwriting changes. She said, “It is called ‘hieratic writing’ meaning ‘sacred writing’, which has been examined by graphologists and exorcists as well.”
When asked how other religions have received her, she said that she is amazed that she has been received well by other religions. Buddhists and Hindus in Bangladesh have thrice awarded her the Golden Medal for propagating harmony, peace and unity. Hence, Buddhists have invited her in Hiroshima to give a talk in their temple. And lately, Muslims have invited her to Syria and Lebanon for an interfaith dialogue with muftis and imams.
When asked if she was given a special message for the Filipino Christian community, she replied by saying that she has been travelling the world, and they (the Filipinos) are number-one in their belief…in their faith. And so, she is in the Philippines to encourage us to continue to pray for Unity. Towards the end of the interview, the reporter asked Vassula what her wish was, not only for the Philippines but for the whole world. Vassula said, “My wish is your wish…to have everybody worshipping God and taste the sweetness of God.”
The live interview lasted for almost an hour. Within it, the public was invited to come to Vassula’s witness meeting, scheduled on March 24, after the 5:30 p.m. Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City.
March 24, 2017 (Friday): By 10:00 a.m. we were on our way to the office of His Excellency Most Rev. Antonio J. Ledesma, SJ, DD, the Archbishop of Cagayan de Oro, for our 10:45 a.m. courtesy visit. Upon our arrival, the archbishop led us to his receiving hall. He graciously invited everyone to pose for photos before he spoke with Vassula, Fr. Joseph and the rest of the group.
Vassula firstly presented him with the TLIG One Book and Heaven is Real but so is Hell. He asked Vassula about her mission on Unity, and he was pleasantly surprised to learn that even the Muslims, who attended Vassula’s conference in Syria, were interested to know what Jesus is saying to her in the TLIG messages. At the end of this conference, many Muslims were interested to not only have the Heaven is Real but so is Hell book, which is her autobiography, but also to obtain the TLIG One Book. As a confirmation to the authenticity of the messages, Fr. Joseph explained the CDF clarifications in the appendix of the TLIG One Book.
Vassula’s courtesy visit with His Excellency Most Rev. Antonio Ledesma, SJ, DD, Archbishop of Cagayan de Oro
Vassula told the archbishop about her vision of Our Lady telling her that it is not enough to feed people with spiritual food; they need physical food as well, especially the poor. And so, TLIG prayer groups opened centers to feed the poor and hungry, known as Beth Myriams (House of Mary) around the world. She showed pictures of some of the TLIG Beth Myriams, adding that there are Beth Myriams in the Philippines: in Cagayan Valley, in Manila and in Calbayog.
The conversation then shifted to a discussion about the ecumenical activities of TLIG, which thoroughly interested the archbishop, as he is working very hard for peace and harmony in the Muslim areas of Mindanao. Vassula invited the archbishop to the TLIG Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Moscow in September so as to have a foretaste of the Unity that Jesus is longing for. Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr, who was with us, showed him photographs of previous pilgrimages, which interested him very much.
Vassula with TLIG-Philippines: courtesy visit with Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ, DD. Seated from left: Evangelical Pastor Jonathan Pineda, Avelina Rosales (TLIG-Cebu), Tina dela Cruz (TLIG-Antipolo), Cora Zaballa (TLIG-Quezon City), Vassula, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ, DD, Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, Fr. Julio Gaddi (TLIG-Phils. spiritual adviser), Raymond Lara (TLIG-Quezon City).
Listen to this Heart your God is offering you
When we arrived at Mt. Carmel Parish in Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City for the 5:30 p.m. Mass and Vassula’s talk, members of TLIG prayer groups from Quezon City, Cebu and Davao were already selling TLIG books near the church entrance. A few soldiers with bomb-sniffing canines were on site to ensure public safety.
The Holy Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ, DD, and con-celebrated by Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr., Fr. Bon Genson, SSJV, the assistant parish priest of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish, Fr. Indra Pamungkas, SCJ, and Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi.
Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr., Fr. Bon Genson, SSJV, the assistant parish priest of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish, Vassula, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ, DD, Fr. Indra Pamungkas, SCJ, and Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, STL.
The archbishop’s homily focused on “the two greatest commandments.” He then informed the public about the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism, encouraging Catholics to reach out to people of other beliefs. By uniting and loving one another, we shall be fulfilling these commandments. He then reiterated his invitation for everyone to stay for Vassula’s presentation after the Mass.
Immediately after Mass, the program began with welcome remarks from Archbishop Ledesma. Vassula was then introduced by Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi. Since this was the first time Vassula was invited to speak in Cagayan de Oro, she asked for a raise of hands from those in the audience who were hearing about the True Life in God messages for the first time. The archbishop humbly raised his hand, along with many others in the audience. It is worth mentioning that the audience was not only composed of people from Cagayan de Oro, but also from the nearby islands, cities and towns, like Ilagan City, Davao City and Cebu City. Some even travelled from Manila and Laguna.
A church-full audience not only from Cagayan De Oro, but also from Manila and from neighboring islands, cities and towns came to listen to Vassula
Vassula firstly narrated the beginning of her call. She explained how she receives the messages through interior locutions and at times, through a light in her intellect. She admitted her prior ignorance about spiritual things, and her distance from God at the beginning of her call. At the time, she thought that there was only one Church with different nationalities. Then when God the Father approached her and said, “I am your Father” (cf. TLIG Messages, July 25, 1987), His words affected her in a manner that brought meaning to her heart.
She said that the messages of True Life in God are God’s gift for our times. It is God’s call to repentance, to a life of unceasing prayer, to a life of reconciliation and to Unity in diversity. God comes to us in these messages to not only console us, but also to re-educate us. She said that Jesus is even sending Our Blessed Mother in over 300 apparitions around the world (according to author Msgr. René Laurentin), to bring us all back to Her Son, Jesus. In a vision she experienced when she was around 11 years of age, Vassula saw herself walking near Christ, getting ready to marry Him; then she entered a room where Mama Mary was waiting for her with two other holy women. With smiles, Mother Mary began arranging her marriage dress, pulling it here and there; then, simultaneously, she was fixing her hair, trying to perfect her for Her Son. This is indeed one of Mama Mary’s roles: to reach out and perfect us for Her Son Jesus Christ. “Conversion is not a one-time thing…it never stops,” she said.
Vassula speaking about True Life in God at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish, Cagayan de Oro
She then declared that the world has apostatized. In the West, the churches are empty, and the dioceses are selling their cathedrals, which are renovated as casinos, hotels, cafeterias, pubs, etc. However, in the East, Russia is building more churches and cathedrals because the churches are so packed with people. She quoted our Lord in a TLIG message from 1989: “I shall not be silent until I will Glorify My Body and renew My entire Church, learn all you who want to suppress My Spirit of Grace and who want to muffle down My Voice, that your evil efforts and your evil intentions are all in vain; I will keep stretching My Hand to everyone, even to the rebels, even to those who provoke Me night and day, see? you are all My People, no matter what creed or race, remember I am LOVE and I have created you all; today My Salvation Plan covers the entire world; I have been and I am, sending you messengers in every nation, to progress you in your faith, to convert you, to establish peace and love, to unite you, so do not try to muffle down My Voice and My Mother’s Calls; Our Voices will keep coming upon you like a hammer shattering the rocks until the Day of My Glory;” (TLIG Messages, May 1, 1989)
God is sending the Holy Spirit as never before to make His creation new. This is the fulfillment of Pope John XXIII’s prayer for a Second Pentecost. In a TLIG message from February, 2003, the Lord said: “from above I saw a massive graveyard and the stench of the putrefying bodies was spreading in the entire cosmos...the world, decaying, is covered by darkness, swallowed by obscurity, so am I to see continuously My sons and heirs enslaved and dying? for how long am I to see My own household torn asunder and riven?” (TLIG Messages, "Odes of the Holy Trinity" (the Son) February-April 2003)
Vassula went on to tell the audience about her mission on Unity. She spoke of another vision--of the three iron bars, representing the three different Christian denominations: Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. She asked, “How can the heads of these three bars meet unless they all bend in humility and love? The keys to Unity are humility and love. Satan is the divider and our division maimed the Mystical Body of Christ. Can a body that is maimed function well?” The Lord finally asked Vassula to pull out the lance’s blade that lies deep in His Heart. Christ enabled her to understand that the blade represents our division and that she has to work for Christian Unity.
“Christ is asking us to REPENT,” she emphasized. “We have to empty ourselves, die to ourselves, so that the Holy Spirit can invade us with His Light to know God’s Will. Jesus is always ready to forgive us. And so, we must also learn to forgive one another. We should not keep a grudge; this is what we pray for in the Our Father. In a TLIG message, the Lord said: 'if you only knew how I am ready to forgive your era’s crimes by just one kind look at Me, a moment’s regret, a sigh of hesitation, a slight reconsideration; a smile at My Holy Face and I shall forgive and forget, I shall not even look at My Wounds, I will efface from My sight all your iniquities and sins, had you one mere moment of regret; and all Heaven would celebrate at your gesture, for your smile and your kind look will be received like incense by Me, and that slight moment of regret will be heard like a new song by Me;'" (TLIG Messages, August 29, 1989)
“Repentance is making peace with God,” Vassula remarked. “The fruit of repentance is love.” She said, "Furthermore, each church has to go through an unceasing repentance to achieve Unity. A life in the Spirit is like a fish that lives its life in the water; the fish moves in the water and breathes in the water and so with us in the Spirit." She ended her talk with the sentiment of God the Father, "It will be a great pity if you die now without having tasted My sweetness." (cf. TLIG Messages, June 22, 1998)
After Vassula’s talk, Fr. Joseph showed the print on canvas painting of “Christ’s Agony in Gethsemane” painted by Vassula. He informed the audience that anyone who purchases this limited edition canvas will be helping TLIG in its mission for Unity and its apostolate towards feeding the poor through the Beth Myriams around the world.
Fr. Joseph showing Vassula’s print on canvas painting, “Christ’s Agony in Gethsemane.”
Vassula told the story about her painting talent: “After my purification (seeing my soul with God’s eyes), I gave God my whole heart. I said, ‘Take me, do with me whatever you want.’ And so I thought I had fully surrendered my will to Him. Then after a week’s time, He (Jesus) asked me, ‘Do you have anything to give me?’ Then I said, ‘I can paint you an icon.’ But He said, ‘The gift of art, Vassula, also comes from Me. Everything that is good comes from Me.’ ‘Then, I have nothing of my own that I can give you,’ I said. And He replied, ‘Yes you do…your will…I want you to give me your will…every single day.’” (cf. TLIG Messages, May 29, 1987)
Subsequently, Vassula asked everyone to stand up to pray the “Prayer for Healing and Deliverance” raising her crucifix which holds the relic of the True Cross. After the prayer, Vassula asked everybody to sit down again as she narrated one (last) lesson on “WE, US.” (cf. TLIG Messages, July 14, 1988) She said, “One day, while I was receiving a dictation from Jesus, which sometimes takes a few minutes, but sometimes it takes hours, I remembered I was cooking something in the oven, which could get burned if I don’t turn it off. Jesus did not say, ‘go down and turn it off.’ He said, ‘What are WE waiting for? Let US go and switch it off!’' Remember always the Presence of Jesus by practicing the “WE, US."
Vassula requested everyone to pray for Unity, especially for the unification of the dates of Easter between the Orthodox and the Catholics. She told the audience of Jesus’ promise that if we unite the dates of Easter, He will send the Holy Spirit in full force so that the Church completely unites in diversity. Moreover, all these terrorist movements will stop! The program ended with a song from the choir. Many books were sold, especially the TLIG One Book and Heaven is Real, But so is Hell.
Thanks be to God for this blessed day!
March 25, 2017 (Saturday): After yesterday’s full schedule, we left the hotel after noon to go to the Sacred Heart Formation House in Aluba, Macasandig, for an ecumenical conference. On our arrival at Cagayan de Oro two days prior, we had learned that the priest who was supposed to help organize this ecumenical conference had not sent out the invitations that were given to him three weeks before the event! When the archbishop heard about this, he immediately contacted a friend from the Xavier University Campus Ministry, asking him to invite some Protestant pastors. Three pastors came from Xavier University: Rev. Pastor Pedro A. Sarceda of the Cagayan de Oro Evangelical Ministers Association (COEMA) Free Methodist Church (FMC), Rev. Joel Bagundol, and Rev. Ricardo C. Yanez Jr. (both from UCCP: United Church of Christ in the Philippines). Also present were Evangelical Pastor Jonathan Pineda from Binangonan Rizal and Brother Antonio Bermudez, MSPM.
At the Ecumenical Conference with Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr., Pastor Jonathan Pineda (Evangelical Church, Binangonan Rizal), Bro. Antonio Bermudez, MSPM, Rev. Pedro A. Sarceda (COEMA FMC), Vassula, Rev. Joel Bagundol and Rev. Ricardo C. Yanez Jr. (both from UCCP: United Church of Christ in the Philippines) and Fr. Indra Pamungkas, SCJ, our host.
The program began with an opening prayer and a welcome greeting from Fr. Indra Pamungkas, SCJ, an Indonesian priest formator for the SCJ seminary in Pagadian City. He was involved with TLIG-Philippines during the rehabilitation of Botong Island in Banatayan, Cebu, for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda). He came to the 2015 TLIG Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Rome, and is spiritually guiding some TLIG Filipino youth in Cavite and Ilagan City. Last year, he helped organize Vassula’s mission to Indonesia.
After his greeting, Vassula was then introduced by Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr. She began her talk with a message from Jesus: "see? you are all My People, no matter what creed or race, remember, I am LOVE, and I have created you all; today My Salvation Plan covers the entire world; .. so, do not try to muffle down My Voice and My Mother’s Calls; Our voices will keep coming upon you like a hammer shattering the rocks until the Day of My Glory;" (TLIG Messages, May 1, 1989)
Vassula then spoke about Unity. She said, “This (Unity) will become official because Jesus prayed to the Father pleading, ‘Let them be one,'--so it will happen.” She continued, “It will take its time but it will happen; either by peace terms or by fire, but it will happen.” She then said, “The Church is One and has always been One. But the people of the Church are those who, with their quarrels, prejudices, pride and mainly their lack of love for one another, managed to divide themselves--and we all know it. This division is directed against Christ. Christ, offended, said in a message, 'My Kingdom on earth is My Church and the Eucharist is the Life of My Church, this Church I Myself have given you; --I had left you with one Church, but hardly had I left, just barely had I turned My back to go to the Father, than you reduced My House to a desolation! you levelled it to the ground! and My flock is straying left and right...for how long am I to drink of the Cup of your division? cup of affliction and devastation;'" (TLIG Messages, November 14, 1991)
She said that the ‘devastation’ the Lord speaks about surfaced through our division which in turn brought a great apostasy in the world. She said that this apostasy is greater in the West: that is, in Europe and the United States of America. She said, “Here in the Philippines, I can see Christianity still hanging in. And I always talk about the Philippines. That if everybody was like the Filipinos, maybe God would not have come and start calling us to repent and terminate our division.” She said that apostasy has been stretched so badly in Europe that the church dioceses are selling churches and cathedrals because they are empty. She continued, “And while the West is selling their cathedrals, the East, which is Russia, is building cathedrals and repairing those that during communism were torn down because they are so packed with lay people. Their faith, which had been prohibited for so for many years under communism, has come back. They are really clinging onto Jesus Christ, and are never letting go. They are so crowded in their churches that they are building cathedrals to put in their people."
"This has been prophesied in Medjugorje, and also in True life in God. Russia will glorify God more than any other country. The search for reconciliation and Unity must pervade the whole life of the Church and should become our priority, so as to reach this goal, which is Christ’s goal. It is our due to God, it is our obligation to God, and it is our responsibility to safeguard the credibility of the Church. However, no matter how much the Church struggles to attain this goal of Unity, so long as the Feast of Easter is not unified and not celebrated as one date, our division will remain and there will be no progress. For years now, Christ has been asking the people of His Church to unify the Easter dates. If this is done, He will do the rest to unify us all and to bring us to complete Unity in diversity. If Christ asks us to do something, it’s because it’s an easy step to take. He does not ask us to take any difficult steps."
She stressed the important role of the laity. She said that Unity is pushed by the lay people who have the right to express themselves as part of the Mystical Body of Christ. She then continued, “To live in Unity with love and humility is not a question of sentimentality; nor is it trading the faith and the truth. It is to declare the truth from the Scriptures, and live every word of the Gospel. We should not remain dead to the Word of God. The Christians that remain divided do not live in the truth. No matter how credible and righteous they want to appear in the world’s eyes, and no matter how many Hail Marys and devotions they would be doing, their lack of love and their lack of humility, and the disobedience to the supplications of Christ’s prayer ‘That we may be one’ (cf. TLIG Messages, December 10, 2001), are a give-away sign of their rigidity and their disobedience to Jesus. All who call themselves Christians and abide divided have broken the commandment of Jesus Christ who said, ‘Love one another.’ So, our division is a sin. It is the transgression and the rejection of the commandment of our Lord and the call of Unity. Our sin of division has destroyed part of the Church, dragging it into a great apostasy, which made desolation out of it. How can the Body of Christ be recognizable in us if we remain divided? And worse, how could the world believe that it was the Father who sent Christ?”
Vassula warned the audience that if they live that Unity, people in authority will prohibit them from spreading it, as did the rulers, elders and scribes who persecuted Peter and John. The Lord says, “they hold the keys to the Kingdom of God, neither do they enter themselves nor allow others to enter.” (cf. TLIG Messages, August 5-29, 1990) She advised, “Today, our response should also be the same as Peter’s and John’s, who had said, 'You must judge whether in God’s eyes it is right to listen to you and not to God. We cannot promise to stop proclaiming what we have seen and heard.’” (Acts 4:19) She encouraged everyone to pray much for Pope Francis to be inspired to unite the dates of Easter. She ended her talk by asking everyone to stand and pray together the “Prayer for Unity” from the TLIG message dated April 30, 1990, which was printed on prayer cards and distributed to the audience.
The Protestant pastors were taking notes as Vassula spoke. After the talk, Pastor Jonathan spoke of an experience he had with the TLIG-Antipolo prayer group members and attested that yes, the TLIG messages really do come from God. Vassula then opened the floor for a question-and-answer session. Our Protestant pastors asked some interesting questions which Vassula and Fr. Joseph gladly responded to.
Members of TLIG-Cagayan de Oro prayer group with (seated) Fr. Julio Gaddi Jr., Fr. Indra Pamungkas, SCJ (our host), Vassula, Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, and Pastor Jonathan Pineda.
A very rare opportunity for a “selfie” with Vassula.
March 26, 2017 (Sunday): The next morning, we were picked up from our hotel to catch our 11:00 a.m. flight back to Manila. While at the waiting lounge of the airport, our group met His Excellency Most Rev. Paciano B. Aniceto, DD, Archbishop Emeritus of San Fernando, Pampanga, whom we met last January while he was leading the Ecumenical Liturgy for the first day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in San Fernando, Pampanga.
Archbishop Paciano Aniceto was pleased to meet Vassula at the lounge of Laguindingan Airport in Cagayan de Oro while waiting for the flight to Manila.
The archbishop told stories of ecumenical efforts of the church in his archdiocese while we informed him of the mission of TLIG on Christian Unity.
Cora, Vassula, Archbishop Aniceto and Fr. Julio
Our plane landed in Manila shortly before 1:00 p.m. We were able to partake in a Mass, a short meeting, and a late lunch with very little rest, before leaving for Vassula’s live interview at ABS-CBN’s DZMM Teleradyo “Salitang Buhay” (“The Word Alive” in English), aired every Sunday from 8:30 – 10:00 p.m. The program is hosted by two SVD (Society of the Divine Word) priests: Fr. Bel San Luis (also a columnist of the Manila Bulletin newspaper) and Fr. Jerome Marquez (a parish priest of the Diocesan Shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus), and a lay person, Ms. Ilsa Reyes (involved with the Ministry on Inner Healing).
Along with the hosts, Fr. Roland Tuazon, CM, came to see and support Vassula. Fr. Roland, assistant chair of the Quezon City Ecumenical Fellowship (QCEF) group, was responsible for organizing Vassula’s ecumenical meeting last year, so as to share TLIG at Santuario de San Vicente de Paul parish in Tandang Sora, Quezon City, in the Diocese of Novaliches. This radio program reaches Filipinos overseas--the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Dubai, etc.), as well as subscribers of TFC (The Filipino Channel) in the USA, Canada, and Europe. The program may also be accessed through the Internet, via live streaming.
After having been introduced by Fr. Bel, Vassula shared the beginning of her call 32 years ago. She also spoke of her mission. When the Lord asked, “Which house is more important, your house or My House?" She answered, “Your House Lord.” Jesus then said, “Revive My House, embellish My House, unite My House.” (cf. TLIG Messages, November 28, 1995) At the beginning, Jesus had to teach her slowly; He even had to teach her the meaning of some Scripture passages. Jesus prepared her for the TLIG mission by teaching her to die to herself so that the Holy Spirit could breathe inside her. This is what Vassula is trying to transmit to the people: the Love of God, the Mercy of God, the need to die to oneself to respond to the Holy Spirit within, and the call to Unity that Jesus wants.
When asked how she received each message, Vassula said that it comes in two ways: one is through locution, wherein she hears the words and feels the tone of the voice. She hears the words, even words that are new to her, ones she needs to look-up in a dictionary. Another way is by receiving a light of understanding in her intellect, which she notates. Fr. Jerome asked, “How sure are we that the messages really come from God, because the devil can also deceive us?” and Fr. Joseph replied, “One thing the devil cannot do, is turn people to the Sacraments of the Church." After clarifying this concept to our hosts, Vassula shared that Jesus said, “the biggest miracle is the change of heart and going back to the Sacraments of the Church” (cf. TLIG Messages, December 12, 1996), which the devil will never do. When the same question surfaced again from a viewer, Fr. Joseph said, “Every tree is known by its fruit. Those who read the writings go back to the Sacraments of Confession and Communion, with great reverence.”
When Fr. Bel asked Vassula if she ever asked God why there is so much suffering in the world, Vassula shared what Jesus said, “If you die, it is because of your apostasy.” (cf. TLIG Messages, January 13, 1988) Then she shared what our Blessed Mother said, "the world has become cold to the love of God, they don’t love God … there is hatred, there’s egoism, and there’s all these, and if disasters fall upon you … and (also) diseases … it is because you are drawing them with your sinfulness, you are auto-destroying yourselves. And it is not God who gives you all of these as you might believe." (cf. TLIG Messages, September 11, 1991) She concluded by referring to Jesus' warning, "And so Satan is deceiving the world with the same lie he deceived Eve; that you can be God and you don’t need God.’ (cf. TLIG Messages, June 1, 2002) She ended her message this way. "It is the apostasy that brings all these things.”
The conversation then evolved onto the issue of the TLIG One Book having a Nihil Obstat and an Imprimatur. Fr. Joseph explained, "The Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat … is an exercise of the ordinary magisterium of the Church. And that’s a universal authority. It’s not a universal doctrine, but it means that the bishop in union with the Pope, exercising his ordinary magisterium, through the Imprimatur, is teaching the Catholics throughout the world.”
Ilsa, the anchorwoman, asked Fr. Jerome to explain the meaning of these words in Tagalog (the Filipino language). Fr. Jerome said, “When we say Nihil Obstat, it means there is ‘nothing objectionable’ to the faith contained in this book, True Life in God. This approval was given by Felix Toppo, SJ, DD, a Bishop of Jamshedpur. So, after the bishop read all the contents of this book, True Life in God, he found nothing objectionable.” Finally, Fr. Bel clarified that Imprimatur means ‘It can be printed.’ Fr. Jerome continued, “The person who gave the Imprimatur is the Archbishop Emeritus of Lipa, Ramon Arguelles. It means this book, True Life in God, can be printed. The bishops read everything before they give the Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat.” Ilsa clarified, “It means that in this book, nothing objectionable can be found against the teachings of the Catholic Church.” Fr. Jerome concluded by saying, “It does not have to be read by the Pope. Bishops within their own dioceses can read it and give their approval.”
Vassula seated beside Ilsa Reyes, the only lay anchor woman of the radio show, “Salitang Buhay”, who also attended Vassula’s talk in 2016 at Santuario de San Vicente de Paul parish in Tandang Sora.
When the conversation drifted into Jesus’ request to unite the dates of Easter, Vassula stated, “The first thing that Jesus asks us to do for Unity is to unify the dates of Easter. They are not unified. And why does He ask this? He asks this because it’s feasible and it’s easy for us to do. And that it could be done in humility and love because He says, ‘the keys to Unity are humility and love.' And since we are not still there, it means that the keys are missing: humility and love. So this is the first thing we have to do; celebrate Easter on one date. If this is done, He promised, ‘I will send My Holy Spirit in such a way that they will know how to manage to complete the unity in diversity,’ (cf. TLIG Messages, October 24, 1994) the way Jesus wants it.”
When Fr. Bel asked if Jesus gave her a message on how to remedy or solve social problems like, corrupt practices, terrorism and other criminalities, Vassula narrated the story of Bishop Oliver from Nigeria, where 49 churches were burned down by a terrorist group, Boko Haram. When the bishop prayed to Jesus about this ongoing terrorism, Jesus appeared to him. Jesus came walking towards him with a sword in His Hands. As soon as the bishop touched the sword, it became a Rosary. And Jesus said three times, “Boko Haram is gone.” Vassula emphasized the importance of offering prayers from the heart and how important it is to also pray for others. She said that “praying for others resembles God’s love, because it is as if you are shedding your own blood for people whom you don’t even know.”
Toward the end of her interview, Vassula mentioned the Beth Myriams--TLIG centers established around the world for the feeding of the poor. As an extension to the interview, people also called in, asking for the official TLIG website, where the TLIG books can be purchased and for their prices. After the radio show, the interview continued until we said goodbye to our hosts in the lobby of the station.
Rev. Fr. Jerome Marquez, SVD, inquiring more about the messages that Vassula receives, even when the show was over
A group photo after the show: From left, Fr. Jerome Marquez, SVD, Cora Zaballa, Fr. Roland Tuazon, CM , Fr. Joseph Iannuzzi, Vassula, Ilsa Reyes, Mica Lara, Celia De Guia, Ari Lara, and Fr. Bel San Luis, SVD.
This radio interview concluded Vassula's twelfth visit to the Philippines and her 2017 Mission to Asia.
March 27, 2017 (Monday): The following day, Vassula and Fr. Joseph had ample time to rest prior to their long trip back to Athens. They checked-in at the airport at 10:00 p.m. for their 12:40 a.m. flight on March 28.
We give thanks to Jesus and Mama Mary
for making this TLIG mission in the Philippines
a triumph for Our Triune God!
By: Cora Zaballa
11th Ecumenical True Life in God Pilgrimage to Russia
Vassula in Paris
Mission to Lebanon and Syria
Mission to China
The Australian Mission
Mission to Vietnam
Vassula in Italy
Nordic Countries Program 2017
Nordic Countries Continuation 2017
Vassula Visits South Lebanon
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New anti-tobacco law expected soon
http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/news/qatar/384547/new-anti-tobacco-law-expected-soon
DOHA: The State Cabinet has taken steps to issue the much-anticipated anti-tobacco law that stipulates stricter punishment for smoking in closed public places.
The draft law has stipulated strict measures to curb the import and use of tobacco products and its derivatives and a ban on electronic cigarettes, “sweika” and other chewing tobacco.
The decision was taken by the Cabinet at its regular weekly session yesterday after noting the recommendation of the Advisory Council on the draft law.
The new law, once issued, will replace the existing anti-tobacco law (No. 20 of 2002).
The Cabinet endorsed its draft decision on establishing a standing committee to review the pricing of fuel in local markets.
The decision stipulates that the committee will be chaired by a representative of the Ministry of Energy and Industry and is to include representatives from authorities concerned as members.
The objective of the committee is to execute the government’s plan to liberalize fuel prices in the domestic markets, Qatar News Agency reported yesterday.
Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani chaired the session at the Emiri Diwan.
The session endorsed a draft Emiri decision on the organisational structure of the Foreign Ministry.
It agreed to the application of provisions of Law No. 24 of 2002 on the retirement and pension of Qatari employees of some entities.
Heavy crackdown needed on smoking in public places
http://www.gulf-times.com/opinion/189/details/467217/heavy-crackdown-needed-on-smoking-in-public-places
Though Qatar has a law banning smoking in public places, it is unfortunate that the implementation part is lacking, Dr Ahmed Mohamed al-Mulla, director of Anti-Smoking Clinic, Hamad Medical Corporation, had pointed out to Gulf Times earlier this year. We are approaching the end of the year and sadly nothing has changed in this regard.
“The Supreme Council of Health has deputed several officers to check the practice. But at the ground level, not much action is taking place. There must be a greater enforcement of the law,” the senior Qatari official had urged. It seems the powers that be are yet to listen to his fervent plea.
On the contrary, smoking in public places has gone up of late. Smokers are puffing away, as if with a vengeance, polluting the air and endangering the lives of non-smokers, who are helpless victims of a crime against good health and wellness.
It is very difficult for non-smokers to visit many public places in Qatar these days. Even a family-friendly recreation location such as the picturesque Museum of Islamic Art Park in Doha reeks of tobacco smoke. Entrances of all popular malls in the country are clouded with tobacco smoke as smokers crowd around and smoke.
Though the managements of malls generally succeed in enforcing the ban on smoking inside their premises, it is unfortunate that some individuals continue to violate the law with impunity, smoking in some coffee shops, sitting right under the ‘No Smoking’ signs. This is nothing but arrogance coupled with ignorance. The staff members at such outlets plead helplessness as the persons who break the law against smoking in public places happen to be “very influential.”
According to facts from the World Health Organisation, tobacco kills up to half of its users. Around 6mn people die each year because of tobacco use. More than 5mn of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while more than 600,000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke, which fills restaurants, offices or other enclosed spaces when people burn tobacco products such as cigarettes, bidis and water-pipes. There are more than 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, of which at least 250 are known to be harmful and more than 50 are known to cause cancer.
There is no safe level of exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke. In adults, second-hand smoke causes serious cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, including coronary heart disease and lung cancer. In infants, it causes sudden death. In pregnant women, it causes low birth weight.
Almost half of children regularly breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke in public places. In 2004, children accounted for 28% of the deaths attributable to second-hand smoke.
A decision by Katara, the Cultural Village Foundation, earlier this year banning shisha smoking at restaurants at its premises, ought to be emulated elsewhere in Qatar. In an interview with Gulf Times, Dr al-Mulla had called for shifting shisha outlets out of the Doha city limits.
Also needed is a heavy crackdown on all other forms of smoking in public places. Every person should be able to breathe tobacco-smoke-free air. When will Qatar residents be able to breathe clean air? The ball is in the court of the authorities concerned.
Qatar- Call for banning tobacco ads on TV, newspapers
http://www.menafn.com/1094241475/Qatar–Call-for-banning-tobacco-ads-on-TV-newspapers
(MENAFN – The Peninsula) A senior GCC official has called on member-states to ban depiction of characters smoking in TV serials and dramas and bar advertising of cigarettes and other tobacco products in any form of media in the region.
The official told information ministry undersecretaries from the GCC states at their meeting here yesterday that an anti-smoking awareness campaign must be launched specially targeting vulnerable groups like school students and women.
“School students and women are the targets of cigarette and tobacco companies,” said Dr Mariam Azbi Al Jalahma, Assistant Undersecretary, public health ministry of Bahrain.
The meeting discussed a memo from the GCC Secretariat-General on measures to fight smoking in the region. Mariam said an anti-tobacco agreement reached among the GCC states earlier must be enforced.
She said characters must not be shown smoking in TV serials and dramas telecast in the region. Such plays must be banned as also promoting smoking through ad campaigns in the local media, whether print or electronic.
This was a preparatory meeting for the 23rd meeting of information ministers from the GCC states. Qatar doesn’t have an information ministry.
Sheikh Abdulrahman bin Hamad bin Jassem, of Qatar Media Corporation, represented Qatar at yesterday’s meeting. The Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage is in-charge of media and information affairs in Qatar.
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Today Kalkan
Kalkan History
Kalkan, known as Kalamaki in ancient times is thought to have been founded 150 - 200 years ago by traders from the Greek island of Meis or with the Greek name of Castellorizo, which is a couple of miles away from Kas town.
Their success encouraged other settlers of both Turkish and Greek origin particularly from Rhodes. In those days all were of course subject of the Ottoman empire.
The influence of the settlers from Meis can be seen in the similarity of the architecture between Meis and Kalkan. Having the only hospitable harbour between Fethiye and Kas also encouraged the development of the village.
In the old town there are two mosques now, one of them which is opposite of Akin pansion was originally Greek orthodox church and you can still see a small cross on the roof .
During the Ottoman Empire period over 500 years Turks and Greeks lived until the early 1920's in kalkan. Today you can see lots of smilarities between Turkish and Greek culture , cuisine and lifestyle.
The main occupation of the Kalkan people was trade. Produce was brought to the village from the high lands and the fertile Patara plain by camels and loaded , via small boats , onto large ships in the bay. From here the produce was taken east to Syria , Lebanon , Egypt , Cyprus and Rhodos , all members of the Ottoman Empire.
During the early 20th century, Kalkan appears to have been quite a prosperous port. There were 17 restaurants, a goldsmith and several tailors. There was also a customs house which was restored and has been used as a family house since. Other thriving industries were charcoal, silk, cotton, olive oil, grain, sesame (a trip to Bezirgan village in the summer will reveal fields of sesame), grapes and timber .
The first changes started to occur in the early 1920's with the founding of the Turkish Republic and exchange in the Greek and Turkish populations.Greeks who lived in kalkan and other parts of Turkey moved to Greece, Greek islands and Australia.Turks who were living in Greece and Greek islands moved to Turkey.
The first coastal road linking all the southern coastal towns opened in the early 1960's . At this time many people left Kalkan to make business in larger towns such as Antalya and Fethiye.
Kalkan's resurgence came in the late 1960's with visits from wealthy yachtsmen. Tourism received a large boost with the asphalting of the road between Kalkan and Fethiye in 1984 which change destiny of Kalkan.
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Families and the New Evangelization - Diocesan Evangelization Workshop
St. Joseph Parish Somers Point, NJ (map)
Pastors, pastoral associates, pastoral councils, parish evangelizations teams, staff, and parishioners are invited to participate in a series of evangelization workshops, scheduled throughout the diocese in upcoming weeks.
Sponsored by the Office of Evangelization, the workshops will provide practical tools to aid in evangelizing families in parish communities, and, in turn, enabling them to evangelize others.
The presenter will be Caroline Gambale-Dirkes. A 1993 graduate of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, she has been active in evangelization and youth ministry for 23 years.
She was the Eastern Regional Director for Life Teen, Diocesan Director of Youth Ministry for the Archdiocese of Newark, and Director of Evangelization at St. Joseph Church in Hillsborough, N.J. In 2013, she received the National Evangelization Team Distinguished Alumni Award for her ongoing commitment to evangelization.
Gambale-Dirkes has spoken internationally at numerous diocesan rallies, retreats and conferences, including the National Charismatic Leadership Conference, Steubenville Youth Conference, National Catholic Youth Conference, and Life Teen Adult Training Conference. Presently she does multi-generational evangelization.
The first session took place on Thursday, April 16 at St. Charles Borromeo Parish in Sicklerville.
Upcoming workshops will be on Tuesday, April 21 at St. Joseph Parish, Somers Point; and Wednesday, April 29 at Our Lady of Peace Parish, Williamstown.
Both workshops are from 7 p.m.- 9 p.m, and admission is free.
For registration or more information, call 856-583-6170 or e-mail [email protected]
Voices For Truth Teen Workshop
Be Strong & Courageous Conference
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Stranded after a tragic plane crash, two strangers must forge a connection to survive the extreme elements of a remote snow covered mountain. When they realize help is not coming, they embark on a perilous journey across the wilderness.
Fool's Gold (2008)
Charming but luckless treasure hunter Ben Finnegan has sacrificed his relationship with his wife to search for the Queen's Dowry, a legendary treasure lost at sea. But the discovery of a new clue rekindles his hope for riches -- and his marriage.
The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)
Charles 'Slim' Lindbergh struggles to finance and design an airplane that will make his New York to Paris flight the first solo transatlantic crossing.
Brave Hearts: Umizaru (2012)
Mika (Riisa Naka) is a flight attendant on board an airplane scheduled to land at Haneda Airport. On the way to the airport the airplane's engine starts to burn. In order to save the 346 people on board the airplane, sea marshall Daisuke Senzaki (Hideaki Ito) and his team are called into action ...
In Alaska, an oil drilling team struggle to survive after a plane crash strands them in the wild. Hunting the humans are a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.
Alive (1993)
The amazing, true story of a Uruguayan rugby team's plane that crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, and their immense will to survive and pull through alive, forced to do anything and everything they could to stay alive on meager rations and through the freezing cold.
Cry of the Innocent (1980)
A Green Beret-veteran businessman investigates the plane crash in Ireland that killed his family.
Pola X (1999)
A writer leaves his upper-class life and journeys with a woman claiming to be his sister, and her two friends.
Passengers (2008)
After a plane crash, a young therapist, Claire, is assigned by her mentor to counsel the flight's five survivors. When they share their recollections of the incident -- which some say include an explosion that the airline claims never happened -- Claire is intrigued by Eric, the most secretive of the passengers
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)
In 1911, Vernon Castle, minor stage comic meets stage-struck Irene Foote. A few misadventures later, they're married. They abandon comedy to attempt a dancing career, which lands them in Paris without a sou. Fortunately, agent Maggie Sutton hears them rehearse and starts them on their brilliant career as the world's foremost ballroom dancers. But at the height of their fame, World War I begins...
Siberia (1998)
Goof and Hugo are flatmates in Amsterdam who have made a tidy sum from having sex with tourists, then robbing them. Their goal is to spend the money together on a world trip and their scam is going well until they meet Lara, originally from Siberia, whom Goof becomes besotted with (IMDB)
Regular Lovers (2005)
1968 and 1969 in Paris: during and after the student and trade union revolt. François is 20, a poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself. They fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?
Jacqueline Susann's Once is Not Enough (1975)
An over-the-hill movie producer marries a wealthy, spiteful woman and closeted lesbian just to please his spoiled daughter who then, in an attempt to spite him, seduces both a wealthy playboy and a local screenwriter.
V.O.S. (2009)
A game between four characters. A comedy about love and friendship. A film about the great lie of story telling that moves between reality and fiction.
Lost Horizon (1973)
This retelling of the classic tale of James Hilton's Utopian lost world plays out uneasily amid musical production numbers and Bacharach pop music. While escaping war-torn China, a group of Europeans crash in the Himalayas, where they are rescued and taken to the mysterious Valley of the Blue Moon, Shangri-La. Hidden from the rest of the world, Shangri-La is a haven of peace and tranquility for world-weary diplomat Richard Conway. His ambitious brother, George, sees it as a prison from which he must escape, even if it means risking his life and bringing destruction to the ancient culture of Shangri-La.
Down to Earth (2001)
After dying before his time, an aspiring comic gets a second shot at life... by being reincarnated as a wealthy but un-likable businessman.
Contamination (1980)
A former astronaut helps a government agent and a police detective track the source of mysterious alien pod spores, filled with lethal flesh-dissolving acid, to a South American coffee plantation controlled by alien pod clones.
The Admiral Was a Lady (1950)
Ex-WAVE encounters four fun-loving, work-hating men, all of whom want to marry her.
S.O.S Mulheres ao Mar (2014)
Bill Marks is a burned-out veteran of the Air Marshals service. He views the assignment not as a life-saving duty, but as a desk job in the sky. However, today's flight will be no routine trip. Shortly into the transatlantic journey from New York to London, he receives a series of mysterious text messages ordering him to have the government transfer $150 million into a secret account, or a passenger will die every 20 minutes.
Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942)
Circus owner Buck Rand kidnaps Boy to perform in his show. He forces a pilot to fly him, Boy and his animal trainer out of the jungle. Tarzan and Jane follow them to New York. At a trial over custody of Boy, Tarzan becomes violent and is jailed. With the help of the pilot's girlfriend Tarzan (who has since escaped, diving off the Brooklyn Bridge) finds the circus. He and the circus elephants complete the classic rescue.
Under Siege 2 - Dark Territory (1995)
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory is a 1995 American action film set on board a train traveling through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Los Angeles. Directed by Geoff Murphy, it stars Steven Seagal as the ex-Navy SEAL, Casey Ryback and is the sequel to the 1992 film Under Siege also starring Seagal. The film was produced by Seagal along with Arnon Milchan and Steve Perry. The film's cast was made up of cameos and supporting roles by Everett McGill, Peter Greene, Kurtwood Smith and a then-unknown Katherine Heigl along with Nick Mancuso, Andy Romano, and Dale Dye, who were the only other cast members besides Seagal to reprise their roles from the first film. The sequel revolves around Casey Ryback who hops on a Colorado to LA train to start a vacation with his niece. Early into the trip, terrorists board the train and use it as a mobile HQ to hijack a top secret destructive US satellite. While not trained how to deal with a teenager, he soon encounters a situation he is trained for.
ReGeneration (2010)
ReGeneration is a 2010 American documentary film written and directed by Phillip Montgomery that looks at the issues facing today's youth and young adults, and the influences that contribute to America's current culture of apathy toward to political and social causes.
No Highway in the Sky (1951)
James Stewart plays aeronautical engineer Theodore Honey, the quintessential absent-minded professor: eccentric, forgetful, but brilliant. His studies show that the aircraft being manufactured by his employer has a subtle but deadly design flaw that manifests itself only after the aircraft has flown a certain number of hours. En route to a crash site to prove his theory, Honey discovers that he is aboard a plane rapidly approaching his predicted deadline.
Millennium (1989)
An investigator seeking the cause of an airline disaster discovers the involvement of an organisation of time travellers from a future Earth irreparably polluted who seek to rejuvenate the human race from those about to die in the past. Based on a novel by John Varley.
Flight (2012)
Commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker has a problem with drugs and alcohol, though so far he's managed to complete his flights safely. His luck runs out when a disastrous mechanical malfunction sends his plane hurtling toward the ground. Whip pulls off a miraculous crash-landing that results in only six lives lost. Shaken to the core, Whip vows to get sober -- but when the crash investigation exposes his addiction, he finds himself in an even worse situation.
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
A cargo plane goes down in a sandstorm in the Sahara with less than a dozen men on board. One of the passengers is an airplane designer who comes up with the idea of ripping off the undamaged wing and using it as the basis for an airplane they will build to escape before their food and water run out.
Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938)
In the jungle near Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Mr. Moto poses as an ineffectual archaeologist and a venerable holy man with mystical powers to help foil two insurgencies against the government.
United (2011)
United is based on the true story of Manchester United's legendary "Busby Babes", the youngest side ever to win the Football League and the 1958 Munich Air Crash that claimed eight of the their number. The film draws on first-hand interviews with the survivors and their families to tell the inspirational story of a team and community overcoming terrible tragedy.
Cast Away (2000)
Chuck, a top international manager for FedEx, and Kelly, a Ph.D. student, are in love and heading towards marriage. Then Chuck's plane to Malaysia ditches at sea during a terrible storm. He's the only survivor, and he washes up on a tiny island with nothing but some flotsam and jetsam from the aircraft's cargo. Can he survive in this tropical wasteland? Will he ever return to woman he loves?
The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978)
An aircraft crashes in the Florida Everglades, killing 103 passengers. After the wreckage is removed, salvageable parts from the plane are used to repair other aircraft. Soon passengers and crew on those aircraft report seeing what they believe to be the ghost of the wrecked airplane's flight engineer.
The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
Reporter John Klein is plunged into a world of impossible terror and unthinkable chaos when fate draws him to a sleepy West Virginia town whose residents are being visited by a great winged shape that sows hideous nightmares and fevered visions.
Silkwood (1983)
The story of Karen Silkwood, a metallurgy worker at a plutonium processing plant who was purposefully contaminated, psychologically tortured and possibly murdered to prevent her from exposing blatant worker safety violations at the plant.
Seven In Darkness (1969)
Seven blind people are on a plane on their way to a convention for the blind in Seattle. Due to bad weather, the plane crashes and only the seven blind people survive.
With a Song in My Heart (1952)
Jane Froman (Susan Hayward), an aspiring songstress, lands a job in radio with help from pianist Don Ross (David Wayne), whom she later marries. Jane's popularity soars, and she leaves on a European tour... but her plane crashes in Lisbon, and she is partially crippled. Unable to walk without crutches, Jane nevertheless goes on to entertain the Allied troops in World War II.
Survive! (1976)
Sixteen plane crash survivors stranded in the Andes turn to cannibalism to stay alive. Based on a true story.
World Trade Center (2006)
On September, 11th 2001, after the terrorist attack to the World Trade Center, the building collapses over the rescue team from the Port Authority Police Department. Will Jimeno and his sergeant John McLoughlin are found alive trapped under the wreckage while the rescue teams fight to save them.
Maid o' the Storm (1918)
Scottish fisherman Andy MacTavish rescues a baby whom he discovers washed up on the shore during a storm, and names her Ariel. As a girl, Ariel often dances on the beach and dreams of a man who will appear to her out of the mist. Her dream comes true when she witnesses an airplane crash in which the pilot, Franklin Shirley, is injured.
Aftermath (2017)
A fatal plane crash changes the lives of Roman and Jake forever. Roman loses his wife and daughter in the accident, while Jake, his mind as he happens to be the air traffic controller, who fails to avert the nightmare. Rage and revenge engulfs Roman and Jake finds himself swamped with guilt and regret. Can the two make peace with the past?
Fire and Rain (1989)
This movie is based on the actual events on the tragic day of August 2nd, 1985. Delta Airlines flight 191 en route to Los Angeles Via Dallas Ft Worth took off from Ft Lauderdale, Fl. When the plane was landing in Ft Worth wind-shear from a strong thunderstorm caused the plane to crash.
Men with Wings (1938)
Reporter Nicholas Ranson is jubilant when, on 17 Dec 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright take their first airplane flight. Back home in Underwood, Maryland, however, his uncle Hiram F. Jenkins, owner and editor of the local newspaper, refuses to print the story. Nicholas quits and continues to work on his own airplane, with the devoted help of his little daughter Peggy. Peggy is actually the first in her family to fly when her friends, Patrick Falconer and Scott Barnes, induce her to get inside a large kite they have made, and run with it in a field until she is airborne. The kite is caught in a tree, however, and Peggy gets a black eye. Later, Nicholas dies when his experimental airplane crashes, leaving his wife and children alone. By Peggy's adulthood, planes are capable of flying at an altitude of 11,000 feet, and speeds of nearly 100 m.p.h. Peggy continues her father's obsession with flight by helping Scott and Pat to build a plane.
Desperate Search (1952)
A man (Howard Keel), his wife (Jane Greer) and his famous-aviator ex-wife (Patricia Medina) search for their two children lost with a cougar.
Please, Let the Flowers Live (1986)
A lawyer who survives a plane crash takes the opportunity to take a new identity and begin a new life.
The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
A film about the life and career of the early rock and roll star.
Bright Eyes (1934)
An orphaned girl is taken in by a snobbish family at the insistence of their rich, crotchety uncle, even as her devoted aviator godfather fights for custody.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968)
Singer is a deaf-mute whose small world brings him in contact with a young girl, Mick, who cherishes a seemingly hopeless dream of becoming a concert pianist. At first hostile, Mick soon becomes friends with Singer, hoping to enlarge his small world. Three other central characters come to Singer for help also, each of them seeing in him a powerful force.
The Right to Live (1935)
A man (Colin Clive) with a broken back dies after his wife (Josephine Hutchinson) has an affair with his brother (George Brent).
Contract on Cherry Street (1977)
A policeman devises an unorthodox plan for bringing criminals to justice after his partner is brutally gunned down.
About Her Brother (2010)
Ginkos younger brother Tetsuro, a failed comedian, is the oddball of the family. Embarrassing, loud and plain inappropriate at times causes Ginko to disown him. The two reunite when she discovers Tetsuro is terminally ill. Tetsuros impending death marks the beginning of love and toleration.
Danny Collins (2015)
An ageing rock star decides to change his life when he discovers a 40-year-old letter written to him by John Lennon.
The Five People You Meet In Heaven (2004)
On his 83rd birthday, Eddie (Voight), a war vet and a maintenance worker at the Ruby Pier amusement park, dies while trying to save a girl who is sitting under a falling ride. When he awakens in the afterlife, he encounters five people with ties to his corporeal existence who help him understand the meaning of his life.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977)
An airplane carring coffee beans from South America has some unpleasant stowaways: a hoard of tarantulas which overcome the pilots as the airplane is flying over an orange-producing town in California. The airplane crashes, and the unlucky inhabitants of the town release the poisonous spiders into their midst. Once the town's officials discover that the tarantulas are responsible for several deaths, the tarantulas have already descended upon the town's only orange-processing factory. The town's citizens risk their lives to remove the tarantulas from the factory while the poisonous pests are rendered motionless by the transmitted sound of buzzing bees
Boom in the Moon (1946)
An American soldier (Keaton) during World War II escapes from an airplane crash over the Pacific Ocean. He arrives on a beach believing he has landed in Japan, but he is actually in Mexico. He wanders into a fishing village and is arrested under the mistaken belief that he is a wanted serial killer. Keaton and another prisoner are put in the custody of an scientist who is planning to launch a manned rocket into outer space. The two prisoners, along with the scientists assistant, are blasted into space but their craft lands in an isolated portion of Mexico instead. They mistake a beekeeper wearing protective headgear as an alien, while the beekeeper believes the trio (who are wearing wizard robes) are escaped lunatics. The prisoners and the scientists assistant are apprehended by the local police, and the matter is quickly settled. The film is notable both as Keatons only Mexican production and as the last time Keaton had star billing in a feature film.
Tarzan and the Lost Safari (1957)
Tarzan leads five passengers from a downed airplane out of the jungle. En route white hunter Hawkins tries to sell them to the Oparian chief.
Zombie Self-Defense Force (2006)
When a UFO crashes and releases radiation, the dead begin to rise in a cannibalistic frenzy. A group of soldiers and civilians make their way to a hotel and must fend off the zombie hordes.
Area 407 (2012)
Survivors of an airplane crash find themselves within the borders of a government testing area and pursued by predators.
Valley Uprising (2014)
In the shady campgrounds of Yosemite valley, climbers carved out a counterculture lifestyle of dumpster-diving and wild parties that clashed with the conservative values of the National Park Service. And up on the walls, generation after generation has pushed the limits of climbing, vying amongst each other for supremacy on Yosemite's cliffs. "Valley Uprising" is the riveting, unforgettable tale of this bold rock climbing tradition in Yosemite National Park: half a century of struggle against the laws of gravity -- and the laws of the land.
Mesa of Lost Women (1953)
A mad scientist, Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan), has created giant spiders in his Mexican lab in Zarpa Mesa to create a race of superwomen by injecting spiders with human pituitary growth hormones. Women develop miraculous regenerative powers, but men mutate into disfigured dwarves. Spiders grow to human size and intelligence.
During World War II, a plane full of RAF fighter crashes in the Ethiopian desert and they are met upon by an enemy Italian patrol that allows them to go free. But, when the Brits are given orders to attack the Italians, lots of problems ensue.
I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. (1982)
A pair of criminal brothers survive an airplane crash and discover a plot by aliens from outer space to conquer Earth by turning human beings in zombies.
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Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu
(Peru)
Avalanche/ landslide
Impacts of tourism / visitor / recreation
Delays in reviewing the Master Plan and developing detailed yearly operational plans, and inadequate budgetary support for effective implementation;
No evaluation of transport options, related geological studies, or the impact of bus traffic on increasing the risk of landslides;
Lack of impact studies related to the carrying capacity of the Citadel and Inca Trail;
Delays in the development and implementation of a public use plan;
Delays in implementing urban planning and control measures for Machu Picchu Village, the main point of entry to the property, which has impacted on the visual values of the property;
Lack of effective management of the property;
Lack of risk management plans related to natural disasters;
Inadequate governance arrangements including lack of adequate coordination of activities between different institutions and stakeholders involved in site management;
Uncontrolled visitor access to the western part of the Sanctuary, related to the construction of the Carrilluchayoc Bridge.
UNESCO Extra-Budgetary Funds until 2013
Total amount granted: USD 15,000 Extra-Budgetary Spanish FIT support for the social participation workshop requested by the World Heritage Committee (Decision 30 COM 7B.35).
Requests approved: 11 (from 1986-2001)
Total amount approved : 166,625 USD
2001 Request for a stone specialist for the assessment of ... (Approved) 5,000 USD
1992 Financial contribution for a training workshop on ... (Approved) 19,325 USD
1992 Organization of a training course for technicians, ... (Approved) 19,500 USD
1991 Preparation of a Master Plan for Machu Picchu (Approved) 40,000 USD
1991 Additional costs for technical consultancy for the ... (Approved) 6,000 USD
1991 Contribution to a monitoring exercise of the following ... (Approved) 3,300 USD
1991 Additional cost for technical consultancy for the ... (Approved) 4,000 USD
1989 Preparation of a technical cooperation project for a ... (Approved) 15,000 USD
1988 Contribution to purchase of fire-fighting equipment and ... (Approved) 20,000 USD
1986 Support for associated training activities related to ... (Approved) 8,000 USD
1986 Financial support for the implementation of the ... (Approved) 26,500 USD
April, 2007: World Heritage Centre/IUCN/ICOMOS reactive monitoring mission; January 2009: World Heritage Centre/IUCN/ICOMOS reinforced monitoring mission; February 2010: World Heritage Centre technical emergency mission; May 2012: World Heritage Centre/ICOMOS/IUCN technical advisory mission.
2012 WHC/ICOMOS/IUCN Advisory Mission Report, Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, 21-25 May 2012
2007 Report on the Reactive Monitoring Mission to the Historic Santuary of Machu Picchu (Peru), 22 - 30 April 2007
2003 UNESCO Mission Report, Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, 23 October 2003
2002 Report on the state of conservation of the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu (Peru). Report of the ...
1999 Report of the WHC/IUCN/ICOMOS Mission to Machu Picchu, Peru, 18-25 October 1999
1997 Joint IUCN /ICOMOS Mission Report, Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, October 1997
A report on the state of conservation of the property was submitted by the State Party on 31 January 2013. The report includes information about the actions taken in response to the recommendations made by the World Heritage Committee, as well as annexes that provide additional technical information on the studies and interventions carried out to date.
a) International Support Panel
In 2010, the World Heritage Committee recommended that the State Party establish an International Support Panel to provide technical advice and support to the State Party, in order to address governance concerns and sustainable finance issues, to guide effective stakeholder involvement, to seek support for the implementation of the 2009 Emergency Action Plan, and to address the backlog of unaddressed management issues (Decision 34 COM 7B.42).
The International Support Panel was only established during the advisory mission to the property in May 2012. The 2012 Advisory mission to the property produced a detailed report on the assessment of conditions and identified recommendations and priority actions for interventions that, as with the 2009 Emergency Action Plan, are centred on these main aspects: participatory evaluation of management effectiveness, governance, planning of the western access, and risk management.
The State Party reports that several actions are being coordinated to implement the recommendations made by the 2012 Advisory mission. These include the updating of the Master Plan, the preparation of a Contingency Plan, the final approval of the new regulation of the Management Unit, improvements at the security check point in the western access of the Sanctuary, the finalization of the risk preparedness plan as well as the improvement of public information regarding risks in Machu Picchu Village and the updating and approval of tourist regulations. However, there are no indications in the report on the proposed timeframe for implementation or on budgetary provisions made to comprehensively implement them.
b) Emergency Action Plan
The 2009 Action Plan, recommended by the Reinforced monitoring mission of January 2009, was agreed on and recommended for implementation in Decision 33 COM 7B.42. Since 2010, the State Party has not provided, in its state of conservation reports, an annotated report on the progress made in the implementation of the 2009 Action Plan. The 2012 Advisory mission noted that three key issues were not substantially addressed: the evaluation of management effectiveness, the planning of the western access and the touristic regulations. The priority intervention actions noted by the 2012 Advisory mission are consistent with those identified in 2009 for urgent implementation.
c) Public use and urban planning
The State Party reports that the formulation of both planning tools is foreseen as part of the updating of the Management Plan, with terms of reference approved in September 2012. The updating will include 5 thematic roundtables including ones on public use, visitor management and Machu Picchu Integral and load capacities. The results from these will be integrated in the updated Plan. Urban planning will be addressed jointly with the District Municipality of Machu Picchu.
The Advisory Mission noted that the 2000 Urban Plan was not implemented and that the lack of enforcement of existing regulations has allowed for chaotic developments to continue at Machu Picchu village which strongly contrasts with the natural values of the setting.
The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies note that updating the Management Plan for the property was also reported as a proposed action in 2011 and in 2012. As in past years, there are no indications on how different tools will be articulated, how the proposed evaluation of management effectiveness will be used or the actual timeframe for the completion of the different processes to fully formulate the proposed planning tools.
d) Western access to the property
The State Party reports that plans are being made to establish a full checkpoint to control the access of visitors, circulation of inhabitants and the creation of visitor facilities at the km 122-Hydroelectrical power plant. The State Party reports that these plans will allow for suitable premises for housing workers and offices for visitor control, with basic services and up to date communication technology. It reports that facilities should be operational within the coming months. It also reports that DRC-Cusco and SERNANP are scheduled to implement an improved controlled access system until the comprehensive strategy is developed and enforced to guarantee controlled entry on the western side, by virtue of an electronic ticket system and where information on the potential risks of the area will be available. In addition, three roundtable discussions have been undertaken to assess the potential extension of the railway line and the construction of a station outside the boundaries of the property that would include infrastructure for visitor services.
The Advisory Mission noted that the World Heritage Committee was not notified of new concessions for the hydroelectric installations in spite of their location within the buffer zone, which will affect the area in the immediate proximity of the property. This area is the most affected by landslides and by uncontrolled traffic and irregular access, issues that have increased alarmingly in the area. The mission further noted that, although the western access had been illegally opened in 2007, to date authorities have not closed the road nor have they planned or regulated its use for tourism nor for the hydroelectric installations. Measures implemented have provided patchwork solutions and the current situation is largely chaotic, with a variety of incompatible uses, and continues to pose a potential danger for visitors to the property.
e) Risk reduction and disaster recovery plans
The State Party reports that training courses on operational planning for disasters and risk management sites were carried out in December 2012. An assessment of current operational capacities has also been developed and the definition of basic content for the comprehensive risk management plan has been outlined. An emergency plan for the historic sanctuary, developed in 2012 by SERNANP, is included in the report which also has provisions concerning activity protocols for park rangers according to risks identified in different sectors with the objective of ensuring visitor safety and mitigating potential impacts in case of emergencies. As in past years, the State Party reports that brochures and posters have been printed for residents and visitors which indicate safety areas. The Municipality has been asked to ensure that the early warning system that was implemented in 2011 is fully operational, which was not the case when the 2012 Advisory mission visited the property. The report also mentions that studies on geological hazards have been updated, which will serve to develop a Monitoring Plan for risk areas.
The 2012 Advisory Mission noted that the vulnerability of the Machu Picchu village has notably increased in the past 20 years, particularly with the increase of construction in areas highly exposed to natural hazards. The mission considered that, although there is information on what to do in case of emergency, most escape routes do not lead to adequately prepared areas and some are even exposed to landslides themselves, evacuation routes are complicated and not clearly marked, and most of the safety areas marked on the ground do not match those indicated in the provided maps. The mission also analysed the different documents that had been produced to date and underscored that while there are many plans to mitigate and diminish threats and to guide responses in case of disaster risk, with varied conclusions and even contradictory recommendations, in practice there is limited implementation, as was illustrated by the 2010 floods and landslides. This confirms what was underscored in 2012 by the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies that to date no comprehensive disaster risk management plan has been fully developed or is currently in place.
f) Governance, harmonization of legislative frameworks and enforcement of regulatory measures
The State Party reports that actions were undertaken to approve the modification and operation of the Management Unit for Machu Picchu (UGM) so as to have a clear regulatory framework for harmonisation of activities and for effective decision making. It is not clear if the proposal for regulations has been approved or when the UGM will be fully operational.
g) Inventory of land ownership and regulatory measures for land use zones
In 2012, rural land registry was finalised and the State Party reports that there has been no increase in settlements and that subsistence agriculture continues to be the main landuse activity; the expansion of large settlements at the Huayllabamba sector has been controlled. Actions are foreseen to address pending land titles to ensure that critical areas become property of the State.
h) Carrying capacity studies and guidelines for the Public Use Plan
The State Party reports that further studies are needed to establish a clear and unambiguous carrying capacity. The State Party stated that the 2,500 visitor number is respected although it recognises that the number is exceeded by 10 to 15% during holidays and other special dates. It should be recalled that the 2012 Advisory mission had access to the visitation statistics and reported that the figure of 2500 is very often exceeded, counting the Inca Trail visitors and other special visits. It is expected that within the update process for the management plan, an appropriate load capacity will be established and respected.
i) Interventions related to the maintenance and conservation at the Citadel
Finally, the State Party also reports on maintenance and conservation activities implemented at the archaeological component of the property, in consideration of the institutional Operational Plan. A detailed report on research and conservation activities at the Citadel, including research on stone bio deterioration, structural consolidation of architectural structures, maintenance of Inca roads within the Sanctuary, and 3D topographic inventory of the archaeological monuments at the Citadel as a tool for conservation purposes, was provided.
Analysis and Conclusion by World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies in 2013
Since 1999, the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies have expressed their concern about the conditions that pose a threat to the Outstanding Universal Value of the property, and which have remained, for the past 14 years, largely unaddressed, with many proposed activities still at the planning stages or only partially implemented.
In 2009, the World Heritage Committee acknowledged these threats and adopted the Emergency Action Plan. In 2010, the Committee further reiterated the major natural and structural threats facing the property and recommended the establishment of an International Support Panel. It considered that both of these measures would provide a strong focus for action to address the threats to the Outstanding Universal Value of the property. The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies note that these two measures have so far not had the effect of reducing the threats to the property, as only a few of the Actions within the Emergency Plan have been implemented over the past six years.
The Advisory Bodies have analysed overall progress made with the implementation of the 2009 Action Plan, adopted as a crucial measure to systematically undertake actions to the backlog of pressing conservation and management concerns. It was envisaged that the 2009 Action Plan would be implemented over a period of three years to address the overall situation at the property and its vulnerabilities that collectively were seen to pose considerable threats that could impact irreversibly on the Outstanding Universal Value of the property and might also threaten the safety of visitors. Of the proposed five main issues to address (Statement of Outstanding Universal Value, management effectiveness, western access, risk management and governance) limited progress has been demonstrated and this pertains only to the development of the Retrospective Statement of Outstanding Universal Value and work for the establishment of the Management Unit for Machu Picchu (UGM) that, as noted beforehand, has yet to become fully operational and does not yet have the adequate regulatory framework for efficient decision-making.
The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies further note that although the Advisory Mission of May 2012 made prioritised and budgeted recommendations, in line with the 2009 Emergency Plan, no precise action plan, with timeframes or costs, has been provided by the State Party so it is not clear when improvement of existing conditions can be anticipated. The International Support Panel was expected to assist the State Party in addressing unresolved issues, however to date its work has been limited and no indication is provided on how effective the collaboration mechanism has been.
The World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies also note that certain threats have increased since 2009. For instance, the growth of construction in areas highly exposed to natural hazards significantly increases the risk of landslides, unnatural erosion patterns and deterioration of the remarkable habitats for which the property was inscribed. Similarly, increasing visitor numbers are leading to an unsustainable situation. Other increasing negative factors are the lack of implementation of the 2000 Urban Plan, the lack of enforcement of existing regulations, and the resulting chaotic development at Machu Picchu village.
The Advisory Bodies consider that strong and decisive actions to address long-standing and persistent threats to the property, identified when the Emergency Plan was developed and the International Support Group was initiated, have yet to be implemented. The impacts of these factors have led to the deterioration of the natural environment and to the erosion of the conditions of integrity. It has also impacted on the longstanding harmonious and aesthetically stunning relationship between human culture and nature for which the property was inscribed, on the understanding of the visual ensemble that links the archaeological site with its setting, and on the land use planning that existed at pre-hispanic times. Together the underscored factors represent a clear potential danger to the integrity and Outstanding Universal Value of the property, in line with paragraphs 179 and 180 of the Operational Guidelines.
In view of the above considerations, the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies recommend that the World Heritage Committee request that the implementation of the identified measures is undertaken within the proposed timeframe. In the absence of compliance with this request within the proposed timeframe, the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies recommend the World Heritage Committee inscribe the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger at its 38th session.
37 COM 7B.35
Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu (Peru) (C/N 274)
1. Having examined Document WHC-13/37.COM/7B.Add,
2. Recalling Decisions 33 COM 7B.42, 34 COM 7B.42, 35 COM 7B.38 and 36 COM 7B.39 , adopted at its 33rd (Seville, 2009), 34th (Brasilia, 2010), 35th (UNESCO, 2011) and 36th (Saint-Petersburg, 2012) sessions respectively,
3. Expresses its deep concern that no strong and decisive action has been taken to implement the Emergency Action Plan drawn up in 2009 or the Revised Action Plan developed by the Advisory Mission of 2012, as a means of addressing threats to the property that have been underscored for more than ten years and which have increased since 2009;
4. Notes that the International Support Panel has not had a dynamic impact in terms of fostering action to address the acknowledged threats to the property and also n otes that the State Party did not submit a technical and financial proposal to continue supporting the collaboration with the International Support Panel;
5. Considers that the long-standing threats to the property derived from increased public use, deficiencies in decision-making and governance mechanisms, uncontrolled development at Machu Picchu Village, among others, have not been comprehensively addressed and its effects have been further exacerbated;
6. Urges the State Party to confirm, by 30 July 2013 , that the International Support Panel will assist national authorities in addressing, as a matter of urgency, all the unresolved issues, and requests that said confirmation includes an explicit course of action to implement the recommendations made in 2012 with a clear indication on the financial and technical resources available;
7. Also requests the State Party, in line with the proposals made in the 2009 Emergency Action Plan, the recommendations of the 2012 advisory mission and previous decisions of the World Heritage Committee, to implement the following measures within the noted timeframe:
a) Harmonize legislative frameworks and enforce regulatory measures and related sanctions for violations by 1 April 2014 ,
b) Develop a comprehensive strategy for the Western access to the property by 1 April 2014 ,
c) Undertake the Management effectiveness assessment to assist in the review and update of the Management Plan for the property by 1 April 2014 ,
d) Finalize and adopt public use plan, in line with the provisions of the Management Plan for the property, including the definition of carrying capacity for the Historic Sanctuary and Machu Picchu village and the measures anticipated in respect to the visitation limits by 1 April 2014,
e) Finalize risk reduction and disaster recovery plans, including all parts of the disaster risk cycle, not only the response to emergency situations, by 1 April 2014 ,
f) Finalize and approve the Urban Plan for Machu Picchu Village, containing the definition of regulatory measures, including building codes and processes for approval of new construction in the village and adjacent areas at the property and its buffer zone by 1 April 2014 ;
8. Also considers that if the absence of the implementation of the above-mentioned actions is noted by the Committee at its 39th session in 2015, the cumulative impacts of the identified and long-standing threats would irreversibly impact the property, which could lead to the consideration of the inscription of the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger by the Committee at its 39th session in 2015;
9. Further requests the State Party to submit to the World Heritage Centre, by 1 February 2014 , an updated report on the state of conservation of the property and the implementation of the above and the final reports on the requested measures by 1 April 2014 , for examination by the World Heritage Committee at its 39th session in 2015.
37 COM 8D
Clarifications of property boundaries and areas by States Parties in response to the Retrospective Inventory
1. Having examined Document WHC-13/37.COM/8D,
2. Recalling Decision 36 COM 8D, adopted at its 36th session (Saint Petersburg, 2012),
3. Acknowledges the excellent work accomplished by States Parties in the clarification of the delimitation of their World Heritage properties and thanks them for their efforts to improve the credibility of the World Heritage List;
4. Recalls that the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies will not be able to examine proposals for minor or significant modifications to boundaries of World Heritage properties whenever the delimitation of such properties as inscribed is unclear;
5. Takes note of the clarifications of property boundaries and areas provided by the following States Parties in response to the Retrospective Inventory, as presented in the Annexes of Document WHC-13/37.COM/8D:
Algeria: Kasbah of Algiers;
Brazil: Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Congonhas; Brasilia; Historic Centre of São Luís;
Cuba: San Pedro de la Roca Castle, Santiago de Cuba;
Dominican Republic: Colonial City of Santo Domingo;
Germany: Hanseatic City of Lübeck; Völklingen Ironworks;
Jordan: Petra;
Mexico: Sian Ka’an; Pre-Hispanic City and National Park of Palenque; Historic Centre of Puebla; Historic Town of Guanajuato and Adjacent Mines; Historic Centre of Morelia; Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaino; Historic Centre of Zacatecas; Rock Paintings of the Sierra de San Francisco; Archaeological Zone of Paquimé, Casas Grandes; Historic Monuments Zone of Tlacotalpan;
Panama: Darien National Park;
Paraguay: Jesuit Missions of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue;
Peru: City of Cuzco; Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu; Chavin (Archaeological Property); Chan Chan Archaeological Zone; Historic Centre of Lima; Río Abiseo National Park; Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana;
Russian Federation: Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments; Kizhi Pogost;
Spain: Old Town of Ávila with its Extra-Muros Churches; Historic City of Toledo; Historic Walled Town of Cuenca; Palau de la Música Catalana and Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona;
Viet Nam: Complex of Hué Monuments;
6. Requests the States Parties which have not yet answered the questions raised in the framework of the Retrospective Inventory to provide all clarifications and documentation as soon as possible and by 1 December 2013 at the latest.
37 COM 8E
Adoption of retrospective Statements of Outstanding Universal Value
1. Having examined Documents WHC-13/37.COM/8E and WHC-13/37.COM/8E.Add,
2. Congratulates States Parties for the excellent work accomplished in the elaboration of retrospective Statements of Outstanding Universal Value for World Heritage properties in their territories;
3. Adopts the retrospective Statements of Outstanding Universal Value, as presented in the Annex of Document WHC-13/37.COM/8E, for the following World Heritage properties:
Andorra: Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley;
Argentina: Cueva de las Manos, Río Pinturas; Jesuit Block and Estancias of Córdoba; Quebrada de Humahuaca; Iguazu National Park;
Australia: Shark Bay, Western Australia; Greater Blue Mountains Area; Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens; Willandra Lakes Region; Kakadu National Park;
Austria / Hungary: Fertö / Neusiedlersee Cultural Landscape;
Bangladesh: The Sundarbans; Ruins of the Buddhist Vihara at Paharpur;
Belgium : La Grand-Place, Brussels;
Belgium / France: Belfries of Belgium and France;
Bolivia: Fuerte de Samaipata; Tiwanaku: Spiritual and Political Centre of the Tiwanaku Culture; Historic City of Sucre; Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos;
Brazil: Serra da Capivara National Park;
Chile: Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works; Rapa Nui National Park; Churches of Chiloé; Sewell Mining Town; Historic quarter of the Seaport City of Valparaiso;
China: Huanglong Scenic and Historic Interest Area; Mount Huangshan; Mountain Resort and its Outlying Temples, Chengde; Ancient City of Ping Yao; Classical Gardens of Suzhou; Summer Palace, an Imperial Garden in Beijing; Ancient Villages in Southern Anhui – Xidi and Hongcun; Longmen Grottoes; Yungang Grottoes; Yin Xu; Imperial Tombs of the Ming and Qing Dynasties; Historic center of Macao; Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor;
Colombia: Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena; Historic Centre of Santa Cruz de Mompox; San Agustín Archaeological Park; National Archeological Park of Tierradentro;
Costa Rica: Area de Conservación Guanacaste;
Cuba: Trinidad and the Valley de los Ingenios; Desembarco del Granma National Park; Alejandro de Humboldt National Park; Old Havana;
Cyprus: Choirokoitia; Painted Churches in the Troodos Region;
Denmark: Kronborg Castle;
Ecuador: City of Quito; Historic Centre of Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca; Galápagos Islands;
El Salvador: Joya de Cerén Archaeological Site;
Ethiopia: Aksum; Fasil Ghebbi;
Finland / Sweden: High Coast / Kvarken Archipelago;
Guatemala: Archeological Park and Ruins of Quirigua; Antigua Guatemala;
Germany: Classical Weimar; Messel Pit Fossil Site; Roman Monuments, Cathedral of St Peter and Church of Our Lady in Trier; Aachen Cathedral; Cologne Cathedral; Hanseatic City of Lübeck; Historic Centres of Stralsund and Wismar; Museumsinsel (Museum Island), Berlin; Old town of Regensburg with Stadtamhof; Speyer Cathedral; Town Hall and Roland on the Marketplace of Bremen; Town of Bamberg;
Greece: Mount Athos;
Honduras: Maya Site of Copan;
Hungary: Old Village of Hollókő and its Surroundings; Millenary Benedictine Abbey of Pannonhalma and its Natural Environment; Early Christian Necropolis of Pécs (Sopianae); Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape; Hortobágy National Park - the Puszta; Budapest, including the Banks of the Danube, the Buda Castle Quarter and Andrássy Avenue;
Hungary / Slovakia: Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst;
India: Sun Temple, Konârak; Group of Monuments at Hampi; Mahabodhi Temple Complex at Bodh Gaya; Elephanta Caves; Great Living Chola Temples; Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus); Mountain Railways of India;
Indonesia: Ujung Kulon National Park; Komodo National Park; Lorentz National Park; Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra; Sangiran Early Man Site;
Iran (Islamic Republic of): Pasargadae; Takht-e Soleyman;
Ireland: Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne;
Italy: Venice and its Lagoon;
Japan: Yakushima; Shirakami-Sanchi; Buddhist Monuments in the Horyu-ji Area; Shiretoko; Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto (Kyoto, Uji and Otsu Cities); Shrines and Temples of Nikko; Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range; Itsukushima Shinto Shrine; Himeji-jo;
Latvia: Historic Centre of Riga;
Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Town of Luang Prabang;
Lithuania: Vilnius Historic Centre;
Luxembourg: City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and Fortifications;
Malaysia: Kinabalu Park;
Mauritius: Aapravasi Ghat;
Mexico: Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacan; Historic Centre of Morelia; Earliest 16th-Century Monasteries on the Slopes of Popocatepetl; Historic Monuments Zone of Querétaro; Historic Fortified Town of Campeche; Franciscan Missions in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro; Agave Landscape and the Ancient Industrial Facilities of Tequila; Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaino; Ancient Maya City of Calakmul, Campeche; Archaeological Monuments Zone of Xochicalco; Historic Monuments Zone of Tlacotalpan; Pre-Hispanic City of Chichen-Itza; Historic Centre of Zacatecas; Historic Centre of Oaxaca and Archaeological Site of Monte Albán; Sian Ka’an; Luis Barragán House and Studio; Rock Paintings of the Sierra de San Francisco; Archaeological Zone of Paquimé, Casas Grandes; Historic Centre of Puebla; Historic Town of Guanajuato and Adjacent Mines; Pre-hispanic town of Uxmal; Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara; Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California; Historic Centre of Mexico City and Xochimilco; Pre-Hispanic City and National Park of Palenque; El Tajin, Pre-Hispanic City;
Netherlands: Ir.D.F. Woudagemaal (D.F. Wouda Steam Pumping Station); Schokland and Surroundings; Droogmakerij de Beemster (Beemster Polder); Rietveld Schröderhuis (Rietveld Schröder House);
Nicaragua: Ruins of León Viejo;
Nigeria: Sukur Cultural Landscape;
Norway: Rock Art of Alta; Urnes Stave Church; Bryggen;
Oman: Archaeological Sites of Bat, Al-Khutm and Al-Ayn;
Pakistan: Taxila; Historical Monuments at Makli, Thatta; Rohtas Fort; Buddhist Ruins of Takht-i-Bahi and Neighbouring City Remains at Sahr-i-Bahlol;
Panama: Darien National Park; Archaeological Site of Panamá Viejo and Historic District of Panamá;
Peru: City of Cuzco; Chavin (Archaeological Site); Historic Centre of Lima; Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu;
Philippines: Historic town of Vigan;
South Africa: uKhahlamba / Drakensberg Park;
Switzerland: Abbey of St Gall; Benedictine Convent of St John at Müstair; Old City of Berne; Three Castles, Defensive Wall and Ramparts of the Market-Town of Bellinzona;
Thailand: Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai Forest Complex; Thungyai-Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuaries; Historic Town of Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns; Ban Chiang Archaeological Site;
Turkey: Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia; Nemrut Dağ; Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği; Hierapolis-Pamukkale;
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Blaenavon Industrial Landscape; Blenheim Palace; Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine's Abbey, and St Martin's Church; Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd; City of Bath; Durham Castle and Cathedral; Giant's Causeway and Causeway Coast; Heart of Neolithic Orkney; Ironbridge Gorge; Maritime Greenwich; New Lanark; Old and New Towns of Edinburgh; Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites; Studley Royal Park including the Ruins of Fountains Abbey; Tower of London; St Kilda; Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret's Church;
Uruguay: Historic Quarter of the City of Colonia del Sacramento;
Uzbekistan: Itchan Kala;
Venezuela : Coro and its Port; Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas;
4. Decides that retrospective Statements of Outstanding Universal Value for World Heritage properties in Danger will be reviewed by the Advisory Bodies in priority;
5. Further decides that, considering the high number of retrospective Statements of Outstanding Universal Value to be examined, the order in which they will be reviewed by the Advisory Bodies will follow the Second Cycle of Periodic Reporting, namely:
World Heritage properties in the Arab States;
World Heritage properties in Africa;
World Heritage properties in Asia and the Pacific;
World Heritage properties in Latin America and the Caribbean;
World Heritage properties in Europe and North America;
6. Requests the World Heritage Centre to harmonise all sub-headings in the adopted Statements of Outstanding Universal Value where appropriate and when resources and staff time allow to carry out this work;
7. Also requests the State Parties, Advisory Bodies and World Heritage Centre to ensure the use of gender-neutral language in the Statements proposed for adoption to the World Heritage Committee;
8. Further requests the World Heritage Centre to keep the adopted Statements in line with subsequent decisions by the World Heritage Committee concerning name changes of World Heritage properties, and to reflect them throughout the text of the Statements, in consultation with States Parties and Advisory Bodies;
9. Finally requests the States Parties to provide support to the World Heritage Centre for translation of the adopted Statements of Outstanding Universal Value into English or French respectively, and finally requests the Centre to upload these onto its web-pages.
Draft Decision: 37 COM 7B.35
2. Recalling Decisions 33 COM 7B.42, 34 COM 7B.42, 35 COM 7B.38 and 36 COM 7B.39, adopted at its 33rd (Seville, 2009), 34th (Brasilia, 2010), 35th (UNESCO, 2011) and 36th (Saint-Petersburg, 2012) sessions respectively,
4. Notes that the International Support Panel has not had a dynamic impact in terms of fostering action to address the acknowledged threats to the property and also notes that the State Party did not submit a technical and financial proposal to continue supporting the collaboration with the International Support Panel;
6. Urges the State Party to confirm, by 30 July 2013, that the International Support Panel will assist national authorities in addressing, as a matter of urgency, all the unresolved issues, and requests that said confirmation includes an explicit course of action to implement the recommendations made in 2012 with a clear indication on the financial and technical resources available;
a) Harmonize legislative frameworks and enforce regulatory measures and related sanctions for violations by 1 April 2014,
b) Develop a comprehensive strategy for the Western access to the property by 1 April 2014,
c) Undertake the Management effectiveness assessment to assist in the review and update of the Management Plan for the property by 1 April 2014,
d) Finalize and adopt public use, in line with the provisions of the Management Plan for the property, including the definition of carrying capacity for the Historic Sanctuary and Machu Picchu village and the measures anticipated in respect to the visitation limits by 1 April 2014,
e) Finalize risk reduction and disaster recovery plans, including all parts of the disaster risk cycle, not only the response to emergency situations, by 1 April 2014,
f) Finalize and approve the Urban Plan for Machu Picchu Village, containing the definition of regulatory measures, including building codes and processes for approval of new construction in the village and adjacent areas at the property and its buffer zone by 1 April 2014;
8. Also considers that in the absence of the implementation of the above actions by the Committee’s 38th session in 2014, the cumulative impacts of the identified and long-standing threats would irreversibly impact the property, which will result in the inscription of the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger by the Committee at its 38th session in 2014;
9. Further requests the State Party to submit to the World Heritage Centre, by 1 February 2014, an updated report on the state of conservation of the property and the implementation of the above and the final reports on the requested measures by 1 April 2014, for examination by the World Heritage Committee at its 38th session in 2014.
Nomination records (Year): 1982
Category: Mixed
Criteria: (i)(iii)(vii)(ix)
Read the SOUV
WHC-13/37.COM/7B.Add
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USS Laffey (DD-459)
For other ships with the same name, see USS Laffey.
USS Laffey alongside another U.S. Navy ship, while at sea in the South Pacific on 4 September 1942
Name: USS Laffey
Namesake: Bartlett Laffey
Builder: Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, San Francisco, California
Laid down: 13 January 1941
Launched: 30 October 1941
Commissioned: 31 March 1942
Identification: DD-459
Fate: sunk Battle of Guadalcanal,[1] 13 November 1942
Class and type: Benson-class destroyer
Displacement: 1,620 long tons (1,650 t)
Length: 347 ft 10 in (106.02 m)
Beam: 36 ft 1 in (11.00 m)
Draft: 11 ft 10 in (3.61 m)
Speed: 37.5 kn (69.5 km/h; 43.2 mph)
Complement: 208
Armament:
4 × 5 in (130 mm)/38 cal guns
1 × 1.1"/75 caliber anti-aircraft cannon
5 × 20 mm anti-aircraft cannons
5 × 21 inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes
5 × depth charge projectors
2 × depth charge tracks
USS Laffey (DD-459) was a Benson-class destroyer of the United States Navy during World War II. She was the first destroyer named for Bartlett Laffey.
Laffey was laid down on 13 January 1941 by Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company, San Francisco, California; launched 30 October 1941; sponsored by Miss Eleanor G. Forgerty, granddaughter of Seaman Laffey; and commissioned on 31 March 1942, Lieutenant Commander William E. Hank in command. She was lost in action on 13 November 1942.[2]
1 Service history
4 In popular culture
Service history[edit]
After shakedown off the west coast, Laffey headed for the war zone via Pearl Harbor, arriving at Efate on 28 August 1942. She steamed in the antisubmarine screen until she joined Task Force 18 on 6 September. When the flagship— the aircraft carrier Wasp—was sunk on 15 September, Laffey rescued survivors and returned them to Espiritu Santo. She sailed with Task Force 64 and touched at Noumea, New Caledonia, on 18 September.[2]
Laffey had her first fleet action in the Battle of Cape Esperance (also known as the Second Battle of Savo Island) on 11 and 12 October 1942. The destroyer operated with Admiral Norman Scott's cruiser group, guarding against enemy attempts to reinforce Guadalcanal. On 11 October, when the group formed into single column, Laffey joined two other destroyers in the van. About an hour later, sailors ran to their battle stations, steel doors clanged shut, and all made ready for battle. When the engagement began, Laffey raked the cruiser Aoba with three of her 5-inch guns. The furious gunfire roared on through the night. At dawn, destroyer Duncan was sinking, Farenholt was badly damaged, and cruiser Boise, though hard hit, had weathered several powerful blows. However, the Japanese losses were even greater. Furutaka was sinking, Aoba was badly damaged, and Fubuki had sunk.[2]
After the battle, Laffey met with a group escorting transports from Nouméa on 11 November, and sailed to Lunga Point, arriving the next day. The disembarking operations were interrupted by a heavy air attack. On 13 November, Laffey was placed in the van of a column of eight destroyers and five cruisers under Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan. Early in the midwatch, the radar operator reported contact with the enemy. The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal was just about to begin when the Japanese force, a group of two battleships, one light cruiser, and 14 destroyers, under Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe, appeared on the horizon. Laffey lashed out at the enemy with gunfire and torpedoes. At the height of the violent battle, the battleship Hiei came through the darkness and both ships headed at full speed for the same spot.[2] They missed colliding by 20 feet (10 m).[3][4][5] Laffey unleashed her torpedoes and, using all her firepower, raked the battleship’s bridge,[2] wounding Admiral Abe, and killing his chief of staff.[3][6] Admiral Abe was thereafter limited in his ability to direct his ships for the rest of the battle.[7] With a battleship on her stern, a second on her port beam, and two destroyers on her port bow, Laffey fought the Japanese ships with the three remaining main battery guns in a no-quarter duel at point-blank range. She was hit by a 14-inch shell from Hiei. Then, a torpedo in her fantail put Laffey out of action. As the order to abandon ship was passed, a violent explosion ripped the destroyer apart and she sank immediately with heavy loss of life.[2] This action earned her the Presidential Unit Citation.[2]
Of the 247 crew members aboard, 59 were killed, including the commanding officer, William B. Hank. The wounded in the engagement numbered 116.[8]
Awards[edit]
Laffey was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for her performance in the South Pacific, and three battle stars for service in World War II.[2]
American Campaign Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with three bronze service stars
World War II Victory Medal
In popular culture[edit]
In the mobile game Azur Lane, Laffey is a sleepyhead, small girl, that is given to the player as a starter ship, among with Z23, Javelin and Ayanami [9]
^ Brown p. 73
^ a b c d e f g h "Laffey I (DD-459)". Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Navy Department, Naval History and Heritage Command.
^ a b Morison, Struggle for Guadalcanal, p. 244
^ Hammel, Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea, p. 137–141
^ Jameson, The Battle of Guadalcanal, p. 22 says, "Only by speeding up did the Laffey manage to cross the enemy's bows with a few feet (metres) to spare."
^ Hara, Japanese Destroyer Captain, p. 146.
^ "USS Laffey website". Destroyer History Foundation. Retrieved October 10, 2015.
^ "Laffey". Azur Lane Wiki. Retrieved June 30, 2019.
Brown, David (1990). Warship Losses of World War Two. London, Great Britain: Arms and Armour. ISBN 0-85368-802-8.
Hammel, Eric (1988). Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea: The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13–15, 1942. (CA): Pacifica Press. ISBN 0-517-56952-3.
Hara, Tameichi (1961). "Part Three, The "Tokyo Express"". Japanese Destroyer Captain. New York & Toronto: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-27894-1. - Firsthand account of the first engagement of the battle by the captain of the Japanese destroyer Amatsukaze.
Jameson, Colin G. (1944). "The Battle of Guadalcanal, 11–15 November 1942". Publications Branch, Office of Naval Intelligence, United States Navy (Somewhat inaccurate on the details of actual damage done to and actions by Japanese ships). Retrieved 8 April 2006.
Morison, Samuel Eliot (1958). "The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, 12–15 November 1942". The Struggle for Guadalcanal, August 1942 – February 1943, vol. 5 of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-58305-7.
This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The entry can be found here.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to USS Laffey (DD-459).
USS Laffey website at Destroyer History Foundation
Barham, Eugene Alexander (1988). The 228 days of the United States Destroyer Laffey, DD-459. OCLC 17616581.
Benson-class destroyers
Hilary P. Jones
Charles F. Hughes
Laffey
Farenholt
McLanahan
Nields
Ordronaux
Republic of China Navy
Lo Yang (ex-Benson)
Han Yang (ex-Hilary P. Jones)
Artigliere (ex-Woodworth)
Preceded by: Sims class
Followed by: Gleaves class
List of destroyers of the United States Navy
Shipwrecks and maritime incidents in November 1942
2 Nov: Empire Antelope, Empire Leopard
4 Nov: Hobbema, U-132
5 Nov: U-408
6 Nov: City of Cairo
7 Nov: Donbass, Eveleen, Ha-11, USS Majaba
8 Nov: Albatros, Brestois, Boulonnais, Fougueux, Frondeur, HMS Hartland, Milan, Primauguet, Surprise, Tornade, Tramontane, HMS Walney, West Humhaw
9 Nov: HMS Cromer, USS Leedstown, Typhon
10 Nov: HMS Broke, I-15, HMS Ibis, Jean Bart, HMS Martin, Méduse
11 Nov: USS Joseph Hewes, HMS Unbeaten, Viceroy of India
12 Nov: USS Edward Rutledge, USS Erie, USS Hugh L. Scott, USS Tasker H. Bliss, HMS Tynwald, U-272, U-660
13 Nov: Akatsuki, USS Atlanta, USS Barton, USS Cushing, HNLMS Isaac Sweers, USS Juneau, Kinugasa, USS Laffey, USS Monssen, U-411, Yūdachi
14 Nov: Hiei, Scillin, U-595, U-605
15 Nov: HMS Algerine, HMS Avenger, Ayanami, USS Benham, Kirishima, USS Preston, U-98, U-259, USS Walke
16 Nov: Irish Pine, U-173
17 Nov: U-331
18 Nov: Krasnoye Znamya, Tower Grange
19 Nov: USS YP-26
20 Nov: Prins Harald
23 Nov: Benlomond
24 Nov: Hayashio
25 Nov: HMS Utmost
27 Nov: Aigle, Algérie, Bordelais, Casque, Cassard, Colbert, Commandant Teste, D'Iberville, Dunkerque, Dupleix, Foch, Foudroyant, Gerfaut, Guépard, Jean de Vienne, Kersaint, La Galissonnière, Lion, Lynx, Mameluk, Marseillaise, Mogador, Panthère, Provence, Siroco, Strasbourg, Tartu, Tigre, Trombe, Valmy, Vauban, Vauquelin, Vautour, Vénus, Verdun
28 Nov: Empire Cromwell, HMS Ithuriel, Nova Scotia, Thomas T. Tucker
29 Nov: Dunedin Star
30 Nov: USS Northampton, HMCS Quinte, Takanami, Thor, Uckermark
Unknown date: Sibylle, Saint Edmond, U-184
Other incidents
7 Nov: USS Thomas Stone
8 Nov: HMS Broke, USS Leedstown
9 Nov: Wandle
14 Nov: USS Electra
15 Nov: HMCS Saguenay
17 Nov: Piemonte
20 Nov: HMS Bramham
27 Nov: Scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon
28 Nov: USS Alchiba
29 Nov: Akka
October 1942 December 1942
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=USS_Laffey_(DD-459)&oldid=904155488"
Ships built in San Francisco
1941 ships
World War II destroyers of the United States
Shipwrecks in Ironbottom Sound
Maritime incidents in November 1942
Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships
Pacific Ocean articles missing geocoordinate data
All articles needing coordinates
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Tip: Importance of Itemizing. Charitable contributions are deductible only if you itemize deductions on Form 1040, Schedule A. Those who take the standard deduction cannot deduct their contributions.
Internal Revenue Service, 2017
According to Giving USA 2017, Americans gave an estimated $390.05 billion to charity in 2016. That’s the highest total in more than 60 years since the report was first published.1
Americans give to charity for two main reasons: To support a cause or organization they care about, or to leave a legacy through their support.
When giving to charitable organizations, some people elect to support through cash donations. Others, however, understand that supporting an organization may generate tax benefits. They may opt to follow techniques that can maximize both the gift and the potential tax benefit. Here’s a quick review of a few charitable choices:
Direct gifts are just that: contributions made directly to charitable organizations. Direct gifts may be deductible from income taxes depending on your individual situation.
Charitable gift annuities are not related to annuities offered by insurance companies. Under this arrangement, the donor gives money, securities, or real estate, and in return, the charitable organization agrees to pay the donor a fixed income. Upon the death of the donor, the assets pass to the charitable organization. Charitable gift annuities enable donors to receive consistent income and potentially manage taxes.
Pooled-income funds pool contributions from various donors into a fund, which is invested by the charitable organization. Income from the fund is distributed to the donors according to their share of the fund. Pooled-income funds enable donors to receive income, potentially manage taxes, and make a future gift to charity.
Fast Fact: Contributions by individuals, couples, and families accounted for 72% of the $390.05 billion donated to charitable organizations in 2016.
Giving USA Foundation, 2017
Gifts in trust enable donors to contribute to a charity and leave assets to beneficiaries. Generally, these irrevocable trusts take one of two forms. With a charitable remainder trust, the donor can receive lifetime income from the assets in the trust, which then pass to the charity when the donor dies; in the case of a charitable lead trust, the charity receives the income from the assets in the trust, which then pass to the donor’s beneficiaries when the donor dies.
Donor-advised funds are funds administered by a charity to which a donor can make irrevocable contributions. This gift may have tax considerations, which is another benefit. The donor also can recommend that the fund make distributions to qualified charitable organizations.
Some people are comfortable with their current gifting strategies. Others, however, may want a more advanced strategy that can maximize their gift and generate potential tax benefits. A financial professional can help you assess which approach may work best for you.
Remember, the information in this article is not intended as tax or legal advice. And it may not be used for the purpose of avoiding any federal tax penalties. Please consult legal or tax professionals for specific information regarding your individual situation.
Giving and Net Worth
Charitable giving appears to trail household net worth by about one year. When household net worth dipped in 2008, charitable giving dipped in 2009.
Chart Source: Giving USA Foundation, 2017; Federal Reserve, 2017
The biggest percentage of charitable contributions — 32% — went to churches and religious organizations. A variety of different types of groups were on the receiving end of charitable gifts.
Chart Source: Giving USA Foundation, 2016
The content is developed from sources believed to be providing accurate information. The information in this material is not intended as tax or legal advice. It may not be used for the purpose of avoiding any federal tax penalties. Please consult legal or tax professionals for specific information regarding your individual situation. Some of this material was developed and produced by FMG, LLC, to provide information on a topic that may be of interest. FMG Suite is not affiliated with the named broker-dealer, state- or SEC-registered investment advisory firm. The opinions expressed and material provided are for general information and should not be considered a solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. Copyright 2019 FMG Suite.
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Flynn’s plea is bad for Trump. But he may never face any consequences.
Flynn’s plea is bad for Trump. But he may never face any consequences. – NBCNews.com
What Flynn’s guilty plea means for Trump and the GOP – NBCNews.com
Michael Flynn Knew the FBI Had Heard His Calls with Russians. So Why Did He Lie About Them? – Daily Beast
Mike Flynn – Google News: ‘Something was desperately wrong with this guy’: US Army lieutenant general who served with Mike Flynn weighs in on … – Business Insider
The details of Michael Flynns plea deal with Robert Mueller are nothing short of brutal
Michael Flynn may have just incriminated Tom Cotton, Donald Trumps new CIA Director pick, in Russia scandal
Tracking Trump: Flynn pleads guilty as cracks form in the ‘special relationship’
The Orthodox Jewish communities in the U.S. and Israel and their leadership groups are deeply infiltrated by Putin’s agents. These matters are serious, and they have to be properly investigated and addressed. M.N. 12.2.17 | FBI News Review
Lying to FBI Is Illegal; How About the FBI Lying to Us? | FBI News Review
8:57 AM 12/2/2017 | FBI News Review
Lying to FBI Is Illegal; How About the FBI Lying to Us?
GUEST EDITORIAL: Rise in hate crimes is disturbing | Editorial
Whats behind the Russian presidents close relationship with an Orthodox Jewish sect?
The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin
ABC Corrects Explosive Flynn Report That Drove Down Stocks
» Flynn Plea Shows Collusion With Israel? IMEMC News
James Comey Waxes Biblical About Mike Flynn’s Guilty Plea – Forward
James Comey Tweets Biblical Verse About Mike Flynn The Forward
Congressmen say Jared Kushners arrest is coming and Donald Trump will be ousted from office
Michael Flynn Will Keep Military Rank And Pension Despite Guilty Plea
Psychiatrists warn Trump becoming more mentally unstable
Psychiatrists warn Trump becoming more mentally unstable, putting US, world at ‘extreme risk’ – CNBC
Mike Flynn – Google News: Flynn pleads guilty to lying to FBI, is cooperating with Mueller – WLS-TV
Russia investigation ‘wearing’ on White House, despite spin – Lincoln Journal Star
Feed Integration by RSS Dog.
mikenova shared this story .
Former National Security Adviser Lt. General Michael Flynn’s Friday guilty plea to making false statements to the FBI about his conversations before President Donald Trump’s inauguration— reportedly a deal in exchange for his cooperation with the investigation of retired FBI director Robert Mueller — is bad news for Trump.
It shouldn’t be surprisingly bad news: After all, Trump didn’t allegedly pressure former FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn, nor then fire Comey when he refused because he thought that Flynn hadn’t done anything that would implicate Trump and/or his close associates.
But it shows that Mueller is leading a serious, meticulous investigation that is carefully being built from the ground up, like an organized crime investigation, which won’t be easy for Trump to derail. Flynn would not have been offered a plea on a relatively minor charge if Mueller didn’t think he had information that was valuable to his investigation.
The facts to which Flynn agreed in his plea are in themselves very damning to Trump: Most critically, Flynn has acknowledged that at least one his conversations with Kislyak took place at the direction of a “very senior” official on Trump’s transition team — reportedly,Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — who asked Flynn to ask Kislyak to oppose or delay a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal.
So not only is Kushner also now in substantial legal jeopardy, but this latest revelation brings the personal ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government not only into Trump’s closest political circles, but into his family.
Worse yet is, according to a report from ABC News, that Flynn is prepared to testify that Trump asked him to speak with representatives of the Russian government during the campaign. That would suggest significant ties between the campaign and a state that was almost certainly intervening in the election in favor of Trump.
Flynn would not have been offered a plea on a relatively minor charge if Mueller didn’t think he had information that was valuable.
Still, it’s impossible to know at this point precisely where Mueller’s investigation will lead. Flynn may well have information that is seriously damaging for senior advisers besides Kushner — like Donald Trump Jr. who, during the campaign, met with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have information from the Russian government that was damaging to Hillary Clinton.
But everyone implicated by Flynn would become someone else with incentives to provide further information. It’s entirely possible that this chain of testimony could lead all the way to the president himself; at a minimum, some of his closest advisers are very likely to be implicated
This doesn’t guarantee, of course, that Flynn or any other Trump associate will end up in jail or that Mueller’s investigation will fully play out. Trump has two formidable weapons he can still use. The first is a plenary power to pardon people for federal offenses, including preemptively. If the investigation gets too close, Trump could simply pardon Flynn, Kushner, his sons and anyone else Mueller’s investigation might implicate.
Because of the care Mueller is evidently taking with his investigation, however, Trump might not be able to escape trouble so easily.
And, should Mueller’s investigation continue to accumulate damning information, Trump could also have it shut down. If Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who is ultimately in charge of the Mueller investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself over his own meetings with Russian officials — refused to shut down Mueller’s investigation, Trump could fire him and find someone in the Justice Department who would.
Because of the care Mueller is evidently taking with his investigation, however, Trump might not be able to escape trouble so easily. Trump’s pardon power doesn’t extend to state crimes, and Mueller’s investigation may well uncover illegal activity (including money laundering) that is illegal under New York as well as federal law. Were Trump to shut down Mueller’s federal investigation, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman would likely be particularly inclined to be aggressive in investigating violations of state law by Trump and his associates — and Mueller is certainly aware of this.
Still, if Trump issues blanket pardons or terminates Mueller’s investigation, the short-term remedies at the federal level might be limited. It is clear that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will not seriously investigate Trump, let alone impeach and convict him, as long as he will advance their agenda.
Ultimately, payback for Trump’s actions may have to be at the ballot box next November, and then in 2020.
Scott Lemieux is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. He is the co-author of Judicial Review and Democratic Theory and contributes regularly to The Week, Reuters and the New Republic.
mikenova shared this story from trump under federal investigation – Google News.
Because of the care Mueller is evidently taking with his investigation, however, Trump might not be able to escape trouble so easily. Trump’s pardon power doesn’t extend to state crimes, and Mueller’s investigation may well uncover illegal activity …
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What Flynn’s guilty plea means for Trump and the GOP
WASHINGTON It’s going to get harder for President Donald Trump to distance himself politically from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe after Michael Flynn’s guilty plea and that could be bad news for his fellow Republicans at the polls …
GOP races to pass tax plan as Russia probe threatens to take down Trump administrationCNBC
mikenova shared this story from Russian Intelligence services – Google News.
Michael Flynn Knew the FBI Had Heard His Calls with Russians. So Why Did He Lie About Them?
For example, the FBI has conducted extensive physical and electronic surveillance of the defendants including the covert placement of microphone-type listening devices in certain locations; the covert placement of video cameras in public locations…
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Slate Magazine (blog) –NBC Montana
mikenova shared this story from 1. Trump Investigation – Mike Flynn from mikenova (9 sites).
‘Something was desperately wrong with this guy’: US Army lieutenant general who served with Mike Flynnweighs in on …
A retired US Army lieutenant general weighed in on Michael Flynn’s guilty plea in the ongoing Russia investigation. Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who served with Flynn in the US Army, said he believes the former national security adviser’s downfall was the…
Mike Flynn – Google News
mikenova shared this story from Palmer Report.
Just how hard of a bargain does Robert Mueller drive? He handed what initially appeared to be a sweetheart deal to Michael Flynn, and in exchange Flynn agreed to provide evidence to incriminate Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and other key players in the Trump-Russia scandal. But the details of that plea deal are now surfacing, and what’s stunning is just how little Mueller ended up giving Flynn when it comes down to it. This is nothing short of brutal.
Legal experts dissected the Flynn plea deal during Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show on Friday night, and I’ll spare you the legalese and boil it down to three points for you. First: Flynn’s deal only grants him leniency on the charge of lying to the FBI. If Mueller doesn’t end up liking what he sees going forward, he can still charge Flynn with other crimes. Second: Mueller now officially owns Flynn. He can make him wear a wire, or dress up like a chicken. The third bullet point is the most astounding one.
There is nothing in the plea deal which formally protects Michael Flynn Jr. By now we all know that Michael Flynn cut the deal in order to protect his son. But even that’s not guaranteed. If Mueller doesn’t like how things are going, he can go back and charge Junior with various crimes at any point. This motivates Flynn to work as hard as he possibly can to help take down the likes of Trump and Kushner, because his son is still far from officially being in the clear.
This deal offers the clearest insight yet into just how brutally effective Robert Mueller can be with his wheeling and dealing. It’s not that he’s trying to torture Michael Flynn. It’s that he wants to keep Flynn motivated to continue cooperating as emphatically as possible. It also means no one else in the Trump-Russia scandal is getting free lunch if they seek a plea deal of their own.
The post The details of Michael Flynn’s plea deal with Robert Mueller are nothing short of brutalappeared first on Palmer Report.
Earlier this week, just as it was becoming clear that Michael Flynn was about to cut a devastating plea deal against Donald Trump and other big fish in the Russia scandal, Trump began pushing a weird sideshow story. He suddenly wants to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson after months of hemming and hawing about it, as part of a series of moves that would elevate Senator Tom Cotton to CIA Director. Now that Flynn’s deal is official, it reveals that Cotton may have been part of the Trump-Russia conspiracy all along.
Let’s emphasize the word “may” here. Perhaps this is all one massive coincidence. Perhaps Trump really does just happen to be looking to give Cotton a coveted promotion, just as Michael Flynn seems to be pointing the finger at Cotton. But if this is a coincidence, it’s a remarkable one. Flynn is confessing that while he was conspiring with the Russian Ambassador to sabotage President Obama’s Russian sanctions, he was relaying that conversation to the Trump national security transition team. Guess who was on that team? Tom Cotton.
We may have to wait a bit to see whether Flynn is referring to everyone on the Trump national security transition team, or just some of its members. But if Flynn is referring to the entire team, then he’s accusing Tom Cotton of having known about the Trump-Russia conspiracy since at least December. If Cotton knew about that felony conspiracy and failed to report it, he would be guilty of a felony himself, and Trump could be offering him a promotion in the hope of buying his continued silence.
Again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We can’t assume Tom Cotton is guilty of anything. But if Michael Flynn really did just implicate Cotton in the Trump-Russa conspiracy, it would very conveniently explain why Donald Trump is trying to buy Cotton’s silence by giving him a promotion, However, if Cotton was looking to disappear into the recesses of the CIA before he could become a suspect in the Trump-Russia scandal, Trump may have blown it by taking this step far too late in the game. Trump should have made the move months ago. Now it may be too late.
The post Michael Flynn may have just incriminated Tom Cotton, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director pick, in Russia scandal appeared first on Palmer Report.
mikenova shared this story from Donald Trump | The Guardian.
In another alarmingly eventful week, the president calls out Pocahontas and retweets a far-right group all before a major development in the Russia case
It was a week in which Donald Trump dived back into the gutter over Islamophobia, alienating one of Americas key international allies, and which ended with the Russia investigation coming one crucial step closer to the president, with his former national security adviser Michael Flynn confirming he had flipped and was now working with special counsel Robert Mueller.
mikenova shared this story from FBI News Review.
The Orthodox Jewish communities in the U.S. and Israel and their leadership groups are deeply infiltrated by Putin’s agents. These matters are serious, and they have to be properly investigated and addressed.
The KGB (which always had a strong “zhidovskiy” element in it, and it always showed) extended their ugly stinking tentacles in the form and the way of the Russian Jewish emigration of the most recent waves, staring in 1990-s, to the U.S. and Israel. That was their Trojan Horse, and their revenge for the defeat, economic and ideological, in the Cold War. And they did that by latching on to the existing Jewish communities in the U.S., apparently mostly the Orthodox ones, using the religion as the pretense and the very convenient cover. The Russian Jews used to go the Communist Party meetings, and now, in America, they started to attend their synagogues dutifully and without any scruples, maybe even as the needed substitute for those Party meetings. It looks like they, the KGB, developed the functional, mafia-like network of their agents, and, in fact, grew in and together, integrated with the Russian-Jewish (“Red”) Mafia. The Darwinian pragmatism and the survival skills honed in the USSR were their guiding lights and the only “ideology”. And the “religion – crime connection” (apparently the ancient and the deep one), worked out for the Russian Jews no worse than the Catholicism for the Italian Cosa Nostra.
Today we are dealing with the complications and the sick sequelae of this invisible (or unseen, or largely neglected and ignored) invasion.
M.N.
FBI News Review: The Orthodox Jewish communities in the U.S. and Israel and their leadership groups are deeply infiltrated by Putins agents. These matters are serious, and they have to be properly investigated and addressed. M.N. 12.2.17
The Orthodox Jewish communities in the U.S. and Israel and their leadership groups are deeply infiltrated by Putin’s agents. These matters are serious, and they have to be properly investigated and addressed. The KGB (which always had a strong “zhidovskiy” element in it, and it always showed) extended their ugly stinking tentacles in the form and … Continue reading“The Orthodox Jewish communities in the U.S. and Israel and their leadership groups are deeply infiltrated by Putin’s agents. These matters are serious, and they have to be properly investigated and addressed. – M.N. – 12.2.17 “ FBI News Review
1. FBI from mikenova (15 sites): james b. comey – Google News: GUEST EDITORIAL: Rise in hate crimes is disturbing – Glens Falls Post-Star
While the liberal media is celebrating the announcement that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, a bigger scandal was practically ignored.
On Thursday, Judicial Watch released 29 pages of FBI emails regarding the inexcusable June 27, 2016 meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac of the Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, AZ. This meeting was not accidental, as Clinton purposely delayed the takeoff of his aircraft to arrange the supposedly impromptu encounter with the Attorney General.
According to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, “These new FBI documents show the FBI was more concerned about a whistle-blower who told the truth about the infamous Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting than the scandalous meeting itself.”
In the midst of a FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s “extremely careless” handling of top secret email communications, Lynch held a secretive meeting with her husband. This bombshell information would have never been made public if not for the investigative work of Phoenix television anchor Christopher Sign, who received a tip about the meeting from a “trusted source.”
With an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the improper handling of email communications, it was highly improper for Lynch to agree to the meeting with Bill Clinton just days before FBI agents would interview his wife. Once confronted about the tarmac meeting, Lynch claimed they only discussed golf and grandchildren, which is a completely ludicrous explanation for the 30-minute meeting.
If the meeting was so innocent, why did the Justice Department withhold key documents for so long? After an initial July 7, 2016 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Judicial Watch for documents pertaining to the meeting, the Justice Department claimed that nothing could be located. Only after an official FOIA lawsuit did the department provide the various FBI email exchanges.
As noted by Fitton, the real focus of the emails was to try to locate the leaker who exposed the meeting. One unidentified FBI agent lamented that the meeting was disclosed to the press and claimed that “We need to find that guy” in order to get him fired or sanctioned by his supervisors. The emails show that the FBI believed the source was a Phoenix police officer and one agent expressed a desire to ban the officer from being involved in future security details.
This anger is very indicative of what is wrong with the FBI today. The source who leaked news of the meeting to the local media did a real public service and should be commended. Americans had a right to know that the Attorney General was involved in a questionable meeting while an investigation was purportedly ongoing. Unfortunately, instead of congratulating the source, the FBI wanted to punish this individual, obviously because they wanted to protect the reputation of the Attorney General and the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton.
The FBI should be impartial, not be taking sides in political campaigns. The bureau was obviously politically comprised, much like the IRS during their unfair harassment of Tea Party groups.
In any vigorous and honest FBI investigation, agents should be outraged if the Attorney General held a secret meeting with the spouse of the subject being examined for wrongdoing. Instead agents showed only concern about identifying the police officer who caused the embarrassment. This nonchalant attitude was not shared by Lynch who admitted that the ill-advised meeting “cast a cloud” on the Justice Department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton.
These disclosures lead to the distressing conclusion that the Hillary Clinton investigation was a sham from the very beginning. In fact, when Clinton was finally interviewed by the FBI on July 2, 2016, she was not under oath and there was no recording of the meeting. Several weeks earlier, before the FBI had interviewed Clinton or 17 key witnesses in the investigation, then FBI Director James Comey had already begun drafting her exoneration statement.
These unusual procedures were denounced by U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) in a joint statement. According to the Senators, “Conclusion first, fact-gathering second—that’s no way to run an investigation. The FBI should be held to a higher standard than that, especially in a matter of such great public interest and controversy.”
Of course, the Senators are right as the FBI’s handling of this matter was atrocious. A mere three days after the inadequate interview of Clinton, Comey announced that she would not be indicted despite what many legal analysts believe were her clear violations of federal law.
Evidently, the FBI, under the direction of James Comey, had no intention of ever truly investigating Hillary Clinton and bringing charges against her. If there was ever an issue that needed a Special Counsel investigation, it is not “Russian collusion,” but the Justice Department’s collusion with Hillary Clinton.
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A new FBI report on hate crimes tells a sobering story. For the second year in a row, police departments across the country reported a rise in the number of crimes motivated by bias.
In 2016, the FBI counted 6,121 reported incidents nationwide — an increase of 4.6 percent from 2015, during which 5,850 cases were reported. That number, in turn, marked a 6.8 percent increase in reported hate crimes over 2014. Roughly 58 percent of such attacks last year were motivated by racial bias, of which about half targeted African Americans. Of the 21 percent of crimes fueled by animosity toward the victim’s religion, more than half the attacks were aimed at Jews, a quarter at Muslims.
The sharp rise in crimes against Muslims and people of Arab descent is particularly troubling. Racially motivated attacks on Arabs jumped 38 percent from 2015, the first year in which the FBI requested data on such crimes. And attacks on Muslims, which spiked 67 percent in 2015, rose an additional 19 percent last year to more than 300 reported incidents. That makes 2016 the year with the highest number of hate crimes against Muslims since 2001, following the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, crimes against Latinos and against white people rose 15 percent and 17 percent, respectively, from 2015. Crimes against transgender people went up 44 percent.
The FBI’s report doesn’t draw conclusions as to what might be behind this disturbing rise in hate. But it’s noteworthy that many of the groups against whom crimes rose by double digits were the focus of inflammatory rhetoric by Donald Trump over the course of his presidential campaign. Likewise, the FBI data show a sharp rise in bias-motivated incidents in the months around the 2016 election — confirming reports by the Anti-Defamation League and others of a surge of attacks on Muslims and Jews in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.
“Hate crimes are different from other crimes,” FBI Director James B. Comey said in a 2014 speech. “They strike at the heart of one’s identity.” For this reason, it’s important that the United States be able to tackle this growing problem with the best data it can gather. The FBI’s statistics on hate crimes, while the best we have, are also incomplete — partly because it’s up to state and local police departments to decide whether to provide the federal government with their data. What’s more, a study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggests that many hate-crime victims never report the offense.
Police departments should work to provide the federal government with more complete data. But taking this rise in hate seriously also requires that law enforcement officials cultivate trust with the communities they serve. Victims need to know they will be treated with respect if they come forward — especially in the current political environment, where many may be particularly fearful.
This editorial appeared in the Nov. 26 edition of The Washington Post.
mikenova shared this story from Slate Articles.
Photo by Alexei Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images
Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center is an impressive place. Original artifacts, film clips, and interactive displays take visitors on a tour through centuries of Judaism’s rich but tragic history in Russia, from the Middle Ages to the czarist-era pogroms to the Holocaust to the repression of the Stalin era to the mass emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Then it just sort of ends.
There’s a panel featuring photos of Vladimir Putin with Jewish leaders, a small display on the Russian Jewish diaspora featuring Little Failure author Gary Shteyngart as an example of a “successful, integrated Russian Jew,” and that’s about it. An exhibit on post-perestroika Jewish life is planned for some time in the future, but for now, the museum gives the impression that Judaism in Russia is a subject of historical interest rather than an ongoing story.
Technically speaking, there are four “official” religions in Russia: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. But given that almost 70 percent of Russians identify as adherents to the Russian Orthodox Church, it’s pretty apparent that one religion is more “official” than others.
The smallest of the four is Judaism. There are fewer than 200,000 self-identified Jews in Russia today—less than the number of pagans—though the number of Russians from Jewish backgrounds who no longer identify with the religion is likely much higher. They are what remains after a mass exodus that saw more than 2 million Jews leave the countries of the former Soviet Union shortly before and after its collapse, mainly for the United States and Israel. Given that most Russians with Jewish backgrounds range from casual observers to entirely indifferent to their religion, it’s a bit unexpected that their official representatives hail from one of the more doctrinaire sects of Orthodox Judaism. You may be surprised to learn, too, that those representatives are quite close with President Vladimir Putin.
Chabad members—a small fraction of a small religious community—have become the dominant force in Russian Jewish life.
Regardless, it’s quite clear that we are not at a high point of Russian Jewish culture. You could argue, though, that for the Jews who are left, things aren’t that bad. Recent years have seen a great deal of government-supported synagogue construction, and a small but growing number of Jews are attending services.
And while there were fears after the fall of the Soviet Union that rising Russian nationalism would lead to an upsurge in anti-Semitism, that never really materialized. “After the collapse of the USSR, the number of cases of anti-Semitism have been steadily dropping on an annual basis over the last 10 years,” says Yury Kanner, head of the country’s largest secular Jewish organization, the Russian Jewish Congress.
There is certainly anti-Jewish sentiment in Russia, but the country is far from an outlier in that regard. Anti-Semitic incidents have been on the rise in a number of European countries, including France, Germany, and Italy. Much of this is related to tension between Jewish and Muslim communities and criticism of Israel, which isn’t a particularly salient issue in Russia. Anti-Semitic far-right parties have also made troubling election gains in countries like Greece and Hungary. Ultra-nationalism is an issue in Russia as well—a controversial far-right rally was held in Moscow on Nov. 4—but when this manifests itself as racism or xenophobia, it’s more typically directed against the predominantly Muslim migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia, perhaps because they’re far more numerous than Jews.
Whatever his many other sins, even Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics concede that he’s not an anti-Semite. As the New Republic’s Julia Ioffe notes, a number of his closest confidants, as well as the Judo teacher who served as a mentor and surrogate father, are Jews. He has personally intervened in cases of state anti-Semitism, such as an incident last year in which a teacher was charged with corruption and the prosecution used his Jewish last name as evidence. Putin labeled that “egregious,” and the conviction was overturned soon after.
Putin’s has also generally been supportive of Jewish institutions—one Jewish institution in particular. One of the more intriguing aspects of contemporary Russian Jewish life is the close relationship between the Kremlin and Chabad, also known as Lubavitch, the Hasidic sect known in the United States for its street-corner proselytizing to fellow Jews and reverence for the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Founded in Western Russia in the 18th century, the Lubavitchers decamped to the United States in 1940, setting up their new headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. The Orthodox Jewish movement has dispatched hundreds of emissaries throughout the world to promote the faith. Just after the fall of Communism and just prior to his own death, Schneerson sent Rabbi Berel Lazar to represent Chabad in Russia.
Today, Lazar, who was born in Italy and educated in the United States, is Russia’s chief rabbi. He appears frequently at Putin’s side at public events, and is the leader of the Federation of Jewish Communities (known by its Russian acronym FEOR), the country’s most important Jewish organization. But the title of Russia’s most important rabbi is not an uncontested one.
Adolf Shayevech, a prominent figure in the community since the late Soviet period, was considered chief rabbi until 2000, and still claims the title. Kanner’s group, the Russian Jewish Congress, also recognizes Shayevech. But since Putin came to power in 2000, he has preferred to work with FEOR. Lazar, who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rabbi,” now sits on the country’s public chamber, a government-appointed oversight committee. Lazar has been nothing but appreciative, praising Putin publicly as a friend of the Jews and calling Russia “one of the safest places for Jews in Europe.”
In a story that seemed tailor-made to demonstrate the rabbi’s devotion to both his faith and his patron in the Kremlin, it was reported in June 2013 that Lazar had agreed, at Putin’s request, to attend a World War II memorial event hours away from Moscow on a Friday afternoon. When his plane was delayed and arrived back in Moscow just 10 minutes before sundown, Lazar made an eight-hour, 19-mile walk home rather than break the Sabbath. Sources close to the rabbi told the Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva that his willingness to make the difficult journey was an “example of the special connection between Rabbi Lazar and Russia’s president.”
Government support has been good for FEOR, which has restored dozens of synagogues and built Jewish community centers throughout the country. It has also gotten funding to develop the Jewish Museum, which opened in 2012 just around the corner from the organization’s Moscow headquarters.
Chabad members—a small fraction of a small religious community—have become the dominant force in Russian Jewish life. “Eighty percent of all synagogues, the rabbis are Chabad,” Rabbi Alexander Boroda, the organization’s chief spokesman, told me in an interview. “But the people who come, many are just young people who want to come and learn something about Judaism.”
Boroda dismissed the notion that there was anything improper about his organization’s close relationship with the Kremlin. “The chief rabbi is the representative of the Jewish tradition,” he says. “It’s the Russian tradition, it’s not like America.” Indeed, a number of other Eastern European countries have chief rabbis, and in Ukraine, as in Russia, it’s a disputed position.
How exactly has Chabad reached its position of influence? For one thing, it has some influential backers. The Uzbek–Israeli billionaire diamond magnate Lev Leviev was an early and enthusiastic backer of FEOR. Roman Abramovich, the billionaire investor, governor, and owner of the Chelsea soccer team, has also been a backer, donating $5 million to build the Marina Roscha Synagogue.
Chabad, which unlike many other Jewish groups is a centrally organized hierarchical organization, also likely looks familiar to the Kremlin. Chabad “replicates in a way the structure of the Orthodox Church,” says Kanner. “There is a center that sends its ambassadors into the communities.”
David Shneer, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Denver who was studied the Lubavitchers’ role in Russia, says it also helps that Chabad is a “movement that cultivates ties with political leadership as part of a broader strategy to make a home wherever they happen to be.” He compares this to the medieval practice of shtadlanut, in which European Jews lobbied local rulers for rights.
Even though most Russian Jews aren’t Orthodox, Shneer says it shouldn’t be surprising that the Orthodox Chabad has taken on a leadership role in Russian Jewish life. “Chabad is evangelical Judaism,” he says. “They bring Judaism to people at whatever level they’re at. If they want to light candles, they’ll show them how to light candles. If they want to keep kosher, they’ll show them how to keep kosher. They know that 95 percent of people who attend Chabad events are not at all religiously observant. But their point is to bring a certain kind of Judaism to as many Jews as possible.”
FEOR’s Boroda argues that the approach has brought results. “More people have started going to synagogue,” he says. “We’re seeing a renaissance in Jewish life.”
Of course, with nationalist sentiment running high right now, there are always fears that this could once against manifest itself in hostility to Jews.
A recent report from Kanner’s organization, which often works with the government to combat cases of discrimination, also noted an uptick in anti-Semitic statements from politicians and on state-run media outlets. A recent Russian television documentary about Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told viewers that “one must take into consideration his Jewish origin.” Other media hatchet jobs of foreign leaders or opposition figures have also noted their Jewish roots. There have also been a number of instances in the past year of vandalism of synagogues and cemeteries. Blatantly anti-Semitic comments from low-level politicians are fairly common. A legislator from the ruling United Russia party, for instance, remarked during a debate at the regional parliament in Kaliningrad that Jews “destroyed our country in 1917 and … destroyed our country in 1991.”
Even so, a spokesman for the Russian Jewish Congress told the news agency Interfax that “the role of anti-Semitism in modern Russia has obviously become less noticeable than in the 1990s and 2000s, when it was the principal essence of nationalistic propaganda.”
But even if life is relatively comfortable for Jews, in contrast to other minorities, that doesn’t mean the community is due for a resurgence. Right now the biggest threat to Russian Judaism may be apathy, not bigotry.
Shneer feels that Chabad’s dominance, and the lack of reform or progressive alternatives, is “terrible for the future of pluralistic Judaism in Russia.” Russia is full of people with Jewish or partially Jewish family roots, but after decades of repression and immigration, many have little connection to the religion. On one level it seems unlikely that a branch of Judaism based in part on a rejection of modern society will be the one to bring doubters back into the fold.
Kanner, though, says the relative lack of interest in reform or liberal branches of Judaism shouldn’t be surprising, and is rooted in the community’s troubled history. “In Soviet times, we were Jews based on our blood. It was a nationality not a religion,” he says. “The main principle of reformism is that you can be a Jew while also being French or German or whatever. That’s why there was no basis for reformism. In Russia, you are first a Jew, then you are anything else.”
Times may have changed and the situation may have improved, but the idea that you can at once be a Jew and a Russian will still take time to take hold.
Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.
Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.
Their respective ambitions led the two men—along with Trump’s future son-in-law, Jared Kushner—to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.
Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”
A few years later, Trump would seek out Russian projects and capital by joining forces with a partnership called Bayrock-Sapir, led by Soviet emigres Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater and Tamir Sapir—who maintain close ties to Chabad. The company’s ventures would lead to multiple lawsuits alleging fraud and a criminal investigation of a condo project in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, the links between Trump and Chabad kept piling up. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter and Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. A few months after the ceremony, Leviev met Trump to discuss potential deals in Moscow and then hosted a bris for the new couple’s first son at the holiest site in Chabad Judaism. Trump attended the bris along with Kushner, who would go on to buy a $300 million building from Leviev and marry Ivanka Trump, who would form a close relationship with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova would host the power couple in Russia in 2014 and reportedly attend Trump’s inauguration as their guest.
With the help of this trans-Atlantic diaspora and some globetrotting real estate moguls, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Red Square can feel at times like part of the same tight-knit neighborhood. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office having proclaimed his desire to reorient the global order around improved U.S. relations with Putin’s government—and as the FBI probes the possibility of improper coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin—that small world has suddenly taken on outsize importance.
Trump’s kind of Jews
Founded in Lithuania in 1775, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement today has adherents numbering in the five, or perhaps six, figures. What the movement lacks in numbers it makes up for in enthusiasm, as it is known for practicing a particularly joyous form of Judaism.
Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, recalled having this trait impressed upon him during one family wedding at which the two tables occupied by his first cousins, Chabad rabbis, put the rest of the celebrants to shame. “They were dancing up a storm, these guys. I thought they were black. Instead they’re just black-hat,” Klein said, referring to their traditional Hasidic garb.
Despite its small size, Chabad has grown to become the most sprawling Jewish institution in the world, with a presence in over 1,000 far-flung cities, including locales like Kathmandu and Hanoi with few full-time Jewish residents. The movement is known for these outposts, called Chabad houses, which function as community centers and are open to all Jews. “Take any forsaken city in the world, you have a McDonald’s and a Chabad house,” explained Ronn Torossian, a Jewish public relations executive in New York.
Chabad adherents differ from other Hasidic Jews on numerous small points of custom, including the tendency of Chabad men to wear fedoras instead of fur hats. Many adherents believe that the movement’s last living leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is the messiah, and some believe he is still alive. Chabad followers are also, according to Klein, “remarkable” fundraisers.
As the closest thing the Jewish world has to evangelism—much of its work is dedicated to making Jews around the world more involved in Judaism—Chabad serves many more Jews who are not full-on adherents.
According to Schmuley Boteach, a prominent rabbi in New Jersey and a longtime friend of Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, Chabad offers Jews a third way of relating to their religious identity. “You have three choices as a Jew,” he explained. “You can assimilate and not be very affiliated. You can be religious and Orthodox, or there’s sort of a third possibility that Chabad offers for people who don’t want to go the full Orthodox route but do want to stay on the traditional spectrum.”
This third way may explain the affinity Trump has found with a number of Chabad enthusiasts—Jews who shun liberal reform Judaism in favor of traditionalism but are not strictly devout.
“It’s not a surprise that Trump-minded people are involved with Chabad,” said Torossian. “Chabad is a place that tough, strong Jews feel comfortable. Chabad is a nonjudgmental place where people that are not traditional and not by-the-book feel comfortable.”
He summarized the Chabad attitude, which is less strict than the Orthodox one, as, “If you can’t keep all of the commandments, keep as many as you can.”
Torossian, who coincidentally said he is Sater’s friend and PR rep, also explained that this balance is particularly appealing to Jews from the former Soviet Union, who appreciate its combination of traditional trappings with a lenient attitude toward observance. “All Russian Jews go to Chabad,” he said. “Russian Jews are not comfortable in a reform synagogue.”
Putin’s kind of Jews
The Russian state’s embrace of Chabad happened, like many things in Putin’s Russia, as the result of a factional power struggle.
In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.
At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.
The Putin-Chabad alliance has reaped benefits for both sides. Under Putin, anti-Semitism has been officially discouraged, a break from centuries of discrimination and pogroms, and the government has come to embrace a state-sanctioned version of Jewish identity as a welcome part of the nation.
As Putin has consolidated his control of Russia, Lazar has come to be known derisively as “Putin’s rabbi.” He has escorted the Russian leader to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and attended the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, Putin’s pet project, on the Jewish Sabbath. Putin returned that favor by arranging for Lazar to enter the stadium without submitting to security checks that would have broken the rules for observing Shabbat.
In 2013, a $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow under the auspices of Chabad and with funding from Abramovich. Putin donated a month of his salary to the project, while the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, pitched in by offering relevant documents from its archives.
In 2014, Lazar was the only Jewish leader present at Putin’s triumphal announcement of the annexation of Crimea.
But the rabbi has paid a price for his loyalty to Putin. Since the annexation, his continued support for the Russian autocrat has caused a rift with Chabad leaders in Ukraine. And for years, the Russian government has defied an American court order to turn over a trove of Chabad texts called the “Schneerson Library” to the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Shortly after the opening of the tolerance museum, Putin ordered the collection transferred there instead. The move made Lazar the custodian of a prized collection that his Brooklyn comrades believe is rightfully theirs.
If Lazar has any qualms about his role in all the intra-Chabad drama, he hasn’t let on publicly. “Challenging the government is not the Jewish way,” the rabbi said in 2015.
Trump, Bayrock, Sapir
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, as Trump looked for business and investors in the former Soviet Union during the first years of this century, he struck up an enduring relationship with a firm called Bayrock-Sapir.
Bayrock was co-led by Felix Sater, a convicted mob associate.
Sater and another Bayrock employee, Daniel Ridloff, who like Sater later went on to work directly for the Trump Organization, belong to the Port Washington Chabad house. Sater told POLITICO Magazine that in addition to serving on the board of the Port Washington Chabad house, he sits on the boards of numerous Chabad entities in the U.S. and abroad, though none in Russia.
The extent of Sater’s ties to Trump is a matter of some dispute. Working out of Trump Tower, Sater partnered with the celebrity developer on numerous Trump-branded developments and scouted deals for him in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Sater escorted Trump’s children Ivanka and Don Jr. around Moscow to scour the city for potential projects, and he worked especially closely with Ivanka on the development of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium building in Manhattan whose construction was announced on “The Apprentice” in 2006.
In 2007, Sater’s stock fraud conviction became public. The revelation did not deter Trump, who brought him on as “a senior advisor to the Trump Organization” in 2010. In 2011, a number of purchasers of Trump SoHo units sued Trump and his partners for fraud and the New York attorney general’s office opened a criminal inquiry into the building’s marketing. But the purchasers settled and agreed not to cooperate with the criminal investigation, which was subsequently scuttled, according to the New York Times. Two former executives are suing Bayrock alleging tax evasion, money laundering, racketeering, bribery, extortion and fraud.
Under oath, Sater has described a close relationship with the Trumps, while Trump has testified under oath that he barely knew Sater and would not be able to pick his face out in a crowd. Several people who worked closely with Sater during this period and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation from both men, scoffed at Trump’s testimony, describing frequent meetings and near-constant phone calls between the two. One person recalled numerous occasions on which Trump and Sater dined together, including at the now-defunct Kiss & Fly in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
“Trump called Felix like every other day to his office. So the fact that he’s saying he doesn’t know him, that’s a lot of crap,” said a former Sater colleague. “They were definitely in contact always. They spoke on the phone all the time.”
In 2014, the Port Washington Chabad house named Sater its “man of the year.” At the ceremony honoring Sater, the chabad’s founder, Shalom Paltiel, recounted how Sater would spill his guts to him about his adventures working as a government cooperator on sensitive matters of national security.
“I only recently told Felix I really didn’t believe most of it. I thought perhaps he watched too many James Bond movies, read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” said Paltiel at the ceremony. “Anyone who knows Felix knows he can tell a good story. I simply did not put too much credence to them.”
But Paltiel went on to recount receiving special clearance years later to accompany Sater to a ceremony at the federal building in Manhattan. There, said Paltiel, officials from every American intelligence agency applauded Sater’s secret work and divulged “stuff that was more fantastic, and more unbelievable, than anything he had been telling me.” A video of the event honoring Sater has been removed from the Port Washington Chabad house’s website but is still available on YouTube.
When I contacted Paltiel for this article, he hung up the phone as soon as I introduced myself. I wanted to ask him about some of the connections I’d come across in the course of my reporting. In addition to his relationship with Sater, Paltiel is also close to “Putin’s rabbi” Lazar, calling Lazar “my dear friend and mentor” in a short note about running into him at Schneerson’s gravesite in Queens.
According to Boteach, this is unsurprising, because Chabad is the sort of community where everybody knows everybody else. “In the world of Chabad, we all went to Yeshiva together, we were all ordained together,” Boteach explained. “I knew Berel Lazar from yeshiva.”
The Port Washington Chabad house has another Bayrock tie. Among its top 13 benefactors, its “Chai Circle,” as listed on its website, is Sater’s partner, Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif.
Arif, a former Soviet bureaucrat turned wealthy real estate developer, owns a mansion in Port Washington, an upscale suburb, but he makes a curious patron for the town’s Chabad. A Kazakh-born citizen of Turkey with a Muslim name, Arif is not Jewish, according to people who have worked with him. In 2010, he was arrested in a raid on a yacht in Turkey that once belonged to the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, and charged with running an international underage prostitution ring. Arif was later cleared of the charges.
Before the scandal on Ataturk’s yacht, Arif partnered closely with Trump, Ivanka Trump and Sater in the development of Trump SoHo along with the Sapir family, a New York real estate dynasty and the other half of Bayrock-Sapir.
Its patriarch, the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.
Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.
Trump attended the bris. A month earlier, in May 2008, he and Leviev had met to discuss possible real estate projects in Moscow, according to a contemporaneous Russian news report. An undated photograph on a Pinterest account called LLD Diamond USA, the name of a firm registered to Leviev, shows Trump and Leviev shaking hands and smiling. (The photograph was first pointed out by Pacific Standard.)
That same year, Sapir, an active Chabad donor in his own right, joined Leviev in Berlin to tour Chabad institutions in the city.
Jared, Ivanka, Roman, Dasha
Also present at the Sapir-Rosen bris was Kushner, who along with his now-wife Ivanka Trump has forged his own set of ties to Putin’s Chabad allies. Kushner’s family, which is Modern Orthodox, has long been highly engaged in philanthropy across the Jewish world, including to Chabad entities, and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Kushner was active in the university’s Chabad house. Three days before the presidential election, the couple visited Schneerson’s grave and prayed for Trump. In January, the couple purchased a home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood and settled on the city’s nearby Chabad synagogue, known as TheSHUL of the Nation’s Capital, as their house of worship.
In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.
Kushner and Ivanka Trump are also close with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Abramovich, an industrialist worth more than $7 billion and the owner of the British soccer club Chelsea FC, is the former governor of the Russian province of Chukotka, where he is still revered as a hero. He owes his fortune to his triumphant emergence from Russia’s post-Soviet “aluminum wars,” in which more than 100 people are estimated to have died in fighting over control of aluminum refineries. Abramovich admitted in 2008 that he amassed his assets by paying billions of dollars in bribes. In 2011, his former business partner, the late Boris Berezovsky—an oligarch who had fallen out with Putin and gone on to live in exile at the Trump International on Central Park West—accused him of threats, blackmail and intimidation in a lawsuit in the United Kingdom, which Abramovich won.
Abramovich was reportedly the first person to recommend to Yeltsin that he choose Putin as his successor. In their 2004 biography of Abramovich, the British journalists Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgely write, “When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator.” The biographers compare the two men’s relationship to that between a father and a son and report that Abramovich personally interviewed candidates for Putin’s first cabinet. He has reportedly gifted Putin a $30 million yacht, though Putin denies it.
Abramovich’s vast business holdings and his personal life overlap with Trump’s world in multiple ways.
According to a 2012 report from researchers at Cornell University, Evraz, a firm partly owned by Abramovich, has contracts to provide 40 percent of the steel for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose completion was approved by Trump in March after years of delay. And in 2006, Abramovich purchased a large stake in the Russian oil giant Rosneft, a company now being scrutinized for its possible role in alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. Both Trump and the Kremlin have dismissed as “fake news” a dossier that alleges that a recent sale of Rosneft shares was part of a scheme to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Meanwhile, his wife, Zhukova, has long traveled in the same social circles as Kushner and Ivanka Trump: She is a friend and business partner of Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, one of Ivanka’s closest friends, and a friend of Karlie Kloss, the longtime girlfriend of Kushner’s brother, Josh.
Over the years, Zhukova has grown close to Jared and Ivanka themselves. In February 2014, a month before Putin illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Ivanka Trump posted a photo to Instagram of herself with Zhukova, Wendi Deng, a bottle of wine, and the caption, “Thank you [Zhukova] for an unforgettable four days in Russia!” Deng was recently rumored to be dating Putin, though she denied it. Other photos from the trip show Kushner was also present in Russia at the time.
Last summer, Kushner and Ivanka Trump shared a box at the U.S. Open with Zhukova and Deng. In January, Zhukova reportedly attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka Trump’s guest.
On March 14, The Daily Mail spotted Josh Kushner dining with Zhukova in New York. According to the outlet, Josh Kushner “hid his face as he exited the eatery with Dasha.”
A week later, at the same time Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were vacationing in Aspen with her two brothers and their families, Abramovich’s plane flew from Moscow to Denver, according to a flight tracking service. Abramovich owns two properties in the Aspen area.
A spokesman for Abramovich declined to comment on the record about the Colorado overlap. The White House referred queries about the couples to a personal spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump. The spokeswoman, Risa Heller, initially indicated she would provide answers to questions about the Colorado overlap and recent contacts between the couples, but did not do so.
President Trump has reportedly sought security clearances for Kushner and Ivanka, who have taken on growing roles in his White House. For anyone else, a close personal relationship with the family of a top Putin confidant would present significant hurdles to obtaining security clearances, former high-ranking intelligence officials said, but political pressure to grant clearances to the president’s children would be likely to override any security concerns.
“Yes, such connections to Russia should matter for a clearance,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA Moscow station chief. “Question is, will they?”
“I don’t think the Trump family camp will have any trouble with security clearances, as long as there’s no polygraph involved,” said Milt Bearden, former chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division. “It’s absolutely crazy, but not going to be an issue.”
With Washington abuzz about the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump world’s relationship with Putin’s Kremlin, their overlapping networks remain the object of much scrutiny and fascination.
In March, the New York Times reported that Lazar had met last summer with the Trump administration’s special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, then a lawyer for the Trump Organization. The men characterized the meeting as a normal part of Greenblatt’s campaign outreach to Jewish leaders and said it included general discussion of Russian society and anti-Semitism. The meeting was brokered by New York PR rep Joshua Nass, and Lazar has said he did not discuss that meeting with the Russian government.
In late January, Sater met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to discuss a proposed Ukraine peace deal that would end U.S. sanctions on Russia, which Cohen then delivered to Trump’s then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House, according to the Times. Cohen has given varying accounts of the episode.
According to one Jewish Republican who said he sees Cohen “all the time” there, Cohen himself is a regular presence at the Midtown Chabad on Fifth Avenue, a dozen blocks south of Trump Tower and a half-dozen blocks south of his current office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Cohen disputed this, saying, “I’ve never been to a Chabad and I’ve never been to one in New York City either.” Cohen then said he last stepped foot in a Chabad over 15 years ago to attend a bris. He said the last Chabad-related event he attended was on March 16 at a hotel in Newark when he spoke at a dinner honoring Trump’s secretary of veterans affairs, David Shulkin. The dinner was hosted by the Rabbinical College of America, a Chabad organization.
To those unfamiliar with Russian politics, Trump’s world and Hasidic Judaism, all these Chabad links can appear confounding. Others simply greet them with a shrug.
“The interconnectedness of the Jewish world through Chabad is not surprising insofar as it’s one of the main Jewish players,” said Boteach. “I would assume that the world of New York real estate isn’t that huge either.”
Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.
mikenova shared this story from Donald Trump.
Flynn was asked to reach out to Russian officials during the Trump transition, not the campaign, according to a source, the network noted.
mikenova shared this story from IMEMC News.
Michael Flynn’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI falls short on Russia “collusion” but points to the Trump administration acting on Israel’s behalf, says author and journalist Max Blumenthal.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Guardian, The Independent Film Channel, The Huffington Post, <a href=”http://Salon.com” rel=”nofollow”>Salon.com</a>, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. His most recent book is Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. His other book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. Max is co-host of the podcast Modern Rebel.
Aaron Mate: It’s the Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor to Donald Trump until his ouster just a few months into his administration, has pleaded guilty to lying to investigators looking into alleged Trump Russia ties. Flynn is the most high level member of the White House inner circle to be indicted and he is said to be cooperating with investigators. And the news has been greeted across liberal media much like it was today on the TV program The View.
Speaker 2: Breaking news.
Joy Behar: Oh my God. Oh, breaking news. ABC news Brian Ross is reporting. Michael Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that, as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians. Yes.
Aaron Mate: But for opponents of Donald Trump, is Flynn’s indictment really something to celebrate? Well, joining me to discuss is Max Blumenthal, Senior Editor of Alternet’s Grayzone Project. Max, your reaction to Flynn’s indictment today.
Max Blumenthal: You know, my reaction is slightly different than The View panelists, who are really expressing the sensibility, or the mentality, of the id lib, or the idiot liberal, who has been kind of indoctrinated over the past 11 months to believe that Trump had colluded with Russia and that this will lead to his impeachment. We actually saw outside the courthouse where Flynn appeared, the people not only chanting “lock him up”, which is hilarious considering that Flynn, at the Republican National Convention led the “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton, but there was also a sign being held by one protestor or heckler, reading “People Power versus Putin Power”, as if Putin kind of controlled Michael Flynn.I mean let’s first acknowledge that this is a confirmation, this indictment of Michael Flynn’s dishonesty, his hypocrisy and his sheer idiocy. I mean, he lied to the FBI and ordinary people who lie to the FBI go to jail. He not only did that, but he did not register as a foreign agent when he took something like half a million dollars from Erdoğan’s government, the government of Turkey, in order to stage some kind of operation to possibly kidnap the person that, the exiled cleric that Erdoğan considers to be his arch nemeses. Fethullah Gülen in Pennsylvania so you can imagine like Flynn and his buddies driving around Pennsylvania trying to kidnap some cleric. It’s like the guy who couldn’t shoot straight. It’s like something out of a Woody Allen movie.Just the level of absurdity of Flynn’s activities has reached a sublime level then you have Flynn testifying before Congress that the U.S. needed to be in the driver’s seat back in 2015 to prevent Russia from setting up nuclear facilities in Egypt and elsewhere and then two weeks later he goes to Egypt and Israel on a trip paid for by a company, one of the companies that had been possibly working with the Russian government to set up, you know, nuclear plants, Flynn did not disclose that at the time when he had a security clearance.So there’s this pattern of failing to disclose activities that he’s been involved in and, you know, he has been pretty much lying ever since 2015. So that’s real, that’s corruption. There’s no way to defend Flynn on that level. The question is, is there any evidence here of collusion with Russia? Trump’s collusion with Russia. And when you actually look at the indictment, you’ve got another dud, it’s just another dud, and these duds arrive every two to three weeks and they send the id libs into a frenzy of ecstasy about having their shambolic narrative of Russia controlling the United States and colluding with Trump to subvert our otherwise shining democracy confirmed.And this confirms nothing. What it does show is that the Israeli government, through Jared Kushner, pressured Michael Flynn to approach the Russian government through Sergey Kislyak, who was the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. at the time, to use it’s position on the U.N. Security Council to stop a resolution condemning Israeli Settlement activity, which the Obama administration was going to abstain on. Something the U.S. government hasn’t done before.Jared Kushner and his family through the Kushner Family Foundation have an extensive relationship not only with the Israeli government, but with Benjamin Netanyahu himself. Netanyahu when he’s in New York would stay with the Kushner family. He would sleep in a bedroom at their house and was almost literally in bed with Jared Kushner. Kushner Family Foundation has donated extensively to the Israeli Settlement Enterprise, to very pro-Israel groups. And so you’re looking actually at Israeli collusion. The real center of influence in Washington emanates from Israel and Kushner has basically been an agent of Israeli influence. An unregistered agent of pro-Israel influence in Washington. This element of the story, which is central, has been completely ignored. And there is another point.Flynn is accused of approaching Sergey Kislyak to discuss how the U.S. and Russia, which was one of the main parties engaged in Syria, would bring the Syrian conflict to an end and take on al Qaeda and ISIS. So that U.S. and Russia are discussing deescalating a conflict that has killed somewhere around 250,000 people. At least around 100,000 on the Syrian government side, by the way. And they have successfully done so, it’s been Russian intervention in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government that has led to the destruction of ISIS, the defeat of al Qaeda, and the end of this conflict. And refugees are now coming back, so once, just to restate that, Flynn approached Kislyak, not the other way around, to discuss deescalating a conflict. And that’s considered a major transgression now in Washington and then there’s the third point in the indictment.Flynn approached Kislyak, not the other way around, to beg Russia not to retaliate against sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia for unproven allegations that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email servers and released it to WikiLeaks. Unproven. Totally unproven, even the intelligence agencies that everyone, every Democrat worships as if they’re some kind of oracle, have just stated with high confidence that these servers were hacked by Russian intelligence agencies and none of them, not the FBI, not the NSA, none of them have examined the DNC’s email servers, none of them have demanded them. So these sanctions were imposed based on an allegation and then you have Michael Flynn, while a member of the Trump campaign, approaching the Russian Ambassador to beseech him not to retaliate.And Putin himself was actually put under pressure by the Russian Foreign Ministry at the same time to retaliate because the U.S. had kicked Russian Diplomatic personnel out of Washington, and imposed them unprecedented sanctions, Putin did not retaliate. I would say it was a fairly elegant, diplomatic move. He was gonna give a new administration a chance.In any case, Flynn lied about these communications he had with Sergey Kislyak, the communications were picked up by the NSA because Michael Flynn was in the Cayman Islands at the time and so he was abroad where the NSA has surveillance latitude and Flynn, you know, he may have been sitting on a beach after having one too many, you know, pina coladas and he engaged in really stupid activity to make this kind of call. But the nature of the call, and the content of the indictment, does not prove that there was collusion with the Russian government. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate that Russia was attempting to subvert American democracy. It does demonstrate that the Israeli government through it’s point man, Jared Kushner, was engaged in collusion, was engaged in foreign meddling, and subversion. And this, for some reason, is not the story and we know why.
Aaron Mate: Right. In terms of what it says about the actual election, which is purportedly the reason why we’re supposed to be caring about Russia and Trump. The first conversation between Flynn and Kislyak happens in December, so well after the election has happened. Let me ask you Max, it’s interesting to see that the outrage today has been over, as you mentioned, Flynn trying to negotiate or make overtures to Russia over matters that could actually deescalate tensions, which, when not viewed through a partisan lens, could be seen as positive because it’s deescalating tensions with a nuclear power, and as you said, trying to find an end to the horrific Syrian War. But, in effect, both those things were known about before. What was not known, at least to my knowledge, was the extent to which Flynn was working to subvert the U.N. Security Council vote about Israel. And it’s surprising, as you alluded to, that that’s the issue that is both new but yet has not elicited very much outrage or attention.
Max Blumenthal: Yeah, I mean, that’s just absolutely shocking that, I mean, and this has also come out through Mueller’s investigation is that Jared Kushner may have violated the Logan Act by conducting freelance diplomacy to work with the Israeli government to attempt to convince other governments to vote against the U.N. Resolution. Other governments on the Security Council. That’s how we know that Kushner was the one who was encouraging Flynn to make this call. And it’s just completely overlooked in Washington, it’s overlooked by mainstream media, not only because of the fear of that very government and it’s cut outs in Washington attacking figures in the media and attacking public figures for daring to point to Israeli influence as a nefarious and nefarious force that contravenes American interests, but because it’s a matter of American policy to allow Israel to dictate our policy with respect to the Middle East.Including in Syria and so you have elements that are deeply embedded in the national security state that have been hostile to deescalating the Syrian Civil War. These elements, you know, you could point to John Brennan from the CIA, one of his babies was the arm and equip operation to train and arm Syrian rebels who were substantially operating under the umbrella of al Qaeda, referred to as the Free Syrian Army, something that we now know was basically a mythical conglomeration of Salafi and Salafi jihadi rebels. And in 2015, when al Qaeda Syrian affiliate, Jabhat Al Nusra, took the city and the province of Idlib, in northeastern Syria, which was just a few hundred kilometers … actually I would just say, you know, a few scores of kilometers away from the Alawite Heartland. An area which al Qaeda and it’s affiliates have pledged to cleanse of non-sitting Muslims. To kill or convert the minority population of Syria.Where Christians were forced to convert or die in Idlib. Where the Jewish population in Idlib was forced to dig up their own shrines. Christians were slaughtered across Idlib. And the Syrian government panicked. You know, what Obama should have done at that point is gone to the city allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and said, “Stop arming these jihadist rebels who have taken Idlib, let’s put a stop to this, this is crazy, they wanna march on Lattakia, they wanna move to Damascus and this would destroy a core country in the Middle East. It’s gone too far.” He didn’t do that. The arms continued to flow.This should have been a signal moment and that is when, in fact the arms continued to flow in the form of something like 20,000 Tow Missiles produced by Raytheon which allowed al Qaeda and it’s allies to destroy entire Syrian Army Tank Divisions. This is when the Syrian government called on Russia to intervene. And it was that Russian intervention that prevented Syria from becoming what we see today in Libya, where there are open air slave markets, where there have been the slaughter of the black population of Libya and now we see sub-Saharan African migrants being sold in open air slave markets. Refugee crisis like you’ve never seen before. This is what Russia prevented in Syria. And the U.S. by 2016, after the fall of Aleppo, or the liberation of Aleppo with Russian help, the liberation from al Qaeda and it’s allies, kind of started to get wise and decided it’s time to deescalate.John Brennan was very unhappy with this scenario, his operation was being discredited. His legacy was on the line. A lot of other figures coming out of the state department were upset at this scenario but the Trump administration was determined to do this and that’s what Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak partially dealt with and it has happened. We’ve seen deescalation zones set up around the Golan Heights, all across the [crosstalk 00:15:26]
Aaron Mate: I think we gotta, Max-
Max Blumenthal: These are coming [crosstalk 00:15:29]
Aaron Mate: Max, let me cut in there because we have to wrap, but I wanna say actually, that it’s quite possible that what Trump and Flynn are being faulted for now, in terms of Syria, is exactly what the Obama administration, despite people like John Brennan, would have done anyway. Because, as you say, the war was going so bad for them that it was obvious that they were not gonna win the outcome that they pursued. But let me ask you, Max, because we only have one minute, so getting back to Flynn and this indictment, people are saying, “Well look, why would Mueller make a plea deal with Flynn unless Flynn had something to offer him that was gonna flip and point to someone higher above him like Kushner, or even Trump, that’s possible. It’s also possible that maybe this is all Flynn has and so now they’re gonna get him on lying to the FBI so I’m wondering, where you think this is gonna go and what kind of punishment you think someone like Flynn will face? I mean lying to the FBI is a serious offense but it’s nowhere near the kind of offense of treason that many people have floated throughout this whole Russia-gate “scandal”.
Max Blumenthal: Yeah. Even though the indictment contradicts the narrative of collusion in Russian subversion of our shining democracy, the narrative will continue and this gives more fumes to the narrative in the way the mainstream media, corporate media’s gonna report this will be slightly distorted. It will obfuscate the details of the indictment. I can only go based on what’s in the indictment and it seems to show that Flynn lied to the FBI, he probably pled out on part to protect his son Michael Flynn Jr. from being, you know, indicted, or called in. And to the extent that he is going to say that Trump ordered him to make this phone call, well, the question is how does that demonstrate any illicit behavior by Trump if Trump himself was urging Flynn, who was his future National Security Council Advisor, to conduct diplomacy with Russia?I mean Flynn’s mistake was to make the phone call in the Cayman Islands where the NSA could pick up the cables and listen to the phone call and his other mistake was to lie to the FBI time and time again. Just being a serial liar. So that’s it from what I can see and from the standpoint of someone trying to prove Trump Russia collusion, or the overall narrative of Russia-gate, this one is another dud.
Aaron Mate: Leave it there. Max Blumenthal is Senior Editor of Alternet’s Grayzone Project, also the current host of the podcast, Moderate Rebels. Max, thank you.
Max Blumenthal: Thanks for having me.
Aaron Mate: And thank you for joining us on the Real News.
11/27/17 The ‘Deal of the Century’ Struck between Reckless Leaders
mikenova shared this story from Comey – Google News.
James Comey Waxes Biblical About Mike Flynn’s Guilty Plea
Quoting the prophet Amos, Comey tweeted a link to a picture of the Great Falls of the Potomac River. It was his 28th tweet since debuting his handle @Comey in March. But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream Amos …
James Comey Waxes Biblical About Flynn’s Guilty Plea
So what now? Special Counsel Robert Mueller has cut a plea deal with Michael Flynn, who is testifying that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner ordered him to be the point man for communicating and conspiring with the Russian government during the election. If Flynn has the evidence to back up those assertions, things will never be the same. Two U.S. Congressmen are weighing in on the matter, and they’re painting a particularly dire picture for Kushner and Trump both.
After the news broke that Michael Flynn was implicating Jared Kushner, and that Kushner had met with Robert Mueller just before it was revealed that Flynn had cut a deal, Congressman Ted Lieu posted this on Twitter: “My prediction? The next time agents & prosecutors for Special Counsel Mueller interview #Kushner, they will read him his Miranda rights.” Lieu is a Democrat, and he’s been publicly rooting for the demise of Kushner and Trump all year. But it needs to be pointed out that Lieu has a history as a military prosecutor in the Air Force, and he currently sits on the House Judiciary Committee (where the impeachment process begins), so this isn’t arbitrary cheerleading. Congressman Lieu knows what he’s talking about from a legal perspective.
Then there’s Congressman Jared Huffman, who saw the news about Flynn implicating Trump in the Russia conspiracy, and responded in this manner: “Let me be the first to congratulate President Pence.” Huffman is a Democrat, and the last thing he wants is to see a far-right extremist like Mike Pence in the Oval Office. However, he understands the urgency of ousting Trump, a mentally unstable traitor. He also knows that Pence is guilty as sin in the Russia scandal, and can then be ousted as well.
So there you have it. According to the Democrats in Congress, Jared Kushner is about to be arrested, and Donald Trump is going to be ousted from office. Plenty of contrarian political pundits are still insisting that neither of those things will ever happen, but those are the same pundits who told us that Paul Manafort would never be arrested and Michael Flynn would never cut a deal.
The post Congressmen say Jared Kushners arrest is coming and Donald Trump will be ousted from officeappeared first on Palmer Report.
Flynn could commit murder today, and be convicted … and still retain his retired general status with pension, one expert said.
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mikenova shared this story from Donald Trump – Google News.
Psychiatrists warn Trump becoming more mentally unstable, putting US, world at ‘extreme risk’
… instability in fact, a pattern of decompensation: increasing loss of touch with reality, marked signs of volatility and unpredictable behavior, and an attraction to violence as a means of coping.” “These characteristics place our country and the…
WLS-TV
Flynn pleads guilty to lying to FBI, is cooperating with Mueller
And, given the direct involvement of the transition team in Flynn’s calls with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the plea also raises questions about the accuracy of repeated assertions by the administration that Flynn had misled Mike Pence and other …
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleads guilty to lying to FBIWABC-TV
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mikenova shared this story from 2016 elections anxiety – Google News.
Russia investigation ‘wearing’ on White House, despite spin
Lincoln Journal Star
“I think that Russia investigation is wearing on all of us, the President most of all,” said a source close to Trump. “But I think he is more concerned about the state of his accomplishments and this presidency.” Flynn’s plea is closest special counsel …
Donald Trump Suspected for Weeks That Mike Flynn Would FlipDaily Beast
Trump’s best and worst day as presidentWashington Post
Does Donald Trump Fear Impeachment After Flynn Plea? President Was Terrified Flynn ‘Turned On Me,’ Report SaysThe Inquisitr
Author mikenovaPosted on December 2, 2017 Format AsideCategories Audio-Video News
Flynns indictment tightens the noose on Trumps White House
The World News and Times –
Flynn’s indictment tightens the noose on Trump’s White House – Financial Times
Trump keeps playing nice with Mueller, for now – Politico
Trump calls Tillerson exit reports ‘fake news’ but was it a misfired plot?
Rex Tillerson Isn’t the Problem. It’s Trump. – POLITICO Magazine
The Russia Investigations: After Flynn Plea Deal, Where Does Mueller Aim Next? – North Country Public Radio
Mueller has arrested 4 ex-Trump advisers in 6 months, signaling peril ahead for White House – Chicago Tribune
The Scalp-Taking of Gen. Flynn – Center for Research on Globalization
Russian Security Council head to visit Brazil, Argentina – TASS
The Kathryn Steinle murder trial: Why the jury and Trump saw two different cases – Los Angeles Times
Flynn plea deal increases exposure of senior Trump transition team members
Who Is Jared Kushner: Trump loyalist or Kissinger protege? – RT
Russia investigation ‘wearing’ on White House, despite spin – Q13 FOX
Friday Talking Points Lock Him Up! – HuffPost
Dacha in reserve and real estate in Miami. How retired police General obtained ownership of paradise – https://en.crimerussia.com/
Letter from the US: Behind the ‘Russia Did it!’ frenzy – Green Left Weekly
Russia investigation ‘wearing’ on White House, despite spin – WGNO
Don’t use antivirus firms linked to Russia, cyber security chief tells Whitehall – The Guardian
Flynn Plea Shows Collusion With… Israel? – The Real News Network
This is the worst day of Donald Trumps life and its about to get far worse for him
Indictment on a relatively minor count suggests retired general has juicy information to share, writes Edward Luce
The last time Mr Trump contemplated sacking the special counsel was in July when the FBI raided the home of Paul Manafort, Mr Trump’s former campaign chairman, who was indicted on several counts in October. As the investigative noose tightens, that …
Who Is Michael Flynn? The Former Top Trump Aide Just Pleaded Guilty to Lying to the FBITIME
Trump keeps playing nice with Mueller, for now
Trump, who has specifically been advised to avoid targeting Mueller on Twitter, kept quiet about the special counsel Friday even as his former White House national security adviser, Michael Flynn, entered a guilty plea for lying to FBI agents about his…
Russia investigation zeroes in on Trump inner circleCNN International
Flynn’s plea deal puts Mueller inside Trump’s inner circle with a message: ‘We’re coming for you’USA TODAY
The Russia Investigations: After Flynn Plea Deal, Where Does Mueller Aim Next?NPR
Newsweek–The Boston Globe– The New Yorker
all 2,612 Aljazeera.com
Multiple reports said the secretary of state would be replaced. Were those sources wrong or did a move against Tillerson fall victim to the Mike Flynn drama?
Donald Trump insisted on Friday that Rex Tillerson was not leaving the US state department, denouncing as fake news multiple reports quoting White House officials as saying the secretary of state was about to be ousted.
Earlier in the day, Tillerson also rejected the reports of his imminent departure as laughable.
Related: ‘Guilty, your honor’: Michael Flynn, who led the ‘lock her up’ chants, enters his plea
Rex Tillerson Isn’t the Problem. It’s Trump.
It appears that those who have been calling for Rex Tillerson’s headwhich includes most of the foreign policy know-it-alls inside the Beltwaymay have finally gotten their wish. The Trump administration’s public shaming of Tillerson this week …
Trump: Tillerson is ‘not leaving,’ but ‘I call the final shots’CNBC
Trump Rejects Reports That His Top Diplomat is DepartingNew York Times
Trump calls Tillerson exit reports ‘fake news’ but was it a misfired plot?The Guardian
CNN –Bloomberg –Financial Times
The Russia Investigations: After Flynn Plea Deal, Where Does Mueller Aim Next?
North Country Public Radio
That was the question raised by Flynn’s guilty plea on Friday, in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador in late December 2016. Flynn conferred with the Trump transition team to ask then-Ambassador Sergey …
Mueller has arrested 4 ex-Trump advisers in 6 months, signaling peril ahead for White House
After six months of work, special counsel Robert Mueller III has indicted two top advisers to President Donald Trump and accepted guilty pleas from two others in exchange for their cooperation with his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election …
Trump’s favorite general: Michael Flynn’s rise and fallThe News Tribune
Michael Flynn is now cooperating with Mueller and could fuel the obstruction case against TrumpBusiness Insider
Flynn Pleads Guilty: Is He Singing on Trump-Russia?The Nation.
Newsweek –Los Angeles Times –Bloomberg
Center for Research on Globalization
The Scalp-Taking of Gen. Flynn
Russia-gate enthusiasts are thrilled over the guilty plea of President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador, but the case should alarm true civil …
Friday Talking Points Lock Him Up!HuffPost
The fallen military hero who could bring down a president: How Mike Flynn marched into Trump’s inner circle and …Daily Mail
Russian Security Council head to visit Brazil, Argentina
MOSCOW, December 2. /TASS/. Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev on December 4-6 will visit Brazil and Argentina, the authority’s press service said on Saturday. “In Brasilia and in Buenos Aires, Nikolai Patrushev will have …
The Kathryn Steinle murder trial: Why the jury and Trump saw two different cases
At the time of the shooting, Trump called Garcia Zarate an animal, the embodiment of the bad hombres and rapists he’d been railing against. This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another …
Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Jeff Sessions and Trump at risk
Analysis: Flynn pleads guilty but signs are Mueller has bigger fish to fry
By agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors in a deal announced on Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn won for himself protection from further prosecution. That protection could conceivably extend to his son, Michael Flynn Jr, who once worked for his father.
Related: Michael Flynn’s wrongdoing is just the tip of the iceberg | Richard Wolffe
Who Is Jared Kushner: Trump loyalist or Kissinger protege?
The second even more mysterious ‘mistake’ involved the firing of James Comey, the FBI Director who was in the process of investigating claims of collusion between Trump and Russia in the course of the 2016 presidential election. It did not take a …
Q13 FOX
I think that Russia investigation is wearing on all of us, the President most of all, said a source close to Trump. But I think he is more concerned about the state of his accomplishments and this presidency. Flynn’s plea is the closest that …
Flynn’s plea deal puts Mueller inside Trump’s inner circle with a message: ‘We’re coming for you’WXIA-TV
Does Donald Trump Fear Impeachment After Flynn Plea? President Was Terrified Flynn ‘Turned On Me,’ Report Says
The Inquisitr
all 2,593 2,457 news articles »
Friday Talking Points Lock Him Up!
<p>This morning, Donald Trump’s first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, pled guilty to charges of lying to the F.B.I. He is now the highest-ranking Trump aide to be targeted by Robert Mueller, and also the highest-ranking person to have flipped …
The Scalp-Taking of Gen. FlynnConsortium News
Breaking down Flynn’s lies about his Russia callsCNN
theday.com–
Dacha in reserve and real estate in Miami. How retired police General obtained ownership of paradise
https://en.crimerussia.com/
… fight against organized crime turns out to be a profitable occupation. Is there any other explanation of the Petukhov’s possession of real estate in Miami for almost $40 million? The General himself claims that he bought Florida property on …
Letter from the US: Behind the ‘Russia Did it!’ frenzy
By this narrative, Clinton didn’t lose the election, Russia won it. Was the Trump campaign contacting Russian officials to see if business deals could be made for a quid-pro-quo of relaxing some US sanctions? Probably. But US sanctions on other …
WGNO
Don’t use antivirus firms linked to Russia, cyber security chief tells Whitehall
Russia stands accused of meddling in the 2016 US election, while MPs have questioned if Moscow has sought to interfere in UK elections and the Brexit referendum. Theresa May used a November speech to tell Russian president Vladimir Putin that the …
Flynn Plea Shows Collusion With… Israel?
Just the level of absurdity of Flynn’s activities has reached a sublime level then you have Flynn testifying before Congress that the U.S. needed to be in the driver’s seat back in 2015 to prevent Russia from setting up nuclear facilities in Egypt and …
You’re Donald Trump. You only care about a handful of things in life. Money. Power. Cheating people. The perverse thrill of scamming society while proudly providing nothing in return. You’ve been getting away with it for seven decades. Except this time you took it a little too far, or at least you did it in the wrong arena. Now your own evil tactics are being used against you, by the very monsters you created. This has been the worst day of your life and it’s about to get far uglier, because you made it that way.
Donald, you took a disgraced and down on his luck former military hero name Michael Flynn, and you helped turn him into a traitor. You encouraged him to sell out everything he ever stood for, in the name of personal ambition. You taught him how to not care about anything or anyone. You taught him the art of cold hard ruthless revenge. And so when it all went wrong and Flynn’s back was against the wall, he took the lessons you taught him and sold you out to save himself. He destroyed you today. Your presidency is a ticking timebomb. Your family is about to be in ruins. Oh, and he’s not the only one.
You also helped turn Paul Manafort into a financial fraudster over the years, a traitor willing to take any money, no matter how bloody. Manafort has begun selling you out as well. Oh, or did you think prosecutors have suddenly moved to release him on bail for no reason? Manafort wants to get out of prison in time to spend up his blood money, and the only way he can do it is to sell you out as callously as you’ve spent your life selling others out.
Just wait, Donald Trump, until this mess lurches even closer to you. You taught your daughter to seek out and marry the exact same kind of piece of crap that you are. His back is now against the wall as well. Do you really think for one second that Jared Kushner won’t sell you out in order to save himself? This is just getting started, Donald. You’ve surrounded yourself with bad people and you’ve taught them how to be even worse people. Of course they were going to betray you when it inevitably came down to it. Everything gets worse for you, Donald, from here.
The post This is the worst day of Donald Trump’s life and it’s about to get far worse for him appeared first on Palmer Report.
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Anthony Kennedy Fast Facts
CNN Library Here's a look at the life of Anthony Kennedy, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Thursday, July 11th 2019, 5:13 PM EDT
CNN Library
Here's a look at the life of Anthony Kennedy, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Birth place: Sacramento, California
Birth name: Anthony McLeod Kennedy
Father: Anthony J. Kennedy, lawyer and lobbyist
Mother: Gladys (McLeod) Kennedy, civic leader
Marriage: Mary (Davis) Kennedy (1963-present)
Children: Justin, Gregory and Kristin
Education: London School of Economics, 1957-1958; Stanford University B.A. Political Science, 1954-1958; Harvard Law School LL.B., 1961
Military Service: California Army National Guard, 1961, Private First Class
Other Facts:
He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
While a Sacramento lawyer in private practice, he was also a lobbyist.
His nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Gerald Ford was a result of his being recommended by California's then governor, Ronald Reagan.
He is known for his reverence for legal precedent, for creating unlikely coalitions among the justices, and for being a strong advocate of free speech.
Kennedy teaches at the University of Salzburg in Austria during the court's summer recess. The class is offered as part of the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law's summer program.
1962 - Kennedy is admitted to the California Bar.
1961-1963 - Practices law at the firm of Thelen, Marrin, John & Bridges in San Francisco.
1963 - After his father's sudden death, Kennedy takes over his law practice in Sacramento.
1965-1988 - Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law.
1973 - Helps draft Proposition 1, a California ballot initiative to limit state spending, which later fails.
May 30, 1975-February 2, 1988 - Judge, Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
November 11, 1987 - To fill the seat vacated by Justice Lewis Powell's retirement, President Ronald Reagan nominates Judge Kennedy to the Supreme Court after the confirmation failures of nominees Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg.
February 3, 1988 - The Senate votes unanimously to confirm his appointment.
February 18, 1988 - Kennedy is sworn in as the 104th justice of the Supreme Court.
June 29, 1992 - Angers conservatives by coauthoring, with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter, the opinion of the court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, to uphold Roe v. Wade.
March 1, 2005 - Writes the majority opinion for the 5-4 ruling in Roper v. Simmons stating that executing killers who were under age 18 when they committed their crimes is unconstitutional.
April 18, 2007 - Voting with the conservatives in the 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, Justice Kennedy writes the majority opinion to uphold the nationwide ban on partial birth abortions.
June 12, 2008 - In Boumediene v. Bush, Kennedy writes the majority 5-4 opinion, assessing that the language of the Constitution grants the Guantanamo Bay prison detainees the right to seek habeas corpus.
June 25, 2012 - Writes the opinion of the court in Arizona v. United States, overturning three sections of Arizona's 2010 immigration law.
June 26, 2013 - Kennedy writes the majority opinion of the court in United States v. Windsor, striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act.
June 26, 2015 - Kennedy writes the landmark majority opinion of the court in Obergefell v. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 US states.
June 23, 2016 - Kennedy writes the majority opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas, upholding the right of universities to consider race as one factor in admissions.
June 27, 2018 - Writes a letter to President Donald Trump announcing his retirement from the Supreme Court effective July 31, 2018.
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Battlefield 3 Patch is in the Works
Source: Battlefield 3 Cover Art | Wikipedia
Battlefield 3’s Armored Kill Expansion is almost here, together with a new patch for the game. It was confirmed by the Battlelog Content Manager Ruben Santana that a “multiplayer update” will land on PlayStation 3 on September 4. However, it is yet to be known whether the patch will include bug fixes, as there are no patch notes yet.
Since its release, game developer EA was able to introduce unparalleled levels on in-game destruction, all-out vehicle warfare, and redefined online gameplay. After that, a Battlefield 3 Premium was released. The game features early access to all five expansion packs, exclusive in-game items, online double XP events, and insider tactics from DICE.
It was followed by the release of Back to Karkand and Close Quarters expansion pack. There were also reports that the Armored Kill Expansion is now in the works, while End Game and Aftermath are still on the horizon.
Exclusive Access to Battlefield 4
Other than the upcoming release of the game’s Armored Kill Expansion pack and patch, it was reported that gamers can have access to the exclusive Battlefield 4 beta when they pre-order Medal of Honor Warfighter.
The MoH Warfighter will come in two versions: Limited and Deluxe Editions. The former costs $60, and it will be available for Xbox 360. The Deluxe Edition, on the other hand, is tagged at $70. It will feature PC Digital Download, Day 1 Unlocks, British SAS SPEC OPS, Russian SPETSNAZ, Alpha Group Heavy Gunner, and Digital Game Soundtrack.
In addition, the game will allow players to unlock the U.S. Navy SEAL sniper and McMillan TAC-300 sniper rifle, as well as engage in Multinational Tier 1 blue vs. blue team play. Other than the exclusive beta access, Battlefield didn’t share any more information about its next addition to the series.
More About Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3, commonly abbreviated as BF3, is a first-person shooter game, which features combined arms battles. This made the series popular across single-player, co-operative, and multiplayer modes. The game also reintroduces the fighter jets, prone position, and 64-player battles on PC—an element that were absent from several Bad Company games.
It was set in 2014 and revolves around the story of Staff Sgt. Henry “Black” Blackburn. In Battelfield 3, the protagonist leads a five-man squad on a mission to find and safely return a U.S. squad investigating a possible IED in Iraq.
When it was announced, Battlefield 3’s pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-shooter launch in EA history.” It also garnered multiple awards, including Best Shooter and Best Multiplayer Game in 2011 IGN People’s Choice Award.
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Answering Islam 4: Did Muhammad Use Religion for His Own Interests?
Here's Episode 4 of our "Answering Islam" series, where I answer the question: "Did Muhammad use religion for his own interests?" For the rest of the series, click on the playlist.
Here's the full text of the video:
Did Muhammad Use Religion for His Own Interests?
There are several different ways to view Muhammad. Muslims, of course, believe that he was a prophet of God. Among those of us who reject Muhammad, there are some who claim that Muhammad knew that he was deceiving people. They believe that he was an imposter who manipulated people into serving him. I happen to believe, along with many others, that Muhammad sincerely believed that he was a prophet. The general criterion I use here is the same whether I’m evaluating Christianity, or Islam, or any other worldview—it’s that, if a person is willing to die for what he’s saying, he probably believes it. In other words, liars make poor martyrs. There are lots of liars in this world. If you put a gun to someone’s head over a lie, they’re generally going to admit that it’s a lie. People who are willing to die for their claims are usually people who wholeheartedly believe in what they’re dying for.
Based on the number of battles Muhammad was in, and the various dangers he faced, I believe that he really thought he was a prophet. So I don’t believe that Muhammad was intentionally using Islam for his own interests.
However, there are a number of passages in the Qur’an and the Hadith, which prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Muhammad’s revelations were influenced by his desires. Let me give you four examples.
First, Surah 4, verse 3 of the Qur’an says that Muslims can marry up to four women. But we know from references in Bukhari and other sources that Muhammad had at least nine wives at one time. So why did Muhammad get more than four wives when the Qur’an says that Muslim men can only marry four women? Well, Muhammad received a special revelation, Surah 33, verse 50, which says that he, and he alone, could have as many wives as he wanted. Now I don’t know about you, but when the guy who’s receiving the revelations starts getting special moral privileges—namely, more sex partners than anyone else—I start getting awfully suspicious.
Second, Muhammad had an adopted son named Zaid, who was called Zaid bin Muhammad—Zaid, son of Muhammad. One day, Muhammad went to visit him and was greeted by Zaid’s wife, Zaynab, who was very beautiful, and who was wearing very little clothing at the time. When Muhammad saw her, he supposedly received some sort of revelation telling him that he was going to marry her, even though she was already married to his adopted son, and Muhammad walked away praising Allah. When Zaid found out that Muhammad was attracted to his wife, he divorced her, so that Muhammad could marry her. Muhammad was worried about what people might think if he married Zaynab, but then he began receiving revelations to justify the marriage. This is when he received Surah 33, verse 37 of the Qur’an, which says that it’s okay to marry the divorced wives of your adopted sons. I’ve never met a person who struggles with this problem. I’ve never met someone who struggles with whether he should marry the divorced wife of his own adopted son. So this verse has no purpose other than justifying what Muhammad did.
Third, Muhammad's wife Hafsa once came home early and caught Muhammad in her bed with another woman—his slave-girl, Mary the Copt. Seeking to avoid further conflict, Muhammad promised that he would stop having sex with his slave-girl. But a little later, Muhammad started having sex with Mary again. How did he justify his sexual relationship with Mary when he had taken an oath to stop having sex with her? Well, he received a revelation. Surah 66, verses 1-2 of the Qur’an, where Allah says:
O Prophet! why do you forbid (yourself) that which Allah has made lawful for you; you seek to please your wives; and Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. Allah indeed has sanctioned for you the expiation of your oaths and Allah is your Protector, and He is the Knowing, the Wise.
Notice, Muhammad swears, “I’ll never have sex with my slave-girl again.” Then he starts having sex with her, because Allah told him to break his oath. Very interesting.
Fourth, one of Muhammad's wives was a woman named Sauda. As Sauda aged, she became unattractive and extremely overweight, and Muhammad decided to divorce her. Terrified of being abandoned in her old age, Sauda hatched a plan. She knew that Aisha was Muhammad's favorite wife, and that Muhammad would like to spend even more time with Aisha. So Sauda told Muhammad that, if he would keep her as his wife and not abandon her, she would give her sex night to Aisha. This arrangement would allow Muhammad to spend twice as much time with Aisha as he spent with any of his other wives. Muhammad was happy with the arrangement, and so was Allah. Allah praises Sauda, in Surah 4, verse 128, for coming up with this solution after fearing cruelty and desertion from Muhammad.
So Islam’s message to women is this: If your husband’s going to abandon you in your old age, just give up some of your rights and let him spend more time with his favorite wife. This will keep him from divorcing you and abandoning you.
Over and over again, Muhammad’s revelations are just too convenient. The Qur’an is supposed to exist eternally in heaven, and yet parts of it have more to do with satisfying Muhammad’s desires than with guiding humanity. Even Muhammad’s wife Aisha noticed this. In Sahih al-Bukhari, Muhammad receives one of his morally convenient revelations, and Aisha says to him, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”
So, I personally believe that Muhammad was sincerely convinced that he was a prophet. But the evidence is clear that his desires influenced the revelations he was receiving.
Labels: Answering Islam, David Wood, Muhammad, Was Muhammad a Prophet?
I truly appreciate your videos and articles.
R. Osman
Gerald Potts said...
David Wood,
I just stumbled over this. It looks like its been out for some time, and you're probably familiar with it. If not, it seems like you might want to utilize this to maximum advantage. What an ironic and glorious conclusion, if the Quran can be used to bring all moslems to Christianity.
https://www.facebook.com/linda.kaur.98/videos/688107297986463/
Gerald Potts
Az gal said...
Ha ha ha! Mohammed was a fraud.
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Joe Vitt Returns As Saints Head Coach Bookies Are On High Alert As Free Agency In Major League Baseball Is In Full Swing!
Adios Honey Badger, Goodbye Millions
On October 26, 2012, in Sporting News, by admin
The Honey Badger seemed to be making a real effort to regain favor with the LSU football team. The old saying goes, “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” In Tyrann Mathieu’s case on Thursday, he didn’t open his mouth—just the door to his apartment. He did not have to do it….but, he did and now the world will never be the same for the controversial former line backer for the LSU Tigers football team. Mathieu was one of four former LSU football players arrested on Thursday on marijuana charges. It was a bad comedy of errors that led to the Baton Rouge police to his apartment near campus on Thursday evening.
Mathieu and former quarterback Jordan Jefferson were charged with simple possession of marijuana, former linebacker Karnell Hatcher was charged with his second offense of simple possession.Mathieu, a junior defensive back widely known as the “Honey Badger,” was removed from the LSU football team earlier this year after what sources said was multiple failed drug tests. He is currently enrolled at LSU and was hoping to return to the team next season. Mathieu was mentioned for the Heisman Trophy in 2011. Both Hatcher and Bryant were defensive backs for LSU.
Jefferson is a former LSU quarterback who started the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama in January 2012. Officers were dispatched to an apartment at 262 West State in Baton Rouge around 3:30 p.m. in reference to a complaint about a man trying to force his way into the complex through a security gate. “Officers immediately smelled a strong odor of marijuana and obtained consent from Mathieu to search the apartment,” a police news release said. “Inside, they found three other men, including the one who had allegedly tried to force his way through the gate. He was identified as Jordan Jefferson. Thanks a lot Jordan!?!?!
Is this latest arrest going to prevent Mathieu from making a living playing football in the NFL? Probably not. All it takes is one NFL general manager to be willing to take a chance. But from a football perspective, you have to wonder if his drug rehabilitation was nothing but a public relations ploy. Mathieu still has a lot of fans pulling for him but he is going to have to show them that he is serious about playing football
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Streatham Removals
Get your quote from the Streatham Removal Specialists today
It is well known that moving is one of the most stressful times in anyone's life, so leave it to the best in the business. Big Red Removals have over 10 years of experience in house and flat moves within Streatham.
Big Red offer a range of services to suit any move, large or small. We can offer a full or partial packing service to ensure that your precious possessions reach their destination intact. Our experienced and dedicated team of professional removers will ensure that your move goes without a hitch. From offering a full site survey for larger moves to flexible hourly rates for smaller moves, Big Red have got you covered, able to offer the most competitive rates in Streatham.
All moves with Big Red can be covered with liability insurance. As Members of the National Guild of Removers we follow their Code of Practice and you can be assured that Big Red will give you the best removals service in Streatham.
Whatever other stresses you have with your move, you can rely on Big Red to ensure that, from start to finish, the removal process is not one of them. Call the Streatham removals specialists now on 0207 228 7651.
51.4278711-0.1240577
Parking in Streatham
Most of the roads around Streatham are controlled parking, and either parking suspensions or dispensations are required. For larger Removals in Streatham a parking suspension is a necessity. The suspension has to be booked 14 days in advance of the required date. These are booked with Lambeth council online. For smaller Stratham removals, using vans, we can load and unload for short periods on single yellow lines. Otherwise a dispensation would need to be booked, if we are packing and Streatham flat moving.
For parking and other council information please click here Lambeth Council.
A Little Bit About Streatham
Streatham means “the hamlet on the street”. The street in question, the London to Brighton Way, was the Roman road from the capital Londinium to the coast near Portslade. It is likely that the destination was a Roman port now lost to coastal erosion, which has been tentatively identified with the ‘Novus Portus’. The road is confusingly referred to as Stane Street in some sources, although it diverges from the main London-Chichester road at Kennington.
After the departure of the Romans, the main road through Streatham remained an important trackway. From the 17th century it was adopted as the main coach road to Croydon and East Grinstead. In 1780 it then became the route of the turnpike road from London to Brighton, and subsequently became the basis for the modern A23.
The village remained largely unchanged until the 18th century, when the village’s natural springs, known as Streatham Wells, were first celebrated for their health-giving properties. The reputation of the spa and improved turnpike roads attracted wealthy merchants to build their country residences in Streatham.
Situated in postcode SW16 Streatham is currently undergoing a multi-million pound regeneration programme. Streatham Hub aims to provide new, improved leisure facilities, and create new housing and jobs.
Streatham’s most popular primary schools are Streatham Wells and Julian’s. Others include St Andrews, St Leonards and Granton Primary schools. Dunraven Secondary school has a good reputation and for private schooling, Streatham and Clapham High School are nearby.
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Copyright © 2004 the Brewery History Society
Journal Home > Archive > Issue Contents > Brew. Hist., 112, pp. 31-40
Porter Myths and Mysteries
by Martyn Cornell
Just over two centuries ago, in 1802, a man called John Feltham, bought out a guidebook called The Picture of London which included three pages on "The Porter Brewery" (using "brewery" in the 18th-century sense of "brewing industry"). Feltham said the story he was about to tell of the origins of porter, "not having yet been printed, we think … proper to record in this work". What he then wrote has been the basis of almost every history of porter ever since. Sadly, little of it appears to be true.
Porter, Feltham said, "obtained its name about the year 1730 from the following circumstances … prior to the above-mentioned period the malt liquors in general use were ale, beer and twopenny … In course of time it … became the practice to call for a pint or tankard of three-threads, meaning a third of ale, beer and twopenny; and thus the publican had the trouble to go to three casks and turn three cocks for a pint of liquor. To avoid this trouble and waste a brewer by the name of Harwood conceived the idea of making a liquor which should partake of the united flavours of ale, beer and twopenny. He did so and called it Entire or Entire-butt, meaning that it was served entirely from one cask; and as it was a very hearty nourishing liquor it was very suitable for porters and other working people. Hence it obtained the name porter."
Feltham's version of history, sometimes lightly leavened with two extracts from other narrative published in 1760 and 1788 which gave 1722 as the year of porter's invention and revealed Harwood's first name and brewery site, has been repeated by nearly every writer on beer since 1802, often using exactly the same phrases. The Penny Magazine for March 1841, for example, contains an almost identical account to Feltham's 38 years earlier, while Richard Valpy French, in Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England, published in 1884, offered an easily-recognisable paraphrase of his words. Another 25 years on, in 1909, and Frederick Hackwood's Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England was still using whole sentences originally written by Feltham in his own account of the birth of porter a century before (though Hackwood was wildly wrong with the year porter first arrived, suggesting it was "about 1750").
This repetition over two centuries has reinforced the apprehension that entire, alias porter, was invented in 1722 by a single brewer, Ralph Harwood of Shoreditch, to save publicans the bother of mixing a pot of "three-threads" from three separate casks, and was called entire because it was "entirely" from one cask. However, the surviving contemporary accounts suggest none of these statements is true.
Ralph Harwood was certainly a brewer in Shoreditch, and from at least 1703, when he is recorded as a brewer leasing four cottages in nearby Hoxton. His brewery was the same premises as John Byde's Bell brewhouse, which existed off Shoreditch High Street in 1653. Byde was Master of the Brewers' Company in the City in 1643-4, and Sheriff of London in 1647. His beer was popular with the diarist Samuel Pepys, who recorded several trips out to Mile End in 1667 to drink at a pub called the Rose and Crown, "a good place for Alderman Bide's ale". A man called Thomas Byde, presumably a descendant of the alderman, still owned the brewhouse site in 1780, but by then it had been leased out to other brewers for very many decades.
Kent's Directory and Alphabetical List of Trades in London for 1736 shows Ralph and James Harwood in partnership as brewers in Shoreditch. Ralph Harwood was an important enough operator to be a trustee of the Lea Navigation in the 1740s. Other London beer makers who were trustees of the navigation included the big porter brewers Felix and Peter Calvert, and Rivers Dickinson, whose family ran the Cannon brewery in Clerkenwell. The Lea river was vital to London's brewers, as it was the route the malt barges used to bring their supplies from the great malting town of Ware, in Hertfordshire, which produced up to 60 per cent of the malt consumed in the capital's beer. To ensure this supply route operated efficiently, London's bigger brewers always took a great interest in keeping the navigation running.
But the Harwoods' brewery in Shoreditch, unlike the Calverts' or Dickinson's, was never among the very biggest concerns. In 1760 it was only the 20th biggest brewery in London, making 17,760 barrels a year, not even a quarter as much as the biggest, Calvert and Seward. Even in 1792, when it was run by Thomas Proctor, it ranked only 23rd out of 148 breweries in and around the capital: it was brewing 19,993 barrels of strong beer and 312 barrels of small. Nor, under the Harwoods, was the Shoreditch business particularly successful. Ralph Harwood was continuing in partnership at the brewery with James Harwood in 1744, the Shoreditch ratebooks reveal. In August 1747, however, the Gentleman's Magazine recorded the bankruptcy of Ralph and James Harwood of Shoreditch, "brewers and partners".
Despite this setback, the Shoreditch ratebooks show Ralph and James were still together at the brewery in 1748. But Ralph died in September 1749, in Tottenham. James Harwood was on his own at the Shoreditch brewery in 1750, though by 1752 it was in the hands of Andrew Pankeman and Co, and the ratebooks suggest Pankeman ran it until Thomas Proctor took over in 1773. All the same, the brewery was listed under the name Harwood by the Annual Register in 1760, and when James Harwood died in 1762, his obituary notice described him as "an eminent brewer in Shoreditch, and the first that brought porter to perfection". Thus it was James Harwood, rather than Ralph, who was first identified with porter, and as the man who perfected it, rather than its inventor.
Porter certainly needed perfecting. The only eye-witness report of the birth of this new style of beer was made around 40 years after the event, by an elderly “outdoor clerk” (or brewery rep) at one of the London breweries, writing in the London Chronicle in November 1760 under the pseudonym Obadiah Poundage. Poundage told the Chronicle's readers that when “Porter or Entire Butt” was first brewed, “it was far from being in the perfection which since we have had it. I well remember for many years it was not expected, nor was it thought possible, for it to be made fine and bright, and four and five months was deemed to be sufficient age for it to be drunk at.”
Poundage, who claimed to be 86, and who said he had worked in the brewing industry for 70 years, wrote that porter had first been brewed “about the year 1722”. But he did not name anybody as the first brewer. It was not until nearly 30 years after Poundage's account appeared that Ralph Harwood was put forward as the great originator. In “A Short Description of Shoreditch Parish” by “A Parishioner”, published in the Gentleman's Magazine on October 14 1788, the anonymous author wrote “... on the east side of the High Street is Proctor's brewhouse, formerly Ralph Harwood's, who, it is said, was the first brewer of porter-beer, which he made there.” The article then quoted a song by “poet Gutteridge, a native of Shoreditch”:
Harwood my townsman, he invented first
Porter, to rival wine, and quench the thirst;
Porter, which spreads its fame half the world o'er,
Whose reputation rises more and more,
As long as porter shall preserve its fame
Let all with gratitude our parish name.
It was thus around 70 years after porter arrived that Ralph Harwood was first named as its inventor, and by a fellow resident of Shoreditch, hardly an unbiased witness.
Certainly London's drinkers liked to have their beers mixed to achieve the flavour they wanted, a habit that lasted centuries. Mixed beer drinks such as mild-and-bitter, Burton- and-bitter or brown-and-mild continued to be popular until the 1960s (and even in the late 1990s mixed drinks such as “lager and light” were occasionally asked for in London's pubs). Three-threads is probably a corruption of “three thirds”: it is not unlike the name given in East Anglia until recently to a mixture of mild and bitter, a “pint of twos”. (The name cannot, incidentally, be derived from taps or spigots “threaded” or screwed into the separate casks, as some modern writers have asserted, since the spigots were never screwed but always hammered in to a hole bored not quite all the way through the end of the cask.)
Turning back to the contemporary evidence, Obadiah Poundage in 1760 said that before porter, in the years of Queen Anne (1702-1714), the regular drinks in London were ale, which was still sweet and heavy, and beer, which was much more hopped and thus more bitter. However, Londoners found the beer too bitter, and “in general” the ale and beer were mixed together, and bought by customers from the “Ale draper” (or alehouse keeper) at “twopence halfpenny and twopence three farthings the quart”.
Meanwhile, Poundage wrote, the country gentry “residing in London more than they had in former times”, had brought with them around the start of Queen Anne's reign a taste for strong pale ales. Pale malt for pale ale cost more than the brown malt the London brewers used for their regular brown beers, not least because pale malt required better-quality barley, and more expensive fuel to dry it, while brown malt could be made from poorer grain. As a result pale ale retailed at 45 per cent more than regular brown beer: four pence the quart, or two pence a pint, which gave it the name twopenny.
London's brown beer brewers, prompted by loss of sales to the pale ale brewers, began trying to win back customers by adding more hops to their mild (or new) beer, Poundage said, while the habit also grew of allowing the brown beer to age – “stale”. This would have given it the sort of tart, vinous qualities found today in a Belgian or Dutch “oud bruin” brown ale. (“Stale” originally meant a liquid that had been allowed to stand long enough to clear, and the modern, derogatory sense of “not fresh” only started coming in during the 16th century). The maturing was done by third-party entrepreneurs who would buy fresh, mild beer, keep it until it was matured, or “stale”, and then sell it to the publicans, an arrangement which saved both brewers and publicans cash-flow difficulties.
Some drinkers now liked to order “mild beer and stale mixed”, others “ale, mild beer and stale blended together at three pence per quart, but many used all stale at fourpence per pot,” Poundage said. Notice, incidentally, that Poundage's recipe for the three-drink mixture, ale, mild beer and stale beer, is different from Feltham's version of three-threads 42 years later, ale, beer and twopenny – and notice, too, that he says the mixture was “blended together”, not “mixed in the pot”.
A couple of small “good pub guides” to the city written in verse give a rare contemporary record of the beers drunk in London's taverns around the time this was happening. The “Vade Mecum for Malt-Worms”, was published about 1716-1718, just after George I arrived on Britain's throne, and its companion, the “Guide for Malt-Worms”, was written in or soon after 1720 (since it mentions the South Sea Bubble). They were probably composed anonymously by the London tavern keeper and poet Edward “Ned” Ward. The most frequently mentioned drinks in the two books are mild and stale (sometimes paired together, suggesting they were indeed drunk together) and twopenny. Others are amber; double beer; stout; “humming stingo”; oat ale; October; Dorchester (at eight pence a quart, twice the price of twopenny); “pale Hocky”; Burton ale; Oxford ale; “York's pale ale”; and “Bull's Milk Beer”.
There is also one reference in the Vade Mecum, under the Bull's Head, Leadenhall Street, to “Tom Man's Entire” – “for so the Belch is called that sets his Face on Fire”. This suggests that as early as 1718, entire was already being used as the name of a beer. Porter is not named in either book, except possibly in a comment in the Guide that a tavern in Shoe Lane is “filled/with folks that are in Porter's liquors skilled.” But under the Hole in the Wall, Hatton Garden, the Vade Mecum says:
“Joyous and glad, thy trade increasing see
and daily broach full casks of Threads call'd Three.”
This is the only mention of three-threads in the two guides. But it suggests the drink came to the publican ready-blended in full casks for dispensing straight away, rather than having to be mixed by the tavern keeper or potboy in the tankard from three separate casks. It would certainly make sense for a popular drink to be pre-mixed. It is also at least possible that a replacement for three-threads was called entire butt, meaning unmixed beer, if three- threads was, by contrast, “mixed butt”, full casks of ready-blended pale ale, mild beer and stale beer. The fact that three-threads only gets one mention, while other beers such as mild and stale get several, incidentally, suggests it was not as popular as later writers claim, a blow to the idea that porter was invented as a replacement for three-threads.
However, there is a far better explanation for the name entire butt, which links it to contemporary brewing practice, rather than Feltham's idea that it was called “entire” because it was drawn from only one cask. Butt-beer was a synonym for porter, according to the London and Country Brewer, a brewing manual first published in the 1730s. Entire, or “intire”, was an expression used by brewers to indicate a beer where the first, second and third mashes had been mixed and fermented together to make one grade of beer, rather than brewed separately to produce three different-strength beers: the 1735 edition of the London and Country Brewer, for example, mentions “intire small beer”, brewed from a complete set of mashes, rather than just the last, weak mash, the normal source for small beer. Entire butt got its name because, as 18th century recipes make clear, it was butt-beer made from an entire set of mashings, unlike stout butt beer, another brew mentioned in the London and Country Brewer, which would have been a strong (or stout) beer made from the first, strongest mash only.
Obadiah Poundage wrote in 1760 that the invention of entire butt was deliberate, that “about the year 1722” the brown beer brewers of London “conceived there was a method to be found” which would do away with the middlemen who were storing beer until it was mature and selling it back to publicans as “stale” at a higher price, and also do away with the subsequent need to mix beers to match the public's taste. Poundage said the London brewers decided that “beer well brewed, kept its proper time, became racy and mellow, that is neither new nor stale, such would recommend itself to the public.” This improved brew sold at three pence a quart, the same price as three-threads and less than stale beer, and although “at first it was slow in making its way … in the end the experiment succeeded beyond expectation,” Poundage declared.
As for the name of the new beer, Poundage said, “the labouring people, porters etc. experienced its wholesomeness and utility, they assumed to themselves the use thereof, from whence it was called Porter or Entire Butt.” This is slightly confused, like much of Poundage's narrative, but it does confirm that at the beginning porter and entire butt were the same beer, something that has been doubted by some writers. It also confirms that the beer was nicknamed porter because it was consumed by porters.
Several fanciful stories have been needlessly invented to try to explain the name porter, when the simplest answer is the one given by contemporary sources: it was called porter because porters drank it. The important place of porters in the economic history of London has now been generally forgotten, but for several hundred years they were a large, thriving and hugely necessary part of the capital's commercial life.
London had thousands of registered porters in the 18th century, the two main groups being the “fellowship porters”, who mostly unloaded “measurable” goods (corn, coal and salt) from ships on the river; and the “ticket porters”. The ticket porters, who wore a pewter “ticket” or badge bearing the arms of the City of London, were themselves two separate groups, “uptown porters”, concerned with carrying goods about the city, who wore a white apron as well as the “ticket”, and “waterside porters”, who worked on the city's wharves and quays doing the portering jobs the fellowship porters did not touch. Thousands more men combined unofficial, casual portering with other unskilled jobs such as “chairman”, or sedan chair operative.
There were at least two public houses called the Ticket Porter in London, one in Moorfields and the other (which was only closed and demolished around 1970) in Arthur Street, near London Bridge. Charles Dickens invented a riverside pub called the “Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” in his novel Our Mutual Friend. The Fellowship Porters are said in fact to have used the Ship, in Gate Street, just to the north of Lincoln's Inn, where new members were initiated. A description of the rite written in the 1920s says that a quart of strong ale was ordered, and the novitiate's badge of office was dropped into the mug. The would-be porter then had to extract the badge with his teeth without spilling any ale.
The porters' hot, hard work bought the desire for a sharp, filling, refreshing, nutritive beer: it has been estimated that 18th century manual workers were getting 2,000 calories a day from beer, the equivalent of an uneatable quantity of bread. As a result they were great frequenters of pubs, both on duty and off. A writer in the Penny Magazine in 1841, describing a former public house called the Triumphant Chariot near Hyde Park Corner, in the 1770s said that outside the pub, by the kerb-stone, was a bench for the porters and a board [that is, table] over it “for depositing their loads” while they stopped for “deep draughts of stout … such as are idealised in Hogarth's Beer Street.” Similar resting-places for porters outside pubs, the Penny Magazine said, “were once universal.”
Sometimes the beer was forced upon the porters. One London brewer, Reid & Co of the Griffin Brewery in what is now Clerkenwell Road, hired teams of porters to shift sacks of malt into the brewery. Reid's made the porters pick up their pay at one of its pubs, and it expected them to drink a pint of beer in the pub after they had been paid. When Reid's increased the price per load of malt it paid to the porters, it also increased the amount of beer they were expected to drink, to a “pot”, or two pints. Brewers were big hirers of porters, with Barclay Perkins's Thames-side brewery taking on up to 140 fellowship porters at a time to unload malt barges.
Poundage's claim that the brewers “conceived” the idea of entire butt supposes that they knew enough to be able to design a beer that they could be confident would capture public taste. Poundage was a propagandist for the brewers (his letter to the Chronicle was a long argument against higher beer taxes) and would want to make them appear skilled operators. It seems quite possible, however, that the first entire butt was a lucky accident. The sole ingredient of the earliest porters, apart from hops and water, was “high brown” “blown” or “snapped” malt, which had been dried very quickly at high temperature. The result was that the husks of the malt grains snapped like heated popcorn, and the malt became very dark in colour. It is hard to see the first “blown” malt being made deliberately: there would have been no ready market for apparently ruined grain. It is easy to imagine, however, that one day in the early years of George I's reign a Hertfordshire brown malt maker accidentally left a batch of malt too long in the kiln, and had to sell the popped, almost charred result cheaply to one of his London brown-beer brewer customers.
The brewer (perhaps it was Ralph Harwood, it probably wasn't one of the leading brewers, who would have no need to buy cheap, damaged materials) made a beer out of this “damaged” malt which turned out to be qualitatively different from the brown beers then being made by London brewers from “ordinary” brown malt, which was kilned at a temperature five to ten degrees Fahrenheit lower than “high brown” malt. The new beer sold well to the city's drinkers, and the brewer went back to the maltster to ask for some more of this new kind of malt. Whether or not it was seen as a replacement for “threethreads” or any other popular drink in London's alehouses at the time, the city's “labouring class”, among them those thousands of porters, soon came to prefer the new beer to any other brew.
However, there is evidence that porter was never “invented” at all, but evolved out of the brown beer already being made in London. A hundred years after the arrival of porter a brewer called John Tuck, author of the “Private Brewer's Guide to the Art of Brewing Ale and Porter”, published 1822, said porter came about because the London breweries “began to improve” the “heavy and glutinous” brown beer that existed about 1720. Tuck said that the “improved” brown beer “was started, well hopped, into butts, and was kept a considerable time to grow mellow. Being the beverage of labouring men, it obtained the name of PORTER and was called INTIRE BUTT BEER.” Porter or entire butt, according to this version of history, was simply a hoppier, more aged interpretation of London brown beer, matured in butts, brewed using an entire mash, which caught on with the portering classes.
The earliest specific mention of porter by name comes in a pamphlet by the Whig political journalist and poet Nicholas Amhurst dated May 22 1721, which talks about dining at a cook's shop “upon beef, cabbage and porter” as being preferable to the life of a galley slave. Five years later, in November 1726, the 21-year-old Swiss traveller César de Saussure, writing home from lodgings in East Sheen, on the edge of the capital, said about England that “nothing but beer is drunk and it is made in several qualities. Small beer is what everyone drinks when thirsty; it is used even in the best houses and costs only a penny a pot. Another kind of beer is called porter … because the greater quantity of this beer is consumed by the working classes. It is a thick and strong beverage, and the effect it produces if drunk in excess, is the same as that of wine; this porter costs 3d the pot. In London there are a number of houses where nothing but this sort of beer is sold.”
One wrinkle to the porter story is the commonly repeated assertion that first public house to sell the new beer, was the ironically-named Last (a last in this case being a shoemaker's wooden pattern) in Curtain Road, Shoreditch, not too far from Harwood's brewery. (The pub is better known now under the name and address it has had since its rebuilding in 1876, the Old Blue Last, Great Eastern Street.). It is not clear that Harwood either owned or supplied the Last, though the pub was certainly owned by a set of later lessees of Harwood's Shoreditch High Street brewery, the Pryors, who took it with them when they merged their business with Truman, Hanbury & Buxton of the Brick Lane brewery, which is why it sports Truman's insignia today.
However, the early porters, as Poundage states, were comparatively raw, and it took some time before the discovery that porter needed a very long maturation period before it was "brought … to perfection”. This discovery probably did not take place until just before 1735, though certainly no later than 1745. During that time the maturation period for porter rose from four or five months to over a year, which would have helped with clearing the drink as well as improving the flavour. The London and Country Brewer said it took nine to 12 months for beer made from wood-dried malt to lose the smoky tang. Tying up capital in beer and casks for a year or more without any cashflow (or with negative cashflow) until the matured porter went out to the pubs must have badly hurt the pockets of the first brewer to experiment with longer maturing. If it was James Harwood who perfected the making of porter, and if it meant the Shoreditch brewery suffered a cashflow crash while the first “long maturation” butts of porter were slumbering in cellars, perhaps this explains why the Harwoods went bankrupt in 1747.
Once the successful techniques for porter brewing and maturing were understood, brewers took over publicans' cellars and also hired “every vault and cellar that could be appropriated”, filling them with butts containing young beer and leaving them for at least 12 months, paying rent to the cellar owners at the rate of one shilling per butt per annum. The supervision of the maturing porter was undertaken by a brewery official known as the “abroad cooper” or “broad cooper”. He was “abroad” a lot – in the late 1740s Whitbread's brewery, for example, was hiring cellars in 54 different locations around London for its porter butts to mature in.
The abroad cooper's job could be dangerous: in 1758 it was recorded that the cooper employed by Mrs Hucks's brewery in London (one of the biggest at the time) had died when he went down into a cellar in Pall Mall filled with 40 butts of unstoppered beer. Contemporary reports blamed the “steam” off the beer, but the cooper, and the sedan chair man who went down after him, and who also died, were undoubtedly suffocated by the carbon dioxide being given off by the beer as it underwent secondary fermentation in the butts.
The rent for all those cellars was costing Whitbread around £100 a year. The capital tied up in casks was also considerable: Thrale's Anchor brewery in Southwark, one of the biggest porter brewers, had almost 19,000 butts in 1748, worth more than £8,500, or around 11 per cent of the brewery's total capital.
By now had already been discovered that maturing porter in vats on the brewery site was not only cheaper and more convenient – and less dangerous for those who had to venture into the cellars – but produced better-tasting, brighter beer. Alderman Humphrey Parsons of the Red Lion brewhouse at St Katharine's in Lower East Smithfield, just to the east of the Tower of London, was apparently the innovator, building vats at his brewery in 1736 that would hold 1,500 barrels each, (54,000 gallons, equal to 500 butts) for £536 a vat. His beer was fine enough to earn the description “Parsons' Black Champagne” from the poet Oliver Goldsmith, and the Red Lion brewery survived, under the name Hoare & Co, until its takeover by Charrington in 1933.
The lease of Harwood's old brewery, meanwhile, passed from Thomas Proctor to Thomas Marlborough Pryor and his brother Robert some time before 1803. They were members of a Quaker family which ran a brewery in Baldock, in Hertfordshire and their uncle, Vickris Pryor, was a malt supplier to Truman Hanbury & Buxton's brewery in Brick Lane, a short distance from Shoreditch. The Pryor's lease on the Shoreditch brewery ran out in 1816, and they apparently could not get it renewed. However, Sampson Hanbury, the head partner in the Brick Lane brewery, and himself a Quaker, was looking for new sources of capital, and invited the Pryors to join the Truman partnership.
The Pryor brothers brought to Truman's their trade, worth 20,000 barrels a year, their capital, £47,350 (giving them three shares each in the Brick Lane brewery) and their own pubs, including the Blue Last. Sampson Hanbury thought it was an excellent deal, telling the Villebois brothers, descendants of Sir Benjamin Truman, whose agreement was needed to extend the partnership: “Our good friends and neighbours, Messrs Pryor … only wish to have as much profit of our trade, or a trifle more, as they can bring trade with them … they will add capital, more than equivalent which with truth I can say seems very advisable, if not necessary … We want capital and managers, I question if the whole trade could produce two persons who would unite so much of what we want – knowledge of the brewery in every part, economical habits, industry and respectability with money. Could you manage to come to town next week?” The agreement was made, and for the next 138 years the brewery in Brick Lane was to be run exclusively by members of the Hanbury, Buxton and Pryor families.
The Shoreditch brewery, meanwhile, looks to have closed when the Pryors departed, ending more than 160 years of brewing on the site – and leaving behind the mystery of its exact role in the creation of London's most famous beer.
This has been adapted from Beer: The Story of the Pint by Martyn Cornell, published in August 2003 and available from the Brewery History Society bookshop.
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Fantasy »
TV and Film »
Film 'V for Vendetta' and TV series 'The Last Enemy'
Author Topic: Film 'V for Vendetta' and TV series 'The Last Enemy' (Read 5121 times)
'V for Vendetta' (2006) is set in a future dystopian England in which security fears have led to the imposition of a police state, with tight controls on public behaviour and suppression of dissent. A girl (Natalie Portman) becomes caught up in the plans of a vengeful and resourceful man, known only as "V", who is planning the violent overthrow of the government. He always wears a mask and costume to represent Guy Fawkes, and it is suggested that he was badly disfigured by an official experiment which went wrong.
I'm not a fan of comics, and when I sat down to watch the film I didn't realise that it was based on a graphic novel. The comic-strip elements are clear enough: not only the man in a mask, but his improbable resources and apparently superhuman abilities with knives. What is slightly confusing is that the rest of the film appears to be a lot more serious in intent, using well-known actors and sending clear messages about the authoritarian direction in which the UK seems to be gradually but inexorably heading, and the dangers which lie down that path. I'm not sure that the serious and comic-strip elements work all that well together, but it was an interesting attempt and worth watching.
The theme of 'V for Vendetta' reminded me of the recent BBC TV series 'The Last Enemy' (shown in five episodes, totalling 330 minutes, in February and March). This was much more realistic, concerning a near-future British government plan to introduce a national "total surveillance" system, linking CCTVs, ID cards and other databases so that anyone can be immediately located and tracked, and comprehensive information about them obtained. A famous but unworldly mathematician is roped in to help sell the idea to the public, and also becomes involved in a parallel plot line concerning a mysterious and lethal ailment apparently caused by secret genetic experiments. Together with a few resourceful friends he tries to expose what is going on but, unlike 'V', the story does not have a happy ending.
The plot of The Last Enemy is really getting close to the truth now, because our government does indeed want to introduce a comprehensive system linking everything about everyone that is recorded on official electronic databases, and providing access to such data via the planned ID cards. There's a lot of debate about the introduction of the ID cards (which is going to be voluntary for most people: at least, at first?). In my view, too much of the discussion misses the point. I see no harm in ID cards. I carry one now ? a driving licence with my name and address, date of birth and photo on it ? and occasionally find it useful in confirming my identity. The main issue is the vast database which the government wants to put behind it, way beyond anything attempted anywhere else, and that's a problem for various reasons. The loss of privacy, the certainty of error in inputting the data, and the horrifying prospect of a really comprehensive identity theft if it's ever hacked (or a civil servant with input access is bribed or coerced). The catastrophic record of government failures in introducing computer-based systems far less sophisticated and complex than this is another reason to regard this idea as misconceived. As is the fact that the excuse for introducing the system is international terrorism, but all such recent attacks in the UK have been by British citizens in good standing who would have been perfectly entitled to be issued ID cards, so where's the benefit there? Oh well, rant over ? for now.
(an extract from my SFF blog)
Anthony G Williams homepage and SFF blog
Re: Film 'V for Vendetta' and TV series 'The Last Enemy'
Readthegraphicnovel
Readthegraphicnovel...
... the film is okay, entertaining, but how do you compress Alan Moore's writing into a 90 minute Wachowski action-fest?
mightyjoeyoung
To write. To be truly read. That must be glorious.
I was a 'V for Vendetta' fan right from the first black and white appearances in Warrior comics way back in the early 1980s, followed it through the graphic novels and even have the script book. As much as I enjoyed the film I think it comes across as a sort of 'slapstick' interpretation of something I had always considered very bleak and uncompromising.
Great film for those who haven't read the graphic novel. Good film for those who have.
Jay Eales
Quote from: ChrisT on April 09, 2008, 08:19:59 pm
Saved me from saying it, Chris!
John Forth
Interestingly, Tony, the elements you refer to as being most reminiscent of comic books weren't actually in the comic. The film is... okay, but it's a very dumbed-down, uncomplicated version of one of the few genuine masterpieces the medium has ever produced.
@JoeYoung - Ah, Warrior, probably the greatest British anthology comic ever produced. Did you follow Moore's Miracleman/Marvelman through to its conclusion. The climax to that tale is probably the bleakest thing he's ever done.
Stalk me at: www.twitter.com/johnforth
Quote from: John Forth on January 25, 2011, 10:27:32 pm
I totally agree about Warrior. A phenomenal comic, and a fine example that you can print cheaply on newsprint and in black and white, and it still beats the crap out of pretty much everything that followed in the next thirty years...
As for AM's finale to Marvelman/Miracleman, I think in the bleakness stakes, Neonomicon looks like it will take things bleaker still, though it's yet to conclude. Based on the issues so far, it doesn't look like there's going to be a happy ending, though!
Quote from: Jay Eales on January 25, 2011, 10:42:15 pm
Right now I don't really know where Neonomicon is going! You're right, though, it's not going to end well. The second issue was one of the harshest things he's done in a long, long time.
@ John Forth - Had every issue of Warrior, followed everything. I think you have just highlighted something that I didn't realize about myself until now, which is where my love of the bleak comes from. Somewhere within the Steptoe's Yard that is my flat, there is a pile of 2000AD comics, roughly half are early newsprint ones interspersed with 1970's British Spider-Man comics and others. I used to be a dealer. I'll have to check the pile out as I definitely had some Warrior issues. Stay tuned to this channel
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A retail sales boom is being muted by inflation, but it is real and becomes visible only after factoring in inflation.
Since consumers drive 70% of U.S. growth, retail sales are an important fundamental in measuring the strength of the economy relative to history.
The retail sales numbers, when adjusted for inflation, reveal that a retail explosion has been ongoing for years, but the media has missed it. A search of Google for news about "retail sales" returned these top stories on Friday afternoon, hours after the release of the May retail sales figures by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The media gets a press release with the nominal retail sales data, which masks the retail explosion underway for a decade. They're not economists and they don't know that adjusting retail sales data for inflation better reflects the surge in purchasing power underway for a decade.
Based on Friday's release, retail sales in the 12-months through May 31st were up 3.1%. Excluding volatile gasoline prices, which can distort the monthly figures, retail sales in this 12-month period through May rose 3%, which is not bad but not a boom.
Compared with the 3.2% peak 12-month period in the last economic boom, in 2006 and 2007, the 3% improvement in retail sales in the most recent 12 months is not impressive.
After adjusting for inflation, however, the boom is clear and loud.
"Real" after-inflation retail sales, excluding gasoline, were up 2% in the 12 months through May, but what's more important is the longer-term. Compared with the 2006-2007 economic expansion, retail sales of the last 12 months were booming.
Real retail sales were flat throughout the peak years of the last economic expansion. This 10-year expansion, which is only days away from officially becoming the longest expansion in modern U.S. history, is largely fueled by the steep growth trajectory in real retail sales for the last decade, and it gets no coverage in the media!
The Standard & Poor's 500 index was up fractionally from a week ago, closing on Friday at 2,886.98, just 3% from its April 30th all-time high.
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Boy names: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Girl names: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Name Trends
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Cade ... (Compare Trend)
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Popularity Over Time: How Many Boys Have Been Named Cade
This chart illustrates how many Boys were named Cade in the U.S. since 1880.
A few facts about the boy's name Cade:
Records indicate that 21,438 boys in the United States have been named Cade since 1880.
The greatest number of people were given this name in 2001, when 1,812 people in the U.S. were given the name Cade. Those people are now 16 years old.
So ... how do we know this stuff? Baby Names Hub identifies trends by analyzing vast amounts of data made available by the U.S. government and other public sources. This data, including social security statistics, provides detailed information on baby name popularity and trends in the United States.
Comments about the name Cade
97% Approval Rating
Based on the comments submitted below
56 Positive Comments
"I named my son Cade in 1991. I wanted something different and strong. I searched data bases and books and found that it was a rarely used name, in fact there were only 3 in our state in 20 years. After I named him, it blew up in our area. Within 4 years of him graduating 6 graduated after him. SMH..." Dec. 6, 2017:
"I'm called Cade, born in 1992 and I love it! It is unique but not enough to get picked on for and I've only met one other Cade in real life. The only problem I have is that is it misheard as "Kate" or pronounced like "Katie", otherwise its a strong name" Feb. 11, 2017:
"I am a Cade, born in 2002. My name, being 2 C's, is confusing to many. My last name especially. Being a Cade just makes me feel smarter. I've done so much to perfect everything I do, and I just love my name, I've only had one other person in any of my classes be named Cade, although it was with a K." Jun. 28, 2016:
"We named our son Cade Victor born March of this year. It was one of the only names we could agree upon that was unique enough without being to strange. We liked the strong masculine tone however we to find ourselves having to repeat and spell it out. Who would have thought a four letter name would be so difficult for people to grasp." Jul. 1, 2014:
"I am going to name my son Cade! Love the name, it sounds so strong!" Jan. 2, 2012:
"My son is 20 months and his name is Cade. We LOVE the name!" Mar. 3, 2011:
"My name is Michael Cade escobedo 16 years old born 1994 and I love my name. Even though its my middle name I always tell people to call me case because there are enough Michael's and only at least 2 cades in my city of 10,000 or more people and as I'm reading all these comments I recognised allot of things I went through to explain to the people who first hear my name what I said but the way I do it is I say "like arcade without the ar" and its worked pretty well so far. I really like that over the years of me telling other people my name that someone who met me three years ago and who's name I don't even rember points me out of a crowd of kids and comes over to to me. I like that my name is still unique enough that someone will remember me clearly just because of it. To all the parents who name their kids cade you just made him the most. Well known kid in" Jan. 14, 2011:
"My 2 yr old is Cade Ryan. I love the name but people do think its Code, Kate, or Cain. It's a very strong name and not many Cade's around, but lots of Kaden's" Sep. 7, 2010:
"I was born in March of 1976 and my name is Cade. The name's origin is Irish and is traditionally spelled with a "C" even though it seems to be evolving into new spellings now. People rarely pronounced it correctly the first time when I was growing up. Teachers would always say "Katie" or "Cad" or I've even had on occassion Code & even Chad? not sure where they get the H from but now that I'm older I hear the name getting more common. I have to say I really don't like that the name is becoming more common. I felt it was a unique name (named after my Great Grandpa) and no one had really ever heard of it but now I get more and more people telling me they have a grandson or nephew named Cade. Oh Well! I guess that's how life goes, something that is great has to be followed by others until it is no big deal anymore. Someday when I'm 80 I'll probably be able to buy a keychain with my name on it finally." Aug. 27, 2010:
"My son Cade was born in 1994. We had never heard of anyone else with the name, and in fact Cade was the last name of a character in a book I was reading when I was pregnant, which is where I got the idea. My family gave me a really hard time, but I didn't listen to them. There is no accounting for taste! Indeed 16 years later, it is a great name and I have no regrets. BUT people do have a tendency to pronounce it "Katie" and sometimes "Code". Girls especially love to pronounce it "Katie", as has his Tae Kwon Do instructor for years. When he was young it bothered him a little, but now that he is 16 he doesn't think twice about it, and he really loves his name." Mar. 18, 2010:
"I named my son Cade Walker in July 2000 because his father and I fell in love with the name. It is so masculine and strong. Everyone loves it!" Mar. 8, 2010:
"Our son Cade was born in Sept 2006 and it was the only name my husband and I agreed on for our second son. Everyone loves the name except you do have to spell it at first for those who have never heard it. It seems to fit him well and we got the name because our older son went to preschool with a Cade who was named after the football player. I loved the name as soon as I first heard it and was so glad my husband agreed!!" Mar. 5, 2010:
"i must be the oldest living "Cade" as I'm in my 40's now. i've always thought it was a cool name. now everyone seems to agree with me." Feb. 24, 2010:
"We are planning our second child and if it a boy we will call him Cade Christopher...we both LOVE the name and the meaning someone else found happy and blessed" Dec. 29, 2009:
"My son is Cade Erickson born Oct 09, I had never even heard the name until I stumbled across it online and my husband fell in love with it...within minutes after he was born I let my husband decide the final choice between cade and evan and of course he chose Cade...he is now 2months old and I LOVE the name- so glad I let him name our son and hopefully it wont get too trendy because I love the uniqueness as well...HA HA we also have to spell his name out to most all people who ask his name, its rountine now to say Cade...C-A-D-E hahaha" Dec. 29, 2009:
"My son, Cade Aaron was born in June 2000. We got the name idea from the UCLA quarterback, Cade McNown...great strong sounding name!" Oct. 25, 2009:
"Our first son is Cade(born 2004). Seventeen years ago, my friend married a Cade(now42). I loved the name and knew I would name my first son Cade. I loved the name so much, I named my Great Dane - Quaid (didn't want the dog and my son to have the same name). People ask me to pronounce and spell it all the time. I don't mind one bit. We have met a few other Cade's around but not many." Oct. 16, 2009:
"We named our son Cade Erich in Jan 2006. Funny, my husband liked that name as he used to watch a show- guys name was Cade Foster. The name has grown on me since the 1st time I heard it and find it so unique.. only thing is people find it hard to understand...my son has been called Kaden, Kate, Kane....LOL" Jun. 24, 2009:
"In the fall of 1985 my mother named my brother Cade after a dear friend by the name of Bill Cade. Bill himself is a fairly well known folk musician and a good guy. I believe my brother is very likely the ground-zero Cade. Over the years, people would comment on the uniqueness of his name and it began to get back to us that they had given the name to one of their own children. Mom, unwittingly, started a trend." Apr. 28, 2009:
"I had my Cade in 2000. He loves it. Some people think it should be spelled Kade. Last year in his class he had a girl named Caden, and girl whose last name was Cade as well as himself. In fottball this past year, there was a Brayden, Cade, Kayden, Jayden and Jay. Say that 10 times fast!" Mar. 24, 2009:
"I named my son Son Cade in 1996, He is now 12 and is disappointed that he is no longer the only Cade around. That's how we found this site..We were in Walmart last night and I called out to him and another younger boy responded. So we had to rush home to google his name to find out just how many of them were there. To his delight, he's one of the 1st 500 to be named this. I came across this name at work looking at an account in TX. I was pregnant at the time and decided on Tristan, but often found other pregnant women naming their sons this as well. Our last name is Catalano, so when I said the 2 names out loud together I felt they sounded perfect together. Very Strong sounding. At first, his dad was against it, but he realized Tristan was becoming very popular and we didn't want him to be one of say 3-4 in his class. Surely no one else would be named Cade!! We too, have to spell it out to new people and he loves his name as it is, as it's spelled. Cade wants to add to this post, he would like everyone to stop namimg their children Cade so he can stay unique. I assured him he's probably always going to be one of the oldest "Cade's" around and with his last name combined, he's going to stand out even more!" Mar. 22, 2009:
"I named my son Cade in 2000. There is usually at least one other child named Cade at daycare/schools he has attended - but never many. He likes his name and likes that it is uncommon. I've had lots of strange comments "you named your boy, Kay?" and of course, "huh?". I've taken to saying, "Cade with a 'D'" and he usually spells his name when he hears the huh...Most people comment that they like/love the name." Jan. 30, 2009:
"Named my son Cade in 2000. He loves it's uniqueness. You do get the odd time people call him Kate, but he thinks that's funny anyway. Yet to meet another Cade (we're in the UK)." Jan. 21, 2009:
"I named my son Cade in 1999 after hearing of the quarterback Cade McNown. We've yet to meet another Cade so it's still pretty unique. In a school of 550 kids - he's the only Cade. He loves his name but people always think it should be spelled with a K instead. We also get the "huh?" but after we do the spelling everyone always says "Oooo, I like that!" No regrets for naming him Cade." Jan. 20, 2009:
"I named my oldest son Cade in 1989, it was actually an old family name,my grandmother suggested it to me and I fell in love with it instantly, almost as fast as I fell in love with him. He reaaly likes it too now, but when he was little, he did seem to think people were calling him Kay. He currently goes by mynameiscade on web handle." Nov. 28, 2008:
"My husband and i have decided on the name Cade for our little boy who is due to be born in December, i'm not sure how we r going to spell it yet, either Kade, Kaid, Caid or cade......" Nov. 8, 2008:
"I LOVE this name!! if we have a boy I will definitely call him Cade. Its strong, and unique. I also like Tate and Cole." Aug. 15, 2008:
"Our baby boy is due Sept 13, 2008 and we have chosen Cade as a middle name. We chose it after Cade's Cove in the Smoky Mtns. That is one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen. We have had several people comment on it. Either they like it, or they don't. We are choosing the first name Memphis." Jul. 12, 2008:
"We named my son Cade in 2004. I am continually spelling it for new people we meet, but once you get used to saying it and knowing him as Cade, it's a great name!" Jul. 11, 2008:
"LOVE it... it is my husband's name and I've never met another Cade which is appropriate because I've never met anyone like him." Apr. 8, 2008:
"Its the name of a character in Gone With the Wind! I love it." Feb. 1, 2008:
"I absolutly love the name...my nephew is named Cade & everyone at his daycare say they love it cause its unique & cute!!!" Jan. 24, 2008:
"I think the name Cade is very unique and not one of those names that there will be "two or three" of in a child's class. My wife and I are seriously considering naming our baby Kincade and calling him Cade." Jan. 17, 2008:
"If you've ever seen Cade's cove in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, it's beautiful... just another reason. :)" Nov. 14, 2007:
"My son is 6 years old and his name is Cade we do get alot of huhs? So my six year old will automatically say my name is cade and then spell out c a d e cade.People seem to love the name. We meet alot of cadens. MY son loves his name" Jul. 15, 2007:
"I had a little boy in December 2006 and named him Cade. I am a school teacher and my 8th grade students all said that it was a name that you really couldn't make fun of (which was good news since 8th graders can seem to make fun of almost anything!) The only downside is that people will often say "huh?" when you first tell them the name and one time at the doctor's office the nurse called out for Katie. It seems to be super-popular now and I just hope he's not the 7th Cade in his class." Jul. 9, 2007:
"I love this name! If I have a boy he will be named Cade James" Mar. 5, 2007:
"I've been named Cade for 31 years. Even though it's only 4 letters and very simple, people rarely get it right. I personally love my name. It's unique and a strong name. Who cares if people get it right??" Feb. 20, 2007:
"I'm due in a few weeks and am definetly having a boy. Not sure why someone would think this is a bad name. This was the only boy name both my husband and I agreed upon. Its different and yet not strange." Jan. 26, 2007:
"I love the name Cade, but it has become so popular (along with Caden and Cadence). I found the name in a baby name book 5 years ago and thought it was unique!" Jan. 23, 2007:
"This is the name of my son. People like to spell is with a "K"! We have a woman in the neighborhood named Kate and sometimes when I call Cade she thinks I am calling her." Jan. 3, 2007:
"Our son's name is Cade so we gave it a "thumbs up" as you would suspect. We were uncertain at first because we thought people might think it was too "different". We grew to really love it and felt it was the perfect name for our son in no time. We did not anticipate people thinking we were saying "Kate" when we said his name and he learned to spell his name at an early age because we often respondes, "Cade, C-A-D-E" when asked what his name is, and he quickly followed with that habit. Overall, we are happy with the name and it suits our son well. He is a personable, easy-going, funny boy on one hand. Yet, still manages to be a curious and energetic learner who tries new things and stays at it until he masters a new skill. We can play quietly and contentedly at times, but is also active and adventuresome. We find a nice balance in him." Dec. 17, 2006:
"I just named my baby boy Cade. I love the name because it is great for when they are little and still sounds good for when they are older and it doesn't require a nickname." Nov. 3, 2006:
"I named my son Cade in 2002. Everyone pronouces it correctly, but for some reason they all want to spell it with a "K."" Oct. 18, 2006:
"I named my baby boy Cade Michael and I love the fact that it's not a name you hear every day. I have since learned it's a character in Gone With the Wind (Cade Calvert). It just sounds cool!" Sep. 29, 2006:
"My name is great. I always say that once people learn it they never forget it. I was born in 1975. My brothers name is Cail. I guess that my mother Jayne and father Ron were tired of "normal" names." Sep. 21, 2006:
"We are naming our son Caden and will be calling him Cade for short." Aug. 14, 2006:
"My name is Cade and I was born in 1975. I hear it all the time now and actually know a few toddlers with the name." Jul. 8, 2006:
"8 weeks pregnant and seriously thinking about this as a boy name" Jul. 3, 2006:
"we are going to name our son cade. we love the meaning "pure" and its short, no-nonsense pronounciation." Jun. 7, 2006:
"I named my son Cade. I had never heard it before, but now I hear it all of the time. Even though I hear it more, I still love it and wouldn't have chosen any other name!" Apr. 1, 2006:
"I found the name, Cade, in a name book in 2003... now it's becoming more popular, especially Caden. But I still plan to use it for our 1st son." Feb. 14, 2006:
"i love the name & would love to use it if i have a boy." Feb. 6, 2006:
"I named my son Cade in 1972. I read the name in Gone With the Wind when I was 13 and said I would always name my son Cade. Have always loved it." Jan. 25, 2006:
"I love my name. I was born in 1982. I had hardly met a Cade until I moved to Utah a year ago. I see them all the time now." Jul. 16, 2005:
"I named my son Cade in 1999 and there were no other Cades and now I am starting to hear it more" Jun. 1, 2005:
2 Negative Comments
"Baby Cade Kavanagh...welcome to the planet May 22 2006" May. 22, 2006:
"I have a friend who named her son Cade. I don't particularly like the name, but that's the way it is! It's just too "trendy" and doesn't have a strong masculine sound to it for my taste. Does anyone know what the name means? or where it come from?" Mar. 11, 2006:
20 Neutral Comments
"umm my names cade and i was born in 2001 and im only 14" Feb. 23, 2016:
"My name is Charles Cade but have only went by Cade since I was born (unless in trouble) due to Charles being a family name "Grandpa, Dad, Me, Son". I am 31 and was named after a neighbor that my dad had worked for for numerous years. This neighbor died in the early 90's and was about 80 years old. I like my name but as indicated by others it is a real challenge having to introduce yourself multiple times before people catch on. Even as I type this, the computer is telling me I have misspelled a word. I now have people come to me and say they liked my name so much that they named their kid Cade, I like the uniqueness of my name but oh well what can you do except say thanks." Sep. 20, 2010:
"Wow! Does not reflect in any charts or comments, but my daughters name, yes daughter, is Emily Cade. She is a little princess. Hahaha I had know idea that it was morefor boys, but I do love the name and have no regrets." Jul. 27, 2010:
"My name is Cade and i was born in 1972. It's funny to read some of these comments with all the same issues i have had growing up with a unique name. I actually went to high school with a Cade and have met quite a few younger kids named Cade also. I love it, embrace it and am so glad i don't have a name like John or Mike. Much love and respect to all my brethren in name!" Jun. 21, 2010:
"I named my son Cade Jaeger. His names mean Pure Hunter. He was born in April 2004. He has just turned 6. I named him after the character Cade Foster in the TV series "First Wave". My wife was not to thrilled at first. She wanted more traditional names. I googled the names she wanted and we saw how common those names were. Cade is a very different name. He has a friend named Kayd and people never know how to spell either of their names." Apr. 19, 2010:
"Named my second son Cade James (after my husband decided he didn't like the name Griffin anymore). Not a trendy name yet in our area. LOTS of Kadens, but not many Cades." Mar. 30, 2009:
"My cousin's name is Samuel Cade but we've always called him cade. I think it's sooo cute. I've never meet anyone else with that name yet. He likes it too and gets mad when we call him Sammy for fun." Sep. 13, 2008:
"I named my son Cade after discovering it through a friend. My son is now 10 and another friend of mine still tries to convince me it should have been Caden (which I really don't like at all) A few times the receptionist at the Dr.s office called out "Katie" with a slight confused tone, to which I replied "cuh-AID" over emphasizing to make my point. I like that it is unique without being really strange, and as someone mentioned before, really hard to make fun of." Aug. 3, 2008:
"I named my son Cade. He was born October 2007. We found a meaning "happy and blessed" and then other meanings "sturdy, stout." We liked the first meaning we found. My son also knew of Cade McKowan (sp?) NFL player and thought that was cool. So far Cade has blue eyes and reddish / brown / blonde hair. He's off the charts in weight and height. I see what people mean about spelling out the name when people ask what his name is..." May. 11, 2008:
"people often pronounce it Kate or Katie. Many people have said they like the name Cade. I know of three from my area that named their children Cade. When I was in school there was one other boy with the same name. That was in a school of about 400 students." Jan. 20, 2008:
"My 8 month old son is named Cade. We love it, but we have to repeat it many times when people ask his name...they think we're saying Kate. The name really fits him though:)" Jun. 25, 2007:
"it sounds like a dogs name ... sorry my best friends sons name is that and i just cant get that thought out of my head :(" Jun. 25, 2007:
"I have been a "Cade" for 18 years. I am always being complimented on it. Although, as a child I didn't like it, I now am really appreciative of my parents for naming me Cade. It is different, and helped me to branch out and embrace my differences. I love it. I am sad, however, that it is becoming "Trendy"." Feb. 26, 2007:
"this has to be one of the worst names ever. if you want people to think you're dumb, name your baby Cade.... seriously, its a cave man name..." Jan. 25, 2007:
"We named our son Cade a little less than a year ago and love the name. We've seen many different 'orgins' of the name, but will stick with 'battler' and 'hope' for him. We do find ourselves repeating the name to people when they ask. They hear it and say, "what a lovely little girl" (thinking we said Kate)." Jan. 23, 2007:
"I named my son Cade in 2001. We live in Wales and I named him after the character Cade Foster in the US series "First Wave". I'd never heard it before but now have heard another boy in the next town is called it as well, but spelt with a K. Tracy Jones, Wales, UK" Nov. 6, 2006:
"cade rox as a name. i'm cade and i was born in 1989. I don' know any other cades so rock on all you cades. (People are starting to call their kids cade more often now)" Jun. 27, 2006:
"My husband and I are strongly considering the name Cade if we have a boy. (due in 6 weeks) I really love it. It's strong and unique!" Jun. 6, 2006:
"I live in the beautiful Caribbean Isalnd of Trinidad. In 1991 I had my first born. During my pregnancy I was looking for a strong boy C-name as both my husband and my name begin with C. I thought I was very inventive when I came up with CADE. Everyone gawked at me that I would be calling my son a suffix...motorcade/cascade. The following year I read a romance novel and the starring buck's name was Sterling Cade.Then some time later I saw on one of the young American after school shows & one of the stars was Micheal Cade. Coincedintally my son's name is Cade Michael. I soon realised that the name was not totally unique and have since met four other boys on our island named Cade.There is even now a BRATZ boy doll named CADE." Jan. 13, 2006:
"I am naming my baby Cade. I heard the name about years ago and loved it. The only thing I don't like is having people say "You're naming him WHAT????"" Aug. 1, 2005:
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Book Review: Victor Kattan's From Coexistence to Conquest
Yasmine Gado
Nakba Education on the Path of Return (Issue No.42, Autumn 2009)
Victor Kattan, "From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949" Pluto Press 2009
Arundhati Roy has called Palestine one of “imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world.” Victor Kattan’s book From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949 leaves no doubt her description is apt.
The story behind why the British would support the idea of establishing a “national home” for one people within the territory of another and how this novel "experiment" came to fruition is the subject of this excellent book. The author, an international law expert, describes the pivotal role that international law, and the lack of its enforcement, played in the creation of Israel and offers a general legal history of the conflict.
What makes this book important and unique is Kattan’s use of a wide range of newly disclosed historical sources, including declassified legal opinions, minutes, telegrams, reports and memoranda, in addition to traditional sources such as UN documents, books and law journals. I will highlight a few of the book’s salient points and revelations that may surprise some readers, citing a narrow selection of this extensive research and legal analysis.
Origin of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
The book begins by addressing the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Kattan’s view, the conflict is rooted in anti-Semitism and colonialism, the driving forces behind British support for Zionism and ultimately the successful colonization of Palestine and creation of Israel. Zionism, he argues, provided anti-Semites in the British government with a pretext to stem the immigration to Britain of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia by diverting them to Palestine, while also supporting Britain’s imperial aims in the Middle East.
Alien immigration was a sensitive issue in England in the early twentieth century when anti-Semitism was common even among the educated elite. Kattan quotes A.J. Balfour making abhorrent statements about the “miseries created for western civilization by the presence of [Jews]” (pp. 20-21), and arguing that their Russian persecutors “had a case of their own” since Russians “were afraid of them” (p. 20). No surprise that he led the passage of legislation in 1905 restricting Jewish immigration to Britain. Kattan argues that within this historical context, the Balfour Declaration in which the British government stated its favorable view of "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" should be interpreted as Balfour’s solution to the “problem” of Jewish immigration.
If anti-Semitism provided the motive, colonialism provided the means to effect the Zionist project. The colonization of Palestine imitated other colonial models, except that it did not involve any desire to "civilize" or exploit the native population. The Zionists wanted the land with as few Arabs as possible – in Theodor Herzl’s famous words: “we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border” (p. 34). Clearly, the Zionists had no regard for the possibility that Palestinians had a say in their destiny, or that they had a right to live on their land at all. Kattan spends much of the book analyzing exactly how far the British went in supporting this vision.
A Palestinian Right to Self-determination?
In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there a very long time.” Putting aside the statement’s appalling racism, was he right that Palestinians were not entitled to independence and statehood in Palestine? After a comprehensive legal analysis, Kattan concludes that prevailing international law and British colonial policy provided ample support for a Palestinian right to self-determination.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British Mandate of Palestine of 1922, and the UN Partition Plan of 1947, which Zionists view as the legal basis for the legitimacy of the Jewish state, in Kattan’s view also contained language that supported, implied and assumed a Palestinian right to self-determination. Although self-determination was not “an independent legal right” (p. 120) for all peoples until decolonization in the 1960s, Kattan explains that by the time the League of Nations was established in 1919, the Great Powers did apply that right to colonized peoples albeit through an “evolutionary process” via the mandate system. That system was established in the League of Nations Covenant, which referred to “certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire [which would include the Arabs of Palestine] which deserved “provisional recognition” as independent states” (p. 129). The mandate system was intended to assist colonized peoples to advance to a stage of development at which they could govern themselves. Palestine’s “A-Class” mandate status meant that it was considered sufficiently advanced to merit “provisional recognition” of independence.
The contradiction between Zionism and the above principles is obvious, however. Not only were the indigenous Palestinians outraged by the British Mandate, with its provision for a "Jewish national home" in their homeland, the policy was controversial among British officials as well. Balfour’s successor Lord Curzon remarked sardonically: “it is quite clear that this mandate has been drawn up by someone reeling under the fumes of Zionism” (p. 124). He spent much of his tenure as Foreign Secretary attempting to dilute the provisions for the "Jewish national home." For example, Kattan reveals minutes and correspondence indicating the word "claim" in relation to Zionists’ rights in Palestine was omitted from the Mandate re-draft on the ground that Britain intended merely to “make room” for a Jewish national home, not to reconstitute Palestine as a Jewish state (p. 124).
Kattan also argues that the terms of the Mandate envisaged “one people for the purpose of self-determination…with Jewish self-determination envisaged only within the context of the self-determination of Palestine as a whole” (p. 128). In his view, the Mandate’s failure to mention Arabs in Palestine by name (instead of indirectly as “non-Jewish inhabitants”) did not negate their rights; and the reason the Mandate contained so many provisions to establish the Jewish national home was that the vast majority of Jews in the early 1920s were not physically present in Palestine while the Arabs already had centuries of continuous occupation there.
In support of this argument, Kattan cites documents such as the 1939 White Paper published by the British government, which stated that its objective in Palestine was the establishment of “an independent state in which two peoples, Arabs and Jews, share authority in government in such a way that the essential interests of each are shared” (p. 122); and a 1922 White Paper drafted by Winston Churchill which declared that “the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian and it has never been intended that they, or any section of them, should possess any other juridical status” (p. 128).
Clearly, though, whatever right to self-governance had been recognized for Palestinians, that right was seriously compromised by the Balfour Declaration. But Kattan points out that even that document contained clauses safeguarding the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and referred to a Jewish home within Palestine, not a Jewish state. While it has been argued that absence of the word "political" negated Palestinian self-determination rights, Kattan cites sources that suggest otherwise, such as Mandate drafting discussions in which Lord Curzon noted that under British law, civil rights included political rights. Much of the private correspondence and memoranda Kattan reveals indicate that when British officials communicated among themselves, a Palestinian right to self-determination was assumed and even explicitly recognized. Lord Balfour himself, chief architect of the "national home policy,” admitted in private correspondence with Lord Curzon that the Zionists’ “position was weak” because it “declined to accept the principle of self-determination” of Palestine’s “present inhabitants,” and that Zionism was a “flagrant” contradiction of “the letter of the [League of Nations] Covenant” (p. 123).
There is a difficulty, however, with Kattan’s use of opinions expressed in private to interpret legal documents and public statements in that he does not always take into account that the colonial powers often engaged in double-speak, claiming to protect those they were simultaneously oppressing. The mere fact that British officials privately spoke of certain Palestinian rights does not necessarily mean they intended to protect those rights in legally binding documents or statements of official policy that were in all likelihood deliberately vague and ambiguous. Should the back-tracking in the White Papers and redraft of the Mandate, for instance, be taken at face value, or was it really calculated political maneuvering designed to quell Arab anger? Perhaps more skepticism is called for in drawing a link between British officials’ private knowledge and public actions.
Whatever the British intended regarding the level of compromise of Palestinian rights, one can conclude that although colonialism was still "legal" during this period, international law had advanced to a stage where rights of indigenous peoples, including the right to self-determination, were recognized and to be protected. The establishment of a national home, not to mention a state, for a people with no connection to a territory other than a claim of exile nineteen hundred years earlier, in a land where they were vastly outnumbered by a people with centuries of continuous residence was as much an anomaly then as it would be today.
Misconceptions About Israel’s Creation
Israelis today generally point to the UN Partition Plan as the basis for legitimacy of the Jewish state. Kattan makes a strong case that Israel could not legally have achieved statehood via the UN Partition Plan because, on its own, the resolution (UN General Assembly Resolution 181) was non-binding, and it was not implemented by the UN Security Council or the British, as would have been required for it to become binding. His argument is based on the fact that the UN Charter generally only grants the General Assembly the authority to make non-binding resolutions; the authorization of Resolution 181 by Article 10, which only authorizes non-binding resolutions; the language of the resolution which is explicit in its being a recommendation; and the opinion of the UN Secretariat at the time that the Resolution effecting partition had ‘no obligatory character whatsoever’ although the Security Council could choose to enforce the plan (p.155). Thus, it was up to the UN Security Council or the British as the mandatory power to enforce the plan, and both declined to do so.
Legal technicalities about enforcement aside, in practical effect the partition resolution gave the Zionists the legitimacy they needed to establish the Jewish state. Lack of enforcement would have defeated their claim to legitimacy, however, if events at the UN had not been pre-empted by the outbreak of hostilities on the ground. Kattan recounts a sequence of legal events just prior to the war between the Zionist militias and the Arab armies that may surprise some readers.
When it came time to enforce the partition plan, it finally dawned on the US that the plan was practically unenforceable, of questionable legality and clearly unjust. They could not secure the necessary votes in the Security Council for enforcement and the British refused to do so as well. Arab representatives accused the US of undue influence on weaker states to vote in favor of partition, and argued convincingly that their right to self-determination was disregarded. The inequity of the partition was obvious. Jews were granted fifty-seven percent of the land although they constituted only thirty-three percent of the population and Zionist organizations controlled less than seven percent of the country's territory, and they were allotted eight-four percent of the agricultural land, while agriculture was the historic core of the economy in Palestine and citrus fruit the largest export. Jews were also given most of the Naqab (Negev) though they made up less than one percent of its population.
Kattan explains that, faced with the prospect of implementing an unworkable partition plan by force, the U.S. did an about-face and proposed a UN trusteeship which provided, among other things, that there would be one state of Palestine, that Arabs and Jews would agree on their form of government by referendum, and that future immigration would not be based on race or religion. In short, the trusteeship would have protected the right to self-determination of both peoples. As it turned out, the trusteeship was never voted on as war had begun and the Zionists ultimately imposed their own version of partition by force, going well beyond the recommendations of the partition plan, driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes through deliberate and carefully planned military operations. Ultimately, partition was effected through the 1949 armistice agreements with the surrounding Arab states.
On 14 May 1948, Israel unilaterally declared its independence. Kattan reveals that the U.S. delegation to the UN, working to effect an equitable solution to the conflict, was stunned by Truman’s immediate recognition of the Israeli state. They had received no warning. Apparently, U.S. diplomats (according to declassified top secret memoranda) did not view the idea of a Jewish state favorably, and did not believe the Balfour Declaration required that they support one.
As the UN had not been given the opportunity to vote on the trusteeship and implement a different vision, the partition resolution has remained in effect, providing Zionists with a credible argument that it established their state. However, despite what Zionists and their representatives assert today, Kattan reveals that Israel could not, as a legal matter, have been established by the UN Partition Plan, and was in reality established by conquest.
Israel's “Exceptional” Nature
In one of Lord Balfour’s rhapsodies on Zionism’s blissful promise, he states: “I cannot help thinking that this experiment … is a great experiment, because nothing like it has ever been tried in the world, and because it is entirely novel” (p. 251). In Balfour’s mind, Zionism and Israel were “absolutely exceptional” – as Kattan puts it, “It was special. It was sui generis” (p. 251).
Unfortunately, this special status has also been granted to Israel by the UN, the body with the most significant mechanisms to enforce international law. The UN has accorded Israel virtual impunity since its establishment (and arguably in the manner of its establishment during the 1948 war, also addressed in this book). Israeli leaders illegally resisted the return of the refugees following the 1948 war and the U.S., bowing to the antecedents of the political forces it caters to today, did not use its power to enforce a condition on Israel’s entry to the UN which required its compliance with international law on the question of refugees. The Holocaust, and the refusal of other nations to accept displaced European Jews undoubtedly played a part in this leniency; yet this does not excuse the failure of the UN to enforce international law vis-à-vis Israel. Even when the UN has attempted to discipline the Jewish state, through annual affirmations of the refugees’ right of return, and UN Security Council Resolution 242 ordering withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territory, Israel simply ignores the law without consequence.
Over six decades of legal impunity, the catalog of Israeli brutality and human rights violations has become vast. It includes: torture, illegal detention, assassination; assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters, and jet fighters; annexation of territory; transfer of civilians for purpose of imprisonment; mass killing as in Gaza, Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatila; denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, and medical aid; use of civilians as human shields; humiliation; house demolitions on a mass scale; destruction of agricultural land; expropriation of water; illegal settlements; economic pauperization; attacks on hospitals, medical workers, and ambulances; and the killing of UN personnel, all carried on with UN acquiescence. Even when a UN fact-finding commission finally had the temerity to report evidence of war crimes by Israeli soldiers in the Goldstone Report covering events in Gaza earlier this year, accountability is a remote prospect.
What has Israel gained by this impunity? Territory that can only be retained through a costly and brutal military occupation. Increasingly, its officials risk arrest when they travel abroad. Comparisons with apartheid South Africa are ubiquitous. In fact, while some might argue Israeli impunity proves the irrelevance of international law, one could view it as proof of the indispensability of international law in that Israel has never known peace. Given consistent Arab opposition to Zionism since the nineteenth century, most likely it never will – that is, as a nation led by a Zionist regime.
As Kattan concludes “in the end it is unlikely that a lasting peace would subsist unless it is based on equity, justice and principles of international law, which have been sidelined throughout the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the detriment of all concerned” (p. 261).
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Home | Business in Action | April 15 | Astoria Custom Homes
Astoria Custom Homes
Professionals with a personal touch
Spectacular architecture, classy, elegant interior design, decades of hands-on experience and unparalleled customer service have each served as fundamental cornerstones that have catapulted Calgary-based Astoria Custom Homes to tremendous success during its 14 years in serving the public.
Launched in 2001, Astoria is an award-winning, full-service company that converts dreams to reality for many new homebuyers, providing customers with outstanding design services, cutting-edge materials and products, excellent quality, sustainable construction and relationship-building that proceeds well beyond the duration of any given project.
The Canadian Business Journal recently had an opportunity to speak with proprietors Jim Stinson and Lisa Stinson. The decision to form their own company was incentivized by Jim’s incredibly successful career. A common theme had emerged whereby Jim would work his way to the very top of the corporate ladder, generating enormous prosperity and revenue for his owners, but could go no further. It was about 15 years ago when he seriously began thinking of branching out on his own in order to earn more of a reward for his expertise while at the same time providing the opportunity to be his own boss and ultimate decision maker.
As Jim Stinson recalls, “it wasn’t a peak or valley in terms of housing builds, but simply felt like a good time to make that move,” on the decision to form the company. With a background in technical drawing and woodworking, it was always his dream to be a carpenter and build beautiful homes. As President and COO Jim executes the design and operations of construction, focusing on quality, craftsmanship building with pride and passion.
“When Jim and I made that decision I decided to collaborate on the new Astoria Custom Homes, I left the oil and gas business and now execute the sales, marketing, IT and finance side of the business, focusing on value and redefining the homebuilding experience,” says Lisa.
The main part of the business consists of designing and building wonderfully unique customized homes and in essence making people’s dreams come true. Several years after opening Astoria Custom Homes the Stinsons introduced another division – Astoria Renovations – to properly service the interior of the business, if you will. The participating partners have nine decades of combined experience and usually take on about 12 substantial renovation projects per year.
First and foremost, high-end custom homes can only be constructed in certain geographic areas due to land lot size restrictions. As one would expect, a lack of sufficient space typically becomes more prevalent as one moves closer towards the core of any city. While there are instances when enough land is available, the more likely scenario is building a larger custom home a bit more towards the outskirts of town or in a rural, country setting, if that is the preference.
Two current major projects at Astoria Custom Homes are at Watermark in Bearspaw, northwest of Calgary along the Bow River east of Cochrane, and Artesia at Heritage Pointe, which is south of the city and north of Okotoks. Both locations are outside the city’s boundary limits, but they do have many of the featured amenities available within the core.
Artesia has wonderful estate lots, including open spaces, and a community centre designed to promote family activities and participation.
Watermark is close to nature, while providing all the benefits of living near an urban centre with fully serviced lots ranging in size from one quarter to over one acre. But farther out into the country the city amenities are often not available. It’s in those types of rural settings where Astoria Custom Homes have in-house expertise that often cannot be found in other homebuilding companies.
The Astoria team sifts through each and every pertinent document with a fine-tooth comb to ensure every aspect of the build is totally covered off. As a critical first step in the process, Jim and two of his senior employees meet with the customer in the Astoria Custom Homes boardroom for what typically takes anywhere from four to eight hours. At the end of that initial meeting Jim and his executives ensure the customer completely understands what is and is not being done. This type of efficient pre-planning avoids misunderstandings and upset customers at future points in the process. That extra dedication is almost unheard of, and is certainly one of the key factors that make Astoria Custom Homes stand out from the crowd.
In fact, such a level of interaction is so out of the ordinary that some competitors have asked Jim and Lisa how Astoria Custom Homes can afford to spend an entire day with several of its top employees undertaking these types of exercises with customers. The bottom line is the Stinsons say it actually saves time taking care of everything all at once from the very start.
“One of the main reasons for having that initial four-to-eight hour meeting is to ensure we understand the vision of the customer. Not all the customers understand the blueprints and other documents so it’s a good time for us to sit down and review anything that may not be clear to them. That way, by the time we are ready to start building their home, there is perfect clarity; we understand what the vision is for their home and then we’re fully prepared to build their dream home,” notes Lisa.
“Also, can you imagine meeting someone for the first time when you’re mad at them versus having been in a room with them for four to eight hours?” questions Jim. With the latter approach, it allows the team at Astoria to learn about their clients, share a few laughs and get a much better feel for what the client wants based on their in-depth discussions. Jim perhaps sums it up best with this simple yet very poignant remark.
“You’ve got to be able to take the time to listen to the customer.”
Although each home project is inherently different with its own set of unique intangibles throughout the building process, the typical length of time from permit acquisition to the home’s completion averages about 10 months. However, any additional modifications during the build will of course add extra time to the project’s timeline.
“If you add 100 change orders from our customer, that could add one or two months to the job,” notes Jim. “People laugh at 100, but our record at Astoria is 102 change orders after job starts. That’s two inches of solid reading in a binder.”
Astoria Custom Homes provides a 10-year structural warranty guarantee to all of its finished homes to back up their quality workmanship. That gesture goes a long way in putting customers’ minds at ease.
For the past five years Jim Stinson has also served on the Calgary Home Builders’ Association (CHBA) board. The CHBA represents single- and multi-family builders, renovators, land developers, trades, suppliers, and professional companies involved in the residential construction industry. The association is bound by a code of ethics and led by an experienced group of board of directors, volunteers who lend their expertise.
“Jim is very knowledgable in residential construciton and widely respected in the industry,” notes Lisa.
Acreage Specialists
A significant advantage for Astoria Custom Homes is the ability to provide specialized expertise in Acreage Design and Construction, which deals specifically with the knowledge and experience to build custom country homes. Building such homes requires an entirely unique level of expertise, which quite frankly is extremely rare. Some of the fundamental core competencies necessary to construct a quality home in the country include having an extensive knowledge about land analysis, septic systems, roads, water management and electrical requirements. The decision by Astoria Custom Homes to put a much greater emphasis on acreage properties came about at the end of 2013 when Jim and Lisa Stinson decided to buy out their former business partner.
“Once we took full reign of the company back we went back to our roots, which is acreage development. When you build a house on an acreage you have to understand how a country home functions with septic systems, wells and pressure tanks, grades, roads, etc., etc. You’ve got to be experienced on that so the whole package comes together,” notes Jim.
A desire to live in a more intimate setting within the confines of a natural environment leaves many people considering the purchase of acreage property. But it’s entirely possible they may have an idealized vision of rural life that may not always accurately reflect reality. It’s absolutely imperative for people to be properly educated on the requirements of country living and how it is so much different than being connected directly to city services.
“A lot of people definitely like the idea of being out in the country but there is a lot of education that goes into ensuring a customer is prepared for the differences they will encounter,” says Lisa.
Astoria Custom Homes will build a dream home on your existing property, or work together with you to find the best location. The Stinsons say about 50% of the people who seek their professional services have already purchased land they’d like to develop, while the other 50% walk in looking to buy acreage. Jim always recommends to clients, or potential clients, that it’s important to add stipulations before signing off on any land contract, one of which is the allowance of bringing out a qualified professional builder to the site prior to the closing of any land deal. Both Jim and Lisa have witnessed the hazards of overzealous people wanting to build farther out in the country without doing their due diligence.
Customers could save themselves a lot of time and money by first consulting experts such as the people at Astoria.
“I go out personally myself and view a lot of acreages with customers before they buy them, and I will tell them what the pluses and minuses are,” he reveals. “Some people go out in the country and look at a completely flat table-top lot and they think they can put a walk-out basement on there. Another may gush at the water they will have around their home, but that too poses a problem because we can’t put a normal septic system in, but rather we’ll have to put in what we call a septic mound, which is above the ground covered in dirt, and costs a lot more.”
During his time in the business, Jim Stinson has educated not just young people but those in their 40s and 50s – sometimes people who have already bought their lot but it turns out it isn’t conducive to their expectations. Jim is always candid and will tell them to re-sell it and instead purchase a lot that better suits their requirements. Another aspect that is often overlooked is that a number of people wrongly assume amenities such as electricity and gas are readily available on rural properties, but that quite simply isn’t the case.
“To hook up gas in the city costs about $1,800 but in the country it can start at $11,700,” remarks Jim. “Just on that alone you need an extra $10,000.”
The culture of Astoria embraces an unwavering commitment to collaboration, innovation, integrity and professionalism. “We believe a positive and supportive work environment brings out the best in a team and enables every member to succeed and contribute to the company’s success,” says Lisa.
It’s always buyer beware for you sign on the dotted line. That’s where the professionals at Astoria Custom Homes have the ability to save their customers an incredible amount of heartache.
“Jim and I live on acreage. It’s just so sad to see people put such a huge amount of time and effort in building their dream and not having a company with the proper expertise. Jim has that expertise and has built multiple acreage homes.”
Industry Relationships
The folks at Astoria Custom Homes have built up a number of outstanding synergistic relationships and in so doing continue to use many of the same vendors and suppliers on a regular basis. Jim Stinson likes to say there are 200 sets of hands that will touch your house from start to finish.
“We don’t change trades very often,” he confirms. “We do reviews once a year. If there’s a problem that develops we’ll call up a senior manager or owner of the company and we’ll have a chat and get things back on line. We’ve had very good relationships with some companies for 20 years.”
“Most of our trades and suppliers have been with us for many years and a few who have been with us from the very beginning. Jim is very particular. He builds every house as if it’s his very own so the expectations in the field are very high. Once you’ve built a strong relationship with a quality trade or supplier then everyone knows what the expectations are. We’re so thankful for our great trades and suppliers who’ve been with us for all of these years and provided the service to us and our company. We’ve gotten to know them all very well. It’s a big plus for our company and we’re very proud to be associated with a terrific group of people.”
In most business sectors, the top enterprises often attract a significant percentage of business through referrals, and it’s no different for Astoria Custom Homes. A healthy culture at Astoria embraces an unwavering commitment to collaboration, innovation, integrity and professionalism.
Going that extra mile not only ensures the current client is happy, but often leads to them recommending those same services to others.
Testimonials written by satisfied customers provide concrete proof about their decision to select Astoria. Here is a small sampling of the type of correspondence often received from homebuyers.
Jim and Lisa, I just had to send you a quick note to tell you we LOVE LOVE LOVE our new home. You have a wonderful team that has made this a great experience. Thank you so much.
This is just a note to say that I’m thrilled and really impressed at the progress with our house. I know you are all working hard behind the scenes as well as the forefront on our behalf. I want you to know how much I appreciate everyone at Astoria for their professionalism and attention to detail as we go through this process. It has not gone unnoticed.
I’ve been able to get away from work a couple of times to meet the guys working on the house. They have been nothing but courteous, friendly and respectful. Wow what a terrific team!… and they really are proud to be working for you.
“We take a great deal of pride in those,” says Lisa. “For someone to take the time to write you a letter to say how happy they are or to invite us to their home after it’s been done is amazing and very important to us.”
The drastic decline in oil prices has made headlines in Alberta and throughout the world, but the ripple effects have not permeated into the higher-end new housing market because, as the old saying goes, people with money always have money, regardless of the overall state of the economy. From that point of view, it’s full-steam ahead with the business.
“We have so much construction going on right now, it’s unbelievable,” says Jim.
“A lot of our customers are not in the oil patch,” states Lisa. “Of course some are, but many are entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and executives from numerous different business backgrounds so the price of oil isn’t as impactful as it might be for someone that is working in a traditional oil and gas setting.”
In building for the future, a colossal mistake often made by corporate executives is expanding too quickly. Bigger is not always better and it’s something the Stinsons keenly keep in mind. They have their feet firmly planted on the ground and will not make any rash decisions that could negatively impact the well-being of such a successful enterprise.
“Between 20 and 25 homes per year is something that we can fully control and I think that is so important. Many companies think they will get bigger and better, but they don’t. Production, service and quality all goes down. I’ve had lots of opportunities in my career to build condos and high-rises, but my motto hasn’t changed: we’re going to do what we do best and stay with that” confirms Jim.
“We are a smaller company,” notes Lisa. “We just don’t have the capacity to take on 30 homes all at once because it wouldn’t allow for Jim and I to be personally involved in every build. We know each and every one of our customers and become friends with a number of them.”
A shared vision of providing a quality home for a good price and customers being able to live in their dream homes is why Jim and Lisa Stinson decided to go into business together.
“We want to stick with that model and have the personal contact,” adds Lisa. “We strive for our customers to be proud to live in an Astoria Custom home, because building dream homes is our passion.”
www.astoriahomes.ca
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Beasts of No Nation (Review)
Africa/2015
"...paints a haunting portrait of war and child soldiers..."
When his family is separated and killed, Agu (Abraham Attah) must learn to survive during a vicious war...
Beasts of No Nation follows Agu, a young child in West Africa. When war approaches his peaceful village, Agu's mother and sister leave for the capital while Agu, his father, brother, and grandfather stay in their home. Agu escapes as his family is slaughtered by the army, barely evading death. Soon thereafter, Agu is caught by the Native Defense Force, the rebels, which allow him to join as a child soldier. Commandant (Idris Elba), the battalion's leader, allows Agu to join under his guidance. Agu transforms from innocent child to trained-murderer as he adapts to survive. The film continues to show this heart-rending transformation until its bittersweet finale.
Beasts of No Nation is truly a fantastic war film. The film paints a haunting portrait of war and child soldiers — an image that will stay with you long after its ending. It's a film that depicts the atrocities of an often forgotten war. Watching Agu's change from beginning to end was absolutely devastating; watching Commandant's deceit and exploitation of these children was appalling. It's a film that makes you feel — we don't see that too often now. The film's war sequences are also tense and raw, balancing the film's drama with traumatic action sequences — in a sense. The depictions of violence are also uncompromising. I liked that about the film. The uncompromising approach allows for a very effective and unforgettable experience.
The acting is superb. Abraham Attah is magnificent in his role — very versatile and genuine in his emotion. Idris Elba is the man you love to hate. Elba plays a disturbed character oozing with charisma — exactly what you'd expect from a deceitful and powerful leader. Elba delivers one of the finest performances of the year. The film is beautifully shot, capturing the lush environment with great attention to color and detail. The music is also perfect in matching the mood. The film is based on a novel of the same title. It was written for the screen and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director of True Detective (Season 1). Fukunaga crafts Beasts of No Nation with finesse. He handles the subject well without compromising, meticulously crafting each scene with a painstaking attention to detail.
Overall, Beasts of No Nation is a superb film. It's certainly a very disturbing depiction of war, but it is a film you should watch. It's a haunting movie, but with good intentions — and it's very well made. From the acting to the direction, Beasts of No Nation is a technical marvel. Beasts of No Nation is one of the best films of 2015, if not, it is the best film of the year.
Parental Guide: Strong violence and blood, some brief nudity.
Labels: 2015, Abraham Attah, Africa, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Drama, Idris Elba, Netflix Streaming, Reviews, War
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Home » Blog » S17 Panel PCs with Real-Time Operating System Software in the Military
S17 Panel PCs with Real-Time Operating System Software in the Military
It is a given fact that the military requires a tough and reliable computing system. This computing technology must be able to withstand harsh environments. And, above all, this equipment must have a viable operating system (OS). This is to secure and protect critical and classified data.
However, the right operating system should also be compatible with an industrial computer. This device must work in the military operations without a system failure.
Fortunately, there is a perfect technology for the military’s complex operations. The S17 touchscreen panel PC can work on different systems. In fact, it is compatible with the most used OS in the military like the Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) software.
But, don’t you know that RTOS can also be installed in S17 industrial PCs? This RTOS software serves as a multitasking system to execute real-time applications. It ensures to achieve a timely & deterministic response to internal or external events.
Now, how essential is the RTOS software for the military? And, how can it be integrated with these industrial computing devices? Read on and know why the military should consider this device.
Why Military Real-Time Operating Systems Need To Have S17 Panel PCs
Actually, there is a demand for advanced computing devices to be used in the military. These panel PCs must also have the specific features needed for the military as well. And, this includes resistance to shock and drop damage, to name a few. Likewise, it must withstand a wide temperature range and perform tough applications.
But, there is an industrial computing solution suitable for the military needs. One of the most recommended devices in many industries is the S17 industrial computers. These devices are designed to work well in various industries. And, that includes the military operations.
In addition to that, it can have the right operating system for any military application. What’s good is that it also supports the most preferred OS for the military. An example of it is the RTOS, which is also compatible with the device.
With this, the military can utilise specific functions of RTOS. At the same time, it can maintain to secure data and classified information.
Understanding the Role of ROTS in the Military Ops
The Real-Time Operating System software has a function to determine and provide quick response to events. Some of the most known RTOS are the Windows CE, LynxOS, Symbian and OS-9.
In fact, this software can be installed in most military computers like the S17 rugged computers. With this setup, the RTOS software can perform its functions on tough applications in the military.
Furthermore, the 17” rugged computers have also the highest protection available. Its IP69K rating proves that it can withstand against liquid substances and solid debris. And, its high NEMA sealing indicates that it is also resistant to heat and humidity.
Now, does this computing equipment provide efficiency and long-term availability for the military? Is it really compatible with the military’s RTOS software? Read on the details further below.
Utilising S17 Rugged Industrial PCs in the Military Operations
Remember the film, “Eye In The Sky” produced by David Lancaster, Colin Firth and Ged Doherty? The film presented how advanced computing devices were used for crucial military ops. Touchscreen PCs were used to control UAVs and monitor the whereabouts of the target.
From that film, these devices could help the military to capture the most wanted criminal. It was also shown how the British General confirmed the possible actions on the mission. Indeed, it was a film that showed how technology was essential in the military missions.
So, what else can it provide? Here are some capabilities of industrial computing devices like the S17 rugged computer.
Compatible with RTOS Application Software
The most used OS in the military is the RTOS. However, the military systems are the most target subject on cyber-hack attacks. And, this may jeopardise critical military intelligence and missions. But, this S17 touchscreen PC can help address this issue.
The S17 touchscreen PCs is compatible with this type of operating system. This ensures that it can meet the preferred requirements for the military. It can also help in supporting to secure data and classified information. Thus, expect that there will be no system failure or security breach.
Capacitive Touchscreen Capabilities
The military has a wide array of applications used in its operations. Its working environment is also challenging. This makes the S17 industrial computers suitable in these conditions.
Also, it has the options to enable its touchscreen capability. The most recommended feature today is the projected capacitive touchscreen technology.
Touch panel PCs with projected capacitance are water-, scratch- and dust-resistant. This makes its internal components to be well-protected.
With its projected capacitive touchscreen, it can have a quick touch sensor ability. So, any military operator can easily navigate an application on the monitor.
Long-Term Availability
A typical computing system can only last a year or two because of its limited life cycle. This is due to the presence of various causes that may damage the system. As a result, the military may need to invest in new computing technology again.
So, why would you spend more where you can save more with the S17 industrial computers? Whereas, having this kind of technology ensures that it provides long-term availability.
Make Data Classified in the Military with S17 Industrial PCs
The military industry is not excluded for the evolution of technology. They are not also immune to cyber-attacks. So, why not invest in the most reliable computing device?
Choose an equipment that can provide both security and reliability. Make use of a device that can be integrated to the military-based operating system. Consider the S17 industrial PCs with real-time operating systems for the military.
Qualities Of Military Computers, Makeitdaisy.com
OEM Standards for Military Computer Systems, Neweraelectronics.com
How to Know the Right OS for Industrial Panel PCs used in the Military
12.1” Touchscreen PC Used On Operating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
S17 Rugged PC for the Emerging Military Technologies
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Nation remembers 9/11 victims, heroes
NEW: Former defense secretary donated thousands for memorial
'On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose,' president says
Day 'began like any other and ended as none ever has,' New York mayor says
Watch 9/11 memorials in New York and Washington on CNN.com Live
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- With moments of silence punctuated by somber music, readings of names, and tears, Americans held solemn memorial services Thursday to honor the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
President Bush comforts a mourner Thursday at the dedication of the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon to help dedicate a memorial to victims of the attack there.
"Today we renew our vows to never forget how this long struggle began and to never forget those who fell first," said Rumsfeld, who despite his high office helped carry the wounded from the burning building seven years ago.
"We will never forget the way this huge building shook. We will not forget our colleagues and friends who were taken from us and their families.
"And we will not forget what that deadly attack has meant for our nation." Watch Rumsfeld speak »
Rumsfeld donated hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to help build the Pentagon memorial.
President Bush followed Rumsfeld at the lectern.
"On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose," Bush said. "... One of the worst days in America's history saw some of the bravest acts in America's history." Watch Bush speak »
After the ceremony, participants moved through the memorial, finding and touching the benches honoring loved ones, colleagues and fellow citizens.
CNN has continuing coverage of events marking the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
All day Thursday
Earlier, a bagpiper walked alone across the Pentagon memorial playing "Amazing Grace." Watch the bagpiper's moving solo »
Seven years ago, al Qaeda terrorists used hijacked airplanes to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- the twin symbols of America's financial and military might. Another hijacked plane crashed in Pennsylvania. iReport.com: 'I just sat in my car and cried'
At the Pentagon, the ceremony dedicated a memorial to the 184 victims killed when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building's west wall.
An American flag was raised smartly to the top of a flagpole, then slowly lowered to half-staff, and a band played the national anthem. Watch and listen to Thursday's ceremonies »
At the White House, President Bush and first lady Laura Bush, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, observed a moment of silence on the South Lawn at 8:46 a.m., the moment when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center.
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a moment of silence also at 8:46 a.m. Throughout the day's ceremonies, he was also to call for moments of silence to mark the time the second plane hit the south tower, the fall of the south tower, and then the fall of the north tower. Watch an audio slide show about that day »
"We come each year to stand alongside those who loved and lost the most, to bear witness to the day which began like any other and ended as none ever has," Bloomberg said.
Poll: Terror worries at lowest level since 2001
Creating 9/11 memorials a slow process
360 blog: 9/11 remembered
Pentagon memorial highly symbolic
iReport.com: Remembering the fallen in Second Life
Flanked by police officers, firefighters and other officials, Bloomberg quoted what he called an Irish proverb: "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal." Watch Bloomberg honor the victims »
Relatives then began to read the names of the 2,751 victims at the crash site, commonly called ground zero.
Moments of silence were also observed at 9:03 a.m., the moment in 2001 that the south tower of the World Trade Center was struck by United Airlines Flight 175; 9:59 a.m., when that tower fell; and 10:29 a.m., marking the collapse of the north tower.
The New York Stock Exchange observed a moment of silence before its opening bell sounded.
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, spoke for less than two minutes at a ceremony to remember the 40 passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93, who perished after the hijacked plane went down in a field there.
Watch Americans remember 9/11 victims »
It is believed that the passengers and crew, aware of the fate of at least some of the other hijacked planes, fought back against the men who had taken control of their aircraft, leading to its crash.
The services were held at a temporary memorial near the western Pennsylvania crash site.
McCain and his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Barack Obama, agreed to suspend campaigning for the day. Both candidates were to take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the World Trade Center site at 3:30 p.m.
All About September 11 Attacks • World Trade Center • The Pentagon
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Interview: Dan Neil, Senior Vice President of MERALCO Power Generation
Dan describes his experience working for a major power generation company in the Philippines, shares tips for people looking to do business in the country and provides an analysis of the biggest changes he has seen in the coal industry in recent years.
You began working with Meralco PowerGen just a couple of years ago after many years in Australia and the UK. How has your experience been so far and what makes the Philippines an exciting market to work in at the moment?
The most exciting part of being in the Philippines is of course the rapidly growing energy market which provides a wide range of opportunities for new projects. And in addition, the fact that diversity of energy supply is still relatively low, so being in at the start of development of wind and solar generation, as well as LNG to come.
Emerging markets can be difficult to enter from a foreign perspective. Do you have any tips for people looking to do business in the Philippines?
As always, forming relationships with experienced local partners will make breaking into a new market much easier. But the Philippines has a well developed market framework, and a strong legal and regulatory regime that puts it ahead of a number of other emerging markets.
At this years Coaltrans Emerging Asian Coal Markets conference in Manila you will be talking about the procurement strategies of some of the countrys new power plants. Will these new projects be good news for coal suppliers?
The good news for coal suppliers is that coal will continue to play a key role in the Philippines generation mix for many years to come, although of course we can expect to see more renewables and LNG in time
You have been working in power generation for 25 years. What is the biggest change you have seen in the industry in that time?
The recognition that governments were not best placed to own and operate power stations is a change that is still working its way around the world. The second big change is seeing that renewables have the potential to make a real market impact as technologies develop and cost reduces.
This content is provided by Coaltrans Conferences for informational purposes only, and it reflects the market and industry conditions and presenters opinions and affiliations available at the time of the presentation.
Top 3 survival tips for coal producers
How to survive in the coal industry if you are a producer? Pat Hanna, Executive Director of Cokal Limited shares his top 3 survival tips.
Interview: Arnulfo Robles, Executive Director of the Chamber of Coal Mines Philippines
Arnulfo provides insights into the evolution of the coal industry in the Philippines and more particularly, the growing acceptability of local coal quality both domestically and in the Asian region and into the challenges coal producers are facing locally.
Interview: Stephan Nel from Thermo Fisher Scientific
Stephan discusses the importance of coal analysis and the latest technology developments.
Events By Region:
All material subject to strictly enforced copyright laws. © 2014 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC.
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Town signs deal to buy Reformer building
Following approvals from Representative Town Meeting, Selectboard moves ahead with purchase of 62 Black Mountain Rd. for police department
By Olga Peters/The Commons
BRATTLEBORO—The Selectboard has approved purchasing the land and building at 62 Black Mountain Rd. with a 3–0 vote.
True to form for the controversial Police-Fire Facilities Project, even this final vote made the board and town staff — specifically Police Chief Michael Fitzgerald — sweat.
With only three of the five board members present at its March 30 organizational meeting, the motion to purchase needed to be unanimous.
Nervous eyes turned to Board Member Kate O’Connor, who had consistently voted against moving the police department to Black Mountain Road.
O’Connor voted in favor.
And after decades of plans and false starts, the town is embarking on rehabilitating its two fire stations and one police station.
And, in the case of the police department, that also means relocating the force from the Brattleboro Municipal Center.
“We are fully authorized to proceed with the project,” said Town Manager Peter Elwell, who reported that the proposed closing date for the current home of the Brattleboro Reformer is Aug. 10.
The path to approval
On March 12, Representative Town Meeting voted 111– 27 to reallocate $4.5 million to move the police department to the north end of town.
The body provided a second authorization March 19, when it overwhelmingly approved the fiscal year 2017 budget, which included funding for the Police-Fire Facilities Project.
Per an option agreement between the town and Brattleboro Publishing Company, Inc. signed last autumn, the town will purchase the building and land for $720,000. The March 30 vote included a $35,000 deposit.
Responding to a series of questions from returning Board Member David Gartenstein, Elwell explained that it would behoove the board to approve the option before April 1.
Otherwise, the option agreement would trigger another three-month extension to hold the property, at a cost to the town of an additional $10,000. Only half of that amount would go toward the final purchase price, said Elwell.
The board had worked the additional cost of a few extensions into the option agreement last year to provide time for the two Representative Town Meeting votes and any potential special town-wide referendum votes
Building purchased ‘as is’
The town has until Aug. 1 to gather the remaining financing of $7.1 million. Approximately $4 million remains of the funds that the town already borrowed in 2013 for the project. Elwell said that amount is enough to start work.
The town manager said the next project stages include inspection and designs. The town will have from now until July to inspect the building.
The funds budgeted for the new police station include purchasing the property, renovations, and upgrades to the building’s major systems like heating, said Elwell.
Elwell noted that the building is being sold “as is,” meaning the current owner is not obligated to make any major improvements before the sale.
The Reformer’s building was constructed in 1981, when the newspaper left its longtime home in the American Building on Main Street and moved to Black Mountain Road. An addition was built in the late 1990s.
Still, the town can axe the deal and receive a refund if inspectors find significant defects.
“We believe we’re well protected,” Elwell said.
Board member defers to vote
When asked why she changed her vote, O’Connor answered, “Representative Town Meeting has spoken.”
O’Connor said that because Town Meeting members voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move, she would not stand in the way of those votes.
Laughter and good-hearted teasing broke out after the board meeting adjourned. Until O’Connor voted, said those in attendance, they were nervous that — once again — the Police-Fire Facilities Project might hit a wall.
But at the end of the day, a sense of community won out and what had been frustrations turned into a group celebration.
An audience member wondered if Fitzgerald’s head might explode.
O’Connor said, “I was always going to vote yes, but [leaving people wondering] was too delicious.”
“I love Kate [O’Connor],” Fitzgerald said. “We’re going to have bumper stickers — ‘P.D. loves Kate.’”
“Now you can take the dartboard down,” O’Connor said, laughing.
For police, cautious euphoria
The project has stalled so often that the officers felt too guarded to feel excited, Fitzgerald said.
“This is awesome,” he continued. “This is a good development, I think, for everybody.”
But, Fitzgerald, his tone turning serious, said that the department will remember that not everyone in town supported the relocation.
People have concerns, and the department must strive to address those concerns, he said, underscoring that the BPD wants to ensure that the community remains confident in the department’s ability to serve.
The chief acknowledged that moving the station to Black Mountain Road would result in a “culture change” for the community and police.
“Some of the hardest work is ahead,” Fitzgerald said. “We must work to maintain that trust and confidence.”
Originally published in The Commons issue #351 (Wednesday, April 6, 2016). This story appeared on page A1.
More by Olga Peters
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http://www.concordia.ca/content/shared/en/news/offices/vpaer/aar/2019/06/20/concordia-s-got-a-lot-of-momentum.html
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Concordia University Magazine
‘Concordia’s got a lot of momentum’
Provost Graham Carr to steer the university until next leader in place
By Doug Sweet
Source: Concordia University Magazine
Provost Graham Carr has lots to do while awaiting the university’s president, likely to be in place about a year from now.
As Alan Shepard departs, Provost Graham Carr becomes interim president until a new leader is installed, most likely in one year, according to those familiar with the process to pick new presidents.
While Carr’s title is “interim,” that should not be equated with “caretaker,” he says.
“Concordia’s got a lot of momentum in many areas, in terms of advancing its academic mission, its strategic directions, its fundraising, its physical infrastructure – all of those things continue,” says Carr, who has also served at Concordia as vice-president of research. “An interim president should be doing what a president does. You can’t put the car in neutral. In fact, it would be a fatal error for Concordia to put the car in neutral because we’re in a good spot and we want to continue that.”
The university has, according to rules and regulations, struck a search committee that includes membership from various communities in the university, including students, faculty, board members and others. The committee has held its first meeting and has sought input from the community on its draft job profile, says Concordia’s associate secretary-general Danielle Tessier.
University leaders tend to change jobs at the end of an academic year, so the expectation is that the Search Committee, with the help of a headhunting firm, will consider and interview candidates beginning in late summer or early fall and have a preferred candidate by early 2020, who would likely be in place by June or July, Tessier says.
Dramatic changes at Concordia in the last decade, including a sharp rise in the number of graduate students (9,000) as well as undergrads (37,000), mean the university now has to “develop a pattern and a pace of growth that we can fully support and that is best aligned with the areas we want to prioritize,” Carr says.
“That’s a long-term game. You know, Concordia’s been in a situation the last few years where students have been knocking down the doors to come here. Our enrolments have been positively out of sync with the experience in the rest of the province. But we’re at a point where we just can’t continue to grow everywhere, so we just have to think about where we want to grow.“
So there’s lots of work for our interim president. Carr is a big supporter of the Campaign for Concordia: Next-Gen. Now.
“It’s really exciting to see how the campaign has unfolded and that in a relatively short space of time, not only have we been able to get more than halfway to our goal, but we’ve done it through a combination of attracting the largest-ever gifts the university has received – both the Gina Cody gift and the anonymous planned giving gift — while at the same time getting great take-up from smaller donors who are equally important.
“They’re all sending the same message collectively about their pride, confidence and trust in the university.”
‘Wherever I go, I will champion this great university’
President takes his leave with Concordia on the rise
‘He’s one of the true visionaries in North America about the future of higher education’
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Crawford County Relay for Life celebrates successful 2017 event
Dan Sanderson | Staff Writer
Hundreds of people gathered in the Grayling City Park on Saturday to put their best foot forward in the fight against cancer.
The Crawford County Relay For Life was held in the park from 11 a.m. to midnight. Dozens of Relay for Life teams had tents set up in the park, where they hosted games and offered items through fundraisers for the event. Participants made laps around a paved trail in the park.
The theme this year was “Manufacturing a Cure,” to recognize all of the manufacturing done in the Crawford County area.
Samantha Karoub, from the Friends for a Cause Team, wore a cake-shaped dress and delivered singing telegrams with a flower to raise funds.
Karoub said her grandparents and an aunt have battled cancer.
“It’s really important to me because I don’t like that it’s such a big thing and not everybody knows the details of how to fix it,” she said. “I really like that we can all come together as a community to stop something that is so big.”
At noon, a cancer survivor and caregivers luncheon was held inside the Grayling Nature Center in the park.
Grayling residents Patti Trudgeon has had bouts with thyroid cancer and cutaneous lymphoma (skin cancer).
Trudgeon, however, said she takes part in Relay for Life to honor her sister, Cheryl Mott, who battled Adenoid cystic carcinoma for 19 years. She died in 2005 at the age of 42.
“What I went through was nothing compared to what she went through,” Trudgeon said.
Linda Robel, a resident of Lachine located near Alpena, was diagnosed with Squamous cell carcinoma – form of skin cancer – a year and a half ago.
“It’s not the worst – it’s the second worst,” Robel said of her skin cancer diagnosis.
Robel had surgery to have the abnormal growth of cells removed.
“We have to keep an eye on it and I’m susceptible to getting it anywhere pretty much,” she said. “I go to the dermatologist every six months and he zaps a few things every time.”
Following the luncheon, a ceremony to recognize survivors and caregivers was held and laps were walked on the Relay for Life course to recognize those who have battled cancer.
Russ Robel, Linda’s husband, said the laps recognize people who are cancer survivors, people currently diagnosed with cancer, and those who have succumbed to the disease.
“We just want to endure some of the pain and suffering they have gone through by walking as much as we can and as long as we can, so we kind of get a feel of what they’ve been going through,” Russ said.
The couple was part of the Relay for Life team from Cooper Standard, a manufacturer of automotive parts with plants in Gaylord and Fairview.
While much of the activities are for fun and entertaining to keep people’s minds off of the stress and loss from cancer, staff from the Grayling Cancer and Infusion Center were on hand at the Relay for Life this year to offer support and education.
“We are local and we are here to support our patients and the community,” said Shirlee Andrews, a staff nurse for Grayling Cancer and Infusion Center.
Located on the campus at Munson Healthcare Grayling Hospital, the Grayling Cancer and Infusion Center has been in operation for four years.
“It really has made a difference, and we are proud that we’re are able to make a difference in people’s lives,” said Annette Moshier, the supervisor for the Grayling Cancer and Infusion Center. “It cost a lot of money, when you’re sick, and you just need checkups. Traveling to Traverse City is very difficult for a lot of people. We are so glad that we are able to offer oncology in Grayling. It’s been fantastic way of treating people, where they can afford to come and get fantastic care.”
As of Saturday, there was $28,180 raised toward the Crawford County Relay For Life goal of raising $37,500 for 2017.
Crawford County Relay For Life has an online fund-raiser through Schwans-cares.com, where they will donate 20 percent of online sales toward this year’s goal. Teams have until August 31 to reach the goal.
Grayling Forecast
Crawford County Avalanche
Grayling, MI 49738
E-Mail: information@crawfordcountyavalanche.com
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Jessica Taylor Desaulniers
Spencer — Sadly our beloved Jessie left us unexpectedly on Sunday, October 2, 2016 after a long struggle with addiction. She leaves behind her two beautiful children Giovanni Taylor Garcia and Ava Gene Garcia who she loved so very much. She also leaves her mother Marion L. Desaulniers, her sister Rachel L. Desaulniers and her brother David W. Desaulniers. Her father, Eugene A. Desaulniers pre-deceased her in 2007. Jess loved her family “to the moon and back!” Jess also leaves behind her Aunts, Uncles, Cousins and many friends that she loved like family. She was a beautiful person inside and out. She was filled with kindness, generosity and love and anyone who met her could see and feel it. Jessica was also a talented musician, artist and naturalist. She loved to make dish gardens and fairy gardens to
give to friends and family. Jess’s passing has left a hole in all of our hearts that can never be filled. Even though she is gone, her light will shine on all of us to help us carry on in this world. She will be so sadly missed. The world has truly lost a beautiful soul. The family would like to suggest, in lieu of flowers, to please honor Jessica’s memory by donating to a cause that addresses the current epidemic of the disease of addiction. So much more research needs to take place to understand and treat addiction in order to free those who are in its horrible grip. Calling Hours for Jess will be Friday, October 7, 2016 from 5-7PM at the ROBERT J. MILLER-CHARLTON FUNERAL HOME, 175 Old Worcester Rd. Charlton, MA. A Celebration of Jessica’s Life will immediately follow at St. Joseph’s Church, 10 H. Putnam Road Ext. Charlton. To Share a Memory of Jess or to Offer an Online Message of Condolence, please visit: RJMillerfunerals.neT
Robert J. Miller Funeral Home - Charlton
175 Old Worcester Road
http://www.rjmillerfunerals.net/
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CHEEVER HARDWICK
Married with one son, I was educated a very long time ago to be a journalist and then as a lawyer. I did neither. I ended up working for years in the international financial arena, mainly in Latin America, until retiring about ten years ago.
Having written two rather light-hearted books about dogs and golf, I am now in the process of assembling a somewhat longer book which is a fictional country tale based in the English Countryside.....a bit of a chiller which revolves around a gallows site in Berkshire known as the Gibbet. The book will be coming out before the end of the year.
Watch this space........
- UK & EU
- USA & OTHER
GOLF... THE CRUELLEST OF GAMES
"Golf... The Cruellest of Games" is a less than serious overview of the game of Golf, written with humour and a bit of irreverence by a lifelong golfer who plays with infinitely more enthusiasm than skill. It should amuse most people and irritate others .....the perfect combination for a good read.
It starts with a loose interpretation of how golf began and then takes a penetrating look at golfing dress, equipment, types of golf courses, the people who play on them, and the customs of the game, as well as some advice for those starting on this much-loved road to madness.
It ends with views on when to give the game up and some hopefully absurd predictions of the possible future of the game.....all done with a strong sense of cynical affection for this wonderful sport. It is a must read for anyone who plays golf or is thinking of taking it up.
Cheever Hardwick's previous book, "The Labrador Theory", is a lighthearted view of the similarities between men and their Labrador dogs. The author can normally be found somewhere in Scotland, England or Portugal.
To apply to be a stockist of "Golf... The Cruellest of Games" by Cheever Hardwick, please contact Choir Press and the team there will be able to give you all the information you need. You can contact them by phone on 01452 500 016 or via email at enquiries@thechoirpress.co.uk.
THE LABRADOR THEORY
This book offers an amusing comparison between men in their middle to late years and their Labradors.....the theory can perhaps help women to understand that men, like their canine companions, are not complex. The older a man becomes, the more he appreciates his bed, a good meal, and a warm reception when he wanders through the door. A boot up the backside attracts neither man nor dog. The motivations of man and beast are rather simplistic, and in most cases, quite innocent.
Many a marriage has foundered on the rocks of over-analysis. Labradors and their masters have much in common, as this gentle tome points out. If a man does not come home on time, chances are pretty good that he got lost.
To apply to be a stockist of "The Labrador Theory" by Cheever Hardwick, please contact Choir Press and the team there will be able to give you all the information you need. You can contact them by phone on 01452 500 016 or via email at enquiries@thechoirpress.co.uk.
Copyright Cheever Hardwick 2017
Email // LinkedIn // Google+
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No More Public Cloud for HP
The company hasn't given up on private and hybrid cloud computing.
The New York Times is reporting that HP is rethinking its cloud computing plans and getting rid of its public cloud offerings. Bill Hilf, the head of HP’s cloud business, told the paper, "We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head."
The company will still be involved in public cloud computing in a roundabout way—by selling servers and services to cloud providers. It also has some hybrid and private cloud plans for smaller customers.
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Counterfeit cancer drug found in the U.S.
By Tim Sandle Feb 13, 2013 in Health
U.S. authorities have issued a warning about a counterfeit version of a cancer treatment drug called Avastin that has been found in the U.S. The fake version of the drug is connected to a company called Medical Device King.
The warning has been issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This warning is the third one that the FDA has issued about counterfeit varieties of Avastin in the past twelve months.
The Wall Street Journal indicates that the latest counterfeit version has been found to have no active ingredient rendering it completely ineffective. The drug has been manufactured for Turkey and is labelled for the Turkish market only. However, supplies have ended up in the U.S.
Even if the drug actually worked, there would be a risk because the Avastin medicine is not licenced for use in the U.S. and has not gone through appropriate trials or tests.
Avastin is sold to treat colon, kidney, brain and lung cancers. An approved form of the drug is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Roche. According to Fierce Pharma, Roche analyzed three bogus vials of Avastin and found they contained salt, starch, citrate, isopropanol, propanediol, t-butanol, benzoic acid, di-fluorinated benzene ring, acetone and phthalate moiety, but no active ingredients of the cancer drug.
The FDA has advised medics not to use any products from the company Medical Device King. The company has two subsidiary firms called Taranis Medical and Pharmalogical, and the FDA has also cautioned against using products marketed under these brands.
More about Drugs, Pharmaceutical, Cancer, Counterfeit
Drugs Pharmaceutical Cancer Counterfeit
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PR The Great Divide on DVD Apr 16
One Friday evening at their monthly get-together, Tosha introduces her friends to a game she created to complete her studies. The game is designed to elicit the feelings and impressions men and women have about each other. To play, the friends divide themselves men against women and as the game intensifies, deeply hidden secrets surface, conflicting views arise, passions boil over, tempers flare, and ... a baby is born, spawning from...
A STAR-STUDDED CAST PLAYS THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES IN AN URBAN COMEDY REMINISCENT OF MARRIAGE CHRONICLES AND 35 AND TICKING
Tosha Landry (Tichina Arnold,"Martin", "Everybody Hates Chris"), eccentric wife and nucleus of a very ethnically diverse circle of friends, is a student of the ancient Indian teachings of the Tantra and Kama Sutra. One Friday evening at their monthly get-together, Tosha introduces her friends to a game she created to complete her studies. The game is designed to elicit the feelings and impressions men and women have about each other. To play, the friends divide themselves men against women and as the game intensifies, deeply hidden secrets surface, conflicting views arise, passions boil over, tempers flare, and ... a baby is born, spawning from...The Great Divide . Richard T. Jones (Why Did I Get Married?, Why Did I Get Married Too?"), Darrin Dewitt Henson (The Marriage Chronicles, Lincoln Heights, Stomp the Yard) and Golden Brooks (Girlfriends, Hart of Dixie) co-star.
Run time: 80 mins.
Price: $14.98srp
Street: April 16
Entertainment One U.S. is the U.S. home video label of Entertainment One (LSE:ETO), a leading independent entertainment that specializes in the acquisition, production and distribution of entertainment content. Boasting a diverse library of feature films, television series and more, Entertainment One U.S. is the home of such notable properties as Sanctuary, McLeod's Daughters, Wire in the Blood, Omnibus and The Abbott and Costello Show, along with Ballet Shoes starring Emma Watson, Little Ashes starring Robert Pattinson and the 2009 Academy Award(R)-winning Best Foreign Language Film Departures. For more information on these and other releases from Entertainment One U.S., please visit www.eonehomevideo.com.
April 15, 2013, 7:45 am - PR
Keywords: comedy
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Dems: Republican spending restrictions unfairly hurt people of color
By Briahnna Brown/Howard University News Service
Panel of House Democrats at Howard University discuss the effects of sequester cuts.
House Democrats came to Howard University to dramatize how, they say, Republican-initiated federal funding policies are disproportionately hurting Black and Hispanic college students, Black and Hispanic families and the educational opportunities for all public school students.
The policy, called sequestration, was enacted in 2011 by the Republican controlled House of Representatives as a plan to force Congress to reduce the country’s federal budget deficit.
Under the plan, when Congress cannot agree on the budget, as the nation saw in 2013’s fiscal year, mandatory, across-the-board spending cuts are made under sequestration that Democrats say have unfairly and unwisely cut certain programs.
“There are no Democrats who support sequestration,” Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland’s 5th District said. “Sequestration is a complicated word that starts with ‘S’ which stands for stupid. It is an irrational policy.”
The act lowers defense and non-defense spending by about $900 billion over 10 years. Sequester-level funding was avoided during the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years, but it is expected to return this year unless Congress takes action.
“In short, [sequestration is] a disinvestment in America,” said Hoyer.
Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, who is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, Calif., who is chair of the Democratic Whip’s Task Force on Poverty, Income Inequality, and Opportunity; and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia echoed Hoyer’s statements.
The group held a roundtable discussion Tuesday, Oct. 20, in Founder’s Library and focused on the impacts that sequestration has on minority communities across the country—particularly on the effects of sequester cuts to education.
“Sequestration and budget cuts are hurting students, they’re hurting your families back at home, they’re hurting your communities back at home and we must do something about it,” Butterfield said.
According to the Pell Institute, over 50 percent of African-American and 40 percent of Latino college students rely on Pell grants. Additionally, 27.6 percent of all Pell grants go to African-American students and 24.7 percent go to Hispanic students.
In 2008, according to The Journal of Blacks and Higher Education, 155,000 Pell grant recipients were enrolled in historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). Over 90 percent of students at eight HBCUs received Pell grants and had 80 percent of students at 17 HBCUs receive the aid, the journal said.
“What has happened as the Pell grant has gone down is that our students are increasingly dependent upon loans,” Norton said. “To take a loan for part of what it takes to go to college is manageable, but borrowing more than $10,000 is detrimental to students, to their future and to the future of the country.”
Lee added that sequestration is having a far ranging impact on the current generation’s future.
“When you look at the relationship between income inequality and education … what we are witnessing now is a devastating impact on the African-American community as it relates to moving into the middle class,” she said.
In addition to hurting Pell grant funding, sequestration also reduces federal funding to pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade education programs nationwide, the panel said. Federal educational programs for low-income families, like Head Start, ended services for 57,000 children last fall, according to the Committee on Education Funding.
During the 2013-2014 school year, 29 percent of pre-kindergarten Head Start students were African American and 38 percent were Hispanic, according to the organization.
Chante Hopkins, a Howard University senior political science major from North Carolina, asked the panel how they expect students like her to trust senior elected officials to efficiently challenge the sequestration.
Hoyer did not respond directly to Hopkins’ question, but instead talked about what he and others in Congress need to do.
“We need to go back to rationally deciding what are the priorities of this country,” he said, “what are the needs of this country, and then what do we need to invest to have a better future.
“The most vulnerable [people] in America – the seniors, low-income families, the homeless, the hungry and the sick – will be disproportionately adversely affected by sequestration. This ought to be of particular concern to communities of color, but of general concern to each and every one of us.”
House Democrats came to Howard University to dramatize how, they say, Republican-initiated federal funding policies are disproportionately hurting Black and Hispanic college students and families
The Black Press excites DC area 3rd graders with Robots, drone and STEM
Ten years later, Katrina victim misses Mardi Gras
NNPA Foundation launches STEM Reach 2020, Dr. Thomas Mensah, ambassador
Obama begins final year with plea for gun control
By Tatyana Hopkins
A member of the all female African American robotics team from Spelman College sets up Lego robot Spice for demonstration for the NNPA...
By Eric Easter/Urban News Service
Artist Johnson displays her work at a 2012 New Orleans event. This has been the only time she returned to Mardi Gras. Jennifer...
Renowned engineer, inventor Thomas Mensah among scientists driving the program. The National Newspaper Publishers Association...
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Eminem Interview: About NFL and his mom
As far as rapper Eminem is concerned, the National Football League can go get stuffed — kind of like the body in the trunk of the car in the song "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" from his double-platinum debut, Slim Shady LP.
The NFL recently pulled its new promotional spots that used Eminem's hit "My Name Is" in tributes to hall of famers Joe Namath, Joe Gibbs, Joe Montana, and "Mean" Joe Greene. Though the spots have scored a touchdown with viewers, the league got cold feet when officials discovered that Eminem's music carries — proudly — a parental advisory sticker for its prodigious amount of obscenities and references to violence and drugs, which the rapper defends as "just vulgar humor."
Eminem says he saw the NFL spots once, when he was in Los Angeles earlier in the fall. "I didn't know they were using it," he says. "I was like, 'What the f--k?'"
After hearing that the league was taking them the off the air, he says, "It just makes me laugh, you know what I'm saying? I was laughing on the phone with my manager, like good, f--k 'em. It doesn't make any difference to me at all.
"People are so f--king stupid, man, to actually take my s--t that seriously. I don't walk around and try to portray this gangster image, but the media has made me out to be that way, like I think I'm some kind of f--kin' white thug."
A more pressing problem for Eminem is his mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, who's accusing him of being a liar — via a $10 million lawsuit. She claims his portrayals of her in songs and interviews as a drug addict who habitually files nuisance suits are untrue and have caused "physical and psychological injury and damages." The case is due to be heard next week, Eminem — who's real name is Marshall Mathers III — maintains that he's telling the truth about her but can't comment much beyond that. "It's kind of a s---ty feeling, like, damn, your mother's suing you," he says. "It doesn't bother me. I expected it."
In fact, Eminem says he's written a song about the legal fracas that may or may not appear on his next album, which he's currently recording with label chief and producer Dr. Dre. He hopes to have it out during the first half of 2000 and describes what he's done so far as "along the same lines" as Slim Shady, but with song topics that are "a little bit harder. The beats are harder, too."
— Gary Graff
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Phrases - Weather, Part 2
Photo by Les Haines, CC By License
Earth Fluent >> Spanish >> Phrases - Weather, Part 2
Learn how to say "Does it snow a lot in Patagonia?", "Patagonia doesn't get much snow.", "Does it rain a lot in Vietnam?", or "Rain is regular in Vietnam for half of the year." in Spanish!
Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?
¿llova Mucho En Vietnam?
Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam? in Spanish
Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?
¿nieve Mucho En La Patagonia?
Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia? in Spanish
Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow.
Patagonia No Consigue Mucha Nieve.
Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow. in Spanish
Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year.
La Lluvia Es Regular En Vietnam Durante La Mitad Del Año.
Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year. in Spanish
► ¿llova Mucho En Vietnam?
► ¿nieve Mucho En La Patagonia?
► Patagonia No Consigue Mucha Nieve.
► La Lluvia Es Regular En Vietnam Durante La Mitad Del Año.
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year..
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?.
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?, Where Is Fifth Street?, Fifth Street Is Far Away., When Do We Get To Seventh Street?, Seventh Street Is Only Ten Minutes Away..
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?, Where Is Fifth Street?, Fifth Street Is Far Away., When Do We Get To Seventh Street?, Seventh Street Is Only Ten Minutes Away., Where Is She Going?, She Is Going To The Beach., When Are You Next Planning To Come?, We Are Planning To Come Next Year..
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?, Where Is Fifth Street?, Fifth Street Is Far Away., When Do We Get To Seventh Street?, Seventh Street Is Only Ten Minutes Away., Where Is She Going?, She Is Going To The Beach., When Are You Next Planning To Come?, We Are Planning To Come Next Year., Where Is The Embassy?, I Need To Contact The American Embassy., Where Can I Send A Package?, I Want To Send A Package To America..
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?, Where Is Fifth Street?, Fifth Street Is Far Away., When Do We Get To Seventh Street?, Seventh Street Is Only Ten Minutes Away., Where Is She Going?, She Is Going To The Beach., When Are You Next Planning To Come?, We Are Planning To Come Next Year., Where Is The Embassy?, I Need To Contact The American Embassy., Where Can I Send A Package?, I Want To Send A Package To America., I Have To Go To The Library., Do You Have To Go To The Market?, Is This The Bus To Barcelona?, This Is The Bus To Barcelona..
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?, Where Is Fifth Street?, Fifth Street Is Far Away., When Do We Get To Seventh Street?, Seventh Street Is Only Ten Minutes Away., Where Is She Going?, She Is Going To The Beach., When Are You Next Planning To Come?, We Are Planning To Come Next Year., Where Is The Embassy?, I Need To Contact The American Embassy., Where Can I Send A Package?, I Want To Send A Package To America., I Have To Go To The Library., Do You Have To Go To The Market?, Is This The Bus To Barcelona?, This Is The Bus To Barcelona., I'm Leaving Tomorrow., I Have To Get There By Tomorrow., Are You Leaving?, I Have To Leave Right Now., I'm Going To Mexico., I Went To Barcelona Last Year., When Will You Go To Guatemala Next?, Is Catalonia On Your List Of Stops To Visit?, How Is The Path?, The Path Is Dangerous., What Is The Room Rate?, The Room Rate Is Fifty Dollars Per Day., Can You Come Here?, I Am On The Way., How Are The Roads?, The Roads Are Slippery., It Is North Of Here., That Is To The West Of Here., That Can Be Found To The East., You Want To Head South From There..
Words Covered : Does It Snow A Lot In Patagonia?, Patagonia Doesn't Get Much Snow., Does It Rain A Lot In Vietnam?, Rain Is Regular In Vietnam For Half Of The Year., How Is The Weather?, The Weather Is Good Today., Is The Weather Going To Be Bad?, How Is The Weather Tomorrow?, Where Is Fifth Street?, Fifth Street Is Far Away., When Do We Get To Seventh Street?, Seventh Street Is Only Ten Minutes Away., Where Is She Going?, She Is Going To The Beach., When Are You Next Planning To Come?, We Are Planning To Come Next Year., Where Is The Embassy?, I Need To Contact The American Embassy., Where Can I Send A Package?, I Want To Send A Package To America., I Have To Go To The Library., Do You Have To Go To The Market?, Is This The Bus To Barcelona?, This Is The Bus To Barcelona., I'm Leaving Tomorrow., I Have To Get There By Tomorrow., Are You Leaving?, I Have To Leave Right Now., I'm Going To Mexico., I Went To Barcelona Last Year., When Will You Go To Guatemala Next?, Is Catalonia On Your List Of Stops To Visit?, How Is The Path?, The Path Is Dangerous., What Is The Room Rate?, The Room Rate Is Fifty Dollars Per Day., Can You Come Here?, I Am On The Way., How Are The Roads?, The Roads Are Slippery., It Is North Of Here., That Is To The West Of Here., That Can Be Found To The East., You Want To Head South From There., Is It Going To Be Hot?, Is It Going To Be Cold?, Is It Going To Be Rainy?, Is It Going To Be Dry?, It's Not Supposed To Rain Today., It's Supposed To Snow Today., It's Supposed To Rain Tomorrow., It's Not Supposed To Be Sunny Tomorrow., How Hot Is It?, How Cold Is It?, What's The Temperature?, What's The Temperature In Fahrenheit?, It's Really Hot., It's Really Cold Today., It's Going To Get Hotter., It's Going To Get Colder Today., It Will Be Hot Tomorrow., It Will Be Cold Tonight., It Will Be Hotter Tomorrow., It Will Be Colder Next Week., It's Been Raining All Day., It Rained Very Hard Today., There Should Be No Rain Tonight., There Is Supposed To Be Rain Today., It's Going To Rain., It's Going To Snow., It's Going To Storm., It's Going To Flood., It Is Raining Now., It Is Snowing Now., It Is Storming Now., It Is Flooding Now., Did It Rain?, Did It Snow?, Will It Rain?, Will It Snow?, Will It Rain Tomorrow?, Will It Snow Today?, Will It Storm Tomorrow?, Will It Flood Today?.
Font Wars (Typing Game that Requires Spanish Keyboard)
Phrases - Travel, Part 56 - Learn how to say "It is North of here.", "That is to the West of here.", "That can be found to the East.", or "You want to head South from there." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 57 - Learn how to say "Can you come here?", "I am on the way.", "How are the roads?", or "The roads are slippery." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 58 - Learn how to say "How is the path?", "The path is dangerous.", "What is the room rate?", or "The room rate is fifty dollars per day." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 59 - Learn how to say "I'm going to Mexico.", "I went to Barcelona last year.", "When will you go to Guatemala next?", or "Is Catalonia on your list of stops to visit?" in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 60 - Learn how to say "I'm leaving tomorrow.", "I have to get there by tomorrow.", "Are you leaving?", or "I have to leave right now." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 61 - Learn how to say "I have to go to the library.", "Do you have to go to the market?", "Is this the bus to Barcelona?", or "This is the bus to Barcelona." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 62 - Learn how to say "Where is the embassy?", "I need to contact the American embassy.", "Where can I send a package?", or "I want to send a package to America." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 63 - Learn how to say "Where is she going?", "She is going to the beach.", "When are you next planning to come?", or "We are planning to come next year." in Spanish!
Phrases - Travel, Part 64 - Learn how to say "Where is Fifth Street?", "Fifth Street is far away.", "When do we get to Seventh Street?", or "Seventh Street is only ten minutes away." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 1 - Learn how to say "How is the weather?", "The weather is good today.", "Is the weather going to be bad?", or "How is the weather tomorrow?" in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 2 - Learn how to say "Does it snow a lot in Patagonia?", "Patagonia doesn't get much snow.", "Does it rain a lot in Vietnam?", or "Rain is regular in Vietnam for half of the year." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 3 - Learn how to say "Is it going to be hot?", "Is it going to be cold?", "Is it going to be rainy?", or "Is it going to be dry?" in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 4 - Learn how to say "It's not supposed to rain today.", "It's supposed to snow today.", "It's supposed to rain tomorrow.", or "It's not supposed to be sunny tomorrow." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 5 - Learn how to say "How hot is it?", "How cold is it?", "What's the temperature?", or "What's the temperature in Fahrenheit?" in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 6 - Learn how to say "It's really hot.", "It's really cold today.", "It's going to get hotter.", or "It's going to get colder today." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 7 - Learn how to say "It will be hot tomorrow.", "It will be cold tonight.", "It will be hotter tomorrow.", or "It will be colder next week." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 8 - Learn how to say "It's been raining all day.", "It rained very hard today.", "There should be no rain tonight.", or "There is supposed to be rain today." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 9 - Learn how to say "It's going to rain.", "It's going to snow.", "It's going to storm.", or "It's going to flood." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 10 - Learn how to say "It is raining now.", "It is snowing now.", "It is storming now.", or "It is flooding now." in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 11 - Learn how to say "Did it rain?", "Did it snow?", "Will it rain?", or "Will it snow?" in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 12 - Learn how to say "Will it rain tomorrow?", "Will it snow today?", "Will it storm tomorrow?", or "Will it flood today?" in Spanish!
Phrases - Weather, Part 2 -- Added to http://www.EarthFluent.com.
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ESPN and ABC Sports December Highlights
Monday, December 3, 2007 , Posted by Christopher Byrne at 10:33 PM, under ABC Sports, ESPN, ESPN Networks, ESPN Schedules
Athens, GA (Dec 3, 2007) - The following are the broadcast highlights for the month of December 2007 as presented on the ESPN Networks and ABC Sports, and published by ESPN.
~~~~ ESPN and ESPN2 ~~~~
The MNF schedule in December will kick off with a key AFC contest when the Baltimore Ravens host the New England Patriots-Ravens December 3. The final three games feature division rivalry match-ups, including Drew Brees and the Saints versus the Atlanta Falcons December 10. The following week, Brian Urlacher and the defending NFC champion Chicago Bears play the Minnesota Vikings December 17 in a NFC North tilt. The MNF regular-season finale will provide football fans with a special holiday treat as the Denver Broncos meet 2006 NFL MVP LaDainian Tomlinson and the defending AFC West champion San Diego Chargers on Christmas Eve, December 24, at 8 p.m. ET.
ABC will provide live coverage of the Dr. Pepper ACC Championship Game from Jacksonville, Fla., Dec. 1 at 1 p.m. in addition to the Dr. Pepper Big 12 Championship Game from San Antonio, Texas at 8:07 p.m. Later that day the network will televise the UCLA vs. USC match at 4:30 p.m.
ESPN and ESPN2 will combine to televise 21 Bowl games from December 20-31. Coverage will begin with an ESPN Bowl Selection Special Sunday, Dec. 2, at 8 p.m. and a College GameDay: Bowl Mania Special, previewing all of the upcoming games, Saturday, Dec. 8, at 9 p.m. Additional, vThe action will start with San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl Dec. 20, at 9 p.m. on ESPN. ESPN2’s bowl game coverage will begin with the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl Dec. 21, at 8 p.m.
Full coverage of the NCAA Div. I Football Championship will be televised live on ESPN and ESPN2, including semifinal #1 Friday, Dec. 7, at 8 p.m. on ESPN2, semifinal #2 Saturday, Dec. 8, at 4 p.m. on ESPN, with coverage of the championship game Friday, Dec. 14, at 8 p.m. on ESPN2. The following day ESPN2 will televise the Div. III championship at 12 p.m.
2007 Home Depot College Football Awards Show Dec. 6 at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN.
2007 Heisman Trophy Presentation presented by Nissan Dec. 8 at 8 p.m. on ESPN.
ABC and ESPN will combine to present a special Christmas Day tripleheader, opening on ABC with the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James versus the Miami Heat with Dwyane Wade at 2 p.m., followed by Phoenix, with two-time league MVP Steve Nash, visiting the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant at 5:15 p.m. In the nightcap, ESPN will showcase the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle SuperSonics’ Kevin Durant, the No. 2 selection in the 2007 NBA Draft, at 8 p.m.
ESPN and ESPN2’s schedule will continue with a combined 47 game schedule, highlighted by the Hall of Fame Elite Four game, Gonzaga vs. Connecticut, Saturday, Dec. 1, at 3:30 p.m. (ESPN), Jimmy V Classic from New York, N.Y., Tuesday, Dec. 4, at 7 p.m. Kansas State vs. Notre Dame followed by USC vs. Memphis at 9 p.m. (ESPN), Big East/SEC Invitational Wednesday, Dec. 5 and Thursday, Dec. 6 (ESPN and ESPN2), and the All College Classic from Oklahoma City, Okla., Thursday, Dec. 20, at 7 p.m. Oral Roberts vs. Oklahoma State followed by Gonzaga vs. Oklahoma (ESPN2).
A Sunday afternoon women’s college basketball doubleheader will be televised on ESPN2 Sunday, Dec. 2 starting with Penn State hosting Duke at 5 p.m. followed by the North Carolina Tarheels at the defending National champion Tennessee Vols. The following day, ESPN2 will televise the Jimmy V Women’s Basketball Classic featuring Maryland vs. Rutgers at 7 p.m.
ESPN will televise one live high school basketball telecast Thursday, Dec. 13, at 9 p.m. (teams to be announced at a later date).
SPORTSCENTER SPECIALS ON ESPN
SportsCenter Year in Review, Dec. 11 at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN.
Top Ten Games, Dec. 13 at 8 p.m. on ESPN.
Pro Bowl Announcement live Dec. 18 at 4:30 p.m. on ESPN.
College Football Special Dec. 28 at 4 p.m.
SOCCER ON ESPN2
NCAA Women’s College Cup from College Station, Texas, December 7-9 with the NCAA Men’s College Cup from Cary, N.C. December 14-16.
Euro Champ Draw Show live Sunday, Dec. 2 from 5-6 a.m.
UEFA Champions League matches Dec. 4, Dec. 11 and Dec. 12 at 2:30 p.m. each day.
ESPN2’s full coverage of the PRCA National Finals Rodeo will begin Friday, Dec. 7 at 12 a.m. The championship round will be televised Sunday, Dec. 15 at 9 p.m. on ESPN.
ESPN’s weekly Sunday afternoon bowling telecasts, at 1 p.m., will continue with three live “Classics”:
Great Lakes Classic, Dec. 2; Beltway Classic, Dec. 9 and Spartanburg Classic, Dec. 16.
Champ Car Grand Prix of Arizona, Dec. 2 at 4 p.m. on ABC
2008 New Year’s Special live Dec. 31 at 11 p.m. on ESPN
Cingular ESPN All America Team Dec. 8 at 5 p.m. on ABC
Peyton Manning: Class of the NFL Dec. 15 at 5 p.m. on ABC
Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year Presentation Dec. 29 at 5 p.m. on ABC.
Golf: Wendy’s Three Tour Challenge Dec. 22 and Dec. 23 at 4 p.m. both days on ABC. Additional golf coverage will include the ESPN National Golf Challenge Dec. 2 at 1:30 p.m. followed by the V Foundation Celebrity Golf Classic at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN2.
2007 NCAA Woman of the Year from Indianapolis, Ind., Dec. 7 at 4:30 p.m. on ESPN2.
2007 High School Heisman Presentation Dec. 9 at 6:30 p.m. on ESPN2.
NCAA Women’s Volleyball Tournament from Sacramento, Calif., Dec. 13-15 on ESPN2.
2007 Pop Warner Championship Dec. 27 at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN.
Bass: 2007 Wild Card Tournament Dec. 8 at 9 a.m.
~~~~ ESPN Classic ~~~~
SPORTSCENTER SPECIALS
SportsCenter, ESPN's flagship news and information program, will present three specials in December that premiere on ESPN Classic:
SportsCenter Year in Review looks back at the 2007 year in sports Monday, Dec. 10, at 9 p.m. ET,
SportsCenter Top Ten Games counts down the best games from 2007 Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 7 p.m.
Best of This is SportsCenter counts down the top SportsCenter commercials Thursday, Dec. 13, at 10 p.m.
ESPN Classic will televise two live games in December:
The Hartford Hall of Fame Showcase featuring Providence at Boston College, Dec. 1 at 6 p.m.
Big East Conference Basketball: Vanderbilt at DePaul, Dec. 12 at 8 p.m.
In conjunction with the overall ESPN tribute to the Jimmy V Foundation, ESPN Classic will televise three of Jim Valvano’s biggest victories from when he was the basketball coach at North Carolina State University on Tuesday, Dec. 4, from 12:30 – 7 p.m., including the 1983 NCAA Tournament final, when N.C. State upset Houston for the championship.
ESPN Classic will televise the SWAC Championship from Birmingham, Ala., live on Saturday, Dec. 15, at 2 p.m.
ESPN Classic will televise a “Heisman Hopefuls Marathon” Saturday, Dec. 8, from 12 – 8 p.m. The marathon will include games that feature the 2007 Heisman Trophy finalists.
College Bowl Marathons
ESPN Classic will provide eight-hour marathons (11 a.m. – 7 p.m. each day) of past Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl and Fiesta Bowl games on three consecutive days in December:
December 26: Sugar Bowl games from 1991, 1995, 2004 and 1982 featuring former greats such as Dan Marino, Hershel Walker and Danny Wuerffel.
December 27: Rose Bowl games from 2006, 1997, 1969 and 1993. Vince Young, Jake Plummer, and Tyrone Wheatley are some of the featured players.
December 28: Fiesta Bowl games from 1987, 1999 and 2003. Featured players include Vinny Testaverde and Maurice Clarett.
In conjunction with the airing of UEFA Champions League matches live on ESPN2, ESPN Classic will be re-airing matches on December 11 and 12 at 5 p.m.
SPORTSCENTURY
ESPN Classic’s Emmy and Peabody Award-winning signature series, SportsCentury, will continue most weekday mornings in December at 9 a.m. Some of the scheduled features include: Reggie Jackson, Dec. 3; Tony Stewart, Dec. 10; Arthur Ashe, Dec. 20; and Seabiscuit, Dec. 26.
60 MINUTES ON CLASSIC
60 Minutes On Classic will continue on ESPN Classic with four premiere half-hour episodes Fridays at 10 p.m. Each episode focuses on two notable past sports-related segments of theaward-winning TV news magazine. Highlights include 60 Minutes on Classic: Mixed Martial Arts/Pro Video Gaming on Dec. 7; 60 Minutes on Classic: David Robinson/Inner City Fencing on Dec. 14; 60 Minutes on Classic: John Daly/Jerry Bailey on Dec. 21, and 60 Minutes on Classic: Joe Namath/Derek Sanderson on Dec. 28.
REEL CLASSICS
Cannonball Run II will debut on Reel Classics, ESPN Classic’s weekly Sunday movie series, on Dec. 2 at 8 p.m. The 1984 sequel stars Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise in the illegal cross-country race, The Cannonball Run. Also appearing in the movie are Rat Packers, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., along with numerous stars of television and the silver screen.
ESPN Classic will televise a Christmas Day movie marathon from 12 – 8 p.m. that includes ESPN Original Entertainment movies The Junction Boys and Codebreakers, as well as Something For Joey and Endless Summer.
Cheap Seats will continue to air throughout December most weekday afternoons at 1:30 p.m. Twin comedians Randy and Jason Sklar host the one-hour comedy series and apply their own brand of comedy watching old games and shows and commenting on game action, announcers and people in the crowd.
USA vs. USSR Marathon
ESPN Classic will televise an eleven-hour USA vs. USSR marathon on Sunday, Dec. 9, from 1 p.m. – 12 a.m. The marathon will include the 1972 Olympic Basketball game, the 1960 “First Miracle” hockey team, and the 1980 “Miracle on Ice.” In addition, the recent ESPN Classic replay of Dimitri Kirilov vs. Jose Navarro and Evander Holyfield vs. Sultan Ibragimov will air as part of the marathon. The marathon will end with back-to-back airings of the movie, Rocky IV.
~~~~ ESPNU ~~~~
ESPNU will offer encore presentations of select 2006-2007 College Bowl Games leading up to the 2007-08 College Bowl games.
Exclusive coverage of two games, including:
NCAA Division ll Championship Semifinal, live, Saturday, Dec. 8 at 11 a.m. ET
Pioneer Bowl from Las Vegas, Saturday, December 23 at 2 a.m. ET
The college football Game-Of-The-Year Marathon begins on Dec. 24 at 6 p.m. and will showcase all of this season’s game-of-the-week winners. Viewers will also have a chance to vote for a game of the year at ESPNU.com. Voting begins on Monday, Dec. 24, at 6 p.m. and will continue through Wednesday, Dec. 26, at 12 p.m.
ESPNU will continue to re-air college football games from ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 throughout the month.
The Home Depot College Football Awards will be televised with pre- and post-Red Carpet segments on Thursday, Dec. 6, at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. The awards will honor college football players and coaches that made a difference in the 2007 season.
2007 Heisman Trophy Programming:
ESPNU’s Heisman Hopeful program highlights some of the best athletes in their pursuit for one of the biggest honors in sports Friday, Dec. 7, at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., and on Saturday, Dec. 8, at midnight.
Re-airs of the Heisman Trophy winner's best performances of the year:
Monday, Dec. 10, at 10:30 p.m.
Tuesday, Dec. 11, at 9 a.m.
Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
ESPNU will air 30 exclusive Men's college basketball games this month, including:
o Duke vs. Davidson – Saturday, Dec.1, at 12 p.m.
o Michigan at Harvard – Saturday, Dec.1, at 5:30 p.m.
o Ohio State at Butler - Saturday, Dec.1, at 7:30 p.m.
o Michigan State at Bradley - Tuesday, Dec. 4, at 9 p.m.
The network will continue to re-air college basketball games from ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 throughout the month.
ESPNU will carry four exclusive women’s volleyball regional matches Saturday, Dec. 8 at 4 p.m., 6:30 p.m., 9 p.m., and 11:30 p.m. There will also be one National Semifinal Game Thursday, Dec. 13, at 9 p.m.
ESPNU will air two live, exclusive hockey games, including Maine vs. New Hampshire Sunday, December 16, at 4 p.m., and Merrimack vs. Boston University Sunday, December 30, at 7 p.m.
The network will carry exclusive coverage of both Men's and Women’s Soccer Championship Semifinals:
Women: Friday, Dec. 7, at 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Men: Friday, Dec. 14, at 5p.m. and 7:30p.m.
ESPNU Recruiting Insider continues every Friday:
o Dec. 7, at 10:30 p.m.
o Dec. 14, at 10 p.m.
o Dec. 21, at 6:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.
o Dec. 28, at 6:30 p.m. and 11 p.m.
ESPNU Coaches Spotlight will be televised Tuesday, December 4, from 1-5 p.m.
ESPNU Inside the Polls airs Monday December 3, at 7 p.m.
Varsity Inc. will air every Sunday at 9 p.m. and reviews the 2007 season of the West Monroe High School Rebels and their quest for the Louisiana State Championship.
SportsCenterU is seen live every Thursday at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday at 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., with re-airs Friday and Sunday mornings highlighting news and information on a wide range of both men’s and women’s college athletics.
Inside the Big East is a weekly magazine show that highlights BIG EAST student athletes and it airs every Friday Night:
o Dec. 7, at 10 p.m.
o Dec. 14 at 10:30 p.m.
o Dec. 21 at 7 p.m. and 11p.m.
o Dec. 28 at 7 p.m.
~~~~ ESPN Deportes ~~~~
Coverage of UEFA will continue on Tuesday, Dec. 4, at 2:30 p.m. ET with AC Milan facing Celtic FC. ESPN Deportes will televise at least 10 games from each Matchday. Matchday 6 will begin on Tuesday, Dec. 11 at 2:30 p.m. Fernando Palomo, Mario Kempes, Richard Mendez and Giovanni Savarese, some of the best soccer commentators of Latin America, will offer their expert analysis. All matches will be replayed on ESPN Deportes throughout December. Match-ups for Matchday 6 are TBD. (Schedule)
Winter Baseball: Dominican League, Venezuelan League, and Pacific League
ESPN Deportes offers baseball fans a chance to catch some players from Major League Baseball (MLB) with coverage of Caribbean Baseball throughout December. Brandon Moss (Boston Red Sox) and Randy Choate (Arizona Diamondbacks) are some of the MLB stars who play in the Dominican League. In January, the Venezuelan and Pacific Leagues (eight teams each) and the Dominican League (six teams) will compete in a playoff series to determine each league’s champion. The champions will face off in the Caribbean World Series.
Dominican League
TIME (ET)
Sunday, Dec. 2
Tigres Del Licey vs. Leones Del Escogido
Friday, Dec. 7
Tigres Del Licey vs. Aguilas Cibaeñas
Friday, Dec. 14
Gigantes Del Cibao vs. Tigres Del Licey
Sunday, Dec. 16
Leones Del Escogido vs. Tigres Del Licey
Leones Del Escogido vs. Aguilas Cibaeñas
Wednesday, Dec. 5
Tigres De Aragua vs. Navegantes Del Magallanes
Thursday, Dec. 13
Leones Del Caracas vs. Cardenales De Lara
Wednesday, Dec. 19
Leones Del Caracas vs. Águilas Del Zulia
Cardenales de Lara vs. Navegantes Del Magallanes
Tuesday, Dec. 4
Algondoneros De Guasave vs. Aguilas De Mexicali
Naranjeros De Hermosillo vs. Tomateros De Culiacán
Tuesday, Dec. 18
Venados De Mazatlán vs. Tomateros De Culiacán
Aguilas De Mexicali vs. Yaquis De Obregón
Naranjeros De Hermosillo vs. Mayos De Navojoa
Tomateros De Culiacán vs. Algondoneros De Guasave
Algondoneros De Guasave vs. Naranjeros De Hermosillo
ESPN Perfiles
ESPN Perfiles is a 30-minute magazine show that provides in-depth looks into famous Latino athletes’ careers through interviews and analysis. This month ESPN Perfiles will feature Roberto Clemente; a talented Major League Baseball right fielder who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and was the first Latin American elected to the Hall of Fame, after his tragic death. This original episode will be televised on Sunday, Dec. 9, at 6:30 p.m.
2007 PRCA National Finals Rodeo
This year, the 23rd anniversary of Las Vegas as the host of The National Finals Rodeo (NFR), the NFR will rope in 120 of the best contestants to compete in bareback riding, steer wrestling, team roping, saddle bronco riding, tie-down roping, barrel racing and bull riding. The contestants will compete in all seven events, each night, for 10 days straight. NFR coverage on ESPN Deportes will begin on Monday, Dec. 17, at 4 p.m.
Monday, Dec. 17
Monday Night Football showcases some of the top matchups of the NFL. MNF will be preceded by a 30-minute live studio show; NFL Esta Noche. Alvaro Martin and Raul Allegre will be hosting MNF, with John Sutcliffe reporting from the sidelines.
New England Patriots at Baltimore Ravens
New Orleans Saints at Atlanta Falcons
Chicago Bears at Minnesota Vikings
Denver Broncos at San Diego Chargers
ESPN Deportes coverage of the National Basketball Association (NBA) will continue on Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 10:30 p.m. with the Phoenix Suns hosting the Utah Jazz.
Related Posts : ABC Sports, ESPN, ESPN Networks, ESPN Schedules
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Counseling Services & Referrals
Education and Advocacy >
Immigrant Health Outreach Project
Tagalog Classes
Filipina Women's Support Program
Leading Youth to Find Empowerment >
Leading Youth to Find Empowerment - Program
Youth Support Services
FAHSI's Philippine Art Collection
USCIS: Immigration Relief Measures for Filipino Nationals Impacted by Typhoon Haiyan
Message from the USCIS:
We in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are deeply saddened by the effects of the typhoon that struck the Philippines on November 8, 2013. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this tragedy.
We have taken steps to provide relief to victims of the typhoon. Filipino nationals in the United States should visit the home page of our website to learn about a series of existing relief measures that may be available to them. In addition, we are proactively identifying and expediting pending petitions for alien relatives, the Form I-130, that have been filed by U.S. Citizens for their Filipino immediate relatives. Our standard security checks remain in place.
A Form I-130 petitioner can check his or her case status online at www.uscis.gov or by contacting the National Customer Service Center at 1-800-375-5283 or 1-800-767-1833 (TDD assistance). In addition, a petitioner can sign up to receive automatic case status updates by e-mail as one’s case is processed. If one has filed a Form I-130 and received a request for evidence or any other type of communication from USCIS, one should read the notice carefully to ensure that one responds to the same USCIS Service Center that sent the notice.
Members of Congress and members of the community have requested that the Philippines receive a designation of Temporary Protected Status, commonly known as “TPS.” The Department of Homeland Security, along with other federal agencies, is reviewing these requests, the conditions in the Philippines, and other relevant factors in assessing whether a TPS designation is warranted.
We are monitoring the situation closely and actively considering what additional measures we can take to assist and support individuals affected by the tragedy.
USCIS Public Engagement Division
Special Social Security Benefits for Certain World War II Veterans including Filipino Veterans
Special benefits can be paid to certain World War II veterans. These include veterans who served in the active U.S. military from September 16, 1940, through July 24, 1947. It also includes Filipino veterans who served in the organized military of the Philippines from July 26, 1941, through December 30, 1946 (while those forces were in the service of the U.S. Armed Forces). The special veterans benefits are payable for months in which qualified veterans live outside the United States.
FAHSI Opens its Office for In-Kind Donations to Benefit Central Philippines
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Young cultural workers take lead in celebrating 50 years of art and culture in the Philippine revolution
Read more articles in Philippines
Jose Maria Sison, Founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Utrecht, Netherlands - Hundreds of cultural workers, youth, human rights and political activists, artists, academics, Filipino and other migrant nationalities and representatives of political parties and formations from all over the world, jampacked the auditorium of center for art and culture in this central Dutch city, December 29, to celebrate “Fifty Years of Art and Culture in the Filipino People’s Struggle for National and Social Liberation” and the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on December 26, 1968.
The celebration was organized by the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) International Information Office in Utrecht, together with the Linangan Art and Culture – a network of young cultural workers and artists in the Netherlands. The Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) – a leading international platform for theoretically-informed, politically-driven art and experimental research, hosted the event.
The celebration which began in the morning, was highlighted with an exhibition of art works, performances and publications, video installations and film-showings produced in the course of the struggle of the Filipino people for national and social liberation.
The celebration was capped with speeches by Prof. Jose Maria Sison, Founding Chairman of the CPP, and NDFP chief political consultant, who spoke on the achievements of the revolutionary movement in the past 50 years; Luis Jalandoni, NDFP peace panel senior adviser, who gave a speech on building the third weapon of the revolution, the united front, and Coni Ledesma, NDFP peace panel member, who spoke on the road to a just and lasting peace.
A one-minute video on “What is Peace” preceded Ledesma’s speech. A choral singing of “Martsa ng Bayan” (March of the People) preceded Jalandoni’s talk, and a dance interpretation of the poem and song “NorthStar” preceded Sison’s input.
Earlier during the day, Julieta De Lima, NDFP peace panel member, gave a premier lecture on the role of art and culture in the struggle of the Filipino masses for national and social Liberation, and the role of the masses in the development of revolutionary art and culture.
The solidarity program included heartwarming and revolutionary performances by young militant cultural workers from the Philippines, Netherlands, the U.S., Canada, Belgium, Turkey, and Italy. They rendered revolutionary songs, dances that included the contemporary and traditional lumad (indigenous) dance, choric reading, and theater performances depicting the triumphs of the people’s army in the Philippines. These performances were always accompanied by visual presentations on the people’s struggle.
Representatives from many organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Iceland, Norway, Peru, United Kingdom, Switzerland, the U.S. and Canada, India, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia attended. The Embassy of Venezuela in The Hague also sent a representative.
Solidarity messages from political parties and formations from the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Kurdistan, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Norway, Indonesia, the U.S. and Canada. Chants of “Viva CPP-NPA-NDF!” and “Mabuhay ang CPP!” interspersed the reading of the solidarity messages from the friends of the Filipino people.
The film “Revolution Selfie: The Red Battalion” by American filmmaker Steven De Castro who tackled the portrait of the 48 year-old people’s army in the Philippines, and the documentary film “Moving Mountains” which tackles the life stories of the pioneers of the Philippine Revolution and the future of the protracted people’s war, were also shown earlier in the day.
During the solidarity program, youth organizations in the Netherlands gave a special recognition to Prof. Sison and Julie de Lima, for being among the most outstanding pioneers of the Philippine revolutionary movement and a guiding inspiration for young revolutionaries, particularly young guerrillas of the people’s army. They gifted Joma and Julie with bouquets of flowers and a Mao pen and Mao’s original classic “Red Book”. Youth activists in the audience chanted “ang karit at maso, dudurog sa estado” (the peasant sickle and worker’s hammer, will crush the state) as the couple received a standing ovation.
As a tribute, a moving video collage of contemporary Filipino revolutionaries – poets, human rights workers, cultural activists, writers, movie directors, academics, militant priests and nuns, solidarity workers, and NPA guerrillas who have passed on, became missing, killed by the Philippine military or died as guerrilla fighters and combatants, was shown.
The evening of celebration concluded with the community singing of the workers’ anthem “Internationale” while a video of exiled NDFP leaders singing the same song was also played, and was followed by a celebratory dance with indigenous music participated in by the Filipino migrants and their children who were garbed in indigenous attire from the Cordilleras and Mindanao.
inspectorrandoness
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Thomas A. Daily practices primarily in the area of oil, gas and mineral law, including title examination, administrative proceedings and mineral litigation. He is also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Arkansas School of Law, teaching classes titled "Oil and Gas Regulation and Agreements" and "Oil and Gas Title Examination."
Mr. Daily is a graduate of the University of the South (B.A.) and the University of Arkansas (J.D., summa cum laude). He is a past President of the Arkansas Bar Association (2003-2004), having previously served as a member of its House of Delegates and Board of Governors, as well as chairman of the Association's Natural Resource Law Section. He is also a member of the Sebastian County and American Bar Associations and is a Fellow of both the American Bar Foundation and the Arkansas Bar Foundation and is currently the vice president of the latter foundation. He is a member of the Arkansas Supreme Court's Professional Practicum Committee. He is listed in Best Lawyers in America; Best Lawyers in Arkansas and Mid-South Super Lawyers.
Mr. Daily is co-author of Well, Now, Ain't That Just Fugacious: A Basic Primer on Arkansas Oil and Gas Law, 29 U. Ark Little Rock L. Rev. 211, and is author of Lawyering the Fayetteville Shale Play—Welcome to My World, 44 Ark. Lawyer No. 2, 11. He is a co-author of the American Association of Petroleum Landmen's Eighteen State Comparison of Oil and Gas Laws and is the Arkansas reporter for the Annual Survey of Law by the American Bar Association's Section of Natural Resources, Energy and Environmental Law and the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Newsletter. He recently served as a member of the task force which drafted the American Association of Petroleum Landmen Form 610-2015 Model Form Operating Agreement.
Mr. Daily is a frequent presenter of continuing legal education programs on mineral law subjects. He has presented several papers to the Arkansas Natural Resource Law Institute. He has often before served as chairman of that institute and is a recipient of its award for distinguished service.
Daily & Woods, P.L.L.C.
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Review: “Sully”
on December 19 | in MOVIE REVIEWS, NEW on DVD AND BLU-RAY | by Michael Parsons | with No Comments
On DVD and Blu-ray December 20th/Directed by Clint Eastwood/Starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Anna Gunn and Mike O'Malley/Drama-biopic/96 minutes/Rated PG-13
We were all agape at “The Miracle on the Hudson”, when an Airbus A320 landed in the water with not a single casualty among its 155 passengers and crew. A bird strike at 2,000 feet caused dual engine failure and subsequent ditch, at the lowest altitude in history no less. It was a frigid day in January, 2009; the NYPD and several nearby boats extracted everyone within 20 minutes, and not a soul was lost. Everything except for the takeoff was unprecedented.
Director Clint Eastwood (“American Sniper”) likes his heroes. But he does not treat them like gods. “Sully” is based on the book Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (with Wall Street Journal contributor Jeffrey Zaslow), the US Airways pilot who executed the landing. Sully is played by Tom Hanks, and co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles by Aaron Eckhart (the latter of whom gets the best line in the movie). They’re in the midst of the NTSB investigation when the film opens, Sully suffering from nightmares and stricken with growing doubt about his decision.
His wife (Laura Linney) fends off the press at home while Sully is stuck in New York answering questions. The media is hailing him as a hero, but the NTSB has a job to do. Playing the lead on the inquiry is Mike O’Malley, whose character is on the brink of being vilified, but plateaus somewhere around cold scrutiny. One could argue that the Canadian Geese are the real antagonists here; nevertheless, the computer simulations indicate that a safe return to La Guardia was possible, and that the left engine may still have been intact (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and it wasn’t).
The biopic dips into Sully’s experience in the Air Force and another heroic act, but director Eastwood keeps it present and relatively lean on back story. Development of some passengers is a bit hokey; otherwise tailoring a great script, writer Todd Komarnicki breaks out some Hallmark-caliber dialogue—maybe it was the timing or just the delivery—anyway, some of those bits struck me as artificial. (Not to diminish the trauma of their real-life counterparts, or composite thereof. Anyway, I’m sure they didn’t mind the performances). Hanks is a sturdy mainstay playing the stoic, frost-haired pilot; plus solid contributions from Linney, Anna Gunn, and especially Mr. Eckhart, who I’ve always admired and am glad to see in a worthy and influential role.
But “Sully” is most interesting on an analytical level; watching the landing from several vantage points, witnessing the NTSB interrogations (though sometimes infuriating), the simulations, and finally the black box recording, which is dramatized in what I assume to be real-time. By the time US Airways flight 1549 skids across the Hudson until its nose plunges under the surface, your knuckles will be white. It’s easier to endure, though, knowing the outcome. If “Captain Phillips” is Hanks’ best performance of the past decade, this would come second.
— M. Parsons
about the author: Michael Parsons
Father. Realtor®. Movie nut. After pestering my parents for their commentary on “Star Wars” when I was four years old, my mind went into a creative frenzy. I’d imagined something entirely different than the actual film, which I didn’t end up seeing until its 1979 re-release at the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC. This was my formal introduction to the cinema. During that long wait, which felt like an eternity to a child, my mind was being molded by more corrosive stuff like “Trilogy of Terror” and “Rosemary’s Baby”, most of which I’d conned various babysitters into letting me watch on television ( I convinced one poor lady that “Jaws” was actually “Moby Dick”). The folks were pretty strict in that regard, so the less appropriate it was for a kid to watch, the more I was fascinated by it. Horror staples like “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th”, as well as lesser-known low-budget fare like “Madman”, “Sleepaway Camp” and “Pieces” all ended up sneaking their way into the VHS on a regular basis. Since then, I’ve developed an obsession with the entire film industry. Even though I watch and review a wide breadth of films these days, my appreciation for the campy, poorly lit micro-budgeters still lends itself to my evolving perspective on movies just as much as the summer blockbusters and Oscar contenders. As I recall my trips to the movie theater, I realize that this stuff is about much more than just a fleeting piece of entertainment. A couple years ago, I was finally given the opportunity to lend my opinion on films to a publication, The Rogers Revue, with a subsequent run at Reel Film News. It's been both a privilege and a gateway to what we’re doing now. Most of my experience has come from interviewing independent filmmakers, who consistently promote innovation. The filmmaking process is grueling and relatively unforgiving. Fellow film enthusiast Eddie Pasa and I have created DC Filmdom as a medium for film reviews, discussion, and (inevitably) some debate. And so, the creative frenzy continues. (Michael is a member of the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Association).
Dec 31 | 1 Comment
21 Films To Watch From 2016
40%%
Sep 8 | 1 Comment
» MOVIE REVIEWS, NEW on DVD AND BLU-RAY » Review: “Sully”
Anna Gunn, Chesley Sullenberger, Clint Eastwood, Flashlight Films, Kennedy/Marshall Company, Laura Linney, Malpaso Productions, Mike O’Malley, Sully, Todd Komarnicki, Tom Hanks
« Review: “Storks” Review: “Julieta” »
The Grand Son (a.k.a. American Pets)
Aug 14 | No Comments
Jun 11 | 1 Comment
Review: “Arrival”
Dec 31 | No Comments
Apr 8 | No Comments
Today's listens: @HDTGM's #Gymkata and #HalloweenIII episodes. @MShowalter says some shit about "becoming Gymkata"… https://t.co/m31y9gyj7x, 37 mins ago
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Treat Believers As if They Are Six Years Old
Are you frustrated that most believers stare back at you with that blank caught-in-the-headlights look as you ask them to think about their faith? Is it maddening to you? Are you scratching your hair out and looking balder by the day? Then here's a solution for you. It's not for everyone. Atheists who are not so frustrated and encouraged that they're making a difference should keep on doing what they're doing. But others might consider taking the following advice. Treat believers as if they are six years old. Al Blazo, a friend of mine, suggested doing something brilliant with this in an email. It's also hilarious:
I was having a candid conversation with me wife today about the frustration that I often feel when engaging in almost any conversation w/ a couple of people that I am either forced or feel obligated to interact with on a regular basis. This conversation commenced about an hour or so before I was scheduled to interact with one of them.
My wife's recommendation was to simply remain silent and ignore everything they proffered. "Don't ask them anything. Don't ask them to explain or elaborate on anything that they voluntarily offer. Don't critique anything that they say. Just remain silent, say 'ah ha,' 'oh, yea, I see,' 'yea, isn't that interesting' etc. and shake your head in silent agreement." she said. In other words, just STFU! To which I replied, "Yea, but what you're really asking me to do is to interact with them as if they were a six year-old." To which she replied, "Precisely!" And then she went on to ask if I would seriously ask a six year-old to offer a clearer explanation of exactly where Santa and his elves live and work. (She then said something about using the George Castanza approach, referencing, of course, to the time George wrote down the sex moves guaranteed to drive women wild on his palm and then reviewed each step of the move as he performed the action. But I digress).
I did admit that heeding her advice was indeed something that I should spend a little more time and effort on cultivating but that it was very hard for me to do, primarily because the people that I'm referring to were adults in every meaningful sense of the term, not children. "Yea," she said, "they look like adults but looks in these particular cases are very deceiving." It's impossible to resist this logic.
So, how might I do a little more "cultivating," I wondered. What can I possibly do to remind myself that I must - at all costs - resist interacting with people on a thoroughly adult, rational and logical level - one that demands a degree of critical thinking uncommon for a six year-old - and instead just smile, shake my head as if I were in agreement with them while muttering soothing sounds of acceptance and approval?
That's when I came up with this brilliant idea: each and every time the person in front of me offered something headbangingly stupid that normally would have driven me over the edge, I simply looked down, listened, opened my hand and stared directly into my palm.
You know what? It worked! Instead of feeling frustrated and aggravated when they offered something too stupid to comprehend (which is most of the time) I was silently laughing the entire afternoon!
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Charlie Graham-Brown
CFO of Seedstars World
One liner: Charlie joined the founding team of Seedstars World as CFO in the early days to grow the company’s coverage and impact to over 65 emerging markets.
Full bio: Charlie started out as a mechanical engineer and thought that working on projects like the A380 at Airbus would keep him entertained but quickly realised it wasn’t for him. He jumped tracks by going through an MBA at the Collège des Ingénieurs in Paris that led to Geneva and into impact investment management with BlueOrchard. The emerging and developing market focus got Charlie traveling and closing deals in 20+ countries across Africa, Asia and MENA. Still being an engineer at heart, with a love of building things, he started his own company before connecting with Seedstars World, which had just done its first year and knew that was his calling! Charlie is now managing the strategy and operations of the company through its incredible growth phase from just 20 countries when he joined to over 65 in 2016. Responsible for the startup screening, analysis and the growth program, he has accumulated deep knowledge of trends in technology in emerging markets.
Past experience: After and early experience with Airbus, Charlie become an MBA and CFA charter holder leading to six years of experience in innovative financial institutions. Working as an investment officer for four years at BlueOrchard Finance, he analysed and invested in microfinance institutions across Africa, MENA and Asia.
Education: Charlie studied at The University of Leeds, UK with a year at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and holds a Master of Engineering First Class Honours degree. He transitioned into finance following an MBA at the Collège des Ingénieurs, Paris and became a CFA charter holder
Speaker: Charlie has participated in several conferences around the world such as Le Hub, Paris (Mar 2015), WebSummit, Dublin (Nov 2015), BPIFrance, Paris (Nov 2015), SEIF, Zurich (Jan 2016), Pioneers, Vienna (May 2016).
The unknown: For several years Charlie compete on the amateure triathlon circuit which culminated with him becoming the world vice champion in 2013, just behind the Mexican ex-olympian! He “retired” early but remains a fanatical skier, runner and surfer.
Video (YouTube)
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We have four trustees. Each one is passionate about giving children a good education.
Steve Kaim-Caudle
Founder and Chair of Trustees
Steve has an economics degree from Lancaster University and a certificate in supply chain from MIT. After a career in logistics management including setting up and running his own company, he worked as a volunteer in Rwanda on community income generating schemes. He then worked in Liberia advising the Ministry of Health on improving their supply chains for the distribution of drugs to health facilities and community health workers. Whilst in Africa he started to appreciate the difference education makes to young lives and wanted to do something to address the inequality between those who could afford to go to school and those who could not.
Dave retired from his post as Chief Executive of a Non-Governmental Organisation six years ago and has been to Africa three times as a volunteer, including three years in Rwanda. He has a Masters Degree in Voluntary Sector Organisation.
Whilst helping to develop an organisation’s capacity in Kigali, he met many families whose children were desperate for a good education and the opportunities that could follow to help themselves and their country but who could not afford the cost of sending them to school. He was impressed by the resilience and hard work of those he worked with and believes that education and the opportunities that follow are the foundation of an inclusive and coherent society.
Jane Kaim-Caudle
Jane is a retired solicitor who specialised in family law. She helped people through difficult periods in their lives often caused by relationship breakdown. She graduated in politics and history from Kent University. Whilst volunteering in Rwanda she worked with the German Government’s GIZ program on human rights and also recorded the stories of people who had suffered in the genocide. She says that these testimonies ‘reveal much suffering but also display the resilience and strength of the Rwandan people’. She thinks girls especially need to be encouraged to graduate from high school and seek further training as they often face pressure from within their own families to help in the house and on the land.
Megan Kaim-Caudle
Megan has volunteered and travelled throughout much of Eastern and Southern Africa with a focus on opportunities to work with young people and helping them in their education. She is a passionate believer in long-term sustainable support to create the right environment for students to succeed. Having spent time in Rwanda Megan is committed to making a difference to children providing them with a better future in this beautiful country. Megan has a degree in International History and Politics and works in London.
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Home New York West Point
West Point, NY Florists
Find Florists in West Point
Happy Flower Florist
1204 Commissary Road, West Point, NY 10996
Flowers By Danielle
3071 BRIGHTON 3RD ST
Pequa Park Florists Inc
Massapequa , NY 11758
Caroline's Flower Shoppe
Islip , NY 11751
Albert Florist
Port Chester , NY 10573
West Point Flower Shop News
Florist Selected to Help Decorate White House for Holidays - U.S. News & World Report
Florist Selected to Help Decorate White House for HolidaysU.S. News & World ReportCOLUMBUS, Miss. (AP) — West Point florist Scott Reed never thought his first trip to Washington, D.C. would be for such an esteemed reason — to decorate The White House for Christmas. Reed, owner of Petal Pushers, which provides an "out of the ...and more »...
Mississippi florist to help decorate White House for holidays - wreg.com
Susan Walsh, AP×Mississippi florist to help decorate White House for holidaysSusan Walsh, APWEST POINT, Miss. — West Point florist Scott Reed never thought his first trip to Washington, D.C. would be for such an esteemed reason — to decorate The White House for Christmas.Reed, owner of Petal Pushers, which provides an “out of the ordinary” shopping experience in floral arrangements, gifts and antiques, received official correspondence from The White House that he was accepted into the 2017 holiday volunteer program.“I’ve always worked with design,” Reed said. “And I just remember hearing about this program years ago and thinking ‘how neat would it be to be a part of something like this?’”The program, he said, is divided between two teams — a preparation team that volunteers the week before Thanksgiving and a decoration team that volunteers the week after Thanksgiving to prepare the interior of the White House for the holidays.His desire to be a part of the decoration process is bipartisan.Reed first applied to the volunteer program, unsuccessfully, during George W. Bush’s las... http://wreg.com/2017/10/30/mississippi-florist-to-help-decorate-white-house-for-holidays/
In full bloom: Cottage Grove Florist reopens, revamps | River Towns - River Towns
There's a chance to win for anyone who comes in," Junco said.There will be 12 big winners; each month in 2017, a winner will receive a free arrangement.Cottage Grove Florist, at 8599 West Point Douglas Road, is open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. For more information, call 651-459-7179 or go to www.cottagegroveflorist.com. http://www.rivertowns.net/news/4160475-full-bloom-cottage-grove-florist-reopens-revamps
Adcock's embraces third generation of florists - LaGrange Daily News
Monday afternoon.The mother son team represent the continuation of a legacy of florists providing arrangements to the area through Adcock’s Flower Shop. The original shop was opened in West Point in 1958 by Grace and Pete Adcock. It stayed open until 2005 when Grace Adcock died. The shop on Vernon was opened this June.“My mother worked in a cotton mill for West Point Pepperell, and she always had a love and a passion for flowers, and she kept begging my daddy, ‘Please, Pete, let me try this,’” said Davis. “She was probably 43 at the time when she started this in a little gas station down in West Point.“… They kept adding and adding. The building kept getting bigger and bigger until my mom passed away at the age of 84. … She put her whole life into educating her family and working hard so that we would be provided for through the years through a flower shop.”Davis fondly recalls riding her bicycle around her parent’s shop as a child, and though she was a nurse for years, now that she runs the flower shop with her son, she feels inspired by her mother’s legacy as a florist.“I feel like, when I unlock that door in the morning, and I come in, I feel like my mama’s here,” said Davis. “I feel like she is guiding my hands.”That inspiration translates into individually crafted arrangements in containers found at antique sales and flea markets instead of the standard glass vases that ar... http://lagrangenews.com/news/18213/adcocks-embraces-third-generation-of-florists
Insurance firms J. Smith Lanier and Flowers Agency merge, to consolidate ... - Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
Insurance firms J. Smith Lanier & Co. of West Point, Ga., and The Flowers Agency of Columbus have merged, with plans to consolidate their Columbus offices to Brookstone Centre office park by the middle of October.The merger, effective Sept. 1, brings together one of the oldest insurance companies in the U.S., with J. Smith Lanier founded just after the Civil War, and the relatively young Flowers Agency, founded by Thomas Flowers in 1980. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Robert Culpepper, J. Smith Lanier senior executive vice president and managing director, in a statement, said the union between the two “enhances our excellent relationships with the insurance carriers, giving us additional strength to provide the best coverages, at the best price to meet our client’s benefit needs.”Flowers expressed excitement about the merger involving his insurance firm, which serves individuals and corporate clients throughout the Columbus area.“Both companies have a long tradition of excellence in customer service and we believe the c... http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/business/article35442210.html
Obituary: John M. Vontobel, 67, Of Stamford - Stamford, CT Patch
Susan (Moavero) Vontobel, daughter Amanda Vontobel, son Michael Vontobel and daughter-in-laws Erin Capuano and Nicole Harris.John was an avid collector of vinyl records and a dedicated New York Yankees fan. Aside from his passion for classic rock, motorcycles and classic cars he was a passionate animal lover and there wasn't anything he would not rescue. From snakes, lizards and turtles to cats and dogs, John always had a lost animal to save and his house was a safe haven for wayward pets.The family will receive family and friends at Lacerenza Funeral Home (8 Schuyler Avenue, Stamford) on Wednesday, June 12, 2019 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in his memory to the Bennett Cancer Center. The family is truly thankful for their care and kindness during John's illness. https://patch.com/connecticut/stamford/obituary-john-m-vontobel-67-stamford
Finding Balance With Florist - Stereogum
Listen to “Time Is A Dark Feeling” and read an interview with Sprague below. [embedded content]STEREOGUM: Why did you end moving to Los Angeles? EMILY SPRAGUE: I was living in upstate New York after we finished If Blue Could Be Happiness, and that year was the year that my mom passed away and that I ended a pretty serious relationship that I was in. It felt like life just started unraveling in a very specific way. I knew that I always really wanted to live in California from touring there, and I knew I had a good handful of friends out there, and it just felt like the right time. Like I needed to go somewhere drastically different to discover new parts of myself. STEREOGUM: A lot of the album is about surrounding yourself in a different environment from what you’re used to. How did changing what’s around you help you to figure things out? SPRAGUE: I think location is a huge part of what input you’re getting into your brain. I think it was less about physically being in a different place and more what the different place represented. When I moved to California, my lifestyle changed a lot. I started surfing, and that became a huge part of my life. I started doing a lot more ambient music, being with different friends within that group … Really, being out in the sun more — it changes a lot. But I was also incredibly depressed for the first six months to a year that I lived there. Writing the album was the thing that finally was the culmination of all those feelings, the thing that finally released it all. I lost my mom, who was my best friend, and I lost this relationship that was a huge source of stability that I leaned on a lot. When those two things were gone, it felt like the structures that I had in my life for the last five years all just came crumbling down. I found myself in this completely new place where I just felt like the only way to survive was to find the power within myself. There’s a saying, in I guess psychology, about having a sense of self and that being the source of how you can build healthy relationships. “You’re the only one who will never leave you.” That was one of the core ideas of all of these songs. I wanted to explore this sense of loneliness, and really find out what’s strong about that and what’s beautiful about that and create that same stability that I had from these external relationships within myself.Obviously, the lead-up to those feelings and realizations is incredibly hard. The album is definitely meant to be listened to within this void of the self, or within a void of the mind. It’s like if you were to go into somebody’s brain and really just be the only thing in there — it’s about that sense of self. STEREOGUM: Is that why you decided to record the whole album by yourself? SPRAGUE: I was writing all of these songs about this specific journey that I was on, and I had been living in LA for a year and my experience there was alone in a lot of ways. Basically, what was going to happen was we were going to record in January in Los Angeles, but, logistically, it just wasn’t going to work out. Everybody wasn’t going to be able to do it, it was the wrong time for everyone. I was sort of in this intense flow state of writing, and all of the things that I was writing felt very isolated from the rest of the band. They’re produced the way that they are because I wanted them to be very obviously just Emily — this is just the songwriter of this project recording these things and ... https://www.stereogum.com/2048286/florist-emily-alone-interview/franchises/interview/
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Chetan Bhagat: Writing for Millennials
Indian author Chetan Bhagat is ranked No. 82 on the 2017 Forbes India Celebrity 100 list
By Forbes India
Published: Jan 2, 2018
Image by: Anshuman Poyrekar / Hindustan times via Getty Images
The writer had one book release last year, his seventh novel One Indian Girl, which had its share of hype and controversies. The book’s ads were displayed on Mumbai’s local trains (a first in the publishing world) and Bhagat (43) went on record to say that as part of the research he had his body hair waxed to write from a woman’s point of view. The book also ran into a plagiarism row. The movie Half Girlfriend, starring Arjun Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor, based on his 2014 book by the same name, released in May. Bhagat co-produced the film. The book and the film did reasonably well and the author has retained a position on the Forbes India Celebrity List.
View Complete List: http://www.forbesindia.com/lists/2017-celebrity-100/1665/1
2017 Forbes India Celebrity 100: Shooting for the Stars
Salman Khan tops Forbes India Celebrity 100 list for second consecutive year
Photos: Meet the 30 highest-earning celebrities
Photos: The Women on 2017 Forbes India Celebrity 100 list
Photos: 21 sports personalities in 2017 Forbes India Celebrity 100 list
(This story appears in the 05 January, 2018 issue of Forbes India. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)
2017 Forbes India Celebrity 100
Sunil Grover: No breakup blues
Priyanka Chopra: The world at her feet
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Home/News/Business Print This Page
More than just a shopping centre
Story and photos by Angelica Ingram
This is the first instalment of a feature series on general stores in the Highlands.
There isn’t a face or name that Bill Burden doesn’t know.
The owner of the West Guilford Shopping Centre for the past 33 years, he greets everyone with a smile, wave or a hello and doesn’t see retirement in his future anytime soon.
As customer after customer make their way into Burden’s lively general store, it’s clear the owner has a passion for his business and his community.
Born in Newfoundland, Burden moved to the Highlands when he was 17 after his father got a job at Haliburton Highlands Secondary School.
He stayed in the area for the next few years, working at a bank in Minden before moving to the Niagara region and landing a good job at a winery.
But frequent visits to see old chums would bring him back to the Highlands, where he met Edna, the sister of one of his friends. The pair were married shortly after.
Born and raised in Haliburton, Edna was able to convince Bill that they should move back to Haliburton County to raise their two kids, Chad and Cory, who were 10 and eight.
At that time, 1983, what was then known as Prentice’s store was for sale, so the couple decided to buy it.
“I mentioned it to my wife and she said why don’t we put an offer in,” Burden said. “I’d never done anything like this, we just wanted to move back up here and have year round work. We tried it and we still like it.”
Today the store is the heart of West Guilford, offering more than what your typical general store might have.
Situated on Kennisis Lake Road, the shopping centre includes a post office, LCBO and Beer Store, an ATM, DVD rentals, and toiletries.
The store has undergone two renovations since it was purchased by the Burdens, one to accommodate the addition of alcohol and the other for the meat department.
Like many general stores in the area, the shopping centre has produce, dairy and other food. However the store is known for its fresh meat counter and butcher.
“Meat’s our big thing,” Burden says.
Homemade sausages in a variety of flavours can be found piled high, next to them are freshly made burgers ready for a barbecue.
An elderly man comes in and picks up his special order pork roast, which the butcher hands him with a smile.
Fresh made sandwiches, bacon and deli items are also available.
Burden tries to have everything you might need at his store, which is busiest during the long weekends of the summer, particularly the Civic Holiday weekend, he said. The only day of the year the store is closed is Christmas.
Ice cream treats greet kids when they walk in the front door and bags of bread and bakery items fill the store with a pleasant aroma.
The shopping centre has a baker on staff who can be found stocking an industrial size oven with dough each day.
“We try to make it a one stop shop,” Burden says.
Apart from the summer months, the store is also busy during hunting season in the fall. They provide food for a number of local hunt camps.
Open 12 months of the year, he says his store gets a lot of local support.
“We try and give the best service we can and supply something of everything,” he said. “I think the big thing is service.”
That customer service has not gone unnoticed. A few years ago the West Guilford Shopping Centre was the recipient of a Haliburton Highlands Chamber of Commerce award for excellence.
Burden points to longtime customers as another reason for his store’s success, as well as its small town feel.
“I enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “I asked my wife, did you ever think we’d be doing this for 33 years? She said no.”
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Bakuman (Movie)
Moritaka Mashiro (Takeru Satoh) doesn't want to follow in the path of his uncle who worked as a manga artist, but ultimately died because of exhaustion. Moritaka Mashiro figures he will graduate from school and work at an office. Things change though when falls in love with a girl at school. The girl, who hopes to become a voice actress, tells Mori… more Moritaka Mashiro (Takeru Satoh) doesn't want to follow in the path of his uncle who worked as a manga artist, but ultimately died because of exhaustion. Moritaka Mashiro figures he will graduate from school and work at an office. Things change though when falls in love with a girl at school. The girl, who hopes to become a voice actress, tells Moritaka they can marry, but only after they both achieve their dreams. Moritaka then teams up with fellow classmate Akito Takagi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) to publish their first manga. less
Genres: Comedy, Drama, Teen
Kamiki Ryunosuke
Sato Takeru
Kiritani Kenta
Arai Hirofumi
Nana Komatsu
Bakuman (Movie) Online
Bakuman (2015) Apr 27, 2016
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Home>News>Government to bring the public sector debt to GDP ratio to 60% by end of June 2021
Government to bring the public sector debt to GDP ratio to 60% by end of June 2021
Date: July 09, 2019
Domain:Economy & Finance
GIS - 09 July, 2019: Government is firmly committed to bringing the public sector debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio down to 60% by the end of June 2021. The strategy, to bring down the public sector debt to a more sustainable level is multi-pronged and is spelt out in Budget 2019-2020.
This reply was given, today, by the Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, at the National Assembly, to a Parliamentary Question pertaining to the measures being taken to stop the increasing trend with regard to the public sector debt as a ratio of GDP.
The Prime Minister highlighted that the first strategy is to boost economic growth and expand GDP at a faster pace leading to a reduction in the debt ratio. For the past three years, he said, the GDP growth rates have been higher at 3.8% compared to a low rate of 3.4% in 2013. For 2019, Statistics Mauritius has forecasted a GDP growth rate of 3.9%, he added.
He emphasised that Government is providing the necessary support to productive sectors to overcome the challenges with a view to sustain growth momentum. Accordingly, he stated that in the sugar sector, planters will be paid Rs 25,000 per tonne of sugar for the first 60 tonnes of sugar accruing to them, which will be more than double the price that they would otherwise have obtained.
With regard to the manufacturing sector, Prime Minister Jugnauth spoke of extending the ‘Support for Trade Promotion and Marketing Scheme’ for another year to improve competitiveness of exporters. To this end, he indicated that the Economic Development Board will set up small industrial and business zones across the island.
As for the tourism sector, he elaborated that the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority will redynamise the Shanghai and Kenya routes as well as reinforce the visibility of the Mauritius destination in traditional markets. A Passenger Cruise Terminal Building is being built to promote cruise tourism and significant investments are being made to diversify and improve the tourism product, he added.
Speaking about the financial services sector, the Prime Minister pointed out that Mauritius is now fully compliant with the standards of the OECD on transparency and exchange of information for tax purposes. He spoke of the tremendous progress made towards complying with the FATF recommendations on AML/CFT. The financial services sector, he stated, is now attracting more and more investors in Fintech while also highlighting on further diversifying the product base of the international financial centre.
The second strategy, he underlined, is to keep the budget deficit at a low and sustainable level. He emphasised that the budget deficit will stay around the 3 % benchmark and added that on the revenue side, buoyancy in revenue collection is being ensured. He referred to the solidarity levy on high income earners introduced in the financial year 2017/2018 and stated that the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme and the Arrears Payment Scheme are being extended for another year.
With respect to tax administration, the Prime Minister put forward that the Mauritius Revenue Authority is harnessing the advancement in technology to facilitate and enhance compliance behaviour amongst the taxpayers’ community.
As regards expenditure, he stressed that the objective is to do more with less and improve the quality of spending by containing recurrent expenditure, therefore making every effort to eliminate wastage and unproductive expenditure.
To this end, the Prime Minister mentioned that a Committee has been set up under the Ministry of Justice, Human Rights and Institutional Reforms to examine the Reports of the Director of Audit and propose measures to address the weaknesses and shortcomings. In addition, the budget for mission expenses has been significantly reduced from Rs 160 million last year to Rs 120 million this financial year, he said.
Moreover, he pointed out that limited resources are being used judiciously by right prioritising of investment projects. To reduce the burden of debt on Government, he indicated, greater private sector participation is being encouraged in public sector infrastructure and other projects.
Referring to the third strategy, the Prime Minister stated that it is to restructure public enterprises so that they are less dependent on the budget. On this score, he underlined that following a financial restructuring exercise, the Development Bank of Mauritius Ltd has been able to turn around its financial situation and is now operating on sound financial footing. Similarly, he added, after the merger of the different institutions into the Landscope (Mauritius) Ltd, the operational cost has been reduced by 24 %.
The fourth strategy, he highlighted, is the early repayment of expensive external debt. He emphasised that some 97.8 % of the Rs 18 billion foreign debt that we are prepaying were borrowed by the former Government. With the prepayment of the foreign debt, he said, the country will be saved of some Rs 400 million of interest payments yearly.
Prime Minister Jugnauth highlighted that the aim is to achieve total adherence to the golden rule in public finance, which is, borrowing only to finance investment expenditure, thus ensuring the sustainability of public finance and bring public sector debt below 60 % of GDP in the years to come.
Government Information Service, Prime Minister’s Office, Level 6, New Government Centre, Port Louis, Mauritius. Email: gis@govmu.org Website: http://gis.govmu.org Mobile App: Search Gov
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Greatreporter
Is the end of the newspaper near?
Britain's top divorce lawyer to speak on prenups at the Law Society
Presswire, 6 July 2011
Ayesha Vardag, whose firm, Vardags, won the biggest Family Law case in English legal history at the Supreme Court last year - making prenups recognised in English courts - will speak at the Law Society on Thursday.
Ayesha's talk is entitled ‘The End of Marriage as we Know it’, a reference to her firm's victory in the case of Radmacher v Granatino last October, and how it changed 150 years of law regarding marital agreements in England and Wales. She will also be touching on the way other countries and cultures approach marriage as well as prenups and postnups.
With the escalation in divorce rates and the increased demand for civil partnerships, the future of the once sacred institution of marriage is now less certain, Ayesha explains.
ayesha_vardagweb.jpg
"We're coming to the end of state control over how we are to manage our financial affairs in the event of divorce. We continue to fight for the freedom for a couple to enter into a contract they can draw up in the best of times to determine what would happen between them in the worst of times. It’s about people taking responsibility for their own relationships and lives".
Ayesha's talk is part of the Law Society Public Debate Series consisting of high-profile public lectures and panel discussions that will focus on cutting-edge topics across the spectrum of law reform.
The panel will discuss the changing face of marriage in the context of the developing legal framework and ask whether the impending reforms represent the end of marriage as we know it.
The evening will be chaired by Desmond Hudson, Chief Executive of the Law Society and will employ a 'question time'-style format to explore how marriage has evolved, both socially and legally, and the ways in which it is relevant today.
The free-to-attend event is open to the public and Law Society members. It will be held at The Law Society, 113 Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1PL with a registration at 1800. The debate will run from 1830 to 2000, with a networking reception afterwards.
Ayesha Vardag graduated from Cambridge University with Honours in Law and from Brussels with a Master's in European Law, working at the International Courts of Justice in the Hague and the UN (IAEA) in Vienna. She then trained and qualified as a finance lawyer at Linklaters London and Moscow on power station and diamond mine projects, before moving on to capital markets work at New York law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges. Ayesha was called to the Bar in 1999 and joined 4 New Square chambers, then crossed to family law at Sears Tooth. She founded Ayesha Vardag Solicitors (www.vardags.com) in 2005.
Trailblazing divorce law firm becomes 'Vardags'
London-based lawyer expert on divorce, family law and marital cases
Bloomsbury Professional celebrates 25 years of Hershman and McFarlane: Children Law and Practice and launches family law online service
Berezovsky divorce: Britain's top divorce lawyer comments
© 2019 Greatreporter.com, a subsidiary of Presswire, Ltd.
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In Celebration of Gregg's Life
Slideshow can also be viewed here.
Gregg Stracks, of Boston, MA, loved life and lived each day to the fullest until his untimely death on January 10, 2012, at the age of 40, after an extraordinarily courageous battle against ocular melanoma. He died peacefully at home surrounded by his loving family.
Above all, Gregg cherished time with his family and friends. He and his beloved wife, Sara, fit a lifetime of love into their 8 years together. In partnership with Sara, Gregg fought against difficult odds to live life as fully as possible and not let illness define him.
To know Gregg was to love him. He had an extraordinary gift of connecting with people. He brought people together, created community, and always cared for others before himself. He made everyone feel loved and special. His generosity was unmatched. Gregg loved adventure and travel, always making new friends along the way. He loved nature and found refuge in the mountains and at the beach. He had a love of art and a gift for identifying talented artists worldwide. Gregg saw possibility in the impossible and pushed through challenges to accomplish his goals and vision.
Gregg grew up in Roxbury, CT, and graduated from Shepaug Valley High School in 1989. He majored in psychology at Dickinson College, earned a master’s in clinical psychology from the University of Hartford, and was awarded a doctorate from the University of Denver. Gregg, a natural and gifted psychologist, was a born teacher and visionary. Professionally, Gregg built on his personal values, focusing on caring for others and supporting community and teamwork. He worked for the Clinton Foundation and Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Kenya and Mozambique to help address psychosocial needs of families dealing with HIV. In Boston, Gregg co-founded OPUS Leadership Group where he helped leaders and teams be most effective in their work.
Gregg will be forever missed, and his legacy and spirit will always remain with those who knew and loved him. Gregg is survived by wife Sara Selig, parents Joan and Richard Stracks, brothers Mark and David Stracks, niece and nephew Rosulian and Richard Stracks, parents-in-law Ellen and Andy Selig, and sister-in-law Becky Selig, in addition to extended family and many cherished friends and colleagues.
Sara will be sitting shiva at their home in Jamaica Plain, MA, Monday through Saturday (Jan. 16-21, 2012), 7:30pm-8:30pm. A celebration of Gregg's life will be held Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 3pm at the Veronique, 20 Chapel St., Brookline, MA.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Melanoma Research Foundation, 1411 K St. NW, Ste. 500, Wash. DC 2005, to support The Gregg Stracks Memorial Fund for ocular melanoma research; or Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Development Office, 116 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02116 to establish The Gregg Stracks Program for Leadership and Teamwork in Medicine. In either case, please specify Gregg Stracks in memo line of check.
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Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile by Julia Fox: A Book Review
Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile
Author: Julia Fox
Genre: Nonfiction, Biography, History
Source: Personal Collection
Synopsis: The history books have cast Katherine of Aragon, the first queen of King Henry VIII of England, as the ultimate symbol of the Betrayed Woman, cruelly tossed aside in favor of her husband’s seductive mistress, Anne Boleyn. Katherine’s sister, Juana of Castile, wife of Philip of Burgundy and mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, is portrayed as “Juana the Mad,” whose erratic behavior included keeping her beloved late husband’s coffin beside her for years. But historian Julia Fox, whose previous work painted an unprecedented portrait of Jane Boleyn, Anne’s sister, offers deeper insight in this first dual biography of Katherine and Juana, the daughters of Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella, whose family ties remained strong despite their separation. Looking through the lens of their Spanish origins, Fox reveals these queens as flesh-and-blood women—equipped with character, intelligence, and conviction—who are worthy historical figures in their own right.
When they were young, Juana’s and Katherine’s futures appeared promising. They had secured politically advantageous marriages, but their dreams of love and power quickly dissolved, and the unions for which they’d spent their whole lives preparing were fraught with duplicity and betrayal. Juana, the elder sister, unexpectedly became Spain’s sovereign, but her authority was continually usurped, first by her husband and later by her son. Katherine, a young widow after the death of Prince Arthur of Wales, soon remarried his doting brother Henry and later became a key figure in a drama that altered England’s religious landscape.
Ousted from the positions of power and influence they had been groomed for and separated from their children, Katherine and Juana each turned to their rich and abiding faith and deep personal belief in their family’s dynastic legacy to cope with their enduring hardships. Sister Queens is a gripping tale of love, duty, and sacrifice—a remarkable reflection on the conflict between ambition and loyalty during an age when the greatest sin, it seems, was to have been born a woman.
My review: Sister Queens is a dual biography of Queen Isabella of Castile’s daughters, Katherine of Aragon, the famous first wife of Henry VIII whom he divorced, and Juana of Castile, who is known as Spain’s Mad Queen. The author chronicles their lives in Spain and to their tragic fate. These sisters thought that they would have a happy future, only to realize that they would face hardships that they would have never dreamed of. However, these sisters prove to be intelligent, strong, and good at politics. The only thing they had against them that shaped their fate was their gender.
While it is a dual biography, the author mostly focuses on Katherine of Aragon. This is because there is more historical information available on Katherine than on Juana. However, the lesser mentioned story of Juana was fascinating. The author portrays her as a tragic figure. Unlike the popular myth of Juana la Loca, Juana was not mad. Instead, she had a strong political acumen. It was because of her gender that no one took her seriously. Her father, husband, and son betrayed her so they could have the throne for themselves. I could not help but pity poor Juana, and I wished the author had written more information on her.
The author reminds us that Katherine of Aragon was not the poor, heart-broken, weak discarded wife of Henry VIII that the popular myth had lead us to believe. When she was the widowed wife of Arthur, Henry VIII’s brother, she struggled with poverty but worked hard to overcome it. As a queen she was intelligent with an impressive range of politics. This was proven when Henry went to war in France, and he appointed Katherine as regent. Katherine was Henry’s equal, and she helped advise him in state affairs. Because she could not produce a male heir to the throne, Katherine was a failure and disappointment in Henry's eyes. When Henry was trying to divorce her, Katherine’s fight for her position made it extremely hard for Henry. Yet, no matter how long she fought, she lost simply because she was not the king.
Overall, this refreshing biography takes away the popular misconceptions to what we have previously thought of these sisters and gives them a different perspective. The novel is full of danger, suspense, court intrigue, and tragedy, but it also shows the women’s strength, determination, and their unwavering faith in God as they fight for their crown. The writing is very engaging and comprehensible. Fans of Alison Weir and anyone interested in the Tudor era will eat this biography up!
4 stars Biography Book Reviews Catherine of Aragon England Europe Flanders History Julia Fox Nonfiction Queen Renaissance Royalty Spain Tudors Woman Sovereign
Diane February 28, 2015 at 3:57 PM
After reading the blurb and your review, Lauralee, I get the feeling that this book has been carefully researched, in which case, it could be quite interesting. I was not aware that Katherine had a sister, and it could be interesting to read about her, more especially seeing that both of the sisters experienced the same kind of male-dominated treachery and abandonment.
Lauralee Jacks February 28, 2015 at 5:57 PM
Thanks. It is carefully researched. They both had the same kind of tragic experience.
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Home / Our News / College News / Stanford’s Jane Shaw to be t ...
Stanford’s Jane Shaw to be the new Principal of Harris Manchester College, Oxford
Harris Manchester College is delighted to announce that it has elected Jane Shaw, Dean for Religious Life and Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford, to be the new Principal from 1st October 2018.
Professor Shaw said on her election: “I am very honoured and delighted to be elected Principal of Harris Manchester College, and look forward to working with the fellows, staff and students to build on the outstanding legacy of Ralph Waller. Harris Manchester’s commitment to diversity and to educating mature students, especially those who enter higher education from unconventional routes, makes it an extraordinary college. I feel very fortunate to be joining it.”
Professor William Mander, Senior Fellow and Chair of the college search committee, said: “In Jane Shaw we have found someone who will hold firm to the values of inclusive and supportive community that have always characterised us, and at the same time confidently steer the College forward towards the next chapter of its continuing development. She has an outstanding track record of institutional leadership, a firm commitment to teaching and research, and the energy and initiative necessary to navigate the best path for the College through ever-changing circumstances and opportunities.”
A distinguished historian of Christianity and respected leader, Professor Shaw has been at Stanford since 2014 where, in addition to teaching in the areas of Religious Studies and History, her duties include providing spiritual and religious leadership for the university as a whole. Prior to going to Stanford, she was the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where she led a period of growth in the congregation, opened the cathedral to a wider public through the development of its public education and the founding of a resident artist programme, and increased donations significantly.
Prior to her move to Grace Cathedral, Professor Shaw taught history and theology at the University of Oxford for sixteen years from 1994 to 2010, first as a Fellow of Regent’s Park College and subsequently as Dean of Divinity and Fellow of New College. During that time, she also served as Canon Theologian of Salisbury Cathedral and was an honorary canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Professor Shaw has a B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Oxford; M.Div. from Harvard University; and a PhD in History from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author and editor of several books, including Octavia, Daughter of God: the Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (Yale 2011), for which she won the San Francisco Book Festival History Prize, and Miracles in Enlightenment England (Yale 2006).
Harris Manchester College, the only college in the University for mature graduate and undergraduate students, has done much to widen access to Oxford in terms of attracting students from a broad range of ages and a variety of backgrounds and experiences. This diversity helps create a real community of endeavour, with an atmosphere of mutual support among all College members. Dr. Waller, Principal since 1989, has steered the College through a period of great growth and improvement, and now under the Principalship of Jane Shaw the College looks forward confidently to further progress and development. Dr. Waller said: “I would like to congratulate the College on the election of Professor Jane Shaw as its new Principal. Under her leadership, the College will move forward into an exciting new future.”
Feb 28Niall SheekeyComments Disabled
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Güeros: skin deep, love and revolution Güeros
June 26, 2015 Anchorage Press
Güeros, the Mexican film by Alonso Ruiz Palacios, takes the viewer on a hell of a ride along with the four protagonists through the Periférico or peripheral ring of highways encircling Mexico City (known as "el DF" for District Federal). With over 27 million people, el DF is sprawling and vast. The road trip that weaves in and out of neighborhoods and suburbs doesn't have to leave the area in order to take viewers and protagonists on a journey through the long history of revolution, race and cultural identity in contemporary Mexico. Like many metaphorical journeys, the destination is ultimately one's self.
Race identity and racism are folded into the class system of Mexico, where the color of skin affords disproportionate advantages to some at the expense of others. The word "Güero" or "Güera" is used to describe persons of light skin, light hair, and/or light eyes. The importance of skin color is vociferous throughout the culture, in its music, humor, storytelling, etc. As it turns out, uses of terms like "Güero" or "Blanco" for light skinned people, and their counterparts for dark skinned people like "Moreno," "Prieto," "Negro," are largely contextual; it all depends on how and when it's used and by whom. The film does a great job at showing this when at some instances, "Güero" is a compliment, and at others an insult. The dichotomy is this, on the one hand if someone is "Güero", he or she is likely to be of a higher class, thus being called "Güero" is a compliment. On the other hand, the word itself likely comes from "Huero"-a term applied to eggs that are non-fertile and don't yield any benefit. A "huevo huero" or failed egg, gets paler with time. When this meaning of the word is applied then the resulting insult is that a "Güero" is a dud of a person.
The plot of the story in Güeros is based on the 1999 student strike at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), which is Latin America's largest university and has been pivotal to social and political movements since its inception. The 1999 student strike, not only straddled the 20th and 21st centuries, it lasted 292 days and was successful. For that entire year, the country sat on tenterhooks lest there be a repeat of the 1968 student massacre. Tenoch Huerta plays Federico who goes by Sombra or Shadow. Sombra is from Veracruz and is a student at the UNAM. He's dark, handsome and has the soul of a troubadour but also carries with him the insecurities that come from being of a lower class and having darker skin than Ana (Ilse Salas), with whom he's deeply in love. Ana is from a rich family, she's smart, articulate and a born leader, but even her skin color can't protect her from the misogynist comments that are hurled at her as she speaks out. Sombra and his friend Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) are not like Ana, they're not part of the movement, nor do they transfer to other schools, they simply live in limbo as the strike goes on. They live in squalor, stealing electricity from their neighbors, and not seeing the point of leaving their digs. Then along comes Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre), Sombra's younger brother who, after getting into mischief one time too many in Veracruz, is sent to el DF by his struggling mother. The relationship between the brothers deepens as the film unfolds, and even though Tomás is Güero, and it seems everyone comments of the difference in their skin color, they share a home, a point of origin and genetic bond.
Tomás is obsessed with a singer from a generation past. The fictitious Epigmenio Cruz' music was so moving that it was rumored to have made Bob Dylan cry. When Tomás discovers that Cruz is hospitalized and dying in destitution, the gang begin its search for the music maker. As each character hears the music through an old-style Walkman, their obsession with finding the singer grows. Ruiz Palacios foments the mystery of the music further by using complete silence as the characters put on the headsets providing intimacy for the characters and a respite from the insanity of the strike and pandemonium of the city.
The dynamics of the social criticisms in the film are not so much contradictory to one another as they are simply parallel: ancient and modern, black and white, rural and urban, rich and poor, cacophony and harmony exist side by side. Güeros provides space for this type of dialogue delivered through beautiful prose, colloquialisms, music and humor.
Ruiz Palacios takes advantage of creative cinematic tools. Apart from the obvious grey scale contrasts created by shooting in black and white, he also uses imaginative camera work to create tension and immediacy. The sound design is thought through and parallels the concept of the film nicely. Ruiz Palacios uses the music of Augustin Lara to bring an idyllic Mexico into the chaos of a contentious one. The bitter sweet irony in this is that Lara's music is now ubiquitous and has been usurped by the Mexican mass media, often portrayed as simple, romantic ballads with cheesy orchestration; however, at the time that Lara wrote them, from the 1940s on, he pushed the boundaries of racial inequities by writing key pieces of his repertoire for the voice of Toña la Negra, an unknown Afro-Mexican singer from Veracruz. Subsequently, Toña la Negra landed some film roles, but even though her presence on the screen is undeniable, she was relegated, like other dark-skinned actors, to secondary and undeveloped roles. After her death in 1982, her music was almost never heard outside of Veracruz and certain musical circles. Luckily, there has been a resurgence of the original recordings and today, Toña la Negra can even be heard on Pandora.
Ruiz Palacios' finely focused juxtaposition of places representing time and concept, in this case el DF and Veracruz, dovetail nicely into the personal journeys of each of the protagonist. At its final destination Güeros is about arriving at the present, armed with the past and with the power to change the future.
Güeros plays at Bear Tooth at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, June 29.
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The Search For Freedom: just do it!
Aug 7, 2015 Anchorage Press
Oxford defines "Freedom" as the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint, but it also defines it as the state of being physically unrestricted and able to move easily. Jon Long's feature-length documentary, The Search For Freedom is all about the latter, which as it turns out may also lead to an existential-like freedom of mind and circumstance.
On the surface, The Search For Freedom is about the evolution of action sports and the personalities that drive them. These thrill-seeking pioneers are interviewed one after another and accompanying their stories are clips of their phenomenal performances and climactic dismounts from motorcycles, surfboards, skateboards, mountain bikes-any extreme sport one can imagine. At first, it may seem like the documentary is all about these dudes who are white, male and adrenaline junkies, but The Search For Freedom is smarter than that and Long ties in the scientific and social aspects of these sports delivering a film that is as solid as it is beautiful. The fact that the first woman interviewed, snow-boarding champion Annie Boulanger, is not featured until 30 minutes into the documentary, and that minorities or people of color do not play a role in the telling of the story until way down the timeline of the production seems odd, and to some viewers even irritating at first. However, it makes total sense if one considers that the creation of these sports was dependent on social freedoms, genetic disposition and economic privileges that white males have in the established social pecking order. As the sports become ensconced in the experiences of everyday life, their audience widens, markets develop and opportunities to partake in them emerge. By the end of The Search For Freedom it is clear that these sport are more accessible than ever, to everyone, of any body type, gender, or background. This is a great thing because on the grander scale, using one's body to find freedom is an opportunity that is there for the taking.
The Search For Freedom is aesthetically stunning, especially on the big screen. Long uses vintage footage with grainy texture and saturated colors to document the early days of action sports. As he tells the history of the sports he brings clearer, sharper and bigger images that reflect the extreme nature of the activities and the rapidly-changing technology used to document the action. The results are breathtaking because viewers share the experiences of the athletes, whether it's jettisoning out the barrel of giant waves or free-falling and flying alongside mountains and through ravines.
As The Search For Freedom moves past first impressions and viewers get a sense of the passion that drives action sports pioneers, the film touches on the reasons some people are avid risk takers and others are not. As it turns out, studies show there are people with a genetic predisposition to engage in extreme behavior. The key is something known as DRD4 or the "thrill-seeking gene." The dopamine receptor D4 is a G protein-coupled receptor encoded by the DRD4 gene. There is evidence that shows strong linkages between people who have this receptor and risk-taking proclivities. There is also evidence that gender is a significant variable. This isn't to say that everyone who has this receptor is an action sport enthusiast, the affinity to take risks also manifests itself through gambling addictions, adultery, drug addictions and other extreme decisions that may negatively impact one's life. All things considered-even with the risk of injury and death-action sports appear to be a positive alternative to more destructive options.
Jon Long's direction is seamless with skilled editing and a compelling soundtrack. By the conclusion of The Search For Freedom he has taken the viewer through the history of action sports, and through a path that is as deep as it is long, giving insight into how significant these experiences are to the human spirit. One can't help but walk away in awe of the athletes and their relationship to nature. Their passion to face their fears using their own bodies-up with and against nature-and taking risks for themselves is humbling, as opposed to, say, a pusillanimous coward depriving the world of Cecil the lion for no good reason.
The Search for Freedom shows on Monday, August 10 at 7:45 p.m. at Beartooth.
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> Viewing Profile: Topics: jos
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Topics I've Started
Prodeus (A bloody gore throwback to the 90s)
I recently discovered a game called Prodeus. It's currently in development, should go into Early Access in the autumn of 2019 while the full release should be in 2020. It's being developed by just two people who previously worked on games like 2016th iteration of Doom, the new Wolfenstein, BioShock: Infinite, Singularity, Payday 2 and some Call of Duty games. The project is also on Kickstarter with at the moment nine more days to go.
The way I'd describe this game is as a bloody gore throwback to the 90s. It's a fast-paced first-person shooter with many enemies coming towards you, a lot of blood and gore, coloured key-cards to collect to open doors, a lot of blood and gore, tons of secrets to find and enemies who'll turn everything into a bloody gore mess when you shoot them. Did I mention the game is full of blood and gore? Blood will even stay on the map, instead of just disappear like in other games. Of course, if you're a pussy you can turn down the amount of blood and gore. The whole game is just very customisable. You can adjust the amount of blood and gore, adjust the graphics to use 216p and sprites to make it really look like a game from the 90s or choose to play in 1080p+ with 3D models, you can customise the HUD and there's a level editor included.
I think this game looks absolutely amazing and according to the FAQ on Kickstarter the game will be available on Mac:
"Linux and Mac support?
Yes! For Early Access, we are targeting Windows, Mac and Linux."
http://www.prodeusgame.com
Project on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstar...prodeus/prodeus
https://twitter.com/ProdeusGame
What are your favourite/best Mac games? You wishlist for Mac?
03 March 2019 - 06:39 AM
What are your favourite Mac games? What games do you consider the best games for the Mac? What Mac games have already been released and would you like to play? What games would you wish had a Mac release?
These are the favourite Mac games, Mac games I consider the best:
- Doom 3: Played it on Windows and later replayed it on the Mac and it's still a fantastic FPS.
- Prey: See Doom 3: Simply a fantastic and very original FPS.
- Mafia II: Played the first game on Windows and considered it a great game with a beautiful and very good story and a soundtrack which delivers a good atmosphere. Played Mafia II on the Mac and it's even better than the first game. Just a shame the game's so short and there's no free-ride. The game's just so good, after finishing it wished there was more of it.
- Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun: Commandos and Desperados were very good and enjoyable games. This game just takes all that's good about those games and even manages to improve them. After finishing it I wished there was more of it. The same developers are now working on Desperados III, which I'm really looking forward to.
These games have already been released for the Mac, but I haven't had the time to play them, but they're definitely on my wishlist:
- Rage: I've always enjoyed games from id Software and I'm sure I'll also enjoy this one.
- Mafia III: From what I've heard it's not of the same quality as the first two games in the series, but I'd still want to play it.
- The new Tomb Raider games: They look like enjoyable games of good quality.
- The Metro games: They look very interesting and having the option to play the game with Russian voices is a big plus for me. I also played Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun in Japanese. It just adds to the realism of the game.
- The Life is Strange games: I like games with a good storyline and these games seem to have a very good one.
These games don't have a Mac release, but they would be an instant buy for me if they were released for the Mac:
- The 2016 iteration of Doom and the upcoming Doom: Eternal: I've played the 2016 version of Doom on Windows and it's a really good FPS.
- The new Wolfenstein games.
- The upcoming Rage 2: Unfortunately Rage was the last game from id Software to be released for the Mac. The new Doom and Wolfenstein games are only available for Windows, so I don't think we can expect Rage 2 to be released for the Mac.
- The updated version of Age of Empires II (HD edition or whatever it's called): I've played the original Age of Empires II for hundreds of hours back in the days on Windows and even today I play it from time to time. I never get bored from playing skirmish missions in this game.
- Far Cry: Also an older game, but stil very enjoyable. It's a game that get's incredibly difficult towards the end, but I've always considered it to be a very good FPS.
- Max Payne and Max Payne 2: I think both of them have been released for PPC. It's a shame macOS doesn't have the backwards compatibility of Windows, because I've always enjoyed these games and would really want to play them again without having to rely on Windows.
- Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: See the Max Payne games.
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Again, see the Max Payne games.
- Mafia: The second and third game of the series are available for the Mac. The first one is also a very good game and I'd really like to be able to play the whole series on my Mac without having to rely on Windows for the first one.
Desperados III
I've always loved the Commandos games and the Commandos clone Desperados was also a fantastic game. After many years of games in Commandos style being completely absent, in late 2016 Mimimi suddenly came with another Commandos clone out of nowhere called Shadow Tactics. Just a few weeks later it was released on the Mac App Store and I immediately bought it on day of release.
It was an absolutely amazing game. One of the best games I've ever played (the game was just flawless) and one of the best Mac releases ever. After completing the game I immediately wanted more and since the moment I completed it I was hoping Mimimi would develop an expansion pack, a sequel, a prequel of whatever to this game. For more than one and a half year now I've been hoping they'd come with a new game in the series or something in line with Shadow Tactics.
At last week's Gamescom it was revealed Mimimi is now working on Desperados III. A sequel to one of my favourite games created by the developers of Shadow Tactics is like a dream come true to me, so of course I was so excited when I saw the news. However, there's always the question of how likely a Mac release is.
Shadow Tactics had a great Mac release, but this game was published by Daedalic Entertainment, whereas Desperados III will be published by THQ Nordic, so I immediately asked myself the question if this change of publisher would have any effect on a Mac release. Just like Daedalic Entertainment THQ Nordic also releases games for the Mac, so there was hope, but just to be sure I sent them an email asking for confirmation. Here's their reply:
https://imgur.com/a/uOdXlQv
Perfect! Just like Shadow Tactics that's going to be an instant buy on day of release. The game should be released somewhere in 2019.
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MainAll NewsPolitics & Gov'tCanadian Muslim Blood Libel
Canadian Muslim Blood Libel
A surge of blood libels against Israel and Jews has spread to Canada, where a Muslim newspaper accused Jews of harvesting children’s organs.
Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, 12/01/10 11:09 | updated: 11:26
Blood libel poster
A Canadian Muslim newspaper accused Jews of harvesting children’s organs and then issued a qualified apology for “causing hurt” without stating that the charges are a lie.
Canadian Muslims last week adopted the spreading practice of renewing the ancient blood libel against Jews when the community's Al Ameen Post published an article accusing Jews of kidnapping “some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the occupied entity over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.”
The source material for the article was Iran’s Press TV network.
B'nai Brith Canada called the Al Ameen posting a "hideous blood libel against the Jewish community and has no place in Canada or anywhere else."
Mohammed Bhamji, the managing editor of Al Ameen, said he did not think the story was racist or inflammatory "because it was reported in the media. [But] I don't have the facts. When we got that story on the Internet we assumed it was true. We are not professional journalists. We are just a community-based newspaper about anything that has to do with Islam.”
Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith, replied that Press TV is "the official mouthpiece of the terrorist-sponsoring Iranian regime."
The Al Ameen website offered a qualified apology on its website. It explained, “The leading Canadian Jewish organization, is not pleased with the content of the article, and have [sic] asked for an apology.
The editorial board of Al Ameen Post, without prejudice, extends its honest and sincere apology to our fellow Jewish Canadians for any hurt,” but the site then added, “Defending our news article at this juncture would mean causing further divide in our harmonious multicultural fabric, which goes against our own values, but it is needless to say that the issue of ‘Organ Harvesting in Israel’ was being discussed at the time of our last publication, by major media outlets, and not just Al Ameen.”
It did not state that the charges were lies.
The British Columbia Muslim Association (BCMA) issued a statement denying any official association with Al Ameen but B’nai Brith noted, “We are still very concerned about the fact that an established Islamic organization such as the BCMA. has not apologized to the Jewish community for the distribution of the anti-Semitic blood libel published in Al Ameen, which was disseminated in mosques operated by the BCMA.
The Canadian National Post, where the report of the blood libel first appeared, has called Al Ameen the “house journal of the BCMA."
The phenomena of blood libel, a common practice against Jews in Medieval times and by many Christians since then, has spread rapidly since last year’s Swedish newspaper report that Israeli soldiers harvested organs of terrorists. Hamas has constantly used blood libels in propagandizing to Palestinian Authority Arabs, and the Muslim world has increasingly used the tactic in the past decade.
Turkish television broadcast a soap opera this week that portrays Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) agents kidnapping children, prompting a diplomatic crisis between Jerusalem and Ankara.
Tags:Canada, Muslims, blood libel, Politics & Gov, Jewry
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Giants send own message to Farhan Zaidi as deadline approaches
Mark W. Sanchez
Farhan Zaidi may not be a believer, but he also is not a nonbeliever. The Giants boss signaled Sunday morning that he would like to see more from this team before he makes moves at the trade deadline.
By Sunday afternoon, the Giants wanted to send a message of their own to the president of baseball operations.
“We know he’s a pretty smart guy. So he’s gonna watch the team, and I think he sees a team that’s playing good baseball and not playing good baseball,” said the winning pitcher, Jeff Samardzija, who tossed seven scoreless innings in the 1-0 victory over the Cardinals at Oracle Park. “And you can tell by just the way things have been going and how it’s going to look in a month. … If we keep showing that we can hit and pitch and obviously we have the bullpen to do what we need to do in the long run.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt in anyone’s minds in here that he’s going to do what it takes to win ballgames.”
First with his arm and then with his mouth, Samardzija tried to turn Zaidi into a deadline buyer.
It’s a tough ask from a team that moved 5 1/2 games out of the second wild card as the first half closed, a somewhat deceiving number because of the nature of the NL; more relevantly, they also would have to leapfrog eight teams to sneak into the slot. Still, a team that was 22-34 as May ended has gone 19-14 since.
“It’s a different vibe. There’s no getting around it,” Bruce Bochy said after Evan Longoria’s homer was the only run they needed. “Winning brings that, but along with that are big hits. I’ve said that — that brings energy. We’ve been swinging the bats better. We got shut down today from a good pitcher [Jack Flaherty], but you still had that feeling that you were going to win the ballgame.
“You can feel the energy in the clubhouse, in the dugout. To get this win, it’s good for this club.”
It’s good for the players and makes things more complicated for Zaidi, long thought to be a shoo-in deadline seller (which, by all odds, he still figures to be).
But the feel of the clubhouse has changed as the results have.
Longoria said he hadn’t glanced at the wild-card standings, wishing to remain ignorant for the moment. But he’s felt it, too.
“There’s definitely more confidence coming to the ballpark right now,” said the third baseman who slugged his fifth home run in six games. “Obviously it comes with winning — it comes with success on the field. It’s tough to create that when you’re not winning and you’re not going well.”
But the Giants are, and they are going well. Can it last?
For more Giants videos, click here.
Giants, Brewers engaged in Will Smith trade talks [report]
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49ers release 2019 training camp schedule
Jacob Hutchinson
© Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
SANTA CLARA – Training camp is almost here. The 49ers officially announced the dates for the team’s training camp schedule, which will be hosted at the 49ers SAP Performance Facility, starting July 27 through August 8. Details regarding public availability to practices are as follows, per the 49ers:
“Beginning today, season ticket members are invited to purchase tickets in their season ticket Account Manager account. On Friday, July 12th at 12 p.m. PT, tickets will be available to all fans, providing the Faithful with 11 opportunities to attend a 49ers open practice.
Additionally, fans in the Denver area will have the opportunity to watch the 49ers practice with the Broncos as both joint sessions on August 16th and 17th are open to the public.
“Our Pre-Season Training Camp Open Practices continue to be some of the most highly anticipated events of the year for 49ers fans,” said 49ers President Al Guido. “Following the tremendous response and attendance from past seasons, we look forward to offering Faithful 49ers fans and season ticket holders this special opportunity to once again engage with their favorite veteran players, rookies, coaches and each other at the 49ers SAP Performance Facility. We are likewise excited that the Open Practices kick-off another season of outstanding digital coverage from 49ers Studios, who will offer exclusive content, video interviews and more across five episodes of Brick by Brick Season 3 for fans engaging with our team digitally.”
Due to space restrictions, limited general public tickets will be made available on a first-come, first-serve basis on the following dates:
Sunday, July 28th
Sunday, August 4th
Tuesday, August 6th
Wednesday, August 7th
Tickets will carry a $5 donation fee to the 49ers Foundation, which will support the foundation’s mission to educate and empower Bay Area youth, and are available at http://www.49ers.com/tickets/trainingcamp.
Children age 2 and under are free.
In addition to a first-look at the 2019 San Francisco 49ers, open practice activations for fans will include a 49ers Foundation Dig for Gold sale – where fans can purchase donated equipment room apparel and more to support the foundation, as well as additional partner activations.
For the second year, each of the 49ers player position groups will host guests from the cause of their choice in the Community Corner. Guests will be invited through a variety of community organizations and will have the opportunity to meet and greet with some of their hosts post-practice.
Fans will be able to bring sealed water bottles, thermos bottles and food. All items are subject to a security screen and a clear bag policy is in effect. For full security policies, visit www.49ers.com/tickets/trainingcamp/safety-policies.”
Giants close gap further in suddenly interesting wild-card race
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les presses du réel:
authors / artists
The Third Mind
Ugo Rondinone [see all titles]
Art centers, museums, galleries & varia [see all titles]
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Edited by Ugo Rondinone.
Graphic design: Ugo Rondinone and Rob Singleton.
published in September 2018
25 x 31 cm (hardcover, cloth bound)
308 pages (color & b/w ill.)
An homage to William Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's eponymous book, this artist book of more than 300 pages is a huge cut-up of the artworks showcased during the group exhibition conceived by Ugo Rondinone at the Palais de Tokyo in 2007.
With “The Third Mind”, Ugo Rondinone offers us a unique journey. An MRI scan of his influences, inclinations, and obsessions this exhibition is constructed as a stroll through a brain in perpetual activity, going straight to the source of the artist's references and discoveries. For the first time his gift for building systems of connections is placed at the service of the works of other artists, not his own. The systems of connections activated as well as the artists and works chosen make “The Third Mind” an exhibition that no curator/art historian would ever have been able to dream up.
On this occasion, Ugo Rondinone creates a special issue of the magazine Palais. In homage to The Third Mind—the cult book that William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin have devised together following the cut-up method—he sets out to cut up and remix the contemporary artistic landscape to allow a new meaning to emerge from it. Composed from the works of thirty-one artists, this huge cut-up of images constitutes a unique artist book created by a third mind, the product of the meeting between Ugo Rondinone and his selections.
Marc-Olivier Wahler, from the presentation of Palais Magazine #04 – Carte blanche à Ugo Rondinone.
Redesigned reprint of a special issue of the magazine Palais conceived by Ugo Rondinone for his collective show “The Third Mind” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from September 27, 2007, to January 3, 2008.
With works by Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Martin Boyce, Joe Brainard, Valentin Carron, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Verne Dawson, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Bruno Gironcoli, Robert Gober, Nancy Grossman, Hans Josephsohn, Brion Gysin & William S. Burroughs, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Emma Kunz, Andrew Lord, Sarah Lucas, Hugo Markl, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Josh Smith, Paul Thek, Andy Warhol, Rebecca Warren, Sue Williams.
Ugo Rondinone (*1963, Switzerland) has lived in New York for several years. Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text by turns, Rondinone is a virtuoso of forms and techniques. Developing surprising sensorial environments, he especially likes destabilizing our perceptions and unsettling our certainties. Rearranging content and formal elements, a personal poetic with elements taken directly from the outside world, he draws us into a synesthetic experience.
See also Palais #22 – Ugo Rondinone – I Love John Giorno; Bomb #140; Album – On/around the work of Urs Fischer, Yves Netzhammer, Ugo Rondinone and Christine Streuli.
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25 Things You Didn’t Know About Billy Graham
February 21, 2018 Kevin D. Hendricks Leave a comment
The evangelist Billy Graham died today at the age of 99.
My first job out of college was working for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). Once upon a time I had a blog about Billy Graham and tried to write a biography. I still have a box of Billy Graham memorabilia (“Billyobilia”?) from the waning days of the BGEA before it moved to North Carolina.
I’m captivated by Graham’s transition from fiery preacher to loving grandfather. I find his comfort and then estrangement with political power to be both inspiring and troubling.
I am sometimes bothered by the seeming simplicity of Billy Graham’s message or the emotional manipulation of plinky music and a stadium full of peer pressure. But that’s also the inherent contradiction of the gospel. It’s a simple message, but a lifetime journey. It’s the already but not yet.
In short, Billy Graham led a fascinating life.
As part of my research in working on a biography, I put together a list of 25 curious facts about Billy Graham. Since little ever came of that research, it seems worthwhile to share it today.
25 Curious Facts About Billy Graham
As a senior in high school, a young Billy Graham found himself in a dark classroom with a girl who begged Graham to make love to her. Instead of rounding the bases, Graham made like Joseph and ran away.
In 1937 Billy Graham fell in love with Emily Cavanaugh and proposed to her in the summer. She had to think about it and eventually said yes in the fall. But by 1938 she was having second thoughts and in the spring she dumped Billy Graham for one of his classmates, Charles Massey.
Graham gave a Ted Talk in 1998.
Graham once went skinny-dipping with President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1993 Graham was taken into custody by the Mexican Navy while wearing a bathing suit he borrowed from President George H.W. Bush.
Billy Graham served as a pastor to Western Springs Baptist Church in Western Springs, Ill., for a year in the 1940s. It was the only time he would officially pastor a local congregation.
In 1948 Graham became the youngest college president in history as president of Northwestern College in Minneapolis.
As early as the 1950s Billy Graham held integrated crusades, at one point tearing down ropes that separated the white seating from the black seating, causing the head usher to resign in protest.
Martin Luther King Jr. insisted Billy Graham call him “Mike.”
Billy Graham was knighted in 2001.
As a child, he went to church only “grudgingly” and the minister at his family’s church reminded him of a mortician.
The first time Billy Graham shared his testimony was with a group of about 10 prisoners. The experience “reinforced my conviction that I would never become a preacher.”
Billy Graham attended Bob Jones University for one semester and upon leaving, Bob Jones Sr. predicted nothing but failure for Billy Graham.
Graham’s first formal sermon lasted eight minutes and included all four sermons he had prepared.
At Florida Bible Institute Billy Graham would paddle out to a small island in the Hillsborough River to practice his sermons and preach to the alligators and birds, like a St. Francis of Florida.
In 1964 Billy Graham’s name came up as a potential presidential candidate. His wife, Ruth, put a stop to any consideration of forsaking his call to evangelism: “If you run, I don’t think the country will elect a divorced president.”
Throughout his life Billy Graham participated in 9 presidential inaugurations. In 2009 Graham passed on the hat he often wore to those inaugurations to Rick Warren, who offered a prayer at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
On his wedding night, Billy Graham had trouble falling asleep in the bed, so he crawled out of bed and fell asleep on the floor. In the morning Ruth woke up to find her new husband gone—it took her a few minutes to find him curled up on the floor, sound asleep.
During World War II, the U.S. Army rejected Billy Graham for the chaplaincy program because he was three pounds underweight.
Billy Graham left on a trip the day his first child was born, dismissing Ruth’s insistence that the baby would come soon and he should stay home. Billy predicted it would take another two or three weeks. Virginia “Gigi” Graham was born that evening.
In the 1970s Billy attended various rock festivals, protests, and love-ins in order to better understand and connect with young people. To maintain anonymity, he attended “incognito” (meaning he donned a hat, sunglasses, and a big sweater).
He always tried to minimize his own prominence, to the point that he strongly resisted naming his organization after himself in 1950, and when the Billy Graham Library opened in 2007 he declared there was “too much Billy Graham.”
Billy Graham once loaned money to then-president Richard Nixon. When the offering plate was passed at a 1970 crusade in Knoxville, Tenn., the president didn’t have any money on him, but Graham discreetly slipped the president a few bills. A few months later Nixon repaid the loan.
In 1993 Billy Graham participated in an AOL chat session, his first foray into the world of online evangelism.
Billy Graham was one of the few Americans who could get mail simply addressed, “Billy Graham, America.”
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Listed Building Spotlight
Community Initiatives, Heritage Under Threat, Listed Building Spotlight
Further Research: Resources & Link
Have you taken an interest in the work that Amenity Societies do?
The Chapel at King’s College London is an example of a Grade I listed building. Credit: Diliff [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Diliff] License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
Every year these societies work tirelessly to protect precious pockets of English Heritage, through a variety of different tactics and stratagems.
Although many of these groups benefit from donations, they are always in need of more help whether that’s in the form of more money, a signature on a petition or an able body at a protest or rally. Whether you’re interested in having an impact on your local area, or you fancy casting your net a little further afield, then you can always help out one of these groups.
Find out more about these groups & societies below and head to their websites to see what you can do to make a positive impact on this country:
The Campaign for Better Transport has spent over 40 years actively promoting new ways of transport that improves the quality of life for people living in the community, in addition to rallying the government for changes. The charity is completely independent and spends its funds providing well-researched, practical solutions (such as monitoring survey and track monitoring) to transport problems in addition to appealing to the government to refrain from building more roads and expanding airports.
You can find out more about their mission and how you can help them by heading to their site here: http://bettertransport.org.uk/
Every year thousands of planning applications are submitted to local councils by large building firms looking to erect new housing estates and flat complexes, despite there already being thousands of vacant homes that could easily accommodate new dwellers. Empty homes was established in 1992 and aims to bring as many of these vacant dwelling back into use as possible, in addition to encourage community-based regeneration in areas with high levels of vacant homes.
Learn about Empty Homes here: https://www.emptyhomes.com/
Ancient Monuments Society
Founded in 1924, the AMS promotes ‘the study and conservation of ancient monuments, historic buildings and fine old craftmanship’. Consulted on by councils up and down the country, the society is comprised of a number of historical and architectural experts, all of whom have are dedicated to the preservation and conservation of buildings in England. In conjunction with the work done with the Friends of Friendless Churches, AMS work tirelessly to protect the heritage of some of our oldest buildings.
Discover about their work here: http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk/our-work/
Joint Committee of the National Amenity Societies
This Committee brings together members from the seven most established historical amenity societies, specifically, the groups that have been described in Acts of Parliament and that have become so important that they are frequently consulted upon before the demolition, alteration or extension of historical buildings take place. They are composed of the Ancient Monument Society, the Council for British Archaeology, the Garden History Society, the Georgian Group, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Twentieth Century Society and the Victorian Society.
Find out more about them here: http://www.jcnas.org.uk/
Tweets by EnglishHeritage
KFAS.org.uk © 2019
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Catalog » Humor » The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection [3CD]
The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection [3CD]
Author: Northcutt, Wendy
Narrator: Jason Harris
Library CD Package ($32.95)Retail CD Package ($22.95)
Back by extraordinary popular demand, The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection, satisfies the appetite of fans of smart humor with a fresh collection of stories honoring those who continue to improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a sublimely idiotic fashion!
Included are over one hundred stories of award-winners, honorable mentions, and (debunked) urban legends--verified by the author and endorsed by website readers--together with a few returning all-time favorites, and exclusive material never before seen, including special science and safety tips for readers on how to avoid the scythe of natural selection!
Appealing to Darwin fans old and new, The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection is a must-have humor audiobook, illustrating the ongoing saga of survival of the fittest in all its selective glory!
The author has appeared in USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, The (NY) Daily News, Boston Herald, Publisher Weekly, BookPage and CNN.com.
The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection contains tales of misadventure. It is intended to be viewed as a safety manual, not a how-to-guide. The stories illustrate evolution working through natural selection: Those whose actions have lethal personal consequences are weeded out of the gene pool. Your decisions can kill you, so pay attention and stay alive.
Wendy Northcutt is a graduate of UC-Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology. She started collecting the stories that make up the Darwin Awards in 1993, and founded www.DarwinAwards.com soon thereafter. She has been profiled in Salon magazine, and now divides her time between managing the website and working as an Internet consultant. Her award-winning website is one of the most popular humor sites on the web today, with over 400,000 visitors a month and growing. It has received acclaim from USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo!, and was chosen as a Cool Site of the Year 2000.
Jason Harris, narrator of The Darwin Awards II, has hosted Nickledeon's Double Dare 2000 and has voiced the lead character for the animated television show, Welcome To Eltingville, seen on the Cartoon Network. His feature film credits include The Guru and Unfaithful, and he has appeared on numerous television shows, including Law & Order: SVU and All My Children.
AudioFile Magazine
"A second volume continues the author's delightfully sadistic celebration of those who have 'improved our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a sublimely idiotic fashion.' We hear true stories and 'urban legends' about people who have perished unintentionally through their own profoundly stupid actions. The writing is light and witty; the narrator's delivery chirpy and reminiscent of a tabloid TV voice-over."
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
"One of the drawbacks to not teaching the theory of evolution in schools is that some people wind up learning the stuff the hard way--Darwin-worthy departures are sent in from people all over the world. One lesson is that fatal stupidity knows no boundaries."
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Top » Catalog » Books » Fiction » First editio
The Glory and the Dream by Roy Chester tells the story of a young boy’s rite of passage. It is full of rich characters, and is played out against a backdrop of social upheaval in the austere post-war years of rationing and shortages. But it was a time when communities pulled together. Walking days, royal visits, Sunday School outings to the seaside and communal bonfire nights were annual highlights. It was a time when youngsters had to make their own entertainment, including playing rugby league. It is a novel about Johnny Gregson, the young star of the Garton rugby league team, whose dream is to follow his dad’s success in the sport. Johnny lives with his mother in Four Locks, a poor working class area in a grimy northern town. His father died in the Second World War. The story starts in 1945, when he is aged 10. It follows his rise from junior rugby league through playing rugby union as a schoolboy to turning professional with Garton. However, there is much more to Johnny than rugby league. He faces challenges at every turn, including when he wins a scholarship to a local public school and is labelled as a ‘slum kid;’ by the class bully. His prowess at rugby helps him deal with this boy. Also, at the tender age of 16, he meets a young woman who becomes very important to him. This is a story about sport, romance and working class life. It includes many humorous incidents, insights and even tragedy in a young man’s development. NOW AVAILABLE FOR £5.00 post free in the UK
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CLS Advisory Council
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CLS Distinguished Professor: Frances Lefcort
Frances Lefcort
Letters and Science Distinguished Professor
Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience
Frances Lefcort, a professor of cell biology and neuroscience in Montana State University’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology who is known for groundbreaking research in neural development and neurological disease, has been appointed as a Letters and Science Distinguished Professor, the highest honor MSU’s College of Letters and Science bestows upon a faculty member in the college.
She received the three-year appointment in recognition of her contributions to the college, MSU and the scholarly community.
Lefcort is a researcher of national and international stature due to her seminal contributions in the field of nervous system developmental biology. She studies how stem-like “mother” or progenitor cells multiply, migrate and differentiate into the myriad of specific cell types found in the mature nervous system.
In recent years, her work has focused on the genetic disease, familial dysautonomia, which devastates the sensory and autonomic nervous systems. Lefcort's lab has successfully created several animal models of this disease, which will allow scientists to test a variety of drugs to treat the disease in humans. She has published more than 35 articles in some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in her field, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Neuroscience and Nature Communications. Her work has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1995.
Lefcort will give a public lecture about her research during the 2017 spring semester.
“I am honored to receive this award and grateful for the support I have received from MSU to conduct my research,” Lefcort said. “I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the undergraduates and graduate students in my lab and we wouldn't have achieved what we have done without them.”
Lefcort came to MSU in 1994 as an assistant professor. She earned her Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, which was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She has also been an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine since 1995, and was a visiting professor at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy, in 2010. She served as the head of Cell Biology and Neuroscience from 2012 to 2016, and was the co-founder and interim director of the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery at MSU.
In addition to being an outstanding researcher, Lefcort excels in the classroom, where she teaches courses on neural development and neuroscience to both undergraduates and graduate students. She also chaired and taught the WWAMI medical nervous system course for 15 years, integrating into the course cutting-edge science gained through her own medically relevant research. She consistently receives excellent teaching evaluations.
Lefcort has demonstrated she is committed to training the next generation of scholars, scientists and medical professionals by personally training and mentoring more than 40 individuals in her lab, including high school students, undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
In 2010, she received the MSU Wiley Award for Meritorious Research and was a speaker for the Provost's Distinguished Lecturer Series in 2013. In 2015, she received the Hero Award from the Montana chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Health in recognition of her efforts to improve the lives of Montanans who live with serious mental illness.
"Dr. Lefcort is an outstanding scientist whose scholarly achievements have brought international recognition to the college," said Nicol Rae, dean of the College of Letters and Science. "We are delighted to honor her scholarship with this award."
Watch Frances Lefcort’s Distinguished Professor lecture on YouTube
College of Letters and Science
E-mail: lands@montana.edu
Location: 2-205 Wilson Hall
Dean: Nicol C. Rae
nicol.rae@montana.edu
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Newton County Blues
Newton County Blues - Newton
Newton County has a dual claim to blues fame, first as the birthplace of several historical figures and later as the site of an important blues event, the Chunky Rhythm & Blues Festival. Newton County natives include record businessman H.C. Speir (1895-1972); blues singers Willie Nix (1918-1991), Andrew Brown (1937-1985) and Prez Kenneth (1933-1995); and bassist Lamar Williams (1949-1983) of the Allman Brothers Band. In the 1980s and ‘90s many top national blues acts appeared at the Chunky festival on the Richardson farm.
Newton County has had several native sons who contributed to blues history, but all moved away at an early age and became associated with other areas. For decades only one performer was identified in blues literature as having roots here: Chicago singer and bass player Kenneth Kidd, known professionally as Prez Kenneth. According to the state’s Vital Records files, he was born Kennis Kidd in Decatur on December 29, 1933; he cited Newton as his birthplace. He moved several times and ended up in Chicago in 1956. There he took up music, and even though he performed only on a part-time basis he still developed a following in collectors’ circles on the strength of his 1960s records, including “Devil Dealing.” He died on June 15, 1995.
Willie Nix (legally Nicks), an eccentric singing drummer, had his heyday in the early 1950s when he had a radio show in West Memphis and recorded for Sun, Chance and other labels in Memphis and Chicago. His career dissipated after he spent time in prison and then drifted around the country, finally settling in Leland, Mississippi, where he died on July 8, 1991. He told interviewers he was born in Memphis but official documents place his birth in Union on August 6, 1918.
Andrew Brown claimed Jackson as his hometown but he was born in Newton County on February 25, 1937. When he was nine his family moved to Chicago. Brown, a multi-instrumentalist, played blues, jazz, R&B and gospel in Chicago and its suburbs. His recordings included songs that were covered by other bluesmen, some valued collectors’ items, and albums released on European labels. On December 11, 1985, he died in Harvey, Illinois, where he had lived since 1962.
Lamar Williams, an acclaimed bassist with the Allman Brothers, Sea Level and other bands that mixed blues with rock and R&B, grew up in Handsboro (now part of Gulfport), but he was born in Decatur on January 14, 1949. He sang with his father Lemon Williams’ gospel group before he and his friend Johnnie Lee Johnson (Jaimoe) played in soul bands on the coast and later joined the Allman Brothers. Williams, a Vietnam veteran, succumbed to cancer on January 21, 1983.
Charles Evers, born in Decatur on September 11, 1922, had a multi-faceted career in politics, civil rights and business, including work promoting blues as a festival sponsor and manager of WMPR radio. In the 1920s and ’30s, many Mississippi blues artists were able to make records thanks to Henry C. Speir, who owned a record store in Jackson and acted as a “talent broker” for record companies. Speir was born in Prospect on October 6, 1895. He died on April 22, 1972.
Ted Richardson was the key figure behind the annual Chunky Rhythm & Blues Festival, which began in 1985. The festival brought in performers from around the nation over the years, and in 1989 the Newton County board of supervisors honored Richardson for his contribution to the local economy.
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